No Particular Music Makes Me

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.

If You're Not Making Mistakes, You're Not Trying.

I Get So Much From Having The Opportunity To Interface With The Younger People And To Bring Information To Them And To Represent Our Culture And Our Way Of Life. The Feeling And The Warmth And The Love, It's Unbelievable. The Type Of Exchange That Goes On Between Students And Teachers Or Visiting People Who Are Doing Master Classes, And Not Just When They're Musicians. Even General Classes, When The Students Are Not Necessarily Musicians.

The Musicians, Duke Ellington, His Thing Was Not About Separating Himself From The Rest Of America. Louis Armstrong - Go To The Forefathers Of Our Music - Jelly Roll Morton - They're Not Preaching A Separatist Agenda. They're Not Taking Their Music And Saying, "this Is For Me."

Even If Nobody's Singing, Just When You Talk, You're Singing. I'll Meet Somebody And Say, "oh, I'm Tone-deaf." I Say, "you're Not Tone-deaf, Because If You Were Tone-deaf You Would Speak Like That. But You're 'oh, I'm Tone-deaf.' You Already Sang A Song To Me."