I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

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'.

By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.

The truth is, I’d give it all up to be a rock star.

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Trees are not known by their leaves, nor even by their blossoms, but by their fruits.

A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes.

We become what we look at most.

There's a fine line between giving the sense of freedom and being too free.

Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.

I wash with my own soap-wear my own perfume...got to bed on my own sheets... have my own food products. I live on me.

People didn't relate to me as being Chinese or white, just being a hippie, a long-haired hippie.