“It’s only now, 18 months on, that I’m starting to realise the impact this album has had on people. The album has been played in the delivery suite as a baby is born numerous times, and also in the final hours of a person’s life. It is so incredibly moving to know that my music has a place in these extremely personal moments. I cry just thinking about it.”
” We don’t confine ourselves to particular genres, or traditional interpretations of genres, and we don’t pre-determine too much about the music. All of us love pop, and have listened to loads in our time on the planet. And Brazilian tunes creep in because I find it hard to omit these from any setlist I’m involved in! Aside from that, Stoneflower creates a very gentle, magical sonic palette that doesn’t attempt to prove anything to listeners.”
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“I think the main link for both [Mike Nock and Sam Anning] is trust and respect. We respect each other and the music and we trust that the choices made are being made for the benefit of the music, its beauty and its communication.”
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“When I started working this with Giorgio Rojas, I felt that this is great; I can start to expand on what I know.He started to give me some recordings of traditional Peruvian music and I transcribed them to see if I can do some arrangements of my own, a panolivio of my own and be able to solo.That’s what I have done with Afro Cuban music.”
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“My music is Jazz for social consciousness, it is music for #blackLivesmatter but not only that. It is music for white, brown, yellow, and purple lives too. I want my music to stir people of all races, creed, age, orientations… to be an empathic elixir to life.”
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“I started singing ‘You Gotta Have Freedom’ with my first jazz band and when I went to London in 1986 I was actually invited by Pharoah Sanders to sing it with him at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz club. It was an incredible experience and an exciting improvisational one, too. I was so inspired by my first sojourn away from home that I started my own original jazz-funk band, YOYO, after returning to Melbourne in 1989.”
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“I think a lot about balancing opposing elements in my pieces: planning/spontaneity, complexity/simplicity, density/openness, intellect/emotion. Music has a lot of scope for self-expression (emotions) and experimentation with ideas (intellect). This might be especially true of creative jazz. I think the dilemma over how much weight to give these potentially competing tendencies is an interesting aspect of writing and playing music. For me the ideal is both: music involving sophisticated ideas and a high level of craft that moves me.”
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“I don’t wait to be asked to join a band that plays a style that I am interested in – I just put one together myself. It’s extremely hard work keeping it all going but very rewarding at the same time.”
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“Music comes and goes,” Leo Genovese says. “[It] is not property, it doesn’t have an owner. It is air moving. It is magic, it is medicine. Even if you compose something, it is not yours, it is patrimony of every human. I know the law works different, but the cosmic law is another thing.”
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“The gig is packed every week and people watching across the street. They say you can hear the band along the whole strip of the cross.”
