“I got interested in playing the guitar because of Charlie Christian. Like all other guitar players! There’s no way out. I never saw him in my life, but he said so much on the records that I don’t care what instrument a cat played, if he didn’t understand and didn’t feel and really didn’t get with the things that Charlie Christian was doing, he was a pretty poor musician– he was so far ahead.

I’m so limited. I have a lot of ideas— well, a lot of thoughts—that I’d like to see done with the guitar. With the octaves, that was just a coincidence, going into octaves. It’s such a challenge yet, you know, and there’s a lot that can be done with it and with chord versions like block chords on piano. But each of these things has a feeling of its own, and it takes so much time to develop all your technique.

My aim, I think, is to be able to move from one vein to another without any trouble. If you were going to take a melody line or counterpoint or unison lines with another instrument, do that and then, maybe after a certain point, you drop out completely, and maybe the next time you’ll play phrases and chords or something or maybe you’ll take octaves. That way you have a lot of variations, if you can control each one of them and still keep feeling it. To me the biggest thing is to keep the feeling within your playing regardless of what you play. Keep a feeling there, and that’s hard to do.

You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn’t get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. (…) I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn’t understand as much as I did Coltrane. Then after I really began to understand Miles, then Miles Davis came up on top.

Now, this may sound pretty weird— the way I feel when I’m up there playing the way I play doesn’t match—but it’s like some cats are holding your hands. C’mon, you know, and they’ll keep you in there. If you try to keep up to them, they’ll lose you, you know. And I like that. I really like that.”