The pressure of show business is on all the time and show business is a fickle business. Whatever is popular now - that's all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I'm doing and why.

If I want to take a particular form of blues somewhere else I have the equipment to do it but I never even thought of it.

There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.

As far as piano players are concerned, Oscar Peterson is my very favorite. I also like McCoy Tyner. I think that the big jazz stars, both now and in the past...how shall I say it? These guys are as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them. People don't know it yet. If jazz survives and is put on a pedestal as an art form, the same as classical music has been through the years, a hundred years from now the kids will know who they were, with that kind of respect.

I'm a real rebel with a cause.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

I'm a nut for Bach as a composer.