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.
Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.
After two takes you're imitating yourself.
At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.
If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.
I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.
I find my inspiration in myself.
I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.
Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.
