D C DowDell

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

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

Music is what feelings sound like.

Jazz – it takes passion to make it happen!

Live music is best! Make plans to get out and support your local Jazz scene.

Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it’s going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts.

All music is beautiful.

Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.

If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

My music had roots which I’d dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

When Bird came on the scene, it was shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark and then there was light.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

When I decided that I wanted to be a Jazz musician, I knew that it was about improvising.