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" My goal is to be really incredible by the time I'm 70. "

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" As improvisers, we're acting as composers in front of people. "

" Each of the CDs prior to 'Flirting With Twilight' were more like roller-coaster rides. "

" Audiences have taught me how to sing better and entertain better. "

" I can't say New York's home, but I've made a lot of friends, and I'm developing a map of what cats are here and where they play, and as a singer, you're always looking for projects that tie things in emotionally and intuitively with your life. "

" Karl Johnson, my first piano player at Milt Trenier's, he just swung really hard and gave me a sense of really belonging to the jazz scene. "

" Out in L.A., things relax even further than they do in Chicago. There's such a looseness to it, and there's a potentially refreshing advantage to that. "

" I had everything to gain by giving it everything I could. "

" Of course we all know when music's too much in the head, and we define our greatest players by the way they are able to communicate directly from their emotional selves. "

" We all know that jazz demands a cultivation of the mind. "

" I'd been studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. I hadn't been doing well, because I was sitting in with jazz musicians at night - it's hard to read Heidegger, but it's especially hard if you're half asleep. "

" The singer is always an ambassador of music. "

" The musicians in Chicago gave me my vocation, but New York calls to a jazz musician, for sure. You want to test your mettle. "

" I try to sleep as much as I can. I drink a lot of water. I practice consistently and just try to be ready for the gig. "

" I'm a guy who has more slapstick than Joe Cool moments in his day, so I'm not taking myself so seriously. "

" The idea is to be unrestrained by categories. "

" I try to stick with things that I can sing with honesty. "

" If you start to dwell on your pain, the amount of pain will increase. "

" I spend upwards of 200 nights a year on the road. "

" My strength is to communicate with an audience and to know what jazz singing is capable of. "

" It must be a hellish thing to know what's possible in music, to be hearing things all the time and not have an appropriate outlet for them. "

" If you're going to be transparent, you're going to have to let the music come that wants to come. "

" At a certain point, the graduate school thing didn't work out, and that meant I was liberated. "

Graduate School

" Part of my joy as a singer is to give gifts to people, and one way I try to connect to them is to add something in French or German or whatever. "

" Sometimes, with vocalese, I'm dealing with something, a great solo from the past, which is so iconic I can't presume to change it or mess with it. "

" I think my intention was there, and my love for the music was apparent. And there are very few singers who get up and desire to take the kinds of risks that jazz musicians routinely need to be taking. "

" I travel all the time. And as I go around the world, I try to learn a little something and not just take up all the available air. "

" I couldn't do what I do without the encouragement and influence of the musicians I played with in Chicago. "

" I know how hard it's been for me to get my thing out there. "

" I'm a goof, man. "

" Listening to something without being present is different from being there in the flesh. "