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.

If you think your best days are behind you, they are. If you think your best days are ahead of you, they are.

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

So often the difference between success and failure is belief. Belief leads to action and execution.

The light went on when I heard Phil [woods] play, and I went like, "That is why I'm playing the instrument." So I got very inspired, I started going to clubs through a friend's mom in the city, again, another person who just completely opened all these doors for me and it was amazing how kind she was.

Sometimes you think "Okay, well I'm going to play my horn, and I'm going to study Charlie "Bird" Parker solos or [John Coltrain] or whatever." But as [Phil Wood] said to me, "Man, Bird listened to everything."

I think we're in a time and place, the last 20 plus years, and certainly now, it's only more so, where it's just about us creating a body of work. Creating hopefully our own scene.