There are musicians who go through their lives sort of shedding their skins. For me, I've always felt backward-compatible to Version 1.0.

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.

One of the things jazz has always excelled at is translating the reality of the times through its musical prism.

There are some musicians who are talented and see themselves as some kind of natural geniuses or something because of a certain amount of natural ability. But that is often rarely the case over the long term.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

I'm always trying to find 'connections' between things. That art is the juxtaposition of a lot of things that seem unrelated but add up to something recognizable.