Smitty:  Yeah, absolutely.

MS:  Can’t make excuses.

Smitty:  Yeah, exactly.

MS:  You are what you are.

Smitty:  Yes, my friend. You’ve been involved in a lot of great fundraisers, and causes that are very humanitarian to the world, and I can think of one of the latest being your contributions and efforts to what happened with Hurricane Katrina. Talk about how you got involved in that.

MS: Well, we have the Prana Foundation and we used one of the songs, “No Room for Hate,” and contributed its sales and stuff like that and contributed to programs that deal with diversity with little kids who have these school programs that teach them about hate, and in the classroom we have special teachers that come in and teach them about hate, so we wanted to put some money into that….that we collected for Katrina, and get involved in it. I think everybody should be involved. It’s far from being over.

We need to be there every day whether we’re thinking about it or we can once I in a while, you know, throw another $20 out there somehow, and one of the organizations that matters to help do something about rebuilding, helping the musicians…there’s just a variety, not only our foundation, but there’s a variety of people out there and foundations that are working towards helping Katrina.

Smitty:  Yeah. I mean, after all, it’s our country and part of our country is in need, you know?

MS:  Dire need.

Smitty:  Yes. So as part of this country, we all should contribute to that effect, and I think you’re right on with that. Very cool. You’re to be congratulated and commended for what you as well as everyone there at Prana Foundation have done. I think it’s a beautiful thing.

MS:  Well, we are passionate about it and we want to go forward with many things if we can, but we’re still working on Katrina right now, the people from that and Hurricane Rita which came right after that. So we’re gonna stick around that for a while.

Smitty:  Very cool.  Now, street date for the record?

MS:  It’s May 30th.

Smitty:  May 30th, yes.

MS:  Yeah, I can’t wait. Get it out and hopefully we can do some playing and bring some great music, some musicians. I hope we’ll get out here and play for the people. I’m really gonna enjoy digging into these songs.

Smitty: Isn’t it wonderful how music has such a healing effect?

MS:  I think it is so important, and you know it’s important when people are ill and in the hospital and you go “Well, I’m gonna bring a little cassette player and I’ll bring a little music” and it calms the soul, and whatever that person likes.

Smitty: I really think so.

MS:  Usually it helps them heal faster.

Smitty:  Yeah.

MS: It brings them closer to a kind of a calmness. It can be wild stuff from wild straight ahead or it can be heavy rap, it could be country, classical…so it’s a beautiful thing, music, everywhere.

Smitty:  Yes it is.  Now, you’re a great songwriter and vocalist in your own right. Do you feel yourself in a different mood in a different mode when you’re doing, say, jazz standards as opposed to contemporary jazz?

MS:  Well, you know, there’s a respect that goes with those standards and there’s sort of rules, I feel.

Smitty:  Oh yeah.

MS: And I feel that when you respect those rules, it is a little bit against the grain because you might write something one way but they wrote it another way, but it got to you. It compels you to want to sing it to relay that melody, that lyric. Something is haunting about it to you that make you want to do it. And I’m not wild about everything for me personally to sing. I may like a lot of it and was raised on it, but I’m not compelled to sing it. It has to really be something I know that I can transcend. So that’s why you don’t see me do a lot of it. I mean, I did the one album, but that’s because everybody….that was everybody’s favorites and everybody said “You need to do this,” you know, so I went after it, but, yeah, I feel there’s a different thing and it’s standards, from whenever the standards was written, to 2006.

Smitty:  Yeah, exactly.

MS:  And it’s stuff that’s written 2006 to whenever the new standard is gonna be. So you try to write with respect to how those songs were written and try to do your contribution to it.