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" I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone. "

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" Saxophone is one thing, and music is another. "

" I think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed. "

" If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die. "

" When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now. "

" The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano. "

" Register is very important. Music sounds best in a certain register. "

" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "

" I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever. "

" The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music. "

" People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world. "

" Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same. "

" I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio. "

" When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly. "

" Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first. "

" You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others. "

" Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant. "

" I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here. "

" What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged. "

" We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn. "

" It starts with a single sound. If there's something in that sound, then it's worth continuing. "

" Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo. "

" The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity. "

" It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up. "

" The more original something is, the more of a threat it seems until the people catch up with it. That happened with Thelonious Monk. It happened with anybody who is really original. "

" Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with. "

" When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all. "

" Jazz is people's music, a collectivity. "

" If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up. "

" To me, there is spirit in a reed. It's a living thing, a weed, really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. It's really an ancient vibration. "