I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.

The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.

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

I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.

I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.

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.

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.