Saxophonists

"Anthropological theory may be compared to a large crossroads with busy traffic and a few, temporarily employed traffic policemen who desperately try to force the unruly traffic to follow the rules. (There are, it must be admitted, a number of minor crashes and other accidents almost every day.) Or it could be described, more harmoniously, as a coral reef, where the living corals literally build upon the achievements of their deceased predecessors."

"We still ask of our diverse world how it can be that people, born with roughly the same inborn potentials and opportunities, can turn out to be so different, and, in the next instance, what they can still be said to have in common. Still, anthropologists insist on giving priority of place to local life-worlds and on a methodological openness intended to prevent ethnocentric misjudgements. For, as Clifford Geertz has put it, if all you crave is home truths, you might as well stay at home."

"It must be added that many anthropologists are satisfied with one or two periods of fieldwork, that not all field studies last for a year or more, and that there are a lot of different ways in which an anthropological investigation can be undertaken, only a few of which have been dealt with here. Yet certain methodological requirements are definite and non-negotiable. Contextualisation is one; another consists of aiming to understand the world of the natives as far as possible in the way they themselves understand it, as a basis for further analysis."

"The significance of observational data can hardly be exaggerated. Far too many social scientists seem to believe that verbal communication, either via interviews or questionnaires, offers a shortcut to an understanding of people’s life-worlds. But surveys and short interviews may simplify too much. It is not always possible to place your views of, say, the government’s policies or dowry practices on a scale ranging from, say, ‘I fully agree’ to ‘I fully disagree’."

"The anthropological production of knowledge has at least two elements: fieldwork and analysis. Some might want to add a third one, namely description; you first collect a body of empirical material through various field methods, you then describe whatever it is that you’ve discovered and, finally, you analyse the findings. Many, including the author, are sceptical of the distinction between description and analysis because the (anthropological) analysis inevitably begins in the (ethnographic) description itself and, indeed, already with observation. No all-encompassing, neutral description exists of anything, and nothing has a meaning independently of that ascribed to it. Already the delineation of the field of enquiry – socially, thematically, spatially, with respect to the concepts used – necessarily entails that reality ‘out there’ is presented in a selective and theoretically biased way. It is impossible to describe everything, or to give equal emphasis to everything one has observed."

"Holism in anthropology thus entails the identification of internal connections in a system of interaction and communication. The word has gone somewhat out of fashion in recent years, particularly because many anthropologists now study fragmented worlds, which are only integrated in a piecemeal fashion. Nevertheless, the examples above indicate that holism today is to do with contextualisation rather than postulating the existence of tightly integrated and stable entities. In the analytical methodology of anthropology, context may actually be the key concept. It refers to the fact that every phenomenon must be understood with a view to its dynamic relationship with other phenomena. No forms of belief, technologies, marriage systems or economic practices (to mention a few examples) have any meaning whatsoever unless they are understood in a wider context."

"In anthropological research, it is impossible to keep single variables constant. If one were to place a group of natives into an artificial, controlled situation, the resulting interaction would lose the very context that guarantees its authenticity, and the result would be useless. The closest anthropologists get to the methodological ideals of the experiment is therefore through comparison. One would then compare two or several societies with many similarities, but with one or a few striking differences."

"Everything I've been through, twenty–nine years strung out on dope, the hard time in prison, and an endless obsession with romantic entanglements——were parts of a journey that I'm just now beginning to understand."

"Don’t count, feel! The only count I know, is Count Basie!"

"Julian Adderley's nickname "Cannonball" was derived from "cannibal," which he was dubbed in high school because of his large appetite. But the alto player also had a voracious hunger for music, which showed in his inventive improvisations, especially on Miles Davis's watershed album Kind of Blue and Adderley's remarkable Blue Note release Somethin' Else."

"A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!"

"I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such."

"There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it's going."

"I mostly like things that have causes more than effects, and this seemed to be a tune that is mostly effects. I don't get the cause clearly."

"With his 1959 Atlantic debut, The Shape of Jazz to Come, alto player Ornette Coleman helped usher in free jazz and avant-garde jazz. Recording without piano helped liberate the songs of a recognizable chord structure and his harmolodics philosophy sought to to free musical compositions from any tonal center. Coleman also used somewhat inventive instrumentation, such as the double quartet (one quartet on each side of the stereo channel), on albums like Free Jazz. The 2006 live album Sound Grammar is among the 83-year-old saxophonist's better recent efforts."

"His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this--or more accurately, because of this--his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz--at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form."

"I'm in favor of Ornette and many of the things he has done ... he does possess the basic elements that go to make up a jazz artist ... a rhythmic drive ... qualities you can find in everybody since Louis Armstrong—all the good guys ... I can still see in his figures a certain quality that was exemplified by Bird. Everybody says Ornette's playing sounds weird or so forth. But the basic jazz essentials, as I said ... Ornette has—the drive and the rhythm. Rhythm is the most necessary part, the prerequisite for the jazz musician—the positive element. But, of course, harmony is the negative through which the positive must exert itself."

"There's two driving forces for every jazz player—the playing and the writing ... Ornette's writing was a little bit ahead of his playing when this record was made. He has a wonderful sense of humor, and the compositions are very interesting. But I don't think he plays his compositions as well as he wrote them."

"Whichever alto player it was, I wish he would play in tune. He's got good ideas, but it would help to get them across a little more, you know, if ... unless that's considered to be a little bit more freedom—if you can take liberties with the intonation like that. if that's liberty, boy, they're making an ass out of Abraham Lincoln! I think it would be a good idea for everybody to just leave Ornette alone for about five years and let him get himself together rather than subject him to all the controversail ends of it ... he's searching and he should at least have the liberty to do it in peace."

"In my estimation a very important date, along with some of Ornette's earlier dates. It was very important insofar as the direction of the music; jazz, specifically the avant-garde ... Ornette inspired me to move from the canal-like narrow-mindedness of the '40s through the later '50s, to the later Grand Canyon-like harmonic awareness of the '60s ... I think he might have had some bearing on Newk Rollins and the impeccable John Coltrane."

"I like Ornette's approach to writing. I wish I could see more of a link between the writing and the solos. It's like a building without any foundation and something's got to keep it up in the air. Even an atom-powered submarine has to go back to home base sometimes ... You've got to know where home is. You've got to acknowledge that somewhere."

"When asked to play a 12-bar blues, Ornette Coleman fingered his plastic saxophone and played nothing...he's felt more nothing than you or I know."

"When people like and John Lewis, whose musicianship I respect, back and support this so openly and fervently, I don't know what to think. I just can't figure it out. From the very first note it's miserably out of tune. [...] I should like to revise one rating. After hearing "Embraceable You" by the Ornette Coleman group, I'd like to raise the rating on ' "Midnight Sun Never Sets" to 12!"

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played nigth after night but differently each time."

"The only thing my mother would say about my music—I'd say, "Mom, listen to this," and she'd say, "Junior, I know who you are.""

"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke."

"Let's play the music and not the background!"

"...you pick up the saxophone again, I suppose it's like writing poetry, you are picking up the history of that. Playing saxophone is like honoring a succession of myths. I never thought of this before but: the myth of saxophone and here comes Billie Holiday and there's Coltrane. I love his work dearly, especially "A Love Supreme." That song has fed me. And all of that becomes. When you play you're a part of that, you have to recognize those people."

"In short, [Coltrane's] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can't separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist."

"A titanic force behind tenor and soprano saxophones during his four decades on this planet, John Coltrane was relentless in his pursuit as musician. Constantly crafting his technique, he supposedly practiced sometimes ten to twelve hours a day, including after gigs or between sets. While there's some great material on his early Prestige recordings, his watershed album Giant Steps for Atlantic was monumental. His Impulse! records with his classic quartet of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones are some of finest discs he released, including A Love Supreme and Crescent. Coltrane influenced countless musicians and his presence is even heard in younger players today."

"Eventually I became a tad compulsive about hearing certain songs. At first it was a handful of jazz classics-Miles Davis's "Freddie Freeloader," John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," Frank Sinatra's "Luck Be a Lady.""

"You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn't get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. When you hear a cat do a thing like that, you got to go along with him. I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles [Davis]. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn't understand as much as I did Coltrane. I really didn't understand what Coltrane was doing, but it was so exciting the thing that he was doing..."

"Much of what the jazz-rock and fusion players would do in the 70s used Coltrane's modal and rhythmic frameworks as a model."

"[W]hen I was with him, he was as straight as a pin, but he had this sugar addiction and he loved these butter rum lifesavers. So he'd be pop—when he didn't have the horn in his mouth, he would be popping these lifesavers in, which satisfied his sugar craving, I guess. But he always had that... his breath always smelled of butter rum lifesavers."

"I think the most interesting thing about Coltrane, besides his tone and his sense of improvisation, was his deep spiritual centre. You really felt his relationship with God in his playing."

"I was playing this concert, and when I finished a solo, I backed offstage. There was Coltrane with the lights behind him, beatified. He held out his arms and took me in and I wept like a child. I'd been through so much, and held so much in, but I didn't cry until Coltrane told me it was alright."

"John [Coltrane] was like a visitor to this planet. He came in peace and he left in peace; but during his time here, he kept trying to reach new levels of awareness, of peace, of spirituality. That's why I regard the music he played as spiritual music — John's way of getting closer and closer to the Creator."

"My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is just part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being."

"I thought about this question. I answered it as best I could [at the press conference]. I felt I didn't tell [the reporter] what I really wanted to say. He thought I was Christian. And I am by birth; my parents were and my early teachings were Christian. But as I look upon the world, I feel all men know the truth. If a man was a Christian, he could know the truth and he could not. The truth itself does not have any name on it. And each man has to find it for himself, I think."

"Q: What would you like to be in 10 years? A: I'd like to be a saint."

"Keep a thing happenin' all throughout."

"[T]he main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That's what music is to me—it's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That's what I would like to do. I think that's one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician's is through his music."

"Rushin' Lullaby."

"I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born."

"During 1945, we used to go down almost every night to catch Diz and Bird wherever they were playing. We felt that if we missed hearing them play, we were missing something important. Man, the shit they were playing and doing was going down so fast, you just had to be there in person to catch it."

"I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around."

"It sounded like a member of the Charlie Parker school. I've never liked that school—it's one of those out-of-tune, honking-type things..."

"If that wasn't Bird, I quit ... You know what's funny? Now I know that Bird was progressing still. The other cats were the ones that were standing still and making Bird sound old, you know? Bird isn't just playing riffs on here, the way his imitators do. You know how he used to be able to talk with his horn, the way he could tell you what chick he was thinking about? That's the way he's playing here. How many stars? FIFTY!"

"Bird's mind and fingers work with incredible speed. He can imply four chord changes in a melodic pattern where another musician would have trouble inserting two."

"I want to say something about Charlie Parker, his importance in the picture. As great as we all think Bud Powell is, where would he be without Bird. He's the first one that should remember it—he himself told me that Bird showed him the way to a means of expression. shows a good deal of personality, but it's still a take-off on Parker. You take Groovin' High, or pick at random any five records by well-known boppers, and compare the ideas and phrases. You'll see that if Charlie Parker wanted to invoke plagiarism laws, he could sue almost anyone who's made a record in the last 10 years. If I were Bird, I've have all the best boppers in the country thrown into jail."