“Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmon...” — Christian Scott Quote

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

Depending on what you allow, you can still get the blues, man. I'm still trying to figure out where the blues really lies, where the street is.

If anyone ever tells me something doesn't go together, it makes me want to try it.

You can't grow if you're going to say: 'The contributions of my predecessors are greater than anything I can ever achieve.' Each generation has to have a chance to find itself.

I kind of prefer to be sort of ahead of the pack checking things out, priming the canvas, if you will, for the younger guys that are going to come up and try to make their own statements about what they feel and what they have to contribute.

A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

I always felt that I had to leave a legacy on the African continent. As I was only the third player to come to the NBA from Africa, I felt I had to do my best to recruit more young Africans to come and play in the NBA - and also find a way to bring the NBA to Africa.

Being one of the few African American women to make it to this level in a classical ballet company, the level of American Ballet Theatre, takes a lot of perseverance.

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.