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.

Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.

In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

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.

You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.

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.