Robert Glasper

“You have to go with the times. You're going to get left behind if you don't.”

“Honestly, recording with Faith Evans blew me away.”

“I got into hip-hop, but I still had appreciation for all types of music, so I was trained to have an open mind and to always go with the flow.”

“I feel like everybody's life literally has a soundtrack because we love music so much, and there are so many songs that people love.”

“I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.”

“I was playing drums in church when I was six. Then I picked up the piano when I was 11 or 12.”

“You can see how different artists work, from writing to recording, just from being in the studio environment with them.”

“Anybody who loves jazz has a little bit of snob in them.”

“I try to get the hip-hop aesthetic, most times without an MC. I don't use a rapper or a DJ to give it the hip-hop style; it's strictly the band that makes that music, which is a lot harder to do.”

“None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn't make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.”

“I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.”

“Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music.”

“I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.”

“Selling out is when you do something that you don't naturally want to do.”

“I'm not really married to the craft of jazz - I'm married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce.”

“Your main radio stations, the stations that get the most listeners, don't play anything that has any kind of integrity to it.”

“I do feel a responsibility because most people like me that are my age or younger, they don't quite make it over to the jazz side. They flirt with it, but they don't quite marry it.”

“Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream - younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans mixed in with the jazz audience.”

“It's very rare that you get very old jazz lovers and super-young hip-hop lovers at the same exact show, when you think about it. Not many artists can do that.”

“'Black Radio' was pretty much a jam session.”