I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I’m not a jazz musician. I’m not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It’s in between these areas.

...I have great hopes for the possibility of a dynamic universalism that respects all our people.

I would find myself backing away from all of the 'isms,' all of the communities. I have always been able to be misused by every community But that is OK. I would rather be misused than neglected.

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

I am interested in the study of music and the discipline of music and the experience of music and music as a esoteric mechanism to continue my real intentions.

I'm a post-Abner Jay kind of guy mixed with Roger Corman and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.

For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.