You can’t be a great leader if all you are serving is yourself.

A guy like Scott [Robinson] plays the whole history of music on every instrument you've ever heard of. He's just kind of an unparalleled genius.

I didn't have time to deal with practicing in a way that I would have liked to. I wish I could have just said, "I've got four to five hours every day that I'm going to go deal with music." I just didn't' have that. I missed a lot of lessons, but I think that maybe was frustrating to me in a big picture sense of, I need the time and energy to put into my instrument.

I was studying with Joe Allard, which was great, as a saxophone student. Being able to study with Joe Allard was an incredible experience.

[Winning the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition]definitely opened some doors.

All we can do is go about our work. But we can have a goal. We can have a dream.

There are a lot of people that impacted me. I remember hearing Oscar Peterson live at the Blue Note, which was very expensive, but... $50 in the '80s... hard to come up with. But it was amazing.