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 think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.

There's the tradition in jazz of having the “Battle of the Bands” and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.

I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.

As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.

The soul gives us resilience - an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship.

Our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent for all of us? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance, and when we squander that inheritance we act outside. We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.