If you are black, the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood. These are the white man's roads.

The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.

The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.

What will be / the sacred words?

Hope is delicate suffering.

James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.