A Quote by Jackie McLean
I tell my students, 'It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?'
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The only way to know everything is to learn how to think, how to ask questions, how to navigate the world. Students must learn how to teach themselves to use new tools, how to talk to unfamiliar people, and basically how to be brave.
I have students who are PhDs in music who come back and scored the music and teach the kids the instruments that I don't know how to play. Those are the points of light, the former students.
The only thing that's new is the internet! But the problems and issues that all the kids go through now, it's nothing different! It's funny how your kid can come home and tell you something and you can tell them almost how it's going to play out. It's crazy, I be like 'Wow, am I that old?' But you've seen it before, and it's the same thing.
You've got to reach towards a better language, and you're not going to make it up from scratch; you've got to reach back into the tradition. Western tradition is not as impoverished as a lot of people would like to think, but you'd have to go back before the industrial revolution; you may have to go back farther than that. Of course, the Bible has a perfectly adequate language, but it's suffered a lot of thoughtless wear.
The beauty of Broadway is that if I'm 60 or 70 years old, if they'll accept me back, I can go back. So I think for right now I'm going to focus on the music--it's the new baby--and see how it's going to work out, and then maybe in a few years maybe I'll go back.
Miles Davis came in a couple of days and said, "Oh, man, I love that. Keep going." So he said, "Let me know when you need trumpet." And he came in, and he was sitting there, and I was very intimidated, because now he's going to play the trumpet on something that I wrote." He starts to play, and I go, "That's not right, but I don't know how to tell him it's not right." Finally he goes, "When are you going to tell me what to do?" He said, "This is your music. I know you know how it's supposed to sound. Stop fooling around. We don't have time."
When I'm making a new ballet, I usually read through the score a little bit, and then I have to go back and translate or transcribe all the counts for dancers because the way that you hear it is completely different from the way the musicians read and play it.
It's the true meaning of music being a universal language, constantly fighting and going through different boundaries in order for new people to hear the music and be like, "Oh, sh*t! I mess with this Pitbull kid."
I think there's nothing that's not important. Everything you do - from how you connect with the guys in the locker room, to how you learn, to how you play on the field - everything's important; everything goes with the position.
My character in 'Hollyoaks' went through absolutely everything! There's not one emotion where I'm going to go, 'I don't know how to play this.'
I was able to learn a new language - a new musical language is learning a new language, because it's so extremely different from Western classical music. African music is completely different.
I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'
I listened to the rock music of that time, but as you know and can easily hear: my music of that era had nothing to do with the common music of this era. I was experimenting, I was searching for something new.
My musical influence is really from my father. He was a DJ in college. My parents met at New York University. So he listened to, you know, Motown, and he listened to Bob Dylan. He listened to Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, but he also listened to reggae music. And he collected vinyl.
There's no borders or lines you can't cross anymore. Everything is getting blended with everything. That's the dope thing about music now. Some people don't like it, more of the older people. They want to, you know, go back to old-school New York hip-hop.
You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.
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