Working with Monk is like falling down a dark elevator shaft.
JOHN COLTRANEThe reason I play so many sounds, maybe it sounds angry, is because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see? I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential.
More John Coltrane Quotes
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All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.
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I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth.
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Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.
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I want to be the force which is truly for good.
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Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.
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The 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.
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Considering the great heritage in music that we have – the work of the giants of the past, the present, and the promise of those who are to come – I feel that we have every reason to face the future optimistically.
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Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that’s too bad.
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One positive thought produces millions of positive vibrations.
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Don’t ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person.
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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 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.
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I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.
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Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.
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Damn the rules, it’s the feeling that counts.
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God breathes through us so completely, So gently we hardly feel it, yet it is our everything.
JOHN COLTRANE