D C DowDell

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

Music is what feelings sound like.

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

It’s spontaneity that has always characterized Jazz music’s finest improvisers.

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

Jazz music has always made powerful statements about freedom, creativity and personal identity.

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

My version of Georgia became the state song of Georgia. That was a big thing for me, man. It really touched me. Here is a state that used to lynch people like me suddenly declaring my version of a song as its state song. That is touching.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time.

The extreme dynamic and percussive possibilities of an acoustic guitar amplified through a bridge pickup have, over many years of performing, informed not only the way I play, but the way I write and sing too. My guitar taught me to sing in textures, from the roundest lingering harmonic to the sharpest snap of a pulled string. Being a percussion instrument as well as a melodic instrument, my guitar also teaches me about the relationship between rhythm and melody. Portable. Did I mention it also taught me about being portable?

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

I don’t meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

I can play all I know in eight bars.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it. Blues was started by the slaves and I think everybody thinks that it all should be sad… even some of the slaves had fun with it.

Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.