When I'd hear something that sounded like I could follow it - most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway - I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.

We were a band who made it very, very big. That's all.

Being such a big band is never a problem but it can be distracting.

When I was 15, I was working for a radio band in Shreveport. Cliff Bruner, the hottest Texas fiddler of them all, was on the same package shows, playing for Jimmie Davis.

I always told the people at Cal Arts that if they wanted me to do Jazz studies, first of all, there couldn't be a big band within 500 miles and that I could do what I wanted to do. And they said I could.

It was by listening to Goodman's band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.