My music is Jazz.
External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.
Check out the albums, … Check out the live performances. That’s the reality of it all. Music is such an energizing thing.
I don’t compose. I assemble materials.
To keep creating you have to be about change.
I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.
You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.
Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.
Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.
There’s a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.
To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.
I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.
The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.
That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take it from you.
I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.
