Charlie Hunter Quotes

My roots and Victor's are jazz, basically, but these two young fellows that we have with us come out of rock bands. And they're tremendously exciting players.

Everybody in Lynyrd Skynyrd loves different styles of music, and our minds are very open when it comes to writing our songs and making the band true to what the band is, but also stepping out and doing something current.

I like to experiment when it comes to music.

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

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.

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

I'm trying to change the root of funk, trying to make it more progressive, more melodic and more lyrically structured.

I love all Yes music and love to play it live, but I'm most interested in making new music with Yes.

Personally, I've found one of the more stimulating ways of playing in recent times has been to kind of move outside the free improvised area and work with people who are probably improvisers but they have a particular way of working.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

Musicians are always eclectic. Musicians are always curious and hungry for new things.

But it can be hard to experiment when you're in a band.

They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.

There's a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they've been wearing.

I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail, it dies. So it needs to be a mongrel, it needs to be hybridised.

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.

The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.

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.

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

Without a doubt, even when I play with Black Label, when we have different guys I play with, everyone always brings their own magic, their own flavor to the soup, hands down.

I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it. I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used. I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing.

We grew up with musicians coming over jamming. We had tons of instruments. So holidays were always like, 50 people would come over, and there would be a jam session with everyone playing jazz.

Ween is in my top five and have always been a huge inspiration.

I think with everything I do, I'm trying to just come up with new ways of creating music and mixing styles together. That's just what's fun for me to do, to try to make myself inspired.