Dave Brubeck Quotes

51 quotes in 719 categories

• 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…
• Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist…
• When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece…
• 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…
• The worst thing about the life of a jazz musician on the road is getting to the gig. Once you're there and playing, it's marvelous.
• I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.
• I wanted to be like my father, who was a cattle man and a rodeo roper. And that was - he was my hero, and…
• If I told you all the people that have secretly told me I've influenced them, you'd never believe it, and you'll never see it in…
• It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.
• My own Brubeck Institute in California is turning out fantastic young jazz players, and I know great things will happen.
• When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.
• Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced…
• I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the…
• My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to…
• My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to…
• The secret of a great melody is a secret.
• I never wanted this kind of life that Im still living.
• We don't know the power that's within our own bodies
• When things are going well, I hate to quit.
• Every individual should be expressing themselves, whether a politician or a minister or a policeman.

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