Dave Brubeck

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.

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

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

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

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

It’s very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he’s creating, the fact that he’s experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in a brotherhood of some kind… we’re in it together.

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

I kind of hate the fact that people are always trying to put you into a category. I hate walls, and I hate boundaries. I don’t like that. I listen to everything.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don’t learn something every day, you know what I think? It’s a day lost. Now, I don’t practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I’m doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.

Love is sweeping the country.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

The beauty of Jazz is that it’s malleable. People address it to suit their own personalities.

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

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

I can’t sing it straight. I have no choice but to swing it.

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

When you’re creating your own shit, even the sky ain’t the limit.