“The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. ”

“Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.”

“Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere if they are serious about this music…The is no valid motivation for it other than love– outlaw motivation in a profit-motivated society.”

“Classical musicians can sometimes get very hung up on the idea that there's a right way and there's a wrong way. You can see this destroy a lot of players. Jazz musicians have a way of understanding that there are a lot of different ways of doing things. That's what's great about them, they're so friendly. And they are so individualistic - that's why they can accept someone like me.”

“Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it–at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.”

“Smell is important. It reminds a person of all the things he's been through; it is a sheath of memories and security.”

“When power is gone the memory of power lingers.”

“I think we'll soon see a new breed of musicians who have both a modern chordal sense (jazz) and a high comfort level with synthesizers and new breeds of sounds (from the electronica/techno/dj scene).”

“The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.”

“That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.”