Stanton Moore – HuffPost 4.15.14

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Stanton Moore: For new artists? Start bands. Start projects. For me, everything that I’ve done, I would start a band. For Galactic I met up with Robert Mercurio and Jeff Raines and we started that thing. Garage A Trois we started that. As for this, I started my own piano trio. With my trio before, the organ trio, I started that trio. By doing that and not waiting for other people to call me I’ve been able to develop my own voice as an artist, which I think is very important. For me, I’ve gotten to where I am by starting bands, starting projects, or being on the ground level. Sometimes I get asked to do a superjam and it might not have been my idea, but then it works out great and then we say, “Okay, let’s do this some more” and a band starts out of that initial superjam. I’m in a few projects like that, Dragon Smoke, Frequinox, The M&Ms, which is pretty much a superjam that turned into a band, M&Ms is myself, Robert Mercurio the bass player from Galactic, John Medeski and Papa Mali. Dragon Smoke is me and Robert Mercurio and Ivan Neville and Eric Lindell. So I’m in several projects like that, that started from superjams, but also I wanted to develop my playing in a funk organ trio kind of context so I started my organ trio and did three records with that. I wanted to focus more on the jazz side of my playing, so I started a piano trio. My advice to new artists is: Whatever you want to work on, develop a band or a project that’ll work on that aspec tof your art. Start bands.