Ornette Coleman quotes

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time. (Ornette Coleman)
You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition. View quote
Ornette Coleman
I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke. View quote
Ornette Coleman
The only thing my mother would say about my music-I'd say, "Mom, listen to this," and she'd say, "Junior, I know who you are." View quote
Ornette Coleman
I'm having this conversation with you now. I'm talking, but I'm thinking, feeling, smelling, and moving. Yet I'm concentrating on what you're saying. So that means there's more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person's got you doing. View quote
Ornette Coleman
No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn't know the words he's saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he's thinking logical to what you're saying. View quote
Ornette Coleman
I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. 'Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles. View quote
Ornette Coleman
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something. View quote
Ornette Coleman
To me, human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two-dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say. View quote
Ornette Coleman
I decided, if I'm going to be poor and black and all, the least thing I'm going to do is to try and find out who I am. I created everything about me. View quote
Ornette Coleman
After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player. (Ornette Coleman)
It seems to me that in the western world, culture has something to do with appearance. A person that's out creating good stuff has got to appreciate someone when they take the time to have an appearance that goes with what they're doing. View quote
Ornette Coleman
It's just someone has labelled us as having a different label to do what you do. I find that labels are the worst thing in the world for artistic expression. View quote
Ornette Coleman
You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes. View quote
Ornette Coleman
I think that those elements - light and sound - are beyond democratic. They're into the creative part of life. View quote
Ornette Coleman
All the things that human beings suffer from are how their environment treats them, and how the elements of their planet affects their mind and body--like radiation, cancer, and all. View quote
Ornette Coleman
Only America makes you feel that everybody wants to be like you. That's what success is: Everybody wants to be like you. View quote
Ornette Coleman
When asked to play a 12-bar blues, Ornette Coleman fingered his plastic saxophone and played nothing...he's felt more nothing than you or I know. View quote
Ornette Coleman
His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this--or more accurately, because of this--his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz--at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form. View quote
Ornette Coleman
I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it. View quote
Ornette Coleman
Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.' (Ornette Coleman)
If you decide you want to be treated good, and you treat someone else good, or you want to learn something, it's information. It's getting the right, good information. View quote
Ornette Coleman
Even when you write it, someone's got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you're still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I'm really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything. View quote
Ornette Coleman
I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient. View quote
Ornette Coleman
That's what I was trying to say when we were talking about sound. I think that every person, whether they play music or don't play music, has a sound - their own sound, that thing that you're talking about. View quote
Ornette Coleman