We have seen waves of creativity from this group of people. And now, there are much younger people than me, like Nicole Mitchell [flute], Savoir Faire [violin], Chad Taylor [drums], Maia Axe [multi-instrumental performer] and if there is really any utility to something like the AACM, it should be able to nurture that kind of creativity. Those people aren't going to sound like the old people; they are going to be different. There'll be a lot of discontinuity. We can't depend on linear progression anymore.

But in the more general sense, if you're talking about the possibility of a new creativity arising, I don't really see any creativity deficit right now. I see lots of interesting things going on. There is plenty to learn from, and if we are lucky, we get to see as much of it as we can before we kick off.

LP: I certainly agree and especially with the world becoming smaller, perhaps we are in the most creative period of our history.

GL: One hopes so, but globalization brings discontents as well.

Interviewing the AACM musicians who went to Paris, they saw things that they never could have seen in Chicago or New York. They were at a point when the technologies of travel were just becoming powerful enough so that people could assimilate these new experiences which are now taken for granted.

But this is where I begin to depart from the anti-essentialists. I feel that there is an essence of creativity that is a human birthright that doesn't go away, and that we are all basically born with. It's not just the province of a few super-people. I feel that when people are listening to music, they can do it because of the sense of empathy that allows them to respond to the creativity of other people by feeling their own creativity. In other words, those neurons start firing and those experiences, those bodily feelings, start to resonate with the creativity that's coming from outside, because they've got it within them.

The challenge is for more and more people to recognize the importance of that birthright. It's different from saying that everyone is an artist, because there are lots of people who are not artists who are creative, and creativity is not just one tiny thing. But you don't want to commodify it to be the province of an official artist who gets written about in newspapers and all of that. We want to be able to recognize the ubiquity of creativity as a means of recognizing its crucial nature to our experience as human beings on this planet, and maybe on the next planet (laughs).

LP: Does the situation in the world today affect your compositions?

GL: Composing what?

LP: Not so much your teachings but your musical compositions and by the way, many of us wish you would compose more.

GL: Well, I really don't make those distinctions anymore, it's all creativity for me and I don't really care where it comes from (laughs). I don't have any political statements to make, if that's what you mean. The only statement I feel like making, I do it in sound and in what I am trying to do here [Columbia University].

Their history will be totally different, but the idea of the AACM, as a kind of magic, secret, and empowering word that stands for a range of possibilities that gets invoked from using the word, is something that will endure.

To say that one is affected by events in the world is, at this point, kind of a truism, so I really wouldn't want to indulge myself in that. There are certain things that I would like to see happen, but those things may be things that will be bounced off of other horrible things.

If I were to really apply myself seriously to the business of political or economic analysis, I would have to go into it with the same fervor and the same level of integrity and commitment that I now try to apply to musical and historical endeavors. And if I'm not prepared to do that, then it becomes somebody just shooting off his mouth and I already do enough of that (laughs).

I'm trying to avoid the glib statement of universal peace. It's easy to say those things when you are sitting in the belly of the beast, the world's largest, and arguably most rapacious imperialist power, and you have this big job as tenured holder of an endowed chair within that institution. You're differentially enabled and disabled, and you are implicated perhaps in some fairly major crimes, to coincide with some of the successes that you might have personally achieved.

The thing that amazes me is that the people who are given to these glib statements seem to have no idea of the extent of which they are implicated in the very things that they are trying to critique. At a certain point, all you can really say is that you are trying to uphold some values that will be of benefit to people.