My grandmother sang, too, and she was really loud. It was this wild kind of singing. I count her among my influences.

I cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist.

Being black, I'm involved in the reparations movement. It's focused toward the African-American audience. We could begin to heal.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.

My father had all kinds of instruments in the house that he would hide from my mother. He bought them through mail order!

Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse.

I'm always imagining some sort of story behind the song, even the ones I haven't written. I'm actively engaging in playacting.

Everything I do is collaborative. It's just my way. I'm really very interested in how the other musicians perceive the song.

I'm always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

Here, in this quiet place we own, worlds are born.

Your true personality is not the outer you but the inner you not the person you present to the world but the person you hide from the world

One of the benchmarks of great communicators is their ability to listen not just to what's being said, but to what's not being said as well. They listen between the lines.

Here is a very simple and trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: If it's not about Christ, it's not Christianity.

Space is the breath of art.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Out of complexity, find simplicity!

No matter how much proponents of 'intelligent design' try to clothe their views in the apparel of science, it is what it is: religion. Whose intelligence? Whose design?

Respecting others' opinions doesn't mean being untrue to our own.

The only war that we must all fight is the one against evil.

The brain is a world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and great stretches of unknown territory.