"What is it that I really like? Following that is a long process of self-excavation from being buried by what you've been told you should like."
"When you hear the word 'jazz,' immediately you've got a certain connotation. If you're not on the inside and know that it's a much broader category, you're just kind of like, 'Oh yeah, I've been there, done that.' If a piece were played on a classical station, saying 'This is the new Phillip Glass,' or the new this-or-that, of somebody from that world, I think it would be accepted, number one; and it would be a whole [different] group of listeners who could be enticed to buy the record, number two.
"I look at it this way. First of all, I grew up in America. I grew up where jazz comes from. It's in the air and in the bloodstream. But if I were looking at the world's music from a more objective viewpoint—outer space or something—I'd say: 'Well, jazz is this music over here. And so to leave it out, if I'm really listening to all the flavors, let's say, from all the places, then to leave that out would be crazy. First of all, it's in my bloodstream. And jazz, itself, is a hybrid, a musical hybrid. It is the collision of African and American—actually African and European, as translated through an American sensibility. So that's why the references are there, and the general feeling of latter-day jazz manifestations à la Gil Evans and Miles.
"At the same time, it was a strange learning process for me—I think I've used the phrase before about parachuting into the jazz world and not having hacked my way through the jungle to whatever center there might be. When I studied, I'm in Memphis, I hear things, I'm blown away as a kid by hearing Stan Kenton and the big improvising orchestra coming—a string section, five trumpets, five trombones, five saxophones, with Maynard Ferguson screaming on top. That was the most thrilling thing I'd ever heard in my life. Not that I didn't know—my parents would let me drive the car if I would go to church on Sunday. But what I'd do is just park and listen to the radio. And I remember Kenton coming on, and I thought, 'Wow! This is amazing. I've never heard this before.'
"So I have a much longer treatise to write about, in some sense, what it is that presets an ear—our sensibility to listen to big, thick chords; to the lush harmonies that came via [Maurice] Ravel, [Claude] Debussy and Impressionism, coming through people like Gil [Evans] and the tradition of using it and translating it in urban terms, the harmonic language of Impressionism. So I've come up through that, I go to school, I'm in Eastman School of Music, I'm studying orchestral trumpet playing, orchestral excerpts and trying to learn "Petrushka" solos and things like that, and [Igor] Stravinsky, at least 'Histoire du soldat.' And I'm kind of slated towards orchestral playing. But then I'm a composer, I'm not really there for trumpet; I'm there in composition basically. Actually, at that point, it was probably for both.
"So I'm in the kind of wild wing of composition..."
