Ornette Coleman Quotes
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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.
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I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, 'Well if you go out and save your money.' So I went and got - I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I'd bring whatever I made.
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Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality.
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The only thing my mother would say to me about my music - I'd say, "Mom, listen to this," and she'd say, "Junior, I know who you are."
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I'm interested in music, not in my image. If someone plays something fantastic, that I could never have thought of, it makes me happy to know it exists.
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I've never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company by someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I'd be left with the record company. And then - because they got fired - the record company wouldn't do anything for me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Only America makes you feel that everybody wants to be like you. That's what success is: Everybody wants to be like you.
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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.
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The idea is more important than the style you're playing in.
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We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life.
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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.
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I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure.
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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.
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Sound has no parents.
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Most of my relationships have been like that - with record companies. I've never had a legitimate business relationship with a company. I've always had a personal relationship with someone in the company.
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Whatever you do, it's over when you do it - but first you have to do it.
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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.
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Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.
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I don't really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I'd like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.
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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.
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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.
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After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer." But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing.
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I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke.
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Musicians tell me, if what I'm doing is right, they should never have gone to school.
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Harmelody allows everybody to be an individual who does not have to imitate anybody else.
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For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action.
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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.
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