I was singing totally jazz then, but when I heard the Beatles and heard the gospel influence and everything, I just said, 'I can make jazz with R&B.'
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.
I once tried to sing jazz for real. But jazz didn't do it for me. You can't have jazz without a jazz world, which doesn't exist anymore.
Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all.
There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.
The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.
After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.
Some people say that if you do anything other than a straight-ahead groove, that it's not jazz. But that kind of labeling is wrong. Music is what it is; if it sounds good, it sounds good.
If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.
I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.
I'm not a jazz singer.