D C DowDell

Jazz affirms the noblest aspirations of character, individual discipline, perseverance and innovation.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

While many forms of music may use the dynamic of improvisation, Jazz exemplifies the unique characteristic of collective improvisation.

Jazz – it takes passion to make it happen!

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

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

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

If a Jazz musician plays someone else’s song, he has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.

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

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

Music has to be accessible.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society to express yourself freely and creatively.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

I say this because it’s a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to. You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don’t have that ability. I didn’t. I had to know what I was doing. And ultimately it turned out that these people weren’t able to carry their thing very far. I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians.I believe in things that are developed through hard work.

I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.

I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

[Stratocaster vs Les Paul] It’s a totally different animal. One is for very subtle and, I would say, more musical things that you can distract and abuse. You can’t do that with a Les Paul. It’s too delicate. It’s got a very delicate tone; most people don’t ever realize that because they are plugged into monstrous amplifiers which completely, instantaneously covers up the unique sound quality it has. All those years of development go straight out the window when you overload the amp.