"Black Unity is one song played live that lasts about 35 minutes and it's free jazz but it has a very deep groove. There's a drummer and a couple of percussionists and the bass player is locked into them. It's almost the jazz version of the Stooges song 'Fun House' if that makes any sense. It's not free in the sense that the drummer's going off, or everyone is going off at once. There's a deep groove but there's also looseness to it too."

"I can't pronounce it either! It's a fantastic record. It's got such a gorgeous mellow vibe to it. It's kind of accessible to people who aren't familiar with jazz, but it also has kind of this free, loose thing. It's not free jazz, it's definitely modal. It's got Pharoah Sanders on it. It's lush and gorgeous and kind of takes you to a different place. Sometimes Alice Coltrane plays the harp, which sounds dreamy. It's one of my go-to's in the morning at work (in Sub Pop) I just kind of put it on to get me going. I probably drive some of my co-workers crazy playing it. You know, there's not a really obvious influence in our music that comes from jazz. I know I'm influenced by it, but I'm not sure how. I don't like all jazz, but certain things I love to death. That's the problem with this list: I can't stick Charles Mingus on it, or Andrew Hill, or Ornette Coleman, or Albert Ayler. One of the things I feel lucky about, my high school friends and I who formed Mr. Epp, we would go to our little record store in our suburban town and the guys there turned us onto The New York Dolls and Ornette Coleman and Ayler and The Velvet Underground, Brian Eno. I feel really lucky to have stumbled into that, at that time."

"My favorite movie is The Talented Mr. Ripley. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy — Tommy.” Philip Seymour Hoffman was crazy. Jude Law was just great. I don’t like what he did, but it was just the whole running-around-Europe-loving-jazz [thing]. That was very interesting to me. He didn’t want to do his father’s business. He just wanted to love jazz. He was free enough to do it and be content. I think Matt Damon was very interesting. Just to be so conniving and to steal identities and money. Jude Law was so naive for a while and then he realized Damon was a moocher. It was kind of weird how quickly someone could be deceived when they’re caught up in their own world."

"Well, that was another one I burned on my way. At first, I was into the earlier John Coltrane, and then when he went into more free jazz, at first I didn't like it as much because I was so into his early tone and the swing and the melody of this more classic jazz, but the next one's more like that. Jesse [Trbovich, bandmate in the Violators] turned me on to it. We got stuck on the way home from an LA show or somewhere, we got dumped off in Phoenix, Arizona, and we had to stay for the night. We knew a really good record store there, Revolver Records, there was just a ton of jazz. I was wanting to stock up so I got Interstellar Space as a recommendation. When I first listened, I was like, [shrugs] yeah, 'cause he's just freaking out, just him and a drummer, Rashied Ali, then I burned it anyway. Usually what happens is that it sounds so good 'cause it's burned from those original vinyls and then you crank it in your headphones and it just sounds unreal, so that's what happened with that one on the way to Joshua Tree. My mind was blown and it's just so open and such raw emotion and so psychedelic without any of the pretensions that 'psychedelic' eventually became - he's just the real thing. It's just wide open and sprawling. 'Lost My Head' for sure has that jazz influence... obviously it's a white man's, with limited skill. The convenience of the key of C, for instance - you play all those sevenths with the same formation all over the place, so that's why the piano's beautiful, but that's got the McCoy Tyner or whatever thing in it."

"I have three copies of Live Evil on vinyl because I play it so much. My favourite period of Miles Davis is from Bitches Brew to Big Fun, but in terms of the musicians on it, this is a compilation so you get almost every musician he played with in that period. Hermeto Pascoal is on it, and Airto Moreira – usually it's just one of those guys. John McLaughlin's on it, Billy Cobham my favourite drummer and Jack DeJohnette, my other favourite drummer. On the same song! Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Joe Dallin... you get all the greats of that period on one record. In terms of the Miles Davies free form jazz album, that's the one to get."

"I came to this record through the Encyclopaedia Of Jazz. As a teenager I played a lot of jazz piano, but more like learning how to play bop or more traditional types of jazz. And I was getting to the point where I was starting to find out about Sun Ra and some of the weirder stuff that was out there, and I was working through the encyclopaedia and I crossed every record off the list if I thought it would be far out and interesting. We had a scam going at the time. HMV in Toronto was pretty relaxed and you could return things for cash value immediately. So I'd go in and buy a stack of ten CDs and I'd just got a CD burner - this was like 1997 - so I'd take them home and burn them all and then take them straight back. And they'd be like, ""You've got the entire recorded work of The Beatles here - you didn't find anything that you liked on there?"" And I'd be like, ""No these are all rubbish, sorry."" And I did the same with John Coltrane. Then I can remember getting to the Albert Ayler page of the encyclopaedia and you know how there's that snooty canonisation thing with jazz music where somebody like Wynton Marsalis or one of those conservative types would be like, ""This guy lost the plot. He went off the deep end."" But this record blew me away. I got this and Interstellar Space, the John Coltrane album, and they both have long periods of free-form wildness on them. But the thing I loved about Albert Ayler is the melodies on the songs - again, a lot of them sound the same, but they feel so elemental to me. It's another record where I feel like those melodies have been there since the beginning of time and it just took him to play them. The sound of his saxophone is so amazing. It's super far-out and forward-looking. If that's too out there for you, there's this album by him called New Grass, where he hired a rock band, and it's like some A&R man had tried to make him have a hit record. There's a song on it called 'Heart Love' - it's less far-out but it has his crazy saxophone playing on it, but with a beautiful melody and this free-soul singing on it."