Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. The Legend of Charlie Parker.
Jazz likes to consider itself a mystery.
Apart from spoken language, the contributions of jazz to humankind's musical language are, quite possibly, without equal. The United States is, and has always been, a society that suffers from cultural self-consciousness. Such is the nature of young nations, and a span of 225 years does, indeed, mark infancy on civilization's time line. Fortunately, America can boast of providing certain gifts to the world. As you will discover, a study of jazz begins with the music itself but can never be fully understood or appreciated on the aesthetic level alone.