The pressure of show business is on all the time and show business is a fickle business. Whatever is popular now - that's all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I'm doing and why.

My people have very subtle slang, inflections and ways of saying things that has little to do with words. If you're from the same place, you'll feel the jargon and know exactly what's happening. Same with any neighborhood cat. What he sees and hears and feels and lives makes him what he is. That's what blues is.

I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I've dreamed.

Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are an artist - it punishes you.

I demand perfection in what I do, and I practice very hard before I give a concert-sometimes three to six hours a day.

I don't like to go to strange places.

Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking.