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

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

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.