Dave Brubeck

No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.

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.

I never wanted this kind of life that I’m still living.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

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

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

When I write songs that touch on social relevance, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper.

Play what you feel, feel what you play.

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

All this is saying is, OK I see now, the ‘hood does not quite want Shirley Bassey yet, so let me still give them this. Crack Music was made after Diamonds. After black people were like, ‘I don’t know about this one.’ It was like me reaching too high for the cookie jar.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

A Jazz man should be saying what he feels: humor, sadness, joy… all the things that humans have.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It’s changing Jazz for the better.