Ornette Coleman

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don’t come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.

When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything – they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I’ll give it to them.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

If a Jazz musician plays someone else’s song, he has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, you’re working without any real feeling.

Everybody has somebody that they patterned themselves after.