Dave Matthews

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

I’m not like a legend that – so I’m sort of in the middle in this sort of gray area where, you know, I’m creating music, and I’m not saying there isn’t an audience, because there is; because all of those people go out and spend $80 to $150 on a concert ticket.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

I was a singing disc jockey who heard every type of music there was – and loved it all.

I’m always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

This be an empty world without the blues.

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

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.