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

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.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Music is not man's invention, but his heritage from the blessed spirits.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.

The Internet makes it possible for people like me to live the way I do now. Without it, I'd have to be in New York or some other city. I think the Internet is the greatest invention in history after antibiotics.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

Wonderful invention, the phonograph. Keeps a man alive long after he's dead.

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.