Ornette Coleman

I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. ‘Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.

I didn’t need to worry about keys, chords, melody if I had that emotion that brought tears and laughter to people’s hearts.

Difference between sex and love? Well, you’re not always sure you’re in love. But when you’re having sex, there’s really no mistaking it.

The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know ? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

I went through a struggle, and I really needed to get myself together and connect with my purpose, which is music.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

My fans are the best in the world! They’ve grown up with me and stayed with me through this entire journey.

Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

Just allow your feelings to go with the music and you’ll find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

This be an empty world without the blues.

A good bassist determines the direction of any band.

All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel… and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

I think you have to leave a lot to the imagination!