What I Really Have In My Head,

Everything Comes Out In Blues Music: Joy , Pain , Struggle . Blues Is Affirmation With Absolute Elegance.

When I First Came To New York Everybody On The Scene Would Treat Me Like I Could Play But I Couldn't.

When I Came To New York, To Brooklyn, I Met Alvin Ailey And Stanley Crouch And August Wilson. They Were Always Putting Things In A Philosophical Context. All The Great Jazz Musicians Did, Too. There Was Always A Sub-context To What They Were Saying About Music Even Though They Would Be Very Down Home And Earthy. So I Started To Develop, In Addition To My Power And Ability To Simply Hear, A Way To Place Myself In A Time.

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.

My Father Was A Teacher, My Mama Was A Community Worker, I Taught In So Many Schools. So When You Get That Experience Of How To Communicate With Younger People, Put That Hand On Them And Give Them That Old-school Feeling, The Maturity And Adult, A Lot Of Our Kids Just Need The Feeling Of That Love, And That's The Frame Of Reference That I Teach From And That's The Frame Of Reference That All Of Our Musicians In The Jazz At Lincoln Center.