Music Is Always For The Listener, But

For Me As A Person Who's In The Arts And As Someone Who Understands The Magnitude Of Our Contributions And The Price That Was Paid To Contribute To That, That We Just Have Not Gotten That Together. I Will Do All That I Can To Get In Front Of Our Kids, To Try To Teach Them, But At A Certain Point The People Have To Want It And Come Towards It.

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.

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.

As Long As There Is Democracy, There Will Be People Wanting To Play Jazz Because Nothing Else Will Ever So Perfectly Capture The Democratic Process In Sound. Jazz Means Working Things Out Musically With Other People. You Have To Listen To Other Musicians And Play With Them Even If You Don't Agree With What They're Playing. It Teaches You The Very Opposite Of Racism And Anti-semitism. It Teaches You That The World Is Big Enough To Accommodate Us All.

The Arts Shows That You're Civilized, And It Makes Life Sweet. So You Can Exist And You Can Buy More Things And You Can Be More - We're Dealing With A Form Of Commercialism That Obscures A Prior Relationship To Quality, And It's A National Problem.