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.
Jose James[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.
Jose JamesOnce I had the band, Jason [Moran] and John [Patitucci] and Eric [Harland] - it's very exciting to have that trio of just world-class guys - I already knew it was going to be fantastic. I didn't really tell them anything about it. They didn't know what they were going to play beforehand.
Jose JamesI really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.
Jose JamesI've sort of realized there's a definite pattern to my output at this point: there's an album that everybody sort of loves, that's a real balance between the old and new, like The Dreamer or No Beginning No End, like a blend of jazz and hip-hop, or r&b and soul and hip-hop.
Jose James