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

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.

Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don’t feel any experience is complete unless it’s recorded.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself – a lad of about 19.

There’s no image we can’t improve.

I’m trying everything. But voice work is the best thing you ever imagined. It’s not about how you look, and you can go to work in your PJs.

it’s not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

Of course it’s very, very important for me to feel Kenya, to feel, every day, this is where images come from. So to be taken away from that by political pressure or other means – one is taken away from the area, which is the basis of inspiration – is difficult.