Through the years I've found that I prefer live playing to recording. I still do lots of recording - but I treasure the live shows.
I can pay my rent now. I guess I could always do that, but now I can get an apartment with heat.
I consider myself a serious musician. Doing a comedy show does not take away from that in any way.
I like pastels and lighter shades on darker skins. I feel like it lifts everything and accentuates being chocolate.
I do some concerts. At the moment, I'm being helped a lot by a gig I play in London, which is Pizza Express.
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.
Brand-new research suggests that the faster you take weight off, the longer you keep it off. Now that's a reason for dieters everywhere to rejoice.
It's impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I've never been so much into runs as making single notes cry.
I have done some things that I'm very proud of. I don't think you can say any more than that, really.
I go through about two Fender mediums a night because I don't pick straight down; it's sort of sideways, and it shaves them off.
I feel I've been blessed with a gift of creativity and composition. That's why I've been able to keep going.
Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.
When Peter Gabriel left, we obviously lost a very strong stage performer. Phil hasn't replaced him; Phil's done a different thing.
I would feel horrible to think I had put my name on a pistol permit and allowed someone to carry around a gun and they committed another crime.
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.
I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples.
When I was a kid I never learned to play. I actually got in bands through watching people play and copying them.
Usually I can hear the pianos, the saxophone, and usually I can hear Ronnie. But I really need to listen to Keith and Mick. The rest of the band is sort of an embellishment to that.
A lot of our tracks have sounded a lot better than I thought they would because of recording, mixing, and because I probably didn't hear it that way. I'm not a songwriter.
