Don't Settle For Style. Succeed In Substance.

Jazz Is Not The Kind Of Music You Are Going To Learn To Play In Three Or Four Years Or That You Can Just Get Because You Have Some Talent For Music.

For Black People, We're One Of The Only Groups Of People That For Some Reason To Express Love Of Yourself, In Some Ways, Is Misconstrued As A Dislike For Someone Else.

My Older Brother And Myself Always Played Together In Bands, But We Never Knew We Would Be Professional Musicians.

You Can Reach A Situation Where Things Of Intelligence And Refinement And Culture Can Be Considered Elite, And Things That Are Crass And Ignorant Can Be Considered To Be Real And Of The People. And When You Begin To Have The Mass Of Populus Striving For Something That's Not Worth Striving For, Then Tremendous Amounts Of Energy Go Into...the Maintenance Of That Which Is Worthless.

I Grew Up In The South, In New Orleans, Where Guys Torture You All The Time. So I Didn't Really Grow Up On The Self-esteem Campaign. When You Were Lousy At Something, They Told You You Were Lousy, And They Told You How To Fix It.