To me, trying to achieve the balance is when you become good: when you have enough technique to be able to play what is that you want, but also when you can refine what you want to communicate to people. As a younger person, it wasn't something I thought about so much.

To me, trying to achieve the balance is when you become good: when you have enough technique to be able to play what is that you want, but also when you can refine what you want to communicate to people. As a younger person, it wasn't something I thought about so much.

The trumpet is a very violent instrument - probably one of the most archaic of all the modern instruments. It's physically really demanding: you have to stay in pretty good shape.

Creating an environment musically that shows that we all belong together is what I'm interested in doing, and that happened really early on.

I liked trumpet because it's related to boxing, but also it has a capacity to create a different type of beauty. There are fight fans, people who want to see that, but what they're really there to see is pretty rough. They're there for blood, which is fine. It's part of it. I enjoyed having the same type of internal, mental, physical fight, but enduring that sort of trauma or pain to send a message of love. I can still have the fight, but what I'm fighting for is more a reality that I want to create.

In New Orleans, you can pitch a rock and hit a great trumpeter.

People call what we do "stretch music." This is our style, and one of the newer, in vogue ways of playing creative, improvised music. It really grew out of me trying to address something that I saw in my everyday life in my neighborhood - trying to develop that and refine that and excavate exactly what that was in a way that, when I communicated it, it was palpable and easily read. That started really early. Why it started was from something that I was really angry about.