Musician

I slept fourteen feet from a polka tavern as a kid growing up. I heard polkas all night long, people singing and drinking beers and having a great time. I know more polkas than Frankie Yancovic!

It's joyful in that there's another point of view on all things, you know, not just mine. That's why I like to write and collaborate with people. There's another point of view, and when those two things come together, and people work at it really hard, they get something that is the whole is more than the sum of - is that how you say that?

I'm this strange kind of fusion of jazz, pop, and R&B.

I grew up the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, so I was really close to the church and sang church music between sips at my bottle, you know? I sat on the piano bench next to my mother. She was the church organist, so that music is deeply inside of me.

I am inspired by all kinds of players and singers.

I love connecting with the audience, and there's more ways than one to do that.

It's always been about making music. I've never gotten caught up with the trappings. You can't get caught up in the limousines and the chicks. The most important thing is the music.

That's Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I'd never worked with before.

That's the way I try to live. I think it's the only way for human beings at this point in our evolution as souls, where everyone in their lifetime is going through stuff.

Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it's not easy. You have to take direct steps. You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.

I'm not sure it's a better music world of appreciation and performance. I think the listener is a different guy, and listening is something he does in passing, with other stuff going on. There's less care and understanding of the relationship between the song and the listener.

The work must be its own reward. I got that early on. And I'm blessed by meeting my own standards of excellence.

I'm an R&B and pop singer as well as a jazzer.

I want an audience that we might call a pop audience. Cross over to pop. Cross over to R&B. And bring those people to Brubeck and Chick Corea, you dig? A lot of people found Dave Brubeck and Chick Corea because they came to hear 'We're in This Love Together' and 'After All.'

I tour Europe a lot. They still have a love and a fascination with the basic thing about music - how it feels and that being the focus. I've got people bringing their kids. And their kids bring their kids. The grandchildren are getting selfies with their Uncle Al.

I've got an odometer on my voice that has out-odometered an odometer on an automobile.

I don't know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.

Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music. So given those things yes, I'm introducing some new music that people haven't really heard me do in quite this fashion.

I was really learning my craft as a jazz singer and working with some great players and all, really growing and feeling my wings.

The Metropole Orchestra is like Count Basie or Duke Ellington with strings... it's strings that swing. Strings that swing like Dizzy Gillespie... keep swinging, baby. And when you have all of that special excellence of the Metropole Orchestra, then your music just flies - it soars in a way that's really magical.