Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

The American drummer is a one-man percussion orchestra.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments & collectively create a thing of beauty.

I think that the rhythm sections, drummers in particular, are the unsuing heroes of the music. It's the rhythm section that has changed the styles from one period to the other.

Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction.

I always resented the role of a drummer as nothing more than a subservient figure.

You can't write the same book twice. Though I've been in historical musical situations, I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.

They had all this talent, and they had no instruments. So they started rap music. They rhymed on their own. They made their own sounds and their own movements.

The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

Not doing attachment-abhorrence (raag-dwesh) while experiencing the unfolding of karma is religion.

I sincerely hope that President Barack Obama’s government will be remembered as the peak of deregulated corporate corruption and not the ongoing rise of it.

Never try to change the nature of anyone in your life, you will loose respect and eventually the person.

God has a purpose in every life, and when the soul is completely yielded and acquiescent, He will certainly realize it. Blessed is he who has never thwarted the working of the divine ideal.

Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm really obsessive about anything dealing with my health.

Sweetness eliminates gravity and thus a man with a heavy burden of life starts feeling like floating in the air before sweetness.

I hardly ever look at my published books.

Remember that you are a teacher, you are helping people, making them feel safer, taking them from fear to love, from ignorance to knowledge.