7. Roberta FlackFirst Take
This album itself I literally wore out the vinyl of it over the years and it’s just – it’s that perfect sweet spot between that austere European approach and the approach to jazz playing that isn’t about masturbation. She has some of the greatest jazz musicians playing with her – Ron Carter is the bass player, who is Miles Davis’s bass player, but she’s playing the piano, but of course she’s a singer, so the piano playing is never doing anything but serving the song. It has the European way of treating the song as the most important part, the actual melody and the feeling put into it, so for me it’s the ultimate of classical and jazz approaches without any of the deadweight in that, in that it’s a pop album, so you don’t have any of the 12 minute-long movements and any of the impossible-to-follow developments of classical music which don’t work anymore in the 21st century.
For me – and Nina Simone had it too – it’s exactly the sweet spot that I’m going for on my piano records, and even on my records with Boys Noize, I go for the approach of never letting the virtuosity get in the way and always realising that we live in the pop era. The song should be no longer than three or four minutes, because that’s easier to follow, and that’s the times we live in and that’s the music I love, the stuff that was easy to get into but then gives you more as you listen to it
I think there’s a certain respect I have for what this generation needs, because I’m part of it. That’s why my sense of humour is so important, it sort of connects me to today and my sense of all of it as pop music and that all of it should be pop music. Every bar of Solo Piano, I secretly wish it could be something that Drake is going to want to sample, and I’m lucky enough that he did sample something off Solo Piano. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, how is this going to sound to a hip-hop fan? How is this going to sound to an underground hipster? I’m not thinking of impressing classical people or jazz people, because I don’t respect them – they’re stuck in a defensive pose trying to preserve something, but secretly they just feel rejected by the audience: their music is dying and it’s their fault, so that’s not who I’m picturing – I’m picturing the hot girls I see in my audience!
