It would be really hard to get serious about anything political today unless it was a joke.

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

What's interesting about a person without problems?

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving.

When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.

I dont enjoy traveling in America. I dont like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

Do not be obsessed with expensive things.Instead, be obsessed with excellence.Things don't make you excellent.However, excellence will make you expensive.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

Walking has been ridiculous in college basketball the past 15 years.

Instead of resisting any emotion, the best way to dispel it is to enter it fully, embrace it and see through your resistance.

Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial.

I've been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I've been an editor on magazines.

There are philosophies which are unendurable not because men are cowards, but because they are men.

I just have my own taste, and I just try and stick with that. I'm just trying to play as many characters as I can for as long as I have an opportunity to.

Isn't the drawing board the place where all the best work happens? It's not a bad thing to go back there. It's the entire point.

Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist.