If you want to be different, do something different.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.

The soul gives us resilience - an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship.

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

The best way to be, is to do.

Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.

As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.