I'm out there doing the best that I can, My lip is cut and I'm still playing.

The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones.

Japanese people they hear my warmin' up and they start screamin'. They can tell it's me.It's my tone on the trumpet, it sounds like I'm speakin'.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything - you know what I mean?

When I went in there, we used drum machine on "Time After Time" and "Human Nature".We don't use the drum machine to play a pattern. You play the pattern by being consistent.

You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren't sweet.