A Quote by Jain

I was always playing with whatever I could get under my hands, making rhythm with it, which was natural for me, because my parents were listening to a lot of African music.
I guess I wanted to emulate the artists that my parents were listening to when I was growing up. I've always had this affinity for folk music, and music in general, for as long as I can remember. So as soon as I could start playing shows, I did. And my parents were really supportive of me the entire time.
I don't think I ever heard music playing when I was younger, other than the radio. My parents got me a Walkman and stuff like that, but I was always way more into listening to music than they were.
I have really diverse tastes, which can be problematic sometimes, but it's good because it means I'm always listening to as much music as possible. I love listening to music, whatever genre it is.
When I went to school, it was really just to immerse myself in listening to, studying, and making music. I came out like, "How is this going to be more than a hobby I'm always paying off debt for?" I could've sat at a desk and written pieces for orchestras that never would have been played, or I could've written music for me as a performer. I play electronics, and the places I was gonna be playing were bass clubs and house parties.
When I was young, we were quite strongly discouraged from listening to pop music. It was an uncomfortable thing, pop music; I think my parents felt threatened by it. They were always happy when they were listening to Mozart, so if your parents are happy, then you're happy.
Jazz was the beginning of rhythm music, which developed into rock and roll. But what the jazz musicians lost because they were so far from their homeland was the intricate rhythms of African music.
If anything I think we connect to what our parents were listening to when they were our age. I'm listening to a lot of classical and electronic music, like Aphex Twin, non-vocal music.
I've always taken apart calculators and anything I can get my hands on when I was younger. When I was around 12 - like, 6th grade - my parents always had around Mac computers because my mom is a teacher. So I'd always be playing around with all the crazy applications and making banners and printing things out and always into graphic design.
One of the things that was a blessing for me is my parents were music lovers. Neither of my parents played an instrument, but they were avid record buyers. And I grew up at every age listening to all kinds of music.
As a youngster, my parents made me aware that all that was from the African Diaspora belonged to me. So I came in with Caribbean music, African music, Latin music, gospel music and blues.
I did not like that name "world music" in the beginning. I think that African music must get more respect than to be put in a ghetto like that. We have something to give to others. When you look to how African music is built, when you understand this kind of music, you can understand that a lot of all this modern music that you are hearing in the world has similarities to African music. It's like the origin of a lot of kinds of music.
We always found that many people are robots without knowing it. The interpreters of classical music, Horowitz for example, they are like robots, making a reproduction of the music which is always the same. It's automatic, and they do it as if it were natural, which is not true.
I would say I grew up listening a lot to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I grew up listening to those because my parents were kind of into folk music.
If I was a carpenter, and I was trying to maintain my father's musical legacy, then I guess it would be a burden because it wouldn't be natural to me to be dealing in music when my natural ability is in woodwork or whatever. But because my natural talent is also music, it kind of makes it much easier.
The music in Haiti is all tied up in voodoo and African rhythm, and so there's this funny thing: go to a voodoo ceremony, and then go to a Catholic church and tell me which music you liked better, to which one the music is more integral.
When I came home my parents were listening to Pakistani Qawwali music, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, they're listening to music from Mali, like Ali Farka Toure, they're listening to Brazilian songwriters, like Gilberto Gil, to opera, to Neil Young even, things you don't hear as a kid in Caracas. I love all the music they turned me onto.
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