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

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

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.
Steve Lacy

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

Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.
Norman Granz

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.
Mike Figgis

If you play jazz, then you play with your fingers. If you're playing rock, you use a pick. There's really no rhyme or reason to that other than that's just the way it has been.
Kevin Eubanks

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.
Herbie Hancock

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.
Roy Ayers

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.
Branford Marsalis

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
Ken Burns

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
Ken Burns

The economic picture in the States today doesn't allow for jazz concerts in a tour fashion. People now are too used to the Festival, which gives them more names for the same price.
Norman Granz

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.
Miroslav Vitous

Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.
Chuck Mangione

I think I was supposed to play jazz.
Herbie Hancock

Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
Ralph Bakshi

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.
Herbie Hancock

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact.
Sonny Rollins