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

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.

My romantically favorite era is 78, 79 listening to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 4, the live tapes, echo chamber and break beats.

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good.

I have a 6-year-old, and his thing is to turn on Radio Disney in the car, and I get such an allergic reaction to listening to that music and the context into which it falls. I'm really working on him about that.

Fancy your having no sunshine in London yesterday! Here it was glorious, like full summer, and I sat up with the window wide open, listening to the discourse of two amorous thrushes.

I was growing up listening to Queen. Freddie Mercury threw those incredible melodies into his songs.

I just love listening to the laughter.

I was up until all hours of the night, listening to stories, meeting great old comedians.

There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

Whatever had been on the radio in the '60s; I mean we were always listening to the radio.

Because of the changes in the Padres team I played with last year, I felt like a veteran recently when I worked out with Jason Kendall and he told me he's liked listening to my records since he was a kid!

I think listening to real classic soul material made me learn how to feel music that's sung.

All of my style came from listening to records.