Sonny Rollins

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

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.

I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.

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

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.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s just that when you’re playing, Stephane, you’ve got both Chaput and me backing you, but when I’m soloing I’ve only got one guitar behind me!

I am very aware that so little has happened to the electric guitar from the time that it was conceived to now; where there are so little changes made where there should be drastic changes made. If we were to put our heads together and start thinking about modern technology we would be much more advantaged with the electric guitar than we are. I think that we’ve been stagnant for many years.

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

Master your instrument, master the music and then forget all that and just play.

Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.

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.

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

You must own it to play it.

Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

First I was working on classical music that didn’t move me at all. I hated it. So I decided to discover the kinds of classical music that did move me—like Chopin, Satie, Beethoven, and certain Mozart songs. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy and it made me feel something. That’s when I realized music was inside me.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.