The Best Way To Be, Is To

I Hope It Might Help Players Have Confidence In Our Own Ways, And Not To Be Afraid Of Them, As Bernstein Showed - Things Like Hoe-downs, Fiddle Songs, And The Art Of Improvisation, And The New Orleans Funeral Tradition, And Call-and-response Church Singing, And The Fact That The Blues Run Through Everything. And In Our Relationship To European Music, In That We Don't Have To Imitate It, It's A Part Of Us, Inseparable.

The Young Very Seldom Lead Anything In Our Country Today. It's Been Quite Some Time Since A Younger Generation Pushed An Older One To A Higher Standard.

And That's The Soulful Thing About Playing: You Offer Something To Somebody. You Don't Know If They'll Like It, But You Offer It.

Our Culture Is What We Did Together. What Did Walt Whitman Represent For All Of Us? What Was His Message To Us? That Is An Inheritance, And When We Squander That Inheritance We Act Outside. We Don't Know Who We Are; We Don't Know Where We Are.

When I Auditioned For My High School Band The Band Director Was Excited Because My Father Was Known To Be A Great Musician. When He Heard Me, He Said 'are You Sure You're Ellis's Son?'