D C DowDell

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

Learn the tunes by playing the masters, learn expression by playing yourself.

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

One shouldn’t be in the habit of quoting oneself.

If the bass plays the root, a pianist superimposes a Maj7 built on the 5th and the sax plays the 13th, will hot women notice?

I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last 10 years.

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

The guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It’s everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It’s everything, but it’s elusive.

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.

I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it.

If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

Do not fear mistakes, there are none.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.