1972 was a year of many pleasant and rewarding experiences for me:

I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

My brother had a big band in high school; after that we continued to play together, eventually forming a group called the Jazz Brothers, that recorded for Riverside Records.

Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.

The hiatus you spoke about happened in 1998. I was somewhat numb from being out on the road every night. I had to stop because I was emotionally and physically drained.

I have been recording for five decades now.

I made many studio albums and I think the danger of studio recording is that if you do not watch out, you come out with a perfectly sterile performance.

I write music people enjoy playing and listening to, and I have a group that loves playing the music.

To do it always right, that is what music is to me.

I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

Brazilian music has many of the ingredients that I strive for in my own music: Strong melodies and a disciplined but intense rhythmic concept, and interesting harmonies.

Then I loved the fact that we were actually recording live.

Music is meant to be a beautiful thing.

Because I don't believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.

With four people you can create one very strong kind of energy, but if you can get 65 people working together, and swinging together, that's a whole other kind of energy.

We may play in a contemporary rock vein, use standard bebop themes, and many other things besides.

My music has always been strong in melodic content.

I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last ten years.

I tend to not want to put labels or categories on the music, only because people come with preconceived ideas about what they're going to hear, or won't come for this reason.

What's happened - in our country, anyhow - is that the young people have shied away from the formality of the concert hall, that tie - and - tails philharmonic image.

Whether it's string writing or whatever, I try to write for what each instrumentalist can do best.

To pay 60 musicians for rehearsal and performance is quite something, and I decided I wouldn't be able to handle that kind of situation financially again, unless somebody else was taking care of that end of it.

I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

I find it very difficult to compose when I'm not playing.

1972 was a year of many pleasant and rewarding experiences for me:

As for the symphonic activities... when I was a student at the Eastman School of Music, I became exposed to a lot more musical forms, elements, opportunities, and I fell in love with strings and their uses.

Most recently we've been working in concert situations rather than clubs. because there aren't too many rooms there like Ronnie Scott's, that are pure music rooms, where people come specifically to listen to music.

A studio recording is perfection, but emotion and passion come only when you turn on the machine and go for the groove. If you do that with no mistakes, it sounds beautiful.

Not compromising the music, but there is a way, by just showing the people that you're sincere and honest with what you're doing, and by talking to them.

My goal was never to sell many records.

In 1994, I started touring again and I recorded two albums for Chesky Jazz.

There's not much in the way of written-down arrangements - just things that Gerry and I have worked out, from playing spontaneously together and hanging on to whatever seems to fall in right.

You know what, I'm a big, big fan of 'Heroes,' but the day they told me that the end of the world was coming, and that day didn't come, I stopped watching.

I've always made music from the heart, and that's what I do.

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

It's a simple thing to break a string, but you cannot hope to break a rope.

I still work hard to know my business. I'm continuously looking for ways to improve all my companies, and I'm always selling. Always.

The legacies of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, of Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein, stand as an inspiration for all who work for peace.

When I was growing up, I never heard the word 'racism.' It was only in Paris I encountered that.

The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India's sophisticated philosophical traditions.

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

Media play a powerful role in establishing and perpetuating social norms.

You meet your soulmate, and you're like, 'Well, this is it. This is the feeling of falling in love, and it's the most intense it can ever be.' Then you have a child, and it's like - it's huge!

Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia's reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states.

True elegance for me is the manifestation of an independent mind.

Life is a succession of crises and moments when we have to rediscover who we are and what we really want.

Comedy naturally wears itself out destroys the very food on which it lives and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

Arizona has become a national leader in the restoration of the Rule of Law, with over 100,000 illegal aliens having left the state since 2007.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.