"Westside Story was probably the biggest thing in my life as teenager walking along the streets of London, me and my friends were always trying to imitate the Jets’ dancing! My favourite songs? There were so many, but Leonard Bernstein was a genius and I just thought if I could be anybody, I would be a composer like Bernstein because his music was just so powerful and it also has a jazz tilt. He was doing things with music that I discovered much later. a lot of it was inspired by The Planets by Holst, with this jagged, staccato, kicking in the music with songs like ‘America’. And I thought, yeah I wanted to be in America, although I wanted to avoid all the gang fights! There were so many messages in that film and my all-time favourite song would probably be ‘Somewhere’. That reflects that ultimate aim in life to find a place away from the turmoil, pain and suffering to a place of peace, happiness"

"I don't know how I came across that album to be honest. But again, some of the lyrics, oooh! Have you seen them live? Brilliant. Fucking brililant. Like a punk rock & roll trio with stand up piano, bass and drums. When we saw them, it was Shepherd's Bush and I wasn't expecting it to be so full on. But the way they create what they do on stage and live – it's almost like three jazz kids who ended up writing quirky pop songs. Their drummer is phenomenal, they all were. The bass player uses distortion at times and Ben bangs the hell out of the piano. I remember that gig really well. Remember when Matt Lucas had the character George Dawes? He was in the audience at that gig. And everybody in the room knew he was there. Everyone was locked into him and someone shouted out 'Tell us the scores George Dawes' and I felt really sorry for him! But it was just a really amazing gig and it's a great record. Rough but brilliant."

"I mean, all of them. I remember the first night my parents let me stay home alone I rented Metropolitan for the sexy VHS cover—I stayed up till morning trying to talk like those characters. And The Last Days of Disco is low-key brutal in its honesty about post-college party life. But man, everything really clicks into place with Barcelona—Cold War Spain, super early Mira Sorvino, prime Chris Eigeman, the stylish but not mannered cinematography, a broad eighties definition of “jazz.” I’ve been thinking about what’s so liberatingly beautiful about Stillman’s dialogue. It’s how everyone is trying to be so precise—and hearing that thought process is very rare in films. And how that extreme precision generates its own excesses and poetic absurdism. Like the crystalline moment: “Plays, novels, songs, they all have a subtext, which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind . . . So subtext, we know . . . But what do you call . . . what’s above the subtext?” “The text.” “OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.”"

"One of the best blue-eyed soul voices ever. Famously he didn't do drugs in the '60s and made up for it in the '70s. My girlfriend gave me a book about how he recorded each album, it's incredibly detailed. For this record, he got a studio together in New York and got a load of musicians together to make the record. At no point did he play any of the session players any vocals – they heard bits of music but they had no clear picture of what the actual song would be like. He had a total vision and he didn't want to deviate from that with anyone else's opinion. People talk about records that go from jazz to prog to psych to vaudeville in one track and that's Todd. A proper studio head who could write hooks and songs in an almost Brill Building way. My favourite story about Todd is that he lives in Hawaii and one side of his house doesn't have a wall. He said about it, "Lots of things come in. Animals, super-fans, stalkers, the weather."

"My first memory of jamming with Mark Ronson was sitting and trying to figure out a song called 'You Know, You Know' from this album. We were just having a bit of fun, but we played that song for two hours straight. Of all the Mahavishnu records this is the least produced, there's only five of them if you include the violin player. This record really changed my life, it opened my brain musically. I found this through Bitches Brew [on which Mahavishnu Orchestra's John McGlaughlin plays guitar]. I'd read the Miles Davis autobiography Miles while I was in high school. I didn't know anything about his music, I'd just read the book because it was there, but it got me into listening to jazz, and once I'd started listening to Bitches Brew every day, that got me into listening to Mahavishnu. It was a direct line of following the breadcrumbs of who played on what album you get into all sorts of stuff, a spiderweb of musicians."

"If I was trying to be cool I’d say Bitches Brew, but this is the seminal album really, isn’t it? The great Coltrane’s on it. It was an astonishing band. It had such a tone to it. For a lot of music that I love, whether it’s dub reggae or electronics or classical or choral music, it’s about soundscape, it’s about tone. I can link the Burial album into Kind Of Blue. A few years ago somebody gave me a very high definition LaserDisc – it was next generation after LaserDisc. It was of Kind Of Blue and it had been remastered. It sounded like the sounds had separated off and they were no longer mashing together as was intended. And it sounded horrible and soulless. I just took it off and never played it again. This is real fusion of sound, though it’s not fusion jazz, and the sounds cross over each other and complement each other so beautifully. It’s the perfect soundscape. It’s another wardrobe in my head."