Ornette Coleman

Music is a verb.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.

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.

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.

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

The true artform is being a human being.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.

One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

Jazz without the Blues is like BBQ without the sauce.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

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

If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters and gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle-class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.

I don’t intend to be a performing flea anymore. I was the dreamweaver, but although I’ll be around I don’t intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don’t want to die at 40.

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

If you think it, want it, dream it… then it’s real. You are what you feel.