You've got to bring your A-game when you're in the same household as a military guy.

I'd like to think that every job and every step I've taken progressed more and more toward the career that I've wanted to have.

When I was 7, we moved to New York because my dad's job was transferred.

I get nervous for any competition. I also get really competitive.

I thought I'd love to be a gardener because I grew up with a vegetable garden and I love being close to the Earth and growing things. At my home in L.A., I have a great garden and I grow all kinds of things. I even have a worm farm! The worms help create organic compost out of kitchen scraps.

We know cancer is caused ultimately via a link between the environment and genes. There are genes inside cells that tell cells to grow and the same genes tell cells to stop growing. When you deregulate these genes, you unleash cancer. Now, what disrupts these genes? Mutations.

Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.

And when I met Cecil Taylor it was a complete transformation of musical identities. All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window.