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" Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America. "

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" When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad. "

" I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on. "

" One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes. "

" I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it. "

" I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts. "

" I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge. "

" You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time. "

" You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood. "

" History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions. "

" The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice. "

" I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement. "

" The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts. "

" You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches. "

" I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance. "

" Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl. "

" I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style. "

" I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head. "

" By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz. "

" Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics. "

" I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities. "

" I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films. "

" The flame is not out, but it is flickering. "

" When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things. "

" You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living. "