It's very important to go through periods where you sound just rotten and you know it, and you have to persevere or give up.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

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.

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

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

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

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

The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano.

They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.