In high school, during lunchtime I would go in the room where the wrestling mats were and try different flips and different moves. Like windmills. I just started mixing martial arts with jazz and contemporary stuff and it would get mashed together and became my style.
I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff.
Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.
I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.
Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.
I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning.
Playing solo with an audience for an hour and 30 minutes without a break means I have to, as the jazz cats say, get into the shed and work on my chops.
Jazz scares me. I've witnessed so many incredible singers and jazz musicians. Pop and soul music have always been the things that I felt like I could do.
I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.
I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.
I would love to make a real jazz album someday because I never have. But that's something I'm not in a rush to do.
My first guitar, a Fender Jazz Master, I traded it in for a Les Paul Deluxe.
I wasn't a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who'd never done any Latin dance. I'd taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I'd never done a dance audition.
I have specific playlists for arrivals in different cities. Tokyo skews new wave, Paris more jazz, and New York is Top 40.
I think I represent a more left-wing view of what jazz is.
Artie Shaw was way ahead of most clarinetists and most jazz players.
What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.
I wasn't a trained Mickey Mouse club performer. I played in jazz clubs and restaurants.
I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.
The best gift I was ever given was the arts. My mum gave me those on a silver platter. Growing up, her and my grandmother would take me to ballets, classical concerts, even smoky jazz clubs I wasn't supposed to be in!
Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.
Jazz is rhythm and meaning.
I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player.
Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.
Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.
Most of the people that I learned and experienced jazz with have been with foreign white people, mostly from France. Excluding my family.
You know, Equal Interest played at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival Awards and not one musician from that category was even thought of. Even thought of! The idea, that here's this vital energy, and that element doesn't even know it exists!
I wasn't very aware of pop music because I attended an arts school. For me, it was all about jazz.
You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.
Jazz celebrates older generations and not just the youth movement. When you 'sell' only to people of a certain age, you get cut off from the main body of experience.
When I heard Charlie Parker, I knew that that was going to be the new wave, the new way to play jazz. From that point on, I was sold with... the idea of bebop.
Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.
In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.
Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.
Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.
Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.