[Eddie Locke] had a huge impact in my life. He was a great jazz drummer. He was mentored by Papa Joe Jones and he played for many years with Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge and actually got me on a gig with Roy Eldridge when I was 20 that I'll never forget.

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.

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."

Failure is not meant to be final and fatal.... It is meant to refine you to be all that you are meant to be.

[Phil Wood] was a great artist, and he knew things. He could be mildly conversant in several languages.

We listened [with my mother] to [Frank] Sinatra and Glen Campbell and we had some Beatles records that I liked. This was in the '70s.

I saw a nice interview with Dave Binney recently. He was saying, "Man it was never easy. It's not like 'Oh wow, the good old days.' What, when certain people couldn't vote?" There was more work for musicians in the '40s, '50s, '60s. But I don't think it was ever easy.