Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm playin' the music I like.
I just have a lot off different influences.
I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old.
A young man ain't nothin' in the world these days
Ever since the world ended, I don't go out as much
I been getting good crowds. It only took 50 years.
I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me.
And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.
The thing of playin' and singin' never bothered me.
The things that really matter don't mix with idle chatter.
I haven't stopped and I don't plan on stoppin' any time soon.
All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.
I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.
Everybody cryin' mercy / When they don't know the meaning of the word.
So I'm in my 51st year of playin' mostly nightclubs. I do some concerts.
Traveling these days has a lot of problems and also it wears you out more.
I don't care what anyone does, as long as they go through the copyright office.
I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.
I didn't feel anything [frustraiting]. I just kept working 110 or 120 nights a year.
The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.
I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.
I finally decided if I was going to make a living, I was gonna have to come to New York.
I can't judge my own stuff. That's for others. But those are the three things that I admire.
It's as much fun as it ever was, you know, once I get there. Gettin' there is a little harder.
But I got an audience that knows what I do. They usually show up, so I usually do pretty good.
At this point, I don't listen to other people too much. I'm not really that affected by anyone.
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.
I never bothered about keeping track.Every now and then someone records one of my songs, and I get credit for it.
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.
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.
My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.
As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
[The producer told me:] "We can try one more record, and we'll see how that one does." Those records never did anything. My music never got mentioned. My color got mentioned.
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'm not inspired by songwriting at all; that took place years ago. I'm pretty well established, as far as my influences go. I don't listen to music anymore. It all sounds the same to me.
I told [my daughter Amy] at an early age that she had a good ear. But I didn't influence her music much. She's pretty much developed her style on her own, and she's a talented songwriter.
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 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 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.
I remember the first check I got from The Who's recording [of "Young Man Blues"]. I'd been getting checks for $10 and $15 and so forth, and this one was for a much larger amount than that. I thought it was a mistake.