GRiZ Quotes

James Brown came from that hard, rough life that I came from. He took the blues and added rhythm to it. And he always had the most funkiest band; I liked the way he took his words and mixed it in with the band.

The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.

James Brown was one of the first artists who found four bars that he liked and played them the entire way through, and then he just added to it vocally.

Every James Brown cut makes a party get crazy. He's the god of all music. I always play different wild remixes of his songs because people start bugging out when they realise what I'm playing.

When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn't stand funk.

I think The Meters are like The Beatles to us in New Orleans, you know.

I worked with the Neville Brothers for 40-some years on the highway, and up and down since I can remember - funk from New Orleans.

'Black Radio' was pretty much a jam session.

I may be taking a different approach, being a guy leading a band with a trombone, but if you take that out of it and put in a guitar or keyboard, it would be considered funk-rock music.

'Uptown Funk' has all the ingredients of the funk that I love.

R&B and all that stuff was always very spare and spontaneous. Nobody made those records under solid gold situations. It was just in and out, and you didn't labor over the thing. I like music like that.

I sat in at every club in New York City, jamming with musicians, because it felt right - and because it felt right and we were having fun - the people dancing and sipping their drinks in the clubs felt it too and it made them smile.

With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.

You get this really cool groove when you're playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone's sort of feeling each other's space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true, and everyone's sort of sitting in their own pocket. It's kind of jazz-like.

Funk, I don't think I have anything to do with funk. I've never considered myself funky.

It's like James Brown used to say... I don't know, but whatever I play it's got to be funky.

The Meters are, I think, the most influential group in our time to come out of New Orleans, to have changed and introduced us all to a way of playing, and to a groove and a level of feel in playing funk-jazz.

I think there's definitely a dance album or at least single in me somewhere. I would want to work with a really cool Ibiza DJ, though.

I had the house rhythm section at a club called the Sundown in Hartford. Stan Getz came up and played with us.

My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

But that kind of falls in line; when you think about it, James Brown was a funk minimalist. All of those parts create a sum that's larger than than the individual parts.

A CCR Headcleaner show will blow your mind.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

I always felt as a horn player, a jam session wasn't satisfying enough for me. I should have been a rhythm section player, actually.