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"They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after me. At 16 I enrolled in something called continuing education. Once a month I'd go out to Jamaica, but I didn't take it seriously."
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"Before I started (college), that's the advice my dad gave me. He said to pick classes based on the teacher whenever you can, not the subject...his point was that good teachers are priceless. They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even when you don't know it."

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."

"Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book."
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"There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians."

"One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing."

"Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz."

"You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work."

"I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician."

"If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I've ever seen was in that period of 1960 to 1965. All of sudden they were handing out major label recording contracts like they were coming in Cracker Jack boxes."

"In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that."

"If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count."

"Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song."
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