I have youth spies, people that report to me and I give them poppers for good information. But mostly I’m still interested in life. I don’t think it was better when I was young. I think the kids that are 15 and getting into trouble are having as much fun as I did. So I’m still curious. I don’t have fear of flying. I have fear of not flying. Always thinking that tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday.

It is really easy for us [jazz musicians] to create. We are born with this feeling that just comes out no matter what conditions exist. Otherwise, how could our founding fathers have produced this music in the first place when they surely found themselves (as many of us do today) existing in hostile communities when there was everything to fear and damn few to trust. Any music which could grow and propagate itself as our music has, must have a hell of an affirmative belief inherent in it.

• Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song?
• What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe… A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.

What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. […] So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.

That’s the wonderful and terrible thing about technology. I changes everything.

Nobody born ahead of their time! Maybe premmie babies, but they catch up!

Every time you open your mouth, you learn something about yourself. Especially when you play characters, because when you improvise, the choices you make are always very revealing of who you are. I learned that you can fail at what you don’t love, so might as well do what you love. There is really no choice to be made.