"He was working with a lot of the young rappers, like Easy Mo Bee. They were laying down hip-hop drums and a few chords and apparently Miles would just improvise over the top and they'd add the vocals. That's a fabulous record, primarily because Miles sounds like he's really enjoying himself. He's more inventive on that album. He's getting more involved than on some of the albums that came before that. I saw him play live at the Hammersmith Odeon in the early 1980s and all he was doing was orchestrating. He'd stand up and play a little riff and then point at the drummer, who'd do a 15-minute solo. He was wearing a baseball hat on and was bent down and you couldn't see his face. Another one-minute solo, then point to the guitar player. The show went a bit like that. But everything he did play was well worth the entrance price. He plays great on Doo Bop. It was his last album. He was doing painting at the time, but he was really into working with these young guys and they were in awe of him. This was their dedication to him. The lyrics are all about how brilliant he is. Miles rose to the occasion and showed his chops. Every note is perfect. I've grown into jazz over the years, but it took me a bit of time to appreciate it."

"I was listening to a lot of Cuban music and salsa, a lot of Latin music. I worked with Selena on the last thing she recorded. And there was a whole series of Celia Cruz records I loved. I did a duet with her for a Jonathan Demme movie, Something Wild. Her early Cuban records were done with a band called Sonora Matancera; those are really great. Instead of going to rock clubs, I would go to Salsa Meets Jazz downtown and the Corso Ballroom uptown to hear salsa bands. There was lots of dancing. I liked the idea that you were dancing to live music, not just DJs, and grew to really love the music. It opened me up to a lot of sentimentality and feelings that maybe didn’t come naturally to me. I decided I wanted to do a salsa record, which I did in the early ’90s. And I did another one a few years after that. It was a little less strictly salsa, but it was still in that vein, and I had a wonderful time with a huge band, [Rei Momo]. We toured everywhere, and a lot of folks in the United States did not like it at all. Oddly, people in Latin America really liked it, but not because it was their music. For a lot of their rockers in Argentina or Mexico, it was like, “He's playing our parents’ music.”"

"In 2000, I went into the shop and I bought some jazz that I knew I wanted to get, and I said to the guy, "what else can I get?", and he pointed out this album with camels on it. I thought, I'll give that a try, and it was this Nubian music, which I got really into and also I bought another one, which was an Algerian CD. I listened to that for a bit and then I just kind of stopped and didn't really listen to world music for 10 years. Ali Hussan Kuban was the doorway to all the rest of them. I heard that in 2011 and I've basically been searching ever since for anything else that feels that way. A few years later, one of the things I found was this track 'Baba Ramdev'. It's just so incredibly joyful and it feels like an epic adventure. There's something absolutely epic about it, to me. It sounds like they're outside. How you seen any of those YouTube videos of the Gypsies of Rajasthan, the colourful dresses they wear and the dances they do? It's pretty incredible. And they're always in some really remote-looking rocky outcrop, somewhere in the desert. And the cover of this album as well, the guy with the amazing moustache. I love that whole spirit, really wild and free - that's what the song feels like to me."

"Despite the fact I love all sorts of Crimson records, I think this is still my favourite. Maybe just for nostalgia reasons, I listened to this record when I was very young. Before I was into jazz, before I was into weird music, I always loved this. Obviously I grew up with The Beatles and the Stones and Floyd and stuff, but I remember I was in a car and Jimi Hendrix came on the radio. I said 'what is this?' I was only 12, and a guy I was with looked at me like I was insane. In those days gas stations had lots of cassettes so we pulled over and I bought a cassette that had Are You Experienced on side A and Axis: Bold As Love on side B. I listened to it until it was completely worn through. That was my introduction to the 60s stuff that I hadn't been brought up listening to. King Crimson's early stuff was among that new, exciting 60s music that I hadn't heard. Robert Fripp became my guitar hero, he used to do a League of Crafty Guitarists thing in New York so I saw him play. I became a Fripp head, I saw them play in the 90s with my English teacher. It blew my mind, but they didn't play the old stuff. I'm not musiciany enough to like that stuff, but the early stuff resonates a lot."

"Like a lot of people of my generation, the first time I heard a Kurt Weill song was The Doors. You go half a lifetime without realising it was written by Brecht and Weill. Recently I went on a journey. I write songs with a guy called Reid Paley. He’s a very less is more, economical songwriter and you know there’s something about him that’s very tin pan alley. He wears a black jacket and a white shirt and has no problem banging out a song. He is not going to use a word like ‘thalossocracy’ in one of his songs. I felt I needed to get into the feel of Threepenny Opera - how has it survived all these years and spawned all these cover versions which are part of the jazz songbook? I really needed to educate myself and listen to that record ten or twenty times to hear the melody and the meter and the drama, what they put together, those dudes back in pre-WW2 Berlin. They were working really hard and we’re still talking about those records today. I was just enjoying it in and my wife was listening along upstairs. She was doing laundry and I was doing pots and pans. And she said: “I could listen to this all day long, whatever it is.” I don’t speak German so I’m missing a lot outside the English part of the libretto but I still love it."