Ornette Coleman

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

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.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Talk of God is most often in church. Is there a God outside of church? I hope so. But how should I know? How does anybody know?

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

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

I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it’s going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

Yeah, it’s more like playing what you think is appropriate for the moment, not forcing any particular style.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

Anyone who doesn’t give [his debut album, The College Dropout] a perfect score is lowering the integrity of the magazine

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

My style is to just play. The more “live” you capture your music-the more unthought-out-the more magical it is.