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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "

" 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 think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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