Jason Moran

While my friends were outside practising to be Tony Hawk or Michael Jordan, I was inside playing Mozart, increasingly disillusioned and bored.

It's important that the art forms communicate, whether it's the dance program with the jazz program or the classical program with the opera program, that these conversations becomes fluid.

Once you step on stage, the people are actually looking to be transformed. That's why they showed up; that's why they spent some money. And great performances do that.

I love Mozart, and I love Bach, and Brahms, and - but at 13, I didn't understand any of that that I was playing.

Are we, as humans, gaining any insight on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context. So I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster.

In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.

I'm a prime example of a person who loves hip-hop, and I will defend it till the day I die.

Very few of us have our special listening room where we close off the rest of the world and only hear the music. As musicians or as listeners, we're generally interacting with music wherever we are, whether we're on a train or on the street.

I don't want any of my records to sound like one style throughout. That's why I choose different grooves and songs: tunes that are sensitive and slow as well as pieces that are abstract and fast. The approach I want to take with my records is to give the listener a variety of grooves, concepts, and composers.

I don't want to be defined solely by what I do as a jazz musician at a club or a festival. That's not all of me. It's not even close.

Music, many times, around the world, serves to help us understand other people without having to talk.

America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.

The great jazz radio stations have a duty to continue evolving their format just as audiences ask the musicians to evolve. How do you do that with a form of music that has 100 years of recorded history? How do you also keep it contemporary so you don't isolate your listeners? These are major questions.

I play a Monk song, it's like you get possessed. And then you have to break that spell. You have to remind yourself that you are an individual, or that you aren't Thelonious Monk.

I see how people look at me, all around the world. They see something because of the race I belong to. I have to understand that and put it into my music.

Confidence is the key. When you're playing something new, find the part you know very well and play it really strong. That'll make you believe that you really do know it.

You make a record because you have to chart your progress, not only for yourself, but for your audience.

As a listener, we're looking for that person who kind of excites the molecules within us - who knows how to tell the story that resonates deeply to our core and almost prompts us into action. Fats Waller has been that person for decades. When people need a lift, sometimes they go to him. I know I do.

I feel like I'm a torchbearer for jazz, fostering its tradition but its future, too.

I'm a bit of a traditionalist, but I kind of mangle things as I perform in a contemporary way.