Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.

Everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.

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?

I love Gustavo Dudamel and I love what he does for classical music, and I love what he comes out of, El Sistema and the old man Abreu. When we were in Venezuela, I had the chance to go to his building. He had, like, five or six orchestras playing of kids from the hood playing, like, Mahler's third symphony and Shostakovich fifth and Beethoven. Man, it's unbelievable. I mean, they could play.

You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.

I try to put a lot of our music in my music - by that I mean of American music.