We don’t have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it’s only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn’t dawned on us yet.
A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.
I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.
Commercialism that has absolutely no relationship to quality whatsoever, only quantitative assessment of a thing.
I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.
Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It’s conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.
I believed in studying just because I knew education was a privilege. It was the discipline of study, to get into the habit of doing something that you don’t want to do.
If you want to be different, do something different.
Sustained intensity equals ecstacy.
New Orleans – the real New Orleans – is the soul of the country.
The bandstand is a sacred place.
Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it’s our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.
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.
We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation.
The main three components are the blues, improvisation – which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up – and swing, which means even though they’re making up music, they’re trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you’re having a great conversation with somebody.
I’ll write down and catalogue all the different devices that are Americana to me, and I try to have a historic depth and breadth and also the things that we do in our time, the type of vamps and chants, things that are available to us.
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.
Art is a luxury. It’s not necessary for you to – you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.
When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn’t.