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You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.
Sonny Rollins
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Sonny Rollins
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: September 7
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Jazz Musician
Saxophonist
Harlem
New York
Theodore Walter Rollins
United
Inferiors
America
Musicians
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Accepted
Play
Jazz
Many
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Inferior
More quotes by Sonny Rollins
I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.
Sonny Rollins
I'm fortunate that I'm making a living at it now because I'm not equipped to do anything else.
Sonny Rollins
I don't want to appear hostile, like I'm hostile to L.A. or that I feel that the people don't appreciate jazz. I don't think it's that. I think it's something more. It's something a little bit more complicated than that.
Sonny Rollins
Jazz is an endless source of ideas, because you can use anything. You can play operatic arias. You can incorporate them into jazz. You can play gypsy music and incorporate it into jazz. You can European classical and you can incorporate it into jazz. You can use anything and jazz it up, as they used to say.
Sonny Rollins
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.
Sonny Rollins
I am a person who thinks about the music first in trying to achieve something musically valid.
Sonny Rollins
Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.
Sonny Rollins
I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.
Sonny Rollins
There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.
Sonny Rollins
How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity.
Sonny Rollins
I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with.
Sonny Rollins
I think music should be judged on what it is. It should be very high and above everything else. It is a beautiful way of bringing people together, a little bit of an oasis in this messed-up world.
Sonny Rollins
I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.
Sonny Rollins
I feel that I have an obligation to jazz and also to myself to play as good as I can play.
Sonny Rollins
Jazz has an audience all around the globe and has had for many decades, I think speaking of the United States, let's say that what we need is more of an official recognition.
Sonny Rollins
I am interested in my music lasting only while I'm alive. I'm not writing for the future.
Sonny Rollins
Jazz never ends... it just continues.
Sonny Rollins
I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.
Sonny Rollins
I'm now a legend, whether I want to be or not.
Sonny Rollins
I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show?
Sonny Rollins