Ornette Coleman

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.

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

I’ve had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I’ve had lots of guys call me up. I’ve gotten two or three commissions to write things. I’ve written lots of movie scores.

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

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

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.

If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you’re going to the bank to borrow money.

As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

Jazz has evolved with an inner necessity characteristic of any true art form.

Play what you feel, feel what you play.

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

Let your life be your music and let your music be your life.

I have a nice car, a Mercedes. And then I have an old El Camino truck that I’m crazy about. I like to get in that truck and go up in the hills near where I live, in Vegas, and take my camera. That, to me, is Heaven, being out in nature, taking pictures of the wildlife.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

Music is interior decoration.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

I wrote “Pilot of My Destiny” because of my love of flying. The fact that my brother is a pilot inspired me to write it. I call him pilot. He calls me copilot.