John Coltrane

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

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

The emotional reaction is all that matters.

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

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

I don’t believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.

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!

I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

It’s the same for listeners. If you can’t stand your girlfriend, can’t take it anymore, put on your headphones and escape into another world.

The reward for playing Jazz is playing Jazz.

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

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

What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.