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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "