Hearing Oscar Peterson was something that resonated within me. There are so many musicians I've been fortunate to play with. The people that inspire me are the people I play with.

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

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

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.

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.

As far as the people that have inspired me, they're the people that I have played with the most. For example, the record that I made called Virtue, there was a wonderful band and a wonderful drummer by the name of Ludwig Afonso and a wonderful bass player by the name of Armando Gola.

I had an opportunity to start going around the world when I was about 18 years old. So, I did. That's one of the things that I was doing.