I learn something new every day - to edit, to take out all the extraneous matter and stress form, logic, and content. I try to play beautiful music.

I had a 10-year heroin habit and kicked that. Then I became an alcoholic. I drank two fifth's a day.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn't have a choice.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.