Voglio essere spontaneo come un animale selvatico
“I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.”
Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!
"Cliffrose and Bayonets", p. 25
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Source: The Vampire's Assistant
“It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.”
1850s, Autobiographical Sketch Written for Jesse W. Fell (1859)
Context: My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he grew up literally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.<!--p.33
“I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.”
What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
Context: Now, whether there is feeling or not depends upon what your environment or your association is or whatever you may have in common with the player. If you feel empathy for his personal outlook, you naturally feel him musically more than some other environmental and musical opposite who is, in a way. beyond you.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that's okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one's mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I'm getting at is that I know I'm a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.
“I wanted to talk to the animals like Dr. Dolittle.”
Reported in Brad Dunn, "Change of Scenery", When They Were 22: 100 Famous People at the Turning Point in Their Lives (2006), p. 51
“Feelings can be like wild animals-we underrate how fierce they are until we've opened their cage”
Source: The Sunflower
