[My mother] told me a little bit about the scene out there and I think, as a small child, I just always felt a connection to that history because my mother had described it to me.

Pretty fortunate that with the exception of two months when I was 23, that I worked in a law office pushing paper around. I was always able to eke out a living somehow. So I'm blessed.

There's a famous story about Dizzy [Gillespie] and Art Blakey taking him aside, and spending a whole night-long talk with [Phil Wood], "Man we believe in you. You can play. So don't be walking around with a frown on your face or whatever, getting yourself into trouble. You have got a gift, and nobody is going to take that away from you." So that meant the world to him.

Adversity is not a dead end but a detour to a better outcome than you can imagine!

Bob [Gordon] died young tragically.

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.