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

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" I want to remind people that black music is amazing. And there are all forms of it that we've forgotten, you know? Rock music is black music! Don't forget that's what it is. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I've heard some people say that I'm selling out, but I'm not. If I hadn't done 'Black Radio', and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldn't be honest with myself; I'd be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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, 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. "

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

" I was playing drums in church when I was six. Then I picked up the piano when I was 11 or 12. "

" You have to go with the times. You're going to get left behind if you don't. "

" I'm not really married to the craft of jazz - I'm married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce. "

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

" There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm from the gospel world. I grew up playing in church. "

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

" 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. "