Ornette Coleman

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’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.

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.

The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.

I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.

The idea is more important than the style you’re playing in.

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

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

Play the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you play.

I don’t meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.

If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn’t be playing anything of depth.

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

Music doesn’t have to hop to be hip, as long as it swings it sings.

[Ben Taylor] He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James Taylor.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

I don’t really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I’d like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

For me, the Les Paul is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar of all time. If you’re not playing a Gibson guitar and you’re playing this kind of music, whether it’s punk, metal or anything grounded in rock ‘n’ roll, you’re not really doing it right. I don’t think professionally I’d every play anything else. Gibson, thank you for making greatest guitars ever.