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

The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.

I'd been in love before - I was always in love.

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

If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.

Some summers my father would take us down to visit our grandmother in Louisville, who was an ex-slave, Susan Jones, and she had a shotgun shack they call it, and no electricity, a well in the back, a coal stove, kerosene lamps.

Though negative things have happened to me, God somehow let me know that becoming bitter was not the way to go. You die when you do that. Someone once told me that if you fully open your arms to receive love, you'll get some scratches and cuts on your arms, but a lot of love will come in. If you close your arms, you might never get cut - but the good stuff won't come in either.