Ahmet Ertegun Quotes

I'm not a big jazz fan.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

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

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I think I was supposed to play jazz.

My favorite music is jazz, actually. It's what I listen to, it's what I was raised on, and it's what I prefer to sing.

I have tons of jazz records: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. I could go on and on.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.

Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

I have a secret love of jazz.

I love, you know, a lot of jazz, John Coltrane.

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

Yeah, I grew up playing lots of jazz music in school.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

I recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

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

I didn't grow up during the time that Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis and all those people were playing. So it's not really my responsibility to keep it up, what they were doing.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

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.

I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word 'jazz' means to them, and that's fine.