In 1983, all of us had U.S. passports, but because there was so much tension between America and the U.S.S.R., we were announced as a Canadian group.
After I came out of surgery - I was in the hospital for five weeks - I found that I gravitated toward very gentle sounds: chant music, solo bamboo flute sounds, a laid-back record of my own called 'Inside.' And the music became a very real part of my recovery process.
It was in 1967, and I was on a spiritual pilgrimage to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That was before the Beatles saw him, by the way, when not too many people knew of him. Anyway, I visited the Taj and noticed its wonderful sound.
We were the first small American jazz group since Sidney Bechet in 1927 to play for the public in Moscow and Leningrad.
Even back when I played 'straight-ahead,' I mixed it up. I played some free-form, classical adaptations, solo flute stuff. It was New Age in its own way.
It's not music you can evaluate in traditional ways. If you look around at a concert, you might see what look like bored people, or maybe they're drifting, but they're just having another kind of experience, an inner thing.
I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.
Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.
We are journeying externally from country to country. We are traveling in historical time, from the present to the distant past. We are traveling inwardly as well, through the music of meditation.