Dave Brubeck

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

Jazz stands for freedom.

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

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, ‘Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

Each time I have the opportunity to play, it’s another chance to tell the truth.

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

I don’t want to sing anything that doesn’t come real.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.

The weird thing about bass is the simplest stuff to do is the hardest.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

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.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

Count don’t do nothin’. But it sure sounds good.