Sonny Rollins

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

My improvisations are a beguiling mixture of the vertical and the horizontal.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

Music chooses her musicians.

Forgive me if I don’t have the words. Maybe I can sing it and you’ll understand.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.

Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

[On the word Jazz] There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s only a word. What’s in a name? Nothing! Cats say, Call me Muhammed so-and-so. But what’s the difference? A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music. Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

I don’t have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapy is in art.

If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

Your sound is you and what you really feel inside.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.

I have no elitist concepts about Jazz. I would not be the musician I am today without experiencing invaluable music styles that are at the roots of African American black life and culture.