Part of the challenge of the Barack Obama campaign was to try to neutralize that white backlash, and of course, he was masterful in doing that.

It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.

For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.

Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.

There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.

Martin Luther King was not a Marxist or a communist, but his radical love leads him to put poor and working people at the center.

Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal.