Dave Brubeck

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.

My dream was to have a steady job, was not to be on the road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a carpenter and knows he’s gonna have a job.

I never wanted this kind of life that I’m still living.

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.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

I did go through a trial-and-error period where I tried out lots of different guitars, but within a couple of years I was right back to the Les Paul. From that point it’s stayed with me ever since. I have other guitars—and I love a lot of them—but I’m most at home on a Les Paul. It’s interesting: most of the time I would even rather make a Les Paul do the things those other guitars do. From the get-go, the Les Paul spoke to me.

The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.

I think you can play anything you wanna as long as you take the audience along with you.

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

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

I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

It’s true I’ve always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody.

I met up with George Shearing about a year before my mother passed away. When I was 11 years old, Mama took me to the Edgewater Inn in Seattle and I was able to sit down and play piano for George and a lot of (the set list) was songs I had heard from the album, ‘Concerto For My Love.’ Then, after Mama died, my dad and I went to actually hear him perform at the Edgewater Inn when I was 12. Oh my gosh! It just really got me into playing piano.