Jason Moran Quotes
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Bjork's album, 'Homogenic,' it's got beats, strings, traditional Icelandic stuff. That's my benchmark for what an album should sound like, right up there with Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' and Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On.'
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You make a record because you have to chart your progress, not only for yourself, but for your audience.
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Jazz musicians don't make any money, so I might as well make some on the market. I pick my own stocks - Microsoft, Dell - the tech stocks, the breadwinners.
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I'm a bit of a traditionalist, but I kind of mangle things as I perform in a contemporary way.
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Confidence is the key. When you're playing something new, find the part you know very well and play it really strong. That'll make you believe that you really do know it.
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Music, many times, around the world, serves to help us understand other people without having to talk.
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I used to watch those rock videos where they would chainsaw the piano. And I thought, 'That's what I want to do.' I thought classical music was corny.
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Usually, when I see films that don't have any score attached to them, I think they're beautiful. I love just the naked sound of the voice. That's already music.
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I don't want to be defined solely by what I do as a jazz musician at a club or a festival. That's not all of me. It's not even close.
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If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.
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I'm a prime example of a person who loves hip-hop, and I will defend it till the day I die.
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I kind of want to get the music back on a road it hasn't been on for a while. I want to promote the arts as part of the American diet.
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Tons of musicians who I love are imprisoned by their identity. That can be totally fine because they are so amazing in their technique, but for me, I'm a little too restless for that.
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In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.
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As an improviser, my nature is to take a theme and constantly rework it.
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I am a huge fan of Adrian Piper: how she works, how she reveals her process in the work, how she writes about it.
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Pianos - if they don't like what you're saying, then they won't talk back to you. And you want it to talk back to you.
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The great jazz radio stations have a duty to continue evolving their format just as audiences ask the musicians to evolve. How do you do that with a form of music that has 100 years of recorded history? How do you also keep it contemporary so you don't isolate your listeners? These are major questions.