It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.
You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played
Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.
I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.
Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it.
Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
Never play anything the same way twice.
If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.
or simply:
