The way jazz works is that we take a theme, and then we write using the same structure, same chord changes, and then we can do different tunes.
If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.
Outside India, Chris Brown, Bruno Mars, Beyonce, and Rihanna are my favourites. I also like Justin Bieber. I like Western jazz and pop. Been a classical singer, I have sung a song 'Auliya,' a fusion of Western and Indian classical.
For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.
I tended to lean towards the guys who both sang and played, such as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Steve Wariner... And at the other end of the spectrum, I had Eric Clapton in a rock and blues sense, jazz guys such as Tal Farlow and Les Paul... Then Chet Atkins-type stuff.
Over time, I've loved jazz, Miles Davis and Chet Baker, then Janis and Jimi and Creedence, then classic rock.
Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.
At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.
I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.
Clifford Brown was in the jazz circles considered to be probably the greatest trumpet player who ever lived.
I had not been in the jazz environment, having been brought up in the church. But once I got to New York, and I was signed to perform at The Village Gate and the Vanguard and clubs like that, and these - the Vanguard was one of the most elite, if not the most elite, jazz club out there.
When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.
Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'
People comment on the way that I phrase. And in my 20s, I realized, my phrasing is jazz phrasing. I don't comply strictly with musical theater phrasing. Musical theater tends to be very one and three, and jazz is definitely two and four.
Intermittently in my concert format, I sing a little jazz, a little scatting.
Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing.
Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.
I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.
