Bamboo is not a weed, it's a flowering plant. Bamboo is a magnificent plant.
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.
Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same.
What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.
If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.
I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.
I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.
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.
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.
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.
I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.
Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.
We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn.
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.
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.
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.
The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano.
I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination.
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.
