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.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

I'll just sit at the piano a lot an play like through different chord exercises and kind of just throwing my hands down on the piano from one chord to the next to see what happens.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

Music is just kind of an expression of who I am. It's what I do.

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.

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.