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

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.

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

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

That's the thing: There are so many art songs in jazz. It's a much more rich experience for the singer than people think.

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 was the pop music of its day, and all American popular music has stemmed from it one way or another.

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.