The best musicians know this music isn’t about “schools” at all. Like my father says, “There’s only one school, the school of ‘Can you play?
It’s hard to be prejudiced against someone you love.
I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.
Even if nobody’s singing, just when you talk, you’re singing. I’ll meet somebody and say, “Oh, I’m tone-deaf.” I say, “You’re not tone-deaf, because if you were tone-deaf you would speak like that. But you’re ‘Oh, I’m tone-deaf.’ You already sang a song to me.”
Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense.
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.
Our culture is what we did together. What did Walt Whitman represent for all of us? What was his message to us? That is an inheritance, and when we squander that inheritance we act outside. We don’t know who we are; we don’t know where we are.
Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.
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.
What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.
I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you’re serious enough to practice.
So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it’s a waste of time.