I just think that I associated music with something that was healing and transformative as a kid.

I definitely had some moments, where, "Wow, these were some hard chords" on some gig.

I'm reaching a certain level [at school] that I had been aspiring to with all these incredibly advanced classical peers around me that I had been trying to be able to hang with them a little bit.

Being positive won’t guarantee you’ll succeed. But being negative will guarantee you won’t.

I finally got to junior high and I got to start saxophone. There were a few of us that were in the beginner band in sixth grade that made it to the advanced band, which was called the morning band at our junior high school in Staten Island.

Families that I lived with a little bit in junior high and quite a bit in high school and college. Just to have a safe, sane space with food and things like that. That's what I needed. And people were really kind and really generous. So I think the world kind of opened up my first years of performing arts, studying classical saxophone with Caesar DiMauro.

Successful people do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency, commitment and focus.