Dave Brubeck

I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Jazz stands for freedom.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

A drummer has to be kind-hearted.

To work is to feel alive.

Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.

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

However it goes, I’ll just keep playing. That’s where the basic satisfaction is at.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

You usually can’t tell what’s inspiring until you look back on it.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.

I’m a fan first. I believed Duke Ellington when he said there’s no bad music, just some of it is presented badly. As a kid, hanging around Church Street, the presentation of music was so powerful, I couldn’t help but jump for joy. I had discovered art, or truth, or whatever you want to call it; I had seen a light I’d follow forever.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.