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So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also.

I always say that the problem with jazz accessibility is not the content of the music, it's people's ability to access it.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

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

It's not easy to play in a framework that requires simplicity and to tastefully find ways to interject the kind of freedom that we have in playing jazz.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.