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

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.

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.

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

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

When you limit the word 'jazz' to one period of history, for the people who love that period, then maybe it can be dead because nobody plays like that anymore. But jazz is progressive music; it always has to progress, and musicians always have to find new landscapes and new ways to speak out, so of course it's always changing.

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