Jon Batiste Quotes

I've always been attracted to multicultural music. It's where the world is going.

All over the world, the idea of creating an melange of international musics, it's a very healthy thing.

American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.

Since music is a reflection of our mindset and our culture, it is bound to change with time. I am glad that India is such a receiving country and is always open to all kinds of music. Our composers, singers and writers are open to experimenting.

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.

It's a melting pot, southern Africa. You find these cultural collisions that result in art and music, and it's pretty amazing.

Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.

More and more, cultural groups are cross-pollinating, and we're getting much more interesting art as a result.

Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style.

The joining of the Japanese with the French should make a new movement. I think it should be good for Paris.

Israel is a mishmash of other cultures. It's like New Orleans; it's a meltdown of other cultures.

What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe.

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.

But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.

Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.

The foreign accent was a promise, and indeed, all over the country, European imports added spice to the sciences, the arts, and other areas. What one had to give was not considered inferior to what one received.

Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.

There is usually an 'X factor' that is hard to define. For HTC, I think it is our culture. We embrace the best of our Eastern roots and combine it with the best of the Western cultures where we have leadership and offices. It makes the culture colorful as well as energetic and creative.

I come from a specific area in Beirut where it's multicultural, and it's a culture that blends with multiple cultures - it's unbelievable lifestyle.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

I want to put my vibe and my feel of music into an album and have people from different places around the world feel that and hear that.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.