My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.
I've often felt I've been born out of my time, and when I started Fairground Attraction in the 1980s, I wanted to be a 1940s jazz singer.
My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
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.
Karl Johnson, my first piano player at Milt Trenier's, he just swung really hard and gave me a sense of really belonging to the jazz scene.
I think jazz guitar isn't very ladylike in general. Not that it shouldn't be.
We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.
The clarinet is not so dominant in Israeli music as it is in klezmer. I heard klezmer when I was growing up, but for some reason I avoided it. I listened to Louis Armstrong instead. But the sense of melody is the connection between jazz and klezmer.
Jazz was a bomb. That was also the low point of Mac sales. People had just written it off.
Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.
I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.
The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.
I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.
I wasn't a trained Mickey Mouse club performer. I played in jazz clubs and restaurants.
Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.
I think Wes Montgomery is the greatest jazz guitarist that ever lived.
Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.
The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.
Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.
I love Rihanna's new album, Skrillex, and Norah Jones. They're are all very different, but I love any rock, pop, and jazz.