“The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.”

You Make Your Mistakes To Learn How To Get To The Good Stuff.

I don’t remember feeling love.

Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.

I’m a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

I never felt like I had a mother.

Did you know you would become as successful as you have? Hell, no. But you know what? You were prepared, baby.

China’s got a billion people and a hit record over there is a million records. You know that ain’t right.

A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.

My dream is to put together a performance of the evolution of black music with Cirque du Soleil . I would also like to do street opera and children’s books. But even as I work toward these things, I want to simplify my life.

My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.

The process is the most beautiful part.

I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.

It’s the attitude about life, man. Looking at the light instead of the dark. Looking at love instead of fear.

Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.

All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.

Speak the things you hope for. Then rearrange how you do the things to make them happen.

The smaller you strip things down, the more you depend on the songs and yourself, as opposed to arrangements.

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.

Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.

The hardest part of a missionary career is to maintain regular, prayerful Bible study. Satan will always find you something to do, when you ought to be occupied about that – if it is only arranging a window blind!

Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.

I believe that forgiving them is god’s function, our job is to arrange the meeting.

You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.