I was raised in Topanga Canyon. It's an eclectic community up in the Santa Monica mountains. A lot of musicians lived there - Joni Mitchell, Neil Young - as well as artists and craftspeople.
I am constantly being told that I have been a big influence for many people, including other musicians.
I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
I think performers are all show-offs anyway, especially musicians. Unless you show off, you're not going to get noticed.
I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.
To my wife, I'm not Herbie Hancock the musician. I'm her husband. When I'm talking to a neighbor, I'm a neighbor. When I vote, I'm a citizen.
I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.
I always wanted to be a full-time musician. Every television job I had was a means to buy a grand piano, or to put in a recording studio, or something like that.
When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.
I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.
The 'Daryl's House' thing has made me into a live musician even more than I ever was, and even in the way I record.
When I look at how fortunate I've been, being a musician... my response to being overpaid is that I should pay it back to my community in some way.
The most frustrating thing for musicians who want to play stuff from the new album is when everyone goes out to buy a beer.
want to live like there's no tomorrow. Love like I'm on borrowed time. It's good to be alive." ~ Musician Jason Gray
I would not describe myself as an avid jazz fan and I am not a jazz musician myself. However, that is not to say that jazz does not play a vital and important role in my life.
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.
Strangely enough, through all those school years I decided at 13 or 14 I was going to be a musician and so school was just something to get out of the way, a waste of time and not to bother with it.
And then the last album, 'Get It', was done over a shorter period of time and I started using other musicians, as opposed to playing all the instruments myself like I did on the other two.
Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.
You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.
Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.
