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.

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

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

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

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

I do Jazz, Blues, Country and so forth. I do them all like a good utility man.

If I could read it, I could play it.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical and spiritual need for me.

If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterward.

I’m trying to get people to see that we are our brother’s keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.

I thought I had swell ideas and wonderful musicians but no one else did.

I am a writer – that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.

I was always exposed to music. Mom and dad would have the radio on constantly.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.