You're only as good as your last record.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized and there's just no outlet, there's no venue for it, in terms of media.

You're only as good as your last record.

When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass.

Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave well enough alone. And that's a lifelong quest.

Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what?

As a melody instrument player, it's all about getting from one note to the next, and those intervals and how you navigate your way through these vertical structures of chords. You realize that everything's moving forward, and it's all linear.

Everyone goes through the ups and downs of living - fretting about the future, worrying about what happened. Music teaches us how to be in the moment.

I always wanna be in the process of evolving and growing.

I became a musician because I love music, and that is what has sustained me; it's not because I thought it was a great way to make a living. Music saved my life.

I have pretty ecumenical tastes. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, so I don't listen with a jaundiced ear to music because it's in a certain category, whether it's country or opera or hip-hop or bebop or whatever it is.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.

I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.'

In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.

In regard to music, I just think that it's always best to have an attitude of being a perpetual student and always look to learn something new about music, because there's always something new to learn.

In regard to music, I just think that it's always best to have an attitude of being a perpetual student and always look to learn something new about music, because there's always something new to learn. Don't dismiss something out of hand because you think it's either beneath you or outside of the realm of where your interests lie.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.

Music is just kind of an expression of who I am. It's what I do.

Music is like an open sky. You know it's out there... and there you are.

My drummer, Gene Lake, is Oliver Lake's son. So I certainly have wide tastes, in not only what I listen to, but what I play as well.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it's done. Ever.

When you're on stage, unless you surrender to the moment, you're not telling the truth. I look for people that tell me the truth.

While St. Louis is technically regarded as part of the Mid-West, it's actually - geographically and emotionally - more part of the South. I mean, the sensibility of St. Louis is really very much that of a Southern Mississippi river-town.

I think that that's the way the music grows and changes and becomes new and creative and vital. It's by synthesizing elements from all around it and not to maintain this kind of rigid myopic kind of tunnel vision, in a sense, trying to maintain a certain kind of purity, or whatever.

My brothers were tremendous shack builders. My shacks were horrible. My brothers once built a two-story shack from the ground up that was awesome!

I wouldn't have gone to a Division I school if I didn't have scholarship help. We couldn't afford it.

Without black, no color has any depth. But if you mix black with everything, suddenly there's shadow - no, not just shadow, but fullness. You've got to be willing to mix black into your palette if you want to create something that's real.

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

I think it's important to keep things private, and there are certain boundaries I feel very particular about drawing. It may seem fastidious, but my experience of talking to the press is that I need those boundaries to remain very clear.

Of course, if you're gonna make movies, you gotta make movies, and I'm not gonna say no to a good role.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

If your house is burning, wouldn't you try and put out the fire?

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this.

Whenever people used to ask me what I wanted to be when I was older, I would always say that I wanted to be a singer. When I was 12, I decided I would do something about it, so I started writing songs.

The wheel is come full circle.

MSNBC policy requires journalists to report any potential conflict of interest and to seek approval from the president of NBC News before making any political contribution.

My interest in space started early, but for many years, I could not find any space-related investments that really penciled-out for venture. That changed in 2009 when Elon Musk came to us with a big vision to explore Mars while producing rockets at a fraction of a price and making space accessible.

I think I'd much rather have a wooden stick and metallic ball than a real dire wolf on set.

I have a voice: I want to share my beliefs about how the conservative movement and the Republican party can regain its footing, because we've lost our way.

Twitter is a blessing and a curse at the same time.

God doesn't just miraculously and physically intervene in the whole process, so if I just go and drop a bunch of chemicals and herbicides that leach into the groundwater, I can pray all day to keep my child healthy, but if the herbicides gone into the groundwater come up my well, my child's going to drink that water.

Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise.

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it's crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it's laughing. Nowadays, we would say, 'How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.'

It is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures; the proper comparison for the Qur'an is with the Old Testament - against which it holds its own.

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.