I Believe In Professionalism, But Playing Is

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 It Comes To Songs And Music, Yeah, People Love To Sing And Dance And Play Music And Tunes, And That Stream Of Consciousness That Exists In Music, Nobody Knows Where That Comes From.

It's Our Job To Just Do As Much As We Can To Enlighten The People About It And To Represent It By Playing It With Some Integrity. That's What I Try To Do.

When I Say "our," I Definitely Mean All Of America. It's Not Less Pertinent For You Because It Comes From A Black Person, Just Like A Great Achievement By An Anglo American Is Less Important.

When I Came To New York, To Brooklyn, I Met Alvin Ailey And Stanley Crouch And August Wilson. They Were Always Putting Things In A Philosophical Context. All The Great Jazz Musicians Did, Too. There Was Always A Sub-context To What They Were Saying About Music Even Though They Would Be Very Down Home And Earthy. So I Started To Develop, In Addition To My Power And Ability To Simply Hear, A Way To Place Myself In A Time.