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" 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. "

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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. "

" 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. "

" You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I've performed solo for 20 years now, but I don't do much of it, because if you only play alone, you go crazy and out of tune and play foolish music. "

" 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. "

" Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "

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

" They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind. "

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