Creativity Quote by Ornette Coleman

Coleman is sneaking a philosophy lesson into small talk, the way a great improviser slips a new key center under a melody you thought you knew. On the surface, he is describing ordinary conversation: talking while also thinking, feeling, smelling, moving. The hook is that he treats this obvious multitasking as evidence, not trivia. If the body can run several tracks at once, then any demand for a single, “correct” focus is already a kind of fiction.

That’s the cultural argument embedded in the casual cadence. Coleman spent his career being told what he was “supposed” to be doing: playing changes, obeying the harmonic grid, proving legitimacy on terms set by institutions that often didn’t have room for his sound. Here, he reframes attention as plural and porous. You can be inside the present task and still carry other sensations, histories, and intentions. Improvisation, by extension, isn’t distraction; it’s an honest report on how consciousness actually behaves.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to control. “The present thing that the person’s got you doing” isn’t neutral phrasing. It suggests social pressure: audiences, bandstands, critics, even conversational partners trying to narrow your bandwidth. Coleman insists the body won’t fully comply. There’s always extra signal.

Context matters: free jazz was frequently misread as chaos or refusal. Coleman’s line argues the opposite. His music, like his mind in conversation, is a coordination of simultaneity - listening and asserting, responding and roaming. He’s defending complexity as natural, not indulgent, and smuggling artistic freedom into the plain fact of being alive.