How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense.

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.

Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.

In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

Many a revolution started with the actions of a few. Only 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence. A few hanging together can lead a nation to change.

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.

I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.