Everybody talks about finding your voice. Do your homework and your voice will find you.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

We all played bad before we played good.

If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.

I gave up my base in popular culture when I left the Tonight Show.

It's hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there's no buzz, there's no interest.

I like to make records sound good. I'm more like a reducer than a producer. If an artist cannot produce themselves, what's the point?