Dave Brubeck Music Quotations

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.

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

That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.

Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic-take it or leave it.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

Kinship doesn't come from skin color. It's in your soul and your mind.

And it still produces, too. The Stockton Symphony is top-notch in my book, and there's some great students coming to the institute. Joe Gilman (the American River College music professor who also teaches at the institute) is one of the most talented pianists I've ever heard. That praise doesn't do him justice,