A Quote by Z'EV

I started working with synthesizer players, and I had to find new instruments. I needed a more complex sound, so I went to a surplus place and got a bunch of hard plastic stuff and stainless steel stuff, and that stuff worked. So from that point on, from the 70s on, I've made instruments.
You're really spread out now, you've got stuff all over the WORLD! You've got stuff at home, stuff in storage, stuff in Honolulu, stuff in Maui, stuff in your pockets...supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain.
I've got all of the old school vinyls from the '70s - even further back, like the jazz music in the '40s, '50s, '60s. Then I've got all the '80s stuff underground, hip-hop when hip-hop really first started. The '90s stuff. All of the good stuff, because I'm really into music, and it helps me create new songs now.
I got into playing the jazz. I played jazz for a good while. I did the popular stuff first. You got the "Twelfth Street Rag" and those kinds of things. Then I got to hanging around with a bunch of guys starting to playing jazz. We'd go from one place to the other and take our instruments, just perform for free.
I'd been collecting different ethnic instruments here and there, and then I started making little bell type stuff, looking for weird little sound toys.
Some of the stainless steel discs that I play, I cut myself from pieces of stainless steel that I found. I don't make as many as I used to, because you can't get into surplus and scrap yards as easily anymore.
If I started something, I had to finish. Like with violin. I started when I was seven only because my best mate wanted to. I hated it and wanted to quit, but Dad made me continue, and I got to grade seven. My parents said I had to know the value of stuff and work for stuff.
A lot of the stuff I was on 'All Stars,' it wasn't new, it was all stuff out of my closet and stuff that I made myself.
I never started learning instruments with the hope of having a career in it. It was more kind of I quite enjoy messing around and writing or playing with the family and stuff like that.
It's hard to say a favorite song of my father's. I listen to all his stuff; a lot of the old stuff before the '70s.
It's hard to say a favorite song of my father's. I listen to all his stuff - a lot of the old stuff before the '70s.
It's been scattered and I had to follow leads. Some stuff was with different family members in various drawers. I find out about more stuff and more stuff [over time]. I won't call it a treasure hunt, but it's like an old Western movie we're you're onto one thing and it turns into another.
Jazz stopped being creative in the early '80s. After your acoustic era, where you had the likes of the Miles Davis Quintet, when it gets to the '70s it started being jazz fusion where you had more electronic stuff happening, then in the '80s they started trying to bring back the acoustic stuff, like Branford Marsalis and the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton sextet. It started dying down from there. Miles was still around in the '80s and he was still being creative; he was playing Michael Jackson songs and changing sounds, but a lot of people were still trying to regurgitate the old stuff.
I was in bands as a singer-guitarist-songwriter until 1980-81. So, there's a bunch of stuff. A lot of the stuff is hard to come by-stuff by the Special Interest Group and the Zobo Funn Band. The Zobo Funn Band was a big Northeast cult band. We had about a billion skirmishes with the big rock industry.
The 'Discovery' album is really complex and really rich and really full of instruments, different parts and stuff.
I knew what real instruments I wanted and, in some cases, who I wanted to play them. I had started listening to a lot of ambient music and jazz and I wanted to incorporate stuff like that, too.
I like to go on stage with a variety, with some stuff that's been around for a handful of years, some stuff from the last year, some stuff is from last week, and some stuff is brand spanking new. Those are the moments that excite me - when I'm coming up to a brand new bit. The more virgin the snow, the more fun it is to run on.
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