Dave Brubeck

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Jazz stands for freedom.

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

There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.

I never wanted this kind of life that I’m still living.

Jazz stands for freedom.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

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.

I play as I feel.

That’s a great thing about jazz. We leave it a little space so that we have the opportunity to go where the moment takes us

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony and a necessary requirement of human emotion.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I’m about to get.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.

If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you’re going to the bank to borrow money.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

Ahhh – those Jazz guys are just makin’ that stuff up!

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.