They say a blind hog will find the acorn one day.

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

I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.

I've met every freak in the business.

Eight kids and a stepmother, and I just wanted to be out of there and so when I got a scholarship from Boston to the Schillinger House, which is now the Berklee School of Music, I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Did you know you would become as successful as you have? Hell, no. But you know what? You were prepared, baby.

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.