When you open box after box of old comics and they're ALL "Archie," you have suffered a trauma from which it is difficult to ever recover.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly romantic, love is the key element. I really love to play with different musicians who come from different cultural backgrounds.

For me, rhythm is a type of divine mathematics in a way. No matter where you're from, we can all understand the mathematics of rhythm. I try to apply this mathematical thinking to my playing.

I think I'm built like a painter. I have friends who are painters and they reflect a similar psychological attitude towards their work. They don't know what's coming next, they just wait for the message, for orders to come and then off they go on their next project.

Music speaks from spirit to spirit and in that sense you could call it a true spiritual language.

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?

When I hear a great musician, I can feel his life inside the music.