Roadkill

You must realize that there are people that think you're lame and that you aren't taken as seriously as the next guy?

"I know what you're saying, but I'm not sure who that next guy is," says the artist formerly known as Kenny Gorelick. "The thing about the criticism I've gotten is that it insinuates I'm able to do other things, but have instead chosen to do this because it sells records. How could that be? There was never any market for this kind of music and it's not like all of a sudden I changed my whole way of playing so I could sell records. This is the way I play, and I was fortunate enough to get the kind of exposure that's typically reserved for vocalists. It's not like I consciously changed to become commercial. That's where the criticism is faulty.

"But I've never said I was a jazz artist and I can understand why the jazz purists would not particularly love my music. It doesn't have a lot to do with traditional jazz. They may get offended when people call my music `jazz' or it's listed that way, but to me, `jazz' is just a word like `rock & roll' or `metal.' `Alternative music,' what is that? Nobody knows, and then all of a sudden somebody plays some music that you're not so sure about, and it gets called `alternative.' Then the alternative people - whoever they are and whatever that means - start to get upset because they say, `That's not alternative.' So what is `jazz'?

"Take a guy like Miles Davis. I think the whole world would say he's a jazz artist in the traditional definition. We used to actually be his opening act and probably played 20 concerts with him. The stuff he was doing at the very end of his life and career, if you compare that with the stuff he was doing in the beginning, it's night and day. Was he still playing jazz? Or do we think whatever he's playing is jazz only because we think Miles Davis is the definition of jazz? A lot of people associate my music with the word `jazz', because it was probably the first time they were introduced to instrumental music. It's just a definition, and just a word to try to put an art form into a category so that you can kind of understand it and form an opinion about it. None of that stuff ever works, though. And that's what I have to say about the word `jazz' and my music." - Andy L