Art & Creativity Quote by Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman punctures the romantic myth of the musician as a full-time identity, a lifestyle brand, a destiny. “I don’t really live like a musician” is less modesty than refusal: he won’t let the world reduce him to a role it already knows how to market. Coming from a figure constantly framed as the avatar of “free jazz,” the line reads like a quiet protest against being fossilized into a genre label or a bohemian caricature. Music, in his telling, isn’t a personality; it’s a practice.

The subtext is Coleman’s long-running argument that sound is a tool, not a shrine. By calling music “just something that I do,” he lowers the temperature around genius. That deflation is strategic. It shifts attention away from biography and toward function: what does the work do in the world? When he follows with “I’d like to be doing lots of other things,” he’s also rejecting the economy of total devotion that art culture loves to demand. The expectation is that real artists sacrifice everything. Coleman implies the opposite: real artists keep their human range.

“I like to cure all kinds of illness” is the key turn, and it’s not metaphor-only. Jazz has always trafficked in the language of healing and survival, especially in Black American life, where music often carried what institutions withheld. Coleman’s phrasing makes that aspiration blunt, almost childlike, which is why it lands. He frames creativity as care work: not escapism, but repair. In a world eager to treat music as consumption, he insists on its older, riskier purpose - to change how people hurt and how they hold together.