Jazz stopped being creative in the early '80s. After your acoustic era, where you had the likes of the Miles Davis Quintet, when it gets to the '70s it started being jazz fusion where you had more electronic stuff happening, then in the '80s they started trying to bring back the acoustic stuff, like Branford Marsalis and the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton sextet. It started dying down from there. Miles was still around in the '80s and he was still being creative; he was playing Michael Jackson songs and changing sounds, but a lot of people were still trying to regurgitate the old stuff.

Instead of hearing, "Oh, he's good," I'd rather hear, "Wow, you changed my feelings today, you made me feel different."

Experiment is actually doing the art. That's the experiment and then you get to experience the experiment.

I do feel a responsibility because most people like me that are my age or younger, they don't quite make it over to the jazz side. They flirt with it, but they don't quite marry it.

I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.

If I was a singer who won those Grammys, I'd be gracing all the magazine covers... I barely got asked to do an interview.

Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music.