A lot of my colleagues just don't really realize that they have to work in order to get the interest of an audience, especially with young kids, especially because it [classical music] is not that popular. You don't see it on TV, you don't hear it on radio, so you really gotta put an effort into promoting classical music.
My parents are musicians. I was listening to the radio and recording songs off the radio on cassette tapes and playing guitars and pianos. Just emotionally responding to music from a very young age.
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 grew up listening to my parents' albums. Many of them were either classical - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - or easy listening, like Mantovani. I loved the spectrum of emotions in classical music, from fortissimo to pianissimo. My early passion for classical made my drumming more musical later on.
I could always sing, from a really young age, but my voice was really weird. I used to make my mum turn up the radio every day in our house. She was well into music so I got that from her.
Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.
I grew up listening to a lot of classic jazz, and stuff like The Beatles, and old Motown stuff, and a lot of classical music. I just loved all of that.
My father knew classical music very well. Driving in the car, listening to the radio, he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.
When I started listening to Paramore, I was in high school, and they were, like, 15. Seeing somebody at such a young age have that ambition, I thought, holy crap, they were so young. They seemed like cool people, and I really liked the music.
I strongly encourage listening to the radio to hear something you haven't heard before. It's a very healthy thing to do. It's strange: unless you reload your iPods every couple of weeks, you're listening to and recycling the same music all of the time. I'm serious. Listen to your radio station.
When I'm in writing mode I tend not to listen to music. I usually have a gestation period before I start writing. When I'm listening, it usually happens on the road. So, we'd been listening to a lot of music on tour the year before and all that stuff sank in.
I grew up listening to pop music with my dad in the car, and we'd just listen to Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Earth Wind & Fire, KC and the Sunshine Band - all that good stuff. So to see it snaking its way back around again is really exciting, and I love listening to the radio.
Obviously there are pieces of classical music that are some of the most beautiful music ever written, for me anyway is a lot of classical or contemporary music, so it's a different kind of space that you enter when you're listening to it.
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.
The average age of the Jazz audience is increasing rapidly. Rapidly enough to suggest that there is no replacement among young people. Young people aren't starting to listen to Jazz and carrying it along in their lives with them. Jazz is becoming more like Classical music in terms of its relationship to the audience. And just a Classical music is grappling with the problem of audience development, so is Jazz grappling with this problem. I believe, deeply that Jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say to ordinary people. But it has to be systematic about getting out the message.
It's an elite group. And once you're in the Hall, you're in the Hall. Up until now, I think the voting system has handled things very well. And like I said before, there are no suspicions in the Hall of Fame.