Ornette Coleman

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

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.

I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. ‘Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.

Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

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

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

You have to sound sad first, then maybe later you can sound good.

I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player and a special award in 1961 for quietness.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijuana, and will expire on cocaine.

I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage.

The audience should feel they are hearing the future, arriving just on time.

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

If I don’t learn something new every day, it’s a day lost