And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.
Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its... It deals with it!
A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
Don't bullshit' just play.
Sustained intensity equals ecstacy.
Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed.
Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
Jazz music is the power of now.
The bandstand is a sacred place.
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.
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.
There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.
Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.
