Musician

Even in these times, there are still neighbors that will turn their backs on neighbors.

If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it.

Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches.

Don't wish for someone else to do later what you can do now.

The best way to be, is to do.

A musician's whole life is to listen.

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.

The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don't even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can't really fault the kids for that.

When you create change with your point of view, you have to be ready for what comes with that.

Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.

When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play, but I couldn't.

I almost never watch TV, except for '60 Minutes' and pro football. I love Drew Brees, the Manning brothers and the Steelers' linebackers.

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.

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.

I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time.

What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world?