“If I hear a song like “Time After Time.” I’m sittin’ there lookin’ at video and Cindy Lauper comes on singin’ this song. I said, “God damnnnnn!””

In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

If you’re going to drop behind, you have to keep it there.

My future starts when I wake up every morning.

There are no wrong notes.

When kids don’t learn about their own heritage in school, they just don’t care about school… But you won’t see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it – like, they say “rock”. Because the white singers can’t sound like James Brown, they call him “soul”. They’ve been doing that for years. That’s the prejudice crap.

Jazz musicians are so comfortable. The reason they can’t do what we do is because they’re so comfortable doin’ what they do.

First you imitate, then you innovate.

That’s the way women do. The frown. They want to give you the attitude to approach them back, by giving you a negative vibe.

Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!

Always listen for what you can leave out.

My father’s rich, my momma’s good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I’ve never suffered and don’t intend to suffer.

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.

When you’re playing against a whole bunch of All-Stars, it’s like a video game. There’s so much talent on the floor at once.

I’m a big video game fan.

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

I won’t do a movie or a video that would bring disrespect to my mother.

I see fighters make funny videos about me and stick them on Facebook and get 20 likes.

You can’t always just put color filters in 80s aerobic videos or take stuff from public-access and look at it in this very ironic, self-conscious way. That only takes you so far.

And we use it to read album reviews and watch kitten videos… not to put those two things in the same light!