And .I never said I disliked Paul's playing; I just disliked Paul as a young man that had some crazy habits.
And different ways of making guys play or not play and making guys comfortable or not comfortable.
And I love to play a good concert.
And there have been all kinds of wonderful people that work together very well.
And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.
And.there's a lot of leaders that will not feature their own men. I'm not one of them.
Every individual should be expressing themselves, whether a politician or a minister or a policeman.
Everybody has to go through a lot in jazz and in art to arrive where they want to.
I always want to remember that at the same time that we're playing what the critics used to like to label us as intellectual performances for universities and colleges, we are also playing at the Apollo in Harlem and black clubs all through the south and black universities.
I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.
I never wanted this kind of life that I'm still living.
I think that we had had some concert dates where we made a thousand dollars a night, but they weren't very many.
I was always the low man financially for years with my Trio and with the Quartet.
I'm always hoping for the nights that are inspired where you almost have an out of body experience.
I'm beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.
If I play a bad concert, I'm in a terrible mood until I play a good one.
If there's a deadline, I work late. If not, I like to have normal hours, and get up early and work.
It's Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can't explain it.
It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.
My dream was to have a steady job, was not to be on the road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a carpenter and knows he's gonna have a job.
My mother loved Chopin, and played Chopin all the time.
No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I've had to put my family through.
Now here's when you're a leader and you know you have a group that's really gonna go to the top if you can hold them together.
Oh, I made it so he would enjoy playing. Sure. But that's what you've got to do when you got four guys and each guy really wants to show what he can do.
One great job isn't gonna make it for you.
Relaxing is not a thing I do well.
So although I didn't play classical piano, I heard it, and it was a big influence in my life.
So many of my friends shouldn't have died and they just believed they were indestructible and they lived too hard and those things finally catch up with you.
That was after the War so, it was pretty dismal time for jazz. The big bands were starting not to make it anymore.
That's the thing that's hard for people to understand - that you can be very well known and have this kind of publicity and recognition and acknowledgement of a talent and so forth, but the pay is not commensurate with that until it builds.
The lights can really distract me, since I've had cataracts and cataracts removed.
The men were making close to a hundred a week. And I was trying to make a hundred a week but as the leader I always had to pay the union dues, the agents' fees and I would end up with less.
There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.
We don't know the power that's within our own bodies.
We wouldn't make enough money to be able to pay to get to the next town without going into the money that you held back from the men for taxes or union dues or whatever, you know.
Well Paul always felt he played better when he played with me.
Well psychologically there are good nights and there are nights that are not so good because the day has been so bad.
Well you - there's different ways of holding a group together.
What I try to do is get beyond thinking about it at all, and just be playing, and not being analytical.
What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.
What I wanted most was a steady job in San Francisco, year round.
What's more important is to play the way you want to play or play the way they want you to play?
When things are going well, I hate to quit.
Yeah, but that's what jazz is all about, is a dialogue or answering one another.
Yeah, well Eugene Wright, the bass player, was the rock that kept us no matter how far we were pushing in a harmonic or rhythmic direction, he kept us rooted.
You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.
You gotta figure out what's gonna motivate these guys to play their best, then they want to stay in the group.
You hate to turn these things down because for years we played on the Riviera every summer for the George Ring Jazz Festival at Nice.
You have to know each guy and adjust tto the personality of each one of the guys.
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