I didn't let these people run with their own agendas. I negotiated their agendas for them. I'm as strong a filmmaker as Wynton is an artist. Nobody takes over my film. If my film is bad or good, it's because of me.
Jazz is an open, free, experimenting art form.
People on the outside begin to go, 'I don't understand what they're fighting about,' when people within jazz argue and nitpick. Marsalis' comments could be taken as doctrinaire, but in the light of what has come before, he simply sounds like the proud son of a vigorous and still-evolving tradition. Burns sees an up side to all of the talk that Jazz has generated. The bad thing is that it tends to denigrate the past, that the past is something we need to leave to the experts. Jazz reinvigorates what I think is a sacred communion between performer and audience.