I'm not a big jazz fan.

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

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

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

And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.

I've often cringed when I heard myself described as a jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a jazz vocalist.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.

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.

Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.