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I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

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

My music is really fun music, with some pan-African and pan-American influences.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music.

I've always been interested in any kind of great music, and African music is, I think, the source of it all.

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.

I was just going more for what I've always been influenced by, European music.