Pastoral Resources

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

Then I took 8 years of French Horn, first jazz, and then classical.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.

Possibly, I should have been a jazz singer from the beginning.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

When I sang that song, I felt it was almost as if some force had moved into my body. Things like that have only happened to me singing jazz. It doesn't happen when singing pop. I get so deeply into the music, it feels like I've become someone else.

I've always loved jazz.

I recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

I think the challenges for me was to go into the studio with these incredible jazz players and come up to their level of excellence. That's always a challenge.

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

I wanted to make a jazz record. I didn't want it to be a standards record.

I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.