For the most part, 99 percent of jazz is boring; you've heard it before. People aren't doing anything creative that's extremely modern. They tend to always be like "Let's do a tribute to Miles Davis!" All the new albums are tributes to history. It becomes too much at a certain point, it leaves us waving like "Hello? I'm alive, I'm here!" You know? So I really do feel like it needs some spice, it needs to be relevant to today's times, today's people, today's sound.

Jazz stopped being creative in the early '80s. After your acoustic era, where you had the likes of the Miles Davis Quintet, when it gets to the '70s it started being jazz fusion where you had more electronic stuff happening, then in the '80s they started trying to bring back the acoustic stuff, like Branford Marsalis and the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton sextet. It started dying down from there. Miles was still around in the '80s and he was still being creative; he was playing Michael Jackson songs and changing sounds, but a lot of people were still trying to regurgitate the old stuff.

Once I started getting mainstream people to my shows, I realized we were taking too many solos, and they were too long. I started gauging when people were going on their iPhones.

Ive heard some people say that Im selling out, but Im not. If I hadnt done Black Radio, and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldnt be honest with myself; Id be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.

That's a skill that I'm proud of: to be able to be a jazz musician and go a bit crazy sometimes and other times be able to pull it all in and lay it down like a track.

I think there's good music out there. I just think that radio stations don't play it.

My fan base is extremely random. It's the 14-year-old white kid sitting next to your auntie from St. Luke's Baptist Church, to the 20-year-old Black girl who probably would go to a Rihanna concert, but she's coming to my show.