WM: Well, I'm a classical musician also, I've played with many orchestras, so my experience with classical music might be more extensive than a lot of other jazz musicians. Bach's music is one of the great wonders of Western man. Like the Sistine Chapel or the works of Shakespeare. Some things touch on so many things at such a high level of craftsmanship th.at you just step back in awe and are just happy that you can understand it. That's one of the unimpeachable achievements in music. When you talk about Bach, sometimes you feel like you need to genuflect. It's just that good. I often speak of classical music as philosophical. It's not necessarily in terms of personal preference. I like Debussy's music, Ravel was a genius orchestrator, but there are many. Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, so many great composers.

THC: People often talk about a "jazz influence" in the visual arts and literature. Does a jazz influence exist in other forms of creative expression?

WM: Jazz has permeated everything in America in the 20th century, in terms of the elevation of individual expression, and the service of the individual expression to a group experience. Movies are always based on that. There's an irreverence for material, but a reverence for quick wits and thinking. There is the whole question of the sophisticated country boy. Abraham Lincoln was an example. This guy off of a farm somewhere delivered the Gettysburg Address. These archetypes exist in our way of looking at things. Jazz is about a process of putting things together. There's no right or wrong in it, it's just a way of doing things. It's been an inseparable part of America in the 20th century, but it will really achieve its greatest height in the 21st or 22nd Century. There was tremendous resistance to it in the 20th Ccntury because its greatest jazz artists were Afro-American. Now that resistance is fading away, because it's not as important as it was then to keep those people down.

SR: Duke Ellington was denied the Pulitzer Prize. You were the first to accept it.

WM: Duke Ellington was denied so much more than that. By the time they got around to considering him for the Pulitzer Prize, he was 60-something years old.