“I was raised to ignore it. It was something my mother's generation saw as an embarrassment. It was corny and archaic and not pushed as something an up-and-coming musician wanted to learn. My mother wanted me to write Broadway shows.”
“All of a sudden, instead of 100 or 200 people in the audience we were playing for 1,000 to 2,000 people. People wanted to re-discover this stuff that was gone for 60 years.”
“When I was 19, I started taking it seriously. I started copying my grandfather's 78s and talking to the older generation who played it, learning their stories and their music and eventually teaching it at the New England Conservatory of Music.”
