Dave Brubeck

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

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

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

Jazz stands for freedom.

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.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

When rock music came in, I wasn’t bitter about it. I was puzzled.

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.

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

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Music can’t save the world, but can make one a little calmer.

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

Oh, my darling, it’s incredible, that someone so unforgettable should think I am unforgettable, too.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.

I didn’t need to worry about keys, chords, melody if I had that emotion that brought tears and laughter to people’s hearts.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.