So I wanted to sing inspirational music, and that's exactly how I approached it - only the words have been changed to declare my relationship with God.
I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.
One of my favorites is 'The Sound of Music'. When Julie Andrews runs through the hills singing her head off, I always wish that a gust of wind would blow her skirt up.
Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.
If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.
Well, Smoke n' Mirrors has very much a world music flavor and it doesn't park itself in one country. It borrows heavily from the Brazilian angle, which is dear to my heart, and I recorded several albums with that flavor.
Janis Joplin is definitely one of my biggest influences. She taught me how to feel music, and I don't think there's anyone like her that could bring such pain and emotion to a song.
Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.
Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.
Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.
Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.
So, essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.
