Ornette Coleman

I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.

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

The idea is more important than the style you’re playing in.

I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. ‘Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.

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

Talk of God is most often in church. Is there a God outside of church? I hope so. But how should I know? How does anybody know?

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Using drugs didn’t help me play, all it did was hang me up for 15 years.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

A guy is influenced by hundreds of people and things, and all show up in his work. To fasten on any one or two is ridiculous. I will say one thing, though. Lennie Tristano’s early records impressed me tremendously. Tunes like ‘Tautology,’ ‘Marshmallow,’ and ‘Fishin’ Around.’ I heard the fellows in his group building their lines with a design and general structure that was different from anything I’d ever heard in jazz.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it’s about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you’ll never do it this way twice. I’ve studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

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 play whatever the hell comes out… that’s it.

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.