I had joined Yes in 1971. I was a classically trained musician who had worked with numerous artists as a session musician. I played on David Bowie's 'Life On Mars,' Cat Stevens's 'Morning Has Broken' and even on some Des O'Connor records, though I kept that quiet.
I joined Yes in July 1971. I had heard Yes live, as Strawbs had supported them at a gig in Hull. I thought they were amazing - incredibly different.
I'm formally trained, I don't know what classically trained really means. I've worked with Sanford Meisner. And I've worked at Circle Rep with Marshall W. Mason and Lanford Wilson and some really good people. I was lucky. I had a lot of really good influences.
A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?
In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.
I don't really have a career as a jazz musician. I don't really have a career as a classical musician. I don't really have a career as a college professor, and yet I did all those things and I did them well. I put out some records in the 1980's and 1990's that changed the way some trumpet players played.
The age of 18 seemed the right time to try something different in my life. Moving to the U.K. was a risk, and I was never confident that I could ever make a full-time living being a musician, but I had to try. Initially, I worked as a jazz musician in pubs or with bands.
My dad is my biggest influence on me as a musician, even though he's not a musician.
David Bowie's my favorite musician. I love him above all, but I'm really into rap a lot right now.
I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.
I never wished to be a 'rock star.' I just wanted to be a working musician. My dreams didn't even go past a session player or a working musician. It was too far beyond my dreams.
The first thing that got to me was seeing David Bowie on a children's TV show, but Bowie was way beyond my aspirations. The Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch came out in 1977 and it had a breakdown of the recording costs, then you saw Pete Shelley playing a broken guitar from Woolworths. We already had an idea of the kind of music we wanted to do, but punk showed us a way to do it.
My father, a musician who worked with All India Radio, is no more. My mother had a government job at BSNL and was always opposed to my career in acting. She had seen the life my father had lived and did not like it.
Every musician that dies is the greatest ever when they die. I never heard a David Bowie record in my life. But for whatever reason, he's one of the greatest of all time now. You know why? 'Cause he's dead.
I'm gonna be making records anyway, even if I had to sell 'em out of the trunk of my car. I'm that kind of musician and singer.
I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.
Well I'm a third-generation musician. My Grandfather's a musician and my father and mother were both musicians and so I'm a musician. It was just natural that I should be a musician 'cause I was born into the family.