The more energy you spend worrying about the people who didn't get on your bus, the less you will have for the people who are on your bus. And if you are worrying about the people who didn't get on your bus you won't have the energy to keep on asking new people to get on.

Percy France told me, similarly, he and Bird used to hang out. They were good buddies. And he said, "Man, we'd just walk through town, sometimes with our horns. And we'd walk by past an Irish bar. And you'd stand outside and check out the music. And Bird would go in and sit in with these traditional Irish musicians. Then we'd past a Greek restaurant and we'd hear that. And Charles "Bird" Parker would go sit in with those guys. He was just listening to everything, reacting to everything.

I've been thankful to work with some wonderful people and sort of combine forces with some folks that... like in recent years, working with Alan Ferber or his brother Mark who's a wonderful drummer.

The Monk competition did open some doors. And I was thankful for that.

[Charlie Parker] was kind of a sponge and intrigued by it all.That's similar to what Phil [Woods] told me about Bird, too. Like he was into cooking. He was just into a lot of things. Yeah, it's about dealing with bebop and jazz and Trane [John Coltrain] and post-Trane and knowing the history. But you've got to live. You have to experience things. Know something in this world. So it was a very deep education about what it means to try and be an artist.

[We need] someone like Don Sickler, who is an amazing trumpet player and who is also a publisher and amazing producer and composer and arranger. There's a lot of ways you can make a contribution.

I went in [Sweet Basil band] and played with them, maybe half the gig for almost eight years or more.