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As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.

I was totally into jazz in my teens.

In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.

I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk.

All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.

My first love of jazz came from joining the Chilliwack Middle School band - it was like an 18-piece jazz band, and I wanted to join just because the older kids looked like they were having so much fun.

There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.

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 was curious and hungry at a young age, and jazz was such a mystery to me, an ocean where you can express yourself in the moment. It represented freedom, it represented wearing wings and going somewhere with music.

I was never really that interested in the punk movement. I was a blues guy: I liked Motown, James Brown.