Charles Bradley Quotes

It's like James Brown used to say... I don't know, but whatever I play it's got to be funky.

James Brown was one of the first artists who found four bars that he liked and played them the entire way through, and then he just added to it vocally.

Every James Brown cut makes a party get crazy. He's the god of all music. I always play different wild remixes of his songs because people start bugging out when they realise what I'm playing.

I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.

Prince is from the school of James Brown, and I love James Brown because of all the great rhythms he plays.

When the pastor's up there, they do this thing called looping. They are literally riffing and spitting in the key of the organ. When looping, you're in key, you're in a rhythm, you're in a pocket, and that's where James Brown was pulling from, and so that's where I'm pulling from. The only difference is I'm coming at it under hip-hop.

'Uptown Funk' has all the ingredients of the funk that I love.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

You can't really dance properly to James Brown. If you dance to James Brown, you look like an idiot. There's a lot of jerking.

But that kind of falls in line; when you think about it, James Brown was a funk minimalist. All of those parts create a sum that's larger than than the individual parts.

You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.

I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that.

New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

I can't even imagine something being more fun than playing James Brown onstage.

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'm a street player, and all of my influences come from bands that I was listening to at the time when I was growing up. I was very impressed with guys like Mitch Mitchell. I liked rock and roll drummers, and I loved rhythm and blues guys like Clyde Stubblefield with James Brown. Man, that band blew me away all of the time.

I started playing with this band, the Polyester Players. It was my introduction into funk. So I went and got a James Brown record. 'Black Caesar' is a film score, but it's so dope.

No matter what happens with EDM, I would like to go to New Orleans and just play with one of those small funk bands in an intimate venue. How cool would it be to work with a band with those huge horn lines and produce all of that great funk that makes you just want to party?

There's a very thin line between rock and funk. Funk is like a dirtier blues, and so is rock. They're close cousins.

Get on up, stay on the scene, get on up, like a sex machine.

I would say our sound is soul pop.

With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.

I stumbled into soul music at a very young age. It had something that really spoke to me.

The Righteous Brothers were purely rhythm and blues, black music.