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 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.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

America can well expect to develop a goodly amount of composers for she has a goodly number of people.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.

The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.