My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.

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

The young very seldom lead anything in our country today. It's been quite some time since a younger generation pushed an older one to a higher standard.

When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.

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.

My schedule is always tight. But I like to have the pressure of having to finish doing something; it gives me an added edge.

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.