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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good. "

" 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. "

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

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