"I'm loyal to Weather Report's vision. I can understand how some people come in through the wrong door with them. This album is from a point where they're coming out of this improvisational period. Their first few albums were really exploratory and you had to be quite committed to them; they weren't instant records. But they had plenty of acclaim and backing from their record label. It's amazing that there was a point in time when record labels backed that kind of music. But this was the point when they were playing a lot of colleges and they added a more funky span to what they were doing. So the bass guitar started to get more prominent. It was Alphonso Johnson playing bass here and not Jaco Pastorious, and people forget that Alphonso Johnson did a lot of the groundbreaking stuff for the fretless bass. There's a painterly quality about this album and the orchestration gets more densely textured. You've got tracks like 'Jungle Book', that closes the album, and it's a beautiful track that could be put together by coloured pencils. It's a very pastel-y track where they've taken an improvisation and drawn round and over the top of it. Tracks like that are really funky. We didn't have ""world music"" back then, but this was the beginnings of that idea; of something beyond the horizon of our culture and something that was kind of hidden. It wasn't about doing an authentic version of ethno-musicology, but taking different elements; it was all about colours."

"I started playing flute when I was about six or seven and I transferred to saxophone when I was 14. It was mostly just playing trad jazz in the school jazz band and so I'd actually played a lot of jazz, because I was classically trained too, so I'd read a lot of jazz solos. But I hadn't really heard much modern jazz. I started listening to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker at the same time as I started listening to The Velvet Underground and Led Zeppelin. I was completely obsessed with jazz for so many years. That was all I listened to. John Coltrane and Miles Davis were like my bread and butter for so long. But obviously, where there's John Coltrane, there's Wayne Shorter, there's Archie Shepp, Joe Henderson, all these other people, and the same with Miles Davis. Miles Davis I've taken such inspiration from because he's someone that says: you've got to change, you've got to adapt to survive. You can't just stay doing what you're doing, you've got to try and engage with the zeitgeist. He was unique in the jazz world really. The people that came after him, that he brought up musically, if you like - Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Weather Report, Chick Corea - obviously they were very much engaged in the music of the time but Miles was so fearless and iconic, not just as a musician but as a figure in his society. To be young, angry and black was such a unique thing. He was absolutely amazing. I've got so much respect for him."