Ron Carter

I am from the planet of elegance.

I felt a responsibility to present a viable alternative to the popular electric sound.

When I write songs that touch on social relevance, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper.

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

The guitar chose me.

There’s millions and millions of people who think Les Paul is a guitar!

If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

Living is easy with eyes closed.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

I have no elitist concepts about Jazz. I would not be the musician I am today without experiencing invaluable music styles that are at the roots of African American black life and culture.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.