Jazz? has no boundaries.
I try to practice with my life.
I try stuff. I synthesize what’s of value with some of the other things I have at my disposal.
It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.
I think there’s a great beauty to having problems. That’s one of the ways we learn.
A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.
You can practice to learn technique, but I’m more interested in conceiving something in the moment.
The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.
I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.
Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.
We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.
My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
I really feel like I made it a great record. I really feel good about it. In this day and age to make a record that you say, This is different,’ that’s a tough nut. I did it by accident but it got done. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know how to do it.
To work is to feel alive.
What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.
The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I’ll keep playing until I feel like I can’t.
Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I’d just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn’t gotten kicked out of school I wouldn’t be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.
Instrumental music can spread the international language.
In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.
I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.
I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.
[on Glastonbury] I started off the show and I completely messed up the music. And me, as you can imagine by this phone call, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So it really put me into a slightly depressed state.
