The young very seldom lead anything in our country today. It's been quite some time since a younger generation pushed an older one to a higher standard.
Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.
Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also.
I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.
Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.
There is an idea that a mind is wasted on the arts unless it makes you good in math or science. There is some evidence that the arts might help you in math and science.
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.
I grew up in the South, and our way of dealing with each other was teasing, ribbing, making fun and scrapping in the street. Criticism doesn't bother me so much. It actually made me, when I was younger, more aggressive. But you get into middle age, and you lose interest in that stuff. It's not serious.
I never minded giving my opinions. They are just opinions, and I had studied music and I had strong feelings. I was happy for my opinions to join all the other opinions. But you have to be prepared for what comes back, especially if you don't agree with the dominant mythology.
My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.
We looked up to our father. He still is much greater than us.
My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.
My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation.
Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.
The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.
