“I do know the older I get, the more I’m referencing music I heard as a kid.”

Lovesick, bitter and hardened heart. Aching, waiting for life to start

In so many ways, it feels the same now when I play as the very first time I picked up the instrument. There’s always this sound out there that’s just a little bit beyond my reach and I’m trying to get there and that just sort of keeps me going.

I can write the stuff and play it myself and have something in my head, but the best feeling is when somebody else plays it and they’re hearing something other than what I’m hearing.

It’s incredible how one song or even one little phrase or just a few notes, if you really concentrate on it, can be a kaleidoscope of possibility.

I used to edit myself. If something seemed super-simple I had to make it more complicated.

Every time I play with someone, not just a new person, but someone I’ve been with all along, that’s where I really learn.

There’s so much music out there & so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

I hate labels; the problem is that if you say you’re one thing, it’s hard for people to imagine you as something else. Music is way more complicated than that.

To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.

I’ve been lucky with the circle of people I’m playing with. We’ve played enough that there’s a language we talk with each other when we play.

“Music, for me, has always been a place where anything is possible.

For me the music community was always like a model for what could be. The way people would play together, just harmony and being – old guys and young guys, black guys and white guys. It was setting an example for what the rest of us could be.

I spend a lot of time copying saxophone players and trumpet players.

Now I’m trying to let what’s in there come out and acknowledge where I come from. I’m trying to make it more. ..true.

I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!

I wanted to be a farmer; actually, I wanted to be a horse-breeder. And I had the stallions… but then I heard Little Richard, and that was it.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.

I suffer the mortification of seeing myself attacked right and left by people at home professing patriotism and love of country who never heard the whistle of a hostile bullet.

It was like being seen after a perpetual darkness, I replied. To be heard after a lifetime of silence.

If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.