Dave Brubeck

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

I don’t care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don’t do that on stage.

There are notes between notes, you know.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

The guitar and the dog, in order not to be separated from man, have submitted themselves with resignation to the worst alterations of size and appearance.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… The new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

I’ve studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it.

The trio is the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.

If my own work had more importance than any others, it’s because the piano is the key instrument in music.