I've been lucky with the circle of people I'm playing with. We've played enough that there's a language we talk with each other when we play.

I hate labels; the problem is that if you say you're one thing, it's hard for people to imagine you as something else. Music is way more complicated than that.

Every time I play with someone, not just a new person, but someone I've been with all along, that's where I really learn.

I spend a lot of time copying saxophone players and trumpet players.

I'm basically a pretty shy person and I don't dance or get into fights. But there are all these things inside me that get out when I perform. It's like a real world when I play, here I can do all the things that I can't do in real life.

Music doesn't hurt anybody, that's what's amazing. Everything is in there, every kind of human emotion, from the darkest to the lightest. And it has power. Unbelievable power.

I feel so lucky that my high school was right in the middle of Denver, which is one of those sort of segregated towns, with black and white and Hispanic neighborhoods. But the school I went to was right in the middle of the whole thing.