As much as possible, I try to live in the culture as if it didn’t have anything to do with me except provide me with opportunities for scorn.
“It’s not just about composition. It’s about challenging the musicians. You’ve got to have people in a position where they don’t really know, where they’re a little bit off guard, a little bit off balance, and they can really be spontaneous and extemporaneous… Familiarity makes you kind of absent from really understanding something. So you need musicians to be challenged. You don’t want them to come up and say, ‘Oh, I know what that is’ every time. You’re not going to get anything. You’re not going to get anything fresh out of them. They need to be challenged every time they come up.”
Henry Threadgill