You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, whi….

I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts..

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't….

I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before ….

I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique t….

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time..

No one was more important to the game of baseball in the last half of the 20th century than Henry Aaron and no one writes about that supremely talent….

Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not….

The flame is not out, but it is flickering..

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions..

The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience o….

I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives..

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head..

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being..

I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and the….

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?.

The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice..

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America..

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed..

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality..

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to phy….