Don't Wish For Someone Else To Do

I Think That When The Education System Started To Be Dismantled During The First Great Depression In The 1930s, We Didn't Recover From That.

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.

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.

But You Listen To Coltrane And That's Something Human, Something That's About Elevation. It's Like Making Love To A Woman. It's About Something Of Value, It's Not Just Loud. It Doesn't Have That Violent Connotation To It. I Wanted To Be A Jazz Musician So Bad, But I Really Couldn't. There Was No Way I Could Figure Out To Learn How To Play.

I Remember When I Wrote A Piece, "blood On The Fields," It Was A While Ago, It Was About Slavery And About Two Characters, And I Studied So Much Of Music, I Would Always Go Back To The Original Documents, And As Much As I Can Get Original Chants And Slave Chants And Different Type Of Beats And Rhythms And Ring Shout.