The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them...I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.

'I've changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?'

'If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.'

'For me, music and life are all about style.'

'If...Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partionings of the ma…

I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious a…

With Moondance, I wrote the melody first. I played the melody on a soprano sax and I knew I had a song so I wrote lyrics to go with the melody. That's the way …