"Jazz" to begin with, is a really bad word... all the true musicians that really play jazz, jazz is the worst word for it. Jazz is a process. Jazz is a creative process. It's not so much a genre, but a way of expression.

Music is a thing where, the more vocabulary you gather, the more you can express yourself.

I started playing classical music, and I still do. I think music ultimately is kind of on a theoretical level, is about collecting and learning as much vocabulary as possible. It's kind of like writing. It's kind of like writing because the more you read, the more you hear people describe things. The more you soak in, as far as vocabulary, the more access you have in order to express yourself accurately and vividly.

My dad, was, by trade, he had a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. He's a huge, huge jazz fan. He used to travel all the time for projects, and he used to collect jazz records. He used to collect hundreds and hundreds of jazz records because he had this passion for it. That's kind of how they had certain hobbies together with my mom.

When I was four, I started taking lessons from my mom. That's pretty much how I started.

My mom was a musician, and my dad had this passion for music. That's kind of how a lot of their relationship was built. When I came around, I was constantly exposed to music.

My dad would play me all of these records: Miles Davis records, John Coltrane records, Bill Evans records, a lot of jazz records. My first exposure to music was listening to jazz records.