I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.

Some stances are just conducive to swinging. If I stand up straight for too long it's harder to swing. Plus my feet hurt.

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed.

I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.

Jazz celebrates older generations and not just the youth movement. When you "sell" only to people of a certain age, you get cut off from the main body of experience. The power of couple dancing and courtship, it's elegant, and you wouldn't realize America was once a nation of dancers and singers today. People of all races could dance and sing.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.