I'll write down and catalogue all the different devices that are Americana to me, and I try to have a historic depth and breadth and also the things that we do in our time, the type of vamps and chants, things that are available to us.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.

Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.

The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.

My father was a teacher, my mama was a community worker, I taught in so many schools. So when you get that experience of how to communicate with younger people, put that hand on them and give them that old-school feeling, the maturity and adult, a lot of our kids just need the feeling of that love, and that's the frame of reference that I teach from and that's the frame of reference that all of our musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center.

You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.