Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
Ken BurnsWrite: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.
Ken BurnsFilmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.
Ken BurnsGood history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
Ken Burns