[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I had to pick songs that I felt the same about.

For me jazz is kind of an extension of hip-hop. Kind of the sad thing is that a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.

I'm listening to a lot of Drake, and a lot of Frank Sinatra just because it's his centennial also. I'm going to be doing some tributes to him this year. I love that Beck album. It was funny to me because my two favorite albums of the year were definitely the Beyonce album and the Beck album.

[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I had to pick songs that I felt the same about.

I love that [ late-50s Verve recordings] - to me, that's the epitome of vocal jazz. It's my favorite style and era of it.

There's a more experimental album that follows that, which is like Black Magic and While You Were Sleeping. Then there's a return to jazz, For All We Know and Yesterday I Sang The Blues. It wasn't like a planned thing, I just kind of realized it when I made a list of my albums. Like, oh wow, this is exactly what I did before.

I really pulled from that repertoire that Billie Holiday was singing, and the way she sang it. It's sort of this beautiful, not really midpoint, but a period of her career where she really still had her voice. She had that deep wisdom that we've come to associate her with. To me, that's her at the height of her powers.