SR: On one of your albums, you make reference to Duke Ellington and his struggles on the road to get his music to people.

WM: And he did get it heard. That's the bottom line. He played it. He didn't stay at home bitching about it. He went out there and played it.

THC: If you look at many younger jazz musicians, there seems to be something of a rejection of any jazz artists who came before alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and any music that established before the hard bop movement of the 1950s?

WM: The greatest artists are always those that are many men thick. That's a constant in the world of art. We're in a renaissance. The greatest musicians I know accept the whole history of music. Marcus Roberts, who I named before, pianist Cyrus Chestnut, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, these are artists who deal with all of the music. They're not being addressed properly, but they're here. The archaic thought that abstraction is the only way to be modern, I don't know who still believes in that. Also, the idea that one period of something defines it instead of the whole of that thing is also archaic. America prizes change and being reborn, but our country has a history and documents that govern it. To function in our society in a position of leadership, it's incumbent upon you to understand those things, not just what you see when you're on the scene.

THC: It's an issue of dealing with things deeper than at face value?