John Coltrane

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

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

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.

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

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

The Blues is never old.

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.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.

Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

Women bring something different to an instrument if they are respectful of their feminine aesthetic.

If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters and gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle-class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

I guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

T-Bone was, to me, that sound of being in heaven.