Ornette Coleman

Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

I didn’t need to worry about keys, chords, melody if I had that emotion that brought tears and laughter to people’s hearts.

I don’t really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I’d like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.

The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

I did go through a trial-and-error period where I tried out lots of different guitars, but within a couple of years I was right back to the Les Paul. From that point it’s stayed with me ever since. I have other guitars—and I love a lot of them—but I’m most at home on a Les Paul. It’s interesting: most of the time I would even rather make a Les Paul do the things those other guitars do. From the get-go, the Les Paul spoke to me.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

As long as you’ve got your horn in your mouth, you’re developing.

What I’m doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word – I love it.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.

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

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

It’s a matter of who would be right for each song. Mickey Hart for ‘All We Need is An Island’ – he’s the only guy I know who has Tahitian drums and every kind of drum on the planet.

It’s either hip or it ain’t.

Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.

I play as I feel.