Let my children have music.
Jazz music is a language of the emotions.
I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.
Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.
Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.
The reason I write music is that I feel it’s a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence.
No one is original. Everyone is derivative.
[on Ornette Coleman] Man, that cat is nuts!
You just sort of have to play the way you are.
The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know ? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.
I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was 6 years old.
When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after were dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.
To rise above the crowd, discipline yourself unceasingly to the strict demand and realities of your ambition.
Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.
You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.
Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.
You can’t go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.
Nothing is out of the question for me. Im always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light Then Im grateful.
All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.
I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.
