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'.

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.

In my society, even the right things are wrong.

I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.

One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government - and they aren't going to like it.

I hate elevators. I'm claustrophobic so for me to be in an elevator or small spaces is probably the worst thing on earth.

A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous.

Woe to those who lead idle lives. Idleness is a dreadful illness and must be cured in childhood. If it is not cured then, it can never be cured.

The type of pop culture that is honestly very moving and powerful to me is [when artists] do their homework. They make it real.

If the Devil is real, then God must be real, too.

Passion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive 'nows.'

Show me a person who never made a mistake, and I will show you a person who never did anything.