Robert Glasper Quotes

The music is going to die if you don’t tap into something that people today can relate to.

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn’t pay any attention to it; it’s, like, 1 percent of the music market – no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

I feel like, paying homage to an artist, it’s better to do something that’s inspired by them – a new work that’s inspired by them – versus another person saying they redid your song.

Everybody has a favorite song, but everybody don’t have a favorite painting.

People don’t know that the very reason the police were made was to oversee slaves; they would be called overseers, and if a slave got out of line or tried to break away and escape, these were the people to hold them in and bring them back.

Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream – younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans mixed in with the jazz audience.

I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.

It’s very rare that you get very old jazz lovers and super-young hip-hop lovers at the same exact show, when you think about it. Not many artists can do that.

I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

Honestly, recording with Faith Evans blew me away.

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.

When my friends were listening to hip-hop or R&B, I was in the crib listening to Billy Joel and Michael Bolton, Luther Vandross, and Oscar Peterson.

You can see how different artists work, from writing to recording, just from being in the studio environment with them.

When music is crashing around us, when you hear the same five songs on the radio that aren’t really saying much, we can always go back to great music. Great music always lives on.

I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music – all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I’m doing now, that’s a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?

My first memories of life were in rehearsal; that’s why I can sleep through anything.

I think the people who are saying jazz has to sound a particular way, or, ‘What you’re doing isn’t jazz,’ are just scared because they can’t do it. A lot of them just aren’t talented enough to do anything new, honestly.

Black people, we built America, and we gave it all of its pop culture and all of its great musical genres.

I’m not really married to the craft of jazz – I’m married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce.

If you got every single artist in the world in one room, and you put Miles on one side and Prince on the other side, those are the two people that everybody would be trying to get a glimpse of. And Michael Jackson would be the other one.

Selling out is when you do something that you don’t naturally want to do.

‘Black Radio’ was pretty much a jam session.

Anybody who loves jazz has a little bit of snob in them.

I do feel a responsibility because most people like me that are my age or younger, they don’t quite make it over to the jazz side. They flirt with it, but they don’t quite marry it.

Your main radio stations, the stations that get the most listeners, don’t play anything that has any kind of integrity to it.

I got into hip-hop, but I still had appreciation for all types of music, so I was trained to have an open mind and to always go with the flow.

Everybody’s not going to like jazz, let’s just be honest about it. Everybody doesn’t like everything. There’s a disconnect in generations and some people just aren’t going to feel that music.

None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn’t make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.

I try to get the hip-hop aesthetic, most times without an MC. I don’t use a rapper or a DJ to give it the hip-hop style; it’s strictly the band that makes that music, which is a lot harder to do.

For a while, R&B was going out of style. It was kind of getting kicked to the side. The first year the R&B Album of the Year didn’t get on the TV portion of the Grammys is when I got nominated.