When I met her she was Anna Mae. I was the one who turned her into Tina Turner. I had to tell her how to dress, how to walk and how to talk on stage. I told her how to stand and how to look, the whole thing, man, I mean from the wig down.

I always considered myself being an organizer. I'm very good at teaching singers, I'm very good at staging a show, to entertain people. But I never included myself. I never applied this to me as an artist.

I believe I was ahead of my time.

When you think of blues, all you think about is crying guitar like B.B. King's guitar. You think about someone crying that their woman's gone. And how bad life is and all that. Why can't it be something happy with the blues? Why can't it have a hip-hop beat to which you can do the dances of today?

In China, when you get to the airport everyone be talking in American slang.

I can put a hip-hop beat to reggae. That is, I can have real reggae in the drums and in the rhythm, and on top of it I can put The Rolling Stones' feeling, anyone's feeling on top. Nobody has ever done this before, man.

The music I listened to when I was a kid was Sonny Boy Williams and Pinetop Perkins. He was the one who had the most influence on my playing. I saw him through a window playing piano and I thought it was unbelievable somebody could move their fingers that fast. And this is how I got interested in piano.