When I started playing the bass, I became kind of fascinated by it and started investigating various styles of bass playing, and I was really struck with funk music, mainly American funk music - Stanley Clarke, Funkadelic and that kind of stuff. That comes out in a couple of songs like 'Barbarism Begins at Home.'
I'm definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s.
In a way, I'm lucky that I was never classically trained and never went to a music college. I'm just from a normal working class family and happened to get obsessed with music as a teenager.
When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
I'm big fan of soulful music - classic rock with a folk-ish twist.
The big stadiums get totally packed, and everyone knows the words, and it's screaming young girls. I met a whole bunch of great Nashville musicians, and they accepted me in their community. Classic rock and country music go well together.
My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.
But my everyday music is classic rock. It's what I relate to the most and where my heart is.
I really like all music, but mostly Country, older R&B, and the good classic rock.
I enjoy all forms of music - pop, classical and opera.
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about... Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.
I like to stick with music I know I can play. I love classical, but I don't think I could ever play it. I'm just not qualified.
When I was younger, studying classical music, I really had to put in the time. Three hours a day is not even nice - you have to put in six.
I definitely want to act, but I also want to score movies, and I have this idea to fuse classical music with other styles that would give it a different perception.
In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I'd never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that's when I started to fall in love with dance.
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
My mom loved rock n' roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around. He liked classical music and Duke Ellington.
Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
