I still get butterflies when I go out and play a show.
It's not really nervousness, it's excitement.
It's the collective energy of everybody coming together, the band, the audience, everybody
and it lifts everything up to a different place.
The audience conveys things to me and then I feed it back to them and then they feed
it back to me.
It's absolutely electric.
And we all walk away from the show feeling that we've been through something together.
And to me that's what a live show is about.
You find a passion in life and that's what you do.
You know, I just fell in love with the sound of the horn, I fell in love with the simplicity
of the instrument.
It just seemed like the path that was already determined for me seemed like where I needed
to go.
I mean I went to the Eastman School of Music and I learned how to play classical music.
I was signed as a songwriter to Laura Maher to Warner Chapel.
Everybody who was anybody was on that label.
Our play was on there in George Duke, Boney James, Kirk Whalen, Norman Brown, I toured
with Rod Stewart for a few years and played with lots of different artists like Joe Cocker
and I toured with Shade, I've recorded with Tina Turner and Tom Petty and I used to play
with war.
I think it's coming on close to 20 years that I've been doing this and so grateful for that.
I'm proud of that.
I'm proud of being able to show up and I think there's no substitute for hard work.
I think a sad piece of music is a sad emotional piece of music no matter who's listening
and whereas an uplifting happy piece of music on the most simplistic level is going to reach
people and touch people that way no matter who you are or where you're from, what language
you speak, what color you are.
I'll give you an example.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, the only gigs that I could get to earn money and pay
my rent and I enjoyed every one of them were Latin band gigs in East LA and I would be
the only white person in a Latin club and I never had an issue and I was accepted and
I was loved and that respect I think music is the universal language.
Music is such a beautiful abstract way of expressing yourself.
I like to think about notes and phrases and things like that like tools, like a tool,
like a mechanics approach.
The notes are individual words in a sentence and you use the sentence as a phrase and a
phrase you use to make a paragraph which might be a song and then the song goes on
to be a part of a record which could be the book.
Playing songs about people, places, things in my life, that's basically the inspiration.
Let's just take for example Emma's song, okay, and this is an example of a song that came
about because of a life experience.
I was working on a record, Kisses in the Rain with Paul Brown and Ricky Peterson who
plays keyboards with David Sandborn and right in the middle of the creative process my daughter
was born.
Seven weeks early it was absolutely a shock and Emma was in NICU so she was in an incubator
because she was having a lot of trouble, she was four pounds and I walked in and Paul and
Ricky were sitting there and they must have seen something on my face because they said
why don't we write a song for Emma, let's write a song.
We started working on it and Ricky got blessed and he just sat down and played this beautiful
simple little thing and I just played through it and the first time I played through it
this beautiful melody came out and I was just picturing, close my eyes and picture her laying
there and what had just happened is okay, she's just born and she's on the respirator
and all that stuff and we don't know, you don't know what's going to happen when somebody
is four pounds and they're seven weeks early and the nurse had said to me, listen, go and
talk to her and she'll recognize your voice and I thought how is she, you know, but I
went in and I said, Emma, it's daddy and this is the first time she opened her eyes, just
a little bit open her eyes and then close her eyes but that was, it was like and that's
what I was picturing when I started to play.
When I get away from music for any length of time, I get uncentered, you know, I really
get uncentered and they feel like there's a part of me that's not connected, you know,
so then I come back in and pick up this piece of plumbing and put some music on and start
playing along, play a little jazz and I always come out, it's like meditation, you know, it
really is, it really is.
Think about music as the landscape of your life, I mean, there's certain tunes that
come on for everybody where you connect it to some memory, some beautiful memory and
all of a sudden, it doesn't matter where you are, you're taken out of that and you're
all of a sudden in that beautiful place and I think that's the key, it comes from the
feelings.
You know, once I can let it just relax to that meditational point of being in contact
with whatever is in the air at that moment, it kind of comes, you know, it does come.
Right.
and I'll see you soon.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
