Connection to the music and the history was very powerful to me. I think that's what I feel the most blessed about.

It's a complicated story [hoe I got into music ]. I actually wrote a book about it, titled For Sue.

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.

The first CD I had, that I think had had any redeeming qualities to it, I did when I was 25 with a relatively small label called Chiarascuro.

One time, I think it was my third lesson third or fourth lesson. Kim Parker and he picked me up at the bus station. And she just said, "Phil [Wood] has been up all night. He's heartbroken. Bud Johnson died last night." And Bud Johnson, like Zoot [Sims] and Al [Cohn] had been mentors to him.

I had made a couple of records in Europe. One as a leader, and one as a sideman before that. It was what it was. I started to work with Maria Schneider around that period and some other people, I started to get called to sub at the Vanguard in my mid-20s.

When I got to Performing Arts, within the first week, a few days, Bill Charlap walked in and couldn't read music but he's playing all these solos from Keith Emerson of ELP, and Rick Wakeman from Yes. Real impressive rock piano and keyboard things. And we had really, truly amazing young 13-14 year old classical players in our year who had been practicing six, eight hours a day for eight years. So it was like "Whoa."