Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

Ethics are more important than laws.

It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.

The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn't going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.

The nerves are a problem on trumpet, because when you mess up everyone can hear it. Just remember most people are too polite to say anything about it. That should calm your nerves.

I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are.