You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.