[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?".

The best thing you can do is just go and have fun with [competition].

Alan [Ferber] is a great trombonist and composer. I'm thankful that I got some associations like that through peers and former students. That's kind of what it is.

Sense of community was really fostered by Larry Laurenzano, who was a great educator.

We had Bob's [Gordon] records, and he's on Clifford Brown's first record as a leader. I believe it was Clifford Brown's first record as a leader and had the original versions of Daahoud and Joy Spring that were arranged by Bob's best friend, the West Coast tenor player named Jack Montrose, who I later met.

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.

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.