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Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.

Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.