I got to perform the [Jaques] Ibert Concertino Da Camera with a brilliant pianist at school named Chunga. I got to perform the [Alexander] Glazunov Concerto in senior year with our school orchestra and the Jewish Grossman orchestra. I won a scholarship from the Goldman band to perform the [Paul] Creston Concerto. Which I never played with them, but they still gave me the money.

I had made a couple of records in Europe. One as a leader, and one as a sideman before that. It was what it was. I started to work with Maria Schneider around that period and some other people, I started to get called to sub at the Vanguard in my mid-20s.

I think what frustrated me more than anything else in my formative years was that I just had to work. I had to have a job. Like twenty to thirty hours a week, a lot of times in high school and college. And that was hard.

We listened [with my mother] to [Frank] Sinatra and Glen Campbell and we had some Beatles records that I liked. This was in the '70s.

A lot of musicians have said things to me like, "Music saved my life". And "I'm standing on the shoulders of dozens of people that you've never heard of that were like angels for me that came out of the woodwork." And that's really the case for me. I had so many people that did those kinds of things for me.

There is a very small chance that you might be really brilliant and really talented.

We were poor [with my mother], and we didn't have too much. So we sat on the floor and we had a record player, and that's all we had in that room in the apartment. But we had whatever we had. Six records and a record player and it seemed like magic. Seven or eight years old, you know.