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

This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.

What takes its place is very dry education. And the tools that actually can teach you - singing and playing, learning how to participate with other people, spiritual richness - are replaced with a big emphasis on how to memorize things. That's such an incomplete education. Survival of the fittest used to mean being bigger and stronger.

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

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.

I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.

I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians.