Debbie Davies

I’ve never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.

I like jazz, rock n’ roll, some hip hop – I can’t think of any music I don’t like.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

I’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

I can’t understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them ‘What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?’

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

A Les Paul feels like a guitar and I play differently on that and I sound too much like someone else.

I didn’t know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out. Changes… man I dug.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

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

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

Jazz music is our original American culture.