I am astounded at my age with a 20-year-old daughter to discover that kids of her generation don't want to watch black and white movies. I understand that they gave up on silent films, but black and white? So, now movies have to be taught in academia because people don't know how to watch them, they don't know how to appreciate them.

If I'm reviewing a record, man, I play that record to death, which is ironic in a way because if I review a concert I feel very confident in myself, certainly at this point, and have for most of my career. You're only hearing it once and then you go to your typewriter and you write the review.

Nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Effusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going.

One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.

Criticism ultimately at some degree is about the writer and not the subject. It's very easy if everybody else says, "He's a genius," to echo that, but then you're not functioning as a critic or as a writer in any meaningful way. You've got to take the risk of being wrong.

I think all of us begin as writers. I wanted to be a writer from the time I as eight, long before I heard of jazz. The question is, once you have that obsession, what is your subject going to be and you often don't know for some time. It might become fiction, it might be non-fiction, and if it's non-fiction it can go in any number of directions.

If you're genuinely candid and expressive then you're never wrong, even when you are wrong.