If you want to play somebody's music, you'd better go into his house.

Think about it: Look at the strides of awareness and treatment and tests that women have had with breast cancer, that the gay community has had with AIDS, because they're active and they talk about it.

Why do you have to retire at 65? Why can't you start at 70? You know, like wine. Why can't music be that way? My new band, we're playing stuff that's never been done before.

As much as I think John Coltrane belongs on the list, I think without Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, both of whom defined improvising on the tenor sax, there would not have been the evolution of the craft by John Coltrane.

If you keep your head in the sand, you don't know where the kick's coming from.

Let's say you have some chicken stock and you're making soup, and out of everything you can taste, some of the things you put in and some of the things you don't. So you start out with an African spice then you hear some Brazilian music, so then it changes. Then you hear Jamaican and it changes again. And the result depends on how much of each spice you put into it. Now, I've been putting in spices since I started playing professionally in 1945.

For me Brazilian music is the perfect mix of melody and rhythm. It just bubbles rhythmically. If I had to pick just one music style to play if would be Brazilian.