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The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing.

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

One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.

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

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best, we're non-judgmental.

I don't think I've ever been true to jazz. There's always a kind of jazz element to what I do. There are a very few genres that I haven't tried out, really, in what I've been doing. As a jazz musician, you can kind of mess about with things with a certain level of musicianship, which helps.

Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.