Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illitera….

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential..

So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows ou….

You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it's not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it's celebrator….

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its co….

Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a whol….

I find that here in the States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive point of view, though they are emotionally more recept….

To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only….

And when I met Cecil Taylor it was a complete transformation of musical identities. All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the windo….

All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window..

In America, for a brief time, people who followed John Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that th….

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, ….

So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very s….

Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the ba….

Yes, the audience is so important to Negro music, especially the element of call and response..

It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement….

I can't see any separation between my music and my life. I play pretty much race music: its about what happened to my father, to me, and what can hap….

A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music..