I'm happy whenever anybody does my material. I don't care what they do with it. I do what I want to with other people's songs.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.

I told [my daughter Amy] at an early age that she had a good ear. But I didn't influence her music much. She's pretty much developed her style on her own, and she's a talented songwriter.

There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

I've heard some tunes in recent years that were pretty close to that same idea. The idea was you turn on the radio and you want to hear some music and up comes a commercial.