On the 63rd Birth Anniversary Of Michael Brecker, A 2000 DownBeat Article

In 2000 I had the honor of writing a long cover story for DownBeat about the extraordinary tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker on the occasion of his then-current CD, Time Is Of The Essence. He’d joined me several years before on WKCR, and, as the ’00s progressed, I was asked to write publicity bios for several of his recordings. It’s hard to believe he’s been gone for five years—today would be his 63rd birthday.

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Michael Brecker (Downbeat Article):

At fifty, Michael Brecker is perhaps the most copied living saxophonist, During his thirty years as a professional improviser, he’s made his mark on every conceivable musical circumstance, from hard core jazz to hard core pop. Brecker no longer needs to prove anything to anyone, but a few holes remained in his resume at the beginning of 1999.

For one thing, the tenor saxophonist had never explored the capacious sonic field of the organ-guitar rhythm section, a mainstay for any young saxman coming up, as Brecker did, in an organ town like ‘60s Philadelphia.  Nor had Brecker, whose debt on every level to the John Coltrane Quartet is no secret, ever locked horns in a studio with drum innovator Elvin Jones, a lifelong hero.

Brecker rectifies both gaps on Time Is Of The Essence [Verve], his third consecutive release devoted to full-bore improvising.  Hammond futurist Larry Goldings and guitar icon Pat Metheny frame the leader’s urgent declamations, while elder statesman Jones and two descendants — Jeff Watts and Bill Stewart, cutting-edge tradition piggybackers with their own trapset dialects — sculpt the rhythm flow on three selections apiece. Goldings, a proactive comper and imaginative soloist, trumps the leader’s ideas and tosses out intriguing postulations; Metheny, an infrequent visitor to the organ function, plays with bluesy feel and spare discretion.  With a tone whose muscularity is less buff and more fluid than some years back, Brecker plays with characteristic blue-flame-to-white-heat clarity, a hungry master searching for — and often reaching — the next level.

For Brecker — who came of age when seminal language-makers like Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk were alive and creative, when today’s “classic” Blue Note albums were hot off the presses — the search seems to involve reaching out to younger musicians like Watts and Goldings whose aesthetic embraces investigating and revitalizing the tradition, not exploding it.

“That’s an interesting point,” Brecker responds when I propose this idea to him.  He’s tall, fit, bald with a trim salt-and-pepper goatee, stylishly spectacled.  He speaks in measured tones belying the sturm und drang that characterizes his tenor saxophone voice.  “The dynamics of the musical scene were quite different when I first arrived in New York, and we were coming from a different place.  The advent of the newer generation of musicians allows me to play in the jazz tradition in a way that doesn’t feel retro.  It feels fresh.  ‘Time Is Of The Essence’ involves a certain amount of looking back.”

Brecker’s comfort level with the organ dates to childhood; his father, Robert, a lawyer and semiprofessional jazz pianist, even brought a Hammond B3 for the household.  “My father and I played it a bit,” Brecker recalls, “and my brother Randy got pretty good on it.  I listened to organ records by Jimmy Smith and Shirley Scott with Stanley Turrentine, plus my Dad took me to hear Jimmy Smith in Philly, where organ trios played all over the city.  Every day as a teenager after school I played drums along with Larry Young’s Unity, which Elvin is on, and both saxophone and drums along with Coltrane records like A Love Supreme.  I played a lot with Eric Gravatt, an incredible drummer who was living in Philadelphia then, who later played with McCoy Tyner and Weather Report,  He exposed me to a lot of things I hadn’t heard, and different ways of playing.  We did a lot of duet playing, just drums and saxophone.  He used to set an alarm clock for an hour, and we’d improvise straight through — killin’!”

We’re sitting in the cluttered conference room of his management suite high above Times Square.  The closed windows cannot mute the blare of traffic and rattle of nearby construction.  Distracted by the cacophony from the street, Brecker lifts his lanky frame from the chair, strides to the window and peers up and down to ascertain that it indeed is closed.  A row of meteorites, from the private stock of manager Darryl Pitt, who sells them, lies on a shelf against the wall.  Brecker looks for one, picks it up, ponders it, has me feel its dense heft and smooth metallic bottom.  We marvel at the wonders of the universe, then return to the table to continue the third degree.

“Why this record now?  I can honestly say I don’t know!” he laughs.  I didn’t think of it in terms of, ‘Oh, now it’s the millennium and it’s time for an organ record.  I just knew that I wanted to record with Larry Goldings.  His sensibility reminds me of Larry Young.  I love everything about Larry’s playing — his sound and sense of time.  He’s funky as hell, and has a comprehensive harmonic palette that’s unusual for an organist — possibly because he’s also a superb pianist.  I thought it would be fabulous to couple him with Pat, which turned out to be a natural.  Pat plays compositionally, melodically, intensely; he he has his own sound which blends with mine in a way that pleases my ear.  I love Pat’s thinking process, quick and very decisive.  My last three records have all been jazz, where you have only a few days to resolve problems, unlike more produced records with electronics where the mixes are more convoluted and complex.  When I’m sitting on the fence Pat will express very firm opinions and force me to make a decision.”

Brecker credits a five-week European tour two decades ago with Metheny, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Jack deJohnette, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden, documented on ‘80/’81 (ECM), as a pivotal transition in a career during which he’d played with Horace Silver, Billy Cobham, the Brecker Brothers, and on several hundred studio dates as the most in-demand session saxophonist in the world.

“I’d moved to New York in ‘69,” he notes, “and became involved in a loosely organized association of about 25 creative players who had been playing in each other’s lofts that was basically led by Dave Liebman with the assistance of Richie Beirach,” he relates.  “It was called Free Life Communication, and we put on our own concerts, playing a lot of very free music.  It was a special time to be in New York.  That’s when the so-called boundaries between what was then Pop music and Jazz were becoming very blurry, and those of us who experimented with combining R&B rhythms with jazz harmony began to develop a music that was a fusion, if you’ll excuse the word, of various elements.  The music was fresh, exciting, powerful and exhilarating.  We really had no word for it; at the time it was loosely referred to as Jazz-Rock.  The culmination of that for me was the group initially referred to as Dreams, which recorded for Columbia.  Our milieu dispersed because we started getting gigs, and we all left that loft scene and branched out.

“During the tour with Pat, Charlie and Jack I experienced freedom differently than in the early New York days.  It was such an open environment; the way they interacted, the way the music was conceptualized made me feel a tremendous sense of freedom, like I could play anything.  There was a type of communication in present time on stage that I hadn’t experienced before.  Something about it caused a directional shift in my approach to playing.”

In a subsequent telephone conversation, Metheny clarifies the point. “I’ve heard Mike and some of his friends say he came back from that tour a changed person, which makes me feel really good!  “I wrote that music for the way I imagined he sounded.  His first Impulse record had basically the same band as 80/’81, and we took up where that record left off.  Mike has evolved into a great composer, which you could see coming with the Brecker Brothers.  Regardless of what anyone thinks of them stylistically, the writing is really advanced.  Very little three-horn writing in any sphere today approaches the sophistication of the three-horn writing on the first Brecker Brothers record 25 years ago.  I go to Smalls all the time and hear guys play; I don’t hear anyone writing three-horn charts that hip.

“Michael’s music is so dense, the hardest music I could imagine playing.  That’s true on all three of his records I’ve been on, and it’s incredibly flattering that he asked me to play on them.  He finds ways to play straight lines through really complicated sets of changes.  I look up to Brecker the way I do to Herbie Hancock.  They remind me of each other in that both are so advanced harmonically that it just isn’t an issue.  I would aspire to that level of harmonic wisdom.  Tales From the Hudson is the date I point to as the most satisfying I’ve done as a sideman in the past few years, or maybe really ever.  To me, that kind of playing, those kinds of tunes, the way the record felt as a whole, is what Modern Jazz is in the ‘90s.  The new one is a continuation, and compositionally it’s the best of them all.”

Brecker’s dance to the vivid beats of the different drummers on Time Is Of The Essence takes the session beyond being just another well played all-star date.  “In the last few years I’ve played a lot with Jeff Watts, which is enormous fun,” he remarks.  “He plays conversationally, constantly feeds me ideas and responds to ideas in present time, gets rhythmic layers going without sacrificing the swing.  Bill Stewart has taken the drum scene by storm.  He’s come in with his own language, a sensibility on the instrument that I’ve never heard.  He has a dry sense of humor, great warmth, tremendous dynamics.  He’s a groove-master, also a conversational player but in a different way than Tain.  It’s interesting that both Bill and Tain are tremendous composers, and I think that carries over into their playing.”

During a Brecker-Metheny brainstorming session, the guitarist, recalling Unity, suggested including Elvin Jones.  “I thought it was a great idea,” Brecker relates.  “I’d sat in with Elvin one night at Slugs in 1970 or ‘71 when Frank Foster and Joe Farrell were playing with him, and later I met him over dinner at a friend’s house, but we hadn’t really played.  I was thrilled to have him, because he’s one of my idols, and such a consummate artist in every way.  The beat even felt wider than I expected, like an open field.  It feels like utter freedom playing with him.”

Reciprocating, Jones asked Brecker to join a first-class edition of the Jazz Machine for his 72nd birthday week at Manhattan’s Blue Note in October, allotting his guest a ballad feature per set, which included “Body and Soul” and “Round Midnight.”  “I had a lot of fun, and learned a few things, too,” Brecker remarks.  “By the end of the week I was using a less notey rhythmic approach, leaving more space, generally playing less, which seemed to allow the music more room to breathe.”

Not that Brecker’s present sound is anywhere near serene or spare.  Yet a quality of intuitive reflection — perhaps the term is mature wisdom — inflects his locutions on recent recordings and guest shots.  The latter occur with increasingly less frequency than the years when he accumulated most of the 525 sideman appearances cited in the February 1998 discography from http://www.michaelbrecker.com, which reads like a history of ‘70s-‘80s Pop and Fusion — Paul Simon, James Taylor, Frank Zappa, George Clinton, Chaka Khan, Lou Reed and dozens more.

Why did Brecker’s sound become an iconic signifier of the period?  “My roots were a combination of jazz and R&B,” Brecker reflects matter-of-factly. “I grew up in Philadelphia listening to Miles and Trane, Clifford Brown, Cannonball Adderley, George Coleman (I could go on and on), as well as R&B and Rock.  I genuinely loved them both, and happened to have a sensibility that let me go in many directions.  It was never my plan to end up in the studios — not that I had a plan.  It really started through the horn section in Dreams.  Randy is so great in so many different contexts, and he already was established in New York.  Dreams made a couple of records for Columbia, became known as a section after a few more records, and a there was a chain reaction.”

But there’s more to Brecker’s aura than felicitous timing, superhero chops, and enviable ability to size up a situation instantly and conjure an apropos, often poetic response.  It’s called respect, manifested in study and preparation.  Consider his duo with Richard Bona on the young Cameroonian bassist-guitarist-vocalist-drummer’s recently issued Scenes From My Life.

“If Michael was in my country, people would call him a wizard!” Bona exclaims.  “This piece, ‘Konda Djanea,’ is a 6/8 rhythm from the Oualla people on the west coast of Cameroon.  There is a certain way to phrase it.  You cannot just blow anything; it’s going right to the heart.  I didn’t send him tapes before we went in the studio, because I didn’t want him to get familiar with it.  I wanted him just to bring his own thing.  I knew he could blow on that, and it happened exactly how I heard it!  Michael has listened to this music for years, has learned it and understands it.  And not just music from Cameroon, but a lot of different music.  He’s a very serious, open-minded musician with a high level of understanding.”

Pat Metheny agrees with Bona’s assessment.  “Sometimes I hear people put him down — ‘Oh, it’s technical and all flash,’” he says.  “I’d like to see any of them follow him anywhere.  Following a Mike Brecker solo is like nothing else that I have ever experienced, and very few musicians on any instrument can do it.  It’s because he’s deep!  Man, by the time he gets done with an audience, people are standing on their chairs screaming.  He gets to people under their skin, and that’s what makes him heavy.  He can just keep going, the way Herbie Hancock can.  And it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that technical stuff.”

Bassist John Patitucci, a friend and collaborator for close to twenty years who has employed Brecker on 6 albums, is well-positioned to analyze the saxophonist’s mystique.  “Michael is a darn good drummer in an Elvin kind of style, and he can swing,” he observes.  “From a rhythm section standpoint, time is the communication link, the mode of speech; his time is flexible and incredibly strong, which is very appealing.  He’s got the history of the horn in his playing, yet he was able to forge a personal sound and statement, which is very hard to find among post-Coltrane guys.  His sound was always very fat and warm; maybe it’s a little darker now than before.  I’m sure any composer who has ever worked with him is impressed with his ability to assimilate a melody emotionally and lyrically, and deliver it with power and vulnerability at the same time — there’s a personality attached to it.  He’s an influence in all styles, which is also rare; not many real jazz musicians are able to internalize the stylistic nuances of other musics.  Michael is very self-effacing and self-critical, but a brilliant human being, yet very approachable, which is rare for someone that brilliant.  For instance, he’s coached me extensively in African music — what records to get and so forth.”

Brecker’s coach was Barry Rogers, the pioneering trombonist with Eddie Palmieri, and a member of the Dreams horn section.  “Barry was my first close friend in New York,” Brecker recalls.  “I miss him.  He was older than me, and he took me under his wing, helped me feel comfortable living in New York.  He was the first to play me African music (out of Guinea, to be exact), and I was smitten by it.  He was the first to play me Cajun music and Latin music.  Barry could take music apart and analyze it very well, and he experienced it on a very deep level, spiritually and emotionally, with tremendous excitement — a very basic instinct that I was attracted to.  We have certain similarities.  I definitely don’t have his ability to communicate excitement, but we were excited by the same things — a certain rhythmic and harmonic tension and release that gets my skin going, that reaches me, as it reached Barry, in a deep emotional-spiritual place.”

In middle age, does Brecker now find he can access the spiritual fount of invention more readily?  “I can’t comment, even off the record,” he says.  “There’s so much going on in that area.  Isn’t that weird?”  Is he doing non-musical things in preparation?  “Yes.”  His regimen?  He utters some nonsense syllables.  Exercise?  “Absolutely.”  Meditation?   “A bit.”  Anything else?  He folds his lower teeth over his upper lip in a mock grimace. “It’s personal stuff.”

Moving from metaphysics to the tangible, Brecker still spends plenty of time in the practice room.  “When I’m on the road, it’s difficult to practice,” he says.  “I try go to soundchecks a little early, and practice before the gig, at the gig.  I don’t like to play in hotel rooms because I’m self-conscious about bothering other people.  When I’m home and have the time and some ideas, I enjoy practicing.  I enjoy the experience of learning new things, then watching it come out in the playing.  I never really work on technique per se.  Sometimes I practice simple things, filling in holes in my knowledge.  I always write down a list of new ideas, like interesting note relationships, and I work on them at home.  Eventually it comes out in my playing.  It comes out better when I don’t try to force it, but just try and learn things and then let it take its course.”

Brecker’s immersion in African music reached another level during Paul Simon’s 1991 Graceland tour, when he met the bassist Armand Sabal-Lecco, and the Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini.  “Having the opportunity to be around them was like a door swinging open, because they were a direct source I could ask questions to,” he says.  “If we were listening to something, I’d first ask where one was, what the words meant.  I’d ask about the structure, the meaning of the rhythm, whether they were hearing it in 6 or in 12 or in 3 or in 4 or in 9.  Armand would tap the rhythm on my arm as he heard it, which often was very different from where I was hearing it.”

Does he see himself blending African tropes with his recent more vernacular-oriented style? “I’m actually looking at it fairly closely right now, though it’s difficult for me for me to articulate it just yet.  But it does play a big part of my music in the future.  Jazz has its origins in Africa, so the aesthetic is built into the music automatically.  At the same time there’s been constant back-and-forth cross pollination; you hear the influence of jazz in African music today and vice-versa.  Even saying ‘African music’ is misleading because it’s so wildly diverse, with so many varieties coming off the continent.  In conceptualizing a future project, I’m thinking more in terms of musicians that I would play with.”

That open-ended intersection of personalities is what we hear throughout Time Is Of The Essence.  “Compared to other instruments, the saxophone is relatively easy,” the four-time Grammy winner and father of two muses.  “Because it’s possible to play so much on it, what’s difficult is learning to edit.  Certainly my playing is more relaxed than it’s ever been,  Maybe some of that is just through age, growing up a bit.”

For Cecil Taylor’s 83rd Birthday, A Jazziz Article From 2001

Master pianist and meta-musician-poet-dancer Cecil Taylor turns 83 today. I had the honor of writing a lengthy feature about him in 2001 for Jazziz, which I’ve appended below, as well as the transcripts of phone interviews that Andrew Cyrille and Tony Oxley graciously gave me towards this  project.

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 ”The best preparation for playing with Cecil Taylor is to be fit and open your ears.  Things happen that have nothing to do with strategy or even preparation.  The joy is so much more immense if you prepare yourself to go where the music will take you, and not try and make it go where perhaps you want it or where you think it might go.” — Tony Oxley.
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For three weeks in February, in a smallish basement performance space at the Turtle Bay Music School on Manhattan’s East 52nd Street, the meta-virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor guided a hand-picked master class — the final iteration comprised 11 sax and woodwinds, one recorder, one trumpet, one bass trombone, six pianists, one guitar, two violins, two vibraphones, one bass, two trapset, one percussion, one voice, and includes a poet and a painter — through ten intense rehersals of ten of his compositions.  Each musician paid $300 for the opportunity to observe how Taylor organizes material, how he chooses to express it, how he shapes it into strong images, how he makes the drama develop.

Around four o’clock on the final day, the orchestra was concluding their “dress rehearsal” with a spontaneous joyful roar.  After a dinner break, they were to reassemble for a culminating, self-conducted public concert, to be followed by a Taylor performance with as-yet undetermined personnel.  I sat in the pale light of the school’s foyer with Trudy Morse, Taylor’s confidante and frequent liaison to the outside world.  A mother of six with 20 grandchildren, Morse is 82, six months removed from her third near-death experience and three months past major surgery, but her voice is clear, her diction precise, her grip firm, and her eyes probe you like a laser beam.

Shortly after the death of her husband in 1987, Morse traveled to Huddersfield, U.K., to attend an electronic music festival, where she witnessed a concert featuring pianists Roger Woodward — performing Ianis Xenakis’ “Herma,” “Evryali” and “Mists” — and Cecil Taylor.  At the post-concert lecture-interview, she perceived amongst the gathered cognoscenti a tone of condescension towards Taylor as a “jazz artist.”

“This puzzled me,” she relates.  “I stood up and apologized to the scholars, and asked them if they understood Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  One man responded, ‘What are you talking about?’  I said, ‘Well, Heisenberg said that the spectator actually controls the experiment.  I would suggest to you that in music it’s the same.  We bring something to this concert.  That’s the way Cecil Taylor strikes me, although I don’t know him personally.’  Cecil Taylor suddenly looked at me and wondered who I was.  I sat down.  Later I noticed that he kept turning pages of music with very interesting notation.  I said, ‘Mr. Taylor, I don’t mean to be too curious, but what kind of notation and whose works are these?’  From then on, it’s history.  Cecil Taylor puzzled me enough that I accepted his invitation to tour with him.  I’ve been touring ever since.”

Morse met Taylor a little more than a year after the death of his significant other in music, the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, his collaborator and alterego since 1961.  From 1964 to 1975, Lyons and the drummer Andrew Cyrille developed with Taylor a way of collectively improvising with furious lucidity off of shapes and structures at whirlwind velocities that picked up where the likes of Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker and Max Roach left off.  Their investigations, documented in the pathbreaking recordings “Unit Structures” and “Conquistador,” inspired musicians around the world as a guidepost to the future.

Over the phone, Cyrille described their process: “As the years went by, after we began to play together consistently, Cecil would say, ‘This is our music.’  He meant ‘our’ inclusively, because we were all creating it from whatever we brought to the table.  I’d say, ‘Is there anything you want me to play in particular?’  I think only twice during the eleven years I played with him did he ever say, ‘Play five beats of this’ or ‘give me three beats of that.’  We would rehearse, listen for hours upon hours, days at a time.  It opened me up and allowed me to try things that I had never played before.

No matter how deeply Taylor, Lyons and Cyrille ascended to the outer partials of abstraction, their connection to the jazz lifeblood was implicit.  After 1975, when Cyrille stopped playing full-time with Taylor, the pianist worked with a succession of drummers — Ronald Shannon Jackson, Jerome Cooper, Steve McCall — who postulated definite rhythmic ideas, bringing forth a certain tension between the personalities from the contrast, the opposition, the push-and-pull.  After 1986, Lyons was no longer available to demonstrate instantaneously and authoritatively how his notes should be phrased, and Taylor — whose aversion to authority or canons or systems of any sort is legend — had to develop a sort of pedagogy by which he could concretely communicate his intentions and maximize the understanding of the other musicians.

During the ’80s Taylor began to crack open a Pandora’s Box of improvisational possibility in encounters with Max Roach, with AACM individualists like Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Leroy Jenkins, and Thurman Barker, and with European outcats like Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stanko, John Tchicai and Peter Brotzmann.  He increasingly incorporated his authoritative knowledge of Native American, African and Japanese ritual into his performances.  Then festivals in Berlin and Amsterdam in 1986 and 1987 spurred him to focus more steadily on Europe not only as a welcoming theater for his music, but as a source of broadening improvisational nourishment.

Taylor’s inexorable forward march gained irreversible momentum during a June 1988 residency in Berlin that juxtaposed him with the creme de la creme of European free improvisers in a series of concerts documented on 13 CDs on FMP.  There followed consequential [visits] in 1989, 1990 and 1991 that left a permanent mark on the European scene.  During those years Taylor collaborated on several hundred occasions with the English drummer Tony Oxley, whose capacious tonal palette has inspired comparisons to an improvising Varese or Harry Partch.  Taylor now employs in his various units such virtuosi from the European speculative improv community as drummer Paul Lovens, cellist Tristan Honsegger, and soprano saxophonist Harri Sjostrom.  Recent encounters include improvised colloquies with Oxley, Derek Bailey, Barry Guy, and the American vibraphonist Joe Locke, three supreme duets with Max Roach, six with Elvin Jones, and a 1998 meeting with Andrew Cyrille.

“Cecil was very sharp,” Cyrille recalled.  “We had a magical dialogue.  This kind of music and improvising is a matter of very close listening and trading of information.  It’s like a game.  We put forth sounds, ideas, rhythms, melodic fragments that turn into much longer statements, and we surprise each other with replies and continue to evolve within the dialogue.  It can be endless.  And when we decide to resolve what’s happening, it’s as though we’ve finished a conversation.  We’ve grown, matured, to some degree even mellowed.  It’s always a struggle to create art.  But the way the effort is put forth is so much smoother and nuanced.  We’re so much more confident with the language than we were.”
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The Turtle Bay project gestated prosaically.  At a party in March 1999, Morse met the guitarist Bruce Eisenbeil, a faculty member.  She inquired whether the school, which has neither a jazz nor an avant-garde tradition, would be interested in hosting such an event.  Eisenbeil investigated.  The answer was yes, providing Eisenbeil would organize it.  Needing to recruit 20 participants to meet expenses, Eisenbeil sent a mass email announcement to several contact lists and a slew of websites, and received 40 responses.

The age range of the musicians who gathered for the first rehearsal was  12 to 60.  Apart from a few Taylor veterans — violinist Ramsey Ameen (1978-1980) and Elliott Levin (a veteran of a 1973 Taylor workshop at Glassboro State University and of an octet that formed from a huge orchestra project at the Knitting Factory in 1995) — they had no idea what to expect from the maestro, a sylph-like man who retains the elastic musculature of a dancer one month shy of his 72nd birthday.  Dressed for work in stocking feet, black stocking cap, gray sweatshirt tie-dyed orange on one side, pants dyed white-aquamarine on the left and pink-gray on the right, Taylor first asked each participant to take a one-minute solo.  Speaking quietly, in calm, declarative sentences, he dictated a sequence of chords, then sang the line with a variety of attacks.  “Whatever you play, play it so people who hear it can hear the magic,” he urged.  “Try to remain connected; I want you to have control of each note you play.”  The musicians separated into sections; Morse strolled from point to point bearing a pot of hot tea.  With his brisk, precise dancer’s movements, Taylor glided to the trumpets and to the strings, imparted information, then sprang to the stage to recite another chordal sequence, seemingly conjured in instant response to what he was hearing, which he demonstrated with stunning precision on the piano.

“Play notes exactly/the way they are supposed/to be played,” he intoned, punctuating his words with well-timed vertical hand-chops.  “I played you just a single line.  Unless you play this extension chord, you have all sorts of possibilities within that sound.”  After a break, Taylor read off another passage, fine-tuned each section with a total command of detail, then played the passage with his left hand and launched into seven or eight variations.  Tenorist Moshe Ras spontaneously applauded, and embarked on a few minutes of spirit-catching through his horn.

Taylor concluded the session with a statement of purpose.  “There will be time for solos,” he told the ensemble.  “But we have to play so that everybody can get the information.  Each of you has the right to say, ‘I would like to hear this part over again.’  Each section has its technical problem.  What is the relationship of the note to the overall structure?  I can show you where everything is connected, but I don’t want to be in the position of telling you how to play it.  Where do you want to begin?  How do you want to proceed?”
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Over the course of the next nine rehearsals, several key themes emerged.  During the second session Taylor distributed photocopies of his scores, giving the musicians a chance to look at how he thinks about tones.  He divides the scores into small modules, which he calls quadrants.  Each has specific rules, with cues and gestures as to how they can be played, and each fits with the others in some manner.  He uses neither bar lines nor staves, but presents the notes as pictographically arranged hieroglyphs of letters, ascending from A to G and descending from G to A, with register and pitch indicated specifically according to the distance in whole steps from middle C.  They look like the branches of a tree, abstract landscapes of plateaus and mountains and valleys, perhaps a graphic representation of a dance.

“The scores seem to be what I would call fields,” says Dan Marmorstein, a composer-pianist whose friendship with Taylor dates to 1985.  “Each page might have a group of 12 to 20 sections of notes.  Each section might notate a melody or group of melodies (sometimes repeats are specified), but it might also be suggestive of a certain collection of notes that can be treated as a scale or mode.  Part of the fun is too discover the possibilities of combining these notes in different ways.  Soometimes Cecil stacks sequences lines of tones, and you get a sequence of diads or triads or polyphonic chords.  These areas of the score can be very dense, and once again, the player has to keep alert and on his toes and decide whether to deal with the vertical stacks and the horizontal lines as consecutive tones or as simultaneously voiced chords.

“The musicians are asked to breathe their own poetry into these melodies and shape them as they will according to their own library of experiences.  This being said, Cecil will often play the line on the piano and expect that we will be capable of hearing that this is the way he wants it to sound.  Sometimes you can hear it, but sometimes if he plays it with his own customary incessantly florid fluidity, it can be difficult to hear the bare skeleton; he’s asking us to sketch the daisy when he’s given us a daisy surrounded by roses and orchids and African violets.  Cecil sometimes simply is playing a melody voiced in four octaves.  Of course, when he does it, it sounds like he is playing single notes on the piano — with authority!”]

Taylor is able to process instantly all the possible permutations of each quadrant, and splice them together in endless combinations.  But how are mere mortals to self-orchestrate?  For example, how to navigate section-to-section transitions?  Once he suggested: “Play it as many times as it is rhythmically of interest.  Play dynamics.  When it’s exhausted, that’s when it ends.  I am only giving you suggestions.”

The essential issue facing the orchestra was how to sustain a dynamic level that kept them dancing in and out of the vortex, like a magician who enters the maelstrom of a column of fire and exits unscathed.  Taylor incessantly emphasized the imperative, in Marmorstein’s words, “to play in such a way that they could leave room, make space, and listen to one another.”  Early on, he offered a lyric sequence at the piano, then asked each section to repeat it.  “Play it as soft as you can,” he told the saxophones.  “Tenors, think of Ben Webster.  Think of the breath.  Whoo-oosh. It should float.”  He distributed the next section, which began with a three-note sequence for the tenors followed by a three-note response by the strings, commenting, “This piece is rather rapid.  After all, that was pastoral.  This is FIRE.”

Attention to breath, the silence before the note, is crucial. As the ensemble worked through possible approaches to Section 10, Taylor gave a telling exhortation.  “After each sound you’ve got do this” — he inhaled — “so that each component becomes very clear.”  One sound is exploding out; the next time when you repeat it, it’s exploding in — in other words, it’s becoming softer.  We want to separate each quadrant, so that it doesn’t become a blur.  It’s the continuation of the piece.”

Occasionally Taylor would decline to demonstrate.  To a saxophonist who asked him to phrase a sequence, Taylor responded, “No, I’ve done that. It’s an emotion; you didn’t just walk into the room.”  But soon after, Taylor stated, “We’re going to change the mood,” and set up a rolling bass line reminiscent of Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy,” tossing it off on the left hand with flawless nonchalance.  Another time Taylor sang a four-note sequence and asked the group to play it twice.  “But I also want you to break up the rhythm,” he added.  “These notes are divided into different rhythmic registers, and that could be the basis of a whole improvisational…” Rather than complete his sentence, Taylor demonstrated five or six variations at half-speed.  “Anything is possible,” he said.  “Let’s try it.”
_________________________________________________________________

By the day of the concert, Taylor had convinced the ensemble, now winnowed down to 30 members, that anything WAS possible.

Bruce Eisenbeil compared Taylor’s organic process of orchestrating, arranging and composing during the rehearsal, coping with the colors and timbres of every instrument in real time, to the way Duke Ellington would state a chord, play it on the piano, and begin assigning notes to specific members of the orchestra.  “Cecil’s musical vocabulary speaks of what’s going on today,” Eisenbeil said.  “His body of work is idiosyncratic to him, as the music of Ellington and Miles Davis is idiosyncratic to them.  As well as Xenakis, or Bartok, or Stravinsky.  Each has a unique sense of rhythm, full of life and urgency.  When he told the saxophones, ‘I want the breath tone; I want Ben Webster’ — that’s calling on the continuum!  That’s so key and central to what the jazz vocabulary is about.  Older musicians relate how Dizzy Gillespie taught them to play the new language of bebop fifty years ago.  This is what you get when you hang out with Cecil today.”

The ensemble’s cogent, flexible navigation through four Taylor constructs — the emotional landscape spanned signature Taylorian canned lightning bellows to achingly ruminative rubato elegies — showed in a way that the rehearsals could not foretell how deeply they internalized the maestro’s principles.  They played like an organic unit, with restraint, dynamic nuance, and idiomatic articulation; the brainy soloists conjured an array of rhythmic attacks, playing with concision and structural variation, always with the overall narrative in mind.

Perhaps the most startling “piece” was “Ka-Kaba”, a 45-minute masterpiece of tension-and-release.  Pianists Dan Marmorstein and Alex Tarampi stated the core melodic kernel, the horns and violins dialogued over a swelling ensemble tone that ascended to a joyful roar.  Elliott Levin and alto saxophonist Aaron Ali Shaikh commenced a firebreathing passage which subsided, giving way to a delicate shakuhachi-like recorder solo.  The band clapped and hollered the syllable HA!! over entexturing violins and percussion; from the churning sound emerged a voice-like bass trombone statement.  The band roared the syllable SO!!, counterstated by flutes, vibraphone glisses, pizzicato violins, guitar sonics, sax-breaths, and synth tone-shapes — Levin’s solo brought the section to climax.  Poet Ulla Dydo chanted a Gertrude Stein-inspired poem (“Better and most and yes and yes, Yes and yes and more and yes”) complemented by synth, guitar, drum scrapes and clarinet microtones.  The roar swelled oceanically, was becalmed by precise pizzicato violins and pointillistic piano, then returned with a high-overtone horn ensemble interlude.  Clarinetist Kevin Sullivan floated over synth nachtmusik, John Keith’s malleted tom-toms gently underpinned a lissome bassoon-piano-bass trombone conversation.  Then Rosi Hertlein sang a piercing DRRAAA-HAAA; trumpeter Amir El Saffar answered the call.  She cried A-HA-HAA; the horn section, breathing as one, found a tonal analogue.  The full ensemble reiterated the original theme, decrescendoing until the recorder emerged from the depths to play free rubato melodies with the violins and guitar until nothing was left to say.

For another hour the ensemble conjured fire and air in equal measure over two more Taylor compositions; they left the stage to a well-earned ovation.  Before they could bask in the afterglow, Taylor abruptly strode to the piano, cellist Tristan Honsegger and trapsetter Jackson Krall in tow, to begin a furious fanfare.  Poet Naima Wade embarked on an impassioned recitative about slavery, miscegenation, and hegemony of the master race’s world view.   Honsegger responded with the dagger-like syllables “mata, mata, matamatika!!”, creating long, startling shapes, playing with such intensity that his bow began to shred, yet hitting the notes and tones with the spot-on articulation of a virtuoso.

He inspired Taylor, who may possess more ways of extracting sound from 88 keys and 3 pedals than any pianist in the world.  Playing as though his arms were attached to springs, he deployed an awesome lexicon of meticulously choreographed snatches, grabs, clutches, swoops, crawls, snips, clips, slides, thrusts, plucks, punches, slaps, thumb glisses, and elbow crashes, each movement honed to micron-precise specificity.  As the poet referred to Billie Holiday. Sarah Vaughan and Duke Ellington, Taylor answered with blindingly complex right-hand passages, riposting with exquisitely executed left-hand flurries.  Honsegger danced around the cello, Taylor laid down a stride figure, Honsegger stomped, chanted and bowed demonically and consonantly with his decomposing wand.  The poet sat.  Honsegger took a dark solo that turned into a Bartokian stomp, answered by more Taylorian variations, left hand completing long, ascending runs begun by the right.  Krall dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s.

There was more.  The unit evoked rainfall, the forest, the sounds of creatures large and small.  They wound down with a collective rubato triologue, Honsegger miraculously conjuring music with his all but disintegrated bow, Taylor’s head cocked to the right, his vigilant left ear attuned to sounds that he might alchemize so as to extend this iteration of his singular ritual.

Indeed, Taylor evoked the mythic half-man, half-dragon persona of Keqrops, the Egyptian who founded Athens in 1600 B.C., whose name titled a composition that Xenakis wrote for Roger Woodward some years after the Taylor-Woodward concert in Huddersfield that Trudy Morse attended in 1987.  We thought of Tony Oxley’s delirious encomium, “To play with Cecil Taylor, you need the stamina of an athlete and the imagination of a God!”

“There was a lot of intensive work during my three years with Cecil,” Ramsey Ameen had stated midway through the rehearsals.  “Now, twenty years later, I see a purification.  Cecil has cleared a path to reach the basic elements of music that go beyond all elements of style, that go to human expression.  Anything extraneous to that is irrelevant.  He’s talking about sound, volume levels, what the ensemble should play very precisely, what they should not play too stiffly, and so on.  I keep thinking I have to go back and read again the Herman Hesse book, Magister Ludi (The Music Master), a person who is constantly deepening into this state of musical grace.”

* * * *

Andrew Cyrille on Cecil (3-16-01):

TP:    Do you perceive any change in the way Cecil approaches music since Jimmy Lyons passed away, conceptually or emotionally or in his inclusiveness of other vocabularies?

CYRILLE:  I don’t know whether it’s changed really in terms of how he prepares.  When I played with him two or three years ago… It must have been ’99 I did that concert in Berlin which was a live recording in Berlin..  We rehearsed, and it was an open kind of improvisation.  I remember years ago… He probably still does this.  I haven’t worked with him since.  He would give out notes.  The last time I saw him giving out notes before a concert we did was in Austria probably in 1987 in Nickelsdorf.  He gave notes out to John Carter, Leroy Jenkins and Roberto Miranda, then later on in the evening we got together and performed the music he had given out.  The last time, Tristan Honsegger was the cellist and a bassist from Curacao whose name I can’t remember.  He lives in Holland.  Anyway, we had a rehearsal, but the rehearsal was based on how we listened to each other and how we would feed each with the music that we made on the spur of the moment.  We rehearsed for hours, I remember, that night.  Then the next day, when we got a good idea of what each other did or could do, then we went ahead and did the concert.

I can say this much.  I think that Cecil was very-very sharp.  His technique had just gotten much better.  He was much more comfortable.  He listened.  I remember he and I on occasion, when maybe the other two would lay out in a performance, we just had this dialogue, and we were having a great deal of fun.  It was magical in terms of what was going on.  Because what happens with us and that kind of music and improvisation, it’s really a matter of very close listening and trading of information.  It’s like a conversation.  It’s almost like a game, so to speak, where certain things are put forth — certain sounds, certain ideas, certain rhythms, certain kinds of melodic fragments that turn into much longer statements.  It’s how we surprise each other with replies and the ability to continue to evolve within that kind of dialogue.  If anybody is listens closely, they can hear the creativity, the way that we spontaneously play and listen and create this music.  It’s just endless.  It can be endless.  And when we decide to resolve what’s happening, we just go ahead and resolve it as though we’ve finished saying something to each other in some kind of conversational story.  There are so many parallels that can be thought about. It’s almost like a dance sometimes, where we can be inclined(?) with each other, and just move along and glide so easily.

But in order to do that, you’ve got to be on top of your game with your technique, what you want to do, and the other person has to be on top of their own technique.  But it’s a matter of being able to listen and to hear and to create with what’s being delivered.

TP:    Earlier you said that Cecil’s technique has become even better and sharper.  One thing I noticed at  this workshop was how many methods he has of eliciting sounds from the piano, the mechanics of how he does.  I found the following verbs to describe what he does with his arms and hands: snatches, hammers, fences, flutters, clips, grabs, clutches, swoops, crawls, snips, slides, scrapes, thumb glisses, clusters, slaps, punches, plucks, spooling notes even…

CYRILLE:  That’s right.

TP:    All of those things, and all calibrated to micronic degrees of specificity.  Was he that specific in eliciting sound production 30 years ago, or was it a different quality?

CYRILLE:  No, it was the same.  We were all in a sense, moving in the same direction that way.  But I’d say we’ve gotten better at doing it.  The older you get, as is said, the wiser you’re supposed to be.  I know I’ve accumulated more information and I’ve been able to deliver more information in a wider variety of ways.  I know more about drumming now.  I feel more comfortable about drumming and what I did over the years than I did 20 or 30 years ago.  And the beautiful part of it is that I’m not finished.  I’m still learning and still evolving.

You made a very good analogy with the term fencing.  It was like, “Hey, we’re crossing the floor, and you back up and you thrust it forward, and sometimes you touch somebody and sometimes they touch you, and sometimes you knock the blow away, etc.  So all that can be considered sports-like or dance-like or maybe like a card game.  But it was just delightful!

TP:    Could I paraphrase that both you and Cecil have become more subtle players, more nuanced over the years?

CYRILLE:  I would say yes.  Because we’ve grown.  We’ve matured to some degree; to some degree even mellowed.  It’s always a struggle to be able to create art.  There’s always a certain amount of effort that one has to put forth.  But the way that the effort is put forth is so much smoother.  And as you say, nuance.  Yes.  Listening to Akisakila, which we did in 1971, if I were to do it again, it would be so much different.  That was formidable, but now there’s so many other things happening.  We’re so much more confident with the language.

TP:    Did Cecil use the notation he uses now when you first met him?  Can you comment on how it evolved?

CYRILLE:  He uses the same method.  But for this particular concert, he did not give out any notes.

TP:    The way he presented the notes to the people in the group, they looked almost like graphic renderings of a dance.  They were like pictograms.  Is that the type of notation he was using 35 years ago?

CYRILLE:  Yes.  See, he gives out notes, and he has his own particular way of drawing the lines.  They may move in a number of different directions, going up, going down, for instance going straight-up vertically, on the other axis going horizontal… They’re like branches, in a sense.  This is how his compositions look.  So when he gives those notes out to the other instrumentalists, he will tell them whether they will be higher or lower or in the same register.  Then the individuals write down the notes that he’s giving, and they play the notes.  Interestingly enough, sometimes there may be unisons and then sometimes there are contrasting rhythmical lines, and sometimes the rhythmical lines are created by the players themselves with the notes.  See, sometimes he doesn’t necessarily give the rhythms.  He lets them decide their own rhythm with the notes that he gives.

TP:    Can you give me the short version of the story of how you first linked up?

CYRILLE:  It was so coincidental.  It was Ted Curson, with whom I went to a rehearsal he was having with Cecil at a school called Hartnett-New York.  This might have been ’57.  I was living in Brooklyn, and that same day I was rehearsing with another pianist named Leslie Braithwaite.  Ted and Harold Ousley heard the music from the street and came to investigate, and Leslie and I were about to wind down our playing for that afternoon, and Ted said he had to go to Manhattan to play with this piano player named Cecil Taylor.  He told me, “You’ve never heard anybody play piano like this guy; come over and check him out.”  So I went with him, and walked into the studio where Cecil was, and he was sitting down at the piano just playing.  Ted said, “This is Andrew Cyrille,” and Cecil looked up and said, “Hi, how are you doing?” and Ted asked him if I could play.  He said, “Yeah.”  So I sat down and started playing.  And to some degree, more or less, it’s like what we do now.  It’s kind of like what we did at the concert in Berlin.  It’s just that now I know, to some degree, what’s happening in terms of how he plays and how I would play with him.  When I first met him, it was a thing whereby you play and you wonder what is it that he would want.  Do I play the rhythms the way that I play with other people?  I guess that is part of it.  But nothing was said, except for the fact that we played with each other and it was something that we wound up exploring.

After that rehearsal, I knew a place up in Harlem… School closed, and I knew this club on Amsterdam Avenue that used to have jam sessions and was a place that had a piano trio with a guy named Cecil Young at night… I knew the bartender because I had gone there several times for sessions.  Cecil and I went up, I asked the guy if we could play, and he said, “Yeah.”  This was late afternoon.  I had a snare drum.  Cecil sat down at the piano and started playing, and I started playing with him.

That’s more or less how we met.  There was never any tension or conflict or, “Man, I don’t know what you’re doing.”  I was listening to him, trying to do what I could with what I heard him play, and I’m sure vice-versa.

As the years went by, after we had begun to play together on a consistent basis, he would say, “This is our music.”  And he meant “our” inclusively, in terms of me and Jimmy and whomever else was playing, because we were all creating the music at that particular moment.  So whatever we brought to the table was ours.  And putting it together, we got this whole.  Yes, of course, he gave us direction so far as allowing  us to do what we wanted to do within the context of the concept.  We would rehearse with each other, we would listen, rehearse, listen, rehearse.  We did a lot of that, days, hours upon hours, within that period of time.

TP:    Was it improvising or was he giving notes?

CYRILLE:  He was giving notes for the players who played those kind of diatonic notes.  But he never really told me to play anything.

TP:    How did it change your conception?

CYRILLE:  It opened me up..  It allowed me to try to play things that I had never played before, some new things.  When we had these rehearsals, in order to make sure that I’d play the same rhythms when he called a particular piece, I’d memorize what I played.  Those things, in a way, became how the heads were made.  It made me feel as though I was really responsible for whether or not this thing came off in terms of what I was adding as a drummer.  I’d say, “Is there anything you want me to play in particular?”  And I think only twice during the eleven years I played with him did he ever say, “Do this” or “Play five beats of this or give three beats of that” or whatever.  He’d say, “Man, you know what drummers do.  You’re the drummer.  You know how to play drums.”

So it was incumbent upon me to make sure that my integrity was as true-blue as Baby Dodds or Zutty Singleton!  Because this was what was going on in my head.  I did not want to do anything to the tradition and the memory of those guys, and the people whom I learned from, listening to Max and Art and Philly Joe Jones, because it could be said that it wasn’t genuine, that it wasn’t blue-blood so to speak.  So I worked on that stuff, man!  I got my information together, and I brought my information to the table.  “Hey, man, look what I found now.  Check this out!  I worked on this.”  That was on every aspect of the drumset, with the independent coordination, the foot-play, the dropping of the bombs, being tasty, playing in the spaces, accompanying, the way that the other members of the rhythm would accompany horn players…. But it was my own sense of how to do it.  It wouldn’t necessarily be the same kind of rhythms that they would play or the way that they would parse the rhythms or how they would organize the rhythms, etc.  But then again, it was!  It was the same but it was different.  Because  I played the same kind of drumset as most of those guys, and on occasion I’d play all kinds of percussion instruments, too.  It’s like when we did that recording, “Niggle Feugle,” for BYG.

TP:    When we did the Blindfold Test, you made a comment about Cecil with Tony Oxley which was very interesting.  When you play with Cecil, when Max Roach plays with Cecil, when Elvin plays with Cecil, you postulate very specific rhythmic ideas, there’s a counter-dialogue.  Another approach, which Sonny Murray did and Jackson Krall and Tony Oxley, is “matching color textures with Cecil’s panorama of sound colors and textures and dynamics rather than playing his own contrasting rhythm,” so there isn’t so much push-and-pull, but it’s more a unison or a synthesis.  Jackson Krall referred to it similarly.  Did your approach change a great deal once you were performing constantly with him?  Was there a difference between the rehearsal and the performance?

CYRILLE:  No.  It’s just that sometimes during the rehearsals, we would play some stuff that I wish would have been played during the performance.  Because it’s improvisation.  So sometimes certain things come to mind that are really gems, etc..  And a lot of times, what also has to be taken into consideration is the way you feel, the sound of the room, where the musicians are located in relationship to each other; in other words, where Honsegger was sitting, where this bass player was standing, where Cecil was, where I was…

TP:    Honsegger is something else.

CYRILLE:  Yes, Tristan is an excellent player.  But I heard Cecil a few years back when he did a solo in Paris, and at the same time the segue to the concert with a group he had that was Honsegger, Harri Sjostrom and Paul Lovens playing drums.  But the solo concert he played was just so magical!  I mean, he just played, and his command of what he was doing… It was almost like a laser beam!  He’d focus on something and he’d go after it and he get it!  It was so pliable!  And the place was packed, SRO, and it was in France.  The people were just enthralled with what he was doing, and then he danced in conjunction and spoke his words, etc.

What I’m saying is that years ago the ideas were there, and we went ahead and did what we wanted to do.  But as the years evolved… It’s like you’re cooking something, and you learn over the years how to make this thing come out and taste a certain way.  It’s like he was the master chef now.  You can put some stuff on the stove and say you’re going to experiment with this and sometimes it comes out beautifully and sometimes not so well and sometimes it’s a bomb.  But on this particular night, it was like he was the master chef, he knew just the exact ingredients to put into the food to make it come out being sumptuous.

TP:    Ramsey Ameen made the comment that when he was with Cecil, Cecil didn’t say much during the rehearsals.  He said he thought one reason why is because whenever the ensemble needed to know how to phrase a section, Jimmy Lyons would just play it, which would give everyone their cue.

CYRILLE:  Right.

TP:    The implication might be, again, that absent Jimmy Lyons, Cecil had to become more inclusive.

CYRILLE:  That’s just what I was saying before in terms of a strong rhythmical player playing the certain notes.  When you say “phrasing,” what is phrasing?  It’s just make a rhythm out of what you have.  Jimmy Lyons was a master at doing that, because he and Cecil played together in combination longer than any other individuals.  He was with Cecil for 25 years.  That’s double the time I played with Cecil on a consistent basis.

It’s so good.  It feels so good.  Like, if I have to sit down and do something with a big band, whether it be Muhal or John Carter or Murray doing Ellington’s music, you know there are certain things you can do in order to bring the music to the level that it should be.  A certain amount of risk is always involved, but you mature and you bring the weight of that maturity with you.  So if I want to play “Northern Lights,” I do the rhythm with a certain amount of conviction.  It’s not that I’m timidly doing it because I wonder whether this is the right thing to do.  I’m doing it because I know this is the right thing to do!  So it’s the same parallel when I play with somebody like Cecil.  Hey, this is what we’re going to do right now, this is what I’m going to do…

The thing that Cecil also appreciates, which is also why he doesn’t say anything, is because he wants your talent to come forth to inspire him.  And when that happens, that’s when you have this beautiful dialogue where there’s laughter and all these elements of surprise that come up.  It makes you want to continue doing what you’re doing, because it’s evolving on such a high creative artistic level.  And you just don’t want to stop.  It’s fantastic what’s happening at the spur of the moment.  I heard that happen with Max to some degree when he played with Max at Macmillan Hall in 1979.  I haven’t heard him play with Max in duet again since.  And I haven’t heard him play with Elvin.  But all I’m saying is that you have these two giants of the drum coming with all of their artillery, the full weight…the bag of all the stuff, and knowing what’s in that bag and knowing what they can use, and they selectively use whatever they feel is apropos.  I feel the same way at this point.  And as far as I’m concerned, hey, let’s do some more.

TP:    How do you assess Cecil’s stature both in the music’s timeline and vis-a-vis people you’ve worked with, like John Carter or Muhal or Anthony Davis?

CYRILLE:  These people feel as though he is definitely a seminal figure.  He helped change the direction of this music.  Before Cecil, there were certain things that were not happening.  The expanse of the compositional arrangement… In other, it’s not like AABA (though that’s still a viable form, and people use it in many ways).  But the music moves in so  many different directions which aren’t necessarily limited by a prescribed traditional way of playing.  The way, again, he would give out notes and expect people to bring whatever it is that they did to the table.  This is where the weight of the sound, the creativity of his different bands, comes out.  Because he is giving these people the chance to play what they play juxtaposed to what he plays.  Like all those records for FMP with Bennink… He absorbs all of that, and they absorb him, and they juxtapose what they do in relationship.  Now, you can’t find a whole lot of people who would allow all of that on their bandstands and that they would want to deal with.  Then again, you have so many people now who say, “Well, this is the way it goes.  I can do this.  I can play duets with anybody.”  And that’s with anybody on the planet.  A man like Cecil has broadened the palette of technical possibilities — I’m talking about ways of doing things — that was not necessarily available outside of a certain kind of structural way that music had been made or had been produced before.  Another way of manufacturing it.

TP:    The people who played in this master class all paid 300 bucks, and everyone could play.  Some were more adept improvisers than others, but everyone had command of the instrument.  Jackson Krall said he thought that they had a certain focus he hadn’t seen in similar ensembles because they had paid money, and people left their egos at the door, so to speak.  But when I spoke with them how the experience of working with Cecil matched their preconception of who he was, a couple of them were coming at him from a jazz perspective, and seeing him as kind of the apotheosis of the jazz timeline, and others were fascinated with his relationship with European classical music and 20th Century music.  Do you see him as having achieved a sort of ultimate cultural synthesis.

CYRILLE:  I don’t know if I’d use the word “ultimate.”  But he’s found a place where he feels comfortable with what he has acquired and learned over the years from both cultures, the African and the European put together in the African-American in this country.  There are other parts of Cecil which he doesn’t talk about too often, but on occasion he will mention his Indian roots.  I’m talking about Native American.  A lot of what he feels and thinks comes out of that cultural perspective also.  Maybe somebody should ask him how much does he feel very close to this that he brings to the surface.  You talk about being integrated and being a true American.  It’s embodied in person like that — and many others also.  When you talk about the synthesis of Europeans and Africans and African-Americans in how all this stuff comes together… All jazz musicians play European music, or most of us do in some way-shape-or-form.  We get information from that area also.  Africans don’t play the same kinds of chords that Europeans brought to the table of humanity.  They don’t play XIII chords and flat IXs and sharp XIs and all that sort of stuff.  That’s not in their vocabulary.  It may come out incidental, but there’s nothing in their vocabulary that says that, okay, now we’re going to play this kind of chord and use this kind of color or voice it like… All that stuff comes out of Europe.

The thing that the African-American does is bring a feeling.  The Europeans might make the clothes, but hey, we’re going to put it on and style it the way that we want.  We’re going to make it ours with what it is that you put on the table.  And it could be because maybe there’s nothing else available.  But we’re going to do it this way.  Then of course, there are other ways of manufacture of clothing by people from Africa, like the robes, free-flowing kinds of dress where you can have air that passes through because it might be a hot, arid place or whatever.  As far as I’m concerned, all of it is valid, because all of it is valid in terms of giving life to human beings in the place where they live — to stay alive!  So one can’t be more important than another.  You wouldn’t wear the same kind of clothes in Northern Europe that you would wear in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The same thing comes about more or less with the music.

All this makes me feel better about myself.  As you ask me these questions and I try to give you some good, qualified answers, it lets me know t some degree that I’m not crazy.  I have more students now than I have ever had who are coming to me, asking me about playing free.  So there has to be a certain kind of qualification and certain parameters.

TP:    I guess the paradox of the notion of musical freedom is the incredible discipline you have to have internalized to be able to do it.

CYRILLE:  That’s right.  There is nothing free.  Not really.  Number one, you’re confined by the properties of the instrument you play.  But the reward comes out of finding things in that instrument that bring you to other places.  You say, “Wow, I can do this with the instrument.”  You listen to how you brought forth something you weren’t aware of that you can do with the instrument.  That’s the beauty of it.  That’s the beauty of the creativity and the evolution.  Which certain kinds of methods don’t particularly allow you to do.  But within the forms of those methods, you can find certain elements that are magical also.  But you can go beyond that, too.  So for me, that has been the contribution of a person like Cecil Taylor.  I think it’s fantastic.

* * *

Tony Oxley (on Cecil Taylor) – (3-20-01):

TP:    I am interested in what CT has indicated is an aesthetic and personal evolution in the last fifteen years, and it may be that your tonal personality is the one he feels the most affinity towards.  So first: What was your first exposure to Cecil’s music?

OXLEY:  It was in the ’60s, of course, with the legendary records Conquistador and Unit Structures.  Of course, I heard something before that.  I think it was from Denmark.  I remember that showing up in the ’60s as well.  But I think you’ll appreciate that living in Britain at that time, it was not easy to get this music.  In fact, there were various people who worked on the Queen Mary who used to actually smuggle it back from New York — as well as equipment, American drums, Gretsch and stuff like that, which you couldn’t get here.

TP:     People in the ship bands?

OXLEY:  Yes.  So a lot of this early culture and contributions of Cecil… I mean, it would have wonderful to be able hear…. On the few occasions he was working in those days, it would have been wonderful to be able to hear this live.  but the real impact for me was Conquistador and Unit Structures.

TP:    You became interested in speculative improvising at an early period, before those records came out.  How did hearing that, if at all, affect the course of how you approach the drums and spontaneous composition?

OXLEY:  Well, I found it very refreshing, very optimistic.  For me personally… I can tell you that the people who were interested in that music in Britain who I knew used to use it as their standard-bearer, if you like.  If they were trying to inform anyone to what was happening in New York with Cecil’s music, those two records would be the thing they would be talking about.  Of course, people were starting to tape this stuff and send it to each other, because you could only get very few records.  So the impact of it for me… It was an alternative, you see, that was not exploited over here in Europe.  That really comes out of what went on before in New York, a continuation in some ways.  Very surprising.  For me, very different to Ornette Coleman, which was a bit more predictable, in a way.  The rhythmic elements in Cecil’s work had a lot more possibilities, in my opinion.  Ornette’s approach had quite a traditional rhythm moving behind it.  It was well-commented-on.  It was noticed over here.  But Cecil seemed to give the space in every direction for what seemed to be the right thing to do at the time, and the right way to go, and how to respond to the way he was working.  So I think there was a lot more openness in the rhythmic side of the music to match the harmonic side.

TP:    When you’re referring to the music as a continuation of what went on before, are you referring to Cecil’s immersion in Bud Powell and the jazz tradition, or are you talking about the early roots of jazz music in the U.S.?

OXLEY:  I don’t know if he comes out of Bud Powell in a direct line.  I wouldn’t like to speculate about that.  But I do know how much of an admirer of Thelonious Monk Cecil is.  And there might have been some kind of connection between what he does and Thelonious Monk.  Now, of course, that might seem ridiculous on first hearing — kind of the opposite.  But influence works in many ways, and it does not work in imitating, in my view.  The philosophy is the thing you learn from, not the imitation.  I would hesitate to recommend anyone imitating.  But that’s another question.

TP:    If I may go on a tangent, who are the drummers whose aesthetic philosophy you assimilated when you were developing?

OXLEY:  Of course, the big band era was very prominent when I was growing up.  So consequently, the big band drummers were very prominent in the public eye.  But for the more discriminating jazz listener who would be brave enough to look for small groups (because big bands really dominated the scene), I would have to say that, first of all, Art Blakey, and then Elvin Jones, and then Milford Graves in those plays were very influential in showing the real issues in American jazz music.

TP:    The real issues?

OXLEY:  Well ,the reality, if you like.  What was important and how to do it.  How they do it.  Because they were all different.  Roy Haynes was another very interesting player in my development for years.  Of course, we’re always developing.  We never really stop, I suppose.

TP:    Was your development entirely through listening to records, or were you ever able to witness any of these people in Britain?

OXLEY:  I did actually.  Because Norman Granz used to send shows with four or five bands in them around Europe, and fortunately, they showed up in Sheffield, where I lived.  So I was able to hear Monk and Blakey live during that period of time.  But it wasn’t very easy to anticipate what might be coming, because you’d have Ella Fitzgerald on the bill, then Monk or Blakey…a variety of music.  But never Cecil Taylor.

TP:    But also in the ’60s, around the time Conquistador comes out, you’re the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s.

OXLEY:  That was in ’66.  But in ’61 and ’62 and ’63, I did take some work, deputizing for the regular bands on the Queen Mary, and that meant three trips a year because there were three bands that needed to be deputized for.  Of course, on those trips, with the 36-hour turnaround in New York, that 36 hours was consumed entirely by chasing around, looking for the best music we could find.  So as a kind of pattern of activity, I would say to you that it would start in the late afternoon at the Metropole, listening to the Woody Herman Big Band.  The Metropole was just one long bar; the band was all strung out along one line, like washing.  There were mirrors on the opposite wall so they could see each other through the mirrors.  And people stood at the bar, so that meant you’d two yards away from the trumpet section.  That was unbelievable!  Lift you off your feet.  Then we’d move on to Birdland to hear Blakey.  Then we’d move on to the Vanguard and hear Bill Evans or Miles Davis.  Then we’d move to the Five Spot to hear the legendary quartet with Thelonious Monk.  So doing that three times a year, hoping that they would be there…  It wasn’t always Blakey at Birdland when we happened to be in town.  But at the best times we had, it was such a ritual as that.  And that was ’61-’62-’63, so quite early in my active professional life I was able to be exposed to some of the realities of New York at that time.

TP:    And I guess you were able to bring that sensibility back to what you were doing in England.

OXLEY:  Well, it couldn’t be ignored, could it.  It was a very dramatic experience for me, I must confess.

TP:    So in the ’60s you were able to function as both a straight-ahead, timekeeping drummer and as somebody interested in a more open-ended form of pulse and texture with the kit.

OXLEY:  Well, at the same time, I was very interested… In ’62-’63 I was starting to work with Derek Bailey and Gavin Bryars.  I’d previously been playing diatonically Classical music, i.e., Beethoven, Mozart, Prokofiev, Haydn, this kind of area.  I was in the Army, and this was the kind of thing we used to be doing…heh-heh, apart from other things.  Of course, when I came out of the Army, I continued my interest in what’s called Classical music, European Classical music.  So that interest transferred itself to 12-tone music.  So during this time, around ’63, I became very aware of Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and of course, that led to John Cage eventually.  So this was happening at the same time as hearing the developments in improvised music, i.e., Cecil Taylor-Bill Dixon, and my interest was continuing to develop in what’s called Classical music, only the second Viennese School.  So there were a lot of influences going on with me at that time.  And I was very hungry as well to hear it.  I suppose that might answer your question.

TP:    Between then and when you wind up playing with Cecil, it’s another two decades.  When were you first actually able to witness a performance by him?

OXLEY:  It would be in the ’70s at Ronnie Scott’s.  There was a production for a week at Ronnie Scott’s, and Cecil was included on the program with Sam Rivers, Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille.

TP:    The Fondation Maeght recordings are from ’69.

OXLEY:  It could have been.  The date I don’t know.  But it was in that area, and there was a whole week of television from Ronnie Scott’s, and Cecil was  the program with that quartet.  I think I’ve got a recording of it somewhere!

TP:    What was your impression?

OXLEY:  Well, I was more worried about how Cecil was going to find the piano.  Because the kinds of pianos that he needs…really they have to be in very good condition.  This has nothing other to do than that the way he approaches the music, the instrument has got to be in good shape.  And I wasn’t so sure about the piano at Ronnie Scott’s holding up!  We’re talking about the late ’60s now.  But from the musical point of view, of course, I was very happy to be there and hear what waas happening.  I remember speaking to Cecil, but of course he wouldn’t remember that.  Many people were saying “hello” and “how’s things” and how’s… I remember  asking him how was the piano.

So it was the ’70s when I first heard him live.  Then I don’t remember him coming to Britain… .The impact of playing with him in 1988 kind of obliterated any preconceptions I might have had about what the music that he might be playing… It was such an impact, that all my concentrations went onto that and not so much an historical view.

TP:    So in other words, it erased anything but the immediate moment of getting sound out.

OXLEY:  Absolutely.  I felt I needed all my concentration and effort, and to try to put out of my head anything that I’d heard him do with other people on record.  And the only records I had were those two that I mentioned.  I tried to put that out of my head in order to approach it with a cleaner palette.

TP:    Does playing with him demand new strategies and approaches on your instrument?

OXLEY:  The music speaks for itself, you know.  When you’re playing with Cecil Taylor, there is only one Cecil Taylor.  And when you become involved in the music, things happen that have nothing to do with strategy or even preparation.  The best preparation I’d say is be fit and open your ears!

TP:    I’ve heard you quoted that you have to have the stamina of an athlete…

OXLEY:  …and the imagination of God! [LAUGHS] You can quote that, if you like.  Well, it’s just to give a sincere answer to a kind of general question, ,to bring it into some kind of perspective.  I think just recently, when we played in the Tonic, I think the power of his work and the power of his imagination was evident.  I thought it was best in ’88 anyway to try to approach it as prepared and unprepared as possible.  Let’s put it that way.  It’s a contradiction, but…

TP:    Over the years have you sustained that strategy of no-strategy?  Do you go into each performance with him with that blank slate?

OXLEY:  Well, I am fortunate, because I love to play with Cecil Taylor and I love to be with him — and so does my wife.  We actually are always together when we are with Cecil.

The joy…and believe me, that word is very, very important when I have to describe the experience of playing with Cecil… The joy is so much more immense if you prepare yourself to go where the music will take you, and not try and make the music go where you want it perhaps, or think it might go.  With Cecil you don’t have to have any of those worries.  There is always something happening.  So you can relax and have this experience of working… He has his language.  I have my language.  And we think, I hope…at least  I think that the compatibility is quite special.  That is one of the most important aspects to remember when you’re either listening or thinking about his music.  That’s about the best way I can describe it.

TP:    Can you discuss your philosophy of playing this music?  Do you have a philosophy of playing with Cecil Taylor?

OXLEY:  No.  As I say I don’t have a plan.  I think by whatever grace, whether it’s the grace of God or the grace of whoever, we actually came to the point where we play together.  Now, before that, I don’t know if he had heard  me.  I doubt it.  So I don’t think there’s any answers to this question in that direction.

But I will say to you that when I was growing up, leaving school, I was a steelworker in Sheffield, and I think that that environment, which I paid close attention to, not only listening, but physically it wasn’t, shall we say, something you wanted to jump out of bed to do every morning…but anyway, it had to be done… The sounds and the rhythms of that kind of environment, I’m pretty sure, had more influence on me than I have ever appreciated, and I am starting to think now that maybe that has quite a significant role to play in the way I work with percussion.  For the rest of it, we’ll wait for the book! [LAUGHS]

TP:    Some of your interactions with Cecil are totally improvised and some would involve his notation, I imagine, with the larger ensemble perhaps.

OXLEY:  Not very often.

TP:    So you’re the wrong person to talk to about his notation..

OXLEY:  Of course, I’ve been quite close to Cecil since ’88, and I’ve seen him in situations with ensembles.  But to put it on a basic level, it would rather depend on the ensemble.  If people come along and they’re well aware of Cecil… Why would they be up there, I suppose, if they weren’t?  But if they come along with the right attitude and they want to be there…

TP:    Trudy Morse said that one reasons she’s very proactive in instigating these workshops is because she wants to introduce as many musicians as possible to Cecil’s notation.  And having seen a number of the sheets he was passing out, they’re graceful, poetic, dancelike…

OXLEY:  You’re talking about this last project, and of course it would be difficult for me to comment about that because I wasn’t there.

TP:    But there were people who had participated in projects of his from 1970 and 1973 who said that the notation was similar.  I thought you’d be interesting to ask about it because of your immersion in modernist classical music?

OXLEY:  It would be easier to talk to Cecil about that.  Have you tried to approach him about that question? [ETC.] Cecil is one of the most generous, sensitive people I know.  But it has to be respected that he also needs time to himself and he also has his way of dealing with a situation.  He works at his own pace.  But believe me, at the risk of repetition, he is one of the most generous and sensitive people I have ever had the privilege of working with and playing with.  So it’s nothing other than having to catch him at the right time.  Between you and me, when I’m ringing him, which is reasonably often, I can ring three or four times and not even get him on the phone, and the machine comes on, and I’ll leave him a message.  He has his own way of working, and that I respect 100 percent because he gives me the same freedom also.  If I’m not there, I’m not there.

TP:    Let me ask you one more question that I raised in the fax.  You addressed Cecil’s impact on the community of European improvisers in the ’60s.  I’m wondering how his intense interaction with that community in the last 15 years has affected the music in Europe.

OXLEY:  You mean personally or musically?

TP:    Both perhaps.

OXLEY:  It’s hard for me to speak for other people.  But of course, I am aware of the people who have worked with him over here in various things, particularly in that production for FMP, the box, which accounts for quite a few people.  I know quite a lot of them, and I know that the impact was quite surprising.  There are different drummers in the duets who show different ways of approaching the music.

TP:    More generally, can you describe the impact he’s had on the community?

OXLEY:  Different people have different views on it, as far as I can gather, and I would only be prepared to speak for myself on that.  Because people change their views.  And the views that I heard in ’88 would probably be very different now.

TP:    Without quoting anyone, can you tell me what views you heard in ’88?

OXLEY:  This time he spent in Berlin I think left a mark in history that will never be erased, in my view.  I think that’s about as much as I can say there.   Musically, it was absolutely phenomenal.  And after we finished…there were gigs being prepared even before he went there.

TP:    I looked at the website.  I counted 24 different gigs.  Not individual dates, but gigs of varying length between 1988 and 1991.

OXLEY:  Well, that’s only half of them that we did.  There’s a 10-CD production coming out from London which I expect will be called “The London Trios.”  If you think about that, that’s ten CDs, and go  back to the box and also go back to the productions Jost Gebers made outside of the box, which I think there are 7 CDs that I’m on… If you look at that amount of work and that amount of playing, it’s quite a phenomenal achievement, when you think about it.

[ETC.]

TP:    You used to use an enormous…

OXLEY:  A cowbell.

TP:    Well, not just a cowbell.  Your drumset incorporated things that normally wouldn’t be found.  Do you still have such an expansive tonal palette in your drumkit, or  have you pared it down?

OXLEY:  Well, I’ve cut it down, but not from when you heard it in Sweet Basil.  I cut it down from the late ’60s when I had electronics as well.  I actually devised a system of having live electronics with the kit, which there are some records around.  Pity you don’t know them..  But it’s an interesting way of working, and I found it great.  I worked with that until about ’78 or ’80.  If you’ve got February Papers… Some of Howard Riley’s recordings; I played the electronic stuff with his trio.  But anyway, around ’80 I gave up the electronics, and went back to playing acoustic entirely, and that’s the kit I used at Sweet Basil.  More or less.  You change a few things here and there, bring a few different things in.  If you have a sound you want to reproduce, then you have   to find a way of doing it.  If you have to make something, then you make it and then, of course, you add it to your language.

* * * *

Dan Marmorstein on Cecil Taylor (3-29-01):

TP:    A little of your personal history with Cecil.  Where did you first meet?  How did you become involved with his music?

MARMORSTEIN:  I first read about what Cecil was doing in the Leroi Jones book called “Black Music.”  I was largely living on the West Coast then when I was about 14 years old, so for me to read about this phenomenon of this kind of inferno of musical activity that was taking place largely on the East Coast fit in with my mindset, which was that nothing was really happening out there in the suburban West Coast, and I was looking for some kind of sanctum-sanctorum of energy and consciousness, which seemed to be being described in Jones’ book.  I went and got the records.  I guess the first record I got was Looking Ahead, which is still one of my absolute favorite records made by anybody at any time.

TP:    Were you playing piano at this time?

MARMORSTEIN:  Well, I’ve always played around on the piano, and I’ve always been involved with the piano enough to feel comfortable on it, but never enough to really call myself a pianist.  That’s still largely the situation.  So my approach to all this stuff is as a composer.  I’ve basically taken the piano thing and written things for other people to play, even on my own releases with my music.

TP:    And was your interest in composition then beginning?  Did it begin with Cecil?  Did it begin before  Cecil?  Was Cecil tangential to it initially?

MARMORSTEIN:  Cecil’s music functioned more as a magnet for me to stay connected and close to the idea and process and activity of making music, whatever that may be, in the way that other things have operated on me as kind of magnets.  I would also call S. Balanchandra, the vina player from Madras, a kind of magnet.  I would also call the Grateful Dead a kind of magnet in the same way.  But in the field of let’s call it modern improvisational American Music, I’m closer to Cecil’s music than I am, for example, to Duke Ellington’s music or, for that matter, even bebop.  Cecil’s music speaks to me more directly in a certain way, and always has.

Starting with Looking Ahead was coming in on a good page.  I think from Looking Ahead I went to Conquistador, which I still think is a beautiful symphonic seance.  That’s what I would call it.  Both sides of it.  The last couple of years I acquired the CD where you have the alternate version of “With/Exit”.  And you can understand why they chose the one that they chose . But even hearing those characters try the same piece twice…things like that brought home to me how compositional Cecil’s music is.  You used the word “structuralist” in one of your questions, and that’s not a word I feel completely facile in using because I don’t know exactly what you meant.

TP:    I’m interested in the way Cecil puts his compositions together, and I thought you’d be the best person to discuss with among the people there.  Because you see the scores and you have a sense of his process and how one process links to another and you attended every one of the rehearsals.  How he presented the material, how the material was received, how the linkages came together, the psychology of the band.  I’m interested in your overview.

MARMORSTEIN:  I’m real qualified to talk about that.

TP:    I know.  First of all, tell me how you met Cecil.

MARMORSTEIN:  My meetings with Cecil as a member of the audience were numerous, before I actually met him personally.  He was already such an object of… There was so much admiration there that I was too shy to approach him or come up to him in several situations, even in several what I would call pretty close encounters.  One the more interesting of the encounters was… Is it okay to say things that I’m not sure if I want…

TP:    Anything you want off the record, just say so.

MARMORSTEIN:  One of the most interesting encounters was when I went to Duke Ellington’s funeral at St. John’s the Divine, which was packed with people, and various artists were performing from the pulpit.  There was no place to sit down.  I came in just as the funeral was starting.  Somewhere about ten minutes into the service, a woman stood up and left, and I decided to grab the seat.  I walked up several aisles in the apse of the church, and turned to the left, and I was about to sit down at the empty place I said to myself, “My God, that’s Cecil Taylor sitting there.”  So I sat next to him for the whole funeral.  And I knew from the things I’d read that for him Ellington was a kind of spiritual father.  So in no way, shape or form was I going to disturb him there.  Then when we left the church I managed to both evade him and take another street down and get away, but when I got on the subway to go downtown, he was on the subway also.  Then I ended up going on the same subway car with him, and we were alone in the subway car.  This would have been my chance to say, “Hey, you’re a big influence in my life.”  But the guy was coming from a funeral and I was coming from a funeral, and it just didn’t seem appropriate.

There were a couple of encounters like that.  Once a guy came to my college and we were going to take a ride to Montreal and Toronto, but on the way we were going to stop off at a little college in Vermont where his brother was teaching, which was Goddard College, and we got to Plainfield, Vermont, which… I’m from New York.  This is in the middle of nowhere, and there was this college, Goddard…oh, and by the way there was a concert there that night.  And who was playing?  Oh, yeah, some guy from New York named Cecil Taylor.  I actually think that concert was recorded and put out on a CD or a bootleg.  It was a stunning concert.  He played solo.  As I remember, there were 50 or 60 people in the audience.  A month later he came to my college, to the music department at Brandeis, and played for less than 50 people with Sirone and Andrew, and then they answered questions.  But Cecil got tired of the public quickly.  Somebody asked him a question, “What kind of musical cues do you give each other?”  Cecil didn’t like the question, and he got very upset at that question, and he let Andrew take over the rest of the question-and-answer session.  Andrew had a very direct and strong way of confronting the audience which impressed me very much.

So there were experiences and close encounters.  But then we have to cut about ten years later.  I was living in New York, and finally I asked somebody who I knew was in touch with him if it was possible to obtain the phone number and phone him.  And I did.  I introduced myself on the phone and told him I was calling him because I had started composing music fairly late in life, but I had been very influenced by his music since I was in my early teens, and I had always wanted to approach him and ask him if I could take a composition lesson with him — or several composition lessons with him.  He said to me, “I don’t give lessons.”  But he said it in a nice way, and we continued to talk for over an hour.  Then he said, “Why don’t you come over tomorrow at around 11 and we can continue this talk.”  I remember I somehow made a reference that I’d be coming over at about 11, but maybe I could stop into this place and some… Then I realized that he wasn’t asking me to come at 11 in the morning.  He was asking me to come at 11 at night! [LAUGHS]

So I came over at 11 that night, and we talked, and we must have talked for several hours.  Around 3 o’clock, he said to me, “Well, this piano piece that you told me about on the phone that you wrote, did you bring it with you?”  I said, “Actually I did.”  Even though he had said he wasn’t going to give me a lesson.  He said, “Can you play the piece yourself?”  I said, “Yeah, sure.”  He said, “Well, go in the room and play it.”  So he’s got this rather large piano.  I have basically a four-movement piano sonata, and I went in the other room and played it for him.  It took me about 50 minutes to play it.  Then I came back in the other room, and he was sitting there, and he began to talk about the piece.  And he spoke so directly and so insightfully and so analytically and constructively about the piece that it was the lesson that crystallized what I was doing up until that point and which I have continued to draw from since.

We became friends from that meeting, and I never broached the question of having lessons with him again since that.  As you know, Cecil is a guy…

TP:    You approach him at his own pace.

MARMORSTEIN:  He’s a guy who goes at his own pace. [LAUGHS] I’ll just agree with you on that.  And you have to catch it when you can.

TP:    So you’ve had a relationship since you were about 30.

MARMORSTEIN:  Right.  Since about February 1985.

TP:    Just so I get it straight: You are an American who lives in Denmark?

MARMORSTEIN:  I am an American.  I lived in America my whole life until 1982, when I moved to Holland, and lived in Holland for two years, and attended the Stedelink Conservatory and studied with Misha Mengelberg.   I was a guest student in the Improvisational Department.  At the end of that year I had kind of run out of gas in Holland on a lot of levels, especially… Well, that’s a whole other subject.  But then I moved back to New York to tank up, especially economically, and I lived there for a year during which I met Cecil.  I was able to pick up some teaching jobs.  Then the woman who I had when I was in Holland who lived in Denmark came to New York and had an art show there, then we lived together, and in the summer of 1985 I moved to Denmark.  And I’ve been here ever since.

So my contact with Cecil, during the time I’ve known him, has largely taken place when I’m in New York for anywhere between a week or two weeks or a month at a time.  Maybe I’ll see him once or twice.  Maybe I’ll see him more than that.  Very often I don’t see him at all.  I might phone him several times, or we get the machine — and you never get any clue whether he’s around and just not answering the call, or whether he’s out of town.  Since 1989, a lot of my meetings have actually taken place in Berlin.  He’s in Berlin a lot, and Berlin is close enough to Copenhagen.  I’ve been to Berlin to see him three or four times.

TP:    Did you witness the June ’88 event?

MARMORSTEIN:  I wasn’t there for any of the box, but I was there in ’90 when he played at the Bechstein Hall.  I think that concert recently came out on Free Music Productions.  Off the record, I don’t think Cecil is very pleased with the release of that, because I don’t think he authorized it.  That’s the Workshop Orchestra.  I was also there for a concert he played at the Berlin Opera House a year after that, in the summer of 1991.

This invitation to the workshop came as a thrilling surprise to me. I have a computer, it’s hooked up to the telephone, and who knows what’s going to happen?  Usually you turn the thing on, and it’s nothing but a lot of junk mail asking people to do this or do that.  But all of a sudden there was this letter that was forwarded to me from Trudy Morse that had been sent out by Bruce Eisenbeil about the workshop.  It was a very nice thing for Trudy to do.  I had met Trudy in Berlin a couple of times with Cecil.  I responded right away.  I guess first I emailed Trudy and said it sounded really good, and should I really  take this as an invitation.  Because to me this was like rubbing the magic lantern.   This is what I wanted to do.  I wanted to study composition with Cecil Taylor, and to be invited to participate in a master class like that.

So I emailed Bruce, who I’d never met, and said, “I’m not a skilled jazz pianist; I don’t play changes.  I’m not an expert classical pianist.  But that being said, if I am still welcome to participate in the workshop without taking up a place that would be better reserved for a more adept pianist, then I’m in..  I would love to do it.”

I remember Bruce’s response.  He said, “Thanks for your email..  I think you should come to this workshop.  You’ll have a blast and you’ll learn a lot.”

The workshop definitely lived up to that.  I had a great time and I learned a lot.  It was a pleasure.  There was one day when I think you weren’t there when Cecil got a little bit tight, and he kind of scared all of us!  But I think for the rest of it he was in a great mood, and I think he was very-very generous with all of us.

My impression is that he was writing the stuff the night before.  Maybe some of it was old stuff that he had lying about.  But he came in with veritable reams of composition.  I could see from what I could guess that… You can’t talk about pencil markings as being fresh; you can only talk about ink markings that way.  That was my sense, that the graphite was fresh on the paper.  He came in with this stuff day after day.   He brought in about ten compositions which we played….we rehearsed ten compositions over the course of the event, and played four at the concert.

The first day of the workshops, my recollection is that he didn’t give out any paper at all.  He dictated the tones to people.  If you weren’t ready with your pencil and your paper before he started talking and you weren’t 100 percent concentrated as he was talking, then you simply couldn’t keep up with the succession of tones.  He was dictating them really rapid-fire.  So I was actually able to get some of that stuff, and some of the other people in the class were able to get some of the stuff.  So what we were able to practice the first week was pretty much what we were able to get.

Then by the second class he came in and gave us a score, so we were able to look at the score and look at his way of thinking about tones.  There are certain  intervals that he likes.  There are certain links that he likes.  There are certain licks, especially in connection with octaves and how octaves are filled in.  One lick that seems to be quite prevalent in his music is something being voiced in octaves and…

[END OF SIDE]

…middle will stay where it is.  So a lick that turns up a lot in these scores is something like a C to the C above it, with the G in between, and then the C# to the C# above it, but then still with the G in between — or things like that.  Then maybe you’ll go up from the D to a D, and probably keep the G as a pedal tone.  There are a lot of sounds like that.

Also, as a pianist, it was interesting to see that a lot of the power of his playing and his melodic statements have to do with the fact that he simply plays these rather curlicued and very harmonically dense melodic lines, which don’t always follow a diatonic sequence of tones but a much more chromatic sequence of tones, but that these lines are played sometimes as octaves or as double-octaves or, in many cases, simply as triple octaves — Cecil is simply playing a melody over four octaves.  But of course, when he does it, it sounds like he is playing single notes on the piano.  But that gives a color and a dimension.

The scores seem to be what I would call feels.  On the page of the scores, he has a group of anywhere between three or five or as many as ten, and sometimes he may stack sequences of lines, in which case you could have 25 or 30 different tones.  Quite frequently, more than one tone is described.  The way that music is transmitted to the musicians is that the musicians are basically being asked to breathe their own poetry into these melodies and shape them as they will.  But that being said, with Cecil being there, Cecil will often play the thing on the piano and expect that we can hear that that’s the way he wants it to sound.  And sometimes you can hear that, but sometimes if he plays it with his own floridness, it’s hard to hear the bare skeleton through this beautiful flower.  He’s asking us to sketch the daisy when actually what he’s done is given us a daisy surrounded by roses and orchids.

TP:    Ramsey Ameen made the point that before Jimmy Lyons died, basically personnel took phrasing cues from Jimmy Lyons’ articulation of the melodies and lines, that Jimmy’s phrasing would tend to be the authoritative guidepost for the musicians.

MARMORSTEIN:  [ETC. ON JIMMY] I wasn’t around…

TP:    The essential issue with the orchestra seemed to be how to phrase this music and how to create a dynamic level that didn’t keep them in the middle of the fire, but enabled them to maybe go into the vortex and then skip out, and go in and out and in and out like a magician going into the center of a maelstrom of fire and coming out unscathed.

MARMORSTEIN:  I think in this workshop situation, Cecil was sitting back and listening quite a bit.  I think he wanted to hear to some extent how this music would sound in a large group of people, and his coaching of the group tended to be on the minimal side — unless he really felt that it had become messy and that people weren’t listening to each other.  His coaching largely consisted that people should play in such a way that they could leave room for each other, make space for each other, and listen to one another.  That was not always the case in the rehearsals.

The miracle of the concert for me, from where I was sitting, was that suddenly everybody seemed to be listening to each other, and suddenly these pieces really functioned as finished pieces.  Okay, maybe not recording studio quality, but interesting enough for people who hadn’t been part of the building-up process to sit and listen to it.  As you probably know, we didn’t know what we were going to play until just before we played before the public.

TP:    How do sections come together in Cecil’s music?  First, is his notation singular unto him?

MARMORSTEIN:  I’ve never seen it before in any other composer.  But the composer Glenn Spearman had charts which are the only things I’ve seen which look something like Cecil’s composition.  But I know Cecil was doing it before Glenn Spearman was.

TP:    As a composer and someone who is immersed in post-Webern European music, can you speak to the Cecil’s connections structurally and on a more metaphysical level to that music.  I mean, during our conversation he was talking a great deal about Xennakis.

MARMORSTEIN:  And I guess Xennakis died a few days later, on the same day as J.J. Johnson.  He did tell that story about Xennakis being kind to him the way he was.

TP:    Trudy met Cecil on a Xennakis festival. [ETC.] Obviously there are palpable connections.  Without your necessarily going into the details of how that concert was put together, I wonder if you see connections in their musical thinking.

MARMORSTEIN:  I certainly can hear connections in Xennakis’ music with Cecil’s stuff, to the extent that when I first heard Xennakis’ piano music,  I thought this was somebody who was trying to play like Cecil Taylor.  But when I mentioned this to Cecil, Cecil didn’t seem to be too thrilled about that kind of cross-comparison.  I think Cecil… I get this as much from what’s written in the Spellman book than actually talking about it at great length with Cecil.  I think Cecil’s attitude about compositional music that’s built around a system of any kind is…I think he tends to stay away from that.  I think he almost tends to eschew that….

TP:    Are you saying that he tends to stay away from the system or that he’s internalized the system so comprehensively that he is able to use that as a part of his improvising vocabulary without even thinking about it?

MARMORSTEIN:  Well, yes, but that still wouldn’t be right, because I think by nature he avoids system.  He would avoid Serialism.  He would avoid any kind of licks stuff.  John Cage’s famous objection to the word “jazz,” as I remember it, is that…

TP:    He said it’s imprisoned by the beat.

MARMORSTEIN:  Did he?  I knew also that he said something about the fact that jazz players learn licks and then stick with that.  I think Cecil is trying in every which way to not be confined to his own shtick as such.  Yet, what I think he tries to do is cultivate a familiarity and an honesty about…you know, definite, clear, sort of subject-predicate-adjective sentences.  I think he tries to say things in music which can only be said through music, a la Schoenberg’s response to Webern’s music when he talked about the Bagatelles — that famous preface.  I guess that’s why I gravitate both to Cecil and to the Webern-Berg Schoenberg thing.  But whereas I would say Webern-Berg-Schoenberg were interested in positing systematization, especially Papa Schoenberg, I think Cecil is not interested in that.  He is not interested in creating a system.  He is not interested in creating a George Russell type theory.  Although I know he respects that thing.  I know he respects George Russell and what he has been doing, by and large.

That’s why it’s a funny thing to be in a workshop situation with Cecil. He doesn’t really want to teach his approach.  What he wants to do is motivate the participants to find their own poetry and their own way of getting started with this stuff.  I think what he wants his compositions to do is to get people to think about music as a process activity and not just a kind of finished product.  I think that’s his game.

I use the word “game” because to me the scores function a little bit like games.  You asked me how did we move from one field to the next.  Cecil gave various directives on that.  In one instance, he simply said, “When you feel that you’ve exhausted the material in one of these melodic sequence fields, when you feel that you’ve said it the way that you wanted to say it with as much variety as you can, especially rhythmic variety, then take a breath and move on.”  That was a very explicit instruction he gave.  Now, how do you translate that when you have 39 participants in the workshop, which had boiled down to about 30 by the time the concert rolled around.

That was funny paradox of the rehearsals at the concert, that for me during the rehearsals it never really-really jelled or was clear.  But somehow, when the public was sitting there, and people were forced to collectively in not an antagonistic us-against-them but in a cooperative us-and-them situation… When you have the performers and the public, you do have an us-and-them situation.  You have the people you’re playing with, and you also have people that you know are listening, who have taken cut these few hours out of their otherwise busy prime-time Saturday night and paid a their money, and you want to offer them something.  You’re not just playing for yourselves.  Now you’re playing for them.  And somehow, like magic, it worked.

Cecil turned to us literally five minutes before the public came in and he said, “Okay, we’re going to play this one and this one and this one and this one.”  Then shortly after that, he said to me, “The first piece is called ‘To be’ and the second piece is called ‘Ka’ and the third piece is called ‘Ka-Ba’ and the fourth piece…”  When he gave those names, that’s the first time I or anyone else had heard those names, and I think it’s the first time that they had names.   So I that the process wad done like that.  It was like finally the creator of the games decided that these four games were the ones that would work best together, and then he gave then names which gives the audience a chance to remember them.

So I’d say each one of the scores has an element of chess or a game of Go, where different variables happen in one area and different variables happen in another area.  In some scores, you’d play through the whole score and then there was a da capo, where you started again and went back to a certain point.  The link between the “Ka” and the “Ka-Ba” pieces, which was the second and the third piece, was something that maybe Cecil had in mind.  I guess he did bring those pieces in on the third day.  But we all could feel that it was a very natural progression from one piece to the other.  But otherwise, the pieces seemed to function as independent… And I use “games” on the highest level I could use the word.

TP:    Do you feel that Cecil’s music is singular in the world of music?

MARMORSTEIN:  I think that’s definitely the case.  I don’t know any music that sounds like that except… I would say that as a pianist, Cecil is the next step from Thelonious Monk.  Also Duke Ellington, but certainly Thelonious Monk, in the same way that for me Eric Dolphy is the next step from Charlie Parker.  It’s a certain way of taking the predecessor, and expanding it and stretching it out and making it little more Gaudi-esque in its shape.

TP:    Do you feel that Cecil’s absorption of architectural shape and form and structure influences the arc of his pieces.

MARMORSTEIN:  Absolutely.  That’s something you know if you talk with him for ten minutes.  And I absolutely think that ballet…dance in general, but for me, his interest in the Classical Ballet…

TP:    It’s like he’s dancing over the piano.  That’s what his gestures are like.

MARMORSTEIN:  His fingers are making the same kinds of leaps that the dancers make in space.  I’m sorry I never saw the duet he made with Baryshnikov.  Another thing that I think is super-important to him these days is singers and vocalists.  So I think we can’t really talk about his piano playing or his composition without talking about architecture, dance and singers, especially the jazz singers, or opera singers, or singers of any kind who have influenced him.  He’s got so many things coming into him.  He’s so hooked up to the outside world and he’s got so much input, that it comes out with this kaleidoscope of stuff which doesn’t sound, to my mind, like what anybody else is doing.  But sometimes, in terms of the internal intelligence and humor in the melodic sequences, you could say that his music is kind of Monkish.  I don’t think Cecil would take too much offense at that.

TP:     I kind of see him as a cross between Monk and Tatum.  I can’t think of any other pianist who ever had that kind of technique.  Of course, he admires Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal, who are contemporaries of his.

Can you address Cecil’s relationship to the European improvisers community?  It sounds like you’re an interested observer in that scene, and I think one of the more interesting developments of the last 15 years is the mark Cecil has made on that community, and I think they’ve made quite an impact on him.

MARMORSTEIN:  That’s a tricky question.  I don’t know if I can come up with so much on the last one.  My impression is that Cecil misses some blues in the European music.  He misses some basic things that for him are essential in the music.  He misses some American Indian and he misses some Blues, which to me the European guys often don’t have.  My impression is that the European guys sometimes manifestly eschew it in their way.  They say, “We don’t want to just be like blues guys.  We want to come up with something all our own.”  Of the European guys, there’s quite a few of the drummers that he feels have something very important to offer.  I don’t know his feeling about the wind players and the pianists.

I think the impact Cecil has made on that community is enormous.  But in my opinion, the impact that community has made on Cecil is more social and humanitarian, in a certain way, than musical.  I think Cecil likes the respect and the fair treatment and the admiration that he gets in Europe, which pleases him.  But I don’t know how much of the music itself…

For David Murray’s 57th Birthday, a Jazziz Article From 2007 and a DownBeat Blindfold Test From Ten Years Ago

David Murray turned 57 a few days ago; he’ll be in NYC next week to present his latest project, a big band collaboration with guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, a partner on various projects over the last 35 years. I’ve appended a feature piece that I wrote about Murray in 2008 for Jazziz, framed around the release of Banished, and also a Blindfold Test from the early ’00s.

* * *
“I’ve always been around poets,” said David Murray, in New York City in January to play the Knitting Factory with his quartet. “They bare their soul so much. When I get my hands on a good poem, I can see the music jumping off the page. The word is powerful.”

Recently arrived from his home in Paris, Murray was having a pre-gig dinner at Chez Josephine. The walls of the West 42nd Street bistro are festooned with photographs and memorabilia of Josephine Baker, the famous African-American dancer-chanteuse out of St. Louis, who sailed to Paris in 1925, at 18, and transformed herself into a staple of French popular culture. After the second world war, she adopted a dozen impoverished French orphans, one of them the proprietor, who reinforces a tone of soulful Francophilia, both with the menu — fried chicken and collard greens share pride of place with snails and bouillabaisse — and the entertainment, provided by an elderly black woman in her Sunday best singing to her own piano accompaniment and a woman of similar vintage blowing melodies and obbligatos on trumpet.

Murray and his pianist, Lafayette Gilchrist, sat near the piano, facing Valerie Malot, Murray’s wife and manager, and Jim West, who runs Justin Time Records, which recently issued Sacred Ground, Murray’s 10th release for the label. On Sacred Ground, Murray and his Black Saint Quartet stretch out on seven songs — on two, Cassandra Wilson sings lyrics by Ishmael Reed — that the leader wrote for the soundtrack of Banished. The PBS documentary film, which premiered in February, examines three towns in Georgia, Missouri, and Arkansas from which residents of African descent were forceably removed during the years after Reconstruction, and which remain lily-white today.

Banished is the most recently realized of an ambitious series of projects, all touching on Afro-diasporic themes, that Murray, 52, launched after he migrated from New York City to the City of Light in 1996 to join Malot, with whom he has two children. It follows Pushkin, a fully-staged quasi-opera, as yet unrecorded, on which Murray wrote a suite of songs to French, English, Creole, and Bantu translations of texts by the immortal Russian poet, himself the great-grandson of an Ethiopian prince. During his dozen years of self-imposed exile, Murray, among other things, has composed big band and string music for Cuban ensembles, and created repertoire for bands comprised of musicians from Guadeloupe (Creole, Yonn-de, and Gwotet, Senegal (Fo Deuk Revue), and the Black American Church (Speaking in Tongues). Later that evening at the Knitting Factory, he intended to touch base with poet Amiri Baraka, the librettist of “Sisyphus Syndrome,” scheduled to open on May 19th, Malcolm X’s birthday, for which Murray had as yet completed only five of 15 songs. In two days, he would fly to Cuba, to audition a string ensemble to perform as-yet-to-be written arrangements for a proposed celebration of Nat “King” Cole with Cassandra Wilson.

After ordering the fried chicken, Murray took his glass of vin rouge to a quieter spot at the front of the bar. “Next week I’m going to be writing like crazy,” he said. “But the deadlines keep me motivated. It’s like Duke Ellington said, ‘If I want to get something finished, all I need is a deadline.’ But between Banished and Sisyphus, I have music to play with my quartet for the next two years.”

In the summer of 2006, Banished director Marco Williams, a Murray fan since the saxophonist’s New York glory days in the ’80s, contacted Malot about Murray’s availability and sent a two-hour rough cut to Paris. “He wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to use me, but I forced myself upon him,” Murray said. “I stopped everything else I was doing, didn’t wait for nobody to give me no money, started writing songs, and had Valerie tape them and send them to him over the Internet.”

“It was a challenging process,” Williams relates. “David is not someone who’s going to write notes that hit a certain cut. Frankly, I couldn’t tell whether the music was going to work or not. But I wanted a collaborator, not someone just to score the film. And it was completely evident that David got the movie, it meant something to him, and he wanted to express something. The music was so beautiful, so evocative. I told my editors, ‘We’ll just get all the stems, and cut down as needed.’”

“Basically, this is ethnic cleansing,” Murray elaborated. “You see that monster, you got to cut the head off. My way of trying to cut the head off was to send him tunes.”

Without much prodding, Murray revealed that the film’s particulars resonated with his own family’s experience.

“Most black people who know their family history talk about how they got ran off,” he said. “We don’t know the terms ‘banished’ or ‘ethnic cleansing.’ We say, ‘We got ran off.’ When a town decides it don’t need you no more, that’s just how it is.” Murray cited his maternal grandfather, George Hackett, a sharecropper who went to Midland, Texas, and struck oil. “They ran him off the property, but he managed to sell his oil rights, and moved to California,” he said. “He was very enterprising. He went north to the Bay Area, but that was too far. A black man at that time couldn’t do nothing with the sea. Then he remembered he’d seen cotton in Fresno. He knew cotton, so he turned around to go where the produce was. He bought a block in Fresno, called Hackett Flats. It still has that name, and I own property on that plot.”

By Murray’s account, his paternal grandfather, a Nebraskan, was less fortunate, leaving his wife six months pregnant with Murray’s father when he fell from a scaffold in a gusting wind. Born in 1925 and full-grown in 1940, David Murray, Sr. hopped a train from Nebraska to Los Angeles, started a body and fender shop near Central Avenue, sent for his mother and older brother, and at 17, lied about his age and joined the Navy. Decommissioned in 1946, he moved to the Bay Area, tried out for the San Francisco 49ers, even joined the circus as an acrobat, but then returned to body-and-fender work, raised his family, and played guitar at church in a band with his wife, sons, and two nephews. Murray played bongos, but for one evening’s gathering, having just received an alto saxophone from his junior high school band director, Phil Hardiman, he brought his new possession.

“I didn’t know jack-shit, just squeaked and squawked,” he says. “I probably sounded a little like I do now, but now I actually know what I’m doing. It was like, ‘Wow, that young Murray is exuberant. He’s got a lot of energy.’ Then a couple of weeks later, ‘He’s starting to learn the songs now. Oh, yeah!’ I knew the melodies because my mother was always playing them. You can say that I am an on-the-job training type of guy.”

Physically mature like his father during high school, Murray, who ran a 4.3 40-yard dash, starred as a football tailback, got good grades, and earned money playing music. “I was always a leader,” he said. “From 13, I was bringing money home to give to my dad. We won a youth contest to play all the Shakey’s pizza parlors in the Bay Area. We had a gig every weekend for three years. We’d do any song, like ‘A Taste of Honey,’ and I’d improvise, not even knowing that I was playing jazz. Then I began to learn it. I’d heard Sonny Rollins play a solo saxophone concert at the Greek Theater, and he was a mighty influence. That’s when I started playing tenor. Later I had a funk group called the Notations of Soul, one of the tight bands in town. We played all the dances and proms. We played a lot of James Brown, of course. They started calling me ‘Murray-O,’ after Maceo Parker.”

During Murray’s teens, post-bop titans like Joe Henderson and Woody Shaw settled in the Bay Area, but Murray — who was slowing down Coleman Hawkins LPs to 16 r.p.m to analyze his solos — opted for the freedom principle, particularly the high-intensity post-Coltrane direction emblemized by Albert Ayler, himself a son of the sanctified church with early R&B experience. On a tip from trombonist Ray Anderson, whom he met during a successful audition for a horn section, Murray matriculated at the University of California-Claremont, and spent the next few years refining his craft with the likes of Arthur Blythe, Bobby Bradford, John Carter, and Butch Morris, all regulars at informal sessions at the house of Stanley Crouch, then a playwright, poet, and professor on the Claremont faculty, and a  drummer under the sway of Sunny Murray.

In 1975, Murray moved to New York City, sharing a loft with Crouch over the Tin Palace, an ultra-hip bar on the Bowery.

“All my Dad said was, ‘Just go out there and make some money — you’ll get good,’” Murray said. He followed that advice, performing as a peer of such A-list outcat elders as Sunny Murray, Don Pullen, and Lester Bowie, as well as Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Hamiett Bluiett, his future partners in the World Saxophone Quartet. In 1979, he assembled an octet, hiring the likes of Olu Dara, Anthony Davis, George Lewis, and Henry Threadgill. As the ’80s progressed he gigged frequently with two quartets, one a boisterous harmolodic unit with Blood Ulmer, the other a quartet with hardcore jazz masters like pianist John Hicks, bassists Fred Hopkins and Ray Drummond, and the iconic drummers Edward Blackwell and Andrew Cyrille. He also led ad hoc encounters with Randy Weston, Jack DeJohnette, and Milford Graves, and conceived elaborate homages to such heroes as Hawkins and Paul Gonsalves.

“I figured out that I could actually call the best musicians in the world and they’d show up, that I’d have one of the best bands just by hiring the best rhythm sections,” Murray said. “They taught me how to play. But I became a man in the World Saxophone Quartet. I’d be saying too much about myself if I said I was their equal when we began. But after five years, my sound started getting bigger. Finally, I became their contemporary — and they let me know it.”

Murray attracted a worldwide fan base through the lyric swagger and raw edge of his tonal personality. He drew criticism from many ’80s “young lions,” who attacked him as a poseur, suggesting that his predisposition to blast off to the outer partials stemmed less from an independent aesthetic decision than insufficient grounding in the tropes of tradition. As Crouch, who had championed Murray during the ’70s, joined forces with Wynton Marsalis to establish the Jazz at Lincoln Center juggernaut, Murray was unceremoniously deleted from the mainstream conversation. He recorded ever more prolifically, for multiple labels, and toured regularly with his various ensembles, but he was falling into a rut, and his rambunctious lifestyle was beginning to take a toll.

“I was troubled, and I needed to leave,” Murray recalls. “I had Paris in my sights.” For one thing, Paris was a magnet for African musicians. For another, Malot, who grew up in North Africa and whose sister’s husband, Klod Klavue, is a master Gwo-Ka drummer from Guadeloupe, understood — and through her booking and production experience was in a position to actualize — Murray’s desire “to get closer to my African roots and do a little personal research” on them by traveling to and performing with “groups of people in Senegal, in Ghana, in South Africa, in Cuba I’d met that I could relate to.”

“Jazz has the primal feeling of African drums and the sophistication of the city,” Murray says. “A primal force, like [drummer] Dudu Ndiaye Rose, brings very complex rhythms. I bring the harmonies and melodies. It  makes me want to play and sweat, like praising the Lord, going into a trance and getting back to roots. I’m trying to get to the core where the musics fuse.”

Today, Murray is less enamored with Paris than he once was. (“[The French] have an attitude that gets on your nerves.”) Nonetheless, Murray finds family life a sanctuary that provides space to think and focus, to work more systematically than the distractions of the New York City allowed.

“I used to put out five albums a year; now I put one out every year or 18 months,” he says. “I worked all the time and took pretty much any gig; now I take select gigs, maybe 120 concerts a year. I’m in Paris half the time, moving around the other half.  I’m not aligning myself with the avant-garde or the bebop, I’m just David Murray. I take my kids to school at 8:30, then I exercise, and I’m home at 9:30. I write until noon, and practice the rest of the day till 6, going through my books, trying to keep my chops up and my mind open. When a project comes up, I get very serious, and don’t study nobody else’s shit but mine. That will last for three months, and then there’s no project. Then I go back to my little everyday shit.”

He’s restless, though, and perhaps another journey is imminent.“One year I’m going to take my saxophone and go around the world myself,” he said. “I’ve got to do it soon, before I’m 55. What kind of music do people make in Tibet? What are people doing in India? I want to play with them.”

* * *

David Murray Blindfold Test:

1.    Charles Mingus, “Better Get Hit In Your Soul” (from “Live at Antibes,” Atlantic, 1960/1994), Mingus, bass, composer; Booker Ervin, tenor sax; Eric Dolphy, alto sax; Ted Curson, tp.; Dannie Richmond, d. (5 stars)

That’s Mingus.  “Better Get It In Your Soul.”  I just love… I heard this on the radio in Paris the other day.  We were in a car.  Everybody said, “Who’s that guy back there?”  I said, “That’s Mingus.  He’s pushing the band on.”  He’s saying all kind of stuff.  We need people like this guy.  We need more people like him.  Is the trumpet player Lonnie Hillyer?  [It's not Lonnie Hillyer.]  Who’s that bald-headed guy, that trumpet player?  [Ted Curson.] That’s Ted!  I could be wrong, but I get the Clifford Jordan vibe from the tenor player. [No.] So it’s Ted Curson, Eric and…goddamn, who is it?  [Well, how did you like the saxophone player?] I loved him.  It wasn’t a long solo.  He was kind of breaking up there at the top, but I liked him.  And definitely it’s before the period when George came into the band.  It couldn’t have been him.  I’m trying to think of who was in that band, because I’ve never seen that band… [Should I tell you?] No, not yet.  Because I might come up with it.  [How would you describe his sound?] What’s the characteristic of his sound?  [Warm.  A little brittle at the top.  [Do you get a sense of where he's from?  Could you locate him geographically by his sound?] Texas. [You got it.] Texas.  I’m just trying to think who the heck it is.  What’s that tenor player…Red Conner? [No.  But this guy was under Red Conner.] Under Red Conner. [He heard that when he was young.  People say he sounded very close to Red Conner.] That’s a very good hint.  Under Red Conner.  And this guy is still around. [No, he died.] Oh, boy.  Texas.  Who’s from Texas.  He sounds like a few different people to me.  That’s why I thought it might have been Clifford, because of the way he started that solo.  Because Clifford always had that restraint, then you’d wait for him to bust it, then he finally busts it at the end.  To me, that’s Clifford.  When I was playing with the Mingus All Star Big Band on that record we did in Paris, I was sitting between Clifford and…who’s that alto player, that guy who’s riding on the horse… He did like one of them slick tunes.  I can’t remember his name.  He teaches at University of San Francisco. [Not John Handy.] Handy.  I was sitting between Clifford and Handy.  Damn, this guy is dead, huh? [For many years.] From Texas.  The only guy he sounds like to me… [AFTER] Goddammit.  I love Booker.  Man, I love him.  I should have got that. {How about the Mingus band?  Did it have an impact on you?] I heard that a lot.  In fact, that… [Your octet reminds me of that sort of feeling.] Sure, of course.  Because I love Mingus’ music.  My son is named Mingus!  That kind of explains things, too.  Just having those three horns or however many horns he’s got, and me having five horns, you get a balance… You could go many ways, especially if you have at least five horns up there.  It could go so many different ways.  Mingus taught me that, how you could try to make a small or middle sized band sound sometimes like a big band, sometimes like a small group, have that flexibility.  Booker Ervin, what a beautiful player. [You have to give stars.] On a recording like this, it’s stood the test of time.  It’s got to be a 5.  Of course.

2.    Charles Lloyd, “Homage” (from “Voice In The Night,” ECM, 1998), Lloyd, tenor sax; John Abercrombie, guitar; Dave Holland, bass; Billy Higgins, drums. (4 stars)

He’s got that Trane thing happening.  Coltrane influenced a lot of people, man.  The guitar, that’s interesting.  I wasn’t expecting the guitar.  Man, there was like a budding genius… I forget his name.  He played tenor and guitar and piano.  Remember that guy?  He died. [Arthur Rhames.] Arthur Rhames. [It's not him, though.] But he had Trane down, though.  Is tenor his only instrument? [He plays flute, soprano, but primarily tenor.] Wow.  [He was very well known thirty years ago.] Is he still alive? [He's still alive.  This is a recent record.] This guy did an album of Billy Strayhorn… [Oh, Joe Henderson.  It's not Joe.] It don’t sound like Joe. You got me on this Bay Area thing, though.  Who the hell was this… I got out of the Bay Area so fast.  As soon as I got out of high school, I was gone. [Should I tell you?] No, let me hear it out. [You might want to think about who the drummer is, too.] [MIMICKING THE STROKES] Sounds like Billy Higgins.  [It's a studio band, though they did tour.] He just loved Coltrane, whoever the hell he is!  But everybody loved Coltrane when I was growing up. [Where does he sound like he's from?] Is this guy really old? [Not really old? [Not really old.  The generation right before us.] Who’s this tenor player, he plays a lot in the studio… He had the same piano teacher who I studied with.  He’s from the Bay Area, but he wouldn’t be the next generation before us.  He would be 25 years before me.  But he doesn’t sound like him.  Tell me. [AFTER] Charles Lloyd!  That’s Charles.  He had that Trane thing down.  I love Charles Lloyd. I guess he was in the Bay Area, but I always thought he was hanging out in L.A.  Yeah, that’s the second time I’ve been stumped by Charles Lloyd.  They played a piece for me in Japan one time, and all I could think of was John Coltrane.  But that lets you know how well he absorbed the Coltrane legacy.  He doesn’t necessarily sound like Coltrane that much now.  But during that period he was certainly all over. [Well, that was the one piece on the album that was in Coltrane's style.  How many stars?] I’d have to give it at least 4 stars, because Billy’s back there playing and boppin’, and I’ll leave off one for creativity perhaps.  How can I say it… Coltrane is such a large figure that… Can’t nobody do it like Coltrane.  I don’t care who you are.  That’s why, in my explorations of Coltrane, I tried to stay away from trying to sound like him, because that’s too easy.  All the notes are written somewhere.  When he studied Coltrane, I’m sure he absorbed it mostly from the records.  In old times, you could slow it down and put it on 16 and get the solo, and then speed it back up.  But now you’ve got all these Coltrane transcriptions.  I have a book over here with all of the different versions of “Giant Steps,” transcriptions of just “Giant Steps”…

3.    Michael Brecker, “Freedom of Expression” (from Milton Cardona, “Cambucha,” American Clave, 1999), Michael Brecker, ts; Milton Cardona, shekeres, doo-wop vocals; Sergio Cardona, percussion (bells). (3½ stars)

Doo-wop with like the shekere, an African kind of thing — that’s nice!  That’s creative.  I want the tenor player to play more.  When was the recording made? ['99.] My first reaction would be… I know it’s not James Carter.  What’s that guy?  Who are some of the new guys… Whoever it is, they like me.  I mean, I don’t know if they LIKE me, but they’re influenced by me. [That's questionable.] Well, I hear it.  [This guy is older than us.] Well, then it is questionable. [And he was very prominent when you came to New York.  Although in a different area.  Do you know who the shekere player was?] He’s an old guy.  Chief Bey. It sounds like him on those shiko drums, that low drum.  Can you play it again for me? It was so sparse, I could never get a fluidity thing. [I think that was in the arrangement.] Probably so. [Because it wasn't his arrangement.  He was playing someone else's concept.  I'll give you a hint.  This is a Kip Hanrahan project, and Milton Cardona is playing shekere.] Oh, Milton, yeah!  He has a strident kind of tone; maybe it’s the recording.  Is this guy alive? [Oh yeah.] [AFTER] I would have never got that.  I like Michael Brecker.  He can play his ass off.  But it’s not something that I listen to often. [I was playing that because you've done so many things with African rhythms.] It’s interesting.  I like the doo-wop part of it.  He always comes up with good ideas. [It was Milton Cardona's project, and they used him.] I’ve never consciously listened to Michael other than I used to hear him play sometimes at Seventh Avenue South through the wall, because I used to live through the wall there.  I like him, but I would never have named him.  3½ stars.

4.    Von Freeman, “Solitude” (from “Never Let Me Go,” Steeplechase, 1992), Freeman, ts.; Jodie Christian, piano; Eddie DeHaas, bass; Wilbur Campbell, drums. (5 stars)

Ah, this is “Solitude.”  He has a nice touch.  Is he from Chicago? [Yes, he is.] Sounds like Von to me.  You know, that motherfucker is so bad.  I was in a bar… He plays at the Apartment Lounge I think every Tuesday night or whichever night of the week.  But whenever I’m there, it’s a must to go hear Von, because he’s one of the last great tenor players.  See, I have a problem in general with… Certain people’s sounds stick in your head, because it really is their own.  That’s probably why I got this one and didn’t get the others.  I hear parts of people in other people’s sounds, but I hear pure Von.  That’s him, man.  He’s great.  It’s just the way that people from Chicago play.  When you hear Johnny Griffin, there’s a certain kind of distinctiveness between the beat.  He’s going to fit as many notes, but it’s the way he lands that makes you know it’s him. [SINGS SUPERSONIC GRIFFIN PHRASE] Damn!  How’d you get all those notes in that couple of beats there.  Incredible.  I’ll give that 5 stars for being Von, for all of the things he’s done and all of the people he has influenced, including his son, who is also great.

5.    Charles Gayle, “Touchin’ on Trane, Part B” (from “Touchin’ on Trane,” FMP, 1991), Gayle, ts.; William Parker, bass; Rashied Ali, drums.

Sounds like Frank Wright.  Is it that guy who used to play with Cecil?  You know the guy who does those festivals… [William Parker.] Is that William?  [Yes, that's William.] [AFTER RAISING HIS EYES] I keep making these facial expressions because… Maybe it’s David Ware or somebody.  I don’t know.  [Not David Ware.] I don’t want to be negative, but I… Let me not be negative. [Be constructive.] What’s that guy that used to be homeless? [Charles Gayle.  That's who it is.] He wears a clown suit sometimes.  In Europe, Sunny Murray did a gig with him, and he said he was wearing a clown suit.  There’s a struggle that you can do when you play with your horn.  When it’s not really relaxed, it sounds like you’re fighting your horn or something like that.  That’s why I keep grimacing, is because I’m not hearing the fluidity.  But what I do hear, I like the mood of the piece.  I like what William Parker is doing.  Let me think about who the drummer is now.  It’s somebody I played with.  That’s Andrew, it sounds like. [No.] I don’t know. [It's Rashied Ali.] Rashied, okay.  It’s hard to tell who’s playing when they play brushes.  He knows how to play the brushes.  I’ve got to give it 3 stars.

6.    Ben Webster, “Chelsea Bridge” (from “Ben Webster with Strings,” Verve, 1954/1995), Ben Webster, ts; Billy Strayhorn, piano, arr.) (5 stars)

That beautiful string arrangement that Billy did.  You know, I did a string arrangement kind of based on his string arrangements when I did the Ellington thing this past summer.  We had a big band, plus we had 20 strings with 2 harps.  So I kind of listened to what Billy had done with the arrangement he did for Ben. It’s beautiful, so I took that and tried to add to it.  I had 20 strings.  He only had a couple.  But it sounded like a lot of strings; it sounded great.  That’s the way the saxophone is supposed to be played.  There’s no struggle.  It’s like he’s having a conversation with you.  Now, in the Billy Strayhorn book, he said that Ben was kind of proud of Billy, and he kind of took care of him like a little… I can see that happening, because he LOVED him, because he knew how great he was.  They appreciated one another for their music.  That’s what I aspire to be. [LAUGHS] I want to be just like that when I grow up.  Shit, man, this is pure music.  And it’s not the genre even.  No, it’s not the genre.  Like, the last thing… Well, I don’t want to go back.  They could have been playing anything.  But it’s just the way that you hold that horn, the way you use it as your form of expression, it’s almost like you love it… Do you love it, or is it just a piece, a thing that you use to spit through?  Do you love it?  He loves that horn!  Shit.  I don’t know if you were around when I did that string concert at the Public Theater years ago.  I did all ballads.  I think I had 14 strings.  That was one of my most successful concerts, because people were actually weeping in the concert.  I wasn’t weeping, but I had a little funny reaction, and then a couple of years after that this family comes up to me on the street and there’s this little baby, and they said, “You know, we have to thank you, because our son was conceived that night you played this concert; it made us really fall in love.”  I did my job!  To me that was the highest compliment that anybody ever paid.  And Ben and Bird with Strings… Every saxophone player has to realize his potential in playing in front of the strings.  I think it’s a wonderful. [So I don't need to ask you how many stars for that.] Oh, man, if they could give more stars, they could give him the tip-top.  That one stood the test of time, jack!

7.    Eric Alexander, “Straight Street” (from “Solid,” Milestone, 1998), Alexander, ts; John Hicks, piano; George Mraz, bass; Idris Muhammad, drums. (4 stars)

This is a classic recording.  This is the one, right?  Oh, it’s a remake of it!  Oh, they got my piano player.  That’s John Hicks, for sure.  It sounds like Ray, too.  Wait.  No, that’s not Ray.  Hell, no.  He’d kill me!  Let me put my thinking cap on.  I like this one. [LAUGHS] Is that Curtis Lundy? [No.] I like his sound.  He sounds a younger guy, but with that old sound.  Whoever it is, he’s got it down.  I can’t say I know who he is.  I could take a wild guess, though.  When was this recording made? ['98.] Who are some younger tenor players?  I don’t really know who’s around. [AFTER] He sounds really good.  He sounds excellent.  I’d give it 4 stars, because it’s a remake of a legend.  I’d give it 5 if it were the real thing.  But John Hicks gets 5 stars for just being John Hicks, man!

8.    Sonny Rollins, “Cabin In The Sky” (from, “Plus 3,” Milestone, 1995),  Rollins, ts; Stephen Scott, piano; Bob Cranshaw, el. bass; Jack deJohnette, drums. 3½ stars.

I know this guy.  I don’t want to be stupid too soon.  I think I have a good idea already who it is.  It’s not who I thought it was at first.  I don’t know this guy’s name, but he is a contemporary of mine, this guy… No? [He's older than you by a fair piece.] Is he living? [He is living.] It’s Sonny Rollins when he was going through his teeth problems.  That’s  what it sounds like.  He’s going through his teeth problem.  Because it ain’t CLASSIC Sonny.  Ah, how can I say this without being negative to Sonny.  It just sounds like he’s dealing with serious dental problems.  Let’s talk about it.  Let me say something different.  Sonny Rollins, but… Let’s just say it’s not the period of Sonny Rollins that I really, really am fond of.  I think Sonny Rollins… Sonny is such a… That’s why I was grimacing during that.  Because when you play tenor, when it’s a struggle to play certain notes for somebody that great, you know there’s something physical going on.  You can tell.  Because some of the notes that he was struggling with, somebody with regular dental work wouldn’t have.  So it probably was during the period of time when something like that was happening.  Well, I loved it!  It’s Sonny Rollins.  I love Sonny Rollins.  I mean, I love him for being Sonny Rollins.  That’s not one of his best recordings, I would say.  3½ stars.  He’s going to kill me.

9.    Sam Rivers/Tony Hymas, “Glimpse” (from “Winter Garden,” NATO, 1998), Rivers, tenor sax; Hymas, piano. (5 stars)

Whoever this is, they have a very nice sound.  You know, the saxophone is the kind of instrument, when it buzzes, you know you’ve got something.  When you don’t hear that buzz, you get a flat sound.  It’s too straight.  This horn has got a buzz.  It’s alive.  He knows his horn.  Now let me figure out who it is.  Is he from this continent? [Yes.] I like the tune.  It’s beautiful. [The saxophone player wrote it.] It’s great.  He’s a good writer.  It’s got that real international kind of sound.  I’m not quite sure who it is. [He was also very prominent in your scene when you got to New York, and he was already in it.] Oh.  In my scene.  [Or parallel.  And he's old enough to be your father.] Okay. [And you'll kick yourself if you don't know who it is.] I will kick myself.  Who’s the brother who teaches in upstate New York… [Not him.] Play me a little more.  I don’t want to be kicked by myself.  I love it.  Whoever it is, I really dig it. [PLAY "Impulse"] My father is almost 75 years. [That's how old he was when he made this.] Incredible.  Is it Sam Rivers?  He’s the only guy it could be!  Sam Rivers is such a great person.  He gave me my first gig in New York.  It sounded like somebody who just knew… He’s probably forgotten more shit than most people know.  It sounded like somebody like that.  It really helped this other tune.  I may have never gotten it with just that ballad.  That’s a beautiful song.  You know when you hear a song and it sounds like it doesn’t matter what year it was made… [It's like Classical music.] Yeah, it’s like Classical music.  It’s always going on.  You could sing it in a different language, and it will still work. [Why did you ask if the saxophone player was from this continent?] Because at first it sounded like somebody from Brazil, like what somebody Ivo Perelman might do.  I like Ivo.  But then as it went on, it sounded like somebody more mature who has been through generations.  And when you said he was old enough to be my father and you put on the faster song, I could hear Sam’s rhythms.  Rhythmically, Sam has a different kind of expression because he’s been through so much, I guess.  His rhythm is not like Sonny Rollins, where it’s like BOM-BOM, right on your head, the way he attacks.  He’s snake-like; he kind of slides through.  But he’s got that sound.  God bless Sam Rivers, man.  I hope he lives to be 100.  I’d give that tune 5 stars.

10.    David Sanchez, “Lamento Borincano” (from “Obsesión,” Columbia, 1998), Sanchez, tenor sax; Edsel Gomez, piano; John Benitez, bass; Adam Cruz, drums; Richie flores, Pernell Saturnino, percussion.  (4 stars).

Is it a recent recording? [Yes.] Everybody loves Coltrane, man!  He’s probably the most quoted tenor player since Bird, I guess.  I take it these are Spanish musicians. [Hispanic-American, U.S.-based.  But mostly from Puerto Rico.] I’ll just take a guess that it’s David Sanchez or somebody like that.  One time this guy had a funny idea to do a Three Davids –  David Murray, David Sanchez and  Fathead! It was funny, man.  People run out of themes sometimes.  So we did this thing.  And it was nice.  We did it with an organ player.  I kind of remember his sound from there.  I kind of like David Sanchez.  He’s still young.  He’s got a ways to go.  But he’s going to be one of the great ones.  I think in about two years he’ll be where he wants to be.  It takes time to be… You’re thrown in there, and there’s this big fray in New York, and they expect you to be great already.  And I’m sorry, it just doesn’t… I didn’t get my own sound til I was about 28, and I feel like I got it early. [So you feel you didn't get your own sound until about '83-'84.] Something like that.  I had to absorb all this stuff around me, people saying this about me, they’re writing about, “Oh yeah, you’re the next blah-blah-blah.”  What the hell, I don’t know, man.  I’m trying to play my horn.  So David Sanchez, he’s getting a lot of recognition, but at the same time, this is a young man.  Give the guy a chance to develop.  He’ll be good.  I’ll give it 4 stars.

11.    Paul Gonsalves/Sonny Stitt, “Perdido” (from “Salt and Pepper,” Impulse, 1963/1997) Gonsalves, Sonny Stitt ts; Hank Jones, p.; Milt Hinton, bass; Osie Johnson, drums. (4½ stars)

It’s two tenor players.  Paul sounds different than before he really got plastered! [You think this is before or after?] This is before.  When he gets really plastered… Here I am going negative again.  But before he’s really libated…he slips and slides even more when he… Before that, he sounds more like a normal tenor player.  You know what I’m saying?  when he plays his little figures.  But when he gets plastered, he sounds like he’s in his own zone.  And I hate to say it for the youngsters, but the guy sounds good when he’s plastered! [LAUGHS] I don’t know!  It’s like no abandon, just pure… I love Paul.  He’s my favorite tenor player, man.  This is definitely pre.  He seems pretty sober here. [Then you have to figure out the other one.] Let me see who’s in the right here.  Paul is in the left.  This is like a separate recording from an Ellington project.  This is not an Ellington project at all.  They both sound wonderful.  That’s all I know.  He’s not an Ellington tenor player. [No.] Not at all. [Not at all.] This is from a whole nother zone. [He had his career as a hired gun.] Okay!  With the correctness of the way he plays, it sounds like it could only be Sonny Stitt.  What comes to mind is the Sonny Rollins-Sonny Stitt thing with Dizzy where they both play their ass off, then Dizzy ends up smokin’ them both!  You’re not going to find two better tenor players on the planet anywhere than Paul Gonsalves and Sonny Stitt. [Any idea who the piano player is?] Let me hone in.  Is he alive? {The piano player is alive.  He’s an elderly guy now, but this was 40 years ago.] [AFTER] I couldn’t really get his left hand, but I should have figured that was Hank Jones.  I played with Hank once in a tenor battle in 1978 at the Northsea Jazz Festival in the Hague.  It was Archie Shepp, Lockjaw, Fathead.  Hank Mobley got sick and I took his place.  Illinois Jacquet was running the session.  Hank Jones was on piano and Max Roach on drums and Wilbur Little on bass.  That’s when everybody in Europe recognized me and said I hung pretty good with the old guys.  So that was my moment.  I’d say 4½ stars for this, only because I’ve heard Paul play better, I guess maybe for the reasons I mentioned!  I don’t know why.  But it passed the test of time again.

12.    Branford Marsalis, “Attainment” (from Jeff Watts, “Citizen Tain,” Columbia, 1998), Marsalis, ts; Kenny Kirkland, piano; Eric Revis, bass; Watts, drums. (5 stars)

Is it one drummer?  I like the tone of the sax player.  I’m waiting for them to get into it.  It’s nice how they got into it finally, like a lilt kind of.  [4 minutes.] I’m not quite sure who this is, but the spirituality of it is something that I can sort of relate to.  Is this a young player, or an older one? [A little younger than you; not too much.] Sounds good, though. [He's someone you have encountered over the years.  You've had a dialogue.] A word dialogue? [I just mean a dialogue.] Oh, a dialogue.  That sounds good to me.  You mean we played together. [I'm just going to say you had a dialogue!] Okay, man.  I’m trying to figure out… It sounds familiar.  Somebody that I know.  Geez… It’s not Chico.  [Okay, you played together.] I’m trying to think what tenor players I played with.  A tenor player that I played with and is younger than me.  [Not that much younger, but definitely affiliated with a different generation than you.] Branford Marsalis.  He sounds good, man.  The spirituality comes through.  It sounds good! [So you can probably figure who the other guys were.] I guess with his band perhaps.  Jeff Tain and the brother who just passed away, Kenny Kirkland.  It was a very nice piece.  I’m impressed.  We encounter one another in Europe all the time.  He’s playing a lot of soprano.  He don’t play tenor that much on the gig.  But I admire him.  He’s a great player.  I’ll give that 5 stars because the spirituality is there, and you feel something. [That was Tain's record, not Branford..] Tain did a good record, then.  God bless him.

13.    Joe Lovano, “Fort Worth” (from “From The Soul,” Blue Note, 1991), Lovano, tenor sax; Dave Holland, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums. (4 stars)

It kind of sounds like Dewey. [Dewey's influenced an aspect of his playing.] Dewey’s son. [No, it's not Joshua.] Okay.  He definitely likes Dewey.  But he sounds good.  I like the composition… [Who's the drummer?] I wasn’t even listening for that.  Give me a few more minutes, a little glimpse of the drummer.  I’ll play you the one before, a duo. [PLAY "Modern Man."] It’s definitely not Dewey now.  He sounds completely different now to me. Is it a recent recording? [1991] I think I need a clue. [The saxophone player has become very prominent in this decade.  This was a sort of breakthrough recording for him.  And he's a year or two older than you.] Oh, that’s great.  Gee.  A year or two older than me.  It’s not Don Braden or someone like that.  I don’t know who it is. [AFTER] Oh, I know Joe.  I should have known that.  I don’t really know his sound.  He sounds good, though.  I’ve seen him over in Holland; we were hanging out in Amsterdam.  I don’t really know his sound, so I probably would have never guessed that. [Who's the drummer?  Do you know?] [AFTER] That’s Blackwell?  No shit.  4 stars.

14.    Ornette Coleman, “Feet Music” (“In All Languages,” Verve, 1987/1997).  Coleman, tenor sax; Don Cherry, tp.; Charlie Haden, b.; Billy Higgins, drums.

It sounds like they’re out of the Ornette Coleman school.  Which is a great school.  Sounds like Dewey to me.  Is that Dewey? [No.] That’s Ornette on tenor!  No wonder it’s out of the Ornette school! [LAUGHS] There’s one note Ornette always play when he plays tenor.  He plays like he’s playing alto, and it just hits that note!  I think he can play any saxophone.  But I’d like to hear him play baritone one day.  He probably could play the shit out of that, too.  People have to recognize that there are… If we’re lucky enough while we’re here, we’ll come across maybe 3 or 4 geniuses whose music really is something that has a lot of influence, and Ornette is one of them.  There aren’t many of them out here now left that their concept was maybe the strongest thing… The concept supersedes even the playing itself.  That’s what brings his genius into it.  That’s why you can hear his… When he did this thing at Lincoln Center, I heard about it.  I heard it was wonderful.  I want to hear some recordings from it.  But those kinds of things Ornette is brilliant on.  We need to hear him more.  He gets 5 stars for all the abuse they’ve given him over the years

A 2002 Downbeat Profile of Frank Wess for his 90th birthday

Due to a foulup by my provider, my Internet has been down for the last week, a refreshing if frustrating lifestyle change. Today, though, it’s incumbent to observe Frank Wess’ 90th birthday, Jan. 4th, by posting a profile that I wrote about him ten years ago for DownBeat. A magnificent musician.

* *

Not long before his 80th birthday, Frank Wess, in the studio with the Bill Charlap Trio, unfurled a tenor saxophone solo on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair” that stands with the classics of the canon. Over a relentless camelwalk groove, Wess leaps in from the top, dissecting the melody with minimum embellishment and maximum soulfulness, spinning out lucid theme-and-variations with a burnished candlelight tone that contains just the right amount of vibrato. Poetic and functional, he conjures the spirits of such old-school storytellers as Lester Young and Chu Berry, who set the standards when Wess was cutting his teeth as a teenager in Washington, D.C.

Wess was full of stories in June at his compact mid-Manhattan apartment, chock-a-block with a top-shelf audio system, instruments, sheet music, tapes, albums, photographs and correspondence. Just back from a Seattle weekend, he was gearing up to fulfill a ten-day itinerary that would tax a man half his age—two concerts with the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra, successive one-nighters with tenor saxophonist Harry Allen and with Charlap’s trio, and a week’s residence at the Blue Note with the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni Orchestra.

“When I heard Lester Young, that was that,” Wess says, leaping back to 1937. An Oklahoma native who had moved to D.C. two years before, he took early stylistic cues from such big sound heartland tenormen as Don Byas (he met him while summering with his mother in Langston, Okla., in 1932), Dick Wilson and Ben Webster. “Basie came through town for a dance at the Lincoln Colonnades; I couldn’t even sleep that first night. They were waving those hats, doo-wah, doo-wah. Prez and Herschel Evans were in the band, and Eddie Durham was playing guitar. The band was hot!

“Prez was staying at a three-story rooming house, and a friend of ours brought us there. Prez came out in his pajamas, with his horn in his arm and a little powder-box full of joints. He offered everybody a joint! We asked him how he made all those funny sounds, and he showed us.”

Sixteen years later, Wess became an integral component of the Basie mystique. From 1953 until 1964, he served as a triple threat tenor saxophonist, alto saxophonist and flutist, almost single-handedly creating a modern jazz vocabulary for the latter instrument. Within Basie’s distinctive environment, operating on the principle “less is more” as opposed to “bigger is better” and never—for all the compositional sophistication of such hardcore modernist colleagues as Thad Jones, Frank Foster and Ernie Wilkins—going over anyone’s head, Wess blended the varying strands of his epoch into a style that might define the term “mainstream.”

Wess speaks of his employer with unsentimental fondness. “I hadn’t been with Basie long, and we were in Atlanta,” [he recalls]. “Next door to the hotel was an upstairs club, and I was drinking, feeling good and acting crazy. Basie saw me, and when I went back in, one of the valets said, ‘Chief wants to see you.’ I knock on the door and come in; he’s sitting on the side of one bed and I sit across from him. He started talking about the transportation was eating him up, and all the humiliation he had to go through. He went through a whole lot of shit with me. I didn’t say nothin’. I didn’t nod my head one way or the other. I just looked at him. And he started through his story the second time, and I still didn’t say nothin’. He’s crying the blues; he was in debt. Then he started through his story the third time. I said, ‘You know what I think? I just want to know why you ever hired Jimmy Rushing, the way you can cry the blues.’ He was trying to talk me out of my salary. That’s the last time he ever did that.

“You had to understand Basie. We used to go to the track together; he loved to gamble and couldn’t gamble—not one lick. So everything was beautiful as long as you didn’t ask him for the money. Then you got stories for days. When we went to England the first time, he wouldn’t carry the music. He said, ‘I’m not gonna pay all of that overweight. You all don’t look at it no-way; you’re always looking out in the audience at some chick!’ So we went to England, and we did two weeks with no music. Blew them people’s minds! They invited us back to do a command performance the same year.”

Basie himself had learned the techniques of blowing people’s minds with swinging riff-based music as a late ’20s member of the Oklahoma City-based Blue Devils, the territory band that spawned the southwest sound. Wess lived a few hundred miles down Route 66 in Sapulpa, an oiltown of 20,000. Guitarist Barney Kessel and future Basie lead altoist Marshall Royal had grown up there, and Wess recalls childhood games of marbles with trumpeter Howard McGhee, a few years his senior. Wess’ mother taught school in town; his father, raised on Lake Seneca in upstate New York, taught 30 miles down the road in Okmulgee, the hometown of Oscar Pettiford. There wasn’t much to do in Sapulpa but practice, and Wess—who picked up the alto saxophone at 10—progressed quickly.

Relocated to Washington, Wess enrolled at Dunbar High School, studying theory with orchestra teacher Henry Grant, a friend of James Reese Europe who had taught Duke Ellington. Away from the classroom, the precocious cohort—they included pianist Billy Taylor and saxophonists Julius Pogue, Billy White, Paul Jones and Charlie Parker soundalike Oswald Gibson— soaked up information from local mentors like guitarists Samuel Wood and Biddy Fleet (the latter would soon show Parker how to execute the augmented and diminished chord extensions that became the DNA of bebop).

Wess graduated high school at 15 and enrolled at Howard University, attending classes by day and working a succession of increasingly remunerative jobs at night. He ascended the ladder, graduating from the dance bands of Bill Baldwin and Tommy Miles to a $35-a-week [position] in the Howard Theater pit band. Blanche Calloway took over the band and brought Wess on the road in 1940 for double the pay. After various adventures involving Lionel Hampton, union bookers and a tragicomic Boston run-in with Bojangles Bill Robinson, Wess enlisted in the Army, sponsored by his ROTC bandleader, John J. Brice, for a spot in the Special Services. Sent to Africa in 1942, he honed his skills as assistant bandleader of a 17-piece unit that accompanied Josephine Baker on a 1943 tour of North Africa.

A few months after his discharge, Wess joined [young firebrands] Gene Ammons, Fats Navarro and Art Blakey in Billy Eckstine’s bebop orchestra. A proponent of the gangsta esthetic half-a-century before hip-hop, the dapper, silken-voiced Eckstine commanded tremendous respect for his well-documented willingness to beat crackers and hoodlums at their own game at various points along the road. “B didn’t take no shit,” Wess agrees, launching into another saga. “People would come up and say, ‘Hey, B!’ and slap him on the back. ‘How you doin’?’ He’d say, ‘I’m fine!’ and then he’d smack them in the stomach.

“We lost a job nine days before Christmas in 1946 in Boston. The stage is about two feet higher than the floor, this couple is sitting ringside, and while he’s doing his act the woman keeps hollering, ‘Sing it, honey chile,’ a whole lot of bullshit. B kept doing his act. When he finished, instead of going off backstage, he went off front, walked down to this table and said, ‘Now, listen. When I’m doing my act, you don’t be hollering up on me. You crazy bitch, what’s wrong with you?’ Then he told her husband, ‘Man, you’re a silly son-of-a-bitch for being out with a dumb bitch like this.’ So her husband gets up. When her husband stood up, B knocked him down and went to get on top of him, but he kicked B in the mouth. B is going for his hunting knife. The cat gets up. Art Blakey is standing right up over him on the dance floor with a chair, comes down with it on his head, and back down he went. At the same time, two of them big Irish cops are standing in the back of the club. They ain’t moving. Then the boss comes out there saying, ‘Get that goddamn band out of here.’ He was a crazy man. Good cat to work for.”

Eckstine disbanded in February 1947. With a young family, Wess settled in Washington, supplementing local jobs through road work with Eddie Heywood, Lucky Millinder and Bull Moose Jackson. “After I’d been South with Moose for the third time in one year, I gave it up,” Wess says. He enrolled in D.C.’s Modern School of Music on the G.I. Bill to study flute. “Mr. Grant had given me one when I was 14, but I realized that I couldn’t do it myself, and I couldn’t afford a teacher then. So I put it on the back-burner until I had a chance to do it.”

After several years of scaling down, Basie began to reassemble his “New Testament” band in 1951, and Eckstine recommended he snare Wess. “Basie had been calling for a couple of years, but even once I graduated school, I wasn’t thinking about going on the road,” Wess says. “Then Basie said, ‘Frank, I can give you more exposure than you’ve had.’”

At this point, according to Wess, the band was nowhere close to the sleek polished powerhouse it would become. “It wasn’t sounding too good,” he says. “There wasn’t much music and the brass wasn’t too strong, though the reed section was pretty good. Things started tightening up after our first tour south, when Joe Williams and Sonny Payne came in. I knew Snooky Young from 1940, when I was in Boston with Blanche Calloway, and in ’57 I talked him in. That really did it.”

Congenial and sharp, Wess had a keen eye for talent that would fit. “Basie didn’t know anybody. I told him to get Al Aarons and Thad Jones. I knew Thad from ’51, when I did a whole summer in Atlantic City in the front bar at Club Harlem, working with a quartet and a singer, and Thad was in the back room with Jimmy Tyler’s nine-piece band, making it sound like a million dollars. Later I I brought in Eric Dixon and Sonny Cohn, and early on, I recommended Eddie Jones to play bass. When Basie said they were getting four trombones, I recommended Bill Hughes, who lived across the street from me in Washington.”

Wess would frame his flute with those four trombones on one of several mid-’50s albums that built on the popularity of his fluid, blues-drenched sound on Basie charts like “Perdido,” “The Midgets” and “Cute.” “Don Redman had heard me play flute on jobs around Washington, and asked Basie if he’d heard me,” Wess says. Then he describes some of the secrets of the Basie sound.

“Basie never fired nobody. That’s where he was smart. Everybody got to know each other—for good or bad—and we knew what to expect and how to work together. He never rehearsed us. Everybody in the band had been playing forever, and we knew how the music should go. The reeds were a fraction behind the trumpets, and the trombones were a fraction behind the reeds, but it was consistent, so when you heard the BAM!, it sounded like one thing. And the band laid back til the last split second to hit a note. That’s the way the music said it should be played. Basie would let you know what he wanted in his own way. He’d say, ‘I want something like this,’ and you’re supposed to know what he’s talking about.”

By 1964, Wess figured he’d been in the game long enough. “The band changed,” Wess says. “It wasn’t as good as before. Snooky and Eddie Jones left the same day. When I told Basie, he said, ‘When do you want to go?’ ‘Sunday.’ ‘No, I’ve got something important coming up. Don’t go now.’ He went through that for about a month. Then we were in Chicago and I told him, ‘Base, I’ve got to go home. Tomorrow.’ ‘Who am I going to get?’ ‘Get Sonny Stitt or somebody.’ ‘He can’t read.’ ‘Well, I don’t care who you get. I’ve been listening to all that for a month. I’m gone.’ ‘When you coming back?’ I said, ‘I’ll be back in ten days.’ I came home and I got everything straightened out for doing Golden Boy with Sammy Davis. I went out and got paid with Basie one Thursday; the next Thursday I got paid for Golden Boy. I never missed a payment.”

Since then, Wess has made his blues turn green as a first-call New York freelancer, putting his kids through college on a mix of jingle sessions, sinecures in TV bands and Broadway pit orchestras, and occasional combo and sideman work, including the New York Jazz Quartet, a “Two Franks” quintet with Frank Foster, and a quintet with trumpeter Johnny Coles. Since 1984, when he left “Sugar Babies,” Wess has stuck strictly with jazz, leading and guest-starring in a variety of what he terms “trendy necrophiliac ensembles” and doing sessions with such younger New York mainstreamers as Bryan Stripling (Wess plays up a storm on Bryan … Get One Free ), Bill Charlap (Stardust), Joe Cohn and Michael Weiss.

A witness to seven decades of jazz history, Wess ruminates on the changing mores of[the scene. "When I was coming up, jazz was a dirty word," he says. "At Howard, they’d put us out of school if they caught us playing jazz. Now it’s in the schools and you can get a degree, which doesn’t always mean something, but still you can get it.

"And the kids don’t dissipate as much as they did. I remember a time when it was just pitiful. Almost everybody was messed up. I drank, but I never was in that other clique. I was lucky when I was 17, in the pit band. One of the trumpet players, who’d been with Lunceford, was the first junkie I knew. We hung out together, and he was a helluva nice cat. He used to tell me, ‘Look, kid, you keep on drinking your whiskey; don’t ever bother with this stuff.’ We’d go to rehearsal Friday morning at 8, and he’d come in with a mouthpiece. I’d have to borrow one of my friend’s horns for him to make the gig.

"What’s funny is that when I was in B’s band, wasn’t nobody in there messed up. Maybe smoking some pot or something, but nothing more. Miles Davis was smoking cigarettes and drinking Coca-Cola. Jug wasn’t messed up until he went with Woody Herman. Fats Navarro wasn’t messed up. Dizzy used to sit in with B’s band to play with Fats; both were playing in the same idiom, but Fats had a little Spanish tinge to his thing and his sound was so much bigger. He’d hit a high G and A, and it enveloped the whole band. After the band broke up, I was playing the Apollo with Eddie Heywood, and I was walking down 126th Street. Somebody called, ‘Hey, Flank.’ That’s what Fats used to call me. I looked around, and man, he was just a skeleton. I almost cried. Just that quick."

Then Wess jerks himself into the present tense, and offers a closing thought [on the futility of nostalgia.] “Ellington never did a whole concert of nobody’s music. Neither did Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. Ain’t nobody that we revere and know ever did that! There’s 24 hours in the day. If you spend all your time looking back, how in the hell you going anywhere?” DB

For Barry Harris’ 82nd Birthday, a Downbeat Article From 2000

For the 82nd birthday of the great pianist-teacher Barry Harris, I’m posting a feature article that DownBeat gave me the opportunity to write in 2000. I’m appending an early draft — the print copy is a thousand words shorter, much of them from long quotes. Going for info here over style.

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The pianist Barry Harris will be 71 this year, and when he talks, musicians listen.  “You know what happens with me?” he asks rhetorically.  “I can tell you, ‘Oh, if you’re doing that, you should do this, too; if you don’t do that, you ought to do this.’  I’ve been doing that for years.  I’m not the catalyst.  People are the catalyst, and I’m the agent.  I can come up with things that we need to learn.  Don’t ask me where it comes from.  It comes through me, whatever it is.”

Harris developed his sagacious, homegrown philosophy and spot-on hip persona in the take-care-of-business atmosphere of post-Depression Detroit, where his peer group included hothouse flowers who developed into some of the most notable improvisers of the ’50s and ’60s — pianists Tommy Flanagan, Terry Pollard and Roland Hanna; trumpeters Thad Jones and Donald Byrd; saxophonists Billy Mitchell, Frank Foster, Yusef Lateef, Sonny Red and Pepper Adams; the guitarist Kenny Burrell; the harpist Dorothy Ashby; bassists Doug Watkins and Paul Chambers; and drummers Elvin Jones and Frank Gant.

“Most of us grew up playing in church, where my mother started me,” Harris reminisces.  “I studied classical with a preacher named Neptune Holloway, who quite a few of us took lessons from, and also Mrs. Lipscomb, which was in a private home.  Tommy Flanagan and I took lessons from Gladys Dillard; we were on a recital together one time.  My mother was a very gentle and beautiful person, and one day she asked me whether I wanted to play church music or jazz.  I said, ‘I’ll play jazz,’  and she was cool with that.

“We didn’t have any schools to go to like people do now. We started out taking things off records, and there were people around us who could play.  Recently I’ve become reacquainted with Berry Gordy; at Northeastern High School, the two boogie-woogie piano players were Berry Gordy and Barry Harris.  We might have got messed up when Theodore Shieldy [Sheeley] came to town from Georgia and went to the school; he not only played better boogie-woogie, but he could improvise.  So could a cat named Will Davis.  Now, I could chord when I was a teenager, maybe 13-14-15, but I didn’t solo too well.  I lived on the East Side of Detroit, and I started going over to the West Side where the cats maybe couldn’t chord as well as me, but they could solo.  When I was 17 a blind girl named Bess Bonnier who’s a very good piano player loaned me a record player that had a device that allowed you to play the record in any key you wanted all the way through.  The first thing I learned how to play was ‘Webb City’ with Fats Navarro, Bud Powell and Sonny Stitt!”

Struck by the bebop bug, Harris and his cohorts absorbed and painstakingly examined records by Bud Powell and Charlie Parker as they came out.  “We were beboppers,” he declares.  “That’s all.  Bebop was a real revelation for us, a musical revelation.  It was like a renaissance.  I was born in 1929, and I became a teenager in the ’40s.  So while someone like Jaki Byard, who became a teenager in the ’30s, learned more about the Stride, Art Tatum and Earl Hines, we heard Al Haig, Bud Powell and George Shearing, who were different than the stride piano players.  So we aren’t the best of stride piano players; there’s no kind of way!”

According to Flanagan, “Barry always had a nice dynamic attack and approach to the piano.  He was quick to get hip to Bud Powell, devoted more time to that style than anyone else on the scene then.  He took it another step.  He had a lot of confidence, too.  He was one of the few guys who would just wait for Charlie Parker to come to town and go up and sit in with him.  That’s more confidence than I had.  I just didn’t have the nerve.”

“I sat in with Bird at least three or four times,” Harris reveals.  “His band was late one time for a dance one time at the Graystone Ballroom, so we played just one song with him during the first set — a blues in C.  He was beautiful to us.  The best experience that I always tell people is a time he was playing a dance with strings at a roller rink called the Forest Club.  We stood in front, and the strings started, and when he started playing chills started at your toes, and went on through your body — orgasms, everything imaginable.  It’s really a spoiler.  I don’t like to go listen to people because I’m expecting somebody to make me feel like that.  Bud Powell is important to me; I’m more a Charlie Parker disciple, even more so now.” (Later, Harris performed with a virtual Bird on “April in Paris” and “Laura” in the Clint Eastwood film, “Bird.”)

Before attaining his majority, Harris worked high school dances and various other functions at Detroit’s numerous dance halls — the Graystone, the Mirror, the Grand.  “We played for our contemporaries.  We played for shake dancers, we played shuffle rhythm, we played rhythm-and-blues.  All of it was part of the deal.  I would go to the dance, stand in back of the piano player and steal a couple of chords, then go home and learn how to play them.  I remember Donald Byrd one day saying, ‘I don’t want to play in a bar, I don’t want to play in the dance hall; I want to play on the concert stage.’  Well, separating the music from dancing might have been the biggest drag that ever happened to us.  We knew how to dance.”

Harris worked various venues around the Motor City, including a 1953-54 run as house pianist at a corner bar adjoining an auto repair shop and a supermarket with a good soul food kitchen and a major-league music policy in the heart of Detroit’s West Side called the Bluebird Lounge. Flanagan—who vacated the post when he entered the Army—recalls the scene:  “There were a lot of musicians on the West Side, and even the laymen were very hip; when the Bluebird started having music it attracted a lot of the people who wanted to be on the scene.  People like the pianist Philip Hill, Thad Jones, Billy Mitchell, and Frank Foster had bands in there, and they started bringing in guest saxophonists like Wardell Gray or Sonny Stitt.  Fine musicians always worked in the club, including the best Detroit musicians, and people like Joe Gordon, Clifford Brown, and Miles Davis.”

Among the highlights of Harris’ Bluebird tenure were a brief 1953 stint with Davis, who was living in Detroit (“I might have been the first to play ‘Solar’,” he notes offhandedly), and an extended engagement with Yusef Lateef and Elvin Jones.  “The Bluebird was a very special place, man,” he stresses.  “You know how Marvin Gaye sang ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’?  I think there was truth to it.  The Bluebird closed as 2 o’clock.  At 1:30 Sarah Vaughan or Bird would come in, and do you know what?  You didn’t see people running to the phones, but within ten minutes that joint would be packed with people.  There were a couple of bars like that.  I played in another called the Bowlodrome, which was a bowling alley that had a bar, with Frank Rosolino — that might have been one of the first steady gigs I had.”

With the exception of a few months on the road with Max Roach after Clifford Brown died in 1956 (sideman recordings that year  with Thad Jones on Blue Note and Hank Mobley on Prestige), Harris spent the remainder of the 1950s in Detroit, working week-long gigs at area showcases like the River Lounge and Baker’s Keyboard Lounge with solo acts like Lester Young, Flip Phillips and Nancy Wilson, and building an almost mythical reputation as a piano guru that spread outside home turf.

“I might have known a little bit more than the rest,” he remarks.  “I don’t know if I was more schooled.  As far as playing Classical, I think Tommy Flanagan was more schooled than me; he and Kenny Burrell were the hippest bebop players around.  I was very quiet and kind of the shy cat.  Wasn’t no sports.  I was a piano player!  ‘Down Beat’ in 1958 had a yearbook with a picture of Paul Chambers on half a page; they’re talking about the Midwest, and they say, ‘Mostly all the musicians who come from Detroit come from Barry Harris.’  My mother had a flat where she let us play all day, and my house was like a mecca.  When piano players came to town, they’d look for me because they’d heard about me.  I don’t know what you would call me.  I’m not the catalyst.  I’m the thing that gets set off by the catalyst.”

Frequenting the Harris salon were young, information-hungry musicians like Joe Henderson, Louis Hayes, Roy Brooks, Paul Chambers, Lonnie Hillyer and Charles McPherson.  “I lived right around the corner from Barry, and I met him when I was about 15.” McPherson recollects, “Barry had heard me sitting in at the Bluebird, where the owner would let us sit in if we brought our parents over, and he told me, ‘You need to learn your scales.’  I started coming over to his house after school.  Barry’s house was a hub of activity.  He practiced and played music all day long, when anybody might come by, then at night he’d go to work.  Traveling musicians always knew to go to Barry’s house.  One time Coltrane came over when he was in town with Miles and Cannonball.

“I owe so much to him for helping me establish a firm musical  foundation, and technically in terms of harmony and theory and chord changes and scales.  But also, he instilled in me a certain kind of musical intelligence in terms of taste and musical discretion — to try always to be musically honest, to use the emotions along with analysis, that technique is wonderful but it’s just a means to facilitate your musical conception, and not the end-all and be-all.  One day he saw my report card, and noticed that it was quite average.  He said, ‘All your heroes, like Charlie Parker, are everything but average.  Charlie Parker might be kind of a bad boy in society, he’s doing a lot of things that’s not cool, but on the intellectual level the guy is brilliant.  All those cats are brilliant, man.  You can’t be an average or stupid guy playing this kind of music.’  I had never thought of it like that.  From that point on, I actually turned my life around school-wise.  I became like an honors student overnight.  I started reading books.  So Barry really instilled in me the notion of intellectual curiosity, that the hipper your intellectual thing is, the more there is to play — because you’re playing your life, your experiences.”

Harris left Detroit in 1960 to join Cannonball Adderley, who recruited him for Riverside records and brought him to New York — where, as he puts it, “a lot of cats knew about me before I knew about them” — for good.  He settled in an unheated cold-water loft on Broad Street in the Financial District, and after a shaky sort — a bout with pneumonia — hit the ground running, finding places to practice, working occasional gigs with people like Yusef Lateef, Lee Morgan, later with Wes Montgomery and Charles McPherson at the Five Spot, Minton’s and Boomer’s.  He found various duo sinecures at joints like Junior’s Bar on 52nd Street, down the block from Birdland, where big band and studio musicians would hang out to drink.

During the ’60s Harris, mentor to so many, found two of his own, forming friendships with Thelonious Monk and Coleman Hawkins, to whom he remained close until the end of their lives.  Curiously, Harris reveals, “I didn’t pay that much attention to Monk when I was getting started; Monk might have sounded very hard.  But you heard the most beautiful melodies; his songs you wanted to know, like the first recording of ‘Round Midnight’ when Bud was with Cootie Williams.  Monk showed me ‘Round Midnight’ one time, which is why I get mad when people play it — they play the changes so wrong.  Cats try to take it all out and everything, but he did it real simple — three notes sometimes.  You gradually grew into Monk if you dealt with Bud Powell; you could tell Monk had influenced him, and you would be influenced by Monk.  Monk was odder than all the rest.  He did unorthodox things, not the regular, run-of-the-mill stuff.”

The Baroness Pannonica de Konigswater, who Harris met soon after arriving in New York, was a long-standing friend to Monk and Hawkins, and helped facilitate his relationships with the avatars.  “I can remember playing at the Five Spot, and Monk coming in and walking back and forth through the joint all night with his hat and coat on,” Harris says.  “That might have been when I first met him.  Later I’d go with the Baroness by his house, and we’d pick him up and all three go someplace.  Monk was an odd fellow.  He didn’t waste any conversation.  Monk never wasted words — or notes.  That was like his music.  And that’s really true, too.  A lot of people assume that Monk didn’t have technique.  I can tell them that they’re lying on that issue, because he really did.  I saw him play a run, and I tried to play it and I couldn’t. Monk danced a lot.  He would sit behind the piano, and suddenly throw his hand out way at the top of the piano to hit a note.  That note was hit.  The way he would play a whole tone scale coming down, I don’t know if anybody ever played like that before!

“Monk was hipper than most of the jazz musicians today.  Monk didn’t practice practicing.  Monk practiced playing — sitting at the piano, play in tempo one tune by himself for 90 minutes.  I lived with Monk for ten years, and one day he said, ‘Come on, let’s play the piano.’  Monk started playing ‘My Ideal.’  I guess we played about 100 choruses apiece, where he’d play one, then he’d make me play one.  I wish it had been recorded.  He was a very special kind of cat.”

Monk probably learned “My Ideal” during his mid-’40s tenure with Coleman Hawkins on 52nd Street; Harris played with Hawkins extensively from 1965 until Hawkins died in 1969.  “I put him in the hospital when he died,” Harris recalls.  “He didn’t want to go, but I had to put him in.  I had gone to live with him on 97th Street, and he had gotten too heavy for me to move him around.  He was a recoverer.  He might overdo things a bit, and then he’d cool out and he’d recover and he’d be all right.  It just happened this time he didn’t recover.

“I can remember the first time I sat in with Coleman Hawkins;  he was playing at the Five Spot.  He called some tune that I knew the melody to, and I figured I could figure out the chords.  So we played it, and all he said was, ‘Doggone it, another goddamn Detroit piano player!’ [LAUGHS] I felt lucky to have worked with him, because he gave me a different outlook on things.  One time he called out ‘All The Things You Are,’ and after he played I just said, ‘Oh my goodness.’  He would play a phrase, laugh his butt off because he knew I was trying to get the phrase.  I wasn’t chording.  I was trying to steal his phrases!  It sort of let me know that there’s a lot more to be played than what we’ve heard.  We can’t think of anybody really as the end.  We were the bebop boys.  That was our music.  But playing with Coleman Hawkins sort of showed one that there was a lot more to play than Bebop, than what Bird and them played.  So one had to work at trying to reach this other level.

“He had a special philosophy.  For one thing he would always say he never played chords; he played movements.  I’m a firm believer that the key thing is how you go from one place to another.  One should know how to go to the relative minor, how to come back from the IV to the I, all these different little things that young cats don’t really know nowadays.  A lot of horn players, unfortunately, sit at the piano, hit one chord and then another, think it’s  hip, and decide to write a melody on it.  They’re missing the boat, because what they’ve done is learn to melodize harmonies as opposed to harmonize melodies, and most people don’t remember a thing you played.  Music is more than that.  Music is movement.  You have to play a chord that moves.  Once you know more about movement, then you can venture away from it.”

Harris still lives in De Konigswater’s home, facing the west bank of the Hudson River with a spectacular Manhattan skyline view, and he speaks of her with reverent reticence.  “She was beautiful towards musicians,” he says.  “All the musicians knew it, too.  She probably helped us all in some kind of way.  One of the greatest ways she helped us, I think, people would walk by a jazz club and see her Bentley or Rolls-Royce parked out in front, and they’d come into the club to see who was in there with this Rolls-Royce or Bentley.  Up in Harlem, they protected that car.  She could park any place up there, in front of Wells, in front of Smalls Paradise, in front of Minton’s.  She never locked the trunk or the glove compartment, and nobody ever touched it.  She was a jazz lover.  That’s no stuff.  She was one of our assets.”

Harris recorded four strong sessions for Riverside, including “Live At the Jazz Workshop,” which is a bible of trio playing for a number of younger pianists.  When the label folded in 1964, Harris began to do business on a handshake basis with A&R man Don Schlitten, for whom he recorded steadily, both as leader of a series of increasingly personal, poetic recitals and as the penultimate sideman, prodding the likes of Dexter Gordon, Jimmy Heath, Sonny Stitt, Al Cohn, Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Criss, Red Rodney and McPherson to superb performances on dates for Prestige, MPS, Muse and Xanadu until the early ’80s.

“He knew all the tunes,” Schlitten comments.  “Everybody knows all the changes, but he also knew the melodies.  He had a certain way of comping and playing the changes that was inspiring to the cats who were playing this music, and he brought a certain kind of enthusiasm and joy which, as far as I’m concerned, is what makes jazz what it is, and turned the other cats on.  Therefore, he became a very integral part of whatever it is that I was trying to present in terms of preserving this particular form of music.  It seemed to work all the way down the line.”

Harris began teaching formally during the mid-’70s with Jazz Interactions, an non-profit organization run by the trumpeter Joe Newman and his wife Rigmor; his classes became so popular that Harris eventually started his own school, the Jazz Cultural Theater, on 28th Street and 8th Avenue.  Picking up where he’d left off on his Detroit home sessions, JCT became Harris’ New York platform for articulating his palpably unorthodox theories.  “I believe in scales,” he says.  “I don’t mean a whole lot of scales, like most people.  I wanted to pay attention to the pentatonic scales and so forth, but my thoughts have changed since I started.  I believe in the dominant 7th scale.  The question becomes to figure out how to apply it to everything that one runs into — and one can.  I am more of the opinion now that if you give students a little basic harmony, to go from one place to the other, and then combine that basic harmony with the scales, one will be on the right track to teach.

“I don’t know if there are too many teachers on the right track.  They have our young now learning these funny songs that don’t have movement, so young people all over the world aren’t even getting a chance to learn to play.  Everybody is writing their original stuff mostly nowadays.  The reason they’re doing that, of course, is because that’s one way for us to make some money.  Record companies aren’t the most trustworthy things in the world, so the only way for you to really make something is to have your original music.  But because people are playing their original music, we can’t have the jam session thing too much.  I could go up and play when Roy Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins were playing, because they’re going to play something I know.  There’s a bunch of standards that everybody in the world should know, like ‘How High The Moon’ or ‘Just You, Just Me.’  Young people nowadays don’t even have a chance to go to a jam session.  That’s why when I had my place, I tried to keep a jam session going every Wednesday night, even though it never was anything.

“With a lot of the young people, I can’t understand their logic when it comes to jazz, or their understanding of jazz, their disrespect for older musicians, and why they play like they play.  Monk didn’t play that way, Art Tatum didn’t play that way, Bud Powell didn’t play that way, Al Haig didn’t play that way, Bill Evans didn’t play that way.  The pianists can’t play two-handed chords; they think that the right hand is just for single notes — and that’s bull.  Whoever taught them that and whoever came up with it is full of stuff.  This music is two-handed music.  All you got to do is listen.  And yet, these people will say that they’re listening to Monk and different people, and I know they’re full of stuff.  They aren’t listening to them.  It’s impossible to listen to them and play the way they play.”

Harris’ pessimistic prognostications belie his actions, which are those of a profoundly optimistic man.  “I’m older now, and I don’t know how much longer I have,” he says.  “Any knowledge that I have, I’m not supposed to die with it; I’m supposed to pass it on, I’m sure.  So I try to pass on my knowledge of this thing.  Hopefully, some of it will win out in the end.  See, I know some of the stuff I pass on is right.  I’ve got piano players playing stuff that no other pianist has ever played in life, because we’re thinking totally different about the piano.  We think about scales.   We have a scale for chording.  Most piano players don’t know anything about that.  99% of the chords we play come from a scale of chords.  And if you don’t know the scale, that means that you’re missing out on 7 or 8 different chords that somebody never told us were chords.  They tell us about augmented ninths, but they don’t know that augmented ninths comes from a scale.  You should be able to take that augmented ninth chord up a scale and find out what the second chord is, the third, the fourth, the fifth, and then you’ll start hearing sounds that you never heard before in your life.

“The more you find out about music, the more you believe in God, too.  This isn’t haphazardly put together.  This stuff is exact.  It’s a science, and part of the music is science.  But we think there’s something above the science part; there’s something above the logic.  There’s a freedom at both ends of the barrel, man.  There’s a freedom in anarchy, but there’s another freedom that comes from knowledge, then there’s another freedom that comes that really is the freedom we seek.  That’s what all of us want, is this freedom.  I think by knowing that the music is not chordal, but scalar, changes the whole thing.

“You learn from teaching.  I have my students trying to catch up to me, and I insist that they don’t.  It really keeps me on my toes, because I ain’t gonna let ‘em catch up to me.”

A Jazziz Article on McCoy Tyner from 2003 {Plus Interviews}

To mark the 73rd birthday of piano maestro McCoy Tyner, I’m posting a feature article about that I had the opportunity to write for Jazziz in 2003. I’ve attached below the verbatim transcripts of the two interviews that I conducted for the piece.

* * *

Thirty-six years after the death of John Coltrane, with whom he famously played from 1960 until 1965, McCoy Tyner remains a jazz icon. The 64-year-old pianist reinforced that stature one night last March, during a thrilling set with vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Charnett Moffett, and drummer Al Foster at Manhattan’s Iridium in the middle of a week’s stand supporting Land of Giants (Telarc), Tyner’s superb 2003 release.

“There’s a prayer that comes through as the music is being played,” Hutcherson noted during a subsequent conversation. Hutcherson, who first recorded with Tyner in the mid-’60s, when both were Blue Note artists, is perhaps Tyner’s most inspired foil. “You’re vulnerable, naked. McCoy knows how to mold the group and make it sound the way it should. We just fall in and then we’re swept away. He throws out so many suggestions and then asks what you think. If you catch it, you catch it. He implies the color or the one note throughout a sequence of chords that says, ‘Play me, play me again!’ — and with that starts the prayer. After every set I’ll turn to him and say, ‘Boy, you were really praying.’ He’ll laugh, but he understands exactly what I’m saying.”

When I paraphrased Hutcherson’s remarks to Tyner, he laughed. “Did Bobby say that? I’ve got a name for him: Rev!” As we sat on the backyard patio of his booking agent’s brownstone office on a bright, 90-degree July afternoon, the pianist looked clean as a whistle in a contoured black sports jacket, a textured, blue silk shirt, a white patterned silk tie, and white linen pants. He wore his hair marcelled into short neck-clinging braids that didn’t betray a speck of gray.

“I don’t want to sound overly poetic,” Tyner continued, on a serious note, “but you do feel cleansed when you’re done playing. I pay homage to the Creator for what he has given me and all of us. But I’m not preaching. If people hear things in my music and identify with them, that’s good! The music speaks for itself.”

I mention that Hutcherson’s description of how it feels to make music with Tyner evokes the collective catharsis that Coltrane stirred in audiences on a nightly basis during the ’60s. “It was a spiritual experience every night,” Tyner reflects. “We were giving everything we had, and you never knew what would happen. There was no time for ego.”

Tyner stands out among professional contemporaries because of his grounded persona and the relentless consistency of his career. He is no stylistic eclectic in the manner of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Chick Corea, all of whom continue to follow the example of their former employer, Miles Davis, in seeking new worlds to conquer. Rather, Tyner’s path more closely resembles the High Modernism aesthetic of Coltrane — and the likes of Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Keith Jarrett — who coalesced and refined diverse influences into a holistic musical conception.

Like all of the aforementioned, Tyner possesses a vocabulary of global dimension. Core sources include Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum, and Coltrane. Every other year or so, he releases a new recording, invariably acoustic, on which he reframes elements of his long-influential style in different contexts. Every important jazz pianist from the mid-’60s until the present — including Hancock and Corea — has assimilated his homegrown system of navigating harmony with fourth intervals. For improvisational fodder, he deploys an exhaustive knowledge of the rhythms and scales of Africa, Cuba, Brazil, and India, as well as the chordal structures of the American Songbook. And he articulates everything with soulful cadences drawn from the Afro-American urban-church and blues cultures of his youth.

Tyner differs from his distinguished contemporaries in that he has never shrunk from expressing his tonal identity within the framework of his roots in mainstream jazz. Perhaps that predisposition — in conjunction with a pronounced lack of personal eccentricity and the middling skills of his working trio of the latter ’80s and much of the ’90s — explains why, despite the fact that Tyner commands universal admiration among musicians and retains what market researchers call a “high recognition quotient,” many “progressive” connoisseurs perceive him as a conservative figure. But no such considerations deterred several thousand New Yorkers — young and old, and with a larger African-American contingent than usually turns out for jazz events south of 96th Street — from packing a cavernous concrete space on the south edge of the Lincoln Center acropolis, called Damrosch Park, on a humid August night for a free concert by Tyner’s trio, with guest flutist Dave Valentin.

Stimulated as much by the crowd’s support as by the inventive accompaniment of bassist Charnett Moffett and drummer Al Foster, Tyner stretched out through seven originals on the trio portion. With unerring logic, impeccable touch, and an astonishingly powerful left hand, he conjured yearning, inflamed melodies from dense harmonies and complex polyrhythms, ornamenting his designs with luscious voicings and elegant figures. He executed every idea with magisterial authority while sustaining the aura of instantaneous creation. For all the baroque grandeur of the lines, he stripped every idea to essentials, imparting an air of poetic inevitability to the arc of each improvisation. With Tyner as the attentive moderator, the trio transcended notes and beats and achieved seamless musical conversation, rendered in cogent sentences and paragraphs.

BREAK

Unfailingly amiable and gracious in conversation, Tyner is not one to expound on the particulars of his art. However, his colleagues are happy to fill in the gaps.

“McCoy is a consummate accompanist,” says tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker, who won a Grammy for his solo on Coltrane’s “Impressions” on Tyner’s 1996 album, Infinity [Impulse!]. “He gives you a lush, wide-open cushion, and you have a feeling of complete freedom. If I hint at building a harmonic tension, he’ll be there instantly, almost like he’s reading my mind. It’s powerful to hear that quality of tension-and-release on the great Coltrane records, but to actually experience it first-hand is incredible.”

Some of Tyner’s most efflorescent playing has occurred in Afro-Cuban and Brazilian contexts, most recently on the prosaically titled McCoy Tyner and the Latin All-Stars [Telarc, 1998]. “McCoy is a master of rhythm,” says trombonist Steve Turre, a regular participant on such projects, who has also played in Tyner’s big band since 1984. “A lot of guys don’t commit to a rhythm; everything is kind of abstract. But McCoy never floats. Rhythm permeates everything he does.”

“Rhythms have languages, and even if you don’t know the language, you can sense what it is and play it,” says bassist Andy Gonzalez, recalling an occasion where the pianist performed as a guest with Libre, the unit Gonzalez co-leads with iconic timbalero Manny Oquendo. “I asked McCoy if he wanted to play Latin-jazz tunes with [chord] changes or montunos, and right away he asked for the montunos,” Gonzalez says, referring to the triplet-based vamps that counterstate the drumbeats of clave. “I had Charlie Palmieri play a real down-home, Cuban-dance-rhythm montuno at him, and it was fascinating to hear him answer it with his own chords and rhythmic feel. It was effortless. Montunos are related to the kinds of pentatonic modal scales that Coltrane was working on, and improvising in those kinds of modes is really McCoy’s forte. That’s very African, very deep-rooted, getting to the very beginnings of music.”

Gonzalez mentions a late ’60s conversation with Tyner during a set break a Slugs, an infamous club on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The pianist revealed that a window opened for him after a concert at Harlem’s Apollo Theater when Coltrane, sharing the bill with Machito, borrowed the Cuban bandleader’s bassist, Bobby Rodriguez to fill in for an absent Jimmy Garrison. Tyner confirms this. He also emphasizes the impact of Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, to whom Coltrane was close, on sustaining his own awareness of African roots. But African music entered Tyner’s consciousness in the early ’50s, when a Ghanaian drummer named Saka Acquaye arrived at Philadelphia’s Temple University to study political science, and earned tuition money by teaching African rhythms to local drummers at a dance school that employed the teenage pianist as an accompanist.

“I fooled around with the drums, but the joints of my fingers started to hurt, and I had enough sense to stop,” says Tyner, who began formal piano studies about a year before the drummer came to town. “I observed Saka and learned how to connect one rhythm with another, how to operate with different layers of rhythm. I was fascinated with the drums even before I met him, and I’ve incorporated those rhythms into my style along with other things.”

Tyner acknowledges regarding the piano as a kind of extended drum. “Thelonious Monk did, too. Monk was very percussive and rhythmic. He’d do stuff that was off-rhythm or against the rhythm or tempo of the song. It was miraculous to me how he could interject so much feeling and depth into such simple ideas. It wasn’t about how many notes he played. It was the immediacy, the spontaneity of the situation. He taught me that what’s important is what you do with the idea you’re trying to portray – the will to push the envelope.”

While Tyner’s ensembles at Damrosch Park and Iridium played with a palpable attitude of freedom, critics cite numerous ’80s and ’90s recordings and performances with less resourceful partners on which his playing sounds attenuated and rudimentary, as though he felt responsible, say, for stating both the drum and piano parts. “I have a mixed personality in that respect,” Tyner admits. “I have a controlled sense of experimentation. I go outside, but there has to be something to work with. I conceived one tune on the new record as having no melody; we just used tonal centers, moved from one tone, one sound, one cluster, to another. I had that experience playing with John. But I use it when it’s appropriate for me, not as a main way to express myself. It’s a tool, and that’s all. I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone, and I don’t want everything to be predetermined. It’s not artistic.”

Perhaps that sentiment explains why, last year, Tyner decided that his two-decade association with bassist Avery Sharpe and drummer Aaron Scott had “served its purpose for that time period” and formed the current rotating unit with bassists Moffett and George Mraz, and with either Foster, Eric Harland, or Lewis Nash on drums. “You can’t get so attached to someone that you restrict them from doing what they ultimately have to do,” he explains. “I had my previous trio for a long time because I hadn’t heard anyone — and I knew there were guys around — who could really do what I was looking for. Then they came along. The right thing always comes around eventually.”

What precisely is Tyner looking for? “I like guys around me who are willing to take chances, explore and feel the situation at hand, as opposed to, ‘Oh, I can’t do this’ – but on a level of professionalism that stands out. It’s not good for an artist to feel that kind of fear. But it’s very personal. You’re asking a person to be honest with themselves and not be afraid. And most of us have fears and sometimes we’re not honest! We spend a lifetime, or at least we should, trying to find out who we are. It’s crazy to stick with something forever.”

The ethos of risk taking was customary during Tyner’s years with Coltrane and was a key component of his formative years in Philadelphia. A late starter, he studied classical music formally for two years before putting aside the books and finding his own solutions in functional situations. “I developed facility because I practiced all the time,” he says. “And the dancing school taught everything, so I heard a lot of music there. I studied things by Bud Powell like ‘Celia’ and ‘Parisian Thoroughfare,’ and I heard Monk’s records. Bud and Monk were my main influences — and John, of course. But I listened for the individuality, not to copy. Monk respected you if you had your own direction. A lot of things come out of so-called ‘mistakes.’ In reality, nothing is a mistake; it’s how you shape music, how you resolve it.”

Like trumpeter Lee Morgan, a childhood pal in Philly, Tyner learned to think on his feet in the crucible of live performance. He played with blues singers and R&B bands, worked fraternity dances and graduations, and, with Morgan, worked two summers in the no-holds-barred environment of Atlantic City. By his late teens, Tyner was a first-call pianist for national bands passing through town, and he spent memorable weeks with, among others, Max Roach’s quintet with Sonny Rollins and Kenny Dorham, and with a unit co-led by Red Rodney and Oscar Pettiford. By then, he’d been playing several years with local trumpeter-composer Calvin Massey, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Tootie Heath. Massey introduced Tyner to Coltrane in 1956 after a matinee job at a neighborhood spot called the Red Rooster.

“When guys from the older generation saw you had some talent, they’d call you for gigs and show you tunes,” he recounts. “And you learned by accompanying. Guys expected you to be supportive, and I learned a lot that way. That cocky attitude of ‘I can’t wait to get my own band’ didn’t fit in at all. The standards were very high. Appearance, presentation — you had to be on point. I came up in an era when Art Blakey would say, ‘People see you before they hear you.’”

I ask if his mother, Beatrice, a beautician who kept McCoy’s piano in her shop, was the source of his fastidiousness. “My mother had a lot to do with everything in my development,” he replies. “She was very elegant, not in terms of her clothes or attitude, but just her demeanor. She was honest, personable, and caring, and people loved her. She loved music, and she’d let me know when anything came up that she thought would interest me. We had a very close relationship. I took her to cotillions. Once she wanted me to play a concert at Mount Olivet Baptist Church – not church music, but the songs I had learned from my instructors. She wanted me to put on tails, and I did.”

I thought of that image toward the end of the trio portion at Damrosch Park. After a venturesome a cappella introduction by Moffett, Tyner — who did not remove his navy, double-breasted blazer throughout the high-energy set — launched into the thunderous theme of “Manalyuca,” carving out the melody with his left hand and comping with his right, using them interchangeably in an improvisation that built to an immense crescendo. He gave way to Al Foster, who, Max Roach-style, stated the design of the melody and transitioned into improvised variations on a march. Tyner re-entered at the peak he had reached before desisting, then, through a gradual decrescendo, reached the final melody statement. He immediately launched into a boogie-woogie figure before embarking on formidable two-handed blues variations that foreshadowed a deeply swinging, medium-tempo excursion through “Blue Monk.”

As at Iridium a few months before, he reminded the witnesses precisely why his name means what it does in the jazz timeline.

“I only did what I was supposed to,” Tyner says of his career. “I mean, people think it’s fabulous, and when I look back at my musical history, I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve had, and to have risen to the occasion. I like simplicity and balance, and I’m dedicated to music, but it doesn’t consume my every minute. I don’t need to be put on a pedestal to feel good. But I don’t downplay my contribution or creativity. I’m confident, but I don’t allow myself to feel I’m in command of everything. Confidence is a tool to get where you want to go. I feel I did the best I could. And I thought it was pretty good.”

* * * *

McCoy Tyner (6-10-03):

TP:    I’ll try not to burden you with too much stuff that’s commonly known, but if I write a longer piece, I may want to ask you some other things.  Let’s talk about this group and this project.  It’s obviously not the first time you’ve joined forces with Bobby Hutcherson, but is this the first time you and he have worked together in a while, or has it been ongoing?

TYNER:  It has been ongoing over the years.  Periodically Bobby and I connect on a project.  We did a duet record, “Manhattan Moods,” just him and I for Blue Note, and several things in the past.

TP:    ”Sama Layuca” and “Solo and Quartet.”

TYNER:  Right, with Herbie Lewis.  And he was on “Time For Tyner.”  So quite a few projects.  Then last year we went on tour in Europe, with this particular band.

TP:    Which generated this record.

TYNER:  Yes, it was a nice tour.  We just closed at the Iridium.  Eric wasn’t with us, because he’s been doing things with Terence Harland.  We try to set it up so everybody will be available to work with me, but we set that sort of thing up gently so that there won’t be any bad feelings.

TP:    Al Foster isn’t a bad guy to have available in a pinch.

TYNER:  Let me tell you.  Al is fantastic.  He adds so much to the music, and knows just what to do dynamically.  So it’s a pleasure having him around so we can play together.  He’s going to Italy with me tomorrow.  It will be a trio with Charles Fambrough.  I’m in transition at the moment, kind of floating a bit, and it’s real nice.  I’ve got some guys who are sailing right along with me.

TP:    You mean you’re changing personnel.

TYNER:  Yes, I’m changing personnel.

TP:    Because you were with Aaron Scott and Avery Sharpe for many years.

TYNER:  Yes.  Avery was with me over 20 years, and Aaron about 16-17 years.

TP:    Thinking of Charles Fambrough, it occurs that you have a bunch of alumni from your bands who are prepared to step in and serve as almost interchangeable parts.

TYNER:  Fambrough hasn’t worked with me for a while, but when he was with me it was a great band.  We had George Adams and quite a few people.

TP:    Right, and Joe Ford.

TYNER:  Right, Joe Ford and George Adams and Wilby Fletcher and Charles Fambrough.  I can always give them a call when I get stuck.

TP:    what are you looking for in your musicians?  Apart from the usual things, sensitivity and technical proficiency, is there a particular perspective they need to have on music, or an attitude?

TYNER:  What it is… I was looking at some of the younger guys, not just because of age but because of talent, and if I think they have potential for growth and development, and they can bring something to the table in terms of my music… A lot of them have grown up listening to some of my music, along with other artists.  Like, Eric had been with Betty Carter, and she was a consummate teacher and very strict about what she wanted, and so she got him in the right place.  Charnett’s father worked with Ornette Coleman, so he brought something else to the table.  It just so happens, I’m not the kind of guy that randomly fires people.  I try to give a guy a chance to see what he can do.  George Mraz has done some things with me, we went to Europe not too long ago.  And Al is a real professional and a great guy.  So I’ve got a bit of selection.

TP:    With Bobby and Charnett, it was interesting, because it provided you with two foils.  Because Charnett is such a strong soloist and projects such a powerful sound, he was really a match for you.

TYNER:  Yes.  He’s been quite an individual, and has been from a very young age.  His father gave him the right idea about what the music is and said “Go ahead, take a shot, go your way and see what you can do.”  With me, he’s able not only to free himself up, but he wants to learn something else about structure in the music, some traditional stuff, which I like to do.  I like to do a lot of different things.  He’s able to do that.  He follows very well, listens, and he’s got a good sound and a good concept.  I like those two guys very much.

Of course, Bobby and I go way back, and we play well together conceptually.  We’ve been like that for a long time.

TP:    It seems you have an exceptional simpatico.  It seems you follow each other’s ideas intuitively.

TYNER:  We phrase a lot alike.  His wife even commented.  She said, “Sometimes I can’t tell,” because we’re both keyboard instruments.  We have the uncanny ability to phrase a lot alike.  It’s kind of unique.  A lot of fun.

TP:    It’s great to hear the two of you together.  You had that sort of simpatico with Joe Henderson on the various records.  And I think it would be hard for people to get that with you, because your conception and execution is so formidable.

TYNER:  Joe sounded great on his records that I did, and I’m very happy with the things he did with me — “The Real McCoy” and “New York Reunion.”  I really miss him a lot.

TP:    It seems one thing you and Bobby share is a fascination with pan-diasporic music in its many varieties, rhythmically, the melodies, the scales and so on.  I wanted to ask you about the evolution of your incorporating that information in your sound.  I gather there was a certain point when you went to Senegal.

TYNER:  Well, actually it started when I was a teenager.  I was very fortunate.  I came up in a very active community musically.  The musicians that were around and the jam sessions that were going on.  We had this guy Saka Acquaye, who was from Ghana, and he came to Philadelphia and taught some of the conga players and drummers in that genre of playing.  A lot of different rhythms, and how to connect everything, how sometimes you play one rhythm and that connects with something else, and you have different layers.  He was great.  And his sister taught African dancing.  I’m writing a book and someone is helping me, and she happened to run into Saka’s name.  I don’t know the correct spelling of the name, but it’s definitely in the book.

TP:    Did you study drums ever, apart from piano?

TYNER:  I was fooling around with it.  But it started in the joints of my fingers, and I said, “I can’t mess…” A lot of these drummers wore tape around the joints of their fingers, so it wouldn’t hurt so much.  I always had a fascination with the drums…

TP:    From the time you met him?

TYNER:  Actually, a little before.

TP:    How old were you at that time?

TYNER:  I must have been about 14-15.

TP:    So it would have been 1952-53.

TYNER:  Something like that, in the early ’50s.

TP:    A lot of Africans started coming to the States after the U.N., like the dancer Asadata Dafora in New York.  Do you think of the piano in a very percussive sense?

TYNER:  That’s part of my style, I think.  I’ve incorporated those rhythms into my style.  Also other things.  But I used to play for a dancing school, and they did a production of “Viva Zapata” that was… It was a song, actually, kind of a hit song back in the ’50s.  So I played piano for them…

TP:    This was as a teenager in Philadelphia.

TYNER:  Yes. Saka was studying at Temple University, political science or something, and was teaching on the side.  I never actually got instruction from him, but I watched him teach the guys who were playing congas.  At the time, there was a lot of identification with the Africans, because during that time… Not political.  Cultural.  Everybody wants to politicize it.  But I think cultural identification is good.

TP:    Were people like Edgar Bateman checking him out?

TYNER:  I’m not really sure.  He was around during that time.

TP:    I’m just thinking of some of the progressive musicians around Philly.

TYNER:  Like Eric Gravatt.  Eric had a very keen knowledge of African rhythms.  Because he worked with me for a while.  Then he went to Minnesota and took up residence there.

TP:    Michael Brecker told me that when he was a teenager, they used to play tenor-drums duets.

TYNER:  I wouldn’t doubt it.  Michael is a fantastic musician, and being from Philly… Guys from Philly have a certain kind of feeling.

TP:    But you had an orientation toward African rhythms at the time that you met John Coltrane, and certainly when you were in the band.

TYNER:  Yes.  And when he came to New York, Babatunde Olatunji was here, and John and Olatunji were very good friends.  John would play at his place in Harlem sometimes.  So there was a keen interest in African culture.  That was good, identifying with the roots.

TP:    Do you feel that inflected your compositions, the melodies and scales, and some of the rhythmic patterns?

TYNER:  Yes.  Especially certain compositions.  I think affiliating with this dancing school, I heard a lot of different kind of music.  Because they did ballet, they did everything, so I had a chance to check out a lot of music.  Also, I studied with two teachers, one a beginning teacher and the other an Italian teacher who took me through Bach, Beethoven, and other areas of European classical music.  So I had a wide range of experience in that respect.  I tried to keep my mind open.  And I always liked Latin music.  The music world is so broad.

TP:    People of your generation I think learned the music differently than the generation today.  Kenny Barron told me that as a teenager he’d play gigs until 3 in the morning, and then go to high school the next day.

TYNER:  Yeah, we had a lot of jam sessions around Philadelphia.  A lot of jam sessions.  We’d be at my house one time, the Heath Brothers would have jam sessions at their house, one time I played up at Lee Morgan’s house.  Plus, Philadelphia is in close proximity to Atlantic City.  So I would go to Atlantic City in the summer and play… We didn’t have much money, but we managed to scrape up three meals!  I played at the Cotton Club in Atlantic City with Lee Morgan’s quartet.  It was fantastic, because we had a chance to see… I met J.J. Johnson, and Tommy Flanagan and Tootie Heath were playing with J.J.  Dinah Washington.  Atlantic City was one of the entertainment capitals of America.  That was a great thing.  We spent two or three summers down there.

TP:    That’s on a very professional level.  There were places with chorus lines and so on.

TYNER:  Yes.  You learned from… There were some fantastic guys around, older guys, the older generation.  They took you under their wing, and if they saw you had some kind of talent, that was all they needed to know.  They’d call you for gigs and show you tunes, old standards.  You would learn just by accompanying.  A lot of the things I learned were by being supportive.  It wasn’t so much like now, where a lot of people want to set up their own band.  There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to get your own band, but when I was with John I wasn’t necessarily looking, “Oh, I can’t wait to get my own band.  I just savored the experience of being with him, and I learned so much just by coming together…” You learn how to do that.  When I was growing up, that’s what the guys expected from you.  They weren’t looking for you to have that kind of cocky attitude.  That didn’t fit in at all.

TP:    I think it would be a situation with Coltrane where you could play the whole history of the music and frame it as individually as you would want.

TYNER:  Well, John was in the R&B band.  Sometimes we’d travel and these guys would show up.  He used to play with a guy named King Kolax, who would show up when we’d play the Midwest.  I played with guys who played what we called House Rockers — the cat would get up and honk his horn and the rock the house, and people would put money in the bell of the horn.  That was a great thing, because it wasn’t about a lot of articulation — it was about feeling and sound.  If you had a sound on your instrument and a good feeling, hey, that was it.  I played with those kind of guys, coming up with blues singers and all that sort of stuff.  So yeah, it was on a professional level, even if you were young.  That didn’t have anything to do with it.  The thing is, to get that experience was wonderful.

TP:    Does it make a difference in the way you play what kind of drummer you have with you?

TYNER:  Well, it doesn’t change the way I play, but I think what it does, if the drummer is playing WITH me, as opposed to just sitting there playing time, I think… That’s a very important element.  But I think if he’s responding rhythmically to what I’m doing on the piano, it’s a tremendous asset.  Because I play very rhythmic anyway, so rhythm is very important, and then I’m able to go from there to other things.  It’s a good point of departure.

TP:    I want to continue on the rhythmic aspect.  In the ’50s and ’60s were you listening to Cuban or Puerto Rican piano players, and that style of playing in clave, which is different than jazz improvising.  Because your own brand of that music is so idiomatic and yet personal to you.

TYNER:  Well, I think that has a lot to do with the African influence.  The jazz and Latin rhythms came out of the African experience.  But because we were from the Americas, it’s a little different.  But that’s the foundation of gospel music and blues, and jazz came out of that.  So those rhythms have been able to last.  But that’s basically where I had a real pleasure just… I played with a lot of Latin musicians over the years, and we feel as though there’s very little separating us, and more connecting us than anything else.

TP:    I did read that you had gone to Senegal, and that it was an important experience for you.

TYNER:  It really was.  It must have been 7-8 years ago. I flew into Dakar, and then we drove from Dakar all the way down to St. Louis.  The French government put on a festival there.  A guy who produced several of my recordings of the big band, who has some affiliation with that festival. It was beautiful.  We went through many villages on the way down.  When I got down there, there were some djembe drummers who played with me.  I went down with Jack DeJohnette, and these guys sat in.  They were a family of drummers.  What happened is that they liked us so much, the French guys and the Africans, that they asked we do a tour of France with… I think Jack did the tour, and there were two drummers from that family.  It was great, and we were able to create a nice marriage.

TP:    Was it a very organic process to start bringing this material into your music circa 1969, when you did “Expansions,” and the early ’70s?

TYNER:  Yes, I’d say it was pretty organic because of my previous experience with African rhythms and drummers, guys who played… One of the guys who played regular trap drums in my R&B band when I went into modern jazz was a conga player, Garvin Masseaux, and he studied under Saka, along with a guy named Bobby Crowder.  They played together a lot and they were good friends.  So from an early age I’d been influenced by African music.  Bobby played and did some recording with Red Garland.  Those guys were our premier conga players around Philadelphia.  Garvin played with my R&B band.

TP:    And I gather that’s the band that you started you off in writing charts and writing tunes.

TYNER:  Yes.  I wrote this chart that never ended. [LAUGHS] Well, it seemed like it never did!  Boy, it was long.  I must have been about 14 or 15.

TP:    Jimmy Heath described his early writing efforts in Philly in a similar manner, and so did Benny Golson, so you’re not alone.,

TYNER:  Yeah.  You have a lot of ideas and you try to cram them all in one song.

TP:    When did your early mature pieces come, things like “Effendi,” and so on.  Did you write them in the early ’60s, or did you bring them up then…

TYNER:  Yes, that’s after I got… John and I were the first two jazz artists on Impulse, and “Inception” was my first record.

TP:    Wayne Shorter, for instance, said that he was writing pieces from the early ’50s, and some of them got into the Art Blakey book when he joined up.  I was wondering if you had been that prolific before coming to New York and entering the public stage.

TYNER:  Yeah, I was writing some things when I met John.  But I came to New York after the Jazztet.  I worked with the Jazztet for a while, because John was committed to Miles and he couldn’t leave, and he wanted people in his own band and it took him a while, so Benny Golson asked me if I was available to go to San Francisco.  He had three weeks at the Jazz Workshop over on Broadway in San Francisco.  I said sure. Then John left Miles not too long after that.  That’s after we did the Meet the Jazztet record, where we did the first version of “Killer Joe.”  It was a great band, but completely different from the direction that was about to develop being with John.

TP:    Benny Golson said he knew it was confining for you.

TYNER:  Well, the thing is, he wrote some nice charts!  Benny’s a heck of an arranger.  And he wrote some nice tunes, “Along Came Betty,” “I Remember Clifford,” some nice songs.  I enjoyed my experience with them.  But I had a verbal commitment with John that whenever he left Miles I would join his band.  So to make that transition took a little time — not too much, because I was with the Jazztet only 7 months.  Then John left Miles, and he came to me and… It was very tough, because I grew up under Benny.  It was tough for me, too, because they were such nice guys and really very helpful, but it was something that had to be done.  I think Art and Benny realized that later on.

TP:    Are you writing for the personalities that you’re playing with?  Is there any of that in your composition?  Or do things just come out and people adapt to them?

TYNER:  What it is, you want to surround yourself with people who can interpret what you write.  With the big band I have more that type of thinking, because it’s a different type of thing — but not so different.  I’ve had the big band since the ’80s. Some of the members of the band, like John Clark and Joe Ford were in the band when I first started it, and they’re still there.  So I know their personalities, and I know generally which songs I like.  I mean, anybody can play on any songs, but with some guys it’s just tailor-made for them.  I think that’s what happens.  Duke Ellington wrote for some of the guys who were in his band.  You can’t help but do that, I think.

TP:    Also, there are a number of your songs that have been performed in many different contexts.  Are you still writing prolifically?

TYNER:  This record has some songs I’ve recorded before, but a lot of them are new, like “December,” “Serra Do Mar,” “Steppin’”.  “Manalayuca” was recorded before; the title has changed a bit.  I’ve recorded “For All We Know” before.  So there’s the mixture.

TP:    And were these written and chosen with this personnel and instrumentation in mind?

TYNER:  Well, yes, in a way.  Definitely, because I knew who was going to be on the date.  I don’t really earmark… See, Bobby and I have no problem in terms of concept, because we think alike conceptually.  But I don’t necessarily all the time… “December” was a song that I had in mind… When I wrote that, I thought it would be wonderful to hear what Bobby could do with it.  Because I know it fit his style.  And I felt like Eric and Charnett would really be able to handle “Serra Do Mar” because it goes from one rhythm to another; different segments of the song interchanged, and I thought they’d be able to interpret that well.  But often I don’t necessarily write everything to tailor-make the song to fit a person.  But I try to pick people who I think like to play my music or can interpret my music well, as opposed to, “Oh, let me write music for this guy.”  But I like to surround myself with people… Because if a guy doesn’t fit into the concept that I have, then he doesn’t need to play with me — that kind of thing.  I shouldn’t say it like that, because I have played with guys who aren’t necessarily used to playing with me, and it’s different for them.  I’ve heard people say, “You’re moving all the time.”  But that’s from playing with John.  He liked me to move around.

TP:    Just talking to you, the program seems almost autobiographical.  There’s material that addresses pan-African rhythms, and you have the blues and the standards and the Ellington and the ballads, and it’s all part and parcel of your musical biography.

TYNER:  I think that music should reflect you.  If you’re the one who’s performing or composing, it should reflect who you are.

TP:    You do concept albums, which is logical, because to keep putting out albums, you have to find ideas to tag them on and give people different angles.  But this has a very organic quality.  It doesn’t seem like there’s any imperative involved except something coming out of you and what you’re thinking about at the moment.

TYNER:  I think you nailed it.  I’m glad that came out, because that was actually the way I felt.

TP:    Seeing you at Iridium put an exclamation point on it.  They had me sitting right up by stage left so I could see you at the piano, and I’d never been that close to you before, and I noticed that you play with a minimum of motion.  For someone who gets as huge a sound as you get… For instance, Ahmad Jamal moves a lot around the piano and dances around the piano.

TYNER:  Keith Jarrett does, too.  He really gets around.  It’s whatever works for you.  For me, in how I utilize the instrument, and it has many characteristics… I approach it a certain way in terms of touch and uses of the pedal, and that gives me the power I need.  I figure it has a lot to do with the touch as well.

TP:    Was that a sound you heard in your mind’s ear and worked towards, or did it come out of your development as an instrumentalist.

TYNER:  I think it was already up here.  I think your sound is who YOU are.  That’s exactly what it is.  You can’t create it if it’s not there, and you can’t embellish on it if it’s not yours.  We have our own sounds!  When you talk, when people recognize who you are, I’ll say, “That’s Ted.”  You have your own sound, and it comes out when we play an instrument.

TP:    But if I put my hands to a piano, people would say “shut up!”  There’s truth to what you say, but there’s also a craft component.

TYNER:  Have you studied piano?

TP:    Many years ago, and I’m not suggesting I couldn’t develop a certain proficiency…

TYNER:  If you ever played the instrument enough, you would hear Ted coming out.  You have your own identity, man.  I think we all do.

TP:    Many musicians would tell me that the instrument is an extension of themselves, and that music is just another vocabulary…

TYNER:  A language.

TP:    And they say it gets passed down.  One of the great things about jazz is that the oral tradition still holds true.  Who for you are some of the people who passed down that oral tradition…

TYNER:  I was very fortunate.  I met Bud Powell.  He lived around the corner from me when I was a teenager.  My mother was a beautician, and my piano was in her shop.  So Richie Powell was on the road with the Max Roach-Clifford Brown band, and Bud occupied Richie’s apartment.  It was right around the corner for me.  And my mother did the superintendent’s wife’s hair.  So she came and she said, “There’s this piano player around the corner who doesn’t have a piano; can he come around and practice on your son’s piano?”  So I asked my mother who it was, and she said, “Bud Powell.”  I said, “Of course.  He can come around any time he wants.”  But he was a hero to us.  We used to follow him around.  We had a place where musicians would hang out, and we’d get him to go up there and play.  His recordings were fantastic.  And Thelonious.  I used to… But I didn’t listen to them to copy them.  What I heard was individuality, the fact that they focused on who THEY were and they did their thing. But they were very inspirational to me.  And later on, Art Tatum, because [LAUGHS] he was an impeccable musician. But stylistically, Bud and Monk were really major influences on me — and then John, of course.

TP:    There’s that German word, the “zeitgeist,” of the time.  They were absolutely one with their time!

TYNER:  Yes, that’s right.  And they were so inspirational.

TP:    So it wasn’t so much that Bud Powell said, “Here’s how I do this voicing” and so on.  You soaked it up.

TYNER:  No.  You have to do that yourself.  You have to find out what your voice is yourself.  That’s it.  Not only is it lasting, but you can develop something from your own personality, your musical personality.  Otherwise, you’re not going nowhere with it.  You’re just limited to whoever the guy is you’re copying, or you’re trying to model yourself after.

TP:    Were there any pianists you did that with?  Herbie Hancock told me that when he was 13, or maybe 11, he found a guy in his class who could play, and he’d been playing Mozart and classical music and was a prodigy, but he couldn’t do this.  Then he found out it was George Shearing, and his mother had a George Shearing record at home, and so he played along with it until he got the accents and phrasing, and that launched him.

TYNER:  Bud Powell was that image for me.  I had Bud’s records, and I was trying to play things like “Celia” and things like “Parisian Thoroughfare” and a couple of other things.  But then I knew that, “Hey, that’s Bud Powell.”  Because that’s just the way it is.  You can’t go but so far.

TP:    But those were things as a kid, you memorized and…

TYNER:  Well, you have to… A lot of the horn players were playing as well.  Actually, what it was, we knew certain pieces like from Clifford Brown-Max Roach and Dizzy’s music and Bird’s music, all these guys playing Charlie Parker’s music.  So I had to learn that stuff in order to play with them.  When I was a teenager, Sonny Stitt would come through… I would play with different people.  Sometimes Sonny Rollins would come through, and Sonny Stitt.  I was playing around locally with a lot of the older musicians.  So I had to learn the tunes.

TP:    Was that at a place called the Red Rooster?

TYNER:  Well, that was I met John, at a matinee.  It wasn’t far from where I lived.  It was a local kind of…not an elaborate place, but a fairly decent place, and people used to come there to listen to music.  I was playing in Cal Massey’s band.  Cal was the friend who introduced me to John.  And Jimmy Garrison was in Cal’s band, and Tootie Heath.  John came out and checked the matinee.  He was on sabbatical from Miles, there was a little period there, and then he came up and he and Cal got back together… Cal was a composer as well.  So that’s how I met John, one afternoon.

TP:    But back in 1960, you weren’t the average 22-year-old.  You were a pretty experienced musician.  I think you recorded with Curtis Fuller in ’59.

TYNER:  Yes, my first record.  I think it was “The World of Trombone” or something for Savoy.  That’s actually before the Jazztet was formed, and after that they had a meeting with Art and Benny and Dave Bailey and Curtis, and they said they wanted to form a band, and I said, “Okay, but when John leaves Miles, I’ve got to go.”  It was a tough one.

TP:    Did you play with any vibraphonists then?

TYNER:  Yes, there was a vibraphonist around Philadelphia who was very popular…

TP:    There was Lem Winchester in Wilmington and Walt Dickerson.

TYNER:  Walt was the guy.

TP:    And he had an expansive concept himself.

TYNER:  Yes, he had an expansive concept.  Absolutely.

TP:    As I recall, the “Time For Tyner” record was a live record in North Carolina?  That’s when you and Bobby first hooked up.

TYNER:  No, it wasn’t live.  Let me tell you what happened.  People have made that mistake because of the way the guy wrote the liner notes.  I played a concert at this university in North Carolina, and the guy came down and reviewed it.  Then for some reason, he happened to mention that on this recording, and it left people with the idea that it was recorded live — and it wasn’t.

TP:    But was it a working band?

TYNER:  No.  Bobby and I never worked extensively together. But we knew each other very well.  We came up in the same generation, so…

TP:    And you were both on Blue Note.

TYNER:  Both on Blue Note.  Wayne and a lot of guys were all on Blue Note at the time.

TP:    What’s interesting is that a lot of the things that were recorded on Blue Note were just in the studio and didn’t have to do with working bands.  Was that the case with you?

TYNER:  Yes, after late ’65, when I left John… It was almost six year.  Which records are you talking about?

TP:    ”Expansions” or “Time For Tyner.”

TYNER:  No, those weren’t working bands.

TP:    ”The Real McCoy.”

TYNER:  No.  Joe Henderson just happened to be in town, and they wanted to do a date.  I did some recordings with him.  “Recorda-Me”, I think.  Kenny Dorham was on it.  But I didn’t have a working band at the time.  Ron Carter did a lot of recording with me, too, but I didn’t have a band.

TP:    But with Bobby Hutcherson, it just emanated from…

TYNER:  Our musical association.

TP:    And it just kept cropping up again.

TYNER:  Yes, exactly.

TP:    Does the record label you’re recording for have any impact on the type of music you’re recording, or does it just have to do with the time and the place.

TYNER:  No.  Telarc is basically a jazz label, as far as I know.  But they have no bearing… They know when they ask me to record what they’re getting into.  I don’t do that.

TP:    So all the projects you’ve done for Telarc have been at your initiative?  The trio and “Jazz Roots.”

TYNER:  Absolutely.  If they make a suggestion, maybe I’ll try this or that or whatever conceptually, but I have the final word on everything.  If I don’t like it, I won’t do it.

TP:    Are you exclusively with Telarc now?  Or are you still a freelancer?

TYNER:  I’m not signed with them, because I like to be a free agent.  But I have done some consecutive work for them.

TP:    Since that thing for Impulse, “McCoy Tyner Plays John Coltrane,” I think everything you’ve put out has been on Telarc.

TYNER:  Yes, that was done in 1997, but they released the tapes in ’99.

TP:    Tell me about the Jazz Roots album, the tribute to your various influences.

TYNER:  It wasn’t so much influences.  It was a dedication to the musicians that I knew — and know — and who were part of the history of this music, and guys who passed on and a lot of them who are here.  It’s a tribute to jazz pianists.  That’s basically what I was doing.  Erroll Garner, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Chick, Bud Powell, Thelonious… It was just a conglomeration of different people.

TP:    was it easy to choose the repertoire, or a difficult process?

TYNER:  Not really difficult.  Because I chose songs that I thought fit these guys, and did the best I could to do that.  I felt pretty good about it, the choice of songs for each guy.

TP:    Is performing in front of an audience for you a very different experience than performing in a studio?

TYNER:  It’s different.  The thing is, it all depends.  If you’re working with people consistently for a long period of time, it has to make a difference.  Like, “A Love Supreme” was sort of a culmination of all the musical experiences that we’d had with the quartet, and it was a high point.  But we knew each other.  We knew each other’s musical vocabulary.  If you talk to a person long enough and you live around a person long enough, you begin to get familiar with how they phrase, in terms of the words the pick, whatever.  Even if you can’t nail it right on the head all the time, but you have a sense of where they’re going with what they’re saying.  And it’s the same if you play with somebody for years.  You don’t have to second-guess.  You can just about go where you’re supposed to.

TP:    Your solo records are so rewarding.  I have the three solos or duos you did for Blue Note, and then this one…

TYNER:  I like to play solo.  I really do.

TP:    You sound free when you play solo.

TYNER:  Yes, because you can go where you want to go.  You don’t have consider if the bassist is following you.  Well, you can hear.  You don’t have to worry about the drummer, if you’re dealing with the rhythms or the melody or with the harmonic content. It’s all about what YOU want to do.  And that’s a lovely thing.  I like playing with a group, because if you can bring that kind of sensitivity to a group setting, it’s wonderful to have two or three or four guys or a big band do that, be sensitive to what’s going on, and listening and responding.  But if you really want to talk in terms of empathy, I think you can’t beat solo playing.  It’s about you.  You’re the only one there.  You can’t lay the blame on anybody!

TP:    Do you still practice a lot?

TYNER:  No, I don’t.  Not at all.  I should.  But I play a lot.  I perform a lot . But I try to compose.  I hear things in my hear and try to do that.  But I really don’t spend time practicing.  I used to years ago.  But my whole career, I’m very fortunate that I was working a lot with John… I haven’t really practiced since I was a teenager.  I spend time at the piano composing. That’s about it.

TP:    If you were going to practice, what might it be that you’d want to work on?

TYNER:  You know, Miles never practiced either.  There’s something about… When you play before the public, it’s better than practicing, I think.  Because you know that there is a communication that has to be made.  The music is about communication, too.  And I don’t mean playing down to people.  I mean just acknowledging the fact that they’re there, listening, and you’re going to take them on this journey.  I think that’s basically what it’s all about.

TP:    Philly Joe Jones once made the comment that he knew exactly what his hands were going to do, so why did he need to…

TYNER:  Yeah.  Well, see, you want it to be automatic.  You want it to be real self-expression.  And practicing is… I already had the tools that I need to work with.  It’s just a matter of ideas and how you present it.

TP:    You said that Miles didn’t practice, and he didn’t rehearse either.  And I gather you have a fairly liberal attitude about rehearsal.

TYNER:  Yes.  Because we didn’t rehearse… With John, I think we might have had… Well, I wouldn’t say a rehearsal.  We ran over some material we were going to record, maybe the Ballads album, and all I did was get like an intro and an ending, and that was it.

TP:    So getting together with Bobby for the European tour and presenting this new material, how did you let it evolve?

TYNER:  Well, we had to run over the material, because there were certain things I wanted to emphasize. But I wouldn’t say practicing.  It was just reviewing the music.

TP:    Because you’ve known each other so long.

TYNER:  That’s what it is.  It’s true, what Philly said.  Because if you have the tools, what are you practicing?  If you HAVE the tools, then it’s just a matter of the ideas and the feeling.  That becomes paramount, as opposed to “let me get in a couple of more runs under my fingers.”  Eventually that happens if you play enough over a period of years, that you can execute without thinking about it.

TP:    Would you talk a bit about the distinction between composition and playing?

TYNER:  I like to play my songs actually.  But then, again, I stuck that Duke Ellington song in there, “In A Mellow Tone,” because I like it.  And Duke’s songs have a tendency to swing!  Just playing the melody itself.  But basically I do like to play on the songs that I have written.

TP:    I guess they suit your style.

TYNER:  Yes, that’s what it is.

TP:    I’ve heard many musicians refer to improvising as spontaneous composition.

TYNER:  That’s a good phrase.  That’s exactly what it is.  And a lot of times, you’ll come up with a melody based on something you’ve played — that you are playing.  “I’ve heard that before.” “Oh, I played that last night.” [LAUGHS] Maybe you think about that.  I don’t know.  You don’t know where exactly it’s from, but it’s part of your expression in some kind of way.

TP:    I don’t know exactly how many records you’ve done, but there can’t be many things you haven’t done in your career.  I’m wondering if you have any aspiration that you haven’t fulfilled yet.

TYNER:  We’ll see.

TP:    You’ll let it come along.

TYNER:  Yes.  Something will tell you.  You just do it, and something will say, “Well, yeah, that’s the right thing.”  It just comes to you.  If music is your world, or whatever it is, it becomes intuitive. You don’t have to sit down and plan it for a year.  I can write a whole date in a couple of weeks in advance.  I wouldn’t advise people to do that.  But I’m just saying that when I’m placed under pressure, I do pretty well.

TP:    Pressure is the great motivator.

TYNER:  Yes, it sure is.  When you have a deadline.  But that’s good, because you learn how to deal with it.

TP:    You bet.  And it makes you stronger.

TYNER:  That’s right.

TP:    So this summer, are you going to be out a good bit, and any with Bobby?

TYNER:  I’m going to Italy and to Japan for about three weeks, and George Mraz and Lewis Nash will be playing with me.

TP:    You’re just getting all the second stringers, aren’t you.

TYNER:  George is a wonderful bass player.  He knows how to play with a piano.  For some reason, you can go where you want to go, and George is right there.  He’s a nice man, he’s fun to be around, and it’s nice to have that kind of selection of people.  He played with Oscar, he played with Hank, he played with Tommy Flanagan.  He knows what to do when it comes to piano players!  He’s not trying to take it out.  He’s the kind of guy that likes to blend into what’s going on.  But when he solos he’s got a beautiful sound on the instrument.  I love George.

TP:    You’ll have fun with Lewis, too.

TYNER:  I did an album of Bert Bacharach’s music that Lewis is on.  I host at Yoshi’s in Oakland every year (this will be the tenth year), and a lot of guys play, and each week is a different band.  Lewis and Christian McBride, who’s one of my neighborhood guys, played very well together.  This year it’s going to be Tain Watts.

TP:    Tain told me a story about having an initiation with you, back in ’87, when he played with you and put out all his stuff on one tune, and he said that after that he was hanging on for dear life, because he’d played it all already.  You were just beginning and he’d played all his stuff.

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] Well, he’s increased his knowledge.  He seems to have a lot left.

TP:    Well, he told the story with relish. It was, “Yeah, McCoy got me.” But again, Art Blakey did it, Miles did it… You’ve become this jazz elder…

TYNER:  Elder statesman? [LAUGHS]

TP:    Well, a jazz elder griot type of thing, where the material gets passed down in this manner to so many people who then sustain it.

TYNER:  I’ve been fortunate to have known a lot of great people who were great inspirations, and I’m very thankful for that opportunity — or whatever you would call it.

* * * *

McCoy Tyner (7-25-03):

TP:    I’d like to talk first of all about your summer itinerary, the configurations you’re working in, the musicians you’re playing with.  I gather you recently did three weeks with Lewis Nash in Japan.

TYNER:  Yeah, he went with me to Japan, and we did a tour of the Blue Notes in Japan.  It’s very nice; Blue Note franchised out the name over there.  It was a great reception.  I’ve been going to Japan since 1966.  The first time I went over was what they called the Drum Battle (it was more like a reunion to me) between Tony Williams, Elvin Jones and Art Blakey.  It was the first time I went over, with Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Owens, and I forget the bass player.  Of course, I’ve gone back after that with my own bands over the years.

TP:    You did a number of recordings there.

TYNER:  I did a solo piano thing, “Echoes of A Friend,” which was dedicated to Coltrane.

TP:    You did it in ’72.

TYNER:  Yeah, something like that.  But there’s a solid base there.

TP:    Japan is part of your regular touring itinerary.  I guess the trio with George Mraz and Lewis has a certain type of tonal personality. Do you go in a different direction, say, with that personnel than, say, with Charnett Moffett and Al Foster.  Or if Jack DeJohnette were playing in a trio with Ron Carter.  I’m just throwing out names.  I’m wondering how different musicians of different attitudes affect the way you respond and listen.

TYNER:  Well, it’s always like that anyway, when you play with people of different characters and characteristics, different personalities.  It’s just like meeting an old friend.  You can’t compare him to the one you ran into yesterday.  They’re completely… Well, they’re not completely different, but what it is, they know what my style is like.  So what they do is, they know they have to listen, and that’s all I ask.  Because I wouldn’t have chosen to have them on this tour if I didn’t think that they could perform with me.  And individually, they have.  George played with me and Al when we did this Coltrane tribute, and Lewis did the Bacharach thing and something else with me.  So they know what they’re in for basically.

TP:    Do you know what you’re in for beforehand?

TYNER:  No, I don’t want to know.

TP:    Do you like the surprise?

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] Yeah.  I’m surprised all the time.  Because they’re growing, and I say, “Oh, wow, there’s something different this time.”  It’s always different anyway, but it’s nice to hear them move in a positive way and develop.  Because we’re all growing.  That’s what it’s all about.  One tour you do with a guy one time, and then the next year or so it’s different.

TP:    But you had a working band for many years with Avery Sharpe and Aaron Scott.

TYNER:  Yes, I did.

TP:    You did other projects, but that was basically the band.  Now it seems like you’re experimenting with different configurations.

TYNER:  Yes.

TP:    What was the reason for disbanding at this point?

TYNER:  Well, everything runs its term.  What I’m saying is that everything has a term.  I had a great rhythm section with them for years, but then I thought it might be a good time to do something different.  I think if you force something to happen, even if it’s change, you can have a negative response. But if it happens naturally… In all the bands I’ve had, it reached a point where it served its purpose for that time period.  Then it was time for me to choose something else.  But I didn’t force it.  Avery was with me for 20 years and Aaron was close for 17-18 years, so it served its purpose.

TP:    Can you describe what the purpose might have been with that band?  I mean, they were obviously very suitable to you.  You had a three-way affinity.  You’re not going to do anything you don’t want to do for two decades.

TYNER:  Mmm-hmm.

TP:    Talk about the qualities.

TYNER:  It was very good qualities.  The thing is that they were very consistent in what they were doing, and determined.  They were eager to learn and develop.  And that’s one thing I do like about people who work with me.  I hope that when it’s served its purpose, that they walk away with information that they didn’t have before they joined my band, and had the opportunity to develop.  I think that’s very important.  But I think it went as far individually as it could have gone, and as a group, consequently, if you don’t move, then everybody is sort of stuck in a situation… You want to be organic.  You want to be healthy no matter what the configuration is.  You want that healthy attitude.  And we can only do what we can do.

TP:    It sounds to me as though you’re now in a mind space where it suits you to play with as many different empathetic personalities as you can, and are able to give yourself a lot of leeway.  Would that be true, or are you looking to find a steadily working group again?

TYNER:  As long as they’re compatible, is what I’m doing.  If they’re not compatible… I can tell sometimes by listening to people.  I heard Eric when he was with Betty Carter.  We were in actually, of all places, Beirut, Lebanon!  They invited us over.  I was a little hesitant at first, but then I’m glad we went.  They were very nice people who invited us there.  Eric was playing with Betty then, and I was playing I think with the Latin band opposite her.  I had a chance to hear Eric then.  I had met Eric actually as a teenager in high school in Houston.  I went to the university to give a little bit of a talk, and met him.  He was a kid at the time.  Of course, he’s developed quite extensively from when I met him with Betty, but it was nice…

TP:    She raised him good.

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] Well, the thing is that we were able to play together and have fun, and that’s good.  He plays with Terence Blanchard and other people, and I think he was with Charles Lloyd recently.  I think Charles heard him in London when we did the thing in London, and said, “Oh, I want that guy to play with me.”  It’s not a steady gig, but he definitely has been making some appearances.  But hey, whenever possible.  That way, I don’t have to dependent on any one guy — on one bass player or one drummer.

TP:    So there’s the trio, and are you doing anything with Bobby Hutcherson this summer also?  Or are you resuming that quartet in the Fall?

TYNER:  I think we’re resuming in the fall.  We’ve come back from Japan not too long ago, maybe ten days ago, and we’re doing something at Lincoln Center on August 2nd.  Dave Valentin is playing flute, and Charnett Moffett and Eric on drums.

TP:    I’d like to ask about the Latin band a bit.  This will take me back a bit and focus on that Philadelphia territory.

TYNER:  Are you from Philly?

TP:    No.  I know a lot of people from Philly, though, and I’ve talked with a lot of musicians who are your peers and older than you and younger than you, like Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath and Reggie Workman and various people.  When we spoke earlier, you said there was an African drummer in Philly whose name you couldn’t quite recall the spelling of, who taught you in the early ’50s…

TYNER:  He didn’t teach me, but I was in his presence.  He taught guys who percussion was their thing.  That was their instrument.  I played piano.  I was just messing around with him.

TP:    You said you did fool around with the drums, but it damaged your fingers.

TYNER:  Yeah, in the joints.  That’s why you see a lot of conga players who have tape on the joints.  They say, “I’m not going to ruin these babies.”

TP:    The crown jewels!

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] I had enough intelligence even during that time!

TP:    You mentioned Garvin Masseaux, Robert Crowder…

TYNER:  Rob’s still there.

TP:    Eric Gravatt might have been an extension of that.  But what this guy was doing filtered into your consciousness, sort of became imprinted on the way you think about music.  Then there was a quote in Lewis Porter’s biography of Coltrane from your former wife Aisha that Latin music was very big in Philly, and everyone danced the merengue.  So all this stuff was percolating for you when you were a young player, in formative years.  I wondered if you had anything to say about how that environment became more solidified as you became a more mature musician.

TYNER:  I was exposed to African culture when I was a teenager because the atmosphere was conducive to that.  So Saka coming to study at Temple University (I think it was political science or something like that), and bringing his sister over to teach African dancing was very appropriate, because at that time people were involved and being conscious of who they are in history.  From that point, we then… Of course, we met Olatunji in New York.  Although my association with the dancing school at the time is where Saka came to teach the other guys, the percussionists.

TP:    So when his sister would teach African dance, he’d come in and play or bring those guys in to play with the class?

TYNER:  Yes.

TP:    And did you play in the dance class that he was teaching, or the drummers?

TYNER:  No, the drummers would.  The only thing I did was, I composed a…not composed, but I just played a little piano for one of those things they did, a kind of South American production, along with other things…

TP:    I think you said “Viva Zapata.”

TYNER:  Yes, “Viva Zapata.”  I played that for the dance company.  Because they did some choreography for that, and that was kind of a big…

TP:    But when you started composing music… You said your first charts were with that R&B band you had, but I’d think your more mature compositions began when you were 19-20-21…

TYNER:  No, before that.

TP:    What’s the earliest composition of yours that you recorded?

TYNER:  Well, I did an album called Inception on Impulse!, and there’s a song called “Sunset.” “Effendi” is another thing.

TP:    ”Effendi” you wrote in Philly?

TYNER:  No, I didn’t write that in Philly.

TP:    I just wondered if there was anything when you were 18 or 19…

TYNER:  Yeah, I wrote a song, but it was so long, I should have called it “When Is This Going To End”?  I wrote a few songs, but I don’t remember exactly the title of the song.  It was something I wrote for my R&B band. But what we did was play “Flying Home” and some Tiny Bradshaw stuff…

TP:    You were how old then?

TYNER:  14 and 15, like that.  I improved very rapidly, you know.

TP:    It sounds like your learning curve was immense.

TYNER:  Yeah.

TP:    You didn’t play until you were 13, but by the time you were 17, Coltrane was impressed!

TYNER:  Yes, it was meant to happen.  I played with a lot of people.  Red Rodney moved to my neighborhood, and he knew Oscar Pettiford, and Oscar came in.  We played one week at a local place called the Blue Note.  Red had played with Bird, and he moved into my neighborhood, so he found out about me.  Then, of course, I met Calvin Massey way before that, and that’s who introduced me to John.

TP:    People in Philly born in 1938 include Lee Morgan and Reggie Workman and Archie Shepp.  Pretty good company.

TYNER:  Yeah!  I used to play with Archie and Lee.  Lee and I used to play fraternity dances.  We did a graduation at Cheyney College outside of Philly.  We did gigs around.  We went to Atlantic City, which was fun.  Then Max Roach came through.  I met him when I was 18, right after Brownie and Richie had passed, and he was trying to get me to join his band.  But Sonny Rollins and Kenny Dorham were playing on there, and George Morrow.  That was a heck of a band.  But I didn’t travel.  I did the week at the Showboat.

TP:    The story you told about Max was that he asked, “Do you know ‘Just One Of Those Things’?” and you played it at his tempo, and he said, “Ah!”

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] Yes.  I loved playing with Sonny.

TP:    So the standards were high when you were coming up.

TYNER:  Yes, the standards were very high.  Appearance, presentation — you had to be on point for that.  It was good training, because things to changed as time went on, and people started looking at it completely differently.  The musicians, basically, the way they presented themselves, and… Of course they were very talented people.  But still, I think presentation is a major part of the music.

TP:    You’re obviously someone who pays a lot of attention to personal style.

TYNER:  Uh-huh.

TP:    It’s obvious, just seeing you now.  It’s 90 degrees, and Mr. Tyner is in a very nice, dark blue…is it a silk shirt?

TYNER:  Yes, silk.

TP:    A beautifully textured silk shirt, a white patterned silk tie, and it looks like white linen pants.

TYNER:  Yeah, that’s what it is.

TP:    Now, maybe you have someplace to go now.

TYNER:  No.  I just…

TP:    But you always look tip-top when you’re performing.

TYNER:  Yes, that’s important.  I came up in an era when Art Blakey used to say “People see you before they hear you.”  It’s just a respect for yourself and what you’re doing that I think should emanate before you go up.

TP:    No doubt.  Your mother was a beautician, had a beauty shop.  Did she have a lot to do with your personal style and sense of presentation?

TYNER:  My mother had a lot to do with everything in my development!  Her name was Beatrice — Beatrice Tyner.  She was just the ultimate classic person.  Very, very elegant, my mother.  I don’t mean that in terms of using clothes or to make her better than anyone else, but just her demeanor, her personality.  She’s a very honest, very likeable person.  People really loved my mother a lot.  She was caring, a very caring person.  She loved music.  She loved piano actually.  She didn’t play, but sometimes we’d go to somebody’s house who had a piano, and she’d tinkle a little bit.  But when anything came up that she thought I should be interested in, she’d let me know — and be very supportive.

TP:    It surprises me, just because of your level of technique and fluency with the instrument, that you started playing at 13.  It sounds like you were listening to music from way before that.  It sounds like all this was in your head and your body by the time you started playing.

TYNER:  Yes, I’d say so.  I listened… From my affiliation with the dance school and the fact that I had two good teachers in the beginning, one guy who taught the beginner piano and then I had an Italian teacher who went through the books and all that.  That was kind of before I formed my R&B band.  I was 13, 13-1/2, whatever.  Then about 14, I put the books kind of the side, and just started studying a little theory.  I went to Granoff School, but that was more like… It was a basically European approach, and that wasn’t what I was looking for.  And the (?) Music Center, which was a nice place…

But I think that mine just came from… I had the facility, because I used to practice all the time.  But like I say, you can’t describe why you have certain treasures, why certain things emanate from you, why certain things just emerge.  It’s hard to explain a gift.  I mean, how can you explain that?  It’s just one of those things.  You keep doing it.  And of course, I had the encouragement of a lot of older musicians around Philadelphia.  Even before I met John, there were guys who were very encouraging — older musicians who heard about me.

TP:    Piano players?

TYNER:  Well, there were piano players around town that were very nice.

TP:    Who were some of your mentors?

TYNER:  Well, Bud Powell was around the corner from me.

TP:    Was he personally encouraging?

TYNER:  No, not personally encouraging.

TP:    Did he have a wall around him at that time?

TYNER:  Well, he was kind of like a child prodigy.  But he needed care.  He needed somebody to be with him.  He needed somebody to take care of him.  He couldn’t function alone.  So he always had these guys.  I don’t know how sincere they were, but they were around him.  But the level of musicality around Philadelphia was on a higher level.  The jam sessions… We used to have jam sessions all the time.  See, what you can’t do… If you’re going to add to what’s there, if you’re going to contribute something, you can’t copy from… You can’t copy people.  It has to be there.  It has to be something that you’re born with.  I never wanted to play like… As much as I loved Bud and Thelonious, I learned a lot from them, from listening to them, and then, of course, meeting Bud and meeting Thelonious later…over the years… They taught me… And Monk was adamant about it.  He respected you when you had your own direction.  He loved that.  I mean, I learned a lot.  I used to kind of try to (?) Monk when I was still (?).  But not to the point where I wanted to be them or wanted to sound just like them.  But Monk was definitely the kind of person, like, “You have your own thing?  Great!”  Because that was the way he was.  I was very fortunate to know him kind of on a personal level.

TP:    There’s that old jazz cliche, “make a mistake; do something right.”

TYNER:  That’s right.

TP:    Benny Golson had a story about playing maybe with Buhaina at the Cafe Bohemia, and his eyes are closed, and he looks up, and there’s Monk in his shades, and after the set he made a comment to the effect that he was playing too perfect, and he just stop thinking about being perfect.

TYNER:  Yes, that’s true.  A lot of things come out of so-called “mistakes.” Really, it’s how what you do with it.  How you shape music.  Nothing’s a mistake.  It’s how you resolve.  When you play something, how you resolve it.

TP:    Thinking on your feet.

TYNER:  Yeah, thinking on your feet.

TP:    At this stage of your life, do you ever make mistakes that you resolve?

TYNER:  [LAUGHS]

TP:    There’s a certain sense of magisterial authoritativeness to the stuff you do!  I don’t know how else to describe it.  But there are times when it sounds as though you’re allowing yourself to get to the other… It sounds like you get into separate spaces when you play, that sometimes it’s just the way it’s supposed to be and presentation, and sometimes that it’s more open-ended.  Now, I don’t know you at all, but am I anywhere close to the reality?

TYNER:  Yeah.  Well, the thing is, I sort of have a controlled sense of experimentation.  That’s what it is.  I go out, but I have to come from something.  Whatever it is, there has to be something there to work from.  Or it can be created.  If it’s sort of a song that’s open, like one of the songs on the record…I forget what I called it… Not “The Search,” but the title is something like… We didn’t have a melody, but it was conceived that way — no melody.  So we just used tonal centers, moved from one tone to another, from one sound, one cluster to another — that kind of thing.  Which I had that experience paying with John.  But I try to use that when it’s appropriate for me, as opposed to using that as a main way to express myself.  It’s another tool.  That’s all.

TP:    It’s interesting that you can go in and out of those attitudes.  A lot of people who have a total sense of their music, who are composers, don’t allow themselves to get into that space, or very rarely so. And you seem able to access both parts of yourself.

TYNER:  Yes.  I have sort of a mixed personality in that respect.  I can do that.  I’m not trying to prove anything…to no one.

TP:    I wouldn’t think.

TYNER:  Just trying to have some fun, and trying to find out more about myself musically.  And sometimes, you find out after you listen back at something.  You say, “Wow, that’s what I did.  Where was I going?”  Because I don’t want to reach the point where everything is predetermined.  It’s not artistic when everything is predetermined.

TP:    I don’t want to burden you too much by dwelling on your time with John Coltrane, but your comment makes me think of a comment I read in a French magazine, where you spoke of your contribution to the evolution of that music, and that it was rooted particularly in your time, in the authority of your left hand, that he always had a home base to come back to somehow, and that you always have a home base to come back to somehow.  I wonder if you could talk about that for the purposes of this conversation.

TYNER:  Well, something’s got to come from someplace, go somewhere, and then return to someplace.  Maybe it might be a different place that you ultimately return to.  But I think it’s good to have these different dynamic dimensions, to go from here to somewhere, using that as a base, and go somewhere and then from there to return…or to resolve it.  Resolution is very important.  Sometimes you listen to people and they go into very interesting places, but then they leave you hanging.  Where are you going from here?  You going to leave me here?  Whatever.  But I always like to make it a complete journey — a departure, a flight and then a landing. [LAUGHS] Sort of what I do normally when I travel!  A good analogy.

TP:    You haven’t crashed yet.

TYNER:  Hopefully not.

TP:    You said you were interested     in drums before encountering Saka.  Who were some of the trap drummers who were favorites of yours in your pre Coltrane years?  I imagine Philly Joe Jones must have been one.

TYNER:  Yes.  I didn’t know Philly when he was there, though.

TP:    Specs Wright.

TYNER:  I knew Specs.  Philly had left, because he was with Miles — him and Red.  But I knew they’d been around Philly a long time.  But there were guys from my generation who were around Philly.  Tootie Heath.  We jammed together.  Lex Humphries was there; he left to go with Dizzy, but he was around for a while.  A guy named Eddie Campbell, who passed; he was a good Art Blakey style drummer.  There were a lot of good guys around who played well.  We were very fortunate in that way.  I mean, we did have good musicians around.

TP:    Were you leading trios around Philly?  Actual piano trios?  When you did Inception, was that just something you went into the studio and did, or had you put some time into that format?

TYNER:  I did some things trio, but not many.  When I’d go to Atlantic City, there would usually be a horn player.  The first time I went was with Paul Jeffries.  Paul came from Philly, and some kind of way Paul got that job in Atlantic City.  We worked at a place called King’s Bar.  That’s really what it was, a bar.  The guy liked my playing so much, he went to Philadelphia and bought a piano.  He bought a little spinet.  Because his piano was horrible.  So Paul and I, we worked together down there for a while.

Then I went down with Lee Morgan.  With Eddie Campbell one time.  I know once with Lex Humphries.  There was a place called the Cotton Club, big-time, that had two stages.  Dinah Washington came in, she was on one stage with Wynton Kelly on piano and Jimmy Cobb on piano.  Then J.J. Johnson came in with Tootie and Wilbur Little on bass and Tommy Flanagan on piano.

TP:    A heady summer.

TYNER:  Yes.  We spent a couple of summers down in Atlantic City.  I think we came back to that same club, the Cotton Club.  It was nice, because we’d have jam sessions late at night after everybody got off at the Steel Pier, all the big bands, and they’d converge on this club until dawn.  How I learned how to play was hands-on.  It wasn’t examining somebody.  Just okay, sit down and play for a while, and then when you’re done there’s another piano player, get up and let him sit down and play.  So everybody had a chance.  When I used to look back and see the line of tenor players that were looking for me to comp, and there would be about ten guys, each looking to play.  Then my mother’s shop was a favorite place.  And a lot of the homes.  Another place called Rittenhouse Hall.  This guy loved the music, and he loved to have dances on the weekend.  People danced to bebop music.  It was the music of that period that I came out of.

TP:    You said somewhere that in doing the gigs, you had to learn the tunes of the day by Bird and Dizzy and Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins.  Sonny Stitt might come through and call those tunes, so if you wanted to make the gig, you had to learn the tunes.  It was an organic thing.  Your quotidian, as they say.

TYNER:  What was so unique about playing for Sonny Stitt, was that whenever Sonny would come to town, there would be four or five tenor players in the club waiting to sit in and cut Sonny.  What he would do… He solved that very easily.  When he saw these guys, he said, “Come on up!  Come on!  Don’t be hesitant.”  The cats would get on the stage.  He’d say, “‘Cherokee’” – [CLAPS FAST] Like this.  And then he would modulate half-steps.

TP:    He’d play every key.

TYNER:  Every chorus he would go up half-steps.  B-    flat, B, C, C-flat… Then the guy would be shaking… “What’s wrong with the saxophone?”  He solved that problem.  Sonny was an amazing musician.  And then, to work with Sonny Rollins and K.D. was… From playing with Max, I really had a chance to meet some very fine…

TP:    Had you chosen to leave Philadelphia in 1958, say, you would have been equipped to do so.

TYNER:  Yeah.  I was ready.  I was ready to do the album John required, Giant Steps.  I knew those songs.  Of course, he used Tommy.  Tommy was in New York.  I guess he felt, “This guy is so young.”  But I was really poised to be on that date.

TP:    You’ve expressed that in print on many occasions.

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] But to question his judgment… Then eventually, of course, I moved up to New York.

TP:    Well, you seem to have had such a sense of certainty that you were meant to be with Coltrane.  Anything I’ve ever seen written about you, you express with utmost certainty that it was meant to be from years before it started.

TYNER:  Yes.  Because he was like family to me.  His wife at that time was very close to my girlfriend, who was going to be my wife, and then, my sister-in-law was a singer.  He was like family.  I didn’t have a big brother.  So he was like a big brother, and his Mom… I’d go to his house, and sit up while he composed “Countdown” and all those songs.  So we had a beautiful, friendly relationship.  It’s almost, like I said, like a family.

TP:    Walter Davis, Jr. would talk about being a teenager and going to Bud Powell’s house when he was composing “Glass Enclosure” or “Hallucinations,” and Walter Davis would play motifs so Bud could hear it.  There was that synergy, so he felt totally intimate and at one with Bud’s music and with Bud.  It was a destiny thing.

TYNER:  Walter Davis was a beautiful guy.  I miss that guy.

TP:    But it seems it was the same way for you with Coltrane.

TYNER:  Yeah.  It was more than just me being a piano player.  He used to call me “Coy.”  “Hey, Coy, what about this?”     It was a very, very close, more of a family kind of relationship.  He had confidence in me, and he knew that that’s where I needed to be, whatever he’d want in his band.  Of course, it took a while, because Miles had to figure out how to get used to him not being there. [LAUGHS] It’s hard to get rid of a guy that great!  Anyway, there was no question that’s where I belonged.

TP:    I’d like to talk about the solo record, Jazz Roots.  Maybe I’m overstating the case here, but I wonder if you could give me impressions of some of these piano players who you signify on here.  Is it okay?

TYNER:  Yeah, if you want to ask me questions about it.

TP:    Let me start with one who isn’t on here, Ahmad Jamal.  When I listen to your earlier records, it seems you were listening to him a lot at that time.

TYNER:  It’s hard to cover the whole spectrum of pianists because there were so many.  I knew Ahmad very well.  But I think I was mainly influenced by Bud and Thelonious.  I really think that was my main influence at the beginning.  Of course, being with John… John was really maybe the number-one instrument, but on the instrument, Bud and Monk.  But the thing is that playing with the Jazztet, when we did “Killer Joe,” that situation kind of reminded me of Ahmad’s playing. Miles loved Ahmad, and I think Benny picked up on that.  So that might have been what that was.  But I just did what I thought Benny wanted for that song.  But Bud and Monk were my main influences.

TP:    I’m not so much looking for what you picked up as your impressionistic sense of what it feels like to hear them.

TYNER:  Individuality.  You see, that’s the key to the whole thing.  You cannot be anybody else but yourself, even if you want to be!  I would like to be like this guy.  Why do we need those kind of heroes?  A guy is already a hero, whether you acknowledge it or not, any time they make that kind of impression on the scene — on music, I should say.  It’s nice to give people the props and give them the praise for what they’re doing and what they’ve done.  But to make them supersede what you ultimately want to be by being them, it’s impossible!  You can never be them.  You have to be yourself.

TP:    Does everyone who plays with you have to have that quality, too?  Do they all have to be straight-up, individualistic players?

TYNER:  I hope so.  In other words, at least look for that.  I think we spend a lifetime, or at least we should, trying to find out who we are as people, as individuals, as opposed to “Let me copy that guy, let me copy that guy…” It’s a blind alley, I think.  Because you can be a spy about somebody, but to say, “Okay, wow, let me stick to this for the rest of my life” is crazy.

TP:    Is it harder to find those type of individualistic personalities now than it was, say, when you started leading groups in the mid-’60s after you left John Coltrane?

TYNER:  Well, yeah, it became a little difficult, I guess.  Everybody had graduated, and I had my band and some of them formed their own bands and carried on with their own lives, and I thought maybe that was very good.  You can’t get attached to someone to the point where you restrict them from doing what they have to do ultimately. So if they’ve learned something from working with me, then I have to continue to look, to see what’s next on the agenda, who’s going to be the next guy that works with me.  That’s it.  Who knows?  You never know.  I had my previous trio for a long time, because I hadn’t really heard anyone — and I knew there were guys around — who could really do what I was looking for.  Then they came along.  Lewis. Of course, Al was around, but he was busy; he worked with Miles for many years.  So it was one of those kind of things.  It always come around eventually, if you keep trying.  The right thing comes around.

TP:    You made a comment in our previous conversation that.. [END OF SIDE] ..what might those qualities be?

TYNER:  You have to have an open mind and the ability to execute the ideas that you hear within your limitations — or within your conscious limitations.  Because you might be able to do a lot better than you think you can.  I think not being afraid to take chances, not being afraid to feel the situation at hand, as opposed to feeling, “Oh, I’m limited; I can’t do this.”  It’s not good for an artist to feel that kind of fear.  If he wants to consciously do something particularly simple or maybe for this particular song he wants to keep it simple, that’s different.  But being afraid to explore, I think is… I like guys around me who are willing to take chances, but do it on a level of professionalism that stands out, as opposed to just doing… But it’s a very personal thing, because you’re asking a person to be honest with themselves and not be afraid.  And most of us have fears and sometimes we’re not honest! [LAUGHS]

TP:    On that level, of chance-taking in a professional way, I can’t think of a more deft foil for you than Bobby Hutcherson.

TYNER:  Yes, Bobby and I play very well together.  His wife said that sometimes she listens to the way we phrase, and she said sometimes it’s hard for her to tell who’s playing, or which is playing, the vibes or the piano.  We phrase very much alike.  We have a similar approach.

TP:    It seems you read each other’s minds.

TYNER:  That’s right.  He’s a very responsive and creative individual.

TP:    Listening to this record through headphones is a lot of fun!

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] Now, that’s a main point.  You said what are the qualifications of people playing with me.  You like to have fun.  I love to have.  It’s very important.  You’ve got to have fun!

TP:    If you’re a performer, you can’t communicate that sense to other people unless you’re experiencing it yourself.  It may not be a qualification for other professions, but as a musician…

TYNER:  Yes.  You’ve got to be able… You’re out there… I remember a guy told me one time… I was playing a solo gig, and he said, “Yeah, you’re out there, you put yourself out there.”  He admired that, because he knew that took courage.  Playing music, you have to love it, but you can’t be afraid to express yourself.  You’ve got to just jump in and do it.

TP:    At this stage, the name McCoy Tyner is known around the world.  You have a world-wide audience, you have a visibility beyond the jazz audience.  In some ways, you’re almost as iconic a figure as Coltrane was in his day. You’ve lived another 35 years at a high level of creativity and accomplishment.  I did a piece on Sonny Rollins a few years ago, and he said to me, “I’m supposed to be a legend, right?”

TYNER:  [LOUD LAUGH]

TP:    ”But I still have to go up there on the stage, so what good does it do me?”  Something to that extent.  How do you respond to that persona?  Obviously, you’re living your life day-by day, you put your pants on one leg at a time.  Blah-blah-blah.  But you also know that you’re McCoy Tyner.

TYNER:  Well, you have to keep that in mind, that you put your pants on one leg at a time! [LAUGHS] Don’t lose sight of that!  Right.  The simplicities of life are very important.  And I think when you start riding on this high horse and thinking of this and that… I only did what I was supposed to do, and basically it… I mean, people think it’s fabulous.  And when I look back at my musical history, I’m very thankful for the opportunities I’ve had and to have been able to rise to the occasion.  I think it was really great to have been in that kind of environment and been able to do that.  But as far as labels and so on, I think that one should never down play one’s contribution or creativity or look down on themselves.  I don’t do that.  I feel as though I did the best I could.  And I thought it was pretty good!  It wasn’t bad!  Some people sort of might want to rest on their laurels or they don’t feel good unless somebody’s putting them on a pedestal.  I’m a very simple guy.  I like simplicity in life.  But I don’t downplay what I’ve done, not at all.  I have the confidence in myself.  That’s very important to me.

TP:    Can I ask you what you like to do in your off-time when you’re not playing music?  Are you a reader?  Do you watch films?  Do you go fishing?  Do you work out at the gym?

TYNER:  There’s one four letter word I like to use — “r-e-s-t.”  Rest.  I do like to rest, and I drink a lot of health juices.  There’s a juice bar across the street from me.  I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager — carrot and celery juice and all that stuff like that.  I need to exercise more, but sometimes I’m so tired from going through airports… I like going out to the theater.  I’ve seen musicals on Broadway, and various plays, and I like that.  I have friends that enjoy me asking them out to dinner and then a play.

TP:    Are you vegetarian?

TYNER:  No.  It’s funny, because I do like the vegetarian cuisine, and I do have friends who are vegetarian.  But I’m not like…

TP:    You’re not a fanatic.

TYNER:  No, I’m not a fanatic.  No way.  I’m not a vegan.  But I like the juice.  I have a juice machine at home.  I don’t use it, because when the juice bar moved across the street I said, “I’m not cleaning this machine!”  I go to his place and let him clean his machine!  I love the diet, but I’ve never claimed to be… I like meat and chicken and fish.  I have a pretty normal diet. But I try to eat good and healthy, and not overdo it.

TP:    Are you someone who thinks about music all the time?

TYNER:  No.

TP:    There’s stuff around us right now, and some people would say, “Ah, I hear music in the rustling of the trees; I can put that into a composition…”

TYNER:  I think it has to be like osmosis.  I don’t think you necessarily should consciously say, “Wow, man, that leaf is so gorgeous, I see a song!”  But I think when you put yourself in good environments, or you happen to be in an environment that’s uncomfortable, whatever it is, you will get something from it.  I think it should be an unconscious assimilation.  When I say “unconscious,” it’s nice when you can absorb things without saying it.  You can feel it if you’re getting something.  To sensitize yourself.

TP:    But you don’t practice.

TYNER:  No.  Not any more.  Somebody asked Miles that, and Miles said, in his blunt way, “Practice for what?!”  What it is, once you attain a certain amount of technical ability, then it’s what are you going to do with it?  It’s not about attaining more.  John even said it.  John said, “After a while, you have enough technique” — because he used to practice a lot to do thing that he wanted to do, that he heard.  And I think he reached the point where he felt like he had enough.

TP:    Really?  He stopped practicing?

TYNER:  No, he would practice.  Because he was hearing a lot of things.  But he reached a point where I guess he felt as though he had enough of a facility, but maybe he was practicing for another reason — for sound and things like that.  Because if you step away from your instrument for a long period of time, you don’t lose the connection, but it’s not the same.  I feel as though I’m in a very good state when I’m performing.  If I stay away from performing for a long time, from playing for a long time, being in contact with music, it’s not as healthy for me as when I’m playing.  I feel very good when I leave the gig and I’ve had a good night — I feel elated.

TP:    Do you keep a sort of steady but not overly… There are a lot of people who say that they just practice on the bandstand or at soundcheck?

TYNER:  You see, what it is, like I said before: The physical side of playing is having a facility to execute certain things — to have the ability to execute.  But how you… Like Lance Armstrong, for instance, this guy who had that bout with cancer.  He’s won the competition now for how many hears?  But there’s something that kicks in that has nothing to do with the fact that… I shouldn’t say nothing.  But maybe it’s more the ability of wanting to win or wanting to overcome or whatever it is, to show just how far you can push the envelope.  whatever.  So I think that’s sometimes more important than having the facility to do things.  The physical aspect is one thing, but if you don’t have the motivation, then that’s…

TP:    The will.

TYNER:  The will.

TP:    Do you ever write stuff for yourself that’s beyond your technique to give yourself a challenge?  Maybe there isn’t anything that’s beyond your technique.

TYNER:  I never do that. [LAUGHS] I never do that!  I don’t want it to be an exercise.

TP:    I’m not suggesting it would necessarily be an exercise.  But is there anything you conceptualize that you have to stretch to play?

TYNER:  Why strain myself? [LAUGHS] I like me!

TP:    Maybe that’s what it is. If that’s your answer, that’s your answer.

TYNER:  What can I tell you?  If I do write something that’s challenging, it’s good!  It’s good.  Like the rapper say, it’s all good.

TP:    I think that precedes the rappers.  I think it comes from the jazz musicians.

TYNER:  I think so.  They took a lot of things from the jazz musicians.  And then when you tell them, it’s “Hmm, really?” [LAUGHS]

TP:    So your attitude about technique is that it’s at the service of…

TYNER:  It’s a facility.  That’s all it is.  Look what Thelonious did with so little.  That to me was miraculous, how he would take a very simple idea and with the feeling he interjected into that idea… It wasn’t about how many notes he played, not at all.  It was about the idea and the feeling that came out of that situation.  He would tell Charlie Rouse… Charlie would want to do another take in the studio, and Monk said, “sorry, that’s it; whatever we did, that’s all you’re going to get.  That’s it.  I’m not doing another one.”  The immediacy of it all. The spontaneity.

TP:    Did you spend a lot of time with Monk?

TYNER:  What happened is that John had worked with Monk for a while, with Shadow Wilson and Wilbur Ware.  I heard that band.  Oh my God!  I walked into the Five Spot… Before I came to New York, my wife and I actually came up… We knew John.  Like I said, it was a big family.  I heard he was playing with Monk, so I said, “Oh, man, one of my heroes…” I walked into the Five Spot, and Shadow was set up right near the door.  And that cymbal beat, and then Wilbur… Oh, man!  Monk was up at the bar dancing and John was taking a solo.  Oh, man, I’ll tell you.  Whoo!

TP:    Imprinted on your memory.

TYNER:  Yes, it sure did!  But it just goes to show you how important simplicity is.  It’s so important. Sometimes even more than having the facility.  Having facility… It’s what you do with it.  It’s the idea you’re trying to portray, more than having… Look, it counts for something.  Everybody has their own way.  Bud was different.  And he loved Monk for that reason, too.  A simple idea and the depth that he was able to demonstrate with simplicity is amazing.

TP:    Your style has so much ornamentation, but there are always very melodic ideas, and it never gets far away from the melody no matter how far out it might get.

TYNER:  [LAUGHS] Yeah.  John said that in one thing he wrote.  He said that I try to make things sound beautiful.  I don’t know about that…

TP:    Maybe that’s just part of who you are.

TYNER:  Yeah, you can get away from yourself.  That’s for sure!

TP:    I’ve been listening as much as possible to your various records, and a lot of the songs sound like they were made to have lyrics put to them.  Have you ever written a song that got onto mainstream radio?

TYNER:  I did an album called Looking Out for Columbia, on which I had  Carlos Santana and Phyllis Hyman. That’s when Bruce Lundvall was at Columbia; he got a lot of jazz guys on the label.  So they wanted me to do something they felt was a little more accessible.  I knew Carlos, and Carlos loved the music I did with John, John was a big hero of his.  So he said fine, and I tried that.  I wrote a song for Carlos kind of in the Latin Rock kind of thing.  I liked it.  My mind is very wide.  I deal with the situation at hand.  So I wrote a song called “Love Surrounds You Everywhere,” and Phyllis sang it.  I wrote the lyrics for it.

TP:    ”You Taught My Heart To Sing” just seems like a natural.

TYNER:  I’ll tell you.  I wanted Barbra Streisand to do that.  I kind of felt as though she could do a good job with that.  Of course, Diane Reeves recorded that.  Sammy Cahn wrote the lyrics.  Somebody mentioned that to Sammy, and he’d heard me… I went up to his New York apartment, and Sammy was on the typewriter, we were back-to-back that way — he had a little spinet.  Sammy said, “Play that again.”  He wanted to hear the actual melody.  He said, “Just play it straight.”  And he was typing away!  He must have had a good…

TP:    Did you play much with vocalists?  Apart from the Johnny Hartman Trio, for which I can’t imagine a more sympathetic trio… Did you have much experience?

TYNER:  Just my sister-in-law, that’s about it.  Because she was around locally in Philadelphia.  I did a thing with Ernestine when she came through Philly.  I worked with a few vocalists around Philly.

TP:    I think of the Bradley’s school of pianists, or someone like Jimmy Rowles, who knew the lyrics and chords for the whole American songbook?  Are you like that?

TYNER:  No-no, those guys are special. Jimmy Rowles and Ellis Larkins.  They’re special!  That’s their thing, and nobody… Also, Jimmy Jones, who played with Sarah Vaughan.  Norman Simmons, who played with Carmen for years.  They’re special guys.

TP:    But in your tunes, is there a narrative, a message, some sort of story?  Are they musical ideas and the story comes later?

TYNER:  Well, that’s what accompanists do.  They learn… I have an idea what the song means.  But those guys know the lyrics so they can construct their chords and the nuances to the music.  But a singer may phrase something, and she says, “It’s raining,” and it sounds like water running off of a rock — whatever.  If he knows that, he’ll accompany her at that moment to give a description musically of what’s happening.

TP:    So in Jazz Roots, when you’re playing “My Foolish Heart” or “Sweet and Lovely,” you’re not thinking so much of the lyrics as of the musical ideas you’re trying to express.

TYNER:  Yeah, and I don’t want to sound like the guy that I was honoring.  I want to sound like me.  It’s just something that reminded me… I had a thing called “Happy Days” that kind of reminded me of Keith, and “My Foolish Heart,” Bill Evans had recorded that, and Monk and Bud Powell… I wasn’t trying, “Oh, let me sound like Bud here.”

TP:    On “Night In Tunisia” you sort of did, but I think it was an accident.

TYNER:  Well, I’m guilty.  Okay? [LAUGHS] Guilty as charged!  You got something on me.  What can I say?

TP:    Are you in the planning stages for the next record now?

TYNER:  I’m thinking about it.  I’ve got a big band date coming up at the Chicago Jazz Festival.  It’s been a while since I recorded it.  We’ve won two Grammies with it.  The big band is still a baby.  I need some time to work on some new charts and new directions I’m hearing with the band.  That’s an ongoing kind of endeavor that I need to…

TP:    You have the big band, the trio, this quartet, the Latin group, the solo activity.  There are these files of activity that overlap and intersect with each other that you can return to and refresh yourself.

TYNER:  Yeah.  I’m not a one-dimensional guy that way.  I try to confound myself. [LAUGHS]

TP:    Do you?

TYNER:  No, it’s not conscious.

TP:    Some people do.

TYNER:  Some people do, that’s true.  Everybody functions on a different level.  What makes one guy happy confuses another guy.  So everybody has whatever vibe, whatever level they’re functioning on.

TP:    You seem like one of the most grounded musicians I’ve ever met.  Did that come from your mother?

TYNER:  I think so.  My mother gave me many gifts, and I think that’s one of the things she gave me.  I either learned or got it from her, inherited certain things… You don’t expect too much.  Just do the best you can.  That’s all you can do!  Do the best you can.  Sometimes we set these goals for ourselves, and we want this… I didn’t set a goal for myself.  I just did the best I could.  I think that’s all you can do.  You start setting goals for yourself, “I’ve got to get here, if I don’t get here by next year…” Come on!

TP:    But it’s obvious that you have a certain sense of destiny. You just said “those are accompanists,” which means, “I don’t think of myself as an accompanist.”

TYNER:  I adapt.  When I did something with Johnny Hartman, Carmen heard that, and she said, “Oh my God!”  She thought it was good!  That’s all.  All it is, is my…

TP:    And when you played sideman on those ’60s Blue Note dates, it was obviously a different mindset.  Obviously, a Wayne Shorter date with you and a Wayne Shorter date with Herbie Hancock are two fundamentally different sides of Wayne Shorter.

TYNER:  That’s right.  Because he and Herbie do well together.  It’s wonderful.  That Miles thing, whatever it is; I don’t know.  They’re very tight.   Bobby and I have that kind of affinity.

TP:    He has that sort of groundedness also…

TYNER:  Well, if you don’t ground yourself, you’ll fall off the handle!

TP:    He can go all the way out like this, but comes back…

TYNER:  I like that about him.  We’ve learned some good lessons over the years, I think, and that’s great!  It’s good to learn from this.  It can be arduous at times, and demanding and challenging.  But as long as it serves you, that’s… It always has to serve you.  You don’t want to be a slave to this.  I love it. I mean, music is a whole other story.  I don’t think you should be a slave to music or anything like that.  I think it should work for you.  It is very demanding, the level that you want to perform, but you can always rise to that occasion if you have the right focus and realize what it is — that it’s there to serve you.

TP:    You always seem to come back to Ellington.

TYNER:  Yes.

TP:    My first record of yours was Plays Ellington, before I even knew about Coltrane.  I didn’t know anything about jazz.

TYNER:  I still play Ellington.

TP:    Did you see Ellington when you were a kid? Did he make a big impression on you always?

TYNER:  Yes, I saw him, and I knew everybody in his family.  I knew his sister, I knew Stevie, I knew Mercer.  But the thing  is, he represented an era in the music that was… I mean, all of it is important.  Louis Armstrong.  Fats Waller.  All those guys.  But Duke had an iconic kind of image in his music.  Duke was a hard worker, traveled a lot.  He really paid his dues and really earned his rep.  He was a consummate genius of music, always writing and always totally involved.  And that kind of sacrifice isn’t… I mean, it’s nice if you can do that.  I like being dedicated to music, but not to the point where it just consumes my every minute.  I’m not that kind of person.  I like a balance in life — whatever balance is.  But a balance for one guy may be not a balance for someone else.

TP:    You’re born in 1938, and when you’re 10-11-12 is right when big bands start to decline.  People like Jimmy Heath talk about going to the Earle Theater to hear the big bands, and playing hooky for school.  Was that any part of your experiences, going to hear those bands, going to dances, things like that when you were younger?

TYNER:  Yeah, we had a band.  Tommy Monroe had a band…

TP:    But did you go to hear the traveling bands?  Say, Basie when you were 15?  Or if Ellington played in Philly in 1953 or 1954, would you go to see him?

TYNER:  I was kind of young.  But I was able to hear the records and things like that… Dizzy’s band.  Lee Morgan joined Dizzy’s band as a kind of child prodigy.  When Lee was about 17, he was in Dizzy’s band.  Benny Golson and a lot of big players were in that band.  Melba Liston, Walter Davis.  So I had a chance to hear Dizzy’s band more than Basie and Duke.  I saw Basie and Duke on TV, and I heard the recordings, but I didn’t actually physically see him until later.

TP:    Did you attend the Ellington Meets Coltrane session?

TYNER:  I couldn’t get there.  I tried.  My car broke down.  I was so disappointed.  Because I knew Mercer. I knew his family.  But I wanted to meet Duke in person.  Stevie told me he knew who I was after I did that album of his music.  But I couldn’t get to the session.  That’s the way it goes!  Now, I heard Duke’s band at the Newport Jazz Festival [1962-3].

TP:    But your mother… So there was a musical environment for you all the time, but she wasn’t the type… A lot of people I’ve spoken to, their parents would take them to live music from early on.  It sounds like she let you be a kid until it was time for…

TYNER:  Thank goodness for that.  I took her to cotillions.  I was very close to my mother.  She was a wonderful person in my life.  I was very lucky.  I wrote a lot of songs for my mother and my sister, my ex-wife, whatever.  I had a very close relationship with her.  So I can conclude by saying that life is good!

A Jazziz Feature on Nicholas Payton From 2001

Although “never assume” is a motto I try to abide by, I would be surprised if anyone who checks out this way-station is unfamiliar with the latest firestorm that Nicholas Payton has combusted with his always thought-provoking blog with the statement that “jazz died in 1959.” I tend to agree with the notion that no art form is dead if best-and-brightest practitioners of the idiom continue to play it. But terminology is personal, and Nicholas stands in a line of world-historic artists — Max Roach, Duke Ellington, Roland Kirk, the Art Ensemble of Chicago — who take issue with the notion that “jazz” signifies the totality of musical production.

I’ve followed Nicholas’ own musical production with interest since he emerged on the international scene in the mid ’90s, and presented four or five interviews with him during my tenure at WKCR, beginning in 1995 (a Musicians Show from that year is posted at the bottom of the page). In 2001 I pitched and was given an opportunity by Jazziz to write a feature about him, which appears immediately below.

Nicholas Payton Article for Jazziz (2001):

On a muggy September Tuesday afternoon in a third-floor rehearsal studio nestled between the two bus terminals of Manhattan’s Port Authority, Nicholas Payton is running down a series of Duke Ellington small band transcriptions with a 10-piece unit culled from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, including tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and singer Diane Reeves.  It’s two nights before opening night of a 23-concert tour called Duke in Small Doses, and Payton is guest musical director for the project.  He’s dressed for the part, dapper in a well-tailored grey suit that contours his compact, powerful frame.  The soft-spoken trumpeter doesn’t need to say much; the ensemble has internalized the music’s groove and flow. while Reeves is fine-tuning her interpretations of songs like “Mood Indigo” and “Azure.”

Payton calls “Poor Bubber,” Rex Stewart’s 1941 paean to Bubber Miley, the King Oliver disciple whose assortment of signifying growls, smears and vocalisms established the tone of Ellington’s ’20s “Jungle music.”  With an embouchure that seems to begin at the back of his neck, he projects an immense, thrilling sound, warm and round and enveloping through the full range of the trumpet.  Never in a rush, he milks the elemental line, creates melodies, sings his song, telling a story that channels Miley’s animating spirit while sounding fresh and in-the-moment.  It’s the kind of performance Payton — now 26 — has been pulling off since he was a teenage phenom in New Orleans, when his ability to infuse Classic Jazz repertoire with idiomatic authority and life force elicited a comment from the late trumpeter Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham — who played with the seminal masters in the ’20s, and was 91 when he recorded with Payton in 1996 — that Payton, born two years after Louis Armstrong’s death, came as close to the Armstrong essence as anyone he had ever heard.

Not that it preoccupies him, but as his career surges, Payton draws skeptical scrutiny from observers who confuse his virtuosic navigation of older styles with a sensibility drenched in atavistic revivalism. It’s the same critique numerous jazz scribes hurl at the oeuvre of J@LC Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, who a decade ago, as a sign of his regard, sent his 15-year-old homie a trumpet.

The charges don’t hold up. Consider Payton’s diverse 1999-2000 activities, which bespeak an ample comfort zone with the full jazz timeline.  He’s just finished mixing “Nick@Night,” the fourth album by his highly interactive quintet, which has worked steadily since 1996, and sounds like it.  The intricately composed tunes cohere like an extended suite; they explore the polarities of nighttime experience — restfulness and peace versus the spirit of partying.  The orientation is optimistic, decidedly Modernist; references include Bebop, the collective improvisation and harmonic alliteration of post-1965 Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter, the sophisticated grooves of CTI-period Freddie Hubbard, and a range of R&B tropes.  Now Payton’s pondering the next record, a Y2K Armstrong Centennial project featuring a group of Armstrong tunes scored for a 12-piece band, concurrent with a Winter 2000 J@LC commission for an original composition exploring the rhythms and sounds he grew up hearing in New Orleans.  Then there’s the still unrecorded 8-9 piece electrified funk group (he adds an effects unit and wah-wah setup to his arsenal) with world-class local musicians that he leads during his increasingly infrequent New Orleans downtime.

You might call Payton’s ancient-to-future aesthetic a birthright.  His family lived across the street from Louis Armstrong Park, once known as Congo Square, the 19th century locus of the slave trade, perhaps the only place in the Antebellum South where Africans were allowed to play the drums.  Located in the Tremaine district, the neighborhood was home base for numerous seminal New Orleans musicians.  During formative years, Nicholas played in the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, a unit formed at the turn of the century which specialized in traditional repertoire, and also in the All-Star Brass Band, a group of peers deeply influenced by the rhythmic and harmonic extensions introduced to local vernacular by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.  He soaked up the feeling of Second Line and Mardi Gras Indian rituals.  His mother, Maria, was a former operatic singer and a classically trained pianist who eschewed a career to raise her family; his father Walter, a bassist-tubist and retired educator who is a mainstay of the thriving Crescent City trad scene, would take his young son to Bourbon Street gigs.

After the gigs, Walter Payton would call midnight rehearsals at the house, and from his earliest years Nicholas heard the nocturnal sessions, soaking up music, experimenting on his father’s expensive German bass, the family piano, and drumkits left by drummers like Herlin Riley or James Black, who didn’t care to lug them home in the wee hours.

“He just sat there like a little sponge, observing, absorbing information, not making a lot of noise,” Riley — the nephew of cornetist Melvin Lastie, a pathbreaking figure in the city’s R&B scene, and the grandson of Frank Lastie, a drummer who played in the 1910s with Armstrong in the foundling homes — recalls fondly.  “He was very mature, with a whole package that showed his  potential to blossom and become a great artist.  I think Nicholas is the spirit of Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden and those kind of people; it lives in him more than any other trumpet player from New Orleans.  He was raised into a TRADITION.  The sound of New Orleans traditional jazz was part of his upbringing; that’s where his roots are.  It wasn’t something he had to reach back for; he took his roots and extended beyond.”

As the youngster entered his teens, he got calls to play in a variety of R&B horn sections, and attended numerous jam sessions at which postbop was the operative lingua franca.  During those years, Payton attended the New Orleans Center of the Creative Arts (N.O.C.C.A.), where Clyde Kerr — a fourth-generation musician whose father, also an educator, hosted ’40s workshop rehearsals attended by important New Orleans musicians like Red Tyler and Alvin Batiste — took him under his wing.

After telling me that he and Walter Payton played their first Mardi Gras parade together in 1960, Kerr recalls his amazement at hearing a 10-year-old Nicholas on trombone with a young brass band “playing lines like a trumpet player would play.  I used to go to those late night rehearsals when Nick was 8 or 9, and he would sit beside me on the sofa and try to play the music.  It might have been over his head, but he approached it from a very serious perspective, the way it should be done.  By the time he was at N.O.C.C.A., he had a vast repertoire of traditional music; I asked him where he learned it all, and he said, ‘Man, I don’t know.  I just know it.’ It made me think a bit about reincarnation, that he’d been here before.  Then also, I did a record called ‘No Compromise’ where I play a solo where I’m stretching, trying to find new sounds, approaching the trumpet like a saxophone — Nicholas was able to sing it verbatim as a young guy.  Once he hears something, he never forgets it.”

Payton credits progressive New Orleans elders like Kerr, drummer Alvin Fielder (he appeared on Roscoe Mitchell’s paradigm-shifting 1966 recording Sound) and saxophonist Kidd Jordan (the father of flutist Kent Jordan and a world-class speculative improviser with close ties to Chicago’s AACM) as mentors who imparted to him the notion of a global aesthetic.  “When I was at N.O.C.C.A., Clyde Kerr never taught us patterns,” Payton recalls during a lengthy conversation in his hotel room the night after the rehearsal, “When he caught us doing it, he would put us in check, saying, ‘No, the heart is what counts.’  He told us to feel.  His manner of teaching and his expression still impresses me.

“New Orleanian musicians have always had a hip thing about the way they play; some of the world’s best musicians live there — you walk up the street and there they are.  A lot of attention is focused on the pioneers — Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton.  But New Orleans produced great, forward-thinking musicians, such as Ed Blackwell or James Black, who were innovators of the drumset.  James Black was swinging out in straight-ahead 5/4, not playing 3/4-2/4 patterns; he referred to Elvin Jones and Ed Blackwell and Max Roach, but had his own conception of the drum.  He lived right around the corner from us; he’d come to our house like at 3-4 in the morning and play, and I would sit at the piano and he would try to show me these things.  I was only 12 or 13 around the time he passed,  but I learned a lot about composition from him.  He’s one of my heroes.”

Not that Payton’s taking his music to the outermost partials, but he shares the iconoclastic sensibility of his mentors.  “I loved science, particularly chemistry, when I was in school,” he declares.  “I contemplated studying to be a chemist, but by high school I knew I wanted to be a musician, and nothing interested me more.  Music is a science.   What’s similar is the feeling of exploration from mixing and combining the bits and pieces of different elements towards an infinite number of possible outcomes.  I like to think for myself.  I’m not the kind of person who can memorize an end result and regurgitate it.  I have to understand the source, so I can create my own perspective, and not go by someone else’s interpretation.  In school I’d want to know why a particular theorem took its form, what a concept actually meant, and I’d get frustrated when people couldn’t explain those things to me.  I spent a lot of time in the library researching the information, and I would challenge the teachers, which got me in trouble sometimes.

“In music I realized early on that I wanted to stay away from the books with patterns and chord changes, from ‘play this on a C7.’  I felt it was too easy, that it wasn’t a way I could get at what I heard on the records at my house.  I wanted to find my own notes, to find the feeling.  So I went to the records to research what Miles Davis was doing on a particular tune on Four and More, which is the record that made me decide I wanted to play jazz, or to investigate Lee Morgan or Clifford Brown or Kenny Dorham, and tried to formulate my own idea about what actually was happening.  It’s almost like I started in the ’60s, then worked my way back to New Orleans.  When I began to play, I was doing a lot of traditional New Orleans gigs and playing in the brass bands, so I wanted to listen to something different.  It took me a couple of years to get back to Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and study them in depth.  I feel very comfortable and liberated playing that music — I grew up doing it, it’s quite natural for me, and I can do so without feeling like I’m not free.  I’ve tried to understand their trumpet styles so well that I’d avoid replicating their solos and not play cliches within what they did.

“I love playing in different styles; to me it’s not old or new, just a different means of expression.  Whenever I play, regardless of the context, I’m inspired by that moment, and I try to fit in.  The music of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five won’t sound right if you play some pentatonic tritonal substitution.  I’m all for updating arrangements on old tunes, but it works better when you play within that specific style.  You can be just as creative and free in that sound as in an Ornette Coleman kind of sound.  There’s no harmonic or any other limitations in playing the older music.  You’re not going to play anything Louis Armstrong didn’t play, or think differently about rhythm.  Things that cats calculate now, he was doing naturally years ago — playing 5-over-4 or 3-over-4, playing flat-IX over a major-IX chord or a major-VII over a dominant VII chord.  All we’re doing is an extension of those things, and there’s greatness in all of it.”

Like many musicians of his age group, Payton is fascinated with rhythm and its connective permutations.  “It’s interesting how African rhythms blossomed differently according to what region slaves were brought and what culture they were mixed with,” he reflects.  “You can hear the clave in all the Caribbean rhythms, and even in New Orleans rhythms; there are so many different transmutations of that same thing.  Now, I’m not keen about the term ‘world music’; there’s been a trend to put a big umbrella over a whole range of sounds which are specific to certain cultures and regions, which neglects the depth and nuance and complexity of each entity.  But jazz was always a hybrid and mixture of numerous influences.  In New Orleans, the African and Indian rhythms were mixed with the European classical influence among Creole families, which you can hear most notably in the contrapuntal improvisation of someone like Sidney Bechet or the compositions of Jelly Roll Morton — and then the Blues and Spirituals.

“I don’t want to clutter up my music, because to me the most important thing is a strong melody.  I’m a harmonic freak.  Sometimes the guys in the band get on me, because the more I write, I keep sticking in chords, and it’s not that easy to play.  I just love a beautiful chord and the way harmony moves, and I love Classical music, particularly the Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel.  But I love rhythm, too, because I grew up playing in the brass bands with that bass drum and snare drum.  Kenyatta Simon, the percussionist who plays with my funk band and has worked with me on my Louis Armstrong project, has turned me on to the rhythms of Mali and Ghana and shown me a lot about using percussion.”

Asked what he’ll listen to on the road, Payton animatedly pulls out CDs by a pan-diasporic array of ambitious composers, including Brazilian visionary Hermeto Pascual and Pascual’s associate Carlos Malta, as well as Gil Evans, Claire Fischer, the late ’80s orchestral recordings of Wayne Shorter (“his music contains everything”), Ralph Irizarry’s up-to-the-second Salsa, a variety of Afro-Cuban records — and Frank Zappa.  “I have all of Zappa’s records — ‘Jazz From Hell,’ ‘Yellow Shark,’ ‘Studio Tan,’” Payton exclaims.  “He wrote things for symphony orchestra that are unbelievable, and did amazing things metrically, contrapuntally, harmonically.”

Impeccably performed like his three previous quintet recordings, “Nick@Night” lays a tantalizing beat behind Payton’s learning curve; like the others, it’s a remarkably candid document of his personal work-in-progress.  “In a way I was searching to tailor the music more for the personalities of the guys I work with, and let them speak, in the tradition of Ellington,” he noted last December in a follow-up phoner.  The virtuoso band — suave early-30s saxophonist Tim Warfield, who offers breathe-as-one precision in the ensembles and passionate tone and convincing narrative in his solos; 28-year-old pianist Anthony Wonsey, an immaculate comper and spot-on soloist with pristine touch who studied with ’30s Armstrong arranger Zilner Randolph as a Chicago youngster; Reuben Rogers, a fluent big-sound bassist with Swiss watch-precise time; and energetic drummer Adonis Rose, Payton’s N.O.C.C.A. classmate — rises to the occasion.

“My career actually has been a slow process, which is what I think allowed me to grow and survive and keep a band out there,” Payton remarks.  “All the major labels approached me about signing from when I was 15 or 16, and I put it off for four years.  I didn’t want to jump on that whole young lions bandwagon.  I wanted to take the time to learn what I needed to learn and develop a foundation so that I would have something to rely on.   When I started touring with my band, we had maybe two weeks worth of gigs the whole year.  My second record was received pretty well, didn’t sell that great, but there was a lot of buzz.  When I performed and played, we tried to give people something personal, and they didn’t forget it; the next time they brought somebody, and the next time they told someone else — and then I was working 9 months out of the year.  It wasn’t some big media blitz.  It was just from me trying to play good, honest music.

“I want to maintain that throughout my career.  No matter how far we stretch out, which we like to do, I think it can be done in a way that doesn’t alienate people.  We can play something that grooves, something that totally burns out, even something totally free; people can see the history, how everything is tied together, and they dig it.  The audience is and always has been very important to me, maybe because of my roots in New Orleans, which is very people oriented.  For me there’s not even such a thing as playing for myself, because if it doesn’t move anyone else it does nothing for me.  Nobody wants to be alone in this world.  Nobody wants to be not appreciated.  Now, that doesn’t mean you have to compromise yourself or your artistic vision.  This music is vast, and I don’t like to box myself into any particular style.  I like to present how I’m feeling and what is real to me at that moment, and I always want to do that.  It’s worked for me thus far.”

It’s certainly working at an exuberant second-night concert at Alice Tully Hall; Payton — part and parcel with his holistic conception — pays strict attention to the function.  “To me Duke Ellington’s music is as modern as it gets,” he declares.  “Here we’re playing arrangements on tunes that probably weren’t played live, because the small band recordings were primarily studio  projects; the voicings that sound as fresh and hip as if somebody wrote it yesterday!”  By the tour’s 23rd and final concert a few weeks later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the band is crisp, playing with spontaneous heat and joyous beat, caught up in the ebullient spirit of the music; “Poor Bubber,” set up as a down-home blues feature for Payton and Lovano, brings down the house.

A few months later, Lovano — who spent about 30 days on the road with Payton in 1999 in encounters including a winter 10-concert Japanese tour with the Ray Brown Trio on which the two were co-equal guest soloists as well as the subsequent “Duke In Small Doses” junket — is happy to offer a considered, cut-to-the-chase encomium.  “Nicholas is a total musician who draws from a rich vocabulary,’ the tenorman begins, “Though he loves all kinds of music and is up on everything happening today, he embraces the whole history, not just the way certain people played at his time.  You can hear that he grew up studying the personalities that emerged in jazz, how they played as well as what they played.  There’s a deep-rooted concept of feeling in his sound, not brash and edgy, but filled with warmth and beauty, no matter what tempo or what kind of tune it is.  You feel his sound at the mention of his name.  Nicholas plays from a beautiful place, and beauty is a rare thing — it either happens or it doesn’t.

* * *

Nicholas Payton Musician Show (3-15-95) — (WKCR):

TP:    What’s impressed me and a lot of other people since I first heard you is the quality of your sound, your ability to project a real volume from the instrument while keeping a capacious burnished tone.  It’s the type of sound you’d associate with brass players from New Orleans historically, where you’re from.  I think I could tell without knowing you’re from there.  You’ve been playing the trumpet almost from birth.

PAYTON:  I’ve been playing since I was 4 years old.

TP:    Let’s talk about your early years and your family history and so forth.  Both your parents are musicians, and your father’s a professional musician.

PAYTON:  Correct.  I asked my father for a trumpet at age 4.  I’d always been fascinated with the trumpet.  It symbolized some sort of strength or whatever.  The trumpet player usually played the lead or the melody, and I just liked the sound of it, moreso than the instruments.  I was fascinated with the trumpet the most.

TP:    Now, when you’re saying that, the implication is that you were seeing trumpet players already through your father’s activity, I would assume.

PAYTON:  Yes.  Well, my father used to bring me out on gigs with him and there were many rehearsals at my house.  I grew up listening to trumpet players like Leroy Jones, Wendell Brunious, Clyde Kerr, Jr., Teddy Riley.  So there were a lot of great trumpet players.

TP:    Now, in New Orleans, for reasons that combine economics and culture, there’s a lot of traditional music and older styles of playing are active and current and in the air moreso maybe than in other places.

PAYTON:  Right.

TP:    So you were hearing a wide range of approaches to trumpet, I suppose, from that early age as well.

PAYTON:  Definitely, from the early beginnings of the music all the way up through to now.

TP:    Talk about the dynamics of the New Orleans scene, how the older music intermingles with the newer, and the sensibility of the players.

PAYTON:  New Orleans is basically a tourist town, so the entertainment industry is geared toward older styles of music basically because people who travel to New Orleans expect to see a certain thing.  That’s good, in a sense, because that helps perpetuate that music, but in another sense a lot of the players who are more interested in more modern forms of the music don’t get as much of an outlet to perform and work in New Orleans unless they go elsewhere.

TP:    Another aspect of the music in New Orleans is the perpetuation of the second line and marching bands, some of which have been going on for several generations, some back to the time of Louis Armstrong, which is another source of continuity.

PAYTON:  Definitely.  It still goes on til today.

TP:    You were playing in marching bands from what age?

PAYTON:  I started doing that I guess around 9.

TP:    So what was happening with you between the ages of 4 and 9?  Your father, Walter, is a bass player, and your mother, Maria, is an operatic singer?

PAYTON:  Yes, she’s a former operatic singer.

TP:    Talk about your earlier musical career?  Was it a natural thing?  You picked it up, you did things, they said, “here, if you do this, you can achieve such-and-such”…

PAYTON:  No.  I mean, the first time I learned how to play I was extremely sad.  Everyone, my father and other musicians, encouraged me to play.  Throughout that period they were very supportive of me.  I remember the first gig I did, where I was hanging out with my father while he was getting ready to do a second-line parade (he plays tuba as well).  He took me out with him, and I had my trumpet with me.  So the musicians asked me to play, and I did the whole parade,  It was like two hours we were walking, and I was extremely tired, but I hung in there, and at the end of the gig all the musicians chipped in and gave me a little bit of money, like ten dollars.  I thought I was rich!  But that was like my first experience as far as being on the gig.

TP:    How about formal tuition on the trumpet.  I know you studied with a very strong trumpeter in New Orleans named Clyde Kerr.

PAYTON:  Right.  I studied with him.  He was one of my early influences.  I remember having rehearsals at my father’s house; Clyde would be on the gigs a lot of the time.  I used to sit by him and play his parts with him, or just watch him.  He knows a tremendous amount about the music and the trumpet, and the love and the beauty of the music in terms of… He has a real lyrical sense, and he really turned me on to Clifford Brown and a lot of different things.  I’m always grateful to Clyde for that.

TP:    One thing about the older musicians in the New Orleans area is their combination of functionally having to play the traditional music, and mastering it and respecting it, but also being very interested in contemporary music and new developments.  People like Kidd Jordan and Alvin Batiste and various visionaries have come through there.  Louis Armstrong himself combined that sense of being rooted in the vernacular and creating something entirely new, and we’ll start out the Musician Show with two classics by Pops.  Now, you’ve been pretty much immersed in performing his music publicly in the last six months to a year, and I’m sure way before that.

PAYTON:  Well, I didn’t really get into the music of Louis Armstrong until later in my playing, when I was 17 or 18.  Before that, I was just really into Miles and Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro and Lee Morgan.  Then I started listening to Louis Armstrong.  I took that style of playing for granted because I had grown up in New Orleans, and I had heard it a lot, but I didn’t really see the beauty of Louis Armstrong’s playing until I started listening to the recordings.  Then I saw how great he was.  I had an image in my mind of Louis Armstrong just being an entertainer and joking around.  I didn’t take him seriously as a trumpeter.  When I went back and started listening to his recordings, I realized how great he was.

TP:    This has been done ad infinitum, but I’d like you to briefly talk about the characteristics of his style that are pertinent today, to you.

PAYTON:  First, he had a huge sound, a very great sound.  It was very personal and very distinctive.  He had tremendous amounts of endurance.  A lot of the pieces that he played, especially in the ’30s period with the big band, like “Swing That Music” and “Jubilee” and “Chinatown,” where he takes these extended solos where he plays all these high notes and ending on like F’s and G’s.  I mean, a lot of people say, “Well, Louis Armstrong didn’t have the technical training” or whatever.  But I’d like to see trumpet players play that now.  It’s incredibly hard.  Rhythmically, he took the music years past what was before him.  Also harmonically.  As Miles Davis was quoted saying once, you can’t play a note on the horn that Louis Armstrong hadn’t already played, and that’s true.  I mean, a lot of things he played with phrases like bebop musicians played later on and whatnot.  So he’ll always be the definitive voice in jazz forever, regardless of how far the music goes.  His place in history can never be denied.

TP:    Now, you’ve had to both replicate his solos and improvise on the solos as well, I guess…

PAYTON:  I never replicated his solos.  I just…

TP:    Okay.  But what are the challenges of playing Louis’ solos for you?

PAYTON:  Well, I guess I’ve sort of gotten accustomed to it because I’ve listened to it so much.  I grew up listening to that style of music, so it wasn’t as hard for me as it may have been for some to approach the music.  But to me, when you’re learning a person’s music or style, it’s not so important to me to know exactly what they’re playing or learn every solo when you’re playing in that style, or to play exactly what they played.  To me, it’s always been more important to get their concept and where they were coming from.  Why did they play this here?  What actually were they doing?  What was his mindset when he was actually playing that.  To get the concept.  That way, when you’re playing in that style, you can be free in whatever you’re doing, and be creative and bring yourself into it, rather than give some kind of recreation of what it is.  Because it’s never going to be as great as what has already been documented.

TP:    Well, Pops came up under King Oliver and formed a lot of his ideas from hearing him play, but of course it’s something very different, and the recordings they did in the early ’20s.  We’ll start with “Dippermouth Blues.” Before we hear it, a few words about King Oliver.

PAYTON:  King Oliver was a great trumpeter.  He had a real hip, bluesy feel.  He influenced a lot of trumpet players, especially with the wah-wah conception that people like Bubber Miley and Rex Stewart and Cootie Williams later employed.  This solo here is one of his most famous solos.  Trumpet players such as Louis Armstrong, Harry James, Rex Stewart…when you play this tune, you almost have to play these three choruses, because it just becomes monumental.  When you play this tune…all the trumpet players who have really played, play this strain when they’re playing this blues.

[MUSIC: Pops/King Oliver, "Dippermouth Blues" (1923); "Potato Head Blues" (1927); Roy Eldridge, "Body & Soul" (1935)]

TP:    Nicholas, would you address what Roy Eldridge did that’s jumping off from Pops, and his own conception.

PAYTON:  Well, one thing is that Roy Eldridge, along with being heavily influenced by Louis Armstrong, was also very influenced by the great Coleman Hawkins.  As you can see, Roy is playing a lot of the longer, linear lines, like Coleman Hawkins was dealing with in the ’30s.

TP:    Trying to play like a saxophone.

PAYTON:  Exactly.  Yet he still has the punchiness and the attack like Louis Armstrong, and was heavily influenced by both.

TP:    What’s interesting is that Coleman Hawkins sat next to Pops in the Fletcher Henderson band in the mid ’20s and was very influenced by him.

PAYTON:  That’s correct.

TP:    You have a piece on your new record that’s very much in the idiom and vibration of Roy Eldridge, a version of “Taking A Chance On Love.”  Talk about the dynamics of his style.

PAYTON:  Roy bridged the gap between the older style, the real straight style of playing, to playing lines more flowingly, more of a linear conception of playing the trumpet.  And he influenced a whole generation of trumpet players, mainly Dizzy Gillespie, who really was influenced by Roy.  Especially on the real early recordings you can tell how much he was into Roy.

TP:    That interaction was memorably record in 1954 for Verve on 9 tracks bringing together Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie.  Nicholas selected “Algo Bueno.”

PAYTON:  You’re about to hear some great trumpet playing.  It’s history being recorded.  These two trumpet titans are really… It’s a good experience to hear where Dizzy was heavily influenced by Roy, but he took that thing and made it his own, and these two trumpet players playing their own style… Stylistically, there’s a difference between them, but Roy wasn’t that much older than Diz — maybe four or five years older.  But they were both great trumpet players.

TP:    One aspect of Dizzy Gillespie’s impact wasn’t just his harmonic innovations, but his rhythmic innovations as well, bring the Afro-Cuban sound into the idiom.  But in New Orleans there’s an implicit Caribbean aspect as well.

PAYTON:  There’s a lot of multicultural influences in New Orleans, being that there were different settlers from all over.  You had French, you had Spanish settlers, you had the Indians.  So a lot of different cultural expressions all culminated into that.  All that goes back to the meetings on Sunday in Congo Square, where the people would get together and play.  That all comes out of that.  The second-line street beat comes out of all those influences.  It comes out of the influence of the march and… Sometimes you see those things where it’s the piccolo and the drum, or also the Afro-Cuban rhythms… It’s all mixed in, and it all comes together…

TP:    That lives on also in the Mardi Gras Indian bands.

PAYTON:  Exactly.  That comes directly out of all that.

[MUSIC: Roy-Diz, "Algo Bueno" (1954); Bird-Fats, "Street Beat" (1950); Clifford Brown, "Donna Lee" (1956)]

TP:    Again, put on the professor’s hat and talk about Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown, the evolution of trumpet sensibility.

PAYTON:  All those trumpet players came out of Dizzy Gillespie.  Fats came out of Dizzy, but he had a different thing, a real personal sound.  He had a huge sound.  He played very lyrically but at the same time being very virtuosic in being able to play long, complex phrases, while at the same time he utilized space and also played lyrically, which is beautiful, which is something that Clifford Brown was very influenced by — the playing of Fats Navarro.

TP:    Talk about playing melodies.  You’ve been quoted — and I can hear this, too — that you always create a melodic phrase even out of very convoluted type of harmonic lines.

PAYTON:  To me that’s the beauty of music.  That’s what it is for me.  Just being able to play a clear, sensible melody is one of the hardest things you can do.  And that’s something I think all the great jazz musicians strive to do over the course of their lives, is just be able to deliver the melodic line.

TP:    How long have you been composing for groups?

PAYTON:  I’ve been composing seriously for three years?

TP:    Do you do it off the piano, off the trumpet?

PAYTON:  It’s a combination of things.  Sometimes I’m sitting sat the piano and something might hit me, and I go on and write it from there.  Sometimes I hear something in my head, and I go to the piano and work it out.  But I never try to write from an instrumental or theoretical standpoint.  I try to hear something that’s singable to myself in my head, something that someone who doesn’t necessarily like jazz or know anything about it could maybe come to the gig or hear it on record, and it’s something that will be singable to them, that could be catch, maybe they’d be whistling on their way home.  I try to think of melodies in those terms.  And I try to write melodies that lead the tune.  I don’t write changes.  I don’t try to write complex changes and then fit some kind of contrived melody over it.  I write the melody to lead where the progression of the tune is going.

TP:    You’ve recorded some standards as well on In This Moment, like “Taking A Chance On Love” and “You Stepped Out Of A Dream.”  Do you follow the dictum of knowing the lyric and keeping it in mind?

PAYTON:  Definitely.  I don’t feel I’m really playing a tune unless I know what the lyrics are and what the meaning of the tune is.  Then you can do whatever you want with it.  I find a lot is lost when you don’t know the melody for yourself as a reference.  I mean it’s good to know what other jazz musicians have played on tunes, definitely.  But you need the score really to see, so you can bring whatever you can bring to it, instead of just getting someone’s interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation, and by the time you get it the whole melodic structure of the tune may be gone.  So you need that as a reference point, I feel.

TP:    I’d like to talk to you a little bit about sound as well.  At the top of the show I said that I think the one thing that strikes everyone on hearing you is just the breadth and warmth of your sound.  Is it a sound you’ve had in your mind’s ear?  Is it a quality of combining hard work and embrochure and so forth?

PAYTON:  Well, sound is something you always are working on.  As a musician, you’re always trying to develop your sound.  And your sound matures as you grow older.  To me, sound is the most important aspect of playing.  Because that’s the thing that people can most readily identify with — your musical sound.

TP:    It’s your voice.

PAYTON:  That’s right.

TP:    Was this very expansive sound in your ear from your early years of hearing brass bands and other music?

PAYTON:  Well, it’s a culmination of different experiences and different influences.

TP:    We’ll leave it at that, and turn to a trumpet player with one of the most beautiful sounds, Joe Wilder, who spent most of his career in the studios, but has recorded a number of extraordinary small group albums where he improvises at wonderful length, and one was done in 1956 for Savoy, a trumpet and rhythm date with Hank Jones on piano, Wendell Marshall on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.  We’ll hear “Cherokee.”

PAYTON:  When I first heard this, I didn’t really know much about Joe Wilder.  I had heard his name before.  I knew he had been a member of several different big bands.  But he hadn’t been involved in a lot of solo projects, or really gotten out there. This is an example of some of the great musicians who have been in our music but have never really gotten the opportunity to get their due.  He was a great player, and I think he deserves to be listened to.

[MUSIC: Joe Wilder, "Cherokee" (1956); Clark Terry/OP, "Brotherhood Of Man" (1963); Sweets/Ben Webster, "Did You Call Her Today" (1961)]

TP:    What came to mind hearing those tracks is that all three trumpet players had mastered and assimilated modern harmonic developments, but kept the phrasing and pace and feel of an earlier generation.

PAYTON:  Well, they sort of fit between the mold of the old-style Swing period and the Bebop period.

TP:    A few words about each.  Harry Sweets Edison has a very vocalized style, almost like he’s having a conversation with you.

PAYTON:  Sweets was a truly great trumpeter.  What I love about him is he has great time.  He really gets into a rhythm.  He can swing one note to death.  A great phraser.  Plays beautiful melodies, too.

TP:    Clark Terry is really a total musician.  Miles said because he heard him in St. Louis in the early ’40s, when he went to 52nd Street nothing he heard surprised him.  He seems able to play every area of music with a totally personal conception.  And you’ve had a chance to associate with him in the last few years.

PAYTON:  Clark has helped me tremendously.  Besides me, he’s helped many young instrumentalists.  He’s a great educator, and he’s very patient with young students of jazz.  Besides being a great musician… I’ve stood on the bandstand with him many a night and listened to recordings.  He’s just another one of those great musicians who never really was able to get established on his own, which is really unfortunate.  Clark influenced many musicians, like Miles…he’s just great…

TP:    He’s a musician who played in the big bands, then stayed in the studios because of the economics of raising a family.

PAYTON:  Yeah.  He was one of musicians’ favorite trumpet players, even though he never got exposed to the masses.  Duke Ellington and Count Basie were quoted as saying that he was their favorite trumpet player.  So he had the respect of the whole musical community.

TP:    I’d like to talk a bit with you about phrasing.  On the one hand, people who come up in different times and are affected by what goes on around them think and phrase in different ways, and yet that type of phrasing we heard with Sweets and Clark Terry is classic, part of the idiom.  Let’s say you were approaching that type of material.  Is putting yourself in that frame of mind something you have to think about, or does it come naturally with playing the piece.

PAYTON:  I think I just try to play that way, period.  I always try to think in terms of phrasing, regardless of the period.  To me, it’s all jazz and they all consist of the same elements.  There are differences within different styles of music, but the foundation is always the same.

TP:    With Mulgrew Miller, Peter Washington and Louis Nash at this Vanguard this week, you have a rhythm section that’s capable of both playing extremely creatively in their solo aspect and also totally supportive.

PAYTON:  They’re great.  Mulgrew and Louis are two of my favorite musicians playing today.  They’re both very tasteful and supportive, but at the same time being very great individual soloists.  I couldn’t think of too many people I’d rather work with than those guys.

TP:    Coming up is Miles Davis, a piece we heard you play last night, albeit under its original title and not the royalty-avoiding one.  This is George Shearing’s “Conception,” which Miles Davis recorded in 1951, then subsequently in 1954 as “Take-Off” for Blue Note.  Within your own personal framework, how does Miles Davis come in?

PAYTON:  Miles has been a tremendous influence on my playing.  He totally changed the concept of the trumpet.  Once Miles Davis’ playing came in the picture, that added a whole new thing to the art of jazz trumpet.  He’s a masterful musician, a master of lyricism and phrasing and timing — and had a wonderful sound, of course.

[MUSIC: Miles, "Take Off" (1954); "Old Folks" (1961)]

TP:    We’ll hear three performances featuring trumpeters with Duke Ellington, two of them by Ellington trumpet players.  Nicholas, you’ve had a chance to play quite a bit of Ellington’s music now with the J@LC.  Ellington used his trumpets in so many different ways, had trumpeters with different personalities, and wrote and arranged for the personalities of those personalities, going back to Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams and Freddie Jenkins and Rex Stewart.  Was your first exposure to Ellington’s music as a kid listening to records?

PAYTON:  When I started listening to Ellington, I didn’t realize the magnitude of the great music he composed.  To me, Duke Ellington wrote “Take The A Train” and “Satin Doll,” and that was my extent of my knowledge of what he did.  It wasn’t until later on, when I got into a lot of his extended works that he and Billy Strayhorn both worked on, like “The Far East Suite,” “The Perfume Suite” and all those type of pieces… I remember talking about the Ellington days with Clark Terry, and he shared a lot of memories.  He said, you look at the Ellington band, and you can take the trumpet players who went through that band and get the whole history of trumpet playing practically, just out of the trumpet section, different people who passed through there.  So there’s a lot of rich history in the Ellington band, not only with the trumpets, but all the instrumentalists as well.

TP:    It must extremely useful to you as an improviser to be able to play the music of the great classic composers of jazz, more or less the music’s building blocks, within the Lincoln Center Orchestra, and then come out as a contemporary improviser with your own sound.

PAYTON:  Yes, I’m very fortunate to get an opportunity to play a lot of this music.

TP:    You get involved in its inner dynamics.

PAYTON:  Definitely.  I mean, it’s great listening to it, but it’s a totally different thing when you’re right there in the middle of the band and you can really hear all the parts clearly and really see what’s going on, and you can really see yourself the range of difficulty this music entails.

TP:    And I think what you want to make clear to people is that it’s not imitative, it’s a processing, then filtered through your consciousness, and something contemporary and new is coming out.

PAYTON:  Yeah.  And that’s what Duke Ellington’s thing was about.  When Clark Terry came in the band, he didn’t make him play like Rex Stewart or anybody.  He let him be Clark Terry and based the band around that.  And I think any great leader has the ability to do that.  Like Miles,  To be a leader doesn’t mean to tell your sideman what to do.  It simply means you create an outlet for the player to express themselves, and let them bring whatever experiences and talents they have into it to make it great.

TP:    One of the great individualists in the Ellington band was Ray Nance, who had the trumpet chair for many years, and we’ll hear a feature for him from 1959, “Pie Eye’s Blues.”

PAYTON:  Ray Nance is a great trumpeter, another who was very respected among musicians but never could really get too much out of the big band circuit.  He was a master of muted playing, and also playing with the hat, and had a gorgeous sound.

TP:    We’ll also be hearing a Shorty Baker feature on “Mood Indigos” from Indigos.

PAYTON:  Shorty was a great phraser.  He had a very sweet, sensual tone.

[MUSIC:  Ellington/Nance, "Pie Eye's Blues" (1959); Ellington-Baker, "Mood Indigo" (1959); Ellington/Diz, "UMMG" (1959)]

TP:    We’ll program a marathon set featuring four trumpeters — Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Booker Little, Art Farmer.  You recorded one of K.D.’s compositions and performed during last night’s first set — “Fair Weather.”  We’ve spoken of individual voices on the trumpet; no one was ever more so than Kenny Dorham.

PAYTON:  Yes, he was definitely an individual with his own conception of sound.  Unfortunately, again, he’s another one of the trumpet players who never got very wide recognition but was very well respected in the musical trumpet.

TP:    As Miles Davis said, he was playing his own thing and was original.  He developed his own conception, as evident on his recording.  He also influenced Freddie Hubbard, who came up here once and said that K.D. had been a saxophone player earlier and had developed a lot of his attitude from his saxophone experience, as you mentioned earlier about Roy Eldridge.

PAYTON:  Freddie is one of the greatest, personally one of my favorite trumpeters.  He has all the aspects of trumpet playing I like.  He has a warm, big sound.  He has a pile of chops.  Is capable of playing very complex lines that are virtuosic, but at the same time has a  beautiful, lyrical quality about his playing.

TP:    Almost operatic in his scope when he’s really on, from lovely ballads to gladiatorial type trumpet pieces.  Born in the same year as Freddie was Booker Little, and they emerged at the same time.  But we’ll never know what Booker Little would have done since he died at the age of 23.  But people are still grappling with what he did.

PAYTON:  Yeah, he was amazing.  Again, an amazing technician as well as a great trumpet player.  He was very virtuosic, but at the same time played lyrically, as you’ll hear.  The way he plays over time is so free and flowing, but at the same time you could still hear the continuity of the piece within his freer time even though he’s playing over the beat.  Booker Little never really developed his full potential because of his untimely death, but all the trumpet players at the time, when Booker Little came, were frightened by him.  I heard Freddie telling about Booker Little, that when he first heard him he was scared.  He said he’d never heard anyone play trumpet like that.  He was great, as well as a great composer.

TP:    Talk a bit about what was great and distinctive about his compositions, and the implications of what those compositions might subsequently have been.

PAYTON:  His music was very intellectual, but at the same time a lot of the melodies were very  simplistic while being complex, which I love.  He had the ability to appeal to people’s highest sense, but at the same time, it’s something someone could relate to on the most tangible level.

TP:    Kenny Dorham also had a lot of trumpet players note his slickness, his ability to go in and out of phrases, and connect…

PAYTON:  Yeah, he was a master of playing turnarounds and stuff like that.

TP:    Finally, concluding the set, we’ll hear a 1964 performance by the Art Farmer Quartet with guitarist Jim Hall on “Stompin’ At the Savoy.”  We’re talking about another of the great individualists of the trumpet, and someone whose every note seems clear as a bell, whose thought process you can hear.

PAYTON:  Yeah, Art Farmer was and still is a great melodist, a great trumpet player.  He was a big influence on my playing.  One of the tracks I do on my record, “It Could Happen To You,” which I do with guitar and bass and drums, comes right out of the quartet stuff we’re going to hear.

TP:    Another thing about Art Farmer is that he never stops challenging himself conceptually and compositionally.  He’s always bringing in new material, and it seems that the harder the piece, the more he wants to play it.

PAYTON:  Yeah.  He has no limitations or any hangups about playing material.

TP:    Well, Nicholas Payton seems to be going in that direction himself, and he’s at the beginning of what promises to be a very interesting career to follow, which I’ll certainly be doing.  You can hear where he is right now at the Village Vanguard.

[ETC.]

[MUSIC: KD, "Lotus Blossom" (1959); Freddie, "One Finger Snap" (1964); Booker/Max, "Garvey's Ghost" (1961); Art Farmer, "Stompin' At the Savoy" (1962)]

R.I.P. Paul Motian, 1931-2011

When I launched this blog last May, I was looking for apropos material to post. As it happened, Paul Motian was at the Village Vanguard that week (it was one of his eight scheduled 2011 engagements) helming a  newly-configured quartet with vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and I decided to share the unedited proceedings of a Blindfold  Test we’d done in 1999.

I last saw Paul towards the end of September, when he was at the Vanguard in a marvelous unit with Greg Osby and Masabumi Kikuchi. He played with characteristic focus and creative energy, and was looking good. But when I spoke with Paul after the set, he told me that he’d been feeling poorly, that his energy was low, and that it had been difficult for him to make it through the week. So when I went onto Facebook yesterday and saw numerous posts from several dozen of the world’s most prominent improvisers, drummers and otherwise,  stating their sorrow about his passing (the cause of death was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone-marrow disorder) and expressing their heartfelt feelings about his brilliance, it wasn’t entirely a surprise. But I’m deeply saddened.

Still, all in all, it seems like Paul Motian split on his own terms — a life in which illness precluded him from playing music may not have seemed to him like a life worth living. Furthermore, by expanding his circle over the last decade on one-offs with such luminaries in his peer group as Hank Jones, Ron Carter, and Chick Corea, and a good chunk of the best and brightest of younger generations from several continents, he ensured that his spirit would continue to inform the music timeline after his body had left us.

I got to know Paul during the early ’90s when he joined me on WKCR to publicize a gig by the Electric Bebop Band at Sweet Basil in Manhattan. As the decade progressed, more radio meetings ensued, and we learned how to speak with each other.  Our last public conversation was in 2008—I’m posting the proceedings below (it appeared on http://www.jazz.com in 2009). There will follow a DownBeat feature article that I wrote on him the week for 9/11/2001 to mark the release of his second run on ECM.

* * *

Paul Motian (WKCR, Sept. 4, 2008): (Jazz.com)

“I think rehearsing takes away from the beauty of the music,” says Paul Motian. “I’ve been playing long enough to know what I’m doing at this point of my life! I’d rather depend on my skills and intuition to play well when the time comes.”

At 77, Motian is an iconic figure, his laid-back, minimalist parsing of rhythm and timbre a fixture on the jazz landscape..

“Just one strike of the cymbal, there’s something transcendent in his sound,” Brian Blade observed earlier this decade. “A lot of people miss how Motian moves the music and gets inside it. He possesses an amazing lyrical looseness, but at the same time keeps a swing and pulsation that injects the music with a good feeling.”

That feeling seduced a number of drummers who, like Joey Baron, came of age aesthetically in the early ‘70s, when Motian propelled Keith Jarrett’s influential trio and quartet,  more than a decade after he attained international visibility playing drums for several editions of the Bill Evans Trio between 1956 to 1963.  “At a certain point,” Baron once remarked, “I started hearing interplay that wasn’t necessarily about stating 4/4 all the time, but a floating kind of time, more like a circle than a straight up-and-down hard groove. It’s the way Paul Motian would really PLAY a ballad; he made it interesting rather than just a straight boom-chick, which a lot of drummers did.”

Motian’s contemporaries feel similar enthusiasm for Motian’s clear, pellucid beats and unremittingly in-the-moment focus. “Paul always played like someone who listens and interprets what he hears immediately,” noted Lee Konitz, who first shared a bandstand with Motian more than half a century ago. “He’s an idea man as opposed to a language man,” added pianist Paul Bley, who helped Motian transition into a speculative improviser during the early ‘60s. “I hear him play one idea on the drums, and there is a silence, and then there is another idea. It’s way beyond accompaniment per se. He’s playing as many ideas as the people he’s playing with, and sometimes more vividly because of the silences.”

That quality of musical conversation permeates all of the bands that Motian leads. There’s the increasingly dense and complex Electric Bebop Band, comprised of two saxophonists (they’ve  included Joshua Redman, Chris Potter, Chris Cheek, and Pietro Tonolo), two guitarists (among them Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Monder, Steve Cardenas, and Brad Shepik), an electric bassist (often Steve Swallow, and also Anders Christensen). Initially a vehicle for off-kilter blowing on core bebop repertoire by Parker, Dameron, Powell, and Monk, Motian now uses it to showcase increasingly involved arrangements of his original material.

There’s also Trio 2000, in which bassist Larry Grenadier triangulates Motian and Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, a master of rubato improvising at achingly slow tempos, in a dialogue with saxophonist Potter on the 1998 recording Trio 2000 + 1 or, as on the 2007 album Trio 2000 + 2: Live at the Village Vanguard, with Potter and alto saxophonist Greg Osby, both Winter & Winter releases.

No Motian project has more deeply impacted the sound of 21st century jazz than the Paul Motian Trio, a super-group with guitarist Bill Frisell and tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, who were just beginning to make their mark when they recorded It Should Have Happened A Long Time Ago [ECM], the PM3 debut, in 1984. Motian no longer travels, and for the last five years or so, the trio has convened only for an annual fortnight run around Labor Day at New York’s Village Vanguard. Without soundcheck, completely in tune from the first note of this year’s run, they spun out collective improvisations of the highest order.

“Every time Paul hits the drums, he has this way of surprising even himself — and of course, it surprises everyone else,” Frisell said. “We’ve been playing 25 years, and I still don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Nor does Motian. “Red Garland once told me that if you have an idea in your head, somehow it will come out on your instrument,” he told me in 2001. “That’s what I do. My eyes are closed, I play what I’m hearing, I play musical ideas, and when they come out, I find myself doing technical things on the drumset that I’ve never done before in my life. Sometimes it might be awkward; maybe if I studied what I was thinking about, I would figure out technically the best and easiest way to do it, and do it differently.”

On night three of the Trio’s Vanguard engagement, Motian joined me at New York’s WKCR to speak about its history, its two most recent recordings (I Have The Room Above Her and Time and Time Again [ECM]), and many other things.

—————————–

PM:   We did the new trio recording, plus our trio recording about two years before that, in one afternoon, five or six hours. I go in with new music, and Joe and Bill are great—they can read the stuff right away, and we make little changes now and then.

TP:    Your custom over the last decade or so, since everyone’s schedule got even busier, is to get together after a long hiatus, and just hit, even with the barest soundcheck.

PAUL:   We’ve been playing together for such a long time. Now we do two weeks every year at the Vanguard, around this time in September. I don’t think we do anything in between. We don’t rehearse. I came in with a new tune last night, “Olivia’s Dream,” that Joe had never seen before. I put up the music and he played great.

TP:   How did you assemble the group?

PAUL:   I had a gig  in Boston, and Pat Metheny was playing with me. I said, “I’m putting together a group; can you recommend some guitarists?” He told me about Bill—he mentioned another guitar player (I can’t remember his name now), but he said he thought I would like Bill. Bill came over to my apartment, and we played, and we got along great. That was in 1980, I guess. So I started with Bill, and then I think Marty Ehrlich came in, and we rehearsed as a trio for a while. Then Marc Johnson, the bass player, came by, and we rehearsed with him for a while, and then Marc recommended Joe—or maybe it was Ed Schuller. Then Joe recommended Billy Drewes. Anyway, that quintet came together in ‘81 or so, and the trio thing happened three years later.

TP:   Was it a matter of strategy or circumstance?

PAUL:   It just happened. We were playing a gig with the quintet, and at one point during one of the songs, the bass laid out, and it was just Joe and Bill and I playing, and right then, that’s what I heard. I said, “Gee, I could get away with this, guys.” Economically it made sense, plus the music was really happening. So I stayed with that.

TP:   You’ve worked with many powerful bass players. The Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro, Gary Peacock and Chuck Israels. David Izenson in your own trio. Charlie Haden in the Keith Jarrett Trio and Quartet. In Oscar Pettiford’s bands in the late ‘50s. More recently in Bill Frisell’s trio with Ron Carter. Can you speak about the dynamics of playing with a bass player vis-a-vis playing without one?

PAUL:   That was going through my head last night as I was playing. Without the bass, I can do whatever I want. I can change the tempo. I can play free, without a tempo. I can play free for a while, and then play in tempo for a while, and not play, and lay out. I’m totally free, and it’s totally open for me to do whatever I want. Now, it’s got to make sense to me, and it’s got to be musical. With the bass, sometimes I can almost do the same thing, but of course, the bass makes a big difference.

TP:   The Paul Motian Trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano toured extensively in the ‘80s and into the mid ‘90s.

PAUL:   I got burned out. That’s why I don’t tour any more. It just got ridiculous.

TP:    Not just with them, though. You developed a number of groups by the end of the ‘90s.

PAUL:   Yeah, plus I was playing with other bands, other people. People would call me from Europe, and I’d go to Europe or Japan, and play with people there. It’s ridiculous.  Now it’s worse than ever, I understand, from when I talk to people now.

TP:   It’s been said that you don’t like to leave the environs of New York City, and would probably prefer not to leave Manhattan Island, if possible…

PAUL:   Well, no…

TP:   Not entirely true.

PAUL:   I mean, sometimes I’ll see a film of maybe a small town in Paris that looks really great, and I remember having a good time there, and I miss that. I played all over Italy, and I miss friends and people, and great food sometimes. Not all the time! Sometimes. But I love New York. I’ve been here forever.

TP:    But you haven’t been wanting to travel so much for the last couple of years.

PAUL:   No. It’s a hardship, man. Plus, I don’t take my drums, so I’m playing a different drumset every night, playing in a different hall every night. You don’t know what you’re going to come up with. Plus, they gave me a hard time on the airlines. When I was playing with Keith Jarrett and we toured, I would take my own drums. When I started with my own trio, with David Izenson and Charles Brackeen, I would take my drums. But after a while, it got harder and harder, and they charged more and more money. People used to take basses on the plane for free! Put it on a seat and strap it in. Free, man. Now you can’t even take a bass on a plane. Then I would just take my cymbals. Then they started giving me a hard time with my cymbal. “What’s that, mister? You can’t take that on the plane.” Blah-blah-blah. So I said goodbye.

TP:   Is it important for you to play with your own drums?

PAUL:   Sure. Yeah.

TP:   Did you ever feel happy with how you played not on your own drums?

PAUL:   Very seldom. Occasionally, I would come across a good drumset.

TP:    Would the difference in quality not be discernible to anyone but you and other drummers?

PAUL:   I feel that it would be. People have told me that I still sound like me, and I’m able to play like me and sound like me no matter what the drums are. But I don’t agree!

TP:   What do you use?

PAUL:   It’s a Gretsch drumset that I bought in a drum shop here in New York about 30 years ago. I love the sound of those drums and I love to play those. I’ve been playing the cymbals that I use for quite a few years now. They’re a mish-mash of different companies. I gave my old drumset to Joe Lovano.

TP:   Tell me about playing with Thelonious Monk.

PAUL:   I played with him a couple of times—a week in Boston, and earlier at the Open Door at Lafayette and Third Street. Lou Donaldson came to the Vanguard the other day, and we were talking about that, because Lou was in Monk’s band—with Donald Byrd and I don’t remember the bass player—the first time I played with Monk. I knew Monk was playing at the Open Door with his band, and I went to hear the music. The promoter, Bob Reisner, knew I played drums—he had seen me around town. When I arrived, he said, “Paul, Arthur Taylor hasn’t showed up; if you go home and get your drums, you can play with Monk.” Man, I ran home, got my drums, and came back. Monk paid me ten dollars at the end of the night. When I told Lou Donaldson that story, he said, “Oh, yeah, that’s all he paid anybody.” Donald Byrd once told me he’s got a picture of me playing with Monk on that date. I’d love to see it. That had to be 1955 or 1956. Then in 1960 I played for a week with Monk in Boston with Scott LaFaro and Charlie Rouse.

Monk said that he liked one take, and Charlie Rouse also talked about it. If there was anything more than, say, a take-two, they would just move on, go on to the next thing. Once you’re into the second take, it’s like a copy somehow. It doesn’t sound real enough. You’re trying to correct something, man. I remember doing record dates, not my own, like just somebody called me to do a recording, and talking about take 15 and 16. That’s ridiculous.

TP:   On one of the Bill Evans Trio dates, Portrait In Jazz maybe, from 1959, you’d done a month at a club called the Showplace, finished the run on a Sunday, then went in the studio to do the session.

PAUL:   That was a club on Third Street. That’s the first record we did with Scott LaFaro.

TP:   But fifty years ago, long runs were more commonplace.

PAUL:   Oh, yeah. There was a club on 52nd Street called the Hickory House. I played in there for three months with Bill Evans, and for three months again with Joe Castro, a piano player. I remember playing 10 weeks with Lennie Tristano at the Half Note. Nine weeks at the Vanguard with Bill Evans and Gary Peacock. One or two weeks or more at the original Birdland. That’s the way it was, then.

It slowed up for jazz around the mid ‘60s. I don’t think I played with Bill Evans after 1964 or so, then I started with Keith Jarrett around 1968. Those couple of years in there, I was doing commercial gigs. I played at a nightclub on 72nd Street with acts coming from Israel. I played with a Hungarian violinist and a Romanian piano player. Great shows!

TP:   Was that a valuable time for you? Did it affect the way you heard music?

PAUL:    It paid my rent. That was it.

TP:   But between ‘63 and ‘68, your personal aesthetic seems to have changed in certain ways. You played with much more radical players.

PAUL:   True. There was a wonderful piano player in Boston named Lowell Davidson, who isn’t around any more. He was very original, and played great. I used to go up to Boston just to play with this guy. There were different bass players. We did a concert of his music at a church I think in 1976, and the bass player was a guy named Jon Voigt, who was the librarian at Berklee School of Music. Lowell Davidson recorded it, and I had a ¼” reel-to-reel tape in my closet for about 20 years. Finally, I told Manfred Eicher at ECM about it, and he said, “Well, give me the tape, and maybe we can do something with it.” I was ecstatic that maybe this could finally be a record, because the music was incredible. I loved that stuff. But now Manfred tells me now that they don’t know where the tape is!

But anyway, I did things with Lowell, and played with Paul Bley and Gary Peacock at a club in the Village with Albert Ayler and John Gilmore. That was a helluva gig!

TP:    So in 1963, you’re playing with Bill Evans, and in 1964 you’re playing with Paul Bley, Albert Ayler and Gary Peacock. Opposite ends of the spectrum. Why did this happen?

PAUL:   I don’t think of it as being that far apart. They were gigs, and it was music. Just playing music, man. Continuing, going forward.

TP:   But if my recollection is correct, you weren’t too happy with the way things were going with Bill Evans. Didn’t you leave mid-gig?

PAUL:   I left Bill Evans. We were playing at Shelley Manne’s club in California, and it seemed like I was playing softer and softer until I finally felt like I wasn’t there at all. So I said, “Bill, I’m leaving.” He begged me not to quit, but I did. I paid my own way back home. He got Larry Bunker to play drums. They went up to San Francisco, and then they went to Europe for the first time. So I wasn’t happy with the music. I just felt I wasn’t playing.

TP:   Was that because of his own direction, what he was asking you to do, or did it just seem that this was where the music was taking you?

PAUL:   I had started playing with different people in New York, and the music for me was going in a different direction—the Jazz Composers Orchestra and with Paul Bley. I wanted to be part of that. I felt like this was the way to go, and with Bill I felt I was standing still.

TP:   In the late ‘50s you were one of the busiest drummers on the scene. I’ve seen your gig book. You were working 330-340 days a year, sometimes twice in a day.

PAUL:   Yeah, I was. I missed that photo shoot of Great Day In Harlem. I had three gigs that day, man. I was told about the photo shoot, that I should go, but I couldn’t make it. I think I played a wedding, a parade, and a gig. One time I was at the Musicians Union, and I was going up the stairs and somebody was coming down. He said, “Hey, Paul! You’re the house drummer at Birdland.” I wasn’t, man, but he just had seen me there a lot.

TP:   A lot of the gigs you were doing demanded you swing and keep really good time, but not a whole lot else.

PAUL: Sometimes. I did a rehearsal with Edgar Varese that was recorded. That had to be 1955-56. There was a tape, and Teo Macero told me that he had it. I don’t know what happened to it. I had a drumstick in one hand and an iron pipe in the other, and I had music in front of me. There were staffs, but not notes. There were open-ended triangles placed in different parts of the staff, and you were supposed to play according to what you… Art Farmer was on it, Hal McKusick, Billy Butterfield, the tuba player—an 8- or 9-piece band. I don’t know how come I got the call to do that, but I did.

TP: Well, you got a lot of calls.

PAUL:   Yeah. Somehow. I don’t get it.

TP:    When did you hit the New York scene?

PAUL:   I was in the Navy during the Korean War, and for a year I was stationed at Brooklyn Receiving Station, across the street from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I had an apartment in Brooklyn. It was like going to a day job. In the morning, I’d go in to a band rehearsal, and if there was no function or no dignitary to play for or anything, I’d go home, then get my drums and find someplace to play. Go play somewhere. Every day, if I could. I got out in September 1954.

TP:   It  was such an active time. For one thing, with the G.I. Bill, a lot of musicians were studying…

PAUL:   Well, I went to Manhattan School of Music on the G.I. Bill for a semester. Then in the middle of the second semester, I got a gig with George Wallington and Teddy Kotick at a club called the Composer Room on 58th Street off of Sixth Avenue—sort of a trio room. Teddy got me the gig; I’d met Teddy through Bill Evans, who I met pretty early on. I started falling behind in my studies, so I quit the school then.

TP:   Was your experience there valuable for you?

PAUL:   Sure. I was studying tympany and xylophone and piano and all of that.

TP:    So you learned something about theory and orchestral percussion, and it refined your skills, I guess.

PAUL:   Oh, yeah. I’d go in for a tympani lesson, and the first thing the tympani teacher would say was, “Sing A.” I never got it right!

TP:   No perfect pitch.

PAUL:   No, not me.

TP:   Do you hear the drums as a melodic instrument?

PAUL:   Yeah, definitely. It can be an orchestra, if you want to. You’ve got cymbals, you’ve got different tuned drums, you could have a string section, or whatever. But you’ve got to put that in your head. If you put it in your head, it can become real.

TP:    What drummers were your modeling yourself after?

PAUL:   Kenny Clarke, number one. I used to go the Bohemia, which opened in 1955. Charlie Parker was the first player they booked to play there, they had his name out front, but then he died. Before that, I went to the Bohemia to play jam sessions. No money. There was no band there. You’d just find some people to play with, then go to the club and say, “Is it okay if we play?” “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” Then people started to hear about it, and it became a club. Anyway, I heard Kenny Clarke playing there with Oscar Pettiford, George Wallington and different people. I was there every night.

I loved Kenny Clarke. His time, his feel. Did you ever hear the movie Miles Davis did the music for, Elevator to the Gallows? Boy, there’s some great stuff on there. Kenny Clarke’s playing brushes on snare drum, really fast tempo. Just the snare drum and brushes, man. It’s great. It’s swinging like a…I don’t want to say it, but you know what I mean?

TP:    We did a Downbeat Blindfold Test on which you also expressed your admiration for Shadow Wilson.

PAUL:   Sure, Shadow Wilson, but also Philly Joe Jones. I was at the Bohemia nightly to hear Miles Davis with Coltrane and Philly Joe. I’d also go to Birdland to see Art Blakey with his bands. Art Blakey, Philly Joe, Kenny Clarke—those were the people I was listening to, who were playing a lot. Roy Haynes wasn’t on the scene that much then. He was with Sarah Vaughan, so I didn’t get to hear him that much.

Lately, I’ve been listening to drummers from the ‘20s and ‘30s. I mean, Jimmy Crawford with the Jimmie Lunceford band, is a motherfucker, man. They used to call him Craw. Great. Manzie Campbell with Fletcher Henderson. There are drummers from that period who nobody talks about or knows about any more, but they were great drummers. I have a recording of Papa Jo Jones playing a duo with Willie the Lion Smith, and a trio with Teddy Wilson and Milt Hinton. Incredible. Simple, but just incredible music.

TP:   Were you listening to those older musicians at the time?

PAUL:   No. It’s only been lately I’ve been listening to all that.

TP:   How did you become interested in the drums in the first place?

PAUL:   There was a drummer in the neighborhood.

TP:    The neighborhood was in Providence, Rhode Island.

PAUL:   Right. I was friendly with his younger brother, who was sort of my age, and this drummer was maybe 16 or 17. He used to play in his house, and a lot of kids used to sit out front, listening to him. One day I went with my buddy to hear him play, and I fell in love with it, and asked if he would give me lessons.” I guess I was around 11. That’s how it started. He wasn’t really a teacher, though. He gave me some drumsticks and pulled out a practice pad, and he played me Gene Krupa doing “Sing, Sing, Sing” with Benny Goodman, then he gave me some sticks and told me how to play a roll or something like that.  After that I found a teacher, and went on from there.

TP:   Did you start playing in bands soon after?

PAUL:   Right after I got out of high school, I went on the road with a big band around New England, like one of those territory bands, playing Glenn Miller stuff. Perry Bourelly and his Orchestra. Also I used to play with other musicians in the neighborhood. I remember going to someone’s house and playing with an accordion player and a guitar player, playing popular songs from the ‘40s and so on.

TP:   Were you listening to records also, checking out drummers?

PAUL:  I’d hear records on the radio, and send away for them. I sent away for Count Basie records and things with Max Roach, who I also heard on broadcasts from Birdland.

TP:    You were coming of age right when when bebop was getting a lot of media attention.

PAUL:   Yes. When I was in high school, someone took me to a record store and played me a Charlie Parker record. It freaked me out. I didn’t know what was going on.

TP:   According to your gig book, you first worked the Vanguard maybe at the end of ‘56?

PAUL:   ‘57. With Lee Konitz. That was the first time I played there.  In those days, they’d have two bands. The Bill Evans Trio opposite the Miles Davis band. We played opposite Mingus. They’d have comedians—I played there with Bill Evans opposite Lenny Bruce. The place was never that full! One night with Bill and Scott LaFaro, there were only three people in the club. Now it’s packed. It’s unbelievable. It’s quiet, and they clap when you walk on stage. That never happened in those days!

TP:    Over the last few years, I’d speculate that your different bands occupy 6-7 weeks a year on the Vanguard schedule.

PAUL:   I think it turns out to be two months total. I’m going to go in there with Bill McHenry’s band at the end of this month, going into October. I think Ben Street is the bass player, Duane Eubanks on trumpet, and Andrew D’Angelo on alto saxophone.  Then I’m with Trio 2000 + 2 at the Vanguard the last week of November. I’m in the Vanguard in February with the trio of Jason Moran and Chris Potter, which we did last year. Jason Moran was saying that should be recorded live, so maybe I can talk to ECM about it and see. Also, in January I’m doing a week at the Blue Note with Bill Frisell and Ron Carter in January.

TP:   Are you under contract…

PAUL:   No-no-no.

TP:   Each record is a one-off situation?

PAUL:   Right.

TP:    So ECM and Winter & Winter split your time more or less evenly?

PAUL:   Pretty much. I do whatever comes up.

TP:   Your history with ECM begins with Tribute in 1972, doesn’t it? I guess your interest in bandleading began while you were with the Keith Jarrett Quartet.

PAUL:   I was playing with Keith, maybe in Boston, in 1976, and I told Keith’s booker that I was thinking about putting together something of my own, and asked if he’d get me a gig if I put a group together. That’s when that company got me a gig in Minneapolis with Charles Brackeen and David Izenson, opposite Earl Klugh. I wanted to do my own music, and I started taking piano lessons and composition lessons. That got me started.

I started playing with Keith around ‘68, coming out of that period with Paul Bley and Lowell Davidson—one thing grew into something else. We rehearsed a little bit, I remember, but not all that much. He didn’t dictate to do this or do that, or play this way or that way. It was open for everybody to play how they played, and everything fit. I left Keith when I started the trio with Charles and David. Actually, Bill Evans called me then and said, “Philly Joe Jones just quit on me; would you play with me again?” I said, “Well, I would love to, but I just started my own trio, and we’re about to do a European tour.” So that didn’t happen.

TP:   Did you get to play with him any more before his death?

PAUL:   No. After I left him in ‘64, the only time was at the Vanguard, when he was playing maybe with Eddie Gomez, and I sat in and played a couple of tunes. I felt very uncomfortable. It seemed like the music was on the edge of a mountain and we were about to fall off. It almost felt like it was speeding up or something. But it wasn’t. We ended up at the same tempo we started with. Miles Davis was in the club that night, and he drove me home, and he asked me how I felt about it. I said, ‘Man, it was okay, but the music just felt like it was speeding up.” He said, “Well, man, it’s only a trio; you got to push with a trio.”

TP:    In the ‘90s, you started developing a number of bands, the Trio+2 being one of them, and also the Paul Motian Electric Bebop Band. The Bebop Band evolved from a unit with odd instrumentation that played standards into a forum for expansive arrangements of your compositions.

PAUL:   Boy, that thing keeps growing and growing. The last time I played with it at the Vanguard, a few months ago, it was like an octet plus a piano player—nine people. I guess I felt like just playing with the trio with Bill and Joe wasn’t enough somehow. Also Bill and Joe started doing a lot of their own stuff, and I felt I wasn’t busy enough. Pretty soon, I started throwing in my music. Now it’s mostly my music; it’s hardly any bebop at all. I feel like you have to keep going on, keep doing stuff, try to do better and better, and try to grow. I’m still trying to grow. I’m still learning.

TP:   You employ a lot of young musicians, people under 40, even under 30.

PAUL:   It’s usually by recommendation. Somebody plays with me, they recommend somebody, and somebody will recommend someone else. I’m not thinking about age or whether they go to school or how they learned to play. Then, when they play with me, if I hear something I’d like to play with, I give them the gig. What’s interesting is that the young players who play with me go on to become bandleaders themselves. Chris Potter started playing with me right after he left Red Rodney. I think he was 23 years old. Kurt Rosenwinkel wasn’t much more than 20 when he came to my house the first time. Now these guys have their own bands.

TP:   We’ve talked about a lot of things.

PAUL:   I’ve been around a long time, man. There’s a lot to talk about.

* * * *

Downbeat (article from 2001)

“I think rehearsing takes away from the beauty of the music,” says Paul Motian. “I’ve been playing long enough to know what I’m doing at this point of my life! I’d rather depend on my skills and intuition to play well when the time comes.”

For Motian, 70, making music is as natural and necessary as drinking water; his laid-back, minimalist parsing of rhythm and timbre is a fixture on the jazz landscape. Consider how next-generation drum-masters Brian Blade and Joey Baron regard the drum icon.

“Just one strike of the cymbal, there’s something transcendent in his sound,” Blade observed  several years ago. “A lot of people miss how Motian moves the music and gets inside it. He possesses an amazing lyrical looseness, but at the same time keeps a swing and pulsation that injects the music with a good feeling.”

That feeling seduced a number of drummers who, like Baron, came of age aesthetically in the early ‘70s, when Motian propelled Keith Jarrett’s influential trio and quartet, more than a decade after attaining an international reputation as the drummer in the Bill Evans Trio from 1956 to 1963. “At a certain point,” says Baron, “I started hearing interplay that wasn’t necessarily about stating 4/4 all the time, but a floating kind of time, more like a circle than a straight up-and-down hard groove. It’s the way Paul Motian would really PLAY a ballad; he made it interesting rather than just a straight boom-chick, which a lot of drummers did.”

Hard swingers and hardcore abstractionists alike favor the clarity of  Motian’s beats and unremittingly in-the-moment focus. Every moment is fresh. “Paul always played like someone who listens and interprets what he hears immediately,” says Lee Konitz, who first shared a bandstand with Motian 50 years ago. “Every time Paul hits the drums, he has this way of surprising even himself — and of course, it surprises everyone else,” adds guitarist Bill Frisell, who received his “Miles Davis phone call” from Motian in 1980. “People say he plays like a little kid. At the same time, he’s a virtuoso, so deft and with so much technique, but the music always overshadows the instrument somehow.”

“Paul is an idea man as opposed to a language man,” says pianist Paul Bley, a partner since the early ‘60s. “I hear him play one idea on the drums, and there is a silence, and then there is another idea. It’s way beyond accompaniment per se. He’s playing as many ideas as the people he’s playing with, and sometimes more vividly because of the silences.”

Bley’s description precisely suits the ambiance of the 12 tunes that comprise I Have The Room Above Her [ECM], the [tk] album by the Paul Motian Trio with Frisell and tenor hero Joe Lovano since Motian’s previous ECM date,  It Should Have Happened A Long Time Ago, from 1984. On the day after Labor Day, they convened at the Village Vanguard to begin a sold-out fortnight. They needed no soundcheck: Completely in tune from the first note of “Good Morning Heartache” – they wove collective improvisations of the highest order, springboarding off of Motian’s pellucid ideas, pristinely executed with no excess strokes.“We’ve been playing for 25 years,” Frisell says, “and every time we play, I still don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Red Garland once told me that if you have an idea in your head, somehow it will come out on your instrument,” Motian said. “That’s what I do. My eyes are closed, I play what I’m hearing, I play musical ideas, and when they come out I find myself doing technical things on the drumset that I’ve never done before in my life. Sometimes it might be awkward; maybe if I studied what I was thinking about, I would figure out technically the best and easiest way to do it, and do it differently.”

Often, it seemed, Joe Lovano took timekeeping responsibilities. “That’s true,” Motian responds. “They played some of my stuff for one drummer on a Blindfold Test, and he said, ‘That’s bullshit. Anybody could do that.’ He didn’t get it. On one record we played ‘My Man’s Gone Now’ and the pianist and bassist played the time in 3/4. I’m playing maybe double or half what they’re doing in three, or playing in four, or maybe playing completely free. But I know exactly where I am in the song. I won’t do anything that interferes with what they’re doing. I’ll just try to make some music out of it without being locked into playing a certain thing.

“I remember when I played with Scott LaFaro the first time with Bill Evans. I’d worked with Oscar Pettiford, Tommy Potter, Curley Russell, Wilbur Ware, who played straight-ahead 4/4 time, but never a bass player who played like that. All of a sudden, the time started to break up. Maybe that’s when I started to realize that the time was already there; you don’t have to play it all the time. Maybe.”

“Paul knows how to accompany in any direction and any style,” notes Lovano, who recently matched the drum elder with Hank Jones and George Mraz on his straightahead Blue Note dates I’m All For You and Joyous Encounter. “He plays with total feeling, and creates amazing texture within the form of a tune. Paul plays with all different elements within the music. He plays like a pianist, where he’s playing the melody, the changes, the rhythm—he doesn’t have to just play a repetitive beat. He leaves a lot of spaces. A lot of counterpoint happens. He’s one of the most creative musicians in jazz.”

[BREAK]

“I wanted to try stuff, and I wanted to get it right,” Motian says of the trio’s early years. “I didn’t know if people who were going to play my music would like it. Is this music valid? What the hell am I doing? So we rehearsed a lot.”

Motian was almost exclusively a sideman until his early forties, when he acquired Keith Jarrett’s grand piano, took composition lessons, started writing tunes, made his first records, Conception Vessel and Tribute,  for ECM, and began his second career as a bandleader. “I began to realize that you could write little ideas and have people interpret them,” he says. “Manfred Eicher told me that I could record my own stuff, and that kicked my ass.”

The son of Armenian emigrants who settled in Providence, Rhode Island, Motian draws heavily on Anatolian and Persian melodies that he heard as a child.

“To some extent, Paul’s Armenian-ness comes through in his sound,” says Jarrett, who recruited Motian for his trio in 1968. “He plays like he’s on a caravan! Paul isn’t particularly jazzy, and I think he contributed a feeling of openness that wouldn’t have been there if he were a hip jazz drummer. Paul definitely was not going to play like any other drummer, nor could you force him to at gunpoint. It’s almost like he has no choice. Paul has kept the doors open. It’s as though he’s purposely eliminated stylistic sophistication in order to stay pure.”

Motian learned the tradition inside-out before setting it aside. As a Providence teenager, he rapidly developed skills on dance gigs with talented local peers and through intense study and emulation of the Savoy and Dial recordings by Charlie Parker and Max Roach. At 19, he enlisted in the Navy, and wound up in a band that joined the Admiral of the Sixth Fleet on his various postings. Posted to the Brooklyn Navy Yard after two years of sea duty, he moved to New York in 1953.

For the next few years, Motian hung out and jammed with a vengeance. “Wherever anybody played, I was there,” he relates. “Every chance I got, I’d take my drums on the subway.” At Birdland, the aspirant soaked up Art Blakey with Horace Silver and Curley Russell or Max Roach with Clifford Brown and Richie Powell; at the Bohemia, he dug how Kenny Clarke “got so much music out of a little amount of equipment” with Oscar Pettiford and George Wallington. “I thought it was par for the course,” he notes dryly. “Everything was like that.”

In the fall of 1954, shortly before his discharge, Motian attended an audition held by clarinetist Jerry Wald, and was impressed by the piano player. “Someone said, ‘Oh, that’s Bill Evans from New Jersey,’” Motian recalls. “I was hoping we’d both get this gig, and we did. We toured to Puerto Rico and different places on the East Coast during 1955. Then somehow, [clarinetist] Tony Scott hired us, and we went on tour with Tony. That was the beginning.

As documented in his gig books, yellowed pocket-size calendars chronicling the names, venues, and wages that comprise his career, Motian spent the next several years swinging for the likes of Eddie Costa, Oscar Pettiford, Don Elliott, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, George Wallington, Lee Konitz, Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans.

“In those days, we played from 9 or 10 at night until 3 or 4 in the morning,” he recalls. “I didn’t see the sunlight. You never went out of town. You spent $2 in a taxi to get to a gig, it took half-an-hour to get there, and you played for 6 hours or more.”

On Thursday, November 5, 1959, Bill Evans called Motian to sub for drummer Kenny Dennis on a trio engagement at Basin Street. By the final week, Motian had the job, as did LaFaro, a new arrival from the West Coast. The trio developed their sound during a subsequent month at the Showplace, on Third Street, after which they spent 9 hours in the studio recording Portrait of Jazz, Motian’s favorite of the Bill Evans Trio recordings, on which his symbiotic connection with LaFaro is already evident. In the ensuing 18 months until the bassist’s fatal motorcycle accident in the summer of 1961, Motian began to reconceptualize his approach. “Scott played the bass like no one ever had heard or played,” Motian states. “Of course, it made a strong impression. I always play from what I hear, and I tried to incorporate what he and Bill were doing into my playing.”

Word reached Thelonious Monk, who hired Motian and LaFaro for a week at Boston’s Storyville during the second week of 1960. Otherwise, Motian committed himself to the trio even when times were less than flush. “At a lot of our gigs we didn’t have full houses and people screaming and clapping,” he says. “I remember playing in the Village Vanguard with only four people in the club, and asking Max Gordon if we could go home. He said, ‘Oh, no, you’ve still got a table of people and you’ve got to play another set.’”  Still, Motian didn’t budge when Evans fell ill in late 1960, taking sporadic gigs and drawing an unemployment check for the hefty sum of $427 for 9 weeks.

“We were pretty busy from the beginning of 1961 to the summer,” he sums up the conclusion of his first career peak. “We were hot!  Then Scott got killed. Then it went on from there.”

[BREAK]

The ascension of the Bill Evans Trio occurred against a New York backdrop of Ornette Coleman’s hellraising at the Five Spot, the ever more intense form-stretching of Charles Mingus, the politicization of Max Roach, the spiritual blossoming of John Coltrane, and the growing visibility of a cadre of young musicians with an avant-garde sensibility. LaFaro and Motian wanted Evans to test those waters, but the leader was reluctant to shift his parameters, and Motian felt the first stirrings of aesthetic restlessness.

The breaking point came during a lucrative January 1964 engagement with Evans and Chuck Israels at Shelley’s Manne Hole in sunny Los Angeles, on the heels of a 1963 itinerary that included time-keeping gigs at Manhattan’s Hickory House with Evans, Martial Solal and Joe Castro. “Every day the music was going downhill,” he remembers. “I felt like I was playing a club date. I was playing brushes, barely touching the drums, and everything I did was too loud! I got pissed off, and I quit and went home. I’d been playing in New York with Paul Bley and some other people, and music was changing. It was getting exciting.” On his return, Motian happily took a $5 a night gig with Gary Peacock, Bley and John Gilmore at Take III, a Bleecker Street coffee house.

Excitement waned during the lean years that followed. Motian became involved with Boston-based pianist Lowell Davidson, whose sound he describes as “like Cecil Taylor with a Bill Evans touch,” and with the Jazz Composers Orchestra; for rent he played floor shows at Café Sabra, a West 72nd Street Israeli nightclub. In 1966, on a Monday off-night, Tony Scott called him to play at the Dom, a club on East 8th Street. “When we walked in,” Motian recalls, “this young guy was playing ‘The Song Is You’ with Henry Grimes on bass. I said, ‘Tony, who’s the pianist? Cat sounds great!’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s Keith Jarrett. I discovered him.’ Tony always said he discovered everybody. We hooked up, and toured the country with Charles Lloyd after Jack deJohnette left the band. In late ‘68, when Keith wanted to put together his own trio, he called me and Charlie Haden; he said he’d always liked my work with Bill Evans and Charlie’s work with Ornette, and thought it would be a good combination.”

Jarrett first heard Motian with Bill Evans at Boston’s Jazz Workshop. “He looked like a businessman in his suit, sitting pretty still, using brushes,” the pianist recalls. “Then I heard a tape of him with Lowell Davidson, and what struck me is that I didn’t know who the drummer was nor who it could be. The enormity of the difference between how he played with Bill and with Lowell made me think that he was not one of those players who would decide ahead of time what he liked and what he didn’t. He doesn’t seem to have a thing about categories. Paul likes good songs; he is probably the most vivid example of a drummer who likes music above his own involvement in it. He would request that we play ballads in the early trio with Charlie! We listened to Bartok together. We’d listen to whatever was good.”

With Jarrett, Motian saw an opportunity to pursue ideas that gestated during the LaFaro-Evans years. “My first record with Bley and Gary Peacock was a turning point,” he recalls. “I started playing a little more open, a little freer. I never thought so much about sound before; I realized how much sound turns me on—I’ll do something on a drumset and that sound will make me do something else, which will grow into something else. Anyway, the way Keith played seemed perfect for me. It seemed like that was the way to go—an improvement, an evolution. Let’s play!”

* * * * * *
Thirty-seven years later, “Let’s play” remains Motian’s mantra. Burned out from decades of road work, he no longer travels, allowing the world to come to him in New York City. “I don’t go on vacation,” he says. “I go to the Vanguard!”

In June, the hallowed basement hosted Motian’s  exploratory unit Trio 2000 + 1, with Chris Potter, Larry Grenadier and pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. In August he displayed his pellucid touch with tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry’s quartet, including bassist Reid Anderson and guitarist Ben Monder. The latter has worked extensively with Motian’s Electric Bebop Band, which plays the Vanguard in January. Formed in 1991 with Josh Redman and Kurt Rosenwinkel, it’s a sextet with a signature configuration (two saxophones, two electric guitars, and electric bass) whose evolution from a crisp not-quite-a-cover band – the repertoire includes compositions by Monk, Parker, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, Charles Mingus, Herbie Nichols, and Motian – to a creative ensemble is evident on a just-mixed ECM recording set for a 2006 release. Also new on ECM are meet-in-the-studio New York trio dates with Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson and with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava and pianist Stefano Bollani.

“I trust Manfred Eicher 2000 percent, especially during the mix,” Motian says of the producer who encouraged him to begin his journey as a leader. He notes that James Farber, who engineered these records as well as I’m All For You, “is really good at getting my sound.”

“On trips to Europe, I had to deal with whatever drumset I got, although I still managed to play how I play,” Motian continues. “But the sound I really love is my own drums, and by playing and recording just here in New York I’m able to use them. It’s the way they’re tuned; the intervals between each individual drum and a kind of bottom sound that I love. It makes a lot of sense to me. It’s very musical.”

“The things people ask me and say make the stuff more important than it really is to me somehow,” concludes the man who was drummer of choice for two pianists who rank high on the influence tree of modern jazz, and whose various groups inspire several generations of improvisers. “I started playing drums at 12 years old, and I just went and took the gigs. I love to play, and I love music, and I would get involved with anything I thought was musical or great—except the commercial, but that was so I could survive and eat. Now I can play bebop, which I love, and play my music, which is open and free. I can do what I want. I’ve got the whole world right there. How good can it get?”

A 2007 DownBeat Article on Phil Woods for his 80th Birthday

For Phil Woods’ 80th birthday, here’s a DownBeat cover story from 2007.

* * *
Like all his fellow 2007 NEA Jazz Masters, Phil Woods worked hard at the International Association of Jazz Educators Conference in January. On the final afternoon, after three days of luncheons, dinners, panels and receptions, Woods engaged in a spirited public conversation with Nat Hentoff, an old friend, in a packed ballroom at the New York Sheraton Hotel. Barrel-chested and moustached, wearing his trademark captain’s cap, Woods was avuncular, charming, and amusing, spinning yarns and speaking his mind with declarative, salty language. After the interview he greeted a line of admirers for a half-hour, giving each his full attention; he did the same for assorted friends and fans as he made his way to the exit.

Trailed by his wife, Jill Goodwin, Woods entered the elevator. The door closed, and he allowed his face to go slack. He took deep, measured gulps. With deliberate steps, he exited the hotel and crossed 53rd Street to the Hilton, stopping twice to catch his breath before reaching his room. Once inside, he removed his hat and coat and shirt, turned on a portable oxygen machine, sat in an armchair, inserted a tube in his nose, and breathed deeply. In four hours he was due to perform three tunes with alto saxophonist George Robert, one of his many proteges. It would be his final IAJE obligation, and it was hard to see how he was going to fulfill it.

“There’s nothing wrong with my lungs,” Woods insisted, referring to the corrosive effects of emphysema, which caught up to him in 2001, when, for good measure, his prostate flared up and he had all his teeth extracted. “It’s the blood-gas ratio that makes me tired. If I stoke up before the gig, as I’m doing, I’ll be fine. I’m not so debilitated that I can’t perform. Don’t get me wrong. If I hadn’t been a saxophone player, I could be really in trouble.”

As he has done on a gazillion recorded solos for more than a half-a-century, Woods shifted to another gear and cut to the chase. “I smoked two packs a day from 15,” he said. “And did a lot of blow, smoked a lot of grass and drank a lot of booze. I’ve had fuckin’ fun! I never thought life was a lemon to be squeezed dry. You’ve got to live it, man. I don’t eat anything organic. Give me some butter still!”

Backed by Robert’s band a few hours later before another packed ballroom at IAJE, Woods uncorked theme-and-development solos that were models of melodic logic, incorporating wicked runs and subtle quotes, projecting a soaring tone instantly recognizable as his. It was no anomaly: a series of strong 21st century albums attests to Woods’ undiminished abilities on his instrument.

The most recent one is American Songbook, a beautifully played 2002 studio date for Vertical by the Phil Woods Quintet that disappeared after the label, as Woods puts it, “went horizontal,” but came out last year on Kind of Blue. On the weekend following IAJE, Woods convened the group at the Deerhead Inn in his home town of Delaware Water Gap, Pa., in the Poconos, to play two Saturday night sets as a quasi-rehearsal for a followup songbook session. Restricted by post-9/11 jazz economics and the leader’s dependence on his oxygen machine, the band hadn’t played together for many months, and hadn’t seen the music, but at the afternoon runthrough they coalesced as though it were the 1980s, when the Phil Woods Quintet was a constant force on the international scene.

As the players examined the sheet music for “Careless,” a bouncy theme song for ’40s band singer Eddy Howard, Woods said, “I’m hearing Kirby,” referring to the John Kirby Sextet, known for the precision of its ensemble playing during Woods’ formative years. Trumpeter Brian Lynch responded, “That means a cut mute.” Nothing more was said.

On break in the studio the next day after the Quintet had wrapped “Careless” in a single pristine, soulful take, Woods rested in a recliner, and sipped mineral water. Pianist Bill Charlap’s harmonic cogitations on the next number came softly over the speakers, and bassist Steve Gilmore and drummer Bill Goodwin, Woods’ partners since 1974, when he formed the quintet, sat with Lynch at a table laden with trays of focaccia pizza, eggplant parm, and chicken cacciatore that a fan had brought from a store in New Jersey’s “Sopranos” district.

“I might have given Brian a sparse sentence on that—like ‘just put a little grease on that motherfucker,’” Woods said. “This front line knows exactly when to put the chitlins in the piece, and when to play it straight.” As an example of the latter, Woods referred to his elegant introduction for “I’ll Take Romance.” “It’s kind of a classical thing, and we played it without vibrato. If it’s funky, we’ll put some bends in it. It’s instinctive; we barely even discuss it.”

Lynch spoke up. “It may surprise you to see us work so efficiently and do tunes on one take, but on the last edition of this series we sight-read the whole thing,” he said. “This band has no fear of that. Each of us can look at a piece of music and almost instantaneously, as the sound starts happening, figure out how to play it and what it should sound like—to understand the style of a piece of paper. With Phil, you get to the artistry as quick as you can.”

“Brian and Bill could do that when they first started playing together in the quintet,” Goodwin said.

“If you’ve played with Horace Silver and Art Blakey, you get that shit,” Woods retorted, referring to Lynch’s c.v. “That’s the school, man. Any musician worth his salt from my generation could do that.”

Woods formed a working group not long after making Musique Du Bois, a combo date that reunited the famous Prestige-of-the-60s rhythm section of Jaki Byard, Richard Davis and Alan Dawson. Some consider it a classic, but he was dissatisfied. “It’s a good record, but I wanted more from the band,” Woods said. “I only see the seams.” After that date, Woods took gigs as a single, including one in Hartford “with some young kids who had their Real Books. I was tired of telling them what tune to play so they could look it up, and I carefully delineated the bridge to ‘Body and Soul,’ every harmonic nuance and melodic thing, and then I gave the downbeat for the melody. They all looked at me like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ I ran into Bill and said, ‘We’ve got to get a band.’”

So he did. On the strength of Musique Du Bois, high visibility solos on Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” and Steely Dan’s “Doctor Wu,” and featured status on Michel Legrand’s “Images,” Woods won the first of his 22 DownBeat Critics Poll awards for best alto saxophonist in 1975, and the first of 29 Readers Poll wins in 1976. In 1977 he garnered the first of three Grammys for Best Jazz Performance by a Group for Live From The Showboat, with a band comprised of Poconos musicians (guitarist Harry Leahey and pianist Mike Melillo joining Gilmore and Goodwin). By 1981, Hal Galper was the regular pianist, and by 1983 trumpeter Tom Harrell was sharing the front line.

“I needed at least one other horn to get into the compositional thing I wanted,” Woods said. “I like to utilize the bass and piano and drums as instruments, as part of the arrangement, not just read the chord symbols and chug along with the front line only playing the melody. I wanted to get some orchestral colors that I think haven’t been used yet by most small groups. We continue that to this day. My piano player has to really know what the fuck is going on. It’s really a five-piece band, not a rhythm section backup to a horn player.

“When we were really hot and working a lot, we’d do 12 sets a week, all different,” he continued. “The book is huge. That’s how you keep a quintet together for 30 years. When the rhythm section starts to sing your chorus along with you, it’s time to get a new bag, baby! I always bring in new tunes. To this day, I think we stand for something more than ‘Giant Steps’ and ‘I Got Rhythm’ and bashing and thrashing. But I also love a band that knows exactly what they’re doing every second, but it doesn’t sound forced and it isn’t stylized. I have the ability to make an arrangement right on the spot. It’s still fresh, because they’re great improvisers. These guys don’t need to look at the Real Book. They’re trained in the trenches. They know every song I know.”

[BREAK]

Among the more entertaining documents of Woods’ recent discography are encounters with Lee Konitz—already famous as the “cool” voice of the alto saxophone when Woods was establishing his white-heat tonal personality in the ’50s—from the 2003 Umbria Jazz Festival, on which Mister Cool and Mister Hot dialogue on repertoire by Konitz, Woods and Enrico Rava. They appear on Philology, the Italian label that bears Woods’ name. So does a profound two-disk navigation of Gershwin by Woods and pianist Franco D’Andrea.

“We both came into that invitation with trepidation,” Konitz recalled. “Phil is a superb player and logician, while I’m coming at it more from scratch, so there was potential for a head-on conflict. But he made me very comfortable. Back in the ’50s, Phil was one of the guys who made me realize how flexible an instrument the alto saxophone is. I wondered how in hell you can play it with the kind of pizzazz and skill and accuracy he’s always displayed. Even now, with the emphysema, he can fill up a hall without a microphone.”

Woods embraces the ethos of the soup-to-nuts musician, and he displays all his wares on This Is How I Feel About Quincy (Jazzed Media), from 2004, performing dearth arrangements of Quincy Jones charts with a nine-piece, six-horn “little big band” (he augments his quintet—trumpeter Brian Lynch, pianist Bill Charlap, bassist Steve Gilmore, drummer Bill Goodwin—with two saxes and two brass). One of the pleasures of the associated DVD, A Life In E-Flat: Portrait Of A Jazz Legend, which juxtaposes scenes of the proceedings with Woods’ account of his turbulent life and times, is the opportunity to observe him playing lead alto saxophone with almost reverential concentration and craft, as he did on the original recordings of this repertoire between 1956 and the mid ’60s. In fact, as Jones recounts in his autobiography, Q, he recruited Woods to play lead alto on Dizzy Gillespie’s legendary 1956 State Department-sponsored tour of the Middle East, the gig that launched Woods to the status of New York’s first-call session alto saxophonist, a function he fulfilled over the ensuing decade on dozens of dates by the likes of Oliver Nelson, Gary McFarland, Gil Evans, John Lewis and George Russell.

“I was a fine musician,” Woods said without false modesty. “I could read flyshit and interpret it. There wasn’t many of me. I was the first-generation jazzer that actually went through the conservatory. The music became more complicated, and it required a better level of musicianship from the section players. Writers like Gil and Quincy, John Carisi, Billy Byers, Al Cohn, Elliot Lawrence, Manny Albam and Bill Potts had to get younger players, because the older guys were not doing justice to the new bebop time feel. I was well-equipped to handle all that.

“At that point, the music, commercial or not, was always an ensemble,” he continued. “It wasn’t done by three idiots with EWIs. You had at least four or five horns, then you did four or five tunes in a three-hour session. Quincy used to change his charts on the fly, and he’d sing the new part—you had to hear it and transpose and be able to execute. So only people that knew their onions!”

What differentiates Woods from the pack, Charlap opined, is his ability to excel—a la Hank Jones, Clark Terry and Milt Hinton—“as both a master section player and a master improviser with a complete personality on the instrument.”

“He has the blues, a raw edge, but he’s also very sophisticated,” Charlap continued “There’s the tough side, but also a tender side. When Phil plays a ballad like “Goodbye, Mr. Evans,” he reminds me of a great operatic tenor, less like Carmen McRae than Pavarotti. His mind is like a computer, and it sure seems like he can execute anything that comes into it. He also has an incredible ability to reach out beyond the bandstand and grab the audience right away. He’s a star, and it’s beyond being a great player. It has to do with charisma and communication.”

Lynch honed in on Woods’ meticulousness and attention to detail. “Every aspect of what he does is at the highest level,” he said. “Some people do some things well, but don’t take care of others. Phil has taken care of everything. A lot of people’s styles are based on artfully disguising their weaknesses. Phil’s style is based on artful presentation of his strengths, not on a limitation, but abundance.”

[BREAK]

While Woods’ solos are marvels of spontaneous construction, he has a rotation of anecdotes which he accesses and repeats verbatim at a moment’s notice with the panache of a lecture circuit veteran. One such addresses a series of “field trips” to New York City with teen chum Hal Serra for lessons with Lennie Tristano during the summer preceding Woods’ senior year of high school in Springfield, Mass., his home town. Already a member of the local musicians union, he was  jamming with such luminaries-to-be as Joe Morello, Sal Salvador and Teddy Charles.

“There was a tenor player named Bob Rich, and we took down all of the Tristano-Warne Marsh-Lee Konitz stuff and played it just before I moved to New York,” Woods recalled. “After the lesson, we’d go to 52nd Street. They knew Hal, and gave us the seat by the drums, not the choicest acoustical spot, but nobody bugged us, and we had a Coca-Cola and sat all night. I remember hearing Tatum and Dizzy’s big band, and Milt Jackson’s Quintet and Howard McGhee. They closed at 4 a.m. and we strolled down to 42nd Street and jumped on our 5 a.m. bus for Springfield.

“After one lesson Tristano said, ‘Are you going to 52nd Street tonight? I’m opening for Charlie Parker, and I thought you kids would like to meet him,’” he continued. “We held back on the pasta and the records so we could buy two Coca-Colas, showed up early at Three Deuces, and got our usual spot by the drums. Tristano’s trio played the first set, and then somebody took us backstage—well, it was a papier mache curtain and a small space behind the bandstand—and there was Charlie Parker sitting on the floor with a cherry pie. He said, ‘Hi, kids! Would you like a piece of cherry pie?’ ‘Oh, Mr. Parker, cherry is my favorite flavor.’ We sat on the floor with Bird, and he pulled out his knife, cut us a big slab. We wolfed it down and talked about music. Then we went back and listened to the genius of the world play the saxophone.”

In 1949, Woods matriculated at Juilliard as a clarinet major, and joined New York’s young fraternity of card-carrying beboppers. “In Springfield we listened to records and jammed all the time, but the only Bird solo I ever copied was ‘Koko,’ although I would cop licks and analyze,” he recalled. “Sal Salvador was the first cat among us to go to New York, and he had a pad in a big old brownstone on Riverside Drive and 93rd Street. Tal Farlow and Jimmy Raney were in that building, too, and Chuck Wayne, Johnny Smith, John Collins and Billy Bauer came to jam sessions. There I finally understood what bebop was. I was still into a diatonic approach, more a swing approach to improvising. That’s when I started understanding the use of all 12 tones, those in-between notes.”

During his four years at Juilliard, then located in Morningside Heights, Woods heard Ussachevsky’s early taped experiments and musique concrete and attended John Cage lectures. He heard new work at the Composers Forum, and attended the rehearsals of Stravinsky’s “Rake’s Progress” at the Metropolitan Opera with a score in hand. For his final thesis, he analyzed Bartók’s “Music For Percussion, Celeste And Strings.”

“I’d listened to Stravinsky and Schoenberg in high school because I knew Bird liked it, but I was not equipped to play classical music when I got there,” Woods said. “My first couple of years I spent hours each night at the record library, trying to catch up to violinists who played Beethoven. By the same token, for my first year keyboard harmony placement test, I played a Bud Powell solo, and was put into the third-year class.”

In stark contrast to such highbrow influences, Woods, who had started a family and moved to Brighton Beach, in southern Brooklyn, made rent money on club jobs around the boroughs and dance band gigs, most notably with Charlie Barnet. In 1953, he joined Barnet on a tour that concluded at the Apollo Theater, coinciding with Woods’ final recital.

“Between shows I’d leave the Apollo, where I was playing for Pigmeat Markham and Honi Coles and the sword swallowers, and run over to Juilliard to play Mozart, Brahms and Stravinsky,” he recalled. “Or I’d practice them unaccompanied between shows, and then stash the clarinet in what I thought was a good place. Like a fool, I left it there overnight the day before my exams. Somebody stole it. When I told my teacher, he said, ‘You were doing fine until you started sticking that needle into your arm.’ I was scuffling, and it was not a joyous time. I said, ‘Fuck you,’ went back to the Apollo, did the six shows for the day, and never looked back.”

Soon after, Woods had a steady gig with drummer Nick “Fabulous” Stabulas, trumpeter Jon Eardley and bassist Teddy Kotick, all boppers, at the Nut Club, a strip joint on Sheridan Square. Gil Evans and other friends came by; a gallon of wine on the bandstand alleviated the boredom.

“I was going through this agonizing youthful angst,” Woods said, launching another oft-told episode. “I went to Juilliard, played with a couple of bands, and all I’m doing is playing ‘Harlem Nocturne’ for strippers. I don’t like the mouthpiece, or the reed, or the horn, or even the strap. I’m not making progress. I’ve got to get some new equipment, and break this mold I’m in.”

One night a report came in that Charlie Parker was jamming across the street at Arthur’s Tavern, still extant, at Seventh Avenue and Grove. “There was a three-octave piano and a 90-year-old guy playing it, and his father was on drums, which consisted of a couple of pie plates and a 10-inch snare,” Woods said. “Bird was playing on Larry Rivers’ baritone sax, and I could tell he was having trouble. I said, ‘Mr. Parker, perhaps you’d like to use my alto’—the one that I figure is not very good and I’ve got to get a new one and all that shit. I retrieved my horn for him, and he played ‘Long Ago and Far Away.’ Then he handed it to me and said, ‘Now you play.’ I played my imitation of a master, all the masters I had listened to and loved, and he leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Sounds real good, Phil.’ I can still hear him saying it. I levitated back across Seventh Avenue and played the shit out of ‘Harlem Nocturne.’ I stopped looking for the magic reed, the magic mouthpiece, and started to practice—stop the maudlin Irish horseshit and just get on about your career. It was a great musical lesson.”

Woods took the lesson to heart. While remaining in Barnet’s employ, he worked with bop pianist George Wallington, hit Monday nights at Birdland with arranger Neil Hefti and drummer Jim Chapin, and recorded as a sideman with all of them. Another sideman date, with Jimmy Raney for Prestige in 1954, led to three well-received Woods-led quintet sessions for the label. In 1956 Birdland owner Morris Levy paid Woods $400 a week, big money then, to play on a 10-week “Birdland All-Stars” tour as an opening act (with Al Cohn, Kenny Dorham and Conte Candoli) for a lineup including the Count Basie Orchestra, Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young and Bud Powell.

“Al Cohn and I took the seat over the wheel, right behind Bud and Prez,” Woods said. “They didn’t talk for 10 weeks. Bud stared out the window, and Prez rolled joints and shot dice with Basie in the back seat. Al and I would play two tunes, and get the rest of the night off, and we’d play gin rummy and sip from a pint of scotch; Bud always came by in hopes that we’d give him a drink. Once the Basie cats got their itinerary, they knew exactly what their existence would be like for the next ten weeks, which amazed me. ‘We’ll stay with Annie Mae here, and have some collard greens, we’ll eat this here, get a reefer here, get some good corn liquor there.’ When we got south of Baltimore, the black cats had to go to a different hotel, and I became an irate white guy. I said, ‘I’m going to go stay with you guys.’ They said, ‘Phil, it don’t go like that. We don’t want you in our hotel; it’s just going to put heat on us.’ I had to learn all about that.

“The black cats viewed the world with a certain street-wise sophistication,” he continued. “You’re playing music; this is important shit. You look right, you be right. They had to exhibit a certain level of professionalism to rise above the position that white society put them in. ‘We do shit that you cats can’t possibly touch.’ But if you’re an ofay and you can cut the mustard, man, they’re going to share with you.”

Although Woods earned respect—and gigs—from such tough-to-please black elders and peers as Gillespie, Benny Carter, Quincy Jones and Thelonious Monk, the skin game worked against his reputation as a hardcore jazz musician in the racially charged environment in which jazz operated from the late 1950s through the ’60s. It didn’t help that Woods was making a name as an heir to Charlie Parker’s throne, most visibly in a battling saxes combo with white altoist Gene Quill. To add fuel to the fire, in 1957 Woods married Chan Parker, the mother of two of Charlie Parker’s children, drawing accusations on the level of Art Pepper’s subsequent shit-sling, “Phil Woods loved Charlie Parker so much, he married his wife.”

“I could feel the buzz,” said Woods, who in A Life In E-Flat recounts a night at the Five Spot when Charles Mingus, noticing that Woods was blowing on Parker’s old King alto, glared balefully at him from the foot of the bandstand. “But most cats were pretty cool—I was with Dizzy’s band, and you didn’t mess with Dizzy’s guys. And Miles was a dear friend; he never gave me any crap. I knew I was good, but I wasn’t sure I had it. I was aware that it’s a black art form, and had the self-doubts of a white guy coming up, but Dizzy and Art Blakey said, ‘Get yourself together; you can play!’ That was the end of that shit. So I was ensconced in a level of musicianship that, ‘OK, he married Bird’s widow, but I don’t think we should mess with him.’ People who knew me knew I was not exploiting the issue, that I was genuinely in love with Chan and I was taking care of the family. Even Mingus knew that. He wouldn’t mess with me! Chan would have killed him.

“The first music I studied was Benny Carter, and I hear more of Benny than Bird in my work early on,” he continued. “I was trying to become my own man, and when I listen to the early records, I think I was already finding my voice. I sounded pretty damn good. I never tried to sound like Charlie Parker. As Lee Konitz said, it was too hard. Or as Gene Quill said, ‘Here, YOU imitate Charlie Parker.’ When I heard Bird’s recording of ‘KoKo’ at 14, that’s all she wrote—no pun intended. It was my epiphany. Within 8 bars I understood that I wanted to be a jazz musician. ‘KoKo’ was the only solo I transcribed, but I learned all the tunes, of course. If I heard a phrase I liked, I’d steal it. That’s how you learn music—or writing or painting. It’s a noble tradition.”

Unlike many Parker acolytes among his peer group, Woods did not succumb to heroin. “People tried to get me to do it, but I never related to it,” he stated. “I snorted some once in Florida because I didn’t know any connection, and wouldn’t be able to get it again. I hated it. I’m an uppers guy. When I was a kid, I’d break down benzedrine inhalers, put them in a Coca-Cola and then listen to Charlie Parker for six hours straight.”

The drinking got worse, as Woods, feeling increasingly trapped in the New York studios as the ’60s progressed, binged after sessions and spent more and more nights in the city. It’s not hard to see why: of the hundred or so sessions comprising Woods’ discography between 1960 and 1968, he led only two—the Hentoff-produced Rights Of Swing (1961) and a novelty album called Greek Cooking (1966).

“My jazz credentials were not quite what I thought they should be,” Woods said. “I was known in New York, but I wasn’t getting out of town much unless it was with somebody else’s band. By 1968, the jazz scene was dying down, and although I was busy-busy-busy, it was mostly jingles. Most of the work was television, selling Coca-Cola and Buick cars, and I wasn’t playing any music. I decided to move to Europe.”

Within six months, Woods noted with some irony, he was invited to play the Newport Jazz Festival with the European Rhythm Machine, his first-ever working group, comprising either Gordon Beck or George Gruntz on piano, Henri Texier on bass and Daniel Humair on drums. Based in the farming village of Champotteux for the next three years, he spent much time in Paris, shed his blue gig suit, grew his hair long and sprouted a moustache, experimented with electronic sax and piano, and took his music to a Woodsian version of the outer partials. In the process, he finally became an international jazz star.

“I sounded like I was let out of jail,” Woods said of his European tonal personality, which incorporated, among other things, intervallic ideas postulated earlier in the ’60s by Eric Dolphy, who Woods got to know well in the John Lewis-led Orchestra, USA. “We were a hot band. We weren’t playing what I’d call free jazz, but it wasn’t your father’s jazz either. You were expected to be an artist and to experiment in Europe. In America they want to put you in a box, but Europe didn’t play that game so much. They take their jazz very seriously, and I thrived on it.”

During these years, Woods commingled with such radical Paris-based musicians as Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton and the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. “Strangely enough, Braxton told me that listening to my records with Oliver Nelson kept him sane when he was in the military,” said Woods, whose tune ‘HUK2E’ is a put-on of Braxton’s ’70s titles. “As with Cage, I like Braxton’s philosophy more than his music. I like the idea of tearing down the walls, and I appreciate an artist who affects the world. Braxton has affected the world. Still, I find that approach rather limiting. How many ways mathematically are you going to divide things? If you’re such a great artist, why do you need a system? Why don’t you just make the melodies?”

[BREAK]

A man as many-sided as Woods may never find inner peace and harmony, but he has, in his seventies, brought the “maudlin horseshit” under control. “I had joneses, and I’ve had to deal with them,” he said bluntly. As an example, he recalled an early morning 50 years ago when, after dropping a couple of sleeping pills on top of the wine over the course of a night of “Harlem Nocturne” at the Nut Club, he raced down the platform of the West 4th Street subway station to catch the Brighton Beach train, tripped, fell on the tracks, and landed a few feet short of the front car.

“Dumb high, but you got loaded,” he said. “After coming so close to biting the bullet, I said, ‘I don’t think I should do that any more’—and I never did. Another time, the early quartet, with Mike Melillo, was working Hoppers, and I got so juiced that I had to give the money back. It was $700. The next day I said to myself, ‘You wanted to be a jazz musician all your life, you’ve got a good band, you’re working—you can’t play and you have to give the money back? You dummy!’ Music first. Not drugs first. Not booze first. So I developed a discipline—play the gig and then drink. I thought I was cool, but then I would drink too much; eventually, that didn’t work either. I never woke up with the shakes or anything. I just drank too much. I stopped. I’ve tried AA and that doesn’t work for me. I’ve been an independent motherfucker doing it my way for as long as I can remember, so I couldn’t adjust to that. Now it’s only the music and my family. And coffee. The last jones. I have a big espresso machine.”

Sober and sage in his golden years, Woods commands as loyal and intense a fan base as any musician in the business. Even so, he still seems to consider himself ever so slightly misunderstood and underappreciated.

“Sometimes I think my artist credentials are suspect,” he said. “Somebody in the band ran across a young saxophone player who mentioned my name, and the cat said, ‘Oh, the technical guy’.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “The technical guy. Yeah, right.

“And there are still people in France who think you can’t possibly play if you’re white. A black writer once rapped the Phil Woods Quartet, saying, ‘Phil Woods used to work with Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson, and took all our music, and now he doesn’t hire any black people.’ Now, you’ve got to realize that the band began when I was staying at Bill Goodwin’s house in the Poconos, which is a lily-white part of the world, and Steve Gilmore and Mike Melillo lived there. There were no black cats. I would prefer to have a salt-and-pepper band, but I’m not going to go out of my way to find one.”

These things being said, Woods has no apologies.“I’m not an innovator,” he said. “I just play songs, man. I play bebop. I’m influenced by Harold Arlen and Charlie Parker and Jerome Kern and Thelonious Monk. I don’t consider myself in those ranks creatively, though. I keep the flame going. I’m very happy to be a good player. A pro. I’ve sometimes referred to myself as ‘a soldier for jazz.’ Sometimes I’d like to change persona and make up a whole new self. But it doesn’t seem to work. It’s too late to change.”

A 2006 DownBeat Feature On Wynton Marsalis, Who Turned 50 Yesterday

I couldn’t attend Wynton Marsalis’s four 50th birthday concerts in which he presented repertoire from his 30+ years in the music business. All accounts state — no doubt accurately — that to witness them was an extraordinary experience.

I’ve admired Wynton Marsalis since 1981, when I heard him playing with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams at the Chicago Jazz Festival. The feeling was reinforced not long thereafter, an extraordinary concert at New York’s Public Theater with Alvin Batiste, Ed Blackwell, his father, Ellis Marsalis, his brother Branford, and bassist Mark Helias. A decade before, I’d conducted two extended interviews with Wynton, resulting in this article, which has been on the Internet for a while.

In 2005, DownBeat gave me an opportunity to write an extended feature on Wynton. Unfortunately, for space reasons, they had to cut my final draft — here’s the “directors’ cut,” so to speak.

* * *

That Wynton Marsalis does not think small was evident last November 14th, when Jazz at Lincoln Center threw a thousand-dollar-a-ticket fundraiser to celebrate its Artistic Director’s quarter century in the spotlight.

When the Rose Theater’s lights dimmed, television journalist Ed Bradley, the evening’s host, brought Marsalis on stage to a standing ovation from a crowd  primarily of donors from New York’s finance, real estate and media industries, intelligentsia, and eminent entertainers, all attired in black ties, cummerbunds, and designer gowns. Themselves tuxedoed, Bradley and Marsalis turned to a projection of 1979 high school yearbook photo of an Afroed, grinning Marsalis, trumpet in hand. “Pet peeve: Sucking valves,” read the salutation. “Biggest weakness: Bach Stradivarius trumpets.”

Another slide popped up. “Always saying: ‘Be cool, white boy,’” read the top inscription. The crowd laughed uneasily. Marsalis shook his head with a rueful smile, and Bradley joked about youthful indiscretion. The line below stated: “Ambition: ‘Transcend the f****g music being played today.’”

Interrupted by testimonials from various JALC dignitaries,  Marsalis spent the next 90 minutes demonstrating how assiduously he had applied himself to the latter aspiration. He played standards with flair—a burnished, elegant “Embraceable You” in duo with Hank Jones; signifying with the mute behind Diana Krall on “East Of The Sun”; stretching out with old piano partner Marcus Roberts on “Cherokee”—but he also prepared a tasting menu of ambitious compositions from the ’90s that reflect his omnivorous interests. The material was decidedly not about conceptualism, nor juxtaposing materials, nor conveying philosophical notions at the expense of human feeling. Rather, Marsalis pursued an aesthetic propagated by his intellectual mentor, Albert Murray, and actualized by painter-collagist Romare Bearden, who expressed a modernist sensibility through deploying an iconography of American vernacular archetypes.

For example, on “Many Gone,” a spiritual from At The Octoroon Balls, the Kronos Quartet conveyed Stravinsky-like harmonies with timbre and attack drawn from American fiddle music. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra displayed its mastery of Ellingtonian erotica behind two Alvin Ailey dancers on “Home: Beyond This Rage,” a vignette from Sweet Release. Gospel diva Kim Burrell raised the roof on “Oh, What A Friend We Have In Jesus/God Don’t Like Ugly,” from Blood On The Fields, Marsalis’ 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz oratorio.

With Joe Lovano standing in for Branford Marsalis and Jason Marsalis for Jeff Watts, Marsalis played “Hesitation” from his eponymous 1982 debut, engaging Lovano in extended, abstract counterpoint. Herlin Riley displayed his assimilation of New Orleans drum vocabulary on “Uptown Ruler,” a Coltrane-esque blues in 5/4 from the late-’80s Soul Gestures In Southern Blue series that marked Marsalis’ embrace of an across-the-timeline aesthetic. To conclude the evening, LCJO played “The Caboose,” the kaleidoscopic end car of Marsalis’ complex, Ellington-inspired 1998 suite, Big Train, replete with intricate ensemble dialogues, highwire brass unisons, instrumental onomatopoeia, a shouted question from Wycliffe Gordon (“somebody, somebody, somebody, please tell me; I want to know just how the big train goes”), and an inclusive choral response from the band in a hymnal subtone (“big train from the east, big train from the west”).

The lyric is emblematic of the scope of Marsalis’ ambition and accomplishment. At 44, he’s perhaps the most visible jazz artist on the planet—he’s filled clubs and concert halls since he formed his first band at 20, and became a bona fide mainstream celebrity at 23, when he won his first Classical Grammy. But he feels, with some justification, that the impact of his corpus on the sound of jazz today is less than it might be.

“I know people haven’t listened to the music, because they tell me so,” Marsalis said on the first press day of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2005-06 season. “Musicians who come into the band always say, ‘I didn’t realize it was that hard,’ or ‘I never heard it.’”

“I think his major contribution was on the political side, raising the visibility of jazz, but I don’t hear anything within his music that I see as a big contribution to the SOUND of today,” says trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, voicing a sentiment expressed off the record by a cross-generational sampling of musicians. “Now, he has influenced a ton of trumpet players, though not really me. He’s very akin to Clark Terry in his phrasing, the way he ghosts the notes. I saw Wynton on a PBS special with Kathleen Battle when I was starting out. I was very classical music oriented then, and it excited me, partly because it was a black person playing the shit out of the trumpet. So I decided to check out The Majesty of the Blues. I returned it right away. With his band, it feels like he wants to educate you. That’s great, but after a while, you feel like you’re  in a seminar or clinic.”

But what a clinic!  “To be to able to hear things the way he hears them is pretty amazing,” said pianist Eric Reed in 1997, after six years in Marsalis’ employ. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, dude, what’s going on in your head?’  To be able to commit that to paper is even more amazing, and getting a group of individuals to play that compounds the amazement. Wynton has unlimited resources, and he’s able to commit to a musical vision, which is unique in the jazz world.”

“Wynton developed in a fishbowl,” says David Berger. “He’s a big risk-taker, and any mistakes he’s made, the whole world watched, whereas most of us did that] while we were in school.”

“You haven’t heard me talk about other people’s music since I became a man,” Marsalis says, referring to the famously irascible statements of his youth, but he remains anything but shy in conveying strongly held ideas about what jazz is and is not, and hews to this pedagogy in selecting repertoire. In response, disaffected jazzfolk have attacked his motives with almost prosecutorial suspicion, disparaged his talent, critiqued his taste, and caricatured him as a musical analog to Reagan-Bush Republicanism. More often than not, the nay-saying has a tabloidish and assumptive connotation, eschewing concrete musical issues and presenting personal tastes and resentments as objective declarations of fact.  Now it’s hard to find an article about JALC in the mainstream press that does not include the C-word.

“It’s our house,” Marsalis likes to say about Jazz at Lincoln Center, showing thick skin in public. But he hears the catcalls.

The trope that the musical community is more attuned to the external trappings that frame Marsalis’ career than to the actual particulars of his production dates to his early years in the spotlight. “The unfortunate circumstance of Wynton being Wynton prevented any real acceptance of the importance of what they were doing,” said trombone playing brother Delfeayo Marsalis on the response of his mid-’80s peer group at Berklee School of Music to Wynton’s first quintet. “They were paying attention to Branford and Wynton—moreso Wynton—as a commodity.”

“I agree with that,” Wynton said. “Because so much of the response was anti, it cheated a lot of musicians out of the chance to figure out how to get to the next step in their evolution. They ended up just imitating stuff from the ’60s or ’50s, erroneously thinking that’s what we were doing. But that’s not what we do.

“My conception is holistic. Instead of being relegated to our time period, we can be in time. We had Afros in the ‘70s. Everybody used suss chords then. Now we can use suss chords and triads and New Orleans grooves, and do the 1960 jazz imitation of what the avant-garde musicians played in Germany in 1912—the chaos element. All the music that’s in one consciousness is the same. We are free to utilize all that we know, because we don’t have to appeal to a tradition, and we can create a truly modern music that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard, but is also traditional. It’s revolutionary in its implications. All of it exists at one time.”

[BREAK]

Two days before Christmas, Marsalis spoke about  ‘All Rise,’ his 90-minute, 12-movement, millennial opus for symphony orchestra, big band and vocal choir, in which he weaves together the various genres, styles and forms that he explored during the ‘90s and incorporates a global array of rhythms, melodies and scales.  “I thought about it way back in high school,” he said at his Upper West Side highrise. “I was always dreaming, and I thought, ‘What if you could put all of the music together and everybody played at one time, but they were all playing stuff that was hard for them to play?’”

An edition of Yeats’ poems lay open on the table in front of his living room couch, and a floor compartment beneath it contained a washboard, the recent Fagels translation of The Iliad, W.C. Sebold’s Austerlitz, Walter van de Leur’s biography of Billy Strayhorn, and Runaway Slave Advertisements.. On a coffee table across the room stood side-by-side sculpted chess sets with matches in progress. Occupying the southwest corner is a piano, piled with books (the Joyce Carol Yates-edited “Best American Essays of the Century,” Eileen Southern’s “History of Afro-American Artists”), scores (among them a folio of Bartok’s String Quartets), and tools of the composer’s trade, such as tuning forks and a slide rule with chords.

Marsalis wrote “All Rise” on commission from ’90s New York Philharmonic head Kurt Masur, and premiered it in 1999. “He brought the idea of using a lot of different traditions and of it being a full evening, which was a risk for him,” Delfeayo said. “He wanted to continue that strain in Gershwin and Bernstein of dealing with Afro-American music and music from the European tradition.”

During a well-received October 2005 U.K. tour of “All Rise” that received reviews with such words as “herculean” and “brilliant,” Masur told a journalist that Marsalis’ understanding of his “basic idea—to reflect how jazz began,” was “absolutely philosophical.”

“In classical music that’s a plus,” Marsalis responded to Masur’s comment. “In jazz, it’s a minus, like something is wrong with you. People who are intellectuals in this music, like John Lewis or Dizzy or Duke Ellington, their music is not dealt with for what it is. People kept crying for Ellington’s music between 1938 and 1942, that it was his best period. All of his music has such depth and complexity. From a philosophic standpoint, what he actually put together begs to be treated on a serious level.”

If he wrote a book about Ellington, what points would he emphasize?

“First would be what in his philosophy allowed him to have such an unbelievably long, sustained development,” Marsalis said. “In the ‘New Orleans Suite’ from 1970 and ‘Black And Tan Fantasy,’ which he wrote in the ’20s, he deals with the same thing—blues, call-and-response, the antiphonal relationship between brass and woodwinds, mood pieces, shuffles. What does his development teach us in terms of his sustained seriousness of his art?

“I could pull out hundreds of  technical things that he invented. How he uses the blues inside of voicings and in the progressions he wrote, how he used the sound of the blues to modulate, how he used metric modulations in ‘Harlem.’ Why he liked that real straight vocal music. How he appropriated New Orleans counterpoint. What he looked for in vernacular music to put in his style. More than the technical things, why did he want to do that? The majority of his songs were not what his audience wanted. Nobody was clamoring to hear ‘Such Sweet Thunder.’”

What drove Ellington to do it?

“He wanted to be great,” Marsalis exclaimed with a long, it-ought-to-be-obvious laugh. “That’s why he searched around to figure out what in all this experience would lead him to the deepest regions of his musicianship and help him to develop his greatness.”

It’s impossible to interpret Marsalis’ assessment of Ellington as anything but a self-descriptive aesthetic manifesto. “Wynton does not want to equal anybody,” said multireedist Victor Goines, who first met Marsalis in kindergarten. Hanging out with Marsalis when both were 14, Goines heard him play Coltrane’s “Countdown” solo and decided that jazz was what he wanted to do. He joined the Marsalis Septet in 1993, allowing Marsalis to add the clarinet to his tonal palette.

“He has to surpass,” Goines said. “The only yardstick that is an accurate length for him is Duke Ellington.”

Stanley Crouch and Murray introduced Marsalis to Ellington during the ’80s. Gunther Schuller and then David Berger schooled him on Ellington’s scores. By 1985, when Branford and Kenny Kirkland jumped ship to join Sting on the cusp of the release of Black Codes From The Underground, the groundwork was set for Marsalis to realign.

“I heard that Albert Murray told him something along the lines of, ‘You will be more able to achieve your goals and vision whenever you start to do more things with musicians who are not your peers, and will more readily focus on what you’re trying to do,’” Watts recalled.

“The first band broke up too soon,” Marsalis acknowledges. “We had some impact, but it could have been greater if we’d stayed together longer. It seemed like everybody picked up on Black Codes From The Underground and liked it. It was high-energy playing. Tain’s combination of fusion and jazz; Kenny Kirkland’s rhythmic propulsion and sophistication; my interplay with Branford on ‘Hesitation,’ which comes from the New Orleans way of playing and the vocabulary of modern jazz. We put a New Orleans Two-Way-Pocky-Way groove and extended rhythms—stuff I’d heard from James Black and my father, using six-bar phrases or 3/4 bars—in the middle of Black Codes. Modulating into different keys within a song, like on ‘Delfeayo’s Dilemma,’ where I play in one key, Branford in another, and Kenny Kirkland in another key. On ‘Twilight,’ we improvised counterpoint at the same time. We phrased our melodies with a funky New Orleans flavor, but still in modern jazz.”

“The early band will have to go down historically as one of the more important small ensembles, but the way things have developed, you almost have to pretend that period didn’t exist, because you can’t find the individuals to re-create it,” Delfeayo Marsalis said. “These guys were going for a high level of intellectual expression. The compositional structure was well-conceived and different, but also it was a great improvising band. Those guys came together, and that hardcore jazz was the right thing for the right time. It was fortunate and unfortunate that it broke up. The level of intellectual challenge that he personally has received after early 1987 is limited. But he will always figure out a way to work the situation, and he became a great sculptor of greater works of music.”

“That’s the type of commentary you always get from people who don’t know what they’re talking about,” Marsalis says. “I think that at a certain moment Delfeayo liked that particular band.”

In Marsalis’ view, the period to which his younger brother refers was a time of philosophical solidification. “First I had to put the history of jazz together in my mind,” he says. “When Albert Murray’s book, Good Morning Blues came out, I played at a party at the Village Gate with Rudy Rutherford, Freddie Green, Buck Clayton, and other older cats who’d played with Basie. I’d played with the bebop musicians, like Max Roach and Art Blakey and Philly Joe, and I knew Miles and Dizzy and Art Farmer. I’d played with Herbie and Tony and Ron Carter. I’d played with Lester Bowie. But I’d never played with musicians from that generation. That was my missing link.

“To sit with all of them and check out their way of playing, the life in their music—it’s like what I knew my whole life. I could fit in easily with the essence of what they were playing. I thought I was going to play modern music—some scales, D over G, all the chords, playing in 5/4. That wasn’t something they could play on. They started just playing riffs. I’m from New Orleans, and grew up hearing riffs. Now, they weren’t men who were going to patronize you. They were like, ‘Damn, that’s a hip-ass riff. Shit, youngster, you might be for real.’ That night I went home and said, ‘Now I understand something.’

“In 1985 Sweets Edison told me something that had a profound effect. He said, ‘Don’t wait for nobody to validate you. You’re from New Orleans. You grew up a certain way. I knew you when you was a boy. You ain’t all this shit that they’re sayin’. You’re not from the North. You’re already yourself. All you got to do is be what you are.’”

Edison’s reference was to Marsalis’ upbringing in the hothouse musical culture of ‘70s New Orleans, where, as Marsalis put it, “musicians work—the gigs don’t pay that much, but you play. I always had a job. I would come home at 1 or 2 in the morning and go to school at 7. I played as much as I could possibly play.”

From 13 to 16, Wynton and Branford earned up to $100 a night with a funk band called the Creators, playing covers of ‘70s R&B hits at outdoor dances, receptions, weddings and the like, subverting the surroundings, Branford recalls, with segues from, say, a Parliament line into a tune by Deodato. Wynton played show tunes with a community band comprised of band directors, marched on parades, played classical music with his high school peer group in the New Orleans Youth Orchestra, with adult amateurs in the New Orleans Civic Orchestra, with symphony brass quartets and quintets. Himself no churchgoer, he played the black church circuit with pianist Kermit Campbell, internalizing the ritual of the service. He played Chick Corea tunes and “‘70s things on the cusp of fusion” with an adult band at Tyler’s Beer Gardens in the French Quarter. And he practiced four or five hours a day, an hour before school, an hour at lunch, an hour before dinner, an hour after the evening’s gig.

“In jazz, the thought always was you play whatever you feel,” Marsalis said. “But to achieve something and be successful in classical music, it was a given that you had to know the history.” Branford Marsalis recalls Wynton coming home from his trumpet lesson “with this big-assed book on Austria. He said, ‘Mr. Janson said that I will never be able to play Mozart unless I understand the people and the times that created him.’” Towards that end, Wynton bought natural trumpets, and systematically taught himself the instrument’s history and literature. Afternoons from 1 to 5, he attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where his father had established the jazz curriculum. There he learned theory from “my great teacher” Bert Braud, whose theme-and-variation class subsumed Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Bach.

Perhaps most importantly, Marsalis rejected the generation gap. “They were so much hipper than us,” he laughs, referring to Ellis Marsalis and such family friends as Clark Terry, Blue Mitchell and Sweets Edison. “We had our lifestyle. But compared to Blue Mitchell? Shit! Jazz musicians don’t get dated. You’re not going to rebel against them. My Dad’s vibe was always, ‘If you really want to rebel against me, come up with something that I don’t understand. Don’t come to me with some bullshit.’ Or ‘the greatest rebellion is self-financed; you’re not really serious about rebelling.” He was serious when he told you that. He was ready for you to be gone! ‘Man, I don’t need you to tell me what to do. Leave! Get your own crib. It’s hard out here with all these kids. I don’t have time to be up babysitting you while you’re trying to live out the American Dream with no money.’”

Stories of prodigies who didn’t fulfill their promise are commonplace in the arts. But Marsalis—who was getting local press by 15 and enjoying the attention of women who found intriguing the sight of the studious, bespectacled young trumpeter doing his homework between sets while “everyone was getting drunk or high”  (“The older ones would say, ‘Are you doin’ your homework, baby?’ ‘Yeah, can you help me with this?’)—did not allow approbation from neighborhood down-homes or local gentry to turn his head.

“I wasn’t impressionable,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to fit in with anyone. My Daddy’s friends were too much older, and I wasn’t trying to fit in with guys in my neighborhood. There’s a certain allure of being in the street and ignorant, but once I determined I wasn’t going to act like them, I didn’t care what they thought. I could play ball, and I would fight. Even to this day, I don’t like to be fucked with. If you want to find out, we can go ahead and do that. I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about it, though. Even when I had to kind of integrate a school and deal with being just one black person being picked on, I always said, ‘If you call me a nigger, we’re gonna fight.’”

[BREAK]

Three years after that party with the Basieites at the Village Gate, Marsalis—with New Orleanians Reginald Veal and Herlin Riley in the bass and drum chairs—began to change his sound. “Wynton is good at adjusting direction based on the talent of the individuals he has around him,” said Marcus Roberts, who replaced Kenny Kirkland in 1985. “It became more of a blues-based, groove-oriented way of playing. He explored different colors, and his concept of blues on the trumpet evolved. He matured in his ability to merge older trumpet styles into a more modern abstract vocabulary that he himself was codifying.”

Goines adds that the effect of a stable personnel is that “Wynton started to write for the individual personalities, like Duke did, as opposed to the saxophone chair.” The primary personalities were Wess Anderson, Wycliffe Gordon, Eric Reed and Goines, and Marsalis used the first iteration of Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra—including such ex-Ellingtonians as Jimmy Hamilton, Norris Turney, Britt Woodman, Willie Cook, and Joe Temperley—as a template for incorporating their sounds as he built the repertoire for the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the next edition of LCJO.

“I always tell this story,” Marsalis said of his stylistic volte face. “A girl came to a concert we gave with the quintet at Blues Alley, and in five minutes she gave me the best critique of what we played that I ever got. She said, ‘I came to hear you all play, and I don’t like jazz, but I took my boyfriend, because I read an article on you all in Ebony and I wanted to see what it was. The first song, you all played together, and then everybody played individually. I thought that’s a great way to introduce the band, but you all played that way on every song.’ So at first it was a critique of the basic form of playing. Then she said, ‘Everybody plays for a very long time; you can follow it, but why do you all play so long?’ So the solos are too long. Then she told us that we played so loud she couldn’t hear all that was going on, and then she said, ‘I liked when you played the slow song, but then you started to play fast, and you played fast longer than you played slow.’ I followed what she said almost to the letter.”

It is interesting to compare Marsalis’ evolution to that experienced by his ‘70s outcat and funkster targets, who shaped their own predispositions in an age when the idiomatic tradition was in the air. His focus on self-determination through institution-building, educational outreach, and constructing an idiosyncratic body of work from a panoply of styles, is not so different from the tenets propounded in ‘60s Chicago by the AACM, comprised of musicians who are generational contemporaries of his father and such other independent-minded ‘70s New Orleans modernist improviser-educators as Alvin Batiste and Kidd Jordan.

“The word ‘conserve’ means to keep what’s good of what we have, like conserving trees,” says Berger. “But we also want to grow new trees. In some ways Duke Ellington was conservative, but he was also avant-garde. That’s what Wynton is. He throws down the gauntlet and says you’ve got to master the past before you can move into the future with any kind of success. How can you say that ‘Blood on the Fields’ is a retro piece? Yes, he uses a lot of Ellington’s conventions, but there’s so much modern stuff that was never heard before, and concepts from all over.”

“I think Wynton decided that whatever was going on in jazz was wrong, and he was going to go back and do it the way it had been done 55 or 60 years ago,” said Branford Marsalis. “I don’t necessarily disagree. Today’s musicians are far more versatile in the things they can do but have light, small, compact sounds and massive limitations in terms of swing. The emphasis of the songs becomes harmony and odd-meter forms. It’s more of a race toward scholarship. Wynton’s band was the absolute antithesis of that. He decided not to use monitors on the stage, not to have a bunch of musicians playing with their bells attached to the microphones or using pickups, which changes the nature of how a band sounds. Neither the song forms nor the meters were complex, but based on either the 6/8 Spanish tinge or straight 4/4 swing. It sounds simple until you get your ass on the stage and try to do it.

“On the standard jazz song, everyone is in the same key when the song starts and plays over the same set of themes. Wynton would have a guy solo on a blues in one key, then have an interlude which leads the next player to solo in a completely different key. It forces the musicians out of their comfort zone. It’s what Duke Ellington used to do. It’s what Jelly Roll Morton used to do. There was an easier and more difficult way of playing back then, and we gave it up for a more difficult, easier way of playing now.”

“You have to be as complete as possible in your knowledge of the history of the music,” says Ali Jackson, 29, who assumed the LCJO drum chair in fall 2005. “To be able to fit the styles of Jelly Roll Morton or Wayne Shorter. To play like Big Sid Catlett or Baby Dodds, or then like Buddy Rich, or Elvin Jones, or Tony Williams, but do it by playing what you know. Wynton is interested in musicians have a vested interest in all of the music. I believe in a style of jazz that runs all the way up to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and we’re similar conceptually.  His perspective is to encompass it all and find the divine paradox, that strain that runs through everything, that ties it all together.”

Jackson adds that because Marsalis writes what he hears, irrespective of instrumental limitation, that perspective also involves a high degree of difficulty.

“The demands of his book on the clarinet are extraordinary,” says Victor Goines. “But Wynton has a certain vision to be able to anticipate someone’s learning curve. I used to make a point of saying, ‘Look, my learning curve has not peaked yet. Whatever you want to write, you should write it. Don’t pigeonhole me.’”

“I like for the music to be hard,” Marsalis said. “As a trumpet player, why do I want to play the Brandenberg Concerto? Because it’s hard. I want to play the pieces that challenge me the most. I don’t just mean velocity. Some music is emotionally complex, too. But a degree of complexity, balanced with a certain spiritual substance and emotional weight, ensures that your music will remain.”

[BREAK]

My first conversation with Marsalis occurred two days after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the turf he had traveled as a youngster. His parents and brother Mbaya were safe in Baton Rouge, and their house suffered minor damage in comparison to some. Still, friends of Marsalis reported that the trumpeter, whose life and career reflect a fundamental, inexorable optimism, was shaken, suffused with the sense that everything could end.

“It’s not going to end,” Marsalis countered the day after New Year’s, concluding our final conversation. “We’re still going to be out here.” He did not elaborate. Two weeks later, the Cultural Committee of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which Marsalis co-chairs, requested $600 million in Federal funds to build a jazz museum, expand the city’s arts distract, and implement a jobs program for artists. A week after that, President Bush reneged on his earlier promise to provide sufficient funds to rebuild the Crescent City.

Perhaps such concerns diminished whatever pleasure Marsalis took in celebrating his astonishing quarter century. “It doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “It seems like a short time, in any case. I have a good friend who says, ‘I forgive everybody; we’re only out here for 80 years.’”

It’s a good bet that Marsalis will sustain his pace for much of that timeframe. In January, he completed the score for Ken Burns’ forthcoming opus on World War Two, and in April he’ll film a piece on Congo Square that will include African percussionist Yakob Addy. Also forthcoming is a small group piece with singing called “From The Plantation To the Penitentiary,” while on the grand scale he’s preparing an opera on the Civil War and, at Masur’s instigation, a mass.

It might take Marsalis 180 years to absolve his antagonists, though. “They call me conservative and all this bullshit, because I’m not of the Rock ethos,” he said heatedly. “Nothing in my experience as a musician would make me look up to that. Jazz was revealed to me from too young an age. In this era we have 50 Cent and these rappers playing over a machine, playing a beat, talking about ‘nigger,’ and ‘I don’t care what my parents like,’ and the use of all these equations to construct something philosophically. But I’m not using a philosophical equation. I’m using what I know, which is music.”