You're just sort of searching for this "thing" and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.
John Abercrombie

If it comes out sounding like Dixieland jazz or classical or punk or rock or even slightly metal, that's because that's where I'm going to find inspiration.
Ben Harper

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.
Travis Barker

What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.
Maxim Gorky

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.
Duke Ellington

The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.
Federico Garcia Lorca

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.
George Foreman

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Nina Simone

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Nina Simone

The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.
Kenny G

My first guitar, a Fender Jazz Master, I traded it in for a Les Paul Deluxe.
Lenny Kravitz

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
Francoise Sagan

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
Francoise Sagan

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.
Buddy Rich

Diana Krall knocks me out. I like jazz and I like her simple approach.
Merle Haggard

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.
Lou Reed

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
Amy Tan

I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval.
Jeff Beck

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo

The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.
Billy Joel