Top 57 Brubeck's Quotes
#1. But Ed Brubeck's a guy, like Vinny's a guy, and guys are all sperm-guns.
David Mitchell
#2. My own Brubeck Institute in California is turning out fantastic young jazz players, and I know great things will happen.
Dave Brubeck
#3. I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.
Dave Brubeck
#4. I was always very aware of drummers. My oldest brother Henry was a drummer, and he drummed on everything in the house from the kitchen sink to stovepipes. He was the first drummer in the Gil Evans Orchestra, so you've got to know how great he was.
Dave Brubeck
#5. I have more energy at the end than I do at the beginning. You can be so beat up that you can scarcely walk on stage but when you get to the piano the excitement kicks in, you forget about being tired.
Dave Brubeck
#6. When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.
Dave Brubeck
#7. I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.
Dave Brubeck
#8. Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.
Dave Brubeck
#9. Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Dave Brubeck
#10. You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.
Dave Brubeck
#11. Concord, California was a great place to grow up.
Dave Brubeck
#12. Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz ... And that is really the idea of democracy - freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want.
Dave Brubeck
#13. 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.
Dave Brubeck
#14. The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel's 'Messiah' when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio.
Dave Brubeck
#15. I'm beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.
Dave Brubeck
#16. I used to take my mother to Yosemite. When I turned 14, I got my driver's license, and that's where she'd want to go, so I'd go take her there for two weeks.
Dave Brubeck
#17. 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.
Dave Brubeck
#18. We used to get on planes, and they'd ask who we were, and we'd say, 'The Dave Brubeck Quartet', and they'd say, 'Who?' In later years they'd say, 'Oh', which amounts to the same thing.
Paul Desmond
#19. When things are going well, I hate to quit.
Dave Brubeck
#20. I wanted to be like my father, who was a cattle man and a rodeo roper. And that was - he was my hero, and I wanted to be more like him.
Dave Brubeck
#21. 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.
Dave Brubeck
#22. We don't know the power that's within our own bodies.
Dave Brubeck
#23. I never wanted this kind of life that Im still living.
Dave Brubeck
#24. 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.
Dave Brubeck
#25. What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.
Dave Brubeck
#26. Your mother's heartbeat is the first sound you ever hear and your own heartbeat is the last.
Dave Brubeck
#27. Once when asked how I would like to be remembered, I answered, "As someone who opened doors.
Dave Brubeck
#28. It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me. And also it's to me the greatest instrument. I shouldn't say that, but I believe that this is the only instrument I can really feel happy about playing.
Dave Brubeck
#29. Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.
Dave Brubeck
#30. When I was first aware that I couldn't read music I didn't know I couldn't read because I could play the music that was in front of me.
Dave Brubeck
#31. Probably the most profound thing in the Bible is 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.' This is what, to me, is the essence of Christianity.
Dave Brubeck
#32. As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.
Jim Coleman
#33. Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic-take it or leave it.
Dave Brubeck
#34. He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.
Dan Simmons
#35. I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.
Dave Brubeck
#36. I'm always hoping for the nights that are inspired where you almost have an out of body experience.
Dave Brubeck
#37. I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.
Dave Brubeck
#38. 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 - leave that to the classical musicians.
Dave Brubeck
#39. Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.
Miller Williams
#40. 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 me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.
Dave Brubeck
#42. I wasn't allowed to play in some universities in the United States and out of twenty-five concerts, twenty-three were canceled unless I would substitute my black bass player for my old white bass player, which I wouldn't do.
Dave Brubeck
#43. If there's a deadline, I work late. If not, I like to have normal hours, and get up early and work. When things are going well, I hate to quit. And then I'll work 'till exhausted.
Dave Brubeck
#44. After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' and 'La Cretion du Monde.' I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, 'Scaramouche.'
Dave Brubeck
#45. 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.
Dave Brubeck
#46. 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 print, either.
Dave Brubeck
#47. 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 listen to her play Chopin.
Dave Brubeck
#48. 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 by European music!
Dave Brubeck
#49. ...there's no mistake if you can resolve it, whether it's in your music or in your life. Sometimes the mistake motivates you or elevates you to a different circumstance that can be better. If I make a mistake, I'm going to develop that mistake, so it doesn't sound like a mistake. -Dave Brubeck
Andrew Zuckerman
#51. 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 that made me want to be a classical composer.
Dave Brubeck
#52. One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It's the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It's the first thing you hear when you're born - or before you're born - and it's the last thing you hear.
Dave Brubeck
#53. Every individual should be expressing themselves, whether a politician or a minister or a policeman.
Dave Brubeck
#54. Sometimes," Brubeck bites into an apple, "sometimes I want to be everywhere, all at once, so badly I could just ... " Brubeck mimes a bomb going off in his ribcage. "Do you never get that feeling?
David Mitchell
#56. Kinship doesn't come from skin color. It's in your soul and your mind.
Dave Brubeck
#57. Brubeck, for instance, is not careless. He's a studied guy. And even if his picture ends up on the back cover of Life, he's still a studious guy.
Eddie Condon
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