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" If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that. "

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" 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. "

" Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work. "

" 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. "

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

" Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination. "

" Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it. "

" I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language. "

" 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. "

" I was spoiled by Monk's music because it was so good, so complete. "

" 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. "

" When I first started playing music in 1955, there was just a small body of people that knew it. It was a very esoteric type of thing. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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