D C DowDell

It’s spontaneity that has always characterized Jazz music’s finest improvisers.

10% of musicians make 90% of the money, while the remaining 90% of musicians make the 10% that’s left.

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

Jazz music has always made powerful statements about freedom, creativity and personal identity.

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

While many forms of music may use the dynamic of improvisation, Jazz exemplifies the unique characteristic of collective improvisation.

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

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

I am only a mixture of countless influences and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

The audience, they’re not professionals. They just love music. It isn’t necessary to play over their heads to be admired.

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

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… The new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

[Stratocaster vs Les Paul] It’s a totally different animal. One is for very subtle and, I would say, more musical things that you can distract and abuse. You can’t do that with a Les Paul. It’s too delicate. It’s got a very delicate tone; most people don’t ever realize that because they are plugged into monstrous amplifiers which completely, instantaneously covers up the unique sound quality it has. All those years of development go straight out the window when you overload the amp.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.