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" To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it. "

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" I didn't try to think what my audience wanted and then make the music accordingly. I made the music and hoped that as many people liked it as possible. "

" I became a musician because I love music, and that is what has sustained me; it's not because I thought it was a great way to make a living. Music saved my life. "

" Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what? "

" I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be. "

" When you're on stage, unless you surrender to the moment, you're not telling the truth. I look for people that tell me the truth. "

" I think, in a lot of ways, it's easier to play a smaller room. You can exploit the quieter dynamics you would shy away from in larger venues. "

" When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass. "

" When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it's done. Ever. "

" I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is. "

" I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process. "

" You're only as good as your last record. "

" My drummer, Gene Lake, is Oliver Lake's son. So I certainly have wide tastes, in not only what I listen to, but what I play as well. "

" I try to do things that keep me interested. And play music that moves me. I like to move around and play in a lot of different ways. "

" I was actually in an iron lung for about a year, and then I was paralysed from the neck down for another year after that. So I spent a lotta time just lying down as a kid. And some of my earliest memories from then are of listening to the radio. "

" While St. Louis is technically regarded as part of the Mid-West, it's actually - geographically and emotionally - more part of the South. I mean, the sensibility of St. Louis is really very much that of a Southern Mississippi river-town. "

" Music is just kind of an expression of who I am. It's what I do. "

" As a melody instrument player, it's all about getting from one note to the next, and those intervals and how you navigate your way through these vertical structures of chords. You realize that everything's moving forward, and it's all linear. "

" I have pretty ecumenical tastes. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, so I don't listen with a jaundiced ear to music because it's in a certain category, whether it's country or opera or hip-hop or bebop or whatever it is. "

" Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music. "

" Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it. "

" I kinda always wanted to be a tenor player, but I'm a small guy, and tenor was just too big. "

" It's tough to be in a relationship with a musician, because it reads sometimes as this ego and self-involvement when it's really just concentration and focus. "

" When I was 17 or 18 and it was time to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I didn't enjoy anything as much as I enjoyed playing music. I felt that I had no choice: that I had to become a musician. "

" Music is like an open sky. You know it's out there... and there you are. "

" Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community. "

" Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave well enough alone. And that's a lifelong quest. "

" If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating. "

" In regard to music, I just think that it's always best to have an attitude of being a perpetual student and always look to learn something new about music, because there's always something new to learn. Don't dismiss something out of hand because you think it's either beneath you or outside of the realm of where your interests lie. "

" I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world. "

" In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that. "