Sonny Rollins

Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it’s going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts.

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music.

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.

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

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.

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

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.

Music is like wine, the less you know about it the sweeter you like it. 

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

A guy is influenced by hundreds of people and things, and all show up in his work. To fasten on any one or two is ridiculous. I will say one thing, though. Lennie Tristano’s early records impressed me tremendously. Tunes like ‘Tautology,’ ‘Marshmallow,’ and ‘Fishin’ Around.’ I heard the fellows in his group building their lines with a design and general structure that was different from anything I’d ever heard in jazz.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

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

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

How are you going to know what’s new to play if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?

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 is the continual pulsation of the now.

My singing evolved with a feeling of intense relaxation, always using my diaphram and breathing specifically through my nose.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.