The Bandstand Is A Sacred Place.

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.

If You Are Serious About American Culture And You Are Serious About Afro-american Culture, You Are In A Lot Of Pain. You Are Not - You Are Not Smiling About It.

The History Of Jazz Lets Us Know That This Period In Our History Is Not The Only Period We've Come Through Together. If We Truly Understood The History Of Our National Arts, We'd Know That We Have Mutual Aspirations, A Shared History, In Good Times And Bad.

When You Study Our Greatest Artists, You Will Find That They Give Us A Key To Understand How To Deal With Each Other, And That Our Bloodlines Are Intertwined. It's Not Hyphenated America. That There Is An America, And It Is Expressed In Those Arts. It Gives Us A Key To Figure Out How To Negotiate With Each Other, And It Tells Us Actually Who We Are.

I Believe In Professionalism, But Playing Is Not Like A Job. You Have To Be Grateful To Have The Opportunity To Play.