I listen to some things that I've done, and I think they're pretty good, but that's not one of them. |
I love working with these guys. But I certainly don't begrudge them when they want to go off and do their own stuff. |
I remember one summer, right after my second album came out, James Taylor was nice enough to allow us to open for him. |
I sat in with them, and I remember their jaws dropped. I could actually play. I had some degree of sense of time. |
I started out, obviously, as a sideman, and I had some really good gigs as a sideman. |
I think as different songs kind of cross your path from one source or another, I approach them with the idea of, can I get inside this song and really kind of inhabit it and bring something of myself into that song? |
I think Norah Jones is a perfect example. Here's somebody who was playing the music she wanted to play and did it with some conviction, and it happened to be at a moment in time when there was a highly receptive audience for that kind of music. |
I think that that's the way the music grows and changes and becomes new and creative and vital. It's by synthesizing elements from all around it and not to maintain this kind of rigid myopic kind of tunnel vision, in a sense, trying to maintain a certain kind of purity, or whatever. |
I think the kind of chronology of the whole thing was that I was making records in the 70's and 80's that used pop production values, but instrumental music; like improvising with R&B kinds of song structures, but with improvisation in them, and pop production values. |
I think the problem is when a genre or style becomes limiting, when it starts to define what you're going to do, then it becomes a problem. |
I think ticket prices are too high, but it costs so bloody much money to get anything together anymore. |
I think with the acoustic bass it allows you to explore the fuller dynamic range. |
I was playing with James Taylor at the time. James agreed to let me open for him, if I played with him also. So I got to be the opening act and I got a lot of exposure that way. |
I'd been doing a syndicated radio show. |
I'll just sit at the piano a lot an play like through different chord exercises and kind of just throwing my hands down on the piano from one chord to the next to see what happens. |