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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
All my life Count Basie was there. He was like manager, mentor, father, brother, everything. He'd help me get jobs when I had my big band later. And, I remember we played up in New Haven, a job that he didn't want to take, and he said, "Okay, I've got a job for your band. You got it." And so they got the contracts. We were the same agency, Willard Alexander, and we got a third of what he would get naturally. It was a 12 or 1300-seat place and only about 700 people showed up, and I was really disappointed and hurt. I had a big band from New York. Basie showed up, and he said, "Okay, give the man half of the money back." I said, "What do you mean, half of the money back?" He said, "He put your name down front and the people didn't come. He will be important for you in the future and you shouldn't hurt him because the people didn't come. Give him half of his money back." I gave half the money back. He always tried to teach me how to be a human being.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
Quincy Jones: We started that in music very early. We had to play schottisches and boogie-woogie, blues or rhythm and blues or be-bop, pop music, concert music, Sousa, everything. From the beginning, we played it. That's why a lot of the jazz musicians, when I did Michael Jackson, they said, "You sold out." I said, "I've been doing this all my life. What do you mean, sold out?" It's not even a stretch, you know, to go from different kinds of music. And, if you start out like that it's not unusual at all. Everything feels good, whether it's Wynonie Harris, Louis Jordan or Charlie Parker or Bartok, Alban Berg or whatever. Nadia Boulanger used to say, "There's only 12 notes, so listen to what everybody does with those 12 notes." That's all there are really.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
The converse side of what I see in a lot of young musicians who just want to be very famous and very rich, very quick -- was a goal that we didn't understand at all in those days, because our idols were not symbolic of that. It was Charlie Parker and people that almost died in poverty, and drugs, and they didn't have that. They didn't think of opulence or that kind of living, jet planes and limousines, and all those things. Today that's a running thing. It's a huge business now, where very young people make enormous amounts of money, and have to deal with an almost super-human position, trying to absorb that kind of adulation and recognition and fame, and adoration and money. It's a very abnormal situation, and they're trying to make it normal, 'cause it's not normal, so we have a lot of casualties as a result of that.
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Naomi Judd
Country Music Artist and Social Advocate
Naomi Judd: I started singing when Wynonna was 12. That's a weird answer, but it was all predicated on her. So that's the origin. She was 12 years old. She was beyond rebellious. This was a kid who had the attention span of a gnat, and we were living on a mountaintop in Kentucky with no TV or telephone. So you can't even imagine the resentment that she had for me at that point in her life. I took her from living off of Sunset Strip in Hollyweird (and put her) on a mountaintop and put her in earth shoes and overalls and said, "This is the drill. Welcome to the country. Pretend you are in the middle of a National Geographic special. You will plant a garden. You will learn how to take care of animals. You will communicate with your lovely eight-year-old sister, and you will develop your imagination."
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Naomi Judd
Country Music Artist and Social Advocate
One of the ultimate joys for me in these experiences -- of getting to perform for the first time in Omaha, Nebraska with the Statler Brothers -- is that I know I'm not special. There's absolutely nothing special or different about Naomi Ellen Judd, and I've always just felt like I am their representative. I just get to be the designated hitter. So, when I would get out on that stage and start twisting and twirling, I was doing it for all the single working moms, for all the women who were lonely and felt like they were just anonymous, just a victim or a face, living a paycheck away from the streets every week, or wondering how you're going to put a jar of chunky peanut butter on the table for the kids tomorrow night. I would be on that stage, or accepting a Grammy at a podium, or sitting on the couch of The Tonight Show, and it was such a humbling experience, because I just felt like I was their representative. I was just the one who got to have the nice dress and got to have the opportunity.
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Anthony Kennedy
Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
You know, all of us have an instinctive judgment that we make. You meet a person, you say, "I trust this person. I don't trust this person. I find her interesting. I don't find him interesting." Whatever. You make these quick judgments. That's the way you get through life. And, judges do the same thing. And, I suppose there's nothing wrong with that if it's just a beginning point. But, after you make a judgment, you then must formulate the reason for your judgment into a verbal phrase, into a verbal formula. And then, you have to see if that makes sense, if it's logical, if it's fair, if it accords with the law, if it accords with the Constitution, if it accords with your own sense of ethics and morality. And, if at any point along this process you think you're wrong, you have to go back and do it all over again. And that's, I think, not unique to the law, in that any prudent person behaves that way.
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Anthony Kennedy
Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
The easiest are the technical ones, the things I was trained to do in law school: how to read a statute, how to apply the rules of evidence. I have a lot of help in the history of the law for that. The most difficult ones are defining the components of human liberty because if you insist that the individual has a particular right, that means the legislature cannot infringe on that right. And, sometimes your own values and your own morals really would disapprove of the conduct that you're ratifying, but you do so because there's an area of morality. But, morality really should have an underpinning of rational choice, and each citizen must make a rational choice to determine what is good and what is evil, and those are hard.
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