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 love to see people recognized [me on scene].

Joe Henderson with Ron Carter and Al Foster at the Vanguard was just wow. And the energy of the three of them.

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.

Life and success are about what you choose to believe.

I'm reaching a certain level [at school] that I had been aspiring to with all these incredibly advanced classical peers around me that I had been trying to be able to hang with them a little bit.

I heard these stories [about musicians from my mother] and somehow music, it was my understanding what my father had done. I didn't know it was misinformation. It sort of inwardly in my psyche laid the template for music being affiliated with my father and my family.