The Duke And Swing Represent Affirmation In

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.

I Didn't Want To Get That Ring Around My Lips From Practicing The Trumpet, Because I Thought The Girls Wouldn't Like Me. So I Never Practiced.

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.

We Don't Have The Leadership Or The Understanding Of The Value Of This, And When Your Political Systems And Your Economic Systems Start To Fail, It's Only A Cultural Understanding That Allows You To Reconstruct Them And To Get Back To Who You Are. For Some Reason, It Hasn't Dawned On Us Yet.

The Majority Of The High Schools And The Public Schools In N.y.c. Don't Even Have Band Programs. Hip-hop In A Lot Of Ways Is An Outgrowth Of A Lack Of Instruments And A Desire To Play Music, So We Can't Really Fault The Kids For That.