Factbox: Quotes by and about saxophonist Ornette Coleman

[June 12, 2015] (Reuters) - Some musicians found saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who died on Thursday at 85, to be a pioneer, but others were disdainful of his approach to jazz. Many of those detractors, however, such as trumpet player Miles Davis, later changed their minds about Coleman.

Following are comments about Coleman from his contemporaries:

* "Hell, just listen to what he writes and how he plays. If you're talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside."

- Davis

* "There's nothing beautiful in what he's playing. He's just playing loud and slurring the notes. Anybody can do that ... I think he has a gang of potential, though."

- Pianist Thelonious Monk

* "Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations of Parker, Gillespie and Monk."

- Pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet

* "I listened to Coleman high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving, baby."

- Trumpeter Roy Eldridge

* "Ornette just pushes the melody out of line here and there. Trouble is he can't play it straight."

- Bassist-composer Charles Mingus

Coleman's thoughts on music were sometimes as difficult to decipher as the music itself. Here are some of his comments:

* "The state of surviving in music is more like 'what music are you playing.' But music isn't a style, it's an idea. The idea of music, without it being a style - I don't hear that much anymore."

- A 2006 New York Times interview

* "You can play the alto saxophone in a way where the people can't hear nothing you're doing but they feel everything that you're playing. Do you know what I'm saying?"

- A 2006 interview with National Public Radio

* "The good thing about music is that there's a lot of room to make your own mistakes - if you can find out what a mistake is."

- Quoted in the International Herald Tribune in 2001

* "I sometimes realize that there is something on the earth that is free of everything but what created it and that is the one thing that I have been trying to find."

- In the New York Times in 1997

* "I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure."

- 2009 Esquire interview

(Compiled by Bill Trott; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Matthew Lewis)

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