Music Is Always For The Listener, But

We Looked Up To Our Father. He Still Is Much Greater Than Us.

Jazz Music Is America's Past And Its Potential, Summed Up And Sanctified And Accessible To Anybody Who Learns To Listen To, Feel, And Understand It. The Music Can Connect Us To Our Earlier Selves And To Our Better Selves-to-come. It Can Remind Us Of Where We Fit On The Time Line Of Human Achievement, An Ultimate Value Of Art.

And That's The Soulful Thing About Playing: You Offer Something To Somebody. You Don't Know If They'll Like It, But You Offer It.

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 Have Absolutely No Idea What My Generation Did To Enrich Our Democracy. We Dropped The Ball. We Entered A Period Of Complacency And Closed Our Eyes To The Public Corruption Of Our Democracy.