It's really not a stretch. The checks and balances are the same. The drums are the executive branch. The jazz orchestra is the legislative branch. Logic and reason are like jazz solos. The bass player is the judicial branch. One our greatest ever is Milt Hinton, and his nickname is "The Judge."

You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people. And when you begin to have the mass of populus striving for something that's not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy go into...the maintenance of that which is worthless.

We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.

What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world?

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.

The fact that we are culturally ignorant and we don't know what our heritage is, the price that we pay is that we act outside of ourselves almost all the time. We make very bad decisions how we deal with other people and their culture.

This music heals people because music is vibration, and the proper vibration heals.