The music in Haiti is all tied up in voodoo and African rhythm, and so there's this funny thing: go to a voodoo ceremony, and then go to a Catholic church and tell me which music you liked better, to which one the music is more integral.
I learned by listening to other people sing and doing impressions of them. And there are things no one can ever teach you, like phrasing. By listening to Sinatra, for instance - you felt that everything he sang had happened in his life.
Parents talk a lot about how much strength and dedication it takes to raise a child. I think it also takes a lot of strength and dedication to carve out a life that doesn't seem normal to anyone else.
On nights that I'm feeling a need to stretch personally and artistically, I tend to put together outfits that are very quirky, mismatched and over-the-top eclectic.
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.
So it's really hard for a horn player to comp. But I'm totally into trying to switch those paradigms around and find a little magic space where that works, and try to mine that.
To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.
I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.
I think, in a lot of ways, it's easier to play a smaller room. You can exploit the quieter dynamics you would shy away from in larger venues.
I'm greedy, and I have a house to pay for and a wife. She has a job of her own, but I bleed her dry. She's on her third shift right now.
I think I'm long past the days where I would go to the store and drop a couple hundred bucks on CDs, so my playlist is gonna be pretty long in the tooth.
Nothing was a style first. Everything started as an idea. A guy did something with an idea. Someone copied him. Some copied all of them and it became trendy and then it became a style.
The New York that Frank Sinatra sang about, people will never know that place. The New Orleans that Louis Armstrong sang about is the New Orleans that's still there - it's preserved.
The ability and desire to transform the mundane materials at hand that we both bring into the collaboration well beyond the sum total of the parts - to birth a new baby neither of us could claim single parentage of.
You know, legends are people like Haggard and Jones and Wills and Sinatra. Those people are legends. I'm just a young buck out here trying to keep in that same circle with the rest of 'em.
That was sort of the 'Second City' approach, which was try to be intelligent and assume your audience is intelligent. We were influenced by 'Monty Python,' too, which would have philosophers in a wrestling match.
Improv seemed to replace stand-up, which was very big before that. Stand-up comedy was real hot in the late '80s and through the '90s.
I got into dub a long time ago. I was into dub before I even had any interest in reggae or Jamaican songs, Bob Marley, or any of those established artists. I just thought it was such an unusual sound.
I was actually in an iron lung for about a year, and then I was paralysed from the neck down for another year after that. So I spent a lotta time just lying down as a kid. And some of my earliest memories from then are of listening to the radio.
Teaching was my first job after leaving university. It was a challenge, but I enjoyed it. Some of the kids were disruptive, but I could deal with it because I was only 24 at the time, and my own school memories were still fresh.
So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore.
