D C DowDell

If the bass plays the root, a pianist superimposes a Maj7 built on the 5th and the sax plays the 13th, will hot women notice?

The more you listen, the more your hear.

Play what you feel, feel what you play.

Learn the tunes by playing the masters, learn expression by playing yourself.

Music is what feelings sound like.

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

I guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.

Risk is at the heart of Jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

I am very aware that so little has happened to the electric guitar from the time that it was conceived to now; where there are so little changes made where there should be drastic changes made. If we were to put our heads together and start thinking about modern technology we would be much more advantaged with the electric guitar than we are. I think that we’ve been stagnant for many years.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

For me, the main thing is spontaneity and taking chances.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.

A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

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

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

If a Jazz musician plays someone else’s song, he has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.