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.
I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old.
I’m improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.
I do some concerts. At the moment, I’m being helped a lot by a gig I play in London, which is Pizza Express.
And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.
I start out with words, with the idea, the line. Then after I get a line or two, I try to find what melodic line those lines would be suited to. As soon as I find the form I can finish the song in my head.
If it’s worth remembering, I’ll remember it. If something keeps coming back, if I keep thinking of that phrase, if I see manifestations of it at different times and different places, then I feel it’s worth making a song out of.
You always want to write the perfect song. But no one will ever write the perfect song, I guess. I would just like to write on that has all the elements of what I’m tring to do. And I’m working on it. I’m always working on it.
The idea was I’d never amount to anything in music, The theme there was that I was talented, but I wouldn’t work hard enough to do anything with it.
Ever since the world ended, I don’t go out as much.
My dad was a self-taught stride piano player. The myth is – I don’t whether it’s true or not – that he taught himself to play by watching a player piano.
As far as I’m concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.
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 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.
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.
My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.
I’m happy whenever anybody does my material. I don’t care what they do with it. I do what I want to with other people’s songs.
I was taking chemical engineering. But I went into the army after that. When I came out of the army, I was a different person. I met a lot of good jazz players in the army.
I never thought I was playing black music. I was just playing music, the stuff I liked. I sang blues at parties and things when I was a kid.
I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped taking music lessons. I never could read music very well, but I’ve still been doing it.
I don’t care what anyone does, as long as they go through the copyright office.