Musician

Perhaps since I have been using the Synthaxe, it might have made it easier for people to listen to me, in a funny kind of way it takes for things to happen.

For me, the only thing that makes one scale different from another is not the starting note; it's the separation of the intervals.

I grew up listening to Ravel, Debussy, Bartok and jazz like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. It was incredibly inspiring! And I was given a guitar and I said 'What the hell is this?!'

It falls in all the cracks, from classical music to jazz,. Anywhere there's a hole in the floor, my music falls through it. But that's OK.

When I hear 'fusion,' I think of Tricky-Dick stuff - really hairy melodies played in unison. It's like, 'Why?'

I wanted to be a music fan who just listens to music. I never wanted to be musician. I didn't gravitate toward playing.

I'm trying to play tunes in a new way, using all the same scales, harmonies, structures, but twist everything a little bit so that it comes out sounding different.

Music moves forward so quickly; music is an accumulation of knowledge, and musicians keep getting better and better.

Standing and playing next to Tony Williams was pretty amazing. One of the things I learned about being a band leader from Tony was that he would never, ever tell me what to play or do.

I knew if I wanted to improvise over chord changes, I'd have to figure out all the scales that went with all those chords.

I'm pretty selfish, I think. I'm probably a terrible dad. I don't do too much with my kids. Obviously I love them and everything, but I just stay here in the studio all day.

I think the guy who tells you he knows about music is really dumb, or he's lying to himself.

Record companies tell me to play something more commercial, but I don't want to do anything else.

To me, I don't see any difference between a synthesizer and an acoustic instrument. It's what's done on it that counts.

If you fall in love with a woman, there's this unknown thing that gives you a force and energy, and music is like that, too. If I lived to be 2000, I'd never know anything about music. And that's great.

It's obviously flattering when somebody likes something one is doing. But at the same time, I get embarrassed about it. It's the 'I'm not worthy syndrome.'

We used to work with a promoter in Italy who used to book for shows with nine hour drives in between, so we got a new promoter.

To most people, jazz-fusion means this dreadful synthetic jazz-rock thing, this jazz-Muzak, which I detest. They also think of jazz as a specific form of music, while to me it's just the opposite.

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

I don't like playing to guitar players, actually. I'd rather just play to ordinary people.