D C DowDell

Music is what feelings sound like.

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

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

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

Hipness is what it is. But sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

Look at the tune and not make the same statement that has been made a million times.

You gotta mean it and you gotta treat it gentle.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

Life is a lot like jazz. It’s best when you improvise.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I’ll give it to them.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

Critics don’t buy records. They get ’em free.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.