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

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "