D C DowDell

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

Music is a calling that you must bring your best to, whether listening, practicing or performing.

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

Practice as if you are the worst, play as if you are the best!

Play the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you play.

What I learned the most from Prince was putting art first, being creatively ambitious, and putting creativity at the forefront of what I do.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

The Blues is never old.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.

What we play is life.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.

Those who wish to sing, always find a song.

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

I don’t meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.