If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.

I'm not really married to the craft of jazz - I'm married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce.

I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.

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.

There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.

Jazz is a state of mind. There's no boundaries.