When I was 12 and started to take singing lessons from a woman, she told me that I would probably spend the rest of my life taking care of my voice.
I'd love to see a Nirvana biopic. I loved them when I was younger. I really like jazz music, so I'd like to see a Billie Holiday biopic - she was a fascinating woman.
But I just think we've got such a continuity with what we're doing that most people come in and fill in the blanks. And sometimes we leave a lot of blanks to be filled.
I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.
My drummer, Gene Lake, is Oliver Lake's son. So I certainly have wide tastes, in not only what I listen to, but what I play as well.
I think that, given a real choice, people would like to hear something interesting, not something bland and right down the middle.
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.
My favorite singer to this day is Nat King Cole. I've tried to emulate his phrasing. It is so absolutely beautiful to listen to his lovely voice.
There's a difference between the blues of the New Orleans guys and anyone else and the difference is in a chord, but I can't figure the name of it. It's a different chord, and they all make it.
I really love jazz, but I will never be a jazz musician as much as I dream. But, I think that the jazz music I love is there in my music.
I had no desire to become a singer until I heard Billie Holiday. The first time I heard her on a record, it was a revelation. She sounded like a woman singing about herself.
Generally, when a record label suggests album ideas for you, you smile politely, and then proceed to shoot it down, because it's never what you as an artist feel is right for you.
I love the idea of having a kid who says, 'Yeah, of course I knew about Billie Holiday and Johnny Cash when I was nine years old.'
I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't.
I mean, in the course of an evening, people will take a solo here and there, but generally it's all about the rhythm of that music. Dealing with the rhythm with everything. That's essentially at least my concept of what that group is.
I never do anything to strictly satisfy a fickle, ever-changing commercial world. I do the music I like to play. It's the only way I feel comfortable existing in the industry.
I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.
The main thing that those two albums have in common aside from my music, which of course, a sense of it, you can recognize, it is that the bass on Infinite Search was playing much, much less like a bass.
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.
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.
My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.
