Jazz Collaboration Quotes

For me, great jazz records really feel like everyone in the room is playing together in a zone - and all the musicians are completely in sync with each other.

If Miles Davis hadn't died it would have been interesting to do an album with him, but there wasn't much else that would have got me into the studio... although Herbie Hancock has just been in touch about doing something and that would be an interesting combination.

I'm thankful enough or blessed enough to be able to say that Miles Davis was a friend when he was alive, and he was a wonderful mentor and really, really funny, you know.

I had the chance to play with Benny 'The King' Carter here in Copenhagen for three days in the Montmartre, and two days in Paris. 'What a Thrill.' He knows so much music, and he is the only person that I get the shakes trying to play my horn behind or with him (smile). However, it was a ball.

I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

I think myself, Jose James, and Robert Glasper are expanding the language - really reminding people that the umbrella of jazz is large and all-encompassing.

It's pretty rare in jazz to have a full-on steady band.

It's a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians.

One of my songs was on a jazz station for awhile. It was a song that I wrote for a jazz sax player friend of mine, and I sang and played the guitar on it.