John Coltrane

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

I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy and Bird.

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

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

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

I listen to all kinds of songs. There’s something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it’s pop or jazz or hip-hop.

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

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.

This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.

I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can’t define it beyond that.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

Musicians need to continue higher learning try to expand the pallet.

For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn’t live with it–even of my own music–with the same nuances forever.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.