Sonny Rollins

It's happened to me when I've had to lay off for a period of time.

For other things, I'm not certain.

I practice a lot of things, but I read once where my friend Mike Sroach said that a lot of musicians shouldn't really practice.

Practicing is cheating after you reach a certain point.

So that may be right, but in the case of just keeping my armature from bleeding and my lip from splitting, I like to play a certain amount every day, you know.

Yeah, a lot of them are songs that I heard when I was a youngster.

When I was growing up, the big thing to do every week was go to the movies on Saturday.

And on Saturday, we used to see a lot of these movies that had these scores on it by some of the composers.

And we'd see Louis Armstrong in pictures and different musical personalities that I enjoyed a lot.

Of course, I also heard music.

I ran the house and so on, but the movies did provide a certain large part, I think, of some of the things that I play today, you know.

I would say...

Basically, yes.

People like Coltrane and Clifford Brown, we all had an appreciation of what they would call today the standard songs.

In my case, I might have found some more obscure songs.

Well, they might have thought so, but they wouldn't dare to say it.

It was my gig, you know.

That's right.

Yeah, well, I was the youngest child.

I have an older brother who was a very fine classical violinist.