One time, on an album, Eddie Harris said, "`Jazz! Jazz! Jazz!' Sometimes we be playin' jazz."

(Another time, on an album, when a fan said he was making Eddie rich, by buying his records, Eddie said, "Is my name Eddie Atlantic?"

I remember reading that Charlie Parker said, "If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn." Monk said, "The music is on the horn-play it or throw it away." And Roland Kirk said, "Anything you have to do, you have to go on and do yourself."
Jazz musicians were the great existential heroes of American art, to me. Even more than the abstract-expressionist painters.
They were unappreciated in their own country and played the music they invented, their way, when they had to share cigarettes to get by.

They weren't discriminated against because they were black. Painters were white, and they were discriminated against. Beat writers were white, and they were discriminated against. They were discriminated against because they were artists, and turned their back on the mainstream. The popular wasn't a challenge. The popular was embarrassing. The popular was uncool.

These guys were cognoscenti. Jazz musicians, abstract painters, and beat writers.

I was lucky, at this age, to be able to hear them, read about them, be around other people who admired them, talk about them to friends, or write about them to friends, after I no longer was around people who admired them, and talked about them.

Mingus said, "Bird's not dead he's hiding out. And he'll be back with some new shit that will scare everyone to death."

That's a view of life.