“I specifically remember Linda walking into class every week with 10-page-long new compositions. I was very inspired — you were very capable,” says Fabian Almazan of meeting his future wife when they were students at Manhattan School of Music.

“He was such a beautiful guy,” George Garzone says of the late tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker. He pays tribute to Brecker on his new recording, Themes For Good Friends.

“When I listen to things, I want to be moved, and I don’t need to be impressed,” says Nils Petter Molvær.

“I’m not going to create a powerful performance by overpowering the audience,” Okazaki explained. “I’m going to create a powerful performance by maintaining interest in what’s going to happen next.”

“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.”