My mother was American, and my father was from the Caribbean, and there was a big open door into the world of humanity and music.

I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.

We return to you, O earth, the things which you have given us willingly and most graciously; with our hearts, hands and minds, in the best way we know how.

Very old music is, like, 11th century in my mind. That's very old.

Music is like the soul of the planet.

I've only been on MTV once as one of their 'Closet Classics,' with some bootleg footage of a 1970 tour I did in Holland. They didn't know what to make of my music, but they finally invented a name for it - world beat music.