Explore Quotes by Dave Brubeck

I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.

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.

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.

I started growing up in a hurry and taking a lot of the philosophy I'd heard from church as a kid a lot more seriously - especially the Ten Commandments - and wondering how 'Thou shalt not kill' could be so absolutely ignored. It took me until I was in my 40s to write what I was thinking as a young soldier.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel's 'Messiah' when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio.

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.

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

Concord, California was a great place to grow up.

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.

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.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline.

I played a lot of sports and it's the plays in basketball that weren't worked out that are the ones that are just fantastic that you remember. We don't know the power that's within our own bodies.