Janis Siegel

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition. If you don’t understand what it’s about, you’re depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

I think I love it more as I get older because I keep getting better on drums, vibes and piano.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

[on Django Reinhardt] This was a man who changed my musical life by giving me a whole new perspective on the guitar and, on an even more profound level, on my relationship with sound…During my formative years, as I listened to Django’s records, especially songs like ‘Nuages’ that I would play for the rest of my life, I studied his technique. Even more, I studied his gentleness. I love the human sound he gave his acoustic guitar.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

It’s a matter of who would be right for each song. Mickey Hart for ‘All We Need is An Island’ – he’s the only guy I know who has Tahitian drums and every kind of drum on the planet.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.

Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

I wanted something very dense, something that would sustain long and more pieces of wood that would be soft, sweet, for more of a mellow sound.