All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.
Ever since the world ended, I don't go out as much
The things that really matter don't mix with idle chatter.
Everybody cryin' mercy / When they don't know the meaning of the word.
I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me.
I been getting good crowds. It only took 50 years.
I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.
I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.
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.
The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.
I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.
I don't remember any impression [from blues].The blues was just everywhere in the Mississippi Delta. It was mostly black sharecroppers living there, and there was a lot of blues around. Sometimes the guys would sing the blues in the fields, working.
I'm playin' the music I like.
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'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 haven't stopped and I don't plan on stoppin' any time soon.
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 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.
As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.
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.
It was the British rockers that saved me. They brought me to a different generation altogether [in the 60th]. The Who and The Yardbirds and Georgie Fame and Van Morrison and all those people. The only person who ever did my songs in [ U.S] country was Bonnie Raitt.
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.
And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.
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.
I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.
