And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.

I finally decided if I was going to make a living, I was gonna have to come to New York.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old.

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.

I just have a lot off different influences.

I'm playin' the music I like.

I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.

Pizza Express has been a real godsend for me. I've been working there for several years, six weeks a year. You can go to work every night and play. It's a nice little club. It's just about the right size for me, about 150 people.

I can't judge my own stuff. That's for others. But those are the three things that I admire.

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.

I've heard some tunes in recent years that were pretty close to that same idea. The idea was you turn on the radio and you want to hear some music and up comes a commercial.

I haven't stopped and I don't plan on stoppin' any time soon.

I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.

Traveling these days has a lot of problems and also it wears you out more.

I've been able to do pretty well. I don't work as many consecutive nights as I used to, but I'm still working over 100 nights a year, so that's good for me.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere.

I'm playin' music for a certain type of person. Fortunately, there are more and more of us. At least there are more comin' to see me than there were 30 years ago or so.

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.

I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me.

But I got an audience that knows what I do. They usually show up, so I usually do pretty good.

The thing of playin' and singin' never bothered me.

I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

At this point, I don't listen to other people too much. I'm not really that affected by anyone.

It's as much fun as it ever was, you know, once I get there. Gettin' there is a little harder.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.

So I'm in my 51st year of playin' mostly nightclubs. I do some concerts.

I been getting good crowds. It only took 50 years.

There's a lot of terrible things goin' on all the time, but you gotta try and have some fun in the end.

I do some concerts. At the moment, I'm being helped a lot by a gig I play in London, which is Pizza Express.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing & instrumental personality.

When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.

I don't like the road. I love being on the track. I like being indoors and the fact I'm not battling past 200 other riders.

I'm a 21st-century guy, secure in who I am.

There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.

Forgiveness releases you from a past that no longer defines you. Allow yourself to move on.

You must never underestimate your opposition.

Preparing food is one of life's great joys, but a lot of times, parents ask their kids if they want to cook with them and then tell them to go peel a bag of potatoes. That's not cooking - that's working!

I can remember every outfit I wore to every party going back to 1983.

In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip.

Whatever we, as prospective participants unaware of our specific features, would desire society to be like is what, morally speaking, we ought to institute.

Don't judge yourself; simply return your attention to what's in front of you right now.

PepsiCo is a $63 billion company. Half the company is snacks, and half the company is beverages. We have a glorious snacks business and a glorious beverage business. We are extremely profitable. We are growing.

He didn't want me to become a musician, he wanted me to be a doctor, because he said singing was too hard.

Once I started to grow up, I realised that my parents are normal people and they can make mistakes.

If you dispute with me you will only quarrel with your bread and butter.