I never got discouraged for long, but we all got our butts kicked musically.

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 didn't have time to deal with practicing in a way that I would have liked to. I wish I could have just said, "I've got four to five hours every day that I'm going to go deal with music." I just didn't' have that. I missed a lot of lessons, but I think that maybe was frustrating to me in a big picture sense of, I need the time and energy to put into my instrument.

Positivity is like a boomerang. The more we put it out there, the more it comes back to us.

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

There is a very small chance that you might be really brilliant and really talented.

Justin [Di Cioccio] was [at Laguardia School of Arts]. He later took over at Manhattan. But I knew Justin through the McDonald's band, which at the time I was finishing high school and starting college, I got involved with. I was not that heavily involved with the school at MSM my first year there. I took a semester off to start my 2nd year. Took classes I felt like taking during my third semester, but by the start of my third year, September of '86, they began the undergraduate jazz program and I joined that program.