Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

Most blues don't have a beginning, middle, or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.

If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I've ever seen was in that period of 1960 to 1965. All of sudden they were handing out major label recording contracts like they were coming in Cracker Jack boxes.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.