Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

Its more about conception and touch and spirit and soul than whether my hardware was in place.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

One very fundamental thing has not changed and I realized that it will never change... is that I really need to go home and practice.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers.

More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.

Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play.

Learning to play is mostly about learning to hear, and learning to really listen deeply to sound in a musical way is a lifetime's worth of work.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

We live in a society in which unnecessary conformities are the very essence of necessity

The wisdom of man can only produce works on a human level. Only the Wisdom of God can realize things divine, and it is to divine heights that it destines us.

I've photographed everybody from Matisse to Isamu Noguchi.

In Islam there is not much room for anything else but Islam.

Hee that goes barefoot, must not plant thornes.

I don't go around, the way many musicians do, with earbuds in my ear listening to my iPod all day and just sticking my head in the music all the time.

No organization is going to be successful unless it places a high value on its employees and engages them in the work that it's doing.

My ultimate style icon is Grace Jones.

Some said Delana was sucessful as a mediator because both sides would agree just to make her stop staring at them.

You're just like, "I like doing this - it's something I have a lot of passion for." You happen to do it, you enjoy songwriting, and eventually if you're writing enough songs, then you fall into it.