I have friends who will critique me much harder than any review.

This music heals people because music is vibration, and the proper vibration heals.

The musicians I respected were much older than me. I expected them to cut my head, and they did.

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.

Milk in a mother's breast-that's cool. Milk in a mouth-that's cool too. But milk in my trumpet? Not so cool. I have to play that thing.

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.

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.