Let the critics criticize and let the doers do.

There's the tradition in jazz of having the “Battle of the Bands” and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

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.

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.

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