D C DowDell

Music is a calling that you must bring your best to, whether listening, practicing or performing.

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

Play the music not the instrument.

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

The true value of this music lies in an artist’s individual creativity and that unique process of expression which is Jazz.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

I have always seen Jazz as innovative.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

If the audience doesn’t hear what is going on, is it going on?

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant 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.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

Words are the children of reason and therefore can’t translate the feeling of Jazz because they’re not part of it.

I’ll always write music. Whether I release a record, whether I let the public hear it or not, I’m always writing music.

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.