D C DowDell

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

Jazz – it takes passion to make it happen!

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

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

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

The more you listen, the more your hear.

What we play is life.

A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.

It’s easy to play any musical instrument, just touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

The truth is I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

You gotta mean it and you gotta treat it gentle.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.