Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'Black Radio' was pretty much a jam session.
Jazz is a state of mind. There's no boundaries.
Honestly, recording with Faith Evans blew me away.
I'm from the gospel world. I grew up playing in church.
Anybody who loves jazz has a little bit of snob in them.
Selling out is when you do something that you don't naturally want to do.
You have to go with the times. You're going to get left behind if you don't.
There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.
A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?
My first memories of life were in rehearsal; thats why I can sleep through anything.
My first memories of life were in rehearsal; that's why I can sleep through anything.
I think there's good music out there. I just think that radio stations don't play it.
The music is going to die if you don't tap into something that people today can relate to.
I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.
I was playing drums in church when I was six. Then I picked up the piano when I was 11 or 12.
I'm not really married to the craft of jazz - I'm married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce.
Black people, we built America, and we gave it all of its pop culture and all of its great musical genres.
Experiment is actually doing the art. That's the experiment and then you get to experience the experiment.
You can see how different artists work, from writing to recording, just from being in the studio environment with them.
Instead of hearing, "Oh, he's good," I'd rather hear, "Wow, you changed my feelings today, you made me feel different."
If I was a singer who won those Grammys, I'd be gracing all the magazine covers... I barely got asked to do an interview.
Your main radio stations, the stations that get the most listeners, don't play anything that has any kind of integrity to it.
I feel like everybody's life literally has a soundtrack because we love music so much, and there are so many songs that people love.
Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream - younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans mixed in with the jazz audience.
If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.
I got into hip-hop, but I still had appreciation for all types of music, so I was trained to have an open mind and to always go with the flow.
When my friends were listening to hip-hop or R&B, I was in the crib listening to Billy Joel and Michael Bolton, Luther Vandross, and Oscar Peterson.
It's very rare that you get very old jazz lovers and super-young hip-hop lovers at the same exact show, when you think about it. Not many artists can do that.
None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn't make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.
That's a skill that I'm proud of: to be able to be a jazz musician and go a bit crazy sometimes and other times be able to pull it all in and lay it down like a track.
"Cannonball Adderley said, 'First 20 minutes we'll jazz out, then the last hour it's gonna be songs that people paid to see.' Which is why he was driving a Rolls-Royce."
I want to remind people that black music is amazing. And there are all forms of it that we've forgotten, you know? Rock music is black music! Don't forget that's what it is.
When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.
Once I started getting mainstream people to my shows, I realized we were taking too many solos, and they were too long. I started gauging when people were going on their iPhones.
When music is crashing around us, when you hear the same five songs on the radio that aren't really saying much, we can always go back to great music. Great music always lives on.
I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.
I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.
It's the repetitive thing that brings space. That's one of the things I love secretly about hip-hop. Jazz doesn't have that element. It changes every bar, nothing is ever the same.
I think we're an inspiration to young people, to know they can be honest and not run away from influences that are not jazz. We're definitely breeding a new wave of jazz, for real.
I do feel a responsibility because most people like me that are my age or younger, they don't quite make it over to the jazz side. They flirt with it, but they don't quite marry it.
I feel like, paying homage to an artist, it's better to do something that's inspired by them - a new work that's inspired by them - versus another person saying they redid your song.
Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it, it's like 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.
Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.
When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.
I grew up in church. That's how most young African American musicians learn how to perform. You could be six years old and playing organ or drums in front of thousands or hundreds of people.
Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music.
For a while, R&B was going out of style. It was kind of getting kicked to the side. The first year the R&B Album of the Year didn't get on the TV portion of the Grammys is when I got nominated.
I try to get the hip-hop aesthetic, most times without an MC. I don't use a rapper or a DJ to give it the hip-hop style; it's strictly the band that makes that music, which is a lot harder to do.
I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.
I think there's beauty in repetition. And that's part of my culture and African culture as well: repeated things, mantra. It's spiritual, it's meditation, it's Buddhism, it's praying, it's all these things.