Boney James Quotes
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When I was getting ready to put out my first album, the record company told me my name, James Oppenheim, wasn’t very marketable, and they’d heard of my nickname. It still took me a good two weeks to decide to use it. And all my writing credits on my albums are still my legal name.
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I think making music is removing the barriers from your inside and allowing that to come through your horn to the outside. I think I’m getting better and better at focusing on what it is I’m trying to convey when I’m playing. I think my style, playing-wise, is a little more direct, more identifiable, more communicative, more consistently me and less derivative.
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It’s a cultural bigotry you sometimes encounter just because you’re playing for, essentially, a guy who doesn’t like Chinese food going to review a Chinese restaurant.
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The best quote about songwriting I ever heard, that I borrow to tell people, was from John Lennon, that it’s like a sculpture. You look at this block of stone and imagine that you can see some form within it, and you just keep chipping away until it is revealed.
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I firmly ascribe to the concept that music is 100 percent subjective. If you’re hearing music and it sounds good and beautiful to you, then that makes it beautiful. It’s all within the listener. It’s not important for other people to tell you how they react.
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If someone is critiquing the actual technique involved, that’s a whole other story. Mainly a lot of music critics have a tendency to just say they don’t like it.
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I don’t know why jazz critics don’t like contemporary jazz. I think a lot of them feel that straightahead jazz has to be championed by them. And I think there’s resentment involved that the kind of music I’m playing will sell more, and has more radio play.
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I’m always looking for a title to communicate something about the overall flavor of an album. And I like the covers to be symbolic-the naive quality of arms for the buoyant sound of Trust, the saxophone as a spine for the grittier edge of Backbone, a moth being drawn toward the light for the sexy sound of Seduction.
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But to say that you don’t like that kind of music just because it IS that kind of music is silly. It’s a very big issue, a big controversy amongst jazz critics.
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I also collaborate a lot with friends, like Darrell Smith, or Carl Burnett, or Paul Brown, my co-producer. Quite often it’s a jamming thing; we’ll just sort of hang, and come up with ideas, and if it’s something we like, we’ll hack away at it.
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There’s good and bad music in all genres. I would be the first one to admit that if you’re listening to some of the smooth-jazz radio stations, a lot of that music is boring. But not all of it is. And if I’m listening to a straight-ahead jazz station, not all of that is emotionally compelling either.
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I’ll get a glimmer of an idea and the rest is just chipping away. It’s a long process, and most of my music undergoes many changes over the weeks or months that I’m writing. The songs change during touring, too, but the recording process always comes first.