“CIA Interrogator:Have you ever met any jazz musicians you would describe, or who would describe themselves, as anarchists?Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair:Hmmm... ah, there was a trombone player, Wilfred Baker.Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair:He's the only jazz musician I can think of who is completely devoid of anarchist tendencies.”
“I was a wise-a** college student of twenty at the time and a precocious musician, with somewhat of that screw-you-I'm-a-jazz-player attitude.”
“In a conversation with the master jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis, he told me, “You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that’s not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise.” The ability to improvise, he said, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge “limits the choices you can make and will make”
“Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender's dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation.”
“If my name were Nubby Blues, I wouldn't be a jazz musician, I'd be a disabled Vietnam vet on welfare.”
“Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. "Individual sovereignty" is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one' s individual potential is one of the basic "rights" to which all humans are born. Yet Spanish anarchists were firmly rooted in the communalist-anarchist tradition. For them, freedom was fundamentally a social product: the fullest expression of individuality and of creativity can be achieved only in and through community. As Carmen Conde (a teacher who was also active in Mujeres Libres) wrote, describing the relationship of individuality and community: "I and my truth; I and my faith ... And I for you, but without ever ceasing to be me, so that you can always be you. Because I don' t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours.”