Sometimes it was good and sometimes it wasn't, but I had to stand up for all of it or else I couldn't play any of it. I learned how to be courageous from that experience. |
Sometimes you can practice something but what you wind up playing when you're out doing a gig is not what you practiced. What you learn is not necessarily what you practice. |
Still, when I finally left Miles in '68 and got my own band, it was a logical step; because anybody that left Miles always had their own band. |
Technology has developed to a whole other level and there's the scientist part of me that loves that stuff. |
Technology has made so much information available but what the technological community has not done is to make any attempt for us to figure out how we're going to assimilate all this information. |
That's one of the reasons for the title of the record, Future 2 Future, because here they are creating kind of a new musical approach, underground approach, but coming out of what used to be underground but what has become popular, which is the whole hip-hop scene. |
That's when I began to understand what a chord is. So I learned theory to find a shorter method to take things off a record. |
The arts can help establish stronger relationships between countries and cultures, in a way that is difficult to achieve by our political ambassadors. |
The concept of improvisation is an idea that's very close to my heart, but I can manifest that in a lot of different genres. It really comes from a jazz sensibility. |
The fact that young hip-hop artists are searching for the jazz roots of their music acknowledges the greatness of roots, helps a person get a sense of being grounded, of being attached, of coming from somewhere. |
The first thing I ever heard about synthesizers, they were being used in rock. |
The mixture of all kinds of things, all kinds of beings - it's just like what we have here in this country. |
The music becomes something that is its own entity. |
The one thing that we should stick to is to figure out how to become better human beings, but in order to do that we have to go to the second level which is to work on defining the palette of what a better human being is made of, and creativity is one of them. |
The other reason is the concept of attitude. I didn't want to appear angry, but it's okay to appear serious or to not smile. |