When I was in high school, there's no doubt I was trying to swing like Tiger Woods when he first came on tour.
I've been in the studio when you go through a track and you run down a track and you know even before the singer starts singing, you know the track is swinging... you know you have a multimillion-seller hit - and what you're working on suddenly has magic.
The Metropole Orchestra is like Count Basie or Duke Ellington with strings... it's strings that swing. Strings that swing like Dizzy Gillespie... keep swinging, baby. And when you have all of that special excellence of the Metropole Orchestra, then your music just flies - it soars in a way that's really magical.
That is one of the great things about Test cricket, the ball. Sometimes it swings conventionally, sometimes it doesn't and sometimes it reverses.
When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.
Here's To Christmas' is something I'm really proud of and I think it stands up as something fun, but something that doesn't sound half bad too - an album to get everyone into the swing of Christmas!