A Quote by Robert Trujillo

Back in the day, being a young, inspired bass player, I started to gravitate toward jazz fusion. I almost would have called myself an elitist. I got to the point where, for a little bit there, I was more interested in instrumental music.
I like Jaco Pastorius' 'Portrait of Tracy.' He was this bass player who played jazz fusion. He was the dopest bass player who ever lived.
As a young woman, I experienced high school and heartbreak, and the music I started to write was a little bit more poetic, and more inspired by spoken word. The real raw emotional things that sit in the back of our minds, that you were afraid to say? That's how I started to write my music. And that's how 'H.E.R. Volume One' came about.
I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.
The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.
Since I came on the tour so young and I won my first match, I've had a lot of comments like 'You'll be a top player one day.' I got to the point where, as nice as it was to hear that, I almost stopped listening to it. I was almost putting added pressure on myself.
Later in high school, I met Hillel Slovak, who was the original guitar player of the Chili Peppers, and we became really close. We had a band, and we didn't like the bass player, so I started playing bass, and I got a bass two weeks later.
I got into one of the Scottish classical styles called piobaireachd, which is a very old music that started around the 1700s or something. I really got into this music. After that, I started to compose bagpipe music in my notations. Then I started building bagpipes by myself, and then I started to perform with the instrument myself in the 1980s.
So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.
I admired fashion but I wasn't an "iconic fashionista" myself. I think as I got more comfortable in my skin, then I got a little bit more into fashion, but it's always been something I've been interested in because you can express yourself through what you wear and your accessories and everything else. So getting into my early 20s was really started to come into myself.
I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.
I started playing violin because I was fascinated by how violin players could play so fast. I would buy their cassettes, and learn different concertos, but then I started rounding out my collection. My dad was a big jazz fan, so I just started hearing a lot more soul music. I loved Little Stevie Wonder, and I got really into him as a singer and a writer as I got older.
I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.
I'm not a jazz artist. Don't get me wrong now, it's all music to me. I just played music and if it's likeable, someone liked the sound, then fine, but I'm not interested in being a jazz musician. I don't consider myself a jazz musician. I don't have anything to do with that word.
I would say I was a little bit outgoing, a little bit shy. I was definitely much more shy than my brother. I was young - age six. I was really drawn to music because my brother started playing instruments and I wanted to be at his level, even though I was younger.
At the time, I didn't know that bass would not be enough for me. I'm not a bass player because bass is always a background instrument even to this very day.
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.
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