Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.

My dream is to put together a performance of the evolution of black music with Cirque du Soleil . I would also like to do street opera and children's books. But even as I work toward these things, I want to simplify my life.

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.

To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft.

Whenever a woman would come too close, I would cut her off. Part of that was vindictive - but that was totally subconscious.

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.

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