I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.

If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it.

What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.

Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician

But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.