I heard this track in 1954 and it was kind of key in my life. THE MUSIC THAT INFLUENCED MY GENERATIONĪs soon as I heard skiffle, I loved it and I knew that I wanted to play it. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it. Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. We were all eager for more knowledge and this was a song that I learned from in terms of chord structure, and appropriate sound and meaning.
I loved the whole Porgy and Bess album and this track just epitomises what you would like to hear as a backdrop to summer. On that journey, I picked up on Miles Davis, who was a huge influence on me.
I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18. That was how I first heard the third movement of this piece, which is the pizzicato movement: it's all plucked. Get this: my dad used to listen to ice-skating on the radio – how do you listen to ice-skating? – but the music was great. As a really young child, I was listening to the echoes of the age before, music hall and stuff like that, as well as classical bits on the radio.