​“When you play blues-type stuff, the material is pretty obvious; it’s how you do a lot with a little,” Liebman said.

“I guess that’s my personality: On the outside I’m very mellow, but, inside, my brain is going 100 miles a minute,” says Scott.

“When I first emerged on the scene, I was dealing with working with a certain trumpet player who shall remain nameless,” Reed said. “It was very much an indoctrinating, dogmatic point of view, but it was all I knew.”

“Remember to be a warrior, not a worrier,” Shorter said, 10 days prior to his passing on March 2.

“I got chills,” Patricia Brennan said while listening to the music of Chris Dingman.

​“There’s so much mystery in his own writing,” Dianne Reeves (left) said of Vince Mendoza (right).

​“I knew Dizzy’s music inside and out,” Cassidy said about playing in the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band. “That’s what I grew up chasing.”

​“Perhaps that’s a key to what makes me tick — a very strong curiosity, which makes me a perpetual fanboy of whatever I’m discovering,” Mehldau says.

“The more I thought about that connection, the more it made sense,”James said of comparing Erika Badu and Alice Coltrane from a musical and spiritual standpoint.

“There was a time I decided I was not a composer, only an improvisor, and I find that very difficult to do with one hand,” Jarrett says. “Jumping off a cliff takes two hands and two feet.”