I would sit in at a jazz brunch [at sweet Basil] with Eddie Chamblee, who was a great tenor player. Really a kind man. The whole band was great.

It's a complicated story [hoe I got into music ]. I actually wrote a book about it, titled For Sue.

[Manhattan School Of Music] didn't' have a jazz undergraduate program at the time so I played a semester in the big band. There was a graduate program. But I wasn't really that involved in jazz yet.

So often the difference between success and failure is belief. Belief leads to action and execution.

There are a lot of people that impacted me. I remember hearing Oscar Peterson live at the Blue Note, which was very expensive, but... $50 in the '80s... hard to come up with. But it was amazing.

One time, I think it was my third lesson third or fourth lesson. Kim Parker and he picked me up at the bus station. And she just said, "Phil [Wood] has been up all night. He's heartbroken. Bud Johnson died last night." And Bud Johnson, like Zoot [Sims] and Al [Cohn] had been mentors to him.

We had Bob's [Gordon] records, and he's on Clifford Brown's first record as a leader. I believe it was Clifford Brown's first record as a leader and had the original versions of Daahoud and Joy Spring that were arranged by Bob's best friend, the West Coast tenor player named Jack Montrose, who I later met.