My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.

If you didn't have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn't have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways - if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.

We need more math classes, we need more science. It's the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music.

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

I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced.

We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted.

My father was a teacher, my mama was a community worker, I taught in so many schools. So when you get that experience of how to communicate with younger people, put that hand on them and give them that old-school feeling, the maturity and adult, a lot of our kids just need the feeling of that love, and that's the frame of reference that I teach from and that's the frame of reference that all of our musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center.