D C DowDell

Play the music not the instrument.

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

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

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

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

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.

A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.

Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society to express yourself freely and creatively.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

Stop before you’re done.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

I think when my brother (Claude who founded vocal sextet Take Six) got his deal and I saw him on the Grammys that was when I said, ‘oh, you know what? If he can do it then maybe I can do too’ and that’s when I really focused on trying to make it in this business.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.