My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.

Young kids are always singing and painting. When you get to that second and third grade level, you're supposed to put all that aside.

The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.

The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.

When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play but I couldn't.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.