“I had to lock myself in a room, grab the 5B sticks and punish my body every day,” Rodriguez said of preparing to record with the band Mars Volta.

“I’ve always wanted to explore the piano trio tradition, and to find my own voice within it,” says the youthful Goldberg.

“Being president of Blue Note has been one of the coolest things that ever happened to me,” Was said. “It’s a gas to serve as one of the caretakers of that legacy.”

“I had total confidence and trust that they were brilliant musicians and would come up with something amazing, which they did,” Harris said of his Blackout band members after their AI-enriched performance at Harlem’s Victoria Theater on Feb. 18.

“Maybe now after all these years I’m finally becoming the musician that I wanted to be,” says Bromberg.

“It has a twang, but it’s not country,” Gardner says of the music from On The Trail With The Lonesome Pines. “And it’s not exactly jazz, but I think it works best when jazz musicians come at it.”

“If I just sit down and try to play a song all by myself, just tapping my foot, that’s going to be the best thing, because that’s the most honest and most true thing,” says Mulherkar in discussing his debut solo album.

On Shadow, Wright has taken the words of vocalist Nina Simone to heart — that an artist must reflect her times.

Omar Sosa

“It’s not like Bach, where you had better play the notes correctly,” Fleck says. “In the case of Rhapsody, it had been done so many ways and with the blessing of [Gershwin].”