I'm Just Lucky To Have

I Worry More About The Marketing That's Taken Hold Since The 70s. The Jazz Era, The Swing Era, Those Were Huge. Entire Decades Were Named For Music. In The 1940s - After World War Ii - Changes In Taxation, Ballrooms Closing, People Moving To The Suburbs, And The Onset Of Target Marketing And The Confusion Of Commerce With Art Caused Some Things To Happen As A Result That Have Taken Us Away From Jazz And What Jazz Offers Us.

My Father Was A Teacher, My Mama Was A Community Worker, I Taught In So Many Schools. So When You Get That Experience Of How To Communicate With Younger People, Put That Hand On Them And Give Them That Old-school Feeling, The Maturity And Adult, A Lot Of Our Kids Just Need The Feeling Of That Love, And That's The Frame Of Reference That I Teach From And That's The Frame Of Reference That All Of Our Musicians In The Jazz At Lincoln Center.

The Reason Why The Music [jazz] Is Important Is Because It's An Art Form-an Ancient Art Form-that Takes In The Mythology Of Our People.

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.

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.