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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 just have a lot off different influences. "

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

" I'm playin' the music I like. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "