When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn’t.
The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.
Whenever you face a man who’s playing your instrument, there’s a competition.
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.
The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.
The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.
My schedule is always tight. But I like to have the pressure of having to finish doing something; it gives me an added edge.
Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn’t recover from that.
Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.
I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time.
We learn a language through its song, and even if you don’t have music you have the song of people you love’s voice, and you’ll notice that song in their voice.
We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don’t know that achievement, there’s no way in the world that could be good for us.
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.
When I say “our,” I definitely mean all of America. It’s not less pertinent for you because it comes from a Black person, just like a great achievement by an Anglo American is less important.
To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn’t mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.
When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.
Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” is still in print. They’re debating right now over Mark Twain. He’s still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are – they’re there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country.
We all teach from that same frame of reference. We’re like neighborhood – the people who have had the opportunity through this music to gain a platform and spread the message of this music, which is basically love in a form of communication that’s honest and truthful.
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 arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn’t going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up.