John Coltrane

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

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

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

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

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

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

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

Just ’cause I’ve forgotten more than I can play, doesn’t mean it’s not Improv.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.

I’ve studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it.

The fact that an artist is experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in it together.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

Jazz is restless. It won’t stay put and it never will.

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.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

Nothing is so well-prepared as a great spontaneous performance.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

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.