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.

Only a few act - the rest of us reap the benefits of their risk.

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.

In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

Jazz music is the power of now.

I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.

We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.