The main thing about the word jazz, is that it's very limiting to what people are doing.

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 grew up in Kansas City from when I was about two years old to my mid-teens. Kansas City at the time was an amazing place, because there was so much music going on there. As a kid, I was playing there all the time and learning a lot about music.

I'd rather call it "instrumental creative music," especially the music that I've been doing. If a person would hear that music, they would undoubtedly call it "jazz." There is this whole generation of musicians that are playing and thinking critically for themselves and making music that's relevant to today. I hope that's the objective of a lot of musicians.

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.

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

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.