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'm pretty much always planning two albums ahead.

The level of musicianship in New York is the highest in the world. It's tough to get into. You start gigging making 50 dollars a night, or playing for nothing to get to something. It's insane. It's like being a modern dancer, or something - the hardest thing to make money from.

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.

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.

When I sort of step in my jazz world, it's somewhere between instrumental jazz and vocal jazz.

All my stuff is pretty seamless - like now, while I'm touring [Yesterday I Sang The Blues], today I'm going to go in the studio, I'm writing my next one. For me it's continual.