Interests · What moves me
Music has never been a hobby I keep at the edges — it’s how I rest, how I feel most human, and, on the best days, something I’m lucky enough to make. I’ve had the privilege of performing alongside a few of the artists I grew up admiring; mostly, though, I’m just a devoted listener. Here’s some of what I keep coming back to.
Public domain — the players and composers whose work has passed into the commons
There is no more honest music than jazz. It’s a conversation — players listening, answering, taking risks in real time — and it taught me that the best things happen when you leave room for someone else to speak. Give me Art Tatum’s impossible hands, Duke Ellington’s elegance, and Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea forever chasing the next idea. I even had the rare gift of learning some of it up close: Charles Covington, a masterful pianist and organist, was my professor at Howard.
Classical is where I go for scale and stillness — music built to outlast the people who wrote it. I’m a lifelong Chopin devotee, and I keep close company with Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Rachmaninoff. It reminds me to think in centuries, not quarters, and that some things are worth doing for no reason other than that they are beautiful.
Gospel is where the music and the faith become one and the same. It’s the sound I was raised on and still return to — the Clark Sisters, Richard Smallwood, Smokie Norful, Shirley Caesar, and the incomparable Mahalia Jackson. There is a joy in it that doesn’t deny the hardship; it rises straight through it. When I need to remember what I believe, I don’t read — I listen.
Hip-hop is the sound of making something from nothing — a corner, a hard season, and a secondhand turntable turned into an art form that conquered the world. It’s the closest thing I know to my own story: where you start does not decide where you end. Jay-Z is my north star here — more than any businessman I could name, I’ve modeled my own steps as a builder on his, from the corner to the catalog to the boardroom. Alongside him: Biggie, Tupac, Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, and J. Cole — poetry with a pulse, truth delivered where softer forms get ignored.
Some of what I love refuses to sit in a single box, and I love it all the more for that. The Beatles and the Bee Gees. Michael Jackson. Luther Vandross. And Motown — all of it, always. If it carries that much soul, I have never needed a genre for it.
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