Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden!
Hopefully people can look at our band and see that we're a heavy rock band. We're definitely not a metal band, but we're a band that focuses on meaningful lyrics and melody.
I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.
Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.
You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.
Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.
I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.
Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.
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.
Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.
We're a pop art band. Not a pop band.
My favorite band was The Band, and nobody compares in my mind with The Band.
There's always a Van der Graaf audience that wants to hear the band's sound. And totally fair enough. Why not? It's a band. You like the band, you like the band.
When you are in a band for a number of years you loose your identity in a way. You become a part of that band and then all of a sudden you are not part of that band. You are still the band without the other two members.
One of my songs was on a jazz station for awhile. It was a song that I wrote for a jazz sax player friend of mine, and I sang and played the guitar on it.
Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.
Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.
I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.
I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.
