If you didn't have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn't have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways - if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.

Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.

Jazz is democracy in music.

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.