Gretchen Parlato Quotes

It's a great honor when somebody takes your song and does something different with it. That's what music is all about: to constantly change what somebody else has done.

I wouldn't want to cover a Hank Williams song in a country-western way. It doesn't occur to me instinctually to re-create productions. I'm interested in re-creating songs. Putting different clothes on them.

I love rearranging and reimagining tunes, so I want my audience to enjoy hearing songs in a new way and make their own discoveries.

In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.

I love rethinking and reimagining songs.

I try to take the foundations of what music is and add some type of twist to it.

I feel like my music is like - there are always new influences in there.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

I'm always trying to come up with something new and unique. I do a beatbox with a harmonica.

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

Whenever I hear somebody cover a song, I don't like to hear it stray too far from the original. I like to hear some of the new energy that a band will put into it, but you kind of want to hear some of the basic parts of the song. I mean, that's what makes it the song that you like.

I love hip-hop and soul, but I desperately want to challenge it and see what I can bring to it.

There's a lot of music at my fingertips that I can be influenced by. And just because I play a horn, I don't need to sound, or try to capture, what was happening before me. I can just respect it and learn from it.

You'll find little schools of musicians experimenting with different ways of making music in Brooklyn, all through Manhattan, in Queens, in Jersey, you know? The city is still bubbling with creativity.

Talking about covers, whether visually or sonically, if a particular combination of notes struck a chord in your heart in a way that you want to be a part of it by covering that song, then there's nothing wrong with it.

I never thought that I would be creating my own 'cross-over' genre. What I did was very real and organic. I have worked in so many different styles so it all just came together.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

I wouldn't go so far as to make 'You Don't Own Me' a tango or 'It's My Party' a hip-hop thing. Believe me, those things have been suggested to me. But I thought if I could stay true to the song, the arrangements would work. I'm really enjoying singing them.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

I've always loved War's Low Rider and Sly Stone's Thank You, and I just wanted to put my take on them.

I get a lot of joy out of covering other people's songs, and, at my best, I think I bring something a little new to a lot of them.

I think it's being innovative and very creative to stay away from flat-out sampling somebody else's record. To me, that doesn't show too much of your creative side unless you take a little piece and add it, almost like spice on a chicken.

I like to experiment when it comes to music.

There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music?

I love hearing the same songs over and over again - as long as queens challenge themselves to come up with new ways of performing them.