Kassim Norris
“Then I became involved in music by being around my Dad and listening to all of the different music collections he had. Although I grew up on the South Side, I really loved music with percussion which meant that my music style was very different to everyone else at school. By listening to my Dad’s albums of Phil Collins and Fleetwood Mac, you can’t help but be influenced by the percussion and drums. I suppose the day I seriously got into to music, had to be the day my Dad gave me my first drum set.”
“I played in a band through out elementary and middle schools, and then by the time I got to high school I seriously got into it. At the time, none of the other high schools had music or recording studios. However, this one teacher of mine played in a band and he brought all of his recording gear from home to our school just to bring some positivity to our education. He inspired us all with music, so much so, that I just fell in love with all of the technicals to do with recording and producing.”
“Along with my music, art and sketching, movies had always been a big part of my childhood too. We didn’t have a whole lot of money, so in my down time at home, I would spend it doing cartoons or watching movies. We didn’t have cable, so my mother bought the hugest selection of VHS tapes in the world! Seriously, my mom had hundreds of movies on VHS.”
“Unknown to me, I was being influenced by watching the same films over and over again. It was kind of like having a film school at home, because I could stop the tape and watch each film, scene by scene. I didn’t really know what I was looking at, but we would talk about these films at home all of the time. I guess in a strange way, I was actually being trained to have a love and a passion for filmmaking. So I have been a movie buff all of my life, really.”
“I was in the wrong era to see films like Star Wars on at the big screen because I was too young. So I didn’t know about that epic film, until a friend of my mother introduced me to Star Wars. It literally blew me away. That film not only inspired me to make films, it inspired me with my music as well. While I was watching all of these films, their music scores would inspired me musically too. So I guess one passion piggy backed itself off my other passion. So I got into music scoring to begin with, because of movies.”
“When I was about thirteen, my Mom moved from Chicago to Indianapolis. Chicago is this really soulful place with all of its jazz music and different cultures from all of these different walks of life. So to come to Indiana, which is a really flat state without a lot of the dynamic that Chicago has, was a big problem to me. Initially, I could’t see what it had to offer me creatively.”
“When I moved here, I suddenly found that I had nothing but time on my hands. There was nowhere that I could go with out a car and nothing to do. There were no stores nearby our house, so if you wanted to go somewhere you had to drive. That kind of affected the way I saw my world. A lot of the time, I would go to school and then spend all of my time around the house. So I had to really use my own creativity to inspire me.”
“Soon after I left high school, we managed to get a record deal with our band. So right out of school, here I was getting experience with a real recording studio while doing our own album! Back then we didn’t have computers, so I put together a small recording studio in my bedroom as well. It was insane because we had outboards and were recording to 2” tape all in this really small space. So you can imagine all of this recording gear in my room with me sleeping around it all. So I guess I have been producing music since I was at high school.”
“During the early stages of my career, I could probably have made a lot of money. But as a young musician, I was very select about whose music I would produce because I found it so hard to give up those tracks when they were finished. I was an artists first and so I had this greed over everything I created. I felt that everything I created back then, was the best work I was ever going to do. I just couldn’t bring myself to give ownership of my work away. I was very young and immature back then.”
“I did end up producing for several R&B artists, hip hop artists and rock artists from a young age. I am still producing music today, but I am doing more film these days. Filmmaking has always been a creative passion for me, and has really become a career after my shooting of Ryan McDaniel's music clip. I have never gone looking for fame or prestige because I see myself as an artist. I feel a bit like Terrance Malick the director. He is more interested in doing beautiful work than seeking notoriety, and I am very much the same way.”
“I guess I kind of fell into all of this filmmaking by mistake. I just watched a video one day, appreciated all of the quality in the film craft and was hooked for the rest of my life. Quality has always been a big thing in my life, because everyone was so artistic in my family.”
“Being in a family with so much artistic passion, meant that I had to pay attention to quality from a very early stage in my life. I really had to pay attention to the quality of the fabrics and fashion that my mother was into and the structure of the music my father was into. Understanding that quality matters in life, plays out for me today, because I believe in quality in my work. The more difficult things are to achieve, the more I am attracted to do them. I guess that is my obsession with quality coming through again.”
“When I started to get into filmmaking, it was really difficult to find out how to achieve the looks I liked. So the more difficult it became in trying to research these techniques, the more committed I became to learning these things. I am the kind of person, where I am not discouraged by difficult things. If you tell me I can’t do something or that something is extremely difficult, well that just makes me more attracted to it! I really have a passion for learning new things.”
“The funny thing is that the more you focus on just doing your art, the more you become noticed. So after the success of the Ryan McDaniel video, I started to get a lot of interest. Up until this time no one had ever managed to get their work aired on BET 106th & Park or MTV or a major network like that from around here. So my work became the first, and looks like it has lit a fire of creativity here. It was a big deal for a lot of the local music artists and has really inspired them to do the same. A lot of guys went really crazy over this and saw me as being at the centre of it all.”
“So now I am getting a lot of good projects. Quality is still a really big thing for me, and I am always striving to make the thing I do next, better than the last. That's what I believe in as an artist. It should always be about the quality of the work above all else.”