I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

If you want to be different, do something different.

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?

Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time.