My taste in music isn't limited to any one genre, and as a result my personal musical influences are wide and varied. I grew up in Manhattan with some of the great pioneers of the nightclub world of music, together with the masters of jazz and the blues. No one could avoid the experimental rock bands of the 1970s or the rock legends. 

I had it easy. When I spent years in Catholic Military boarding schools from the third to the eight grade of elementary school, I learned to read music and play the marching music of military bands on the trumpet, and played taps at night to put everyone to sleep on the bugle; or reveille in the morning to wake them up.

When I left for Europe in 1956, the trumpet was left behind.