Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

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

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.

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 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.

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.