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.

You Can Reach A Situation Where Things Of Intelligence And Refinement And Culture Can Be Considered Elite, And Things That Are Crass And Ignorant Can Be Considered To Be Real And Of The People. And When You Begin To Have The Mass Of Populus Striving For Something That's Not Worth Striving For, Then Tremendous Amounts Of Energy Go Into...the Maintenance Of That Which Is Worthless.

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.

My Schedule Is Always Tight. But I Like To Have The Pressure Of Having To Finish Doing Something; It Gives Me An Added Edge.

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.