CNN: You write that jazz leaves room for individual creativity, but you have to listen and allow the other musicians to participate equally. So what’s the lesson for the nation?
MARSALIS: We have to have an overall cultural objective, which we don’t have. … We then fight under the flag of a position, the left or the right, black or white, old or young. It’s very simplistic. We don’t know our cultural history, we don’t know we are together, and because we don’t know we are together we can’t act in that way. And that’s the main thing our music, and the history of our music, can teach us as a nation.
The one concept that has to be at the heart of the American experiment is integrity. The integrity of the process is very important. If you come up on the bandstand you have to be at least trying to swing. If you don’t really want to swing or play with the musicians, there’s nothing they can do, because you have the freedom to destroy it.
— Wynton Marsalis, CNN.com