In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.

Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.

I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.