What surprises me is when people give me their mobile number. The other day, someone on a bus asked if I swear. I said I try not to, but of course I'm just a normal person. ↗
A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn't have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts. ↗
Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days. ↗
Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language. ↗
I think it's a great document of John Stevens' originality. At that time he was already much more fully formed in his conception than I was. I was sort of struggling to keep up, and sometimes it's pretty obvious. ↗
I think the solo playing, the decision to start playing solo, came out of having discovered what lay behind the doors that that technique opened for me. ↗
I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway. ↗
I've been to the studio several times, and it's not that I'm not happy with what I've got, but each time I come away, I feel that I've learned something that I want to work on. ↗
