Musician

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

The potential for the saxophone is unlimited.

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.

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.

The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music.

People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die.

I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here.

I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down.

You have to sound sad first of all, then maybe later you can sound good.

I was spoiled by Monk's music because it was so good, so complete.

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.

Kenny G, I have to be grateful to him for proving that the instrument can be played all different kinds of ways.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.

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.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

The more original something is, the more of a threat it seems until the people catch up with it. That happened with Thelonious Monk. It happened with anybody who is really original.

Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with.