Jamie Cullum Quotes

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

I'm an old Coltrane disciple just like I'm a Christian.

Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.

I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

I hear many extra-musical things somehow in Coltrane.

Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.

When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.

I think that's what I love about jazz is that you can do what you want, and you're allowed to mess up.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

I love Ornette Coleman. I love Don Cherry. I love the way those guys play.

If I'm going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.

What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

I don't know any jazz stuff. I don't know how to jam in that way. So jamming, for me, is writing a tune.

I loved Art Tatum! And, through him, and other different jazz musicians, I actually found my technique.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

Blues is the first step to get to jazz.

I grew up listening to Puerto Rican music like everybody else. But when I listened to Charlie Parker for the first time, I said, 'How does this guy play so fast?'

I just really liked those trumpets and horns - Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie - and I honed in on that. I always looked for those big horn lines.

I try to make my flow sound like a John Coltrane solo.