A Quote by Bria Skonberg
What I do is always hard for me to explain, but it's like a mixture of New Orleans jazz and world music, with a little bit of Spanish flavour. I just take all that and mix it with Chilliwack, and something comes out!
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Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.
If I have to be considered any type of jazz artist, it would be New Orleans jazz because New Orleans jazz never forgot that jazz is dance music and jazz is fun. I'm more influenced by that style of jazz than anything else.
I like to mix and match things so I'm infusing a little bit of jazz, a little bit of classical, a little bit of soul, into the whole blues idiom and I'm coming up with something that I'm really interested in.
Presley is country music, white music. Jazz is black music - it was invented by the blacks in New Orleans. And I'm really a jazz singer. I was impressed with Elvis - he was the handsomest guy I ever met in my life, and a very nice person, too. But the music doesn't impress me.
Before I went to New Orleans, I was a little scared of New Orleans. I don't know why. I had only been there a few times. Something about it made me feel nervous, knowing a bit about the history.
Essence is something I always enjoy, because I love New Orleans. Since they brought it back to New Orleans, it's a special place to me. We been doing it since the beginning. We did it when it was in Houston, but there's nothing like New Orleans.
I've always had a love for music, and it developed as I learned jazz, blues, and gospel. And I performed with jazz singers in New Orleans.
I come to New Orleans so often that, one day soon, someone's going to declare me a native. I love the food. I love the music. I serve on the board of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.
When I am introduced as someone from New Orleans, people sometimes say: "I'm so sorry." New Orleans. I'm so sorry. That's not the way it was before,not the way it's supposed to be. When people find out you're from New Orleans, they're supposed to tell you about how they got drunk there once, or fell in love there, or first heard the music there that changed their lives. At worst people would say: "I've always wanted to go there." But now, it's just: "I'm sorry." Man, that kills me. That just kills me.
New Orleans is New Orleans. It's a great city and fun and great food. It's one of those cities that when you are working hard hours like we work, you have to do as much as possible to stay out of trouble. Not much of a problem for me, but in New Orleans, trouble tries so much to find you.
Another one of my favourite sayings is, you can't handpick your audience. I feel like I'm making music for people who think like me about music, and that takes a lot of different forms. I could never generalise - but I think if I were to generalise, I'd think that you would say that most of my fans are music lovers who are looking for something outside of the mainstream: maybe a little bit hard to pin down, a little bit hard to categorise.
I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer...I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues – just a right-out blues – but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.
I don't feel bound by the ebbs and flows of musical trends, or what's happening with new music in general. I always had a fascination with that sound. It's a mixture of the idea that something could be going wrong along with the idea of bending constrained, Westernized music out of tune. But because I wasn't copying an idea, and it just came from somewhere inside me, it felt like a birth of something that most people didn't understand at the time.
Every film tries to advance the state of the art, at least a little bit. Brand new techniques? A lot of them are just evolutionary: we're just building on something that's like something we've done before and just trying to do it a little bit better or make it a little bit more realistic.
It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.
My first love of jazz came from joining the Chilliwack Middle School band - it was like an 18-piece jazz band, and I wanted to join just because the older kids looked like they were having so much fun.
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