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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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