"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."

"My Father introduced me to this, he was very passionate about culture, literature and music, especially jazz and classical music and he would take me to see it. I lived in L.A. and on the long drives home he’d put on whatever music he was interested in at the time and was always really passionate about it. “I was a classical and jazz nerd when I was a kid, that’s what was around me and what I was learning about. My older brother started learning the guitar when I was about ten and I started then too, I got really serious about it and he sort of stopped. “I’m of a generation where we really listened to records as records, I’d go extremely deep with symphonies and jazz records and this one was really major. It’s a piece of music that’s stuck with me since I was fourteen years old, it’s the harmonic sensibility in it, the drama and the way it paints this very intense, almost kind of landscape picture. There’s a mid-20th Century sense of harmony to it that’s stuck with me and I’ve continued revisiting it and referencing it in my mind as an example of really rich, really emotive writing, without any words whatsoever. “It was my first experience of a deeply technical piece of music that was deeply emotional and accessed your emotional brain in a really intense and overwhelming way. That’s always been the goal, not to make music that’s cerebral, but to use your technical ability to channel something that hits your emotional brain and takes your entire brain over in almost a trance-like experience. “This was the first piece of music that I heard that had that level of complexity, but it was still as affecting as a Beatles record."

"My number two movie is Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of Murder starring Jimmy Stewart — one of my favorite James Stewart performances. He’s the country lawyer, so all those folksy tricks that Jimmy Stewart uses just really come into play here– ’cause he’s also so bright, you know? He’s the brilliant, folksy country lawyer. And Lee Remick is in it, in the flower of her youth. Bra-less and in Ray-Bans — you know, who doesn’t want [to see] that? And gosh, Ben Gazzara in a really neurotic, strange performance. I think it’s the screen debut of George C. Scott as the young lawyer from Lansing, MI, who takes on this case; and he’s — it’s just brilliant courtroom stuff. Murray Hamilton — who plays the mayor in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws — he’s the bartender, and he’s wonderful; it’s a great turn. And the music: Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, so it’s a great jazz score. The Jimmy Stewart character tinkles on the ivories and he plays a little bit of jazz sometimes as a kind of hobby, so that justifies the score. But that’s a great film — black and white, beautifully shot, underrated. Almost a perfect film."

"This wonderful film about young female factory workers in an isolated town in central Czechoslovakia utterly convinced me that I wanted to spend my career making photographs of institutional life. To raise the morale of the women, the factory director invites a reserve unit of older men (mostly married) to the next factory dance. The only young man at the dance is a jazz musician from Prague. The result is hilariously funny and very touching, with a twist of sadness at the end—a typical Milos Forman film."

"It’s early 70s, with the Master Musicians of Joujouka. That’s partly why I chose it, because they’re on a couple of tracks. That record is one of the earliest jazz records I found myself listening to a lot. Somebody handed it to me and I was really impressed by it. I didn’t know anything about these Joujouka guys at that point except for the fact that their name always came up in relationship to the Rolling Stones and Brian Jones. At that point I don’t think I’d even heard of that Pipes of Pan At Jajouka record that Brian Jones recorded but I started to get really interested into Dancing In Your Head. Ornette went to Morocco with this music critic named Robert Palmer. Palmer was a really important music writer and I’d read some of his stuff, so when I saw his name on the back of that record I was even further intrigued. It was a kind of an early avenue into free jazz for me, because this record led me to Miles and to Coltrane and to Thelonious Monk and Albert Ayler and all this other stuff. I think probably at the same time I was also listening to African “world music” as they called it later, and a lot of Gamelan was really important to me. I was looking for world music that I felt I could find stuff in, that could inform my interest in rock & roll and certainly the Gamelan music had a lot of that just because it was metallic and loud and it had these furious beats and Dancing In Your Head did too because it was really drone-y in ways that reminded me of the Velvet Underground and was also really loud. It also tied directly with jazz music because The Master Musicians of Jajouka playing those rhaitas were circular breathing in the way the jazz players were, just going around, you never felt like the music broke for breath. They were just going around in this endless loop, which also tied it in with my interest in tape music and tape loops and things like that. It wasn’t really until I went there and played with these guys in the 90s – we went to the village and spent a couple of days there and kind of played all night long with them – they had a cheap generator and an electric guitar – I could see that it was loud and kind of stomping in a way that related to rock & roll but it also had this circular trance-y thing where you started to lose track of time. Had it been going on for ten minutes or forty minutes or whatever it was? It had a very druggy quality with or without the drugs. There was just something about Ornette Coleman and when I heard this record I felt like I was hearing someone who was a great force. He did all these amazing ground breaking records and it opened up the whole world of jazz for me."