“It was just that suddenly … I could hear it,” Ravi Coltrane said of an epiphany he experienced during his late teens regarding his father’s music. “And it was almost like a calling, like something saying, ‘Hey, man, come on. It’s time to get serious.’ And the first time you really tune in and dial in and focus like that, it can be very life-changing.”

“Are you for the whole or are you for yourself only?” says Terri Lyne Carrington. “There’s a balance because we live in a capitalist society.”

“I wanted it to be bare,” says Zaccai Curtis of his new album. “I didn’t want to have a ton of overdubs.”

Seamus Blake has taken a deep dive into the music of Eddie Harris. “The more that I listened to him, the more I appreciated and recognized the diversity of his kind of talent.”

On The Blues Is My Biography, Branch employs far-reaching roots to advance the blues process of observation, reportage, assertion, transcendence.

“Jeff knows just what to play, how to construct drum fills around the arrangement,” Willie Jones III says of Jeff Hamilton. “Very musical.”

Joe Lovano’s Paramount Quartet will record live at New York’s Village Vanguard for ECM records on Aug. 26–27.

“I think it’s rare to find an improviser that all goes and nothing has to go at all,” says Ambrose Akinmusire of Mary Halvorson.

“We have figured out our show, and people seem to be really connecting with it,” Emmet Cohen says of his band’s current tour, a tribute to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. “The audiences are large and exuberant. It feels like we’re doing what we’re meant to be doing.”

“I feel a little lost in our pop music world today where the art of melody has been lost,” says Steve Wilson. “Hopefully we can get that back.”