Ato Essandoh Quotes

One of my big inspirations was Chuck Berry, and his playing was always about the rhythm and the lyrics. So I've always been that way in my playing, really.

My guitar playing is a synthesis of traditional American acoustic style and Urban Pop and R&B.

But my big thing was always the blues.

I like a lot of old-school R&B, soul, and classic rock.

There were a lot of R&B groups that were my heroes, but the funny thing about my career and the way it went and where it went, at first I didn't really want to do pop music. I was a little bit more into jazz and R&B.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

Jazz is the American’s preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires ...

I spent a lot of time with the Neville Brothers and Dr. John and different people. They play different styles of music, and it allowed me to learn different styles.

Prince got some Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and Sly in him, also, even Little Richard. He's a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington.

I just want to spearhead and lead a new style of New Orleans music.

I may be taking a different approach, being a guy leading a band with a trombone, but if you take that out of it and put in a guitar or keyboard, it would be considered funk-rock music.

I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.

I have a wide range of influences - I mean, first of all, I am a big, big fan of old soul music. Then, there's people like Donny Hathaway, Elton John... a diverse array of music.

Blues has always been a huge part of my life.

The thing with me is, about that - about rock and all that - years and years of crate-digging, listening to old music, you kind of start to connect the dots. And I was seeing the thread that was connecting everything together, which is pretty much the blues. And everything soul or funk kind of starts with that.

From a musical standpoint, I was inspired by '90s hip hop, with a lot of drums and the tempos. I'm always inspired by David Bowie and Prince.

I am a big music guy. Hip-hop, R&B, old school, jazz.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

My musical taste has always been wide. I started out as a folky before I moved on to blues and soul.

I grew up listening to a lot of soul music, and a lot of folk music.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.

Jazz was my first love.

There's not much music I'll listen to if it doesn't have pretty heavy swing. Rhythm is so important. Punk rock would have more power and feeling if it had swing.

I think America concedes that true American music has sprung from the Negro.

You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.