Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

I'm having this conversation with you now. I'm talking, but I'm thinking, feeling, smelling, and moving. Yet I'm concentrating on what you're saying. So that means there's more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person's got you doing.

After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer." But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing.

I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure.

To me, human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two-dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say.

For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.