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

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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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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