I got into music when I was a little boy. My dad was always into jazz. I got my education from him. The first time I listened to jazz, he gave me a Thelonious Monk record. It was so different from anything I had ever heard. It took me a while to understand it, and I liked that. I liked the fact that it wasn't immediately palatable.
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play.
I listen to all those kinds of music, from classic soul to hip-hop to Brazilian music to, you know, jazz to indie to alternative. So whatever. I listen to all if it. Classic rock and classic pop, all of that.
Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.
I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.
They always say that jazz doesn't sell, but it's a lie, because it does sell, and it sells consistently year in and year out.
There's nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it 'jazz parenting.'
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.
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.
I use a lot of tunings because I listen to a lot of jazz.
One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.
And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.
You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.
We grew up listening to a variety of music, such as Gospel/Christian, R&B old/new school, jazz, blues, Mozart, Mary Poppins, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, just to name a few. I love opera, too - went to state in high school as a soloist.
We don't live in a jazz world, unfortunately. I think if I had lived in a jazz world, I would have done OK. I'm not sure I would have done great. I'm a lover of jazz music, so I would have been happy, don't get me wrong. I go to jazz concerts like the biggest jazz fan in world. The drag is that I don't play jazz for a living.
For me, great jazz records really feel like everyone in the room is playing together in a zone - and all the musicians are completely in sync with each other.
I knew that I could sing when I was young. I would listen to a lot of jazz; I'm a big jazz fan. When I first got to high school and studied musical theater, I could sing. But I added certain things to my voice, and I realized after graduating high school that this is the kind of voice I had. It's not very nimble, but it's heavy.
I do after-school ballet and also hip-hop and jazz.
Jazz can accommodate so many things. Jazz is like the universe: it's been expanding since its creation, and it's connected to everything.
Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'
So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.
Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what?
I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.
One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.
I don't want to sound as if I'm doing something tremendously special. But I am a jazz fan.
When I was doing jazz concerts in America, I would use the biggest names I could find.
The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.
John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.
He would catapult you forward, and that was his intention with the Jazz Messengers. He would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.
What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.
I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.
I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.
In South Louisiana, every single thing we do is jazz or zydeco.
Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.
You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they've never heard.
I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.
