Dave Holland

Just allow your feelings to go with the music and you’ll find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

I think that what is important is that the music be honest and direct and that it is relevant to today.

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

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.

Music is like wine, the less you know about it the sweeter you like it. 

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

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

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

I felt like I was making a record under the radar, and that is my favorite way to do anything.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at Jazz.

To work is to feel alive.

Using drugs didn’t help me play, all it did was hang me up for 15 years.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.