Zitat des Tages von Jason Moran:
Once you step on stage, the people are actually looking to be transformed. That's why they showed up; that's why they spent some money. And great performances do that.
I play a Monk song, it's like you get possessed. And then you have to break that spell. You have to remind yourself that you are an individual, or that you aren't Thelonious Monk.
I used to watch those rock videos where they would chainsaw the piano. And I thought, 'That's what I want to do.' I thought classical music was corny.
If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He's the river that's carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.
As a listener, we're looking for that person who kind of excites the molecules within us - who knows how to tell the story that resonates deeply to our core and almost prompts us into action. Fats Waller has been that person for decades. When people need a lift, sometimes they go to him. I know I do.
Freedom is the thing that has attracted me most to jazz. Within improvisation, you're really able to express something that maybe I'm not so adept at expressing via language. So I develop a language through the instrument to tell stories. So it's kind of this freedom of thought and freedom of expression that kind happens.
America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.
I'm a bit of a traditionalist, but I kind of mangle things as I perform in a contemporary way.
Very few of us have our special listening room where we close off the rest of the world and only hear the music. As musicians or as listeners, we're generally interacting with music wherever we are, whether we're on a train or on the street.
I see how people look at me, all around the world. They see something because of the race I belong to. I have to understand that and put it into my music.
I don't want to be defined solely by what I do as a jazz musician at a club or a festival. That's not all of me. It's not even close.
I love Mozart, and I love Bach, and Brahms, and - but at 13, I didn't understand any of that that I was playing.
Monk's music is often defined as enigmatic, eccentric and humorous - as if it had little to do with the pain he may have endured to create his art. But I believe Monk routinely shared his history with his audience, no matter how unpalatable that history was, and it is for that very reason that his music connects with people around the globe.
I'm lazy. I don't practice enough. I do other stuff. I'm not a musician's musician, and I don't necessarily know if I want to be. When I hear something and want to work on it, then that's what my project will be.
In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.
Usually, when I see films that don't have any score attached to them, I think they're beautiful. I love just the naked sound of the voice. That's already music.
As an improviser, my nature is to take a theme and constantly rework it.
I have that huge print from Pollock by the piano because the influence is reciprocal. He was into hearing music while he created, and I sometimes do the opposite. I'm influenced by everything from an ant to a dream.
It's important that the art forms communicate, whether it's the dance program with the jazz program or the classical program with the opera program, that these conversations becomes fluid.
While my friends were outside practising to be Tony Hawk or Michael Jordan, I was inside playing Mozart, increasingly disillusioned and bored.
