Dave Brubeck

Jazz stands for freedom.

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

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.

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.

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

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

Jazz music is the power of now.

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

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’

I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

To rise above the crowd, discipline yourself unceasingly to the strict demand and realities of your ambition.

Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel… and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.