John Coltrane

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

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

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

Through Dizzy and Bird I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

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

You never master the instrument. You always just strive to get better.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

I think Ive done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I havent yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe Id reached that peak. But Im 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, Ill be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better.

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.

I’ve been a jazz artist playing pop and R&B my entire career.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

I still do what I love, and I don’t really think about it. I try to make a beautiful show, so people go home happy. That’s my biggest aspiration: to make people happy.

Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.

I don’t care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.