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.

Purpose is the ultimate fuel for our journey through life. When we drive with purpose we don't get tired or bored and our engines don't burn out.

Only through service and sacrifice can you become great.

I don't know that there was a moment, like one specific moment where I was like "Ugh. Now what do I do?" I was just always like, "I'm just in here and if I have to fight with myself or ask for help or just be lost for a little while, but I'm just going to keep looking." Because music was all I had.

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].

[Charlie "Bird" Parker] would sit down and ask [Phil Wood], "What do you think about this whole secondary Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern? Are you listening to that music and what do you feel about it?" These were the conversations that he was having. And he also said, what he learned from Charlie Parker was, not that he studied with him in the formal sense, is that the first thing that Charlie Parker would always ask was, "Did you eat today?".

Ernie Hayes, Jimmy Lewis, and either Belton Evans or Khalil Mahdi on drums [were in Sweet Basil]. All those guys really took care of me.