Max Roach

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.

I try to teach by example and not force ideas on a young musician. We’re here to be part of a process of exchange.

I’ve worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren’t.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I’ll give it to them.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

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

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.