Cultural Blend Quotes

When we're in London my family goes to mass on Christmas Eve. The next day Dad cooks the turkey on the barbecue, standing outside in the freezing cold.

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.

My mother is black and my father is Filipino. I got the best of both worlds.

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

Honolulu is a melting pot.

Canada is a really big melting pot of cultures, so we ended up with a giant mosaic of different music.

I'm Jewish and my wife isn't so right now we're literally decorating a Christmas tree with Jewish stars draped around it.

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

I like the mix of something farmlike and something futuristic and artsy mixed together. It's kind of both my worlds.

My recipes aren't classic recipes; they're all fusion recipes inspired by all the places I've been to.

I lived in London for eight years and I like to say that I am two parts American and one part British because I lived there for a third of my life.

There was a time when I had spiky hair and I was doing Indian-influenced R&B fusion songs.

I live between two things-I live between art and pop all the time.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

Jazz is an endless source of ideas, because you can use anything. You can play operatic arias. You can incorporate them into jazz. You can play gypsy music and incorporate it into jazz. You can European classical and you can incorporate it into jazz. You can use anything and jazz it up, as they used to say.

I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background's completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one's life, and I can't say that the Chineseness in me is not there.

I have my own religion. I'm sort of one-quarter Baptist, one-quarter Catholic, one-quarter Jewish.

There's the fine line between presenting your culture and learning about other cultures so it becomes global.

I'm a Tennessean at heart, and a New Yorker in spirit.

I grew up in a place that felt very integrated.

When hiring, mix Harvard Nerds with Chicago Improvisers and stir.

Song, dance and cinema are so deeply within the Indian culture and with so many cultures incorporating their elements too, it has become a wonderful collage.

Culturally, I'm not 100 percent Korean. I'm very mixed and very open.