Complexity can be a trap. You can have a ball developing a phrase, inverting it, playing it in different keys and times and all. But it's really more introspective than communicative. Like a crossword puzzle compared to a poem.

Not for me. If I want to tune everybody out, I just take off my glasses and enjoy the haze.

The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.

Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

It was never supposed to be a hit. It was supposed to be a Joe Morello drum solo.

We're working as if it were going out of style-which of course it is.

I discovered early in life that if you take gym first period, you can go into the wrestling room and sit in the corner and sleep.