John Coltrane

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

All of the technique doesn’t matter… only if the feeling is right.

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

The emotional reaction is all that matters.

I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

I always wanted to play the piano, and jazz appealed to me.

Your ear is the final judge to what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

It’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is Jazz itself.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

I’m… a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.