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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The potential for the saxophone is unlimited. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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