Adoption is a beautiful picture of redemption. It is the Gospel in my living room.
Music is a thing where, the more vocabulary you gather, the more you can express yourself.
Basically, my mother is a piano teacher, and she actually teaches piano at Yamaha School of Music today. She's a really, really amazing human being and is very patient. She had enough patience for me, as a kid, which I'm very thankful for. She made sure that music was a part of my general education as well.
I started playing classical music, and I still do. I think music ultimately is kind of on a theoretical level, is about collecting and learning as much vocabulary as possible. It's kind of like writing. It's kind of like writing because the more you read, the more you hear people describe things. The more you soak in, as far as vocabulary, the more access you have in order to express yourself accurately and vividly.
I'd rather call it "instrumental creative music," especially the music that I've been doing. If a person would hear that music, they would undoubtedly call it "jazz. " There is this whole generation of musicians that are playing and thinking critically for themselves and making music that's relevant to today. I hope that's the objective of a lot of musicians.
The main thing about the word jazz, is that it's very limiting to what people are doing.
"Jazz" to begin with, is a really bad word. . . all the true musicians that really play jazz, jazz is the worst word for it. Jazz is a process. Jazz is a creative process. It's not so much a genre, but a way of expression.
Courtly manners are contagious; they are caught at Versailles.
For the three decades after WWII, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for people up and down the income ladder, but since then most income growth has occurred among the top quintile. And among that group, most of the income growth has occurred among the top 5 percent. The pattern repeats itself all the way up. Most of the growth among the top 5 percent has been among the top 1 percent, and most of the growth among that group has been among the top one-tenth of one percent.
The public doesn't care about figures.
You have to be driven by the stories that you want to tell. You can't simply be responding, or there won't be any real heart to those stories anymore.