When I give a concert, I know they're not going to hear everything; there might be a lot going on. My individual perceptual and cognitive path through the music is just that: one path through music. My experience will be probably at some level different from other people's, and that multiplicity of experience has to be supported by the music. I might just focus on the cowbell the whole time - maybe I have a fever for more cowbell!

This is a tradition of resistance to the term that's as old as the term itself, especially because that term has been used to commodify and reduce black creativity, and also to appropriate and sell it. That's what John Coltrane said in an interview with a Japanese journalist: "Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist." And he's treated as one of the central figures in the history of jazz. So if he rejected it, then why is it weird when I do it? I'm in the tradition!

If you look at my collaborations, it is very much in line with all these others in the sense that it is a building of community, particularly among artists of color. This is what I learned from the example of elder African-American artists, which is where it is all coming from; to refuse to be silenced.

I make a lot of music with other desis - that's hugely important to me, but it can't be the sum total of who I am and what I do. It's not accurate; it doesn't reflect my life experience.

It is one thing to be a virtuoso, but a different thing to play with compassion.

What I've learned from my gurus is that when you hear music, you hear a person, or you hear people, and you hear everything about them in those moments. They reveal themselves in ways that cannot be revealed any other way, and it contains historical truths because of that. To me, that is the most important thing. It shouldn't be a footnote, or the last chapter. It should be the complete thesis about a book on listening.

In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It was infuriating. Those kinds of situations stick with me. We got to come in and play music for them because that's a way of caring, just offering something, a gift, basically. They're basically the most grateful audiences I've ever experienced, because nobody's giving them anything.