"I first met Chris Bear when I was fifteen. We were both at a jazz programme and he was the one person there that was frighteningly talented, just ridiculously talented, I was very intimidated by him. “He introduced me to this and it was one of the first records the two of us bonded over. I didn’t see him again for a few years, but this record was something I kept with me throughout the last few years of high school and I always remembered this amazing drummer who introduced me to it. “That first meeting with Chris Bear has been influential in my music and my life. We were all trying to be cool kids, trading on stuff that we knew and he had this record. There’s a wildness and a subtle funkiness to it, it’s functioning within the bounds of what the genre is but it’s pushing these tiny gradations of feeling. That’s what makes really good jazz really great, it sucks you into these funny little changes in the way that people are playing. It’s so human you feel like you’re in it, like you’re the person making it happen, it’s very physical. “The playing on this is incredibly fiery, Elvin Jones is a classic player and I think Chris Bear’s drumming comes a little bit from his playing at times, but this record is a little bit outside of pure jazz. I feel in our band, and in Chris Bear’s playing, he’s always had that subtlety of feeling, you can play within any one genre, but there’s this lightness of touch and a really subtle dynamic going on. “It takes knowing the right thing to find what’s good in jazz, it’s got a language and a history and it’s easy to hear terrible shit too, I get that. I remember riding around L.A in the back of someone’s car getting really stoned and listening to the whole record was like seeing colours, it was really intense and overwhelming"

"This is a record that has been with me so long because of the hippy environment that I grew up in. When I was 11 or 12, I remember the excitement of hearing this record for the first time. There are a couple of duds on there, and that threw me off a bit. But there are so many amazing songs that show the softer side of Jimi Hendrix - incredible songwriting and more mellow stuff, and these choruses that just explode in a really dramatic way. It also triggers a funny memory for me when I think about this record… My first girlfriend - in grade seven, when I was 12 or 13 - she was the daughter of one of the teachers at the school. She was really into Hendrix and was part of the reason why I got into him. But around the time I got hold of this record, she dropped acid in gym class. She was the first person I knew to drop acid. And then her mum came up to her when she was trying to open her locker - she was the teacher - and started talking to her. I know some people find 'Little Wing' a bit too saccharine, but all those Hendrix ballads make me so nostalgic for that time and all the people that I knew and where I grew up."