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

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.

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.

Larry [ Laurenzano] said to me one day near the end of junior high, "Jon, are you Jewish?" I said, "No." And he said, "Well neither am I. I'm not sure of Caesar DiMauro, but he teaches at the JCC and I got you a scholarship there."

Only through service and sacrifice can you become great.

The secret to life and the greatest success strategy of all is to love all of it and fear none of it.

I got to talk to people like Mel [Lewis] and Milt Hilton and Benny Carter and Clark Terry and... Jay McShann. I just found myself in some circumstances, on some gigs or sometimes in clubs, with the ability to talk to some of these people. Just being around their energy and being around that history was invaluable. And what I normally say to young people that are getting into the music, if you can and go... now there's less of those folks around, sadly.