The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

The people who make it to the top - whether they're musicians, or great chefs, or corporate honchos - are addicted to their calling ... [they] are the ones who'd be doing whatever it is they love, even if they weren't being paid.

Let's not get too full of ourselves. Let's leave space for God to come into the room.

I look back and say, "This must have been somebody else." I am not going to tell you that when I was 4, I dreamed about all of this.

Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.