Quote

The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

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.

We all know that jazz demands a cultivation of the mind.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

It's something that - jazz is one of the few things that you can go and listen to, I don't care where you're from, what you are, what background you come from - there's something there for you.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.

Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.