D C DowDell

You don’t chose your inspirations, they chose you.

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.

Music is a calling that you must bring your best to, whether listening, practicing or performing.

Play the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you play.

If the bass plays the root, a pianist superimposes a Maj7 built on the 5th and the sax plays the 13th, will hot women notice?

A Jazz Diet will make you hipper, thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier and more attractive to members of both sexes.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

The Blues contain so much joy and sadness at the same time.

Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.

Look for the one who’s not smiling and play to that person. Once you’ve got that person, you’ve got the whole club.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

I find my inspiration in myself.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

Composing makes me feel like I’ve finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?