John Coltrane

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

All of the technique doesn’t matter… only if the feeling is right.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

Through Dizzy and Bird I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

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

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

Despite the fact I’m a professional performer, it’s true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

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

As long as musicians have passion for spontaneity and creating something that’s never been before, Jazz will flourish.

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

I’m trying to make music a sensual expression, not and academic experiment.

[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

I think we musicians are emissaries. Every time we go before the public, we’re there to make converts.

I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

Music can’t save the world, but can make one a little calmer.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

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 play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?