Every morning you have a choice. Are you going to be a positive thinker or a negative thinker? Positive thinking will energize you.

Enthusiasm comes from the Greek word entheos, which means, "inspired" or "filled with the divine."

My mother was a singer, and I never heard her sing a note in my life.

A tenor player named Bud Revels there at the time. A lot of really nice associations amongst the students. Garry Dial was a returning student. He actually got me on Red Rodney's band subbing a little bit. I gigged some with Red when I was 21 in 1988. So I had a lot of nice associations that came from [ Laguardia School of Arts]. But a lot of my education was going on in the clubs. Hearing music and sitting in.

Definitely I had a lot of times where I was really hard on myself. Really frustrated. But I never felt like I had someplace else to go. Just had to stay here and deal with this.

Sometimes I would go on Sundays and play with Doc Cheatham. I was also playing in a band of teenagers led by Don Sickler called Young Sounds, and The McDonald's Big Band led by Rich De Rosa and Justin Di Cioccio. All those guys were great educators and musicians and taught me a lot! Simultaneous to all this, another one of my musical fathers came into my life, Eddie Locke.

[My mother] told me a little bit about the scene out there and I think, as a small child, I just always felt a connection to that history because my mother had described it to me.