Play as well as you can all the time, and if you're truthful to your thing, you'll succeed.

Many times you never know what's going to happen. You'll play songs that you never thought you were going to play.

The way we look at it, everything is a sound.

Jazz is so difficult. A lot of people think once they've learned these licks they can get up and play them for the rest of their life. But that's not being truthful to the music 'cause it's not developing. Cats you hear that don't make no mistakes? They ain't trying to do nothing. everything they hear is on the mark, but they've played it so many times... I've built a whole career out of making mistakes!

The trumpet is forceful.

You play ensemble things that you had no idea you were going to play two minutes before.

Because people really got tired, too, of the same old formatted sort of thing, and the same old formatted music.