I don't need much coaxing.

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

What's interesting about a person without problems?

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving.

When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.

I dont enjoy traveling in America. I dont like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

The ideal is the enemy of the real.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

For me a day without training is like a day without eating.

A slowness to applaud betrays a cold temper or an envious spirit.

How can the heart travel to God, when it is chained by its desires?

The ends justifies the means.

Wanting is not enough, long and you attain it.

Feminism is a way of understanding reality, not just a series of things to do. Feminism challenges our predilection for one right answer, one right God, one size fits all.

White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America.