The reason why the music [jazz] is important is because it's an art form-an ancient art form-that takes in the mythology of our people.

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.

There's always the cliche of the choir shouting and clapping. OK, you have to do that, but there's also introspective parts, parts where you just follow someone that's preaching. There's lots of different emotions and moods that a service requires.

Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.

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.

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.