D C DowDell

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

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

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

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

Hipness is what it is. But sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.

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

The high note is not the only thing.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

It’s very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he’s creating, the fact that he’s experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in a brotherhood of some kind… we’re in it together.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, ‘That’s just that ole blues singer.’

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

First I was working on classical music that didn’t move me at all. I hated it. So I decided to discover the kinds of classical music that did move me—like Chopin, Satie, Beethoven, and certain Mozart songs. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy and it made me feel something. That’s when I realized music was inside me.

In order to be honest with myself, I have to reveal more of who I am. This is a part of the improv process.

As long as I can say what it is that I need to say, then I’ll fit whatever I’m trying to say around a melody.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead

There is nothing more stuntastic than rapping in front of an orchestra.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.