Biography

Converted to Soka Gakkai Buddhism (1972).

He plays jazz piano, keyboards, synthesizer and is also a composer.

Has received ten Grammy Awards since 1983.

Made his stage debut with the Chicago Symphany Orchestra at the age of 11.

Inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame (1995).

[on the influence of Clare Fischer] Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were.

My main work is to grow and expand, and to investigate what else I'm made of besides being a musician. We all manifest ourselves in a lot of different ways. But most of us define ourselves by that one single thing that we're probably best known for. And my belief is that we shortchange ourselves in that way, whereas if we define ourselves as a human being first, it includes that and every other aspect of what we are. So when you talk about 'doing the work', that's the work I'm interested in. What can I contribute as a human being?

[on 'The Imagine Project'] It's the 21st century, and already it's quite clear that we're at the beginning of a more global connectivity on the planet. That carries with it its own challenges. We can see that it's a very difficult world that we live in, and the idea of global collaboration is something that I think needs to be promoted over and over again. In other words, if we're active participants in creating the kind of globalized world that we want to live in and want our children to live in, there's much more of a chance for us to be happy about the future than if we sit on our hands and wait for somebody else to create the globalized future of the planet.

I've been practising Buddhism for forty years and that's what has led me to this path of discovering my own humanity and recognizing the humanity in others. The wonderful thing is that jazz itself is a wonderful model of that kind of thinking, because it's a music that's in the moment. It's also collaborative, so it's unselfish in that way. And it certainly is creative.

Playing in stage with Mwandishi [originally the Herbie Hancock Sextet] meant treading a fine line between brilliance an chaos. Everything was intuitive, in the moment. Nothing was planned. When it worked it was so, so powerful. When it didn't, it was truthfully kind of a mess. Adding synthesizers opened up whole new territories for us to explore. It was when they came along that I saw that the dream in the back of my head of marrying two things - technology and music - could happen.