I was pretty much prepared because I was already playing in extremely good ways when I arrived from Europe because I played jazz four or five years before I arrived here.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.
I think I was supposed to play jazz.
You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.
I wanted to play some more grown-up music - jazz.
I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.
I was exposed to jazz early on.
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.
Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.
Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.
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