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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

There's a lot of terrible things goin' on all the time, but you gotta try and have some fun in the end.