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 wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.

The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art

We all teach from that same frame of reference. We're like neighborhood - the people who have had the opportunity through this music to gain a platform and spread the message of this music, which is basically love in a form of communication that's honest and truthful.

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.