Ornette Coleman quotes

Ornette Coleman was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and innovator, widely regarded as a pioneering figure in free jazz. His approach broke away from conventional musical structures and emphasized improvisation and emotional expression. He influenced generations of musicians and reshaped the landscape of modern jazz. Here are 52 of his quotes:

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

I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke.

Ornette Coleman

The only thing my mother would say about my music-I'd say, "Mom, listen to this," and she'd say, "Junior, I know who you are."

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

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.

Ornette Coleman

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.

Ornette Coleman

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Ornette Coleman

To me, human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two-dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say.

Ornette Coleman

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.

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

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.

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 think that those elements - light and sound - are beyond democratic. They're into the creative part of 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

Only America makes you feel that everybody wants to be like you. That's what success is: Everybody wants to be like you.

Ornette Coleman

When asked to play a 12-bar blues, Ornette Coleman fingered his plastic saxophone and played nothing...he's felt more nothing than you or I know.

Ornette Coleman

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.

Ornette Coleman

I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it.

Ornette Coleman

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.

Ornette Coleman

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.

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

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