We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don't think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.

I used to practice piano for hours, and now, with a synthesizer, you can input the music and the machine perfects the song. That's why we have so many people in the music business who should be plumbers. They don't really understand music because they haven't been trained.

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

Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.

A lot of the guys were like that - Oscar Pettiford - they just took me under their wing, and that's why I automatically help young people. I just love it, because they did that for me.

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.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.