That's the way I try to live. I think it's the only way for human beings at this point in our evolution as souls, where everyone in their lifetime is going through stuff.

That's Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I'd never worked with before.

Learn it well in your head, know it well, pick things you know and bring the old you and all the experience you have from singing these various kinds of feelings that are still related to what I have done in the rest of my career.

Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music. So given those things yes, I'm introducing some new music that people haven't really heard me do in quite this fashion.

I have been with the record company and Tommy was there doing records with other people.

Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career. It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road.

I really do see it as the start of the second half of my career.

These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I'm washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles. The ones that you sing when you're driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.

I'm really looking forward to it because it will give me the opportunity to do the whole other kind of approach to the music live that I haven't had a chance to do. and I think is important for me to do.

We are just fanatics about using the technology to make it all wonderful. We laughed at the fact that we were having such a great time working this way.

More live recording. I have missed the boat over my career by not doing every second or third CD live because things happen onstage that don't happen in the studio.

Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it's not easy. You have to take direct steps. You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.

I don't know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.

My eyes went blank, and I stared off, and the music started. It was raining, and the sun was shining at the same time, and there were these big bay windows, and there was the blue in the sky, and the sun on the trees, and it was drizzling.

That's the way I try to live. I think it's the only way for human beings at this point in our evolution as souls, where everyone in their lifetime is going through stuff.

I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

I've thought about doing it as soon as it is possible with this new CD getting some wings and getting out there. I don't know how soon that will be.

Before I get out of bed, I am saying thank you. I know how important it is to be thankful.

I am a distance runner, a marathoner... literally and figuratively.

I grew up the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, so I was really close to the church and sang church music between sips at my bottle, you know? I sat on the piano bench next to my mother. She was the church organist, so that music is deeply inside of me.

I have serious hearing loss. I'm challenged if I don't have my hearing aids in.

I want to give the audience the whole package, and for me, the whole package is to give them something fresh as well. It's not as much fun resting on your laurels.

I'm a Buckeye at heart. I spend more time giving concerts in Ohio than I do in any other state - perhaps more time than I spend performing anywhere else in the world. I have a great relationship with the people of Ohio, and it's great to be near the OSU when I come to Columbus.

I'm not sure it's a better music world of appreciation and performance. I think the listener is a different guy, and listening is something he does in passing, with other stuff going on. There's less care and understanding of the relationship between the song and the listener.

I'm touched by rock n' roll. I'm touched by the Beatles. I want some of the music I do to reflect that.

It's a wonderful thing to have life and to look at all this creation and say thank you. I even say it on stage.

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.

Music is such a balm. Always has been. It's such a heartbeat, like blood thrumming through the womb. That's why music appeals to people.

The Metropole Orchestra is like Count Basie or Duke Ellington with strings... it's strings that swing. Strings that swing like Dizzy Gillespie... keep swinging, baby. And when you have all of that special excellence of the Metropole Orchestra, then your music just flies - it soars in a way that's really magical.

The work must be its own reward. I got that early on. And I'm blessed by meeting my own standards of excellence.

What I try to get beyond is playing music at people and, instead, to play music with people because audience members are constantly part of the experience. What they say in their body language, what they say in their eyes, what they sing with me... it's an 'us,' and there's a communication that's like... it's like church, man.

Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.

Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego's evolution.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

The theory of evolution is totally inadequate to explain the origin and manifestation of the inorganic world.

Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.

I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

If we turn to palaeontology to tell us about our biological evolution it is to prehistory that we look for evidence of the evolution of specifically human patterns of behaviour.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

In the span of my own lifetime I observed such wondrous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living.

My most ardent desire is that my country will recapture its historic opportunity for a peaceful evolution and that Poland will prove to the world that even the most complex situations can be solved by a dialogue and not by force.

There are very few men and women in whom a Universalist feeling is altogether lacking; its prevalence suggests that it must be part of our inborn nature and have a place in Nature's scheme of evolution.

We're all like little ants who scurry around with the materials that are at hand right now. Each generation finds new materials. Its just evolution, isn't it?

Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

It's the lie of evolution that all man are just evolved and that they're all equal, and that all creatures are equal.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.