What attracts you to Sergei Rachmaninoff and Béla Bartok?
Béla Bartok was my hero more than Rachmaninoff. Some things are pretty obvious, like the melodies he uses in his orchestral pieces, but his interest in folk music is part of it. In school I loved his quartets. When I first got into the Cleveland Institute of Music [Paul] Hindemith was a favorite because he reminded me of Stan Kenton. I knew nothing about Mozart and thought he was elementary, but in five years he got so much better. I don’t listen to music very much now because it tends to influence what I am doing. I look more at paintings and that sort of thing. If somebody asked what recording I would take on a desert island, “4’33” of silence by John Cage would be my choice. ‘Clarity is the thing you are after.’ What is clarity in improvisation? It means listening to what you just played then reacting to that and making something out of it — which is not to say that you can’t push the envelope a lot too. You once said the guitar is still a mystery to you. Absolutely. You get all of
