You don't show respect to Frank Sinatra and his great example by trying to sound exactly like him. You show it by sounding exactly like you, and that's the way jazz has always progressed as an art form.

It must be a hellish thing to know what's possible in music, to be hearing things all the time and not have an appropriate outlet for them.

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.

Romance is one of the things that most countries share, and I've noticed how different communities have their own ways of singing about love and heartbreak.

It's a lovely thing to have people in any circumstance appreciate your work.

If you start to dwell on your pain, the amount of pain will increase.

Listening to something without being present is different from being there in the flesh.

You don't want to make records so you can win a Grammy. You make records because you want to be a musician.

Sometimes people have this notion that improvisation is simply intuitive leaping into the unknown.

Salacious? I suppose every once in a while the salacious thing is not a bad thing. It's kind of monochromatic if that's all you do.

I've got enough miles under my belt to know that whatever you envision in your mind, even if it comes true, will only keep a shape in the most general way.

My intellect was quickened at divinity school, and my abilities to discern were strengthened, and that's always valuable.

While I revel in the memories of my own Grammy moment, I also know how it feels to walk away empty-handed.

There are incredible musicians around the world.

I'd been studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. I hadn't been doing well, because I was sitting in with jazz musicians at night - it's hard to read Heidegger, but it's especially hard if you're half asleep.

Audiences have taught me how to sing better and entertain better.

Part of my joy as a singer is to give gifts to people, and one way I try to connect to them is to add something in French or German or whatever.

The great jazz and jazz-influenced singers carry themselves with a certain panache and a certain elegance and, for lack of a better word, self-confidence.

You can never predict what the specific shape of your life is going to be, and you won't really know its general shape until, God willing, you're advanced in years and you have the time and opportunity to look back in a coherent way and see what your life was about.

When improvisation is properly applied, it is compositional thinking, sped way up.

Every record is a gate of a certain kind for me.

Chicago has a burly, action-oriented but still self-assured and relaxed confidence to its stride. The city has a lot of wide-open space and all the possibilities that suggests. There's a lot of horizontal grandeur here.

We all know that jazz demands a cultivation of the mind.