We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation.

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

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.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

You don't try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he's the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it.

I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians.

The bandstand is a sacred place.