You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

I have pretty ecumenical tastes. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, so I don't listen with a jaundiced ear to music because it's in a certain category, whether it's country or opera or hip-hop or bebop or whatever it is.

I think that that's the way the music grows and changes and becomes new and creative and vital. It's by synthesizing elements from all around it and not to maintain this kind of rigid myopic kind of tunnel vision, in a sense, trying to maintain a certain kind of purity, or whatever.

I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.

I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.

In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.

As a melody instrument player, it's all about getting from one note to the next, and those intervals and how you navigate your way through these vertical structures of chords. You realize that everything's moving forward and it's all linear.