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I was able to work with the best musicians in Kansas City starting when I was really young.

Like every other place, I guess, Kansas City was quite a different city when I was a youngster there. They had quite a few clubs, and we had what we used to call jam sessions every night.

I credit Kansas City with my work ethic and learning from the amazing artists that are in that town.

Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.

If you put this in the context of Detroit in '64 or '65, the economy was booming. Everybody had jobs and there was a whole nightclub culture where bands could work.

In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.

Actually, a lot of my influences were horn players. I really liked Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and Miles Davis - people like that. My dad had a lot of those records. So when I started playing jazz primarily, it wasn't jazz guitar that I was listening to.

We are serious about our music here in Philadelphia, and jazz has meant a lot to this city.