In 1994, I started touring again and I recorded two albums for Chesky Jazz.
I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.
I like rock music. I like jazz better, though.
It's much like playing jazz, flying. It's multitasking in real time. You have a number of instruments that alone won't tell you exactly what the airplane is doing but together give you a picture of everything that's going on.
It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.
There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.
We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.
Both of my mom's parents were music teachers, so I got a lot of knowledge about everything from classical music to jazz to musicals.
Some people say there was no jazz tenor before me. All I know is I just had a way of playing and I didn't think in terms of any other instrument but the tenor.
I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.
Painting, I think it's like jazz.
Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.
For me, jazz offers so much freedom in the way the music can be interpreted. It's natural to me. It's where I feel most free.
By the time I approached my forties, I had the self-assurance to approach all the genres I love so deeply: R & B, rock, jazz, and pop.
When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.
I'm into the old school. I listen to rock, soft rock, jazz, old school R&B.
I flow between modern and traditional jazz, between samba and choro - all maybe in a week's time.
I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with.
I'm concerned with trend. I don't know where jazz fans will come from 20 years from now.
For years, Jazz At The Philharmonic albums were the only ones of their kind.
I love the sounds of Latin jazz, R&B, hip-hop, alternative, all that stuff. I'm a radio kid.
Diana Krall knocks me out. I like jazz and I like her simple approach.
Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.
If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.
Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.
What I see for the band by the end of this year is the Complex live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I want my guys to be comfortable. I'm certainly not in this for the money, but I'd really like to see my guys make some money off of this stuff.
So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.
We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.
I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.
I did ballet, jazz, and all that, but I think hip-hop is really where I learned rhythm and groove, which has helped me in music.
The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.
I think I was supposed to play jazz.
My audience went, 'Wait, why is she singing jazz? What's going on?' And then they went, 'Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.' And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.
In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.
My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz.
