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Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

There's so much music going on in New Orleans.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

We are serious about our music here in Philadelphia, and jazz has meant a lot to this city.

What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.

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.

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

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.