Humility is a very important trait in a critic.

Even my colleagues don't read classic criticism. And my feeling is that if you don't do that then you're not really practicing your craft. That's how you learn how to do it. You don't learn how to write about jazz just from listening to jazz. You learn how to write by reading the great writers and how they worked, the great music critics.

I hate the idea of turning jazz into homework assignments. I would never have a quiz saying, Who's the clarinetist on the Hot Five? I don't care. If you like the clarinetist, you'll know who it is.

Criticism ultimately at some degree is about the writer and not the subject. It's very easy if everybody else says, He's a genius, to echo that, but then you're not functioning as a critic or as a writer in any meaningful way. You've got to take the risk of being wrong.

If you're genuinely candid and expressive then you're never wrong, even when you are wrong.

People should not feel intimidated by received wisdom. You have to discover it yourself. If I tell you that Armstrong is great, it's meaningless you have to hear it.

I am astounded at my age with a 20-year-old daughter to discover that kids of her generation don't want to watch black and white movies. I understand that they gave up on silent films, but black and white? So, now movies have to be taught in academia because people don't know how to watch them, they don't know how to appreciate them.

Bing Crosby said that Armstrong is the beginning and the end of music in America, and he wasn't far wrong.

I think all of us begin as writers. I wanted to be a writer from the time I as eight, long before I heard of jazz. The question is, once you have that obsession, what is your subject going to be and you often don't know for some time. It might become fiction, it might be non-fiction, and if it's non-fiction it can go in any number of directions.

I never really wanted to be a daily critic who goes out every night and writes 300 word reviews, I wanted to write essays. And that gave me the luxury to be able to go out and if it was lousy, I could just say, well the hell with that, I'll go to hear something else, or, I'll go tomorrow night I as writing for a weekly.