“When I was coming up in New York in the '50s I was always into the radical players but at the same time I was contemporary with some of the younger accepted players.I was really mainly concerned to work with the radical people but at the same time I couldn't ignore the non-radical elements. But for me playing with the accepted people never worked out. Simply because they knew all the patterns and I didn't. And I knew what it took to learn them but I just didn't have the stomach for it. I didn't have the appetite. Why should I want to learn all those trite patterns? You know, when Bud Powell made them, fifteen years earlier, they weren't patterns. But when somebody analysed them and put them into a system it became a school and many players joined it. But by the time I came to it, I saw through it - the thrill was gone. Jazz got so that it wasn't improvised any more. When you reach what was called 'hard bop' there was no mystery any more. It was like - mechanical - some kind of gymnastics. The patterns are well known and everybody is playing them. It reached a point where I, and many other people, got sick and tired of the 'beat' and the '4 bars' - everybody got tired of the systematic playing, and we just said 'Fuck it'.”
“I think the question of appetite is very important. Some people are of a progressive bent and some are not. And you can't ask either of them to change. Some people are interested in carrying on an old tradition and they can find their kicks in shifting round patterns and they are not in any rush to find new stuff. They can rummage around the old stuff all their lives. People become obsessed with not just maintaining a tradition but with perfecting it. Some people search for the perfect arrangement of the old patterns and that is progress for them. Other people want to beat down the walls and find some new territory.”
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