It happened to be, from '73 to '78, the five years that, our most glorious years for bass players. We had Larry Graham, with his own band, Stanley Clarke with his own band. We have Bootsy doing his thing. We had Jaco Pastorius. They were all leading their own bands.

I think jazz is a beautiful, democratic music. It encourages musicians with very strong, and many times, very different points of view to work together as a team while, at the same time, giving them the space to express their individuality. It's a very important art form and can be used as a model for different cultures to work together.

I got so many emails and text messages, my phone blew up because it couldn't handle everybody. It's like almost being at your own funeral because of the way the headline read.

Watching Michael Jackson was like taking a history lesson and a lesson on the future at the same time. If that weren’t enough, Michael then went and single-handedly revolutionized music videos. It’s amazing that today, some twenty-five years later, everyone who makes a pop music video still feels obligated to include a 'group dance' sequence like the one Michael pioneered in 'Beat It'. That’s how influential and ahead of the times he was.

It's so important to me to make the music right that I didn't have time to be intimidated.

It's a great thing about being a musician; you don't stop until the day you die, you can improve. So it's a wonderful thing to do.

I brought the music out to L.A., and the producer Tommy LaPuma heard it and he said - "Man, I love it. Let's do it. Let's record it." I said, "Okay, where's the band?" He said, "We don't have a band. We want it to sound exactly like your demo." I said, "Well, I played all the instruments on the demo." You do that when you're making demos. You got your guitar, you got your sax. He said, "Well, I want it to sound just like that, so get all your instruments out here." So I ended up playing all the instruments.