Coleman Hawkins

If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.

You can separate the men from the boys and ballads.

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

What I look for in concert is a connection with the audience.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

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

Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society to express yourself freely and creatively.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

The Blues contain so much joy and sadness at the same time.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.