It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.

The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me."

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.

Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

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.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.