Much of my playing is rhythmic and choppy; I use a lot of double stops. The wah just accents all those stops and chops and brings out the rhythmic aspect that much more.
Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
I love countermelodies, I love hooks and melodies that stick in your head. If I could put 20 melodies in a song and they would all work together, I would.
I feel everything. I feel everything, so when you feel, you know you have emotions and everything. Music is a feeling. Music is energy, vibrations and sounds.
When we were younger, we sang at the dinner table. We started doing two part harmony, then three part, and then we added back up tapes and instruments.
In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms - the complexity of rhythms.
So it's really hard for a horn player to comp. But I'm totally into trying to switch those paradigms around and find a little magic space where that works, and try to mine that.
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
If you're using live bass versus orchestral bass, you've got to make sure that you're not stepping on the toes of the other elements, so you've got to balance it out.
We find it very interesting to call upon different voices as though they were different instruments.
Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music.
The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued. And the more you know about music and harmony, the more you can do with that.
