Ornette Coleman

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

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.

My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

[moving to Las Vegas] It was sort of like a man getting married – you don’t have to go out looking for girls, you’ve got your girl with you. I could go to casinos any time I had money and wanted to, so I actually went less.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

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.

When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent’s disapproval.

The true musician plays what he/she hears. That cannot be a mistake.

I have been doing music all my life so everyday when I get up I expect music will be part of it.

A Jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path and process taken towards it.

It’s just exciting to be part of something that is brand-new.