Ornette Coleman

Music is a verb.

The idea is more important than the style you’re playing in.

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.

Talk of God is most often in church. Is there a God outside of church? I hope so. But how should I know? How does anybody know?

I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.

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.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

Jazz improvisation is an elusive genius.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

Jazz goes into my coffee in the morning, in my wine at night.

Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

Django Reinhardt was fantastic. he must have been playing all the time to be that good.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

There’s two things you can’t live without. Water and music.

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

For me, the Les Paul is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll guitar of all time. If you’re not playing a Gibson guitar and you’re playing this kind of music, whether it’s punk, metal or anything grounded in rock ‘n’ roll, you’re not really doing it right. I don’t think professionally I’d every play anything else. Gibson, thank you for making greatest guitars ever.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.