The musicians are really on board, they're doing a great job together. There is some kind of a good chemistry, I would say affectionate chemistry and it's a huge promise of success.
I actually started playing in little cafes around New York, and I have a lot of good friends of mine who are musicians who are struggling in New York.
It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa.
I think there are just a million interviews in anthologies with famous musicians that are about the music, and they're really boring to read.
My father used to tell me about how musicians don't have respect from people and he was afraid about my future.
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.
Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.
If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.
When I was 21 or 22, I realized I was never going to be something else - I had to be a musician. I can't commit to anything unless I love it.
The thrill of hearing your own voice recorded is still there, I still love it, going into the studio and thinking how can I sing this song and between the producers and the musicians you find a way of doing it.
At the risk of sounding hopelessly romantic, love is the key element. I really love to play with different musicians who come from different cultural backgrounds.
As a musician I'm about expressing what's inside, and I think everyone has a song in them that they need to get out, whatever their gig is.
We need improvement in the style of performance. There is no more advantage in a musician who plays and conducts than in one who is only a beater of rhythm.
It keeps me in touch with younger musicians who are constantly saying, 'Have you heard this new artist, or this new guitar player?' It keeps you reaching.
The project which we developed, however, was for a sound piece and I was initially curious that a sculptor should be interested in working with a musician, especially on a project for radio.
As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
I talk to people who are musicians, and they go, Oh this is hell. And I go, Are you kidding me? You never put tar paper on a roof, did ya?
Now as a musician, if you have it within you, you can create your own reality. Believe me, it's a novelty.
Musicians playing together, it's a conversation, and ideally I want our conversation to be really intriguing and interesting and beautiful.
