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"If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world."
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"There are so few directors who are musical who appreciate music."

"I can see me continuing to make the best music I can, and let the chips fall where they may."

"88% of what we call good songs aren't really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had."

"I just really longed to do music that reflected me as an adult and music that I thought was for other adults."

"Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn't, I don't really see a point to it."

"So all of the music had reference, or is inspired by something of the dharma that I've come in contact with."

"A song has to become as much a part of you as a tailored suit."
Explore more quotes by Dave Van Ronk

"There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians."

"They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after me. At 16 I enrolled in something called continuing education. Once a month I'd go out to Jamaica, but I didn't take it seriously."

"One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing."

"Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz."

"You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work."

"I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician."

"If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I've ever seen was in that period of 1960 to 1965. All of sudden they were handing out major label recording contracts like they were coming in Cracker Jack boxes."

"In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that."

"If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count."
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