[Manhattan School Of Music] didn't' have a jazz undergraduate program at the time so I played a semester in the big band. There was a graduate program. But I wasn't really that involved in jazz yet.

Great leaders don't succeed because they are great. They succeed because they bring out the greatness in others.

One time, I think it was my third lesson third or fourth lesson. Kim Parker and he picked me up at the bus station. And she just said, "Phil [Wood] has been up all night. He's heartbroken. Bud Johnson died last night." And Bud Johnson, like Zoot [Sims] and Al [Cohn] had been mentors to him.

[Charlie Parker] was kind of a sponge and intrigued by it all.That's similar to what Phil [Woods] told me about Bird, too. Like he was into cooking. He was just into a lot of things. Yeah, it's about dealing with bebop and jazz and Trane [John Coltrain] and post-Trane and knowing the history. But you've got to live. You have to experience things. Know something in this world. So it was a very deep education about what it means to try and be an artist.

[Charles McPherson] was kind enough to go to a record gig of mine where we recorded a song of his.

If I could have picked two guys on the planet, to have some exposure to at that age, those were the two right guys [Phil Woods and Charles McPherson].

There's a lot of good people out here that want to help you grow and to help the music to continue to grow and evolve and go find those folks and be around them and carry it on... carrying the tradition on in the way with what it is that you have to offer. Find some good people in the music that will believe in you and they'll help you do that.