The best way to be, is to do.

So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it's a waste of time.

I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country.

Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American.

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

We need more math classes, we need more science. It's the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.