You have to be concerned with yourself because if you're not on it all the time, nobody else is going to be.

One of the advantages of not having a record contract is that you can make your own mistakes, you don't need somebody else to organize them for you.

Let's say you have some chicken stock and you're making soup, and out of everything you can taste, some of the things you put in and some of the things you don't. So you start out with an African spice then you hear some Brazilian music, so then it changes. Then you hear Jamaican and it changes again. And the result depends on how much of each spice you put into it. Now, I've been putting in spices since I started playing professionally in 1945.

The reality is that what you find out is that your head is the medicine. If your head is not in the right place and you don't think positively, all the medicine technology in the world is not going to work.

The music we're playing now is based on my heritage, which is Russian, Romanian and Hungarian.

I was raised in Brooklyn, and I lived there for 59 years.

My youngest son, who is now the drummer in my band, lives in Brooklyn. My oldest son is about to move out to California, and my daughters are both out of town.