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 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.

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.

Only by changing the state of consciousness can we change mankind.

The different shades of colours present cultural diversity.

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

The groups, though, were my inspiration way back then. I liked Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers.

Apart from the resurrection of Jesus, the eschatological orientation of the church appears as the spoke of a wheel without a hub.

You never gain something but that you lose something.

I have to say that I thought search-and-rescue duties over Snowdonia were physically and mentally demanding, but looking after a 3-week-old baby is up there!

The only thing pain can wring from a soul that has abandoned resistance and from a mind that has lost its hate is sorrow