Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.

I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.

So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it's a waste of time.

What takes its place is very dry education. And the tools that actually can teach you - singing and playing, learning how to participate with other people, spiritual richness - are replaced with a big emphasis on how to memorize things. That's such an incomplete education. Survival of the fittest used to mean being bigger and stronger.

I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are.

We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet.

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