Music is interior decoration.
I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!
Your humanity is your instrument.
A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?
The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.
Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.
You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, ‘Yes, where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I want a ticket to nowhere.’ I thought: that’s it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.
You blows who you is.
Genius is a word too often tossed around in musical circles.
Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.
Let the music speak for itself.
Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul.
You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.
What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.
I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.
When you’re creating your own shit, even the sky ain’t the limit.
You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody.
Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it’s almost as if it’s intertwined with society.
People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.
A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!
Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.