D C DowDell

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

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

Practice as if you are the worst, play as if you are the best!

Music is what feelings sound like.

Play the music not the instrument.

The true value of this music lies in an artist’s individual creativity and that unique process of expression which is Jazz.

Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

To keep creating you have to be about change.

If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.

I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

The main thing is you want to emote.

I went through a lot of mental pains and anguish about choosing between jazz and classical. I realized that where I functioned was where I should be, and where I functioned was in jazz, so that was it.

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.

Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take it from you.

It’s just exciting to be part of something that is brand-new.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.