Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.
Steve Lacy

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

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

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.
Steve Lacy

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.
Steve Lacy

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.
Steve Lacy

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.
Tony Wilson

I'm saddened to see that everyone's pitched out the baby with the bath, in that we say that it can't be one or the other, it could be both. I mean, just because we listen to classical music doesn't mean that we can't listen to jazz.
Don Bluth

The lion's share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the '60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid.
Branford Marsalis

The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.
Lucinda Williams

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
Benny Green

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.
Steve Lacy

This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.
John Hench

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?
Charlie Watts

For years, Jazz At The Philharmonic albums were the only ones of their kind.
Norman Granz

The whole point is, give me a break with the standards. You go to the average jazz label and suggest a record and they want to know which standards you're going to play. I'm saying let's break the formula.
Branford Marsalis

One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.
Branford Marsalis

I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.
Warren Zevon

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.
Herbie Hancock

We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.
Carly Simon