D C DowDell

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

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

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

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

Music is what feelings sound like.

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

It’s always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s just there and I don’t question it.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.

I got out of the car and there was a knife in my neck. The guy says, “Don’t move.” And the drummer got out of the car, and he got a gun in his head. This was my entrance to the South Side of Chicago. But it was necessary, because I wanted to play jazz.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

If you think it, want it, dream it… then it’s real. You are what you feel.

I don’t care for the music when they’re talking bad about women because I think women are God’s greatest gift to the planet – I just like music.

I don’t intend to be a performing flea anymore. I was the dreamweaver, but although I’ll be around I don’t intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don’t want to die at 40.

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

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