“He’s a pianist who was really instrumental to me. He started in cabarets, and he did honky-tonkish music. He wasn’t classically trained, he was basically self-taught, and he did weird stuff, like compose music for specific rooms. It was like, ‘This is the lunch music area, and then there’s the children’s room suite.’ He tried to compose for orchestras, and he got help from [Claude] Debussy, but he didn’t really do it himself. But what he did do was utterly gorgeous. He was a weirdo, too. He only ate white stuff, and he had an umbrella collection in his apartment that he elected to keep open at all times. He was an odd fellow.”