Ornette Coleman

Music is a verb.

I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.

The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know ? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.

I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.

I didn’t need to worry about keys, chords, melody if I had that emotion that brought tears and laughter to people’s hearts.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education… just talent.

Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

First of all, I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.

Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.

All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician.

There are notes between notes, you know.

There’s so much music out there and so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.

Music used to be essential and meaningful, but now it’s disposable.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

When rock music came in, I wasn’t bitter about it. I was puzzled.

The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on.