I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

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.

In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that.

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

I'm a very, very stubborn man.

By the mid-70s, I wanted to get out of the business. I was tired anyway.