D C DowDell

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.

The true musician plays what he/she hears. That cannot be a mistake.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

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

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don’t come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.

I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.

My singing evolved with a feeling of intense relaxation, always using my diaphram and breathing specifically through my nose.

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

You can’t explain Jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it’s feeling, not words.

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.