Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

And then adds with a laugh, 'but in retrospect I think he may have been more sophisticated than we were.'

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song.