"So this is pre-teen me; I became a bit of a rocker. This is when I got into Marvel really heavy, and still playing in jazz band and other stuff. I remember my favourite movie at the time was The Crow, and when I was younger the littlest thing would snag me, like if I heard some type of melody or harmony or something that would immediately get stuck in my head and I would have to know where it came from or what it was. Stone Temple Pilots, for me, it started with The Crow. I remember hearing Scott Weiland singing the melody of 'Big Empty' and I was like, 'What? Who wrote this? Who the hell wrote this song?' I was literally like, I had to find this album. I would listen to albums with repetition a lot of the time, and this is right in the middle of like the grunge era. All kinds of stuff going on, and clearly Stone Temple Pilots, when they came up, were making waves outside of that. Ultimately, because Purple had my favourite song from my favourite movie on it, it essentially became one of my favourite albums when I was a child. To this day I still listen to it."

"It's this live, spiritual thing from '66 - Alice Coltrane, his wife, and Pharoah Sanders is on it. It's just a really spiritual performance. At one point, he starts beating his chest and making Tarzan noises. This was one of the things I burned - that's more obscure, the others are more influential, but yeah, Temple University is in Philadelphia, so it was very close to home in that regard. There's a writer from Philadelphia, Francis Davis, I read one of his jazz books, I'm intrigued by that guy. I haven't met him but I really love his writing and he was there back then, he was going to Temple, he was at the concert, and he wrote a review that came in there. That's a great, intense live performance. I've always sort of been into the improv thing of feeling it in the moment spiritually, but yeah, I was listening to a lot of jazz records and it really opens your mind, just because they're all such real players. It's all live, it's not overdubs, it's just capturing a real moment of true feeling, especially when you've got the greats, like John Coltrane, or in this case, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali and they're all just such heavy people, you know? It's unreal."