That's life. By which I mean you can examine many lives within the arts and without and come to that sort of conclusion. Chance and circumstance and nature and nurture and the air and the ether all are a battlefield or a cakewalk and sometimes both to endure and win or be defeated by for any of us. The difference being with artists, and in our case especially jazz artists because we love and understand the art, we have that beauty to savor . . . . And so yes it's bitter-sweet at times, but we don't have to dwell on the bitter background.
I'm listening to Nathan Davis tell a little story right now. All those stories! Art is a wonderful thing, to be able to bring something out of the human brain and communicate it in a fascinating way.