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

I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.

Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.

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

Excellence isn't an act, it's a habit

It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

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