It takes you years to learn how to play like yourself.
Always look ahead, but never look back.
Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.
Drummers - sometimes they play and they listen. And that little listen takes a speck away from the right tempo.
I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.
I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.