Music is made of what we do when we move, and we can only move in certain ways, in certain ranges of tempo because of the inherent constraints that our bodies offer, or you can call them 'affordances' - that's another word for me. It's a little more positive; doesn't make it seem like a limitation, but rather, a set of opportunities. You can say that that's part of music making, but there's also the imagination. The power of the imagination is kind of trumping - sorry to have to use that word.

I think what music can offer is the feeling of forward motion, also the feeling of accumulation of information, of sensations, of feelings, like we're going somewhere. When I say 'feel like,' I don't mean to suggest that it's not real, but that it's the work of the imagination, which is what narrative is.

Beyond that, it gets down to the nuts and bolts of discipline - not a tradition or genre, I don't care about that, actually - but discipline in the sense of just working on music and working on thinking about music. It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically.

I use are provisional terms, and they usually put any proper nouns in critical distance. I'm in a tradition of people who resist naming, fixity. That means it's a tradition of people who insist on mobility, who defy proper nouns and genres and those kinds of things. When I push back against the word 'jazz' it's because I've learned that from many, many elders who think that way. I'm not just being a jerk.

If you look at my collaborations, it is very much in line with all these others in the sense that it is a building of community, particularly among artists of color. This is what I learned from the example of elder African-American artists, which is where it is all coming from; to refuse to be silenced.

Lately I feel being political is also about the company I keep and the ideas I put forward. When I do a curate a program or do a workshop, I want to make it intergenerational; I want to have women on the faculty and also among the students.

I notice that Indians love to tweet about each other - will be like, yeah, go India, we're awesome, Indians are awesome, here is another example of an awesome Indian. That's a dangerous false nationalism that I am not interested in. There's a huge amount of diversity within our so-called communities; within the South Asian community, there are people who would never talk to each other.