I didn't want to get that ring around my lips from practicing the trumpet, because I thought the girls wouldn't like me. So I never practiced.

My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.

I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians.

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?'