D C DowDell

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

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

My neighbors always listen to very hip Jazz… whether they like it or not.

Play what you feel, feel what you play.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

Jazz – it takes passion to make it happen!

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

What’s tied Jazz together is its foundation in the Blues, a reliance on group interplay and the unique phenomenon of spontaneous improvisation.

Jazz is a music that allows a person to express his deepest, most personal self.

If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.

[Ben Taylor] He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James Taylor.

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music.

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

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

I think you have to leave a lot to the imagination!

People couldn’t give an F about how many cars you got any more. It’s about the way the music sounds, where you’re going, the experience you’re going to hanging out with your friends, the type clothes that you’re wearing – all of that’s art.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

The Blues is never old.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.