New Orleans - the real New Orleans - is the soul of the country.

This music heals people because music is vibration, and the proper vibration heals.

Whenever you face a man who's playing your instrument, there's a competition.

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

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

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.