Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.

I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything.

I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.

When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.

You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.