My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.
Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.
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.
Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can, there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.
The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point.
Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry.
In Las Vegas, the magnitude is impressive, but the humanity is gone. It feels like you're being intimidated out of your money instead of inviting you to come have this experience.
You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can't be entertained - or people who are afraid. You can't entertain a man who has no food.
There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura.
If you are bitter, you are like a dry leaf that you can just squash, and you can get blown away by the wind. There is much more wisdom in forgiveness.
I spend so much of my time working away, but I love being here. My family is in Somerset, and this is where my heart is.
Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.
I really worked with icons in the music business, which really had a strong effect on me. It wasn't just pick-up gigs.
Musicians are probably the most uncomfortable people in themselves in the world. Happiness, I think, only exists when you're a child and once you go past 11, unfortunately it's gone.
Now I believe that lovers should be draped in flowers and laid entwined together on a bed of clover and left there to sleep, left there to dream of their happiness.
Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?
Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.
I mean, the great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them.
Great cataclysmic things can go by and neither the orchestra nor the conductor are under the delusion that whether they make this or that gesture is going to be the deciding factor in how it comes out.
One of the great virtues, apart from the pleasure of performing these works, is that it's opened up an entirely new, expansive repertoire of American Jewish music.
And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.
