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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

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.

Most of the people that I learned and experienced jazz with have been with foreign white people, mostly from France. Excluding my family.

What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

When somebody uses a word as a genre distinction, all it really does is trigger certain experiences, or music, that somebody's been exposed to. But that's an individual thing; there's no sort of universal understanding of what jazz is.

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