Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All John Coltrane's records are amazing.
I feel like I'm musically free to do what I want.
I think the open mind is the one that's reachable.
My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan, and Whitney Houston.
Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.
Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.
When you bring multiple cultures together, there's a degree of push and pull.
So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre.
As musicians, we have one of the greatest tools of bringing people together in music.
Music doesn't come out of you, it comes through you. You are almost like a messenger.
By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician.
I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.
My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.'
Fela Kuti blew my mind. His playing is very unorthodox, but I learned how to appreciate that.
When you're making music, you're creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something.
My dad was very much a Pan-Africanist and instilled in me and my siblings a want for that knowledge.
I think the reason why I see life as this never-ending struggle is because I imagine it having endless potential.
This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect.
There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed.
There's a deeper level of healing that needs to happen for the world in general. There's a mass of people who are broken.
I'm trying to just keep pushing on the things I've been wanting to do in my life and in music. And think of new things to do!
Someone like Donald Trump can't control the way I show love to my brother. He can't control the way I feel about my neighbors.
I like living on that edge, musically. I like a bit of insecurity and that feeling of not really knowing what's going to happen.
I don't want to live my life to necessarily overcome struggle, but when I am going to hit struggle throughout my life, I face it head on.
I used to play until 4 o'clock in the morning.My dad would go nuts - he'd scream and say the cops are gonna come and break our instruments.
'Harmony of Difference,' to me, was an opportunity to celebrate one another. And 'Fists of Fury' is an opportunity for us to protect one another.
If we all give our power to one person, that's what the world will be. If we all decide to make the world a beautiful place, it'll be a beautiful place.
I have to always check back in with my imagination just to remember that I have this infinite potential, and I can do anything, and anything is possible.
I think people psych themselves out before they listen to jazz a lot, thinking that they have to, like, put on a suit or something. That's not what it is.
My hope is that witnessing the beautiful harmony created by merging different musical melodies will help people realize the beauty in our own differences.
At a certain point, when there's a barrier between you and what's right, eventually you have to decide you're not going to allow yourself to be subjugated.
Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old.
Hip-hop and jazz have always been intertwined. Even the G-funk thing. You listen to 'The Chronic,' there's flute solos and everything. It's always been there.
I started playing drums at three, then piano at five, then clarinet. But it wasn't till I picked up a saxophone aged 13 that I really got serious about music.
American music comes from the same tree, but sometimes we get to these places in history where we forget where things come from, and they get compartmentalized.
I've had experiences where people say, 'I hated jazz before I heard you guys!' I'm like, 'You didn't hate jazz before you heard us; you hated the idea of jazz.'
I've had experiences where people say, 'I hated jazz before I heard you guys!' I'm like, 'You didn't hate jazz before you heard us, you hated the idea of jazz.'
One of the things I did learn from 'The Epic' was that we don't have to feel so much pressure to conform to set formats. A song doesn't have to be three minutes and 30 seconds.
As a musician, your instrument is almost predetermined. I had played drums, piano, clarinet, but when I heard Wayne Shorter play the saxophone, I knew that sound is what I wanted.
The fact of the matter is that nobody understands what John Coltrane is doing except John Coltrane. And maybe not even him. So we're all experiencing it on this subconscious level.
I started playing with this band, the Polyester Players. It was my introduction into funk. So I went and got a James Brown record. 'Black Caesar' is a film score, but it's so dope.
People have been starving for intellectual fodder, but the best way to get people to close their eyes and not say anything is to tell them that they're not smart enough to comprehend.
I've known that about myself, that I've had two sides: one that's pretty tactical, down to earth, aware. There's also a really spacey side. But I realized they're kinda the same thing.
What fixes your spirit when Ferguson happens? When Trayvon Martin and those kind of things happen, they hurt your spirit; it hurts your heart and your soul. You need something to fix it.
In the '80s, a lot of kids, if you were kind of bright, you got bussed to schools out of your community. So you wouldn't know the talented musicians who lived around the corner from you.
The thing about hip-hop is, like, that the instruments were taken out of schools. But - you might have taken the instruments out of schools, but we'll take the records and sing over them!
As a person who grew up in Los Angeles - that's a very diverse place - I've always felt like that diversity is a blessing. It's not a problem to be solved: it's a gift to be thankful for.
Every day we're here is an opportunity to do what we can to make the world right, to help someone close or far from us, to not get so hung up on what we can't do, and remember what we can.
In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm just taking the music that comes to me and trying to make it as beautiful as I can. You can't really predict or control how people will receive that music.