Dave Brubeck

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

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

I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

My dream was to have a steady job, was not to be on the road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a carpenter and knows he’s gonna have a job.

Jazz stands for freedom.

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.

Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.

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

I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

Music chooses her musicians.

A Jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

A Les Paul, which is kind of a sissy guitar compared to a Strat anyway. The Les Paul is heavier, but because of that bulk you can do bends on it more easily. Also, the Les Paul’s lack of a vibrato arm means you’re not wrestling against the spring-loaded bridge all the time. The Strat is the ultimate because it’s like having a miniature pedal steel within it. Once you get familiar with it where the bends are and where they meld down into a fourth or whatever, you can do all kinds of pedal-steel-like things, which I think are cool..

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic.

[moving to Las Vegas] It was sort of like a man getting married – you don’t have to go out looking for girls, you’ve got your girl with you. I could go to casinos any time I had money and wanted to, so I actually went less.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.

I learn something new every day.

The first time I went to Paris, it just felt like I was home. I didn’t question it.

Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.

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