My roots are in my record player.
Improvisation is a compositional method.
Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language.
So what starts is ad hoc and you never know where it's going to lead, so it's important to keep an open mind about those things.
I didn't get where I am today by being timid, young man.
In a certain sense, aspects of my solo playing were developed in order to test the theory about how long particular elements could be, as parts of so-called free improvisations.
You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.
When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated.
I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.
I've never been one that thinks that the function of an instrument is to approach the purity of voice or the structure of a beautifully sung line.
Remarkable only the very best arrangers can get a sound like that from four horns
We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.
Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records!
So in the sense that we were all dealing with that freer approach, yes, it was certainly one of the first contacts, perhaps the first contact, when Peter came that summer. So it's a very pivotal moment that is documented there.
I think the voice does that perfectly adequately without being imitated by other instruments.
So I'm looking to the saxophone as a resource which has its own unique set of possibilities. I'm looking to exploit them and develop them and have the fullest range of possibilities of the saxophone be known.
There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.
I think the solo playing, the decision to start playing solo, came out of having discovered what lay behind the doors that that technique opened for me.
Of course I knew the work of Roland Kirk and Harry Carney and the specific uses they would make of circular breathing, so I knew it was physically possible.
In my mind these two instruments speak to me in different ways, and the solo stuff seems to be easier to do on the soprano.
A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn't have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts.
I'd met Roscoe in Europe quite a few times over the years, and we'd say hi and so on, but this was the first time we'd actually played together.
Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.
I've been to the studio several times, and it's not that I'm not happy with what I've got, but each time I come away, I feel that I've learned something that I want to work on.
