In general, in my life, one of the coolest things that I've been able to do is to go to different places and meet different people and see how they view the world and to learn what their music is and what their language is, and the food they eat and everything. That idea of the beauty of the vastness of the world has just been my life.

The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city - there's Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there's African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans.

As a person who grew up in Los Angeles - that's a very diverse place - I've always felt like that diversity is a blessing. It's not a problem to be solved: it's a gift to be thankful for.

I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was 'The Rite of Spring.' That's what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.

When I was younger, I'd be walking down the street and suddenly panic because I had a cool idea and no way of getting it down - I'd have to sing it all the way home. Now I can hum it into my phone.

I started playing drums at three, then piano at five, then clarinet. But it wasn't till I picked up a saxophone aged 13 that I really got serious about music.

People like to compartmentalise music, especially African-American music, but it's really one thing. One very wide thing. I mean, it's like all those great records by Marvin Gaye and James Brown back in the day - there are tonnes of jazz musicians playing on them.

I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop.

We've now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We've grown up alongside rappers and DJs; we've heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane.

As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music.

When you're making music, you're creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something.

There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed.

Jazz is a part of me.

My dad was very much a Pan-Africanist and instilled in me and my siblings a want for that knowledge.

American music comes from the same tree, but sometimes we get to these places in history where we forget where things come from, and they get compartmentalized.

I like living on that edge, musically. I like a bit of insecurity and that feeling of not really knowing what's going to happen.

So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre.

Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old.

I feel like I'm musically free to do what I want.

Someone like Donald Trump can't control the way I show love to my brother. He can't control the way I feel about my neighbors.

We do have the power to kind of make this world what we want it to be. But we have to just choose to do it ourselves and not wait for someone else.

It's either, like, 'Your album was the first jazz album I listened to,' or, like, 'My friend took me to this show, and I've never been to a jazz show before, but, man, I'm so happy I came. I can't wait to go home and see more.' And you can feel it in the crowd, too. You can see the groups of people that don't really know what to expect.

The thing about hip-hop is, like, that the instruments were taken out of schools. But - you might have taken the instruments out of schools, but we'll take the records and sing over them!

I'm trying to just keep pushing on the things I've been wanting to do in my life and in music. And think of new things to do!