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

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

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.