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.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.

I remember when I wrote a piece, "Blood on the Fields," it was a while ago, it was about slavery and about two characters, and I studied so much of music, I would always go back to the original documents, and as much as I can get original chants and slave chants and different type of beats and rhythms and ring shout.

My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.

What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world?

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

For me as a person who's in the arts and as someone who understands the magnitude of our contributions and the price that was paid to contribute to that, that we just have not gotten that together. I will do all that I can to get in front of our kids, to try to teach them, but at a certain point the people have to want it and come towards it.