I'm not any different from you or the guy down the street or across the globe, we're all connected in some way and hopefully my music can integrate that feeling of human connectedness.

In a certain sense, these were lessons I learned by playing with Indian musicians. The rhythmic forms that they use are very complex, and very challenging. In order to play in fifteen, or eleven, or seven or even five, you have to have mastered that time in order to be able to be free with the music.

My entire life is dedicated to music, and at my age, that makes a lot of years! But all the work and dedication is only that I'm able to forget myself and let the music do the 'talking.'

Music that touches the transcendental aspect of a human being is reserved for a marginal audience

The music dictates to me which instrument I use. I'm basically waiting for orders as it were.

If I can get out of the way, if I can be pure enough, if I can be selfless enough, and if I can be generous and loving and caring enough to abandon what I have in my own preconceived silly notions of what I think I am - and become truly who in fact I am, which is really just another child of God - then the music can really use me. And therein lies my fulfillment. That's when the music starts to happen.

Question: Does it frost Jackson, Jesse Jackson, that someone like Obama, who fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an Oreo -- a black on the outside, a white on the inside -- that an Oreo should be the beneficiary of the long civil rights struggle which Jesse Jackson spent his lifetime fighting for?