Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.
All the music that I've made in the past I've believed in. I think some of it has been more commercially successful than others, but it wasn't premeditated.
I didn't try to think what my audience wanted and then make the music accordingly. I made the music and hoped that as many people liked it as possible.
I try to do things that keep me interested. And play music that moves me. I like to move around and play in a lot of different ways.
I never think my music isn't easy until I got to teach it to other people.
In other words, the celebrity gets out of hand, and if you're not careful, you will forget what you are about - and that is you are about making music that people want to hear.
I come from an African Caribbean background. I've been influenced by a reggae church music style, contemporary gospel, and rock all fused together.
My parents were quite strict; we couldn't just listen to whatever music we wanted. It was very much like they monitored what we listened to.
I never got into sports at all until I was in my early 20s, after my music career got going.
A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn't have happened without the social changes.
Whatever I have come to offer, I have come to offer and it may or may not be connected to anything that has happened in the past.
I truly believe that people like myself, who are in a position of entertainers in the limelight, should keep their mouth shut on politics.
I could write songs about politics, but I'm conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago.
If there is any justice in the world, then eighties rock will never again serve to blight humanity as it did in that dark decade!
I've recorded 25 or 30 albums. I know that sometimes when you work with producers who are kinda dictators, it doesn't help you make a better record.
Session work makes you more strict. You can't hit notes all over the place. You've got to make each one really count.
The world can't have a global solution to climate change with U.S. action alone; and the world can't have a global solution without U.S. action.
Under Thatcher, who ruled us with an iron rod, great art was made. Amazing designers and musicians. Acid house was born. Very colourful and progressive.
The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.
Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.
I'm looking to evolve the concept of the new renaissance artist, taking the world by storm through the art of public display and demonstration, with technical savvy, using cell phones and computers.
