My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.
I find early jazz to be the most revolutionary music of its time.
Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.
Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.
I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music... the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.
People hear traditional jazz and think it's stale, where there are so many ways it can be opened up. With New Orleans and old-time grooves, there's no limit in what can be done with that. I want to break the stereotype of what traditional jazz is.
I don't like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know.
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 just want to spearhead and lead a new style of New Orleans music.
All New Orleans music is based off dance music, even jazz.
My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.
