"I'm fortunate that I'm making a living at it now because I'm not equipped to do anything else."
"I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress...so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair".
"One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really."
"Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it's going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts".
"What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there. "
Sonny Rollins
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