People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.

There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.

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.

That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.

The whole point is, give me a break with the standards. You go to the average jazz label and suggest a record and they want to know which standards you're going to play. I'm saying let's break the formula.

What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.

The lion's share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the '60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid.

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.

It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.