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The idea is more important than the style you're playing in.
Ornette Coleman
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Ornette Coleman
Age: 85 †
Born: 1930
Born: March 19
Died: 2015
Died: June 11
Composer
Jazz Musician
Recording Artist
Saxophonist
Trumpeter
Fort Worth
Texas
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman
Jazz
Style
Playing
Idea
Music
Ideas
Important
More quotes by Ornette Coleman
When I have them working together, it's like a beautiful kaleidoscope.
Ornette Coleman
I would like to play for audiences who are not using my music to stimulate their sex organs.
Ornette Coleman
That's why I haven't been so anxious. But now, lots of people write and say, 'I want to find out what you're doing.' So I know that this book will enlighten them.
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.
Ornette Coleman
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
Ornette Coleman
For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action.
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.
Ornette Coleman
I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure.
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.
Ornette Coleman
I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.
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.
Ornette Coleman
Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality.
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.
Ornette Coleman
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.
Ornette Coleman
Jerry Garcia was one of the original American icons. He played naturally and beautifully.
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
I don't know what they're thinking about. Just because someone says, 'I like what you do' or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I've had that experience with record companies.
Ornette Coleman
Harmelody allows everybody to be an individual who does not have to imitate anybody else.
Ornette Coleman
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.
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.
Ornette Coleman
