I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.
I listen to a lot of Freddie Hubbard.
Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse.
Oh yeah, that was the thing to do at that time. This was before the new wave of bebop started.
[Lee Morgan] was the only young cat that scared me when he played. He had so much fire and natural feeling. I had more technique, but he had that feeling. People seemed to like him more than they like me at the beginning.
Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.
They always want to sell me as a hard bopper.
I used to tell my friends, 'Art Blakey is way more gangster than Eazy-E!' I ended up getting my friends into jazz, and all of a sudden there was this little group of kids in the middle of South Central that were all into hard-bop.
My musical influences are from the '50s: Bill Evans, Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal.
I had the fortunate experience to play with people from different schools of music. Sam Rivers is from the fundamentalist school of music.
For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.
