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

The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.

I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.

And my identity...I never really wondered about it because, unfortunately, I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

It's our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That's what I try to do.

You don't try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he's the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it.