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.

Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its... It deals with it!

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

The Duke and Swing represent affirmation in the face of adversity.

The only justification for looking down on anyone is that you're going to stop and pick them up.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.