My fan base is extremely random. It's the 14-year-old white kid sitting next to your auntie from St. Luke's Baptist Church, to the 20-year-old Black girl who probably would go to a Rihanna concert, but she's coming to my show.

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

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.

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.

I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it, it's like 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

You’ve got to be uncomfortable and rise to different occasions in order to become your best. No one is born a hero, but things happen and your response makes you a hero. It’s instinctual, it’s something that you may not even realize is there.