The only people who have doubts about the sincerity of my music are people who come to it relatively late, off the back of having seen me in a film. Acting is about being other people, and music is about being myself.
People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.
I came up in Brooklyn singing doo-wop music from the time I was 13 to the time I was 20. That music served a purpose of keeping a lot of people out of trouble, and also it was a passport from one neighborhood to another.
I've programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic, sexy, but classy, all in one. And that's the challenge. Once I create that music, then the lyrical content starts to come - you know, the stories and things like ...
I really was kind of like a musical nerd. I would watch VH1's 'Behind The Music.' That was heavy when I was a kid. I would sit up and want to watch that all day instead of going outside sometimes.
For me, when I grew up playing music, I played music in church and people were shouting and having a big time, and church wasn't something where it was subdued. If you played something, you brought it to church with you.
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.
Usually, when I do a soundtrack, the music from the movie doesn't have anything to do with me personally. It's music to enhance to the film. My own stuff is more introspective and about what's on going in my head.
The Indian music market is very film-oriented, and any other creative music venture doesn't receive enough support. I'd rather do singles and put them on my website.
In the course of transferring all my CDs to my iPod, I have found myself wandering the musical hallways of my past and reacquainting myself with music I haven't listened to in years.
The L.A. rap scene is popping again because rappers stopped saying 'West Coast.' Nobody says that anymore. Fans of L.A. music were reaching and saying, 'This is West Coast music,' because nobody else liked it.
As I was sitting there, the deejay was playing music and talking over the music, and the kids were going crazy. All of a sudden, something said to me, 'Put something like that on a record, and it will be the biggest thing.' I didn't even know you cal...
With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.
All musicians practice ear training constantly, whether or not they are cognizant of it. If, when listening to a piece of music, a musician is envisioning how to play it or is trying to play along, that musician is using his or her 'ear' - the unders...
Listening to music for me is like homework. Music will give me enjoyment, but as soon as it's giving me that enjoyment, I want to analyse it, and then it becomes work. Why does it sound like that? How?... then I dissect it.
You would probably think that rock music is an urban phenomena, but the main reason for doing it in '68 was so that we could play music very loud any time of the day or night without getting complaints from the neighbours.
The way popular music is categorized and formatted cuts down on everyone's options. And although people don't talk about it, there are a lot of issues of race determining musical categories of what's rock, R&B, or even folk. It ends up restricting cr...
I want to take Justin Bieber for a month and just lock him up in a cage where we sit and make music. He's one of the most successful people in the world, but his music could be so much tighter.
I was very pleased to find that once I had records out music videos were starting to happen, so I directed some of my own music videos and got to experiment in other areas of expression.
I take it very seriously, music. I think it's one of the tools that a director has with which to kind of paint. The right music can sometimes do five pages of scripted dialogue.
