John Coltrane

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

Through Dizzy and Bird I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

You just sort of have to play the way you are.

If you can’t play the Blues you might as well hang it up.

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

I’ve worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren’t.

I kinda went back to that period between ’88 and ’94 where I felt like I was the most creative, without being hindered by powers that be. I was no longer going to try to hinder myself to what I thought was going to be on the radio.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

I do the best I can with any instrument I get attracted to. But they’re just tools in order for you to express yourself and that’s really the upshot of it.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

[On the word Jazz] There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s only a word. What’s in a name? Nothing! Cats say, Call me Muhammed so-and-so. But what’s the difference? A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music. Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.