Lee Konitz Quotes

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you’ll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

We all learn from each other, and I never really hung out with guys in that way, so I missed out.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

Out of Coltrane’s whole history, there are things which I think are great from all the periods.

Names and theoretical things don’t occur to me. If they do, I’m not doing my real playing mode.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

Many people do think it’s naive to improvise in front of paying customers. I’m not saying one way is better than another.

Labels don’t mean anything to me. I’m trying to play as passionately as I’m able to. If they want to call that cool, that’s fine. Just spell the name right, is the formula.

It’s very demanding to make up your own music.

It was 100 percent music. There was no ego involved, no attitudes, no black and white, it was pure music.

In some ways Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician. He does some things which are just phenomenal.

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

I wish that person outside would stop coughing.

I understood that if I wanted to work, the saxophone was the main instrument. The clarinet was what we call a double.

I love Indian music very much, but I haven’t studied that specifically.

I listen to classical music very much. There’s a lot of jazz that I don’t enjoy listening to.

I just completed a tour in Europe. I played every night. This requires traveling some days for six hours in a van or a train or a car. After six weeks of that, I checked into the hotel and just fell apart.

I hear many extra-musical things somehow in Coltrane.

I have been able to get a small audience. It’s not the huge audience, but it’s enough to make it possible to play. I appreciate that.

I could stop and say, Well that was a D minor, G seven, but I really don’t want to know that. I just want to know that there’s a combination of notes that makes a sound.