I’ve got wide tastes, but I don’t like jazz.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

I would say that I’m more moved by melody, even though I love to rap.

I read every book there was on jazz, about the original players – King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and all those groups. At one time I was fairly well schooled in that… I could tell you who played where and when, historically, way before my time.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

It’s always fun to talk about jazz.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time. Something different from heavy metal, a different attitude.

If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.

I don’t like freeloaders; I don’t like people who are negative.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

I like making things. I don’t like getting my picture taken.

I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn’t have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that – except I couldn’t afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.