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Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.

I want to expand jazz; I don't want to keep the audience limited. I want to reach people who have never come to a jazz concert before. One way to do that is by making records that have a lot of different kinds of music on them.