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

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

My son is a hip-hop producer.

A person's age can be determined by the degree of pain he experiences when he comes in contact with a new idea.

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

Benny [Carter] opened the eyes of a lot of producers and studios, so that they could understand that you could go to blacks for other things outside of blues and barbecue. He's a total musician. He was the pioneer, he was the foundation. He made it possible for that doubt to be taken away.

All the jazz guys had interracial relationships, and even the ladies did. Over the years, interracial relationships have been a hip, almost defiant thing, a way of saying "Nobody can put a boundary around me."