D C DowDell

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

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

Jazz goes into my coffee in the morning, in my wine at night.

Play the music not the instrument.

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

The true musician plays what he/she hears. That cannot be a mistake.

You just sort of have to play the way you are.

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

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 is America’s classical music.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

I always had a deep feeling to be one with the very minute I’m in.

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

For me, the Les Paul is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar of all time. If you’re not playing a Gibson guitar and you’re playing this kind of music, whether it’s punk, metal or anything grounded in rock ‘n’ roll, you’re not really doing it right. I don’t think professionally I’d every play anything else. Gibson, thank you for making greatest guitars ever.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.