I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.

When I started doing improvise music in Europe, in the beginning I thought the way that Europeans were interpreting the reconstruction of deconstruction of this thing that we call jazz - of course it's different than what Americans do, because Europeans have a different history, a different sensibility and so forth - the nature of the creative process itself it's the same; but what comes from that creative process is different, because you have a different history, you have a different society, different language.

If you're truly playing improvised music, I don't care who you are or where you come from, you don't know what's going to happen. I feel essentially we really don't know anything anyway, most of the times we're just guessing.

If you say you have an empty mind and you don't have an empty mind, you only know later that you have an empty mind. Because if you say you have empty mind, you don't have empty mind, because you're already thinking about it.

Femininity doesn't always relate to being a woman and masculinity doesn't always relate to being a man; it's a quality of being-ness. Women have to portray the quality of masculinity; society wants it to be like a man; not necessarily male, but like a man. If that makes sense...In nature itself, there's yin and yang, there's masculine and feminine.

Musicians are affected by the audience just as much as audiences are affected by the musicians. The only problem is that often times musicians won't allow themselves to admit to that fact.

The world is going to change, whether we like it or not. We can participate in that change or we can be the victims of that change. In a way. Either we go in our stupidity ignorance, and arrogance, bring more destruction in a way, or we're forced to change.