I don't feel that the kind of music that we play,
which is based on earlier tradition,
is in any way obsolete or old-fashioned.
It's just my belief that if something was good once,
that it doesn't become less good with the passage of time.
We gotta realize that jazz started out
and continued for a long time to be part of popular music.
And as we all know,
popular music depends upon novelty
for its continued existence.
It's always gotta be something new.
And part of this kind of psychology was certainly in jazz,
too,
and it was what I call the cult of the hip.
You had to be hip.
You had to do the latest thing.
It seems like we Americans aren't particularly tradition-directed.
We're kind of all looking around to see what everybody else is doing,
and we gravitate to the new things.
But this jazz music is a great tradition,
and there's things that should not be allowed to die.
And I think probably my role in jazz has
been to maybe help remind people about
some of these marvelous things,
which fortunately,
for the phonograph record,
we still have them around.
If it wasn't for the phonograph record,
I think this music would have died.