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" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "

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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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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'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. "

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

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

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

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