Those who play for applause....Tha t’s all they get.

Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time.

The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.

The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art

It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.

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.