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.
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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.
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The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music.
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People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world.
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I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.
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Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.
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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.
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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.