Quotes

My wife is from Copenhagen and her father has been a huge Liverpool supporter since the early 1960s.

The great thing about being on tour is that... the band plays at night and other than that we have a lot of free time.

I'm very fortunate and grateful to wake up every morning in the rural countryside I live in, looking at farmland and these beautiful mountains.

It's actually not that hard to play guitar in a rock band.

One of the hardest things about being a musician is finishing a project and then having to wait three or six months to publish it and to do all the sort of promotional behaviour.

We wanted to create an opportunity for people to share anything, on their own terms, revenue and all. Get away from the commerce side of music, which can be exciting and necessary but ultimately dilutes the creative impulse. The further and further you go down that path is sometimes the further you are from the reason why you started making music.

Just because you listen to The National, Spotify might tell you that you want to listen to The Lumineers' music. Well, maybe you don't.

There are so many books out about Abraham Lincoln out now because it's the bicentennial of his birth. I've known a lot about the Civil War, but I'm just getting more into it.

And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.

It's much like playing jazz, flying. It's multitasking in real time. You have a number of instruments that alone won't tell you exactly what the airplane is doing but together give you a picture of everything that's going on.

My grandfather, Arthur Baskerville, he played and still plays a little bit piano and trombone, and so when I was a kid, I always heard jazz around the house, but I also went to his gigs, whether it be a Saturday brunch in my hometown Columbus, Ohio. We'd go and hear him play with some of the local musicians.

A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.

My father, I think he played percussion in high school. My mother played piano when she was very young, but only for a brief while. I don't think she had a great teacher. In any case, neither of them were really into music at a young age.

I had experiences or exposure to music in church. I went to a church, it was very unique. It was a predominantly African American Catholic church. So they would have - one mass would be traditional church music, and then the other mass would be gospel music.

I consider myself very fortunate. I mean, I think there's that old saying, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' and I just have such a passion for jazz music and playing the piano that I just find a way to make it work, so to speak. Fortunately, I have so far.

I'm not saying that in order to be a great jazz musician you have to be a great classical pianist first. But I am saying that it makes things easier when you can get around the instrument, and you have some idea of how to approach the various hurdles.

The older I get, the more I realize the importance of maintaining an even temperament - not getting too emotional, focusing on the task at hand. You don't want to make a business deal based on your emotions.

There's a huge part of me that's thinking about perfection. I have to fight that urge, to try to live in the moment, reach for something that I might be hearing, and not second-guess myself.

When I see young people interested in music. I always look out for that passion in their eyes. You never know where that might lead.

I really want to bring ensemble playing back to the forefront - not just for me, but for everyone in jazz. When you have a group, a true co-op group, you can really heighten the possibilities of all the treasures of jazz.

There's always room for improvement. That's my mindset.

Big-time players make big-time plays in big-time spots. That's who I want to be.

It's not that hard to be good, you can be good off raw talent. But I feel like it's that extra step, doing work and putting a body of work in and doing things when nobody else is watching. When nobody else is telling you to do it, you're pushing yourself to do it.

Leaving a legacy behind is huge.

You always want to have success, but you never think it will be as big as it is.