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

I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.

Thank the good Lord for a job.

When you study our greatest artists, you will find that they give us a key to understand how to deal with each other, and that our bloodlines are intertwined. It's not hyphenated America. That there is an America, and it is expressed in those arts. It gives us a key to figure out how to negotiate with each other, and it tells us actually who we are.

The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art

I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.

Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.