Don't bullshit' just play.

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.

We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us.

When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play but I couldn't.

I worry more about the marketing that's taken hold since the 70s. The Jazz era, the Swing era, those were huge. Entire decades were named for music. In the 1940s - after World War II - changes in taxation, ballrooms closing, people moving to the suburbs, and the onset of target marketing and the confusion of commerce with art caused some things to happen as a result that have taken us away from jazz and what jazz offers us.

Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.

Young kids are always singing and painting. When you get to that second and third grade level, you're supposed to put all that aside.