Sonny Rollins

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

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

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

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

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

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

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn’t be playing anything of depth.

Music is interior decoration.

I have always seen Jazz as innovative.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

It is better to be felt than to be heard.

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

Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet, put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying ‘yes.’

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles and Dizzy it was very difficult.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

True Jazz lovers understand the rhythms are infectious because they are the roots.

I think the most important thing about playing is to walk out with confidence, look the people right in the eye and say ‘Here I am,’ and go and do your thing. As soon as they know you’re confident, they’re confident. As long as you adjust to them you’re not in trouble. You should eyeball them, find out what they want, and give it to them. They didn’t pay to come out and look at the tapestries.