D C DowDell

Play what you feel, feel what you play.

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

Music is what feelings sound like.

Learn the tunes by playing the masters, learn expression by playing yourself.

A Jazz Diet will make you hipper, thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier and more attractive to members of both sexes.

10% of musicians make 90% of the money, while the remaining 90% of musicians make the 10% that’s left.

I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.

The Blues is never old.

Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

If you play a tune and a person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

I want the music to connect to people; reach people every time I perform.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

I’m going to make music out of whatever style it is, being true to the artform itself.

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?

For me, the Les Paul is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar of all time. If you’re not playing a Gibson guitar and you’re playing this kind of music, whether it’s punk, metal or anything grounded in rock ‘n’ roll, you’re not really doing it right. I don’t think professionally I’d every play anything else. Gibson, thank you for making greatest guitars ever.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.