“I’m a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness – beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.”
“After I came out of surgery – I was in the hospital for five weeks – I found that I gravitated toward very gentle sounds: chant music, solo bamboo flute sounds, a laid-back record of my own called ‘Inside.’ And the music became a very real part of my recovery process.”
“Yes, I played inside the Taj Mahal, but the experience was also a quiet, inner experience.”
“Music is that universal language which unifies the spirits of mankind.”
“We are journeying externally from country to country. We are traveling in historical time, from the present to the distant past. We are traveling inwardly as well, through the music of meditation.”
“New Age music does something wonderful to the nervous system.”
“It’s funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don’t learn jazz in school.”
“Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.”
“You have to go out and learn jazz by playing.”
“It was in 1967, and I was on a spiritual pilgrimage to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That was before the Beatles saw him, by the way, when not too many people knew of him. Anyway, I visited the Taj and noticed its wonderful sound.”
“I don’t like any category; categories are not my favorite subject. They’re too confining.”
“Basically, I like to pick up my flute, which is a pretty instrument, and play pretty on it.”
“The ‘Inside’ record definitely opened up a whole new audience.”
“Even back when I played ‘straight-ahead,’ I mixed it up. I played some free-form, classical adaptations, solo flute stuff. It was New Age in its own way.”
“It’s not music you can evaluate in traditional ways. If you look around at a concert, you might see what look like bored people, or maybe they’re drifting, but they’re just having another kind of experience, an inner thing.”
“We were the first small American jazz group since Sidney Bechet in 1927 to play for the public in Moscow and Leningrad.”
“In 1983, all of us had U.S. passports, but because there was so much tension between America and the U.S.S.R., we were announced as a Canadian group.”
“The enthusiasm, the adulation for us as jazz artists, in Kiev and Odessa was really heartwarming.”
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