Top 64 Sayings About John Coltrane
#1. When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.
Wynton Marsalis
#2. Growing up, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues records - John Coltrane and Etta James. I was also really into Radiohead and the BeeGees.
Alex Clare
#3. Lately, I've been listening to some jazz albums. I love the new Pat Metheny album. John Coltrane. I still like good metal, though!
Geezer Butler
#4. [John Coltrane] liked my qualities as a person and that's the reason why he let me play with him. It wasn't what I was doing musically or my instrument or anything like that. He let me play whatever I wanted to play.
Pharoah Sanders
#5. I have tons of jazz records: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. I could go on and on.
Ted King
#6. Style to me is incidental. The British are very adept at creating it for its own sake, but the best style is incidental. John Coltrane had a style but it was totally incidental to what he was.
Tom Verlaine
#7. When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.
Robert Glasper
#8. If there's any such thing as a perfect man, I think John Coltrane was one. And I think that kind of perfection has to come from a greater force than there is here on earth.
Elvin Jones
#9. As much as I think John Coltrane belongs on the list, I think without Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, both of whom defined improvising on the tenor sax, there would not have been the evolution of the craft by John Coltrane.
Herbie Mann
#10. Grover Washington was my main influence, and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane.
Kenny G
#11. If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn't really work.
Isaac Mizrahi
#12. My own musical background is based in the blues, and in classical composition. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven and Bach.
Frederick Lenz
#13. Bob Erlendson, a local piano player, taught me chord structure and which scales go along with them. Later, I began listening to [pianists] Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. Then I got interested in [saxophonist] John Coltrane.
Lenny Breau
#14. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing "All Blues," a moody, blues form piece in 6/8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.
Blake Crouch
#15. It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.
Patti Smith
#16. He didn't say nothing. He would just do things. He never said nothing or explained nothing. He just would do it and that was it. You were on your own. You had to be very independent being around John [Coltrane].
Pharoah Sanders
#17. I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know ... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.
Kim Gordon
#19. John Coltrane - I've been listening to the 'Trane again. It blows you away, because I know more now and I hear more now and I had a life that I've lived!
Alan Vega
#20. To me John Coltrane was like an angel on earth. He struck me that deeply.
Elvin Jones
#21. I remember when my father was dying, I remember listening to Bjork, and listening to John Coltrane, and these things, and I don't know why but music has the power to transcend your physical being and take you up just a little bit.
Wayne Coyne
#22. I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp ... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.
Eric Clapton
#23. Now listen for your song. Everybody's got a song. When I used to chase the Trane - John Coltrane that is - he used to tell me, 'If I know a man's sound, I know the man.' Do you hear the melody playing in your mind? Does it move you, nudge you off your seat?
David Mutti Clark
#24. When you're 8 years old, and you've become subconsciously familiar with the layout and design of Black Sparrow books, and you know the difference between Miles Davis and John Coltrane, something is bound to stick.
Patrick DeWitt
#25. John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O'Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society?
Cornel West
#26. I think John Coltrane is one of the great American heroes, like Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson.
Simon Van Booy
#27. I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.
Cornel West
#28. I want to be a force for real good. In other words. I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.
John Coltrane
#29. 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.
John Coltrane
#30. I believe that men are here to grow themselves into best good that they can be - at least, this is what I want to do.
John Coltrane
#31. Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.
John Coltrane
#32. If you're bourgeois, money is it. It's all the questions and all the answers. Ain't no E-flat or color blue, only $12.98 or $1,000. If it isn't money, it isn't nothing.
John Coltrane
#33. I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth.
John Coltrane
#34. We should pray and seek for knowledge which would enable us to portray and project the things we love in music, in a way that might wholly or in some part, be appreciated as having been conceived and composed or performed and presented with dedication and in positive taste
John Coltrane
#35. A teenage girl creaming while she listens to some boy-band, a monk digging on the God he hears in Gregorian chants, or John fucking Coltrane himself climbing up into the sky on a staircase made of sixteenth notes, it's all the same. If it takes you there, it's good.
Tad Williams
#36. I've always felt that even though a man was not a Christian, he still has to know the truth some way or another. Or if he was a Christian, he could know the truth. The truth itself doesn't have any name on it to me. And each man has to find this for himself, I think.
John Coltrane
#37. I'd like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.
John Coltrane
#38. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being ... When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups ... I want to speak to their souls.
John Coltrane
#39. Any time you play your horn, it helps you. If you get down, you can help yourself even in a rock 'n' roll band.
John Coltrane
#40. 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.
John Coltrane
#44. Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician.
John Coltrane
#45. Don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person.
John Coltrane
#46. 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.
John Coltrane
#47. Change is inevitable in music - things change.
John Coltrane
#48. God breathes through us so completely ... So gently we hardly feel it ... yet it is our everything.
John Coltrane
#49. Invest yourself in everything you do. There's fun in being serious.
John Coltrane
#51. There are so many things to be considered in making music. The whole question of life itself ... I know that I want to produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need.
John Coltrane
#52. 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.
John Coltrane
#53. I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.
John Coltrane
#54. I think I know what it is but don't ask me to play it
John Coltrane
#55. There is never any end ... There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state.
John Coltrane
#56. I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing ... the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.
John Coltrane
#57. The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.
John Coltrane
#58. Working with Monk is like falling down a dark elevator shaft
John Coltrane
#59. One positive thought produces millions of positive vibrations.
John Coltrane
#60. 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.
John Coltrane
#61. The 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.
John Coltrane
#62. When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups.
John Coltrane
#63. After all the investigation, all of the technique-doesn't matter! Only if the feeling is right.
John Coltrane
#64. The real risk is not
changing. I have to feel that I'm after something. If I make money, fine. But
I'd rather be striving. It's the striving, man, it's that I want.
John Coltrane
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