I don’t remember what was going through my mind, but what was going through my body was fear and terror. I had been on the road with Johnny and working gigs and playing a lot of the organ clubs.
On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.
If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.
You’re just sort of searching for this ‘thing’ and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you’re improvising, at least the way I play, I’m trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.
Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces.
Every time I listen back to solos of mine I’ll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can’t stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don’t think so much like that
I just think TV is becoming more and more interesting in a way. Films are more and more derivative, you know, whether it’s ‘Transformers 2’ or ‘Shrek 5’, or it’s yet another iteration of another kind of clone of something else. It’s a bit depressing in a way.
I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.
‘The Blade Itself’ was my first book. Probably I should’ve tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.
I span the entire geek spectrum.
