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This interview [.pdf] of the great bassist appeared in a June 2007 AllAboutJazz-New York publication, and it's very enlightening into the world of jazz, from Miles Davis to Keith Jarrett. He talks about his career and the great musicians that he's played with:

Q: What did you learn from playing with Miles Davis?

A: Listening became part of my body. Sometimes Miles would be playing and he'd stop in the middle of a song and turn around and look at me. The first couple of times I thought, "Jeez, I must have fucked up." After a while I realized that he was listening to everyone around him. I saw that when Miles would stop playing, what he stopped playing would be finished by Herbie (Hancock) on piano. That was a real opening for me.

Another thing that was particularly good for me was a playfulness. There was an enormous sincerity in the music and sometimes a complete lack of seriousness. One time we did a midnight concert for the black community and we started off with "Stella by Starlight." We had an arrangement where Miles and I played just the first part and then Herbie and Tony (Williams) came in after eight bars. So Miles and I got towards the end of our part and he tuned around and said, "Watch this!" I'm waiting for him to do something tricky and I'm going to have to be on my toes. He turns around and he gets to a certain phrase and he bends the note down and the first eight rows in the audience just swooned. Miles turned around and said, "Wasn't that note a motherfucker?"

The interview is just full of great stories like that.

Or when he talks about his relationship to his instrument - the upright bass - and how dropping acid changed his life:

Q: How has your relationship to the bass changed over the years?

A: At first it was me and the bass. Something to conquer, something to control. It gave me a sense of identity and a purpose in life. One thing in my life that wasn't flipping out all over the place, something I could count on. As a result of that, it produced a lot of anxiety, because once I became that identified with the instrument, then let's say something happened to my hands, I wouldn't have an identity. That's who I was, I was a musician - I wasn't anything but that. In the beginning it worked very well, because that anxiety kept me on target, it kept me woodshedding and then one time I took acid with Timothy Leary's group. I went through periods where i would die and I would come back and I couldn't stop it. The people I was with put me in a tub of ice-cold water to shock my nervous system. I stopped breathing for a second and when i looked down I had turned into a turtle. So that didn't help!

But the next day I felt really calm. When I looked at the calm, I saw that I had realized I wasn't a musician. That was something I had made up in my mind; it was something I did, but it wasn't who i was. But if I'm not that, then who am I?

My relationship with my music and with the bass completely changed. The bass was an instrument I played; it wasn't me. If i couldn't play music anymore, I wouldn't die. My interest in music ended and it didn't come back until about ten years later when I did a short tour with Paul Bley in Japan and something turned the wheel, something happened.

So the relationship I have now is taht I'm me. There's a relationship between myself and the instrument, but it's me over here and the bass over there. We're not the same and we're not different.

He goes on from there... Don't miss it!

Here it is again [.pdf].

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