Hang on to your eccentricities, because they will give you a style.
...The key to playing with any group is you listen all the time and you listen more than you play.
When you compare music, you lose the joy of listening to it.
Sound is what drives my solos, not verbal concepts, I never think 'I'm going to use a Lydian Dominant scale and then go up a half-step', even though that might be exactly what I end up doing.
One thing people always ask me is 'How do you play outside?' ... I have no idea how to teach that, but when I was discussing this with our bass player Jesse Murphy, he said 'tell them to go cliff diving'... In other words, when you're jamming, you have to take risks if you want to find new sounds.
We don't want any vocalist messing up the music.
The Meters are, I think, the most influential group in our time to come out of New Orleans, to have changed and introduced us all to a way of playing, and to a groove and a level of feel in playing funk-jazz.
I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.
I like forms that are flexible, that can let you feel creative.
Who isn't a fan of Ray Charles?
