If You Are Serious About American Culture

Many Heroic Things Happened During Slavery. And Remember That There Was A National Movement Away From It Even At The Time. The Era Of Reconstruction And Then The Subsequent Dismantling Of Reconstruction Sent Us In A Tailspin. Then We Had The Civil Rights Movement. Now We Have Our First Non-white President. We Have A Pattern Of Moving Apart And Then Coming Back Together Throughout The History Of This Country. Each Time, We Come Closer.

I Remember When I Wrote A Piece, "blood On The Fields," It Was A While Ago, It Was About Slavery And About Two Characters, And I Studied So Much Of Music, I Would Always Go Back To The Original Documents, And As Much As I Can Get Original Chants And Slave Chants And Different Type Of Beats And Rhythms And Ring Shout.

Whenever You Face A Man Who's Playing Your Instrument, There's A Competition.

I Love Gustavo Dudamel And I Love What He Does For Classical Music, And I Love What He Comes Out Of, El Sistema And The Old Man Abreu. When We Were In Venezuela, I Had The Chance To Go To His Building. He Had, Like, Five Or Six Orchestras Playing Of Kids From The Hood Playing, Like, Mahler's Third Symphony And Shostakovich Fifth And Beethoven. Man, It's Unbelievable. I Mean, They Could Play.

Jazz Is Not Just 'well, Man, This Is What I Feel Like Playing.' It's A Very Structured Thing That Comes Down From A Tradition And Requires A Lot Of Thought And Study.