Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.
Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.
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.
If you didn't have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn't have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways - if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.
My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.
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.
My schedule is always tight. But I like to have the pressure of having to finish doing something; it gives me an added edge.
There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.
We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation.
We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.
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.
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.
The fact that we are culturally ignorant and we don't know what our heritage is, the price that we pay is that we act outside of ourselves almost all the time. We make very bad decisions how we deal with other people and their culture.
Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.
My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.
The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.
People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.
There's the tradition in jazz of having the “Battle of the Bands” and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.
If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it.
There really have only ever been a few people in each generation who step out, are willing to put themselves on the line, and risk everything for their beliefs.
No particular music makes me feel nostalgic. If it's great, it just keeps me in the present moment. That level of music is like a classic story, like the Iliad-something so perfect it can never be old.
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 arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.
Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it.
