Dave Brubeck

I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

Jazz stands for freedom.

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

Tomorrow you’ll wish you had practiced harder today.

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

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

Let my children have music.

I don’t think anybody steals anything; all of us borrow.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.

There’s such a cynicism about the phrase ‘I laughed all the way to the bank.’ It’s as though money is what you’re doing, rather than playing music. If you’re playing a money game, why not get into banking?

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

When rock music came in, I wasn’t bitter about it. I was puzzled.

Music isn’t just learning notes and playing them. You learn notes to play the music of your soul.