Dave Brubeck

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

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

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.

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

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

Jazz stands for freedom.

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

Les is an old friend of mine. He gave me this special white Les Paul – he wound the pickups himself – for my birthday, first time I met him. I play everything from heavy metal to blues to jazz on it. He just hit it right on the head when he designed the Les Paul. I like it better than most girlfriends I’ve had. The godfather of rock ‘n’ roll, I call him. Without him, none of us would have a job.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.

There’s always this sound out there that’s just a little beyond my reach and that just sort of keeps me going.

Jimmy (Wakely) told me, ‘I don’t want you to sound so much like Dinah Washington.’ So, I thought, ‘How can I get around this?’ And one of the people I really dug was Patti Page. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to sound like her.’ I actually did with a couple curly-cues thrown in for effect, but, that’s how I started getting away from the predominant Dinah influence, and getting my own style together.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.

Your sound is you and what you really feel inside.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.

What’s tied Jazz together is its foundation in the Blues, a reliance on group interplay and the unique phenomenon of spontaneous improvisation.