Coleman Hawkins

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

You can separate the men from the boys and ballads.

Music should always be an adventure.

I’ve been told that nobody sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.

Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

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

For me, there wasn’t a line between working and getting paid or simply playing for fun.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I’m about to get.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

As a young cellist I had played to an audience that had included Pablo Casals and reacted with poor, nervous playing. Casals sought me out after the concert and praised me highly, somewhat easing the pain and thinking him a very kind man.

It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

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