To work is to feel alive.
One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.
Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.
I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.
If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.
I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.
I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.
The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.
I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.
I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable.
Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.
Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.
I do Jazz, Blues, Country and so forth. I do them all like a good utility man.
Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.
The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.
Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.
Well, for me it’s – music is the instrument of life.
If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.
Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.
I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.