－－You’ve had a pretty varied career as a jazz pianist. Black Radio is your 5th album. How does it differ from your previous projects?
Shit load of guests on this album. This one is targeted for more of a mainstream appeal. This album specifically, I went more mainstream than normal for the people on the other side to come to our side. I want them to say like “hey guys”, and then be like “wait what is this? who are you?” Then they’ll dig me up and see I have other records. I want to get black people more involved in the music and jazz. I don’t need them to necessarily love John Coltrane. I just want them to like what I do. There’s a lot of people playing modern jazz now and we are overlooked. If you are going to hear about jazz now 9 times out of 10 you’re gonna hear about Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane. On any magazine or any radio station those guys get the shine. Even on iTunes they get the shine. I always get beat by Miles Davis, all the time. Like when “Black Radio” comes out I’ll be number 1 for like a month and then I’ll beat by “Kind of Blue”, hands down. So that just shows you there’s a disconnect. There’s a lack of a modern day, now jazz audience. It’s not as big as it should be. Unless you’re in college and go to school for music most young people don’t know about what me or my peers are doing. So I’m just trying to be heard. But in that I’m doing stuff that I like, I’m not as some people say selling out. I’m playing hip hop shit because I listen to hip hop shit and I can. And I love Soul music and I can play it. So that’s why I’m doing it. It’s not pretentious at all. It’s stuff that I love to do and I’ve been waiting for the right time to do it.
－－You interact a lot with the hip hop community. We’ve seen you do a lot of work with Questlove and people like Mos Def (Yasiin Bey). How did that all begin?
I stepped in when I met Bilal in school. When he got signed they kinda hooked him up with all of these hip hop cats for his record. That’s how I met Dilla. They asked Dilla to work with Bilal and he was like I want to bring my man with me who can play keys. So they flew us both out to Dilla for 2 weeks. The song that Dilla produced they got, Common and Mos on it. That’s how we got a relationship. They lived in Brooklyn. From that I started giving Common piano lessons at his crib. He lived up the street from me. Erykah lived down the street from him and Bilal. We all just became a family. From there I met A Tribe Called Quest, I mean Ali and (Q-)Tip. I think they were trying to sign Bilal to their label at the time. Just living here allowed me to become closer with a lot of cats. And my relationship with Bilal helped a lot. Cats would call me to help put their bands together. They would want me to play but I didn’t want to do that so I would say “check this guy out” or “check this cat”. At that time Tip started doing stuff that I could play on. I did a lot of stuff with Tip. We co-wrote some songs and I worked on the Renaissance album. I met Questlove on the shoot for the Soul Sista video. He knew Bilal so we became cool. He would call me to do stuff for the Roots and to do different stuff. It just kinda grew from there.
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