I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

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.

When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

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.

When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it's done. Ever.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.