A man goes to the village to visit the wise man and he says to the wise man, “I feel like there are two dogs inside me. One dog is this positive, loving, kind, and gentle dog and then I have this angry, mean-spirited, and negative dog and they fight all the time. I don't know which is going to win.” The wise man thinks for a moment and he says, “I know which is going to win. The one you feed the most, so feed the positive dog.

You do [jazz] because you love it and hope many some others may as well. You do this because you need it.

When we hear music that we love that changes the world for us, we might as well at least aspire to something like that and aim high. You're probably not going to get beyond your dreams. So you might as well make them big.

I just lucked into a lot of good people man. In my life and through friends, and in the music, that really embraced me and took care of me. I'm a lucky guy.

Definitely I had a lot of times where I was really hard on myself. Really frustrated. But I never felt like I had someplace else to go. Just had to stay here and deal with this.

I saw that [music] reflected in my mother when we listened to these records [of Bob Gordon]. And I felt it too.

I had a really nice association with Richie DeRosa, a great musician, a great drummer and composer and arranger. And I had a number of classes with him.