Working with Monk is like falling down a dark elevator shaft.
Change is inevitable in music – things change.
I’m into scales right now.
I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.
Damn the rules, it’s the feeling that counts.
Considering the great heritage in music that we have – the work of the giants of the past, the present, and the promise of those who are to come – I feel that we have every reason to face the future optimistically.
The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.
Don’t ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person.
I think I know what it is but don’t ask me to play it.
Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.
Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that’s too bad.
The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.
The reason I play so many sounds, maybe it sounds angry, is because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see? I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential.
We should pray and seek for knowledge which would enable us to portray and project the things we love in music, in a way that might wholly or in some part, be appreciated as having been conceived and composed or performed and presented with dedication and in positive taste.
I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth.
I’ve always felt that even though a man was not a Christian, he still has to know the truth some way or another. Or if he was a Christian, he could know the truth. The truth itself doesn’t have any name on it to me. And each man has to find this for himself, I think.
Any time you play your horn, it helps you. If you get down, you can help yourself even in a rock ‘n’ roll band.
I want to be the force which is truly for good.
There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.
To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am – my faith, my knowledge, my being... When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups.