From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2009-11-19:
"It [Blues] is America. It's that combination, those tensions, the east-west tensions, the kind of tension of being a slave in the land of freedom, and the land of freedom itself, the Western mind, the concept of soloing across time, the call-and-response of democracy, direct call and response, the kind of optimism that is American in nature, is in the blues.
p>"There are elements in it that are African and there are elements of the American take on Europeanism. It's integrated, it's like a person whose DNA is integrated. You start to try to figure it out -- but you can't. That's how the blues is, that's why it fits with everything, country-western, bluegrass -- everybody's playing the same music."</p>-- Wynton Marsalis, from an interview on CNN.
[ http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/24/wy
nton.marsalis.blues.race/index.html ]
(submitted to the mailing list by Brian K. Read)