Ornette Coleman

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.

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.

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

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.

How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

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

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

Music can’t save the world, but can make one a little calmer.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

I’m always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.

Actually, I think the more Ben [Taylor] sings, the less like James he sounds.

Music and life are all about style.