Music with Ease > Jazz Quotes > Ornette Coleman Quotes

"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke."
-- Ornette Coleman, quoted in: Esquire (January 2010)

"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."
-- Gunther Schuller on Ornette Coleman, as quoted in: John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (1983)

"The only semblance of collectivity lies in the fact that these eight nihilists were collected together in one studio at one time with one common cause: to destroy the music that had given them birth. Give them top marks for the attempt."
-- Downbeat associate editor John Tynan on Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz

"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."
-- Ornette Coleman

"It's the hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: you feel this, you play this."
-- Ornette Coleman

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time."
-- Ornette Coleman


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