Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.
Bill Laswell

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.
Art Blakey

In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.
Dave Holland

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.
Frank Gehry

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.
Pat Metheny

The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do.
Billy Higgins

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.
Charlie Haden

Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.
Dexter Gordon

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.
Gary Burton

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.
Rita Coolidge

Jazz was my first love.
Frankie Valli

I listened to Billie Holiday a lot in order to learn to sing. She remains one of the extraordinary jazz singers. But my intent is to become my own voice, to be able to interpret these songs in my own way.
Madeleine Peyroux

The first thing is, jazz is one of the few things to let you know that there is a God and there is a creation.
Billy Higgins

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.
Bill Evans

The way that I got involved with microtonal music was, frankly, through jazz.
John Eaton

To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.
Herbie Mann

Well, actually, I don't consider myself a jazz legend or anything.
Joseph Jarman

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.
Dave Van Ronk

Jazz is not the format where I want to stay, but it really is a starting point for me.
Justin Guarini

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.
August Wilson