"A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was suppose…"

"I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such."

"There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to…"

"the farmer takes Jill down the well & all the king's horses & all the king's men can't put that baby together again c…"

"death is where jimi hendrix is, where our revolution ended up."

"There has always been something wrong wif the tesses. The tesses paint a picture of me wif no brain. The tesses paint…"

""I'm tired," I says. She says, "I know you are, but you can't stop now Precious, you gotta push." And I do."

"this country might have been a pio neer land once. but. there ain't no mo indians blowing custer's mind with a differ…"

"Being curious is an absolute rule of life. If you don’t have that, I don’t know what you're doing in this music."

"Even while I was studying at [Manhattan School of Music], I was learning about melody and rhythm, and theory, and har…"