Musicians From The United States

"How do the angels get to sleep / When the Devil leaves his porch light on?"

"I know a place where a royal flush can never beat a pair, and even Thomas Jefferson is On The Nickel over there."

"Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk."

"Music isn't enough. Performers aren't enough. There must be someone that loves music as much as life. For you, and remember this always, those of us with something urgent to say, we give everything."

"Few artists have ever battled so manfully with management or so unheitatingly sassed the press. He was afraid of nobody because his heart was pure."

"He was, this smoldering, passionate young pianist, generous, lovable, deeply gentle of heart."

"Life is like a trumpet. If you don't put anything into it, you don't get anything out."

"The blues is a method. It represents a treatment of songs, first by W. C. Handy, and then by a great line of singers and musicians."

"It's a street in Memphis that W.C. Handy wrote about in his "Beale Street Blues." You know, If Beale Street could talk,/If Beale Street could talk,/Married men would have to take their beds and walk."

"If my serenade of song and story should serve as a pillow for some composer's head, as yet perhaps unborn, to dream and build on our fond melodies in his tomorrow, I have not labored in vain."

"I think America concedes that (true American music) has sprung from the negro. When we take these things that come from the art of the Negro and from the heart of the man farthest down."

"Keep it nappy or braided up Dirty in the cockpit, blazin' up (FIRE!)"

"Run-uhhn-uuhhn-uhhn, nominated at awards Back in the days drivin' an Accord"

"I'm immune to all viruses I get the cocaine it cleans out my sinuses Kill all the government microchips in my body I'm the paranoid nigga at your party I kill all my enemies at birth! Shut the fuck up! Bitch and let my slide my hands up your skirt"

"Oh baby I dedicate this to all the pretty girls All the pretty girls Its on [echo] All the pretty girls, in the world And the ugly girls too Cause to me your pretty anyways babyI don't have no trouble with you fucking me But I have a little problem wit you not fucking me"

"What y'all thought y'all wasn't gon' see me? I'm the Osiris of this shit!""

"You know God damn well I don't smoke this shit Meth *coughing* Know damn well I don't smoke this sheyit Know damn well!"

"First things first man you're fucking with the worst I'll be sticking pins in your head like a fucking nurse I'll attack any nigga who's slack in his mack Come fully packed with a fat rugged stackWhile you sleep I be the God on point, with Scottie Pippen As I, jump on stage, flip rip a show Strip and rip a hoe, wayyy like Bo Jackson while I'm still taxin maxin Relaxin sittin back sellin good tracks and Again and again when I rock the jam"

"When it comes to children, Wu-Tang is for the children."

"Do I let my children listen to my music?' Of course I do. Shoot, the worst curse is a lie."

"Yeah nigga, fart that shit. [referring to a vulgar method of lighting marijuana]"

"Everyday, like probably three times a day, I'd jerk my dick off so much that the prisoners would say yo Ol' Dirty chill the fuck out. Every girl I saw on T.V., her ass looked funny to me, and i just kept jerkin my dick off, every fucking day and night."

"I'm into all assholes. I like it because it's tinier than a pussyhole. It's so tiny, it's tinier than a clitoris. When i get the feeling of licking a york peppermint patty, it's a sensation."

"Ladies don't love shit. Ladies just act like they love. You understand what I'm sayin'? It's an act when it comes to Ol Dirty Bastard. They ACT like they love Ol Dirty - ladies don't love Ol Dirty Bastard because … Ol Dirty Bastard is busy lovin' them. They might like Ol Dirty Bastard, know what I'm sayin? They might listen to his music or something, but really they don't pay no mind. They pay nothing no mind, nothing is paid a mind to, really, on this earth. It's just living, and dying. The world is a big ball of fire and it's just burning with no feeling."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"...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."

"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."

"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."