Robert Glasper
I want to remind people that black music is amazing. And there are all forms of it that we've forgotten, you know? Rock music is black music! Don't forget that's what it is.Collection: Amazing
Selling out is when you do something that you don't naturally want to do.
When music is crashing around us, when you hear the same five songs on the radio that aren't really saying much, we can always go back to great music. Great music always lives on.
The music is going to die if you don't tap into something that people today can relate to.
Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music.
There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.
I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.
I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.
I'm not really married to the craft of jazz - I'm married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce.
I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.
I do feel a responsibility because most people like me that are my age or younger, they don't quite make it over to the jazz side. They flirt with it, but they don't quite marry it.
I've heard some people say that I'm selling out, but I'm not. If I hadn't done 'Black Radio', and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldn't be honest with myself; I'd be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.
Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.
When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.
Your main radio stations, the stations that get the most listeners, don't play anything that has any kind of integrity to it.
I try to get the hip-hop aesthetic, most times without an MC. I don't use a rapper or a DJ to give it the hip-hop style; it's strictly the band that makes that music, which is a lot harder to do.
If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.
My first memories of life were in rehearsal; that's why I can sleep through anything.
Black people, we built America, and we gave it all of its pop culture and all of its great musical genres.
People don't know that the very reason the police were made was to oversee slaves; they would be called overseers, and if a slave got out of line or tried to break away and escape, these were the people to hold them in and bring them back.
Everybody has a favorite song, but everybody don't have a favorite painting.
It's very rare that you get very old jazz lovers and super-young hip-hop lovers at the same exact show, when you think about it. Not many artists can do that.
Anybody who loves jazz has a little bit of snob in them.
If you got every single artist in the world in one room, and you put Miles on one side and Prince on the other side, those are the two people that everybody would be trying to get a glimpse of. And Michael Jackson would be the other one.
I feel like, paying homage to an artist, it's better to do something that's inspired by them - a new work that's inspired by them - versus another person saying they redid your song.
You have to go with the times. You're going to get left behind if you don't.
For a while, R&B was going out of style. It was kind of getting kicked to the side. The first year the R&B Album of the Year didn't get on the TV portion of the Grammys is when I got nominated.
I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.
I'm from the gospel world. I grew up playing in church.
'Black Radio' was pretty much a jam session.
Honestly, recording with Faith Evans blew me away.
You can see how different artists work, from writing to recording, just from being in the studio environment with them.
I think the people who are saying jazz has to sound a particular way, or, 'What you're doing isn't jazz,' are just scared because they can't do it. A lot of them just aren't talented enough to do anything new, honestly.
Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream - younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans mixed in with the jazz audience.
When my friends were listening to hip-hop or R&B, I was in the crib listening to Billy Joel and Michael Bolton, Luther Vandross, and Oscar Peterson.
A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?
I was playing drums in church when I was six. Then I picked up the piano when I was 11 or 12.
I feel like everybody's life literally has a soundtrack because we love music so much, and there are so many songs that people love.
I got into hip-hop, but I still had appreciation for all types of music, so I was trained to have an open mind and to always go with the flow.
None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn't make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.
You're supposed to create new standards. The more you play songs by your peers, they become standards, you know? Miles Davis played 'Gingerbread Boy' 'cos he and Jimmy Heath were cool, you know? That's how the culture goes.
I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.Collection: Hurt
Jazz is a state of mind. There's no boundaries.Collection: Mind
You’ve got to be uncomfortable and rise to different occasions in order to become your best. No one is born a hero, but things happen and your response makes you a hero. It’s instinctual, it’s something that you may not even realize is there.Collection: Hero
I think there's good music out there. I just think that radio stations don't play it.Collection: Thinking
Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it, it's like 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.Collection: Media
It came from my mother. She was a singer, and literally every day of the week she sang at a different club in a different genre of music: country, R&B clubs, jazz clubs, church on Sunday morning where she was the music director, pop hits, soft rock. I grew up listening to all this music, so it was never one thing for me.Collection: Country
When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.Collection: Mean
Jazz stopped being creative in the early '80s. After your acoustic era, where you had the likes of the Miles Davis Quintet, when it gets to the '70s it started being jazz fusion where you had more electronic stuff happening, then in the '80s they started trying to bring back the acoustic stuff, like Branford Marsalis and the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton sextet. It started dying down from there. Miles was still around in the '80s and he was still being creative; he was playing Michael Jackson songs and changing sounds, but a lot of people were still trying to regurgitate the old stuff.Collection: Song
Instead of hearing, "Oh, he's good," I'd rather hear, "Wow, you changed my feelings today, you made me feel different."Collection: Feelings