Monk's music is often defined as enigmatic, eccentric and humorous - as if it had little to do with the pain he may have endured to create his art. But I believe Monk routinely shared his history with his audience, no matter how unpalatable that history was, and it is for that very reason that his music connects with people around the globe.
— Jason Moran
It's important that the art forms communicate, whether it's the dance program with the jazz program or the classical program with the opera program, that these conversations becomes fluid.
I love Mozart, and I love Bach, and Brahms, and - but at 13, I didn't understand any of that that I was playing.
In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.
Very few of us have our special listening room where we close off the rest of the world and only hear the music. As musicians or as listeners, we're generally interacting with music wherever we are, whether we're on a train or on the street.
I want to express what's meaningful. I'm not into gimmicks. I want to make truthful music that's invigorating, maintains a cutting edge, takes on different shades.
I don't want to be defined solely by what I do as a jazz musician at a club or a festival. That's not all of me. It's not even close.
The great jazz radio stations have a duty to continue evolving their format just as audiences ask the musicians to evolve. How do you do that with a form of music that has 100 years of recorded history? How do you also keep it contemporary so you don't isolate your listeners? These are major questions.
I see how people look at me, all around the world. They see something because of the race I belong to. I have to understand that and put it into my music.
From being a teacher and educator, I see the state of the music through the eyes of an 18-year-old coming on to the scene, and we want to make sure it stays intact. With my generation, it's our duty to do that.
Bjork's album, 'Homogenic,' it's got beats, strings, traditional Icelandic stuff. That's my benchmark for what an album should sound like, right up there with Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' and Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On.'
You make a record because you have to chart your progress, not only for yourself, but for your audience.
Pianos - if they don't like what you're saying, then they won't talk back to you. And you want it to talk back to you.
I feel like I'm a torchbearer for jazz, fostering its tradition but its future, too.
While my friends were outside practising to be Tony Hawk or Michael Jordan, I was inside playing Mozart, increasingly disillusioned and bored.
Once you step on stage, the people are actually looking to be transformed. That's why they showed up; that's why they spent some money. And great performances do that.
Are we, as humans, gaining any insight on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context. So I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster.
For a while, I was working on transcribing rap lyrics and then converting them into rhythmic patterns on the piano. And so in my mind, when I was taking a solo, I would be saying the lyrics and trying to play actual notes to their rhythms. Now, the influence just comes in and out in my playing.
If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.
I don't want any of my records to sound like one style throughout. That's why I choose different grooves and songs: tunes that are sensitive and slow as well as pieces that are abstract and fast. The approach I want to take with my records is to give the listener a variety of grooves, concepts, and composers.
Music, many times, around the world, serves to help us understand other people without having to talk.
I grew up with KTSU, and that station gave me so much info about the pantheon of black sounds: reggae, gospel, blues, soul, hip hop, and mostly they played jazz. That was a major part of how I understood music.
Confidence is the key. When you're playing something new, find the part you know very well and play it really strong. That'll make you believe that you really do know it.
I used to watch those rock videos where they would chainsaw the piano. And I thought, 'That's what I want to do.' I thought classical music was corny.
Jazz musicians don't make any money, so I might as well make some on the market. I pick my own stocks - Microsoft, Dell - the tech stocks, the breadwinners.
Usually, when I see films that don't have any score attached to them, I think they're beautiful. I love just the naked sound of the voice. That's already music.
I have that huge print from Pollock by the piano because the influence is reciprocal. He was into hearing music while he created, and I sometimes do the opposite. I'm influenced by everything from an ant to a dream.
I'm a bit of a traditionalist, but I kind of mangle things as I perform in a contemporary way.
Freedom is the thing that has attracted me most to jazz. Within improvisation, you're really able to express something that maybe I'm not so adept at expressing via language. So I develop a language through the instrument to tell stories. So it's kind of this freedom of thought and freedom of expression that kind happens.
If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He's the river that's carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.
There's mediocre jazz, mediocre salesmen, mediocre golfers. If you want to be good, you have to really hone your skills.
I'm a prime example of a person who loves hip-hop, and I will defend it till the day I die.
Most pianists listen to about four or five different piano players before they call it quits and say, 'Okay, I've got my thing together.' Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and maybe Chick Corea. Or maybe before that, Oscar Peterson.
Tons of musicians who I love are imprisoned by their identity. That can be totally fine because they are so amazing in their technique, but for me, I'm a little too restless for that.
America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.
I play a Monk song, it's like you get possessed. And then you have to break that spell. You have to remind yourself that you are an individual, or that you aren't Thelonious Monk.
I kind of want to get the music back on a road it hasn't been on for a while. I want to promote the arts as part of the American diet.
My killer crossover project would be to combine Bjork and Grace Jones with the West Coast rappers and create this massive music. That's, like, one of my dreams.
I'm lazy. I don't practice enough. I do other stuff. I'm not a musician's musician, and I don't necessarily know if I want to be. When I hear something and want to work on it, then that's what my project will be.
As a listener, we're looking for that person who kind of excites the molecules within us - who knows how to tell the story that resonates deeply to our core and almost prompts us into action. Fats Waller has been that person for decades. When people need a lift, sometimes they go to him. I know I do.
I am a huge fan of Adrian Piper: how she works, how she reveals her process in the work, how she writes about it.
As an improviser, my nature is to take a theme and constantly rework it.
