Jack Bruce Quotes

Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That's what classical music is, real European music.

I love music; I come from a region of Kurdistan that is a base for music.

What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.

My mother is half-French, half-Malagasy, so I've been listening to African music, like Malian and Congolese music, since I was a child.

I was bred and raised in a multi-cultural music background.

It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.

I think every once in a while country has lost its way, but found its way back. It's always going to drift away from the traditional side, but then find a way to return. There's room for all kinds of influences be it pop, blues, gospel or whatever. But I will always say that I think we need more traditional country music coming down the pike.

Lauryn Hill, P-Funk, Marvin Gaye, Public Enemy - I have a very diverse palate for music. I can go from Judy Garland to Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Wonder to Rachmaninoff. I just love great music.

The music we're playing now is based on my heritage, which is Russian, Romanian and Hungarian.

I've been hearing fiddle music since I was in the womb, I'm sure.

The music that I play and that I like is traditional music, maybe it's because of my age.

I didn't want to go out and change anything. I just wanted to make the music that was part of my background, which was rock and blues and hip-hop.

Even if the production doesn't feel African, the vocal delivery - singing through your nose. Specifically, Highlife music from Nigeria. That was the first music I ever heard as a child. So singing through my nose is something I do often, and that's directly rooted in my heritage.

Listening to all these different musical genres from all over the world and listening to my father's record collection, the Irish folk influences from home. Of course they're all in there somewhere hiding within the lyrics and melodies. But rap music was the biggest influence on my way of writing and my performing.

When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.

Puerto Rico's relationship with music is everything. It's an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.

My parents were part of a crowd that was attached to all the different navies stationed in Malta. When they would have parties in each other's houses, I would get taken along, and that's where I heard all this great music. I didn't distinguish particular styles; it was all music to me.

I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

I grew up listening to everything. And rock and roll has always been a big, big part of it - as big a part of what I do as any other type of music.

I think America concedes that true American music has sprung from the Negro.

I'm not suggesting our music is the only music, but I am suggesting that there are certain elements in America's culture that are so precious that it would be a shame for them to go down the drain.

Listening to the type of music I grew up with, like King Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti and experiencing different things and conditions and hardship, as well as the good times in Nigeria, has definitely carved me into who I am.