Life is a beautiful struggle.

You gotta eat right, you gotta have healthy habits, you know, and balance out your decadence with a healthy lifestyle during the day.

Skip the religion and politics, head straight to the compassion. Everything else is a distraction.

I met Mos Def around that time but I didn't hook up with him until I was about 17 or 18.

So I just had to step up how I was doing it and the moment that I stepped up and the moment I focused all my energy on that is when things started to happen. So there's a direct relationship between my inspiration and my output.

Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

I think hip hop is a dance music that's rebellious by nature.