I don't do drugs anymore... than, say, the average touring funk band.
I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.
I can watch anything from 1970s West Coast rock to 1990s electro-funk - I don't care.
If you listen to a lot of old funk records, the drums are really small. But you don't perceive it like that because the groove is so heavy.
My favorite bands were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Grand Funk Railroad. If you listen to some of my early music, you can hear it.
This is the first year for me as a teacher and, by the looks of this class, I’m hoping it won’t be my last.
When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk.
But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.
The Meters are, I think, the most influential group in our time to come out of New Orleans, to have changed and introduced us all to a way of playing, and to a groove and a level of feel in playing funk-jazz.
To me, if you're going to talk about funk, you have to go back to George Clinton and Bernie Worrell. Those guys are the giants. I've played with Bernie, and it was unreal. He's the master.
A cardio-funk class - I should have at least taken one of those. But it's always terrified me. I'm never one to be a dancer on the dance floor, even at a bar or a club.
There's a lot of people over time who have brought out all these funky records that everybody has started jumping on like a catch phrase... When Planet Rock came out, then you had all of the electro funk records.
But that kind of falls in line; when you think about it, James Brown was a funk minimalist. All of those parts create a sum that's larger than than the individual parts.
You know, in the 1970's, when I was in high school, I belonged to a band called the Happy Funk Band. Until an unfortunate typo caused us to be expelled from school.
I had this idea for a while to do mix this Al Green vibe with a samba thing. I tried to do that in many different ways. Peter added his own modern notion of funk and his own deep background in classical music.
I didn't grow up with Broadway music. My mother played Perry Como, while I listened to Andy Williams records. Later on it was Cream, Grand Funk Railroad and lots of R&B like the Isley Bros. and Parliament.
My plays are for the kind of black people who relate to funk music, to Parliament-Funkadelic. When those guys get out of a spaceship - the idea that black people are from outer space, there's a poetic truth to that. We are this vast people.
Stuff like Buena Vista Social Club and Fela Kuti were quite a main thing to my childhood. As soon as I reached an age where I realized that Fela was singing in English, when I got past his accent, I loved the rawness of it, and the funk and the rhyth...
I tried to sing 'What's Going On' with Amy Winehouse once at an old cinema in the West End. There was a funk band that had members of both of our bands playing in it, but it was the worst kind of place to sing bad karaoke because everyone there was a...
Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.
I started buying records in the '80s. I listened to everything new wave, disco, funk synth-pop, rock, but in my house we were listening to bossa nova, tango, and folk.
