Buddy DeFranco:

Named for a pope, a king and the supreme artist-scientist of the Renaissance, the clarinetist Boniface Ferdinand Leonardo “Buddy” DeFranco came to maturity during the golden age of jazz.  Now 76, he’s the supreme jazz virtuoso of his instrument, an innovator who defies category — and time.

“I had about six careers during the last 60 years,” the 20-time Downbeat Poll winner reflects.  “Periodically I’ll envelop a new concept on the clarinet, stay with that for a while, almost discarding what I was doing before, though not quite.  I gradually wound up with a sensible mixture combining whatever new thing I was doing with my earlier way of playing; that is, the idea of swing and a fundamental approach, especially in stating a melody.”  Nurtured on the driving arpeggiations of Benny Goodman and the sophisticated line of Artie Shaw, DeFranco viewed them through a lens cut and polished by Charlie Parker’s liquid phrasing and harmonic extensions, forging a unique sound and approach.  Known as the first bebop clarinet player, he’s no ideologue about vocabulary.  “I had a wide range of experience in all facets of music,” DeFranco remarks, “and my playing reflects the gamut.  We brain-pick as many people as we can, and make our own voice from what we’ve heard and studied.”

DeFranco draws on resources garnered through six decades on the road in inspired dialogue with piano wizard Dave McKenna and guitarist Joe Cohn on “Do Nothing Til You Hear From Us” (Concord), a follow-up to the Grammy-nominated 1997 DeFranco-McKenna duo “You Must Believe in Swing.”  On both recordings he takes chances, playing crisply executed lines with impeccable intonation, unfettered imagination and a fiery edge, never losing the arc of conversation.  In short, he conjures the kind of “unedited” improvisations that have been his goal from the very beginning.

Raised in south Philadelphia, DeFranco began playing clarinet at 8, after several years of ear instruction on mandolin from his father, a blind man who played guitar and earned his living as a piano tuner.  “Then I wanted to play saxophone,” he continues.  “My Dad knew many good musicians, who suggested I start clarinet first, and he took the advice and bought me one for $25, which was a lot of money — our family was very poor.  I attended Mastbaum School of Music, a vocational school with a great music course, where I got my basic training and developed my clarinet skills.  I once heard Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti play at a music store in my neighborhood, and I was overwhelmed by records like Django Reinhardt’s ‘Nuages’ and Art Tatum’s ‘Elegie’ and ‘Yesterdays.’  My Dad and uncle loved the big bands, and they bought every record they could by Jimmie Lunceford, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Chick Webb, and took us to hear them.  That’s how I started getting interested in the idea of jazz.

“I decided to play jazz clarinet after listening to Johnny Mince with Tommy Dorsey.  My brother, Leonard, had a good ear, and he and a friend took big band arrangements from the records, like Tommy Dorsey’s ‘Marie’ and ‘Don’t Be That Way,’ and Artie Shaw’s ‘Begin the Beguine.’  When I was 13 we organized a big swing band, which played in a South Philadelphia ballroom every Sunday night.  We also had a kiddie band on a Sunday morning children’s hour.  South Philadelphia had an Italian section, a Jewish section and a Black section — we were all friends.  It was very common for kids of all the races to go to somebody’s basement and jam.  There were two jam clubs, one owned by Billy Kretchmer, a terrific jazz clarinet player, and the Downbeat, owned by Nat Segal.  As teenagers, we’d sneak into either club and hear Charlie Christian and Art Tatum and Coleman Hawkins, or guys from Benny Goodman’s band coming from the Earle Theater to sit in.  Once in a while on slow nights Billy Kretchmer allowed us to play with the rhythm section he had there.

“Hearing Benny Goodman capped the whole idea of jazz playing — the feeling, the swing idea on clarinet, plus his great technique.  Then I heard Artie Shaw, who was way ahead of his time harmonically, and had the technique and ability to express what he wanted without editing, which is what I expect from someone who handles the clarinet.  His fluency was like a fine violinist; he could navigate all the chord progressions and make them flow.  I liked Buster Bailey, who could have been a great symphony clarinetist, except that he was black, so he couldn’t get a break.  I listened to him because of the purity of his tone and his execution, whereas many other noted clarinetists then were slightly too primitive in their approach to suit me.  I had the so-called “legitimate” background, which is the only way you can play the clarinet correctly.  There’s still a prevalent notion that the player who is too proficient doesn’t play good jazz.  I disagree with that.”

After graduating from Mastbaum in 1939, DeFranco embarked on a field work apprenticeship in elite dance bands, playing challenging music day-in and day-out for a decade.  While touring with Charlie Barnet’s crackerjack unit around 1943, he heard Charlie Parker’s seminal recordings with Jay McShann.  Only 20 years old, he’d already spent four years with trumpeter Johnny “Scat” Davis (“Hooray For Hollywood”) and Gene Krupa.  With Krupa he met Roy Eldridge, then Krupa’s featured soloist, who DeFranco regards as “at the time probably head and shoulders over any other trumpet player.  He was a musician’s musician, a creative player with feeling and emotion.  He was a good influence, and I gleaned a lot from him.

“I have enough ego to consider that I was gravitating harmonically towards a different way of playing at the same time Dizzy Gillespie was.  I was led by Artie Shaw, while Dizzy was moving to a more modern approach — it wasn’t bebop — out of the Roy Eldridge style, as you can tell from his records then.  It wasn’t until Bird came along that both Dizzy and I said, ‘He wrote the new study book; this is it.’  No horn player at that time used as many alternate chords or that kind of articulation.  I decided to play the clarinet like Bird articulated on the sax.  It wasn’t so easy to imitate Artie Shaw, and even more difficult to copy Bird, because the clarinet is such a hard instrument to play.  Bird was the first almost completely unedited modern jazz player; he had a great embrochure and perfect fingers.  I align Art Tatum with Bird in that regard.  People used to think that he was contrived, but he wasn’t.  If you hear all his different versions of the same song, you realize that Art Tatum had the most flexibility and was more unedited than anyone of his time.  He and Charlie Parker were the best, on a genius level.  From that point on, we talk about all the other guys who are really good.”

DeFranco’s solo on “Opus One” during the first of three tumultuous stints with Tommy Dorsey led to a Downbeat award in 1945.  “Dorsey was a strict disciplinarian, but one of the greatest musicians ever, possibly the best trombonist I’ve heard,” DeFranco says.  “He was unequaled at playing even a simple melody and making it meaningful, which almost every musician will tell you is the most difficult thing to do.  Technique is something else.  Practice enough and you’ll get a technique.  I learned the feeling of playing a melody and playing long phrases from Tommy Dorsey.”

In 1947 he played with Boyd Raeburn’s adventurous orchestra.  “It was one of the first outside bands I ever heard,” DeFranco recalls.  “It was intellectually unbelievable, like going to a conservatory.  You could play exactly the way you wanted and the writers could write any way they wanted.  We played off-the-wall, space charts by George Handy and Johnny Richards, and a couple by Bob Graettinger; a very difficult, technically challenging library which took great skill to play.  We could empty a room in two minutes.  Announcers used to say, ‘From the Planet Mars, here’s Boyd Raeburn.’”

DeFranco settled in New York in 1948, and joined the 52nd Street mix.  “I played in sessions at the Royal Roost and the Clique Club before it was Birdland.  Once I worked at the Clique with the George Shearing Trio, where Sarah Vaughan was the headliner, opposite the Oscar Pettiford All-Stars, which included Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Kai Winding, J.J. Johnson, Dexter Gordon, Lucky Thompson, Max Roach and Bud Powell.  George Shearing got me a New York union card and a police card, which you needed in those days.  So I got a chance to hear and work with these guys in the very beginning.  In fact, I had Bud Powell and Max Roach in my group for a while.  When Bud was straight and really playing well, nobody could touch him.  It was dazzling.  But when he was strung out or something, he’d get evil.  You’d suffer for a whole set.  Sometimes he’d play the bridge twice so he could throw you off.  You’d shift with Bud’s emotions.

“By then I was fairly well-known.  I’d started winning polls, and was picked to do Metronome All-Star dates, which is when I really got to know Bird, and we became friends.  We hung out together quite a bit.  He was very gregarious and always gracious; he’d talk about philosophies and attitudes toward life.  He seemed to read people quite well, and he was knowledgeable about a lot of different things.  I remember once he told me how many muscles in your face it takes to smile, how many it takes to frown — things out of the blue.  Charlie Parker invented the modern concept of playing; I was there when it happened.  There’s something of his influence in all jazz music today, which cannot be said of any other jazz player.  All the guys that got well-known afterward branched off from Bird, but we all live in Bird’s shadow.”

DeFranco’s career was taking off.  After several modernist sides with big band and sextet for Capitol in 1949, he joined the Count Basie Octet in 1950-51.  “Working with them was an education in the idea of swing,” DeFranco emphasizes.  “I’d never realized how much Bill Basie influenced the sound of the band from the piano.  I became more relaxed, more cognizant of a time feeling.”  DeFranco had met Norman Granz by this time, and went out periodically on Jazz at the Philharmonic.  In 1951, a nadir for big bands, he formed his own, following the path of idols Goodman and Shaw — it dissolved in under a year.  During the rest of the ’50s he recorded prolifically for Granz, including numerous dates with Oscar Peterson and documents of a touring quartet between 1952 and 1955 comprising pianists Kenny Drew and Sonny Clark, bassists Gene Wright, and drummers Art Blakey and Bobby White.

“I learned more about the idea of rhythm and swing with Art Blakey than any other drummer in my career,” DeFranco states.  “Sometimes when I was really tired and whipped (we were on the road a lot; the band was pretty hot at that time), I’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t think I can play tonight.’  And Art would say, ‘I’ll make you play.’  He meant that.  He had so much energy and steam and feeling, that we would burn, as the saying goes.  Sometimes we’d get static from the ‘civilians’ about having a mixed group; I was the only white guy with three black guys.  Other than that, we had a great time together; we had a terrific relationship.

“The only thing I can say about Black and White is that during those days the black bands had a swing feeling that gripped you, you felt it in your hips, in the depth of your emotions.  The white bands were maybe a little more polished; they’d try to simulate that swing, but never really got it.  Not to belittle the white bands; it’s a simple fact of life.  Tommy Dorsey was aware of that, and once in a while he’d say, ‘We don’t have a swing band; if you want one, go listen to Count Basie and absorb what he does — that’s a swing band.’  I had an affinity with the black bands, because within the depth of my organism, I knew that was the beat.  That’s the feeling I liked, and that’s the feeling I’ve always tried to impart when I play.”

DeFranco’s interaction with Parker, Basie and Blakey helped him come into his mature sound, a process enhanced by rigorous self-examination.  “I’m from humble circumstances,” DeFranco says, “I was riddled with insecurities; my only security was my playing.  When that was satisfactory, I felt more secure.  When it came time for me to get on stage and perform and emcee on the microphone, it was painful.  I learned of Dr. Wilhelm Reich through Jack Eagle, a trumpet player, and decided that when I was in New York City for any length of time, I would look up a Reichian therapist, which I did.  Frankly, both therapies — Reich and Blakey — brought out in me something that was lacking in my playing and demeanor.”

As DeFranco blossomed, the bebop business withered, and he moved to California in search of work.  He led a succession of cream-of-the-crop combos and worked in studio orchestras led by Nelson Riddle.  In 1956, Norman Granz offered DeFranco the ultimate improvitorial challenge, pairing him with Art Tatum for a recording.  “Tatum made me feel at ease, even though it was very difficult to work with him because he had a chord progression every two beats,” DeFranco laughs.  “Keys didn’t matter to him.  He played through everything; even when you soloed, you accompanied Art Tatum.  It was my task to try to keep up with him, and occasionally, when I did, I was gratified.  It was fun to him.  Even the highly technical things were kind of a game, and he’d show off.  Now, showing off is part of playing jazz.  If you play all the jazz in the world in your room and nobody hears it, what does it mean?  On the stage you show what you can do.  A lot of people scoff at that.  They said, ‘Well, Art Tatum is just trying to show everybody his technique.’  Well, of course he was!  It was his inner voice.”

Accessing his own inner voice is the quest that’s sustained DeFranco through good times and bad.  A quixotic project with Polytones, a quartet with accordionist Tommy Gumina that “focused on polychordal music which we learned from the old masters — Prokofiev, Shostakovich and the movie writers, like David Raksin,” was a creative peak and a financial disaster.  DeFranco led the Glenn Miller Orchestra from 1966 to 1974, and even stopped playing by around 1970.  He resumed his jazz career in 1975, and he’s maintained a dual track of working steadily with small units and presenting numerous clinics, many in conjunction with Yamaha, his clarinet-maker.  He recently published “Hand In Hand With Hanon,” an acclaimed study book for woodwind players.

Our third conversation finds DeFranco off the road from a 10-day Swedish tour with clarinetist Putte Wickman, followed by four days at Hilton Head, S.C. with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, a frequent partner of the last two decades.  “Over the years people have accused me (and it’s true) that I take my music — or myself — too seriously,” DeFranco confesses.  “With your own group, there’s a certain tension because everyone has a critical eye on what you’re doing.  Terry is funny and clever, and the attitude — not the music — is lighter.  The sound alone brings up the Benny Goodman-Lionel Hampton connotation, and we manage to play pretty much what we want when we solo.

“All the players who contributed to the idea of jazz are analogous to the artists of the past few centuries.  The same kind of passion for what they were doing, the same desire to do something different, however minimal, so that you become an original, so that people will say, when they hear your record, ‘That’s who it is.’  That’s Bird.  That’s Art Tatum.  That’s Oscar Peterson.  That’s Buddy.”

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DEFRANCO:  Then the thing is this.  I’ll just briefly tell you that my recent history in the past couple of years has been one of the most interesting of my careers…

TP:    you said you had about six of them.

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  I’m starting another one.

TP:    You’ll have to tell me exactly which six they are.

DEFRANCO:  Oh, I can’t really tell.  They go up and down.  I guess that’s nothing unusual with people in the music business.  Phil Woods gets discovered every three years.

TP:    Oh, when you say you’ve had six careers, you mean you keep getting rediscovered.

DEFRANCO:  Yeah, rediscovered.  Fall down and go broke, and sometimes…and then back again.  That’s happened quite a bit.

[PAUSE]

DEFRANCO:  I’ve done a lot of music festivals and also music clinics, mostly for Yamaha.  They make a great clarinet.  I’ve played it for about 25 years. What I find appealing about the Yamaha is it suits my needs almost to a T, as they say.  It’s a very classical instrument.  It has a nice tone quality… Of course you have to produce that.  But built in is a good tone quality, and a very exact scale, even scale.  It also affords a flexibility that I need to play jazz.

TP:    What are the dynamics of the instrument that do this?  You went into some description of this in our interview.

DEFRANCO:  I did.  Yes, not too many clarinets are flexible enough to where you could play as close to what they used to call “legitimate”…I hate to use the term, but “legitimate,” symphonic music.  Then you use the same instrument to feel the freedom of playing jazz, the flexibility.  Yamaha does that for me.

Also, toward the mid-’50s, when Rock-and-Roll got very big and jazz was really pushed out of the picture, almost totally… The only guys who were really popular were Miles Davis, the top guys, Stan Getz… They were still making money and doing very well.  They were really the stars of the jazz world.  Everybody else kind of fell apart.  And I was bemoaning my fate to Stan Kenton one time, and Stan Kenton said, “Instead of crying, let’s get together.  I’ve started a program with Dr. Gene Hall of North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, Texas.”  He said, “Gene Hall is the first guy to let the students obtain credits for jazz in a college or university.  He said, “We’re doing clinics, and we’re doing them all over the country; in fact, all over the world.  We get the young people.”  He said that the tie-in was the band directors who remember the big bands and jazz, who have a stage band (so-called; it’s really a swing band).  He said that we go in and we impart as much knowledge as we can, and keep the idea of swing bands and jazz alive, and the band directors respond to this because they remember when.  He said, “That way we get to the youngsters, because we cannot get to the youngsters through television or radio now” [at that time he was speaking] or recording.”  So there were very few jazz recordings being made.

So he said, “Try that,” and I did.  It was the best advice I think I’d had in many years, because I found out that the youngsters in the bands respond to what you’re doing, but the band directors are the ones who kept jazz alive, underground, all these years.  Not too many people acknowledge that fact.  It’s guys like Gene Hall and Matt Benton and Stan Kenton, the band directors through all the high schools and universities and colleges who have kept jazz going, even though in the public eye it was finished.  So that’s a very important thing, and I am still doing those clinics.

TP:    This was still in the ’50s, when you started?

DEFRANCO:  Around ’54, somewhere…

TP:    So this dovetails with when you moved to California.

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  I actually moved to California because I thought maybe with some friends I could get some work there.  Which I did.  I got the studio work from Nelson Riddle.

TP:    Oh, just playing in the section.

DEFRANCO:  Just clarinet, but playing behind, you know, TV shows.  I did all the segments of “Route 66″ and I did “Profiles In Courage” and all those things where Nelson Riddle wrote the scores…

TP:    Oh, were on the Sinatra sessions.

DEFRANCO:  “Oceans 11.”  And I was on two Sinatra sessions.

TP:    Do you remember which ones?

DEFRANCO:  I don’t remember. [LAUGHS] Also, last September Yamaha and I got together, and we did the first Buddy De Franco-Yamaha Jazz Festival in Panama City, Florida.

TP:    Is that on your web-site?

DEFRANCO:  I think so.

TP:    Did you have any input into the specifics of making this clarinet?

DEFRANCO:  No.  None whatever.

TP:    Do a lot of other jazz clarinetists use it?

DEFRANCO:  They have.  I don’t know if they still do.  I know Eddie Daniels used it for a time, but he’s now using another clarinet that he says functions the same way — Blanc(?), I believe.  But a lot of professional clarinet players have used it.

TP:    Do you keep up with the current state of the clarinet?

DEFRANCO:  I have to.  I listen to them all.

TP:    Who are some of the people you like these days?

DEFRANCO:  I like Eddie Daniels.  I like Ronnie Eldridge.  He’s a periodontist, and a fine clarinet player.  I like Putte Wickman.  I’ll be playing with Putte in Sweden.  We leave tomorrow.  We’ll do 11 concerts and a CD in Sweden.  Putte Wickman is one of the best.

TP:    Ken Peplowski?

DEFRANCO:  He’s a good player.

TP:    Alvin Batiste?

DEFRANCO:  Well… I’ll pass.

TP:    I was just wondering about your current taste.

DEFRANCO:  When I talk about clarinet players, I must include the fact that they are more than just competent players, because if you go along with the competent players, you’ve got a big list.

TP:    Did you like John Carter, by the way?

DEFRANCO:  No, I did not.  See, as a clarinetist, I’m pretty critical.  There are two aspects of playing the clarinet, as in all jazz; two diametrically opposed fields and schools of thought in jazz.  On the one hand, people say, “Don’t study too much because it will ruin your jazz playing.”  In fact, years ago it was an old story.  The band director said, “Can you read music?” and he said, “not enough to hurt my playing.”

TP:    Most of the great players I’ve talked to wouldn’t think that was much of a notion, I think.

DEFRANCO:  Well, that’s still prevalent in jazz where the player who is too proficient doesn’t play good jazz.  And I disagree with that.  I’ll give you a good example in the piano world.  One of my favorites of all time, of course, has been Oscar Peterson, mainly because of what he plays and how he plays it, the dexterity he has.  He has such a great technique.  So I’ve kind of aligned myself with him because I had a technique.  I love his playing, as opposed to, say, Thelonious Monk, who had no technique… I’ll quote Oscar Levant.  “He played piano with arthritic abandon.”  That’s not to say that he doesn’t play jazz.  He was a force in jazz.

TP:    Did you like Monk?

DEFRANCO:  I liked what he was getting at and I liked his songs.  I couldn’t play with him and I did not like his playing, because it lacked the proficiency that I am used to hearing.  Then there’s for instance the later Miles Davis as opposed to Freddie Hubbard.  My bet would go with Freddie Hubbard, see.  Because he’s a trumpet player and a jazz player and a more than competent execution in his playing.

But there are two schools.  Years ago in clarinet, everybody said Benny Goodman was the greatest, Artie Shaw was the greatest; and the other school of thought, like in the Thelonious Monk camp, would be Pee Wee Russell.  There are people who swear by him.  They think he’s the greatest clarinet player who ever lived.  And I pass on that.

TP:    Well, you made the comment in our interview that you liked… I asked you if you’d listened to Jimmie Noone and Johnny Dodds and those guys, and you said no, because of your technique, but you loved Buster Bailey.

DEFRANCO:  Oh yeah, he had an excellent technique.  He was a fine clarinetist.

TP:    I’d like you to talk more about Charlie Parker.  We can relate this to the technique question.  You said that he was the first unedited player, that his technique enabled him to be an unedited player.

DEFRANCO:  I’ll qualify that.  Modern jazz player.  Because Art Tatum was that.  People used to think that he was contrived, but he wasn’t.  If you hear all his recordings and you hear different versions of the same song, you realize that Art Tatum had the most flexibility and was more unedited than anyone of his time.  So I align he with Bird.

TP:    Tell me what you remember about the session you did with Art Tatum.  I know you said you were sick and that you weren’t at your best.

DEFRANCO:  Right.  Norman Granz wanted to know if I wanted to cancel, and I did not cancel because I knew that would be the only time I would ever get to play with Art Tatum.  I just had to do it.  I’m not sorry I did, because a lot of it came out good.  But if I were feeling better and if it were later in my career I could have played substantially better.

TP:    You’d feel more equipped to have played with Tatum, say, 20 years later just because of general knowledge and…

DEFRANCO:  Right.  I’ll give you a good example of my thinking.  Somebody said to me, “Who’s the best?”  Well, that’s silly because, in a way… I’ll quote Eddie Daniels.  If you go into an art gallery and you see Van Gogh, and then you stop and you see Gauguin, and then you’ll see Da Vinci, who is going to say who is the best?  It depends on what you derive from that particular thing.  They’re all good.  They’re all genius.  So if somebody said to me, “Who is the best?” it’s hard to say.

However, when you talk about what I consider the best, on a genius level, I’d have to say Art Tatum and Charlie Parker.  Immediately.  That’s it.  From that point on, then we talk about all the other guys who are really good.

TP:    Do you remember anything about Tatum’s demeanor during that session or the process of putting it together?

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  He made me feel at ease, even though it was very difficult to work with him because he had a chord progression every two beats.  It was very difficult, very hard.  He sometimes would suggest a strange key to play the tune in.  Keys didn’t matter to him.  He played through everything, so that when you played with Art Tatum it was his ballgame.  You were there almost accompanying him, even when you were playing your solos.  But I expected that, and I didn’t care because I just admired him so much.  It was my task to try to keep up with him, and occasionally, when I did, I was very gratified with that.

He was terrific.  It was fun to him.  His attitude was great.  Even on the highly technical things, it was kind of a game to him, and he’d show off.  But there again, that’s part of playing jazz — showing off.  If you play all the jazz in the world in your room and nobody hears it, what does it mean?  What you do on a stage is show off.  You show what you can do.  That’s part of playing jazz.  And a lot of people scoff at it.  They say, “Oh, well, Art Tatum is just trying to show everybody his technique.”  Well, of course he is!  Just like Oscar Peterson.

TP:    Well, I guess he just internalized it.  He didn’t get all that technique separate from his inner voice.  That was his inner voice.

DEFRANCO:  That’s right.  It was his inner voice, that’s for sure.

TP:    You said that you first heard “Hootie Blues.”  Can you put a date on it?  You said 1941, so you must have been with Johnny “Scat” Davis?

DEFRANCO:  Or Charlie Barnet’s band.

TP:    The encyclopedias say that you joined Charlie Barnet in ’43.

DEFRANCO:  That can’t be.

TP:    That’s not true?

DEFRANCO:  I don’t think so.  They might be right because my recall isn’t… But in ’43, it seems to me, I was in Tommy Dorsey’s band.

TP:    I’ll read you what the 1960 Encyclopedia of Jazz says.  “Scat Davis in late ’39.  Gene Krupa ’41-’42.  Ted Fiorito, who is a new one on me, in ’42.  Charlie Barnet ’43 and ’44.  Tommy Dorsey ’44 and ’46.  You settled in California.  Boyd Raeburn.  Return to Dorsey ’47-’48.  Then you go to New York, small combos in New York and Chicago and I guess traveling.  Count Basie Septet in ’50.  Big band in ’51. Then you start with the quartet from ’52 to ’55 or so.

DEFRANCO:  That’s pretty close to it, except that in the early years… I have a feeling that in the latter part of ’41 and part of ’42 I was with Barnet, and then in ’43 I was with Tommy Dorsey.  It seems to me that I was with Tommy Dorsey from ’43 to ’48 three times.

TP:    Three times in that period.  I’m not interested in splitting all the hairs.  But in terms of the Charlie Parker thing, when you say you heard Charlie Parker’s “Hootie Blues” when you were with Charlie Barnet, what impact did that make on you?  Did it sound like anything you had heard before?

DEFRANCO:  No.

TP:    Why?

DEFRANCO:  Well, by virtue of the fact that the articulation of what he was doing was completely different, and the chord progressions that he used, even at the very beginning…the substitute chords were different than most people were using, with the exception of Art Tatum.  But no horn player used at that time as many alternate chords, and no horn player used that kind of articulation.  It had never been done before.  So in my humble opinion, Bird wrote the book.

TP:    So you were well-schooled enough to hear what Charlie Parker was doing because of the high quality of education you’d had at Mastbaum.

DEFRANCO:  Yes, I would say that.  Not only that, I was playing… I have enough ego to consider that I was gravitating towards more modern playing while I was with Charlie Barnet at the same time that Dizzy was.  Dizzy grew out of the Roy Eldridge style.  But when you listen to some of his stuff during that time, he was gravitating toward a more modern approach to playing.  It was not Bebop.  And my case was the same way.  Harmonically I was gravitating towards something else, in a way.  But it wasn’t until Bird came along that both of us said, “He wrote the book; this is it; this is the new study book.”

TP:    I guess Dizzy got that close-up proximity to Charlie Parker with Earl Hines…

DEFRANCO:  That’s right.  He got hold of Bird, listened to that, and it was immediate.

TP:    Dizzy had some other qualities, particularly his assimilation of rhythm and being able to codify Latin rhythms into…

DEFRANCO:  Oh yes.  He was the first I can remember playing modern jazz like that…

TP:    But if Dizzy came out of Roy Eldridge doing that, was your assimilation of Benny Goodman leading you in that direction?

DEFRANCO:  It was Artie Shaw leading me.

TP:    Talk more about Artie Shaw, who obviously had a profound influence on you.

DEFRANCO:  Well, I would say the way he executed the clarinet, and harmonically he was way ahead of his time.  His approach to playing, the fluency that he had was like a fine violinist.  That impressed me.  If you listen to his early records with his bands, when he played, he played more modern than the whole band, than anyone in the band.  Also, when he started playing, he changed the color of the band just by playing, so that the concept was much more advanced.  Then when he stopped playing, the band would seem to go back to its old symmetrical and angular way of playing.  So I always admired Artie, the way he made all those chord progressions that he did and made it flow.

TP:    Then I guess you could also say that Coleman Hawkins was implying the modern style as well.

DEFRANCO:  yes, absolutely.  No question about that.

TP:    Were you influenced by saxophonists as well as clarinets?  You did say that your concept of clarinet was playing the clarinet but thinking saxophone.

DEFRANCO:  Thinking saxophone.  But no, my major influences were more than likely piano players.

TP:    Primarily Tatum or other piano players?

DEFRANCO:  All of them.  Teddy Wilson and Dodo Marmarosa.

TP:    We didn’t discuss Dodo Marmarosa in the previous interview, and I know you were very close to him.

DEFRANCO:  Yes, We lived together in California for about a year, and we played in about five different bands together.  He was a great influence in my playing.

TP:    You played together with Dorsey.

DEFRANCO:  Well, we played in Johnny Scat Davis’ band together, Gene Krupa’s band, Charlie Barnet’s band, Ted Fiorito’s band, and then Tommy Dorsey.

TP:    So you really hung together.

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  He was also in the same kind of state of flux that I was, playing.  We wanted a more modern approach to playing, and he played his piano in a more advanced modern way, but did not play bebop at that time.  We both heard Bird together, and we both decided this is the way it’s going to be.

TP:    So when you heard “Hootie Blues” you were with Dodo Marmarosa.

DEFRANCO:  Right.  Well, more than “Hootie Blues,” but all the stuff that he played.

TP:    If it was in 1941, then “Hootie Blues,” “Sepian Blues,” “Swingmatism,” the only records he was featured on.  But when did you first meet Charlie Parker?

DEFRANCO:  ’42.  End of ’42, beginning of ’43, somewhere in there.

TP:    Was he with Earl Hines?

DEFRANCO:  No, he had left Earl Hines.

TP:    Did you hear the Earl Hines band with Bird and Diz?

DEFRANCO:  Oh yeah.  I thought it was the forerunner, or one of the forerunners of the big swing band idea.  They were ahead of their time — at the time.  Very few bands were playing with anything that resembled the modern concept.  Earl Hines did.  Jay McShann.

TP:    Did you hear McShann live?

DEFRANCO:  Yes.

TP:    With the White big bands, would your paths intersect with the Black big bands?

DEFRANCO:  Well, you see, the White… I hate to talk about Black and White because they’ve been intermingled for so long that you can’t say this… But the only thing I can say about Black and White is during those days the Black bands had a feeling, a swing feeling that would…I don’t know, that would grip you.  You could feel it in your hips, the depth of your emotions — the swing.  The Black bands had the swing, and the White bands had maybe a little more polish, but they tried to simulate that swing, but never got it.  They never really got it.  And Tommy Dorsey was one who was aware of that, and he used to say once in a while, “We don’t have a swing band; if you want to have a swing band go and listen to Count Basie and absorb what he does, because that’s a swing band.”  Glenn Miller had the same thing.  He said, “I have a commercial band; I don’t have a swing band.  Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie are the swing bands.”

TP:    Jimmy Crawford and Jo Jones.

DEFRANCO:  Oh, boy.  Jimmy Crawford was marvelous.

TP:    So you really loved the big bands.

DEFRANCO:  Oh, of course.  Well, mainly because my Dad, who was blind, he and his brother, my uncle, loved the big bands.  When they caught on, they bought every record that they could.  They especially liked Jimmy Lunceford and Count Basie and Chick Webb — those bands.  Well, there again, they had the feeling.  This is not to belittle the White bands.  It’s a simple fact of life.  Black bands had the feeling there.

TP:    Of a lot of the prominent White improvisers who came up when you came up, I can’t think of another one who worked as seamlessly with Black musicians as you did.  People have told me that Art Blakey would speak glowingly about you.  Now, he didn’t do that about everybody!

DEFRANCO:  No.

TP:    So it seems as though you were very much truly accepted by the black musicians, who didn’t necessarily open their arms to everyone who was coming along.

DEFRANCO:  That’s true.  I simply had an affinity with those swing bands.  Because within the depth of my organism, I knew that was the beat.  They were swinging.  That’s the feeling that I liked, and that’s the feeling I’ve always tried to impart when I played.  And playing with different people through the years, like Jimmy Jones and Sid Catlett on drums, or John Simmons, these kind of players years ago, playing with them when I was a kid…

TP:    When did you play with Sid Catlett?

DEFRANCO:  Oh, I sat in with him many times.  There’s a good example of a feeling, a rhythmic feeling and concept opening the door for you.  When I played with Sid Catlett and a few other drummers during my career, and of course Art Blakey… I can quote Art Blakey.  Sometimes when I was really tired and beat (we were on the road a lot, the band was pretty hot at that time — a lot of recording), I’d say, “Oh, I don’t think I can play tonight.”  And Art would say, “I’ll make you play.”  He meant that.  He did.  He had so much energy and steam and feeling, that we would burn as they said.

TP:    Let’s get back to Charlie Parker.  Talk about the relationship you had with him.

DEFRANCO:  Well, when I first met him, Dodo and I were just overwhelmed at what he did.  It was a very brief meeting.  But then later on, he got very popular, then I got fairly well known as a jazz clarinetist and started winning polls, and so we were both picked to do the Metronome All-Star dates (I think we did two together), and that’s the point in time when I really got to know Bird.  From that point on we were friends, and every chance I got, I went to hear him.  Sometimes if I would play somewhere and he would be in the same town at another club or even in a nearby city, I would go to hear him.  And we got friendly.  So we spent some time together.  We hung out together quite a bit.  He was like Art Tatum.  He was very gregarious.  Knowledgeable about a lot of different things.  And was always-always-always gracious.

TP:    It sounds like he showed different sides of his personality to different people.  I mean, there were certain people he would not be around when he was strung out, and there were people he did that with.

DEFRANCO:  Yes, that’s true.  Also, he was well aware of being victimized by that drug.

TP:    He talked about it?

DEFRANCO:  He talked about it, and he told young people to stay away from it.  “Don’t even start.”  I can remember that distinctly when Bird… He’d almost get hostile.  “Don’t even start.  Don’t think about starting it.”

TP:    And a number of the younger musicians who did get strung out said he would treat them with no mercy once that happened to them.

DEFRANCO:  Well, they got started because they thought he’s the guy who…

TP:    Well, we don’t have to talk about that aspect of Bird.  But apparently he had many interests and much knowledge of matters outside of jazz as well.

DEFRANCO:  Oh yes.

TP:    Do you remember what sort of things he’d talk about?

DEFRANCO:  Well, he’d talk about certain philosophies of life and attitudes of life.  He had a good perception of people.  He could seem to read people quite well.  I remember him telling me one time… I don’t know what the circumstances were.  He told me how many muscles in your face it takes to smile, how many it takes to frown.  Things just out of the blue.  I guess I told the story about “Skinning Rabbits.”  Those were the type of thing…

And another time, coming home from some town outside of New York on a train with Bird.  It was a Sunday morning.  We had played and then hung out all night or something.  Sunday morning we got a train back to New York.  It was a time when you could move the seat back and forth and face the other way.  We had a Sunday paper, and he read through the whole paper.  Then a guy came in, and I don’t know if he was a workman or a farmer or something, kind of a little cardboard suitcase, what we would call in those days a real square…

TP:    A hayseed.

DEFRANCO:  Yeah, a hayseed.  But Bird said hello to him, and started talking with him, and “Where are you from?” and “What do you do?”  Then finally Bird said, “Come on, sit with us,” and he got up and moved his seat, the other seat, so that we faced each other.  He began telling this guy about the record date that he’s planning with strings.  He was telling me as well, because I didn’t know that he was going to do a date with strings.  He told me that Mitch Miller was going to be the A&R guy.  The funny thing is that he said several times to me, “And Buddy Rich is on drums.”  I said, “yeah.”  And he repeated it like I didn’t hear him.  “Buddy Rich is on the drums, and I’m going to do it with strings.”  And he started talking about how eager he was to work with strings.  He liked the idea.

That was a strange session because it wasn’t the greatest string section, and not the greatest rhythm section really.  But Bird was like a shining star.  He just made the whole thing come together with his playing.

TP:    Did you play on the same bill with him on 52nd Street?

DEFRANCO:  No.  I had my group and he had his group.  Sometimes, even in the summertime…two times I remember that Bird liked my rhythm section a little better than he had.  Who knows why?  And he’d come down with his horn and sit in with me.

TP:    Well, that’s because you had Bud Powell, Max Roach… This was after Max Roach left him, right?

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  I had Max Roach and Bud Powell; I had a lot of guys.

TP:    So you had Bud Powell, Curley Russell and Max Roach as your rhythm section.  What was that like for you?  You were talking about the technical difficulties of the clarinet.  Was there a volume problem?

DEFRANCO:  No.  I could project.  I needed a microphone because these were heavy players.  But I could project most of the time.  And also, Bud Powell was interesting, because when he was feeling okay and when he was straight and really playing well, nobody could touch him.  He was just fantastic.  There was no question about it.  It was just dazzling.  Smashing, as they say.  As opposed to when he was strung out or something, and he’d be getting nasty.  Then it was hopeless.  You really suffered for a whole set.  Because he’d get evil.  Sometimes he’d play the bridge twice so he could get you off.

TP:    He’s try to mess with you.

DEFRANCO:  Yeah.  It wasn’t only me.  It was anybody.  He tried it once with Bird, and Bird almost hit him with the horn.

TP:    Tell me about your time with Count Basie.

DEFRANCO:  There again, working with Basie and that group was really an education and a lesson — a lesson in the idea of swing.  I didn’t realize before that how much feeling comes from Bill Basie at the piano.  Not only Freddie Green, but Bill Basie at the piano, the way he played — for the group, for the soloists — was just superb.  And the feeling… There again I got… It was an eye-opener.  Another door opener.

TP:    So you were playing with some of the greatest, Max Roach, who was young…

DEFRANCO:  Oh, the list of guys I played with.  I had a group in California with Victor Feldman on vibes, Carl Perkins on piano, Billy Higgins (he must have been 11 years old), and Leroy Vinnegar, and Howard Roberts I believe on guitar.  We played East Los Angeles.  Never recorded.  What a great group.

[END OF SIDE A]

TP:    Talk about what you learned about what playing with Max Roach, Art Blakey, or Basie did for your rhythmic concept.

DEFRANCO:  That’s hard to put into words.  I always hesitate to describe at a clinic rhythm.  I don’t do it in my clinics, in fact.  When it comes to rhythm, I tell the students, “Find the most swinging or find the best player that you can in your area, play with them, and it will either come to you or it won’t.”  There’s no way you describe technically what happens.  Harmony you can, in terms of execution on your instrument you can.  But when it comes to swing feeling, two cliches: Don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got it; and if you don’t know what it is, forget it.  Because if you can’t feel it, it’s not going to happen.

TP:    I’d like to see if you can pinpoint a couple of things for me from way back.  You said you got your clarinet when you were about 8, and you joined the Sympathy Youth Club, and your Dad bought records of Django Reinhardt and Art Tatum and you were overwhelmed by them, and you were about 10 years old, so it’s got to be about ’33.  Do you remember which records those were?

DEFRANCO:  Well, the things Django did were “Nuages” and those things, and Art Tatum’s “Elegie” and “Yesterdays.”

TP:    Also, you said that your brother would take big-band arrangements off of records, and you had a swing band.  Do you remember which records those were?

DEFRANCO:  Mostly the clarinet.  We took a couple of Tommy Dorsey arrangements, like “Marie” and “Don’t Be That Way”, and Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine.”

TP:    On your website you said you had won a contest that was a jumping off point for you or an incentive to play when you were a teenager.

DEFRANCO:  Yes, that was in Philadelphia, in 1939 I believe.

TP:    You said you were wearing short pants.

DEFRANCO:  Right.  At the Earle Theater in Philadelphia there was a Tommy Dorsey swing contest, a weekly contest out of various cities every week in a theater, and it was broadcast nationally.  There were four contestants.  I was fortunate enough to win that.  I think I won $75, and a little plaque of some kind.

TP:    Good money in 1939.

DEFRANCO:  Oh yeah, it was great.  And I was a hero in my neighborhood the next day.  But it didn’t make the papers.  I did have a youth group at the same time that played different jobs, and every Sunday night a ballroom in South Philadelphia with a big band.  We also played the Horn & Hardhardt’s children’s hour, of which Stan Lee Broza was the emcee, and his son was Elliott Lawrence.  He played tenor sax in those days with the band.  We had what was called the Band Busters. That was broadcast every Sunday morning.

Anyway, there were four contestants in this contest, and I managed to win almost by default, because I didn’t play that great.  Even for a youngster, I wasn’t that good — at that time anyway.  But I was a young kid, and my teacher advised me to wear short pants.  He said, “The audience will love it.”  He showed me how to play one note on the clarinet with one hand, and he said, “This is what you’ll do at the end of your solo.”  And it worked.  I mean, those other guys didn’t have a chance.

TP:    Showmanship.

DEFRANCO:  Yeah, showmanship plus the fact that I was a little kid.

TP:    So there’s Johnny Scat Davis, you go on the road with him, and then you join Krupa for a while.  Do you have any memories of Krupa?

DEFRANCO:  All fond memories.  Because Gene Krupa was one of the nicest persons I ever worked for.  A delightful guy.  And he gave us every opportunity to play.  All the soloists.  Charlie Ventura, Roy Eldridge… He featured everyone who could play.

TP:    Oh, you were in the band that Roy Eldridge was in, so you got to know him a little.

DEFRANCO:  Oh my gosh, yes.  He was at the time probably head and shoulders over any other trumpet player.

TP:    Even Pops.

DEFRANCO:  Oh yeah, I’m afraid so.  Pops had done great and he was a great influence, but he concentrated I guess more on his commercial playing and singing, and Roy was a musician’s musician at that time in terms of jazz.  A real creative player.  Feeling, emotion.  He was tough.  He was number one at that time.  And the whole band used to love to hear him play a solo.

TP:    Did he influence your improvising approach?

DEFRANCO:  Yes, quite a bit.  Roy was a good influence.  I gleaned a lot of things from Roy.

TP:    So it sounds like you really developed your technique and conception in the big bands, polishing off the technical foundation you got at Mastbaum.  It was your laboratory.

DEFRANCO:  Right.

TP:    here’s what I want to ask you about when you get back.  A little more detail on Charlie Barnet, a little more on Dorsey, Boyd Raeburn, and the big bands you were with and the personalities…

We should discuss what you think are the salient points, and come up with a happy medium.

TP:    May I ask you a little more about your father, and the way your aesthetic developed?  Was he born here or in Italy?

DEFRANCO:  He was born here.  His parents came from Italy, from an area called Foggia, which is central Italy not far from the Adriatic Sea.

TP:    I read Whitney Balliett’s article on you.  Before he was blind he was a musician?

DEFRANCO:  He was a guitarist.  But he was an amateur guitar player.

TP:    But did he come from a family that had an artistic bent, or was there sort of an artistic craft tradition in his family?

DEFRANCO:  Oh yes.  Both sides had musicians.  I don’t know exactly what they played, but I know that both my parents had musicians in the background in Italy, and it’s almost an axiom that they loved the opera.  They were very musical.  That augured well for me, because they could tell whether I was playing well or out of tune or missed the beat or did something.  Unfortunately, too many youngsters who are playing today, their parents really don’t know.  So that was kind of a good thing.

My Dad had a terrible, terrible life.  It’s a long story; I don’t think I can go into it.  But it would make a book.  You just wouldn’t believe the tragic things that occurred in his life, and how he rose above most of it.  He was just incredible.  He was always in good humor and good wit, and kept us interested in music.  Never failed to play for us or have us play with him in the little band that he had which I told you about.  Once in a while, when we first started, he’d let us sit in with his group.  That’s where it started.  It was a whole musical background, experience… Everything was music in our family.

TP:    So basically there was never anything for you other than… Did you ever consider that you were going to do something else?

DEFRANCO:  No, I never did.  Mainly because that seemed to be all I was interested in.  Though I did later, on my own, read extensively, and I got interested in psychology, and read Adler, Freud and Jung, and I became a Wilhelm Reich disciple for a while, and I went into therapy for three years in New York.  Every time I came to New York I went to therapy with Dr. Pelletier, who was a Reichian therapist.  Looking back, it was the best thing I could have done.

TP:    Why was that?  How did that affect you musically, would you say?

DEFRANCO:  Being from somewhat humble circumstances, I was somewhat insecure in life.  The only security I had was my playing.  When that was good (when it was satisfactory, I can’t say good), I felt more secure.  When it came time for me to get on stage and be somewhat of an actor on the stage and speak in a microphone and emcee, since I was beginning to have my own groups, it was painful.  It was painful for me to even say anything on a microphone.  I was riddled with insecurities.  So I learned of Dr. Wilhelm Reich through Jack Eagle, who was originally a trumpet player who played in my big band and played on a lot of my recordings, and he played with a lot of different bands — Jerry Jerome and Georgie Auld and Boyd Raeburn.  He was interested in a lot of different things, like religion and philosophy and psychology.  We spent a lot of time together, and he introduced me to Reich.  I bought some books and I began avidly reading those books.  I decided when I got back to New York City for any length of time, I would look up a Reichian therapist, which I did.

TP:    Was this around the time you started the quartet that toured?

DEFRANCO:  No, it was actually before that.  It was when I had my big band.

TP:    Which was the year before.

DEFRANCO:  Right.  But I really got into going for therapy when I had a small group.  It was easier, and I worked in New York quite a bit, so I could go for my therapy sessions.

TP:    So you were getting one type of therapy from Art Blakey and another type of therapy from the Reichians!

DEFRANCO:  That’s the idea.  And frankly, both therapies brought out in me something that I was kind of lacking in my playing and my demeanor.

TP:    Am I correct in emphasizing the impact of being with Art Blakey for a couple of years?  Because the other articles I’ve read haven’t gone into that so much, and I was concerned I was doing too much amateur psychologizing.

DEFRANCO:  The effect that Blakey had on me was obvious musically.  I think it goes hand in hand with the effect that Tommy Dorsey had, that Art Tatum had, that Bird had, and that Count Basie had.  Count Basie had a tremendous effect on me.

TP:    You went into that a little bit.  Would you say a bit more about Basie’s impact?

DEFRANCO:  Well, let me see.  It’s tantamount to the Blakey experience.  First of all, I never realized how dynamic Count Basie was at the keyboard, playing.  I never realized how much influence he had from the keyboard to manipulate the sound of the band, and it was his personality and his playing, that he could get any 15 musicians who were capable, and within a couple of hours they would sound like Basie’s band, partly because they wanted to and mostly because of Bill, because of the way he accompanied people and the little nuances in the way he played.  A dynamic force.  He and Freddie Green were just unbelievable, the feeling they could get.  And Gus Johnson had the same kind of feeling when he played.  So the rhythm section for Basie always sounded pretty much the same.  Even though there were different types of personalities and different types of players playing from time to time in Basie’s rhythm section, generally they sounded the same because of Bill Basie, his dynamic way of playing.

TP:    What did it do for your playing?  Did it make it more relaxed?

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  Absolutely.  No question about it.  More relaxed and more cognizant of a time feeling.

TP:    Would you talk a little more about Dorsey for me?  He seems to have been immensely important to you, and it seems to have been a very complex relationship.

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  First off, he was important to everyone who worked for him.  He influenced everyone who worked for him.  Everyone who worked for him would say the same thing.  It was incredible, the influence he had.  We were all somewhat seasoned players (we weren’t brand-new into the business) and somewhat sophisticated.  Yet, Tommy Dorsey could play just a simple melody and the band would applaud.  You could hate him at the same time, but what came out of the trombone was great — unequalled, I think.  So everybody got a feeling of playing and breathing technique from Tommy Dorsey.

TP:    Did he ever give you any hands-on instruction about the breathing technique, or was it just something you’d watch and pick up?

DEFRANCO:  Mostly something we watched.  Though from time to time he would give us some tips.  Most people thought that he employed that circular breathing, but that was not true.  He had a way of taking in air in the corner of his mouth, and not having his mouth or embrochure leave the mouthpiece, as opposed to circular breathing.  Circular breathing means that you take the air through your nose while you’re blowing at the same time.  Tommy didn’t do that.  He got a tremendous amount of air through the corner of his mouth, never taking the mouthpiece away from it, but also, filling up the abdomen, filling up his lungs.  He knew how to spin a note.  He used to call it “spin a note.”  He knew how to play very soft on the instrument, but you could hear it in the room.  You could hear it in the far corners of the room.  It’s a combination of physical and mental mechanism, so that you could play, or he would… He was a master at it.  He could play very soft, and everyone could hear what he was playing.  And he could play as loud as the whole band.  It was incredible.

TP:    Did you feel restrained in these big bands of the ’40s?  Were you sort of chomping at the bit to play what you really wanted, or was it a satisfactory musical experience?

DEFRANCO:  No, all the soloists felt restrained, because the big bands were dance bands.  They were not ostensibly the show bands and a showcase for soloists.  So the only chance we got to show off was in the theater.  But we were playing the one-nighters in ballrooms.  I mean, you played maybe 16 bars of a solo, then maybe you wouldn’t play a solo for two sets or a set.  Nothing extended.

TP:    So it wasn’t like the Ellington band playing a ballroom where the solo function would be integrated into the dance experience, as it were.

DEFRANCO:  Yes.  This was strictly a big band… Even Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw played for dancing.  That was one of the gripes Artie had about the whole idea.  He wanted himself and his band to be more concertizing.  In fact, if he were operating now with his big band, it would be a perfect setting for him, because he could do all these concerts, he could do festivals, and play exactly the way he wanted to play, and not conform to the dance.  You’re too young to remember this, but Artie Shaw one time walked off the stage in the face of, I don’t know, a million dollars of contracts that he had.  He walked off the stage and announced that all the jitterbugs were idiots — which made the front lines of the papers.  But he also doubled his attendance.  He called them idiots and he said, “We love you.”

TP:    Prefiguring Miles Davis.

DEFRANCO:  Yes, Miles Davis, exactly.

TP:    When you left Dorsey in ’48 and came right to New York, had you been knowing all of your contemporaries who were involved in Bebop?  Is that one reason why you fit in so comfortably with them?

DEFRANCO:  Oh, yes.  Absolutely.  We knew that New York was the hub at that time.  At the same time, there was the beginning of the Cool School, although ironically enough, most of the cool guys, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper…all those guys were from New York.  That was ironic.  But they lived in California.  They kind of generated this Cool School of playing.  But the kind of playing that I was engaged in was, as Lennie Tristano would say, “obvious swing,” which he detested. [LAUGHS] Oh, we used to argue for hours.  Lennie Tristano I think approached genius.  He was incredible.  His technique, his musical prowess and his ability to do some things that were at that time phenomenal on the piano and with his group.  He didn’t like the idea of the swing feeling projected into music.  He liked the idea of rhythm, of course.  But he used to say to me that he couldn’t understand why I played with the obvious swing.  It was ridiculous, you know.

TP:    Why did he think it was ridiculous?

DEFRANCO:  Well, he just didn’t feel that was necessary, and he didn’t feel that creative jazz needed that.  Well, I did.  I go back to the school of Basie or Blakey where if it’s not swinging, it doesn’t mean too much — or that’s only half the picture.

TP:    So no matter how intellectually challenging the thing may be, Ellington’s dictum is still the operative principle.

DEFRANCO:  Swing’s the thing.

TP:    Can you tell me a little bit about playing with Boyd Raeburn’s band.  It sounds as though that was the place where you could really expand your horizons intellectually in terms of music.

DEFRANCO:  You could.  You could play exactly the way you wanted to play, which was why he hired me and the other guys in the band.  And the writers could write any way they wanted to write.  So consequently, we got some pretty spacy music.  But it was intellectually unbelievable and very difficult.  It took great skill to play that library.  Probably one of the most difficult, technically challenging libraries in the business.  The guys were George Handy and Bob Graettinger and Johnny Richards.  Johnny Richards was a phenomenal writer, although I thought he was ponderous in many ways and overwritten — but still a great writer.

TP:    Was your own big band a cross between the Artie Shaw concept and the Raeburn concept?

DEFRANCO:  Maybe.  I didn’t try to get that outside with it.  But the concept was the big Benny Goodman-Artie Shaw… You can lump them all together and that’s what I had.  I wound up with zero.

TP:    It wasn’t entirely your fault.  I mean, it was not a great time to be starting a big band.

DEFRANCO:  No, it was the wrong time.  But I could sense when we played… I thought I mapped out everything, so to speak, so that we could play our music in a dance tempo and still make it a jazz-worthy project.  But I realized that that didn’t work.  That did work with what I had in the audience.  So you give it up and go on to other things.  Then I got the small group, and that did work.  That was hot for about a year-and-a-half or two years.

TP:    Then you had to move out to California.

DEFRANCO:  Oh yes.  Well, the jazz (?) died completely.

TP:    By the way, when did you leave Philadelphia for good?

DEFRANCO:  1939.

TP:    were you coming back to Philly after that?

DEFRANCO:  Oh, sure.  I’d come back to see my family and friends.  Once in a while I’d play in Philadelphia.

TP:    But you were basically a citizen of the road.

DEFRANCO:  That’s it.

TP:    And you’d come home and touch base with your family.

DEFRANCO:  That’s right.  For a while I established a home in New York, got an apartment and played out of New York, then gave that up and got a place in California.  But the same kind of thing.  I’ve been actually ostensibly on the road for sixty years.  These past few years have been more of a home base operation.  I’ve spent more time here in Florida and more time in Whitefish, Montana, than I have out playing.

TP:    I think you’re entitled.

DEFRANCO:  Oh yeah!  I really feel entitled.

TP:    Can you tell me about your relationship with Terry Gibbs.  That seems to be your longest standing association of this particular period anyway.

DEFRANCO:  We’ve been working together several times a year.  We link up and work with a local rhythm section or a rhythm section in Europe, or we get a rhythm section from New York or California.  We work together well and it’s a lot of fun.  I take those jobs because Terry and I enjoy each other’s playing, and it’s fun.  There’s not the kind of tension you would imagine when you go out, for instance, with your own group.  There’s a certain amount of tension where you’re being tested; your group is being tested, you are being tested, and everyone has a critical eye on what you’re doing.  This is kind of a different aspect of playing what we want.  Terry, first of all, is great to work with because he’s funny and very clever, and the attitude is lighter.  Not the music, but the attitude is lighter.

TP:    So he lets you lighten up a little bit.

DEFRANCO:  I think so.  I would tend to get pretty grim in my music.  Sometimes people have accused me (and it’s true) that I take my music too seriously, or myself too seriously.  And through the years that has been true.  It took the Reichian therapy for me to realize that my music was not the center of the universe.

TP:    Even of your universe.

DEFRANCO:  Even my universe, yes.

TP:    Even with Terry Gibbs, it lets you operate in a specific instrumental tradition.  Because having the clarinet and the vibes together is going to bring up associations for people.

DEFRANCO:  That’s right.  And the sound alone brings up the Benny Goodman-Lionel Hampton thing, because they started that particular sound.  Which is great for us, because in a way, we manage to play pretty much what we want to do when we play solos.  People hear that sound, and they identify with Benny Goodman and Lionel, so they like it.

TP:    Could I ask you a couple of specific things about your bands from the ’50s until the Glenn Miller thing?  I think I have conflicting information.  I think Balliett had some inaccuracies because he conflicts with Gitler’s note on the Mosaic box.  Was the group with Tommy Gumina only a quartet?

DEFRANCO:  Yes.

TP:    And that came after you played with Victor Feldman and Carl Perkins and Billy Higgins.

DEFRANCO:  Oh yes.  That was another interesting experience for me working with Tommy.  He was a magnificent musician.  We did five albums together, which people don’t realize — one for Decca and four for Mercury.

I had Scott LaFaro and Victor Feldman in New York.

TP:    Let me ask you something philosophically about the craft and the art of making music, coming back to the question of whether art was the family craft, as it were.  Do you see yourself as analogous to artists in other traditions and other media?

DEFRANCO:  All of the jazz players who amounted to something, who contributed to the idea of jazz, I think are all analogous to the artists of the past few centuries.  The same kind of passion for what they were doing, the same desire to do something…however minimal, something different, so that you become an original, so that people will say, when they hear your record, “That’s who it is.”  That’s Bird.  That’s Art.  That’s Oscar.  That’s Buddy.  That’s what I wanted.  You can copy.  For some period of time, I copied Benny Goodman.  Now, of course, it’s too hard to copy Benny Goodman, because you can refer to your basic studies.  The Klosee method or the Behrman method, basic studies of arpeggiated forms, Benny used in his jazz.  That was the focal point of his jazz clarinet playing.  So it was kind of easy to do that, as opposed to, say, not so easy to imitate Artie Shaw who at the same time was involved in linear playing, making lines, or, even more difficult, Bird.  So it was tough enough to play sort of in the Bird tradition on any instrument, but doubly difficult on the clarinet because clarinet is such a hard instrument to play.

TP:    But you don’t seem to be a vocabulary quoter.  I don’t pretend to have heard every one of your records.  But even when you’re playing bebop things, I don’t hear you quoting Bird.  It’s very much your personal vocabulary.

DEFRANCO:  Yes, there are a few quotes I maintain.  But most of the quotes in my playing are my own quotes.  Sometimes when I’ve been criticized for being repetitive, my answer to that is, “I’m allowed to be, since it’s my stuff.”  I mixed that with some quotes from the Bebop era, but not… Also, I tried not to directly quote.  Just like there are some things I’ve gotten from, oh, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Nelson Riddle, Bill Finnegan, David Raksin, where I used it in my jazz playing.  But I didn’t quote them exactly.  It’s just an inference of what they did.

TP:    Let me take you back again for a second.  In the ’30s when you were a kid, you talked about jamming at these clubs.  There were two different clubs, right?

DEFRANCO:  Two different clubs.  Billy Kretchmer is still alive.  He lives in Margate, New Jersey, and up until just a couple of years ago he was still playing.  At that time, in the ’30s, he was neck and neck with Benny and Artie.  He was quite a jazz player.  He just played in his own group in his club, and he played in the pit theater at the Earle, next to my teacher, Willy Di Simone.

Butch Morris Blindfold Test (11-21-02):

1.    Thad Jones, “One More” (from THAD JONES, Debut, 1991) (Thad Jones, tp; John Dennis, p; Charles Mingus, b; Max Roach, d) – (2 stars)

Is that Sweets?  Howard McGhee?  Is it a youngster?  Roy?  I mean, Roy Eldridge.  This is a modern crowd we’re speaking to; we don’t want them to misunderstand.  You kind of stumped me.  And then the drummer… Play it again.  The trumpet player’s velocity was amazing, especially the way he played those dynamics and his capacity for strength.  Amazing.  He’s probably a real good section cat, too, along with being a good improviser.  But somehow to me he sounds like he could have been a big influence, but also he’s been influenced by a lot of people.  I mean, all of those people I named, I think.  There was a lot of originality, because I think at the time everybody was pretty much original.  It could even have been late ’40s, for that matter, but I think the ’50s.  I hear a little Diz, I heard a little Sweets, I hear a little Fats, I hear a little Howard McGhee.  But at this point, I’m guessing.  Do I have to give it stars? 2 stars. [AFTER] That was Thad Jones?  What year?  2 stars only because he was quoting from so many sources.  Not to say Thad wasn’t original.  But he seemed to go from… I mean, there was some Fats in there, there was some Howard McGhee, there was some Roy Eldridge.  He was all over the map.  That’s probably what made him such a good arranger that he knew the terrain.  I probably put my foot in my mouth from saying he’s not original.  But I’d prefer to hear Thad in the late ’70s.

2.    Miles Davis, “White” (from AURA, Columbia, 1985/2000) (Miles Davis, tp; Palle Mikkelborg, comp.) (5 stars)

It sounds like Don Cherry.  Huh, that’s strange.  It sounds like Don Cherry, it sounds like Miles Davis, it sounds like Ron Miles a little bit.  It’s very nice music.  But the first few notes were very deceiving.  Immediately I thought of Don. Then I thought of Miles.  Miles Davis.  I’ve never heard this before.  Whoever it is, is all over Miles.  It’s probably Miles, some Miles I’ve never heard.  It sounds like the record could be around the “Siesta” thing.  I think the music is way up in Gil territory, too, for that matter, but I don’t know where it is or what period is from.  In a way, it sounds like a lot of stuff me and J.A. Deane and Wayne Horwitz used to do, too. I’d give it 10 stars.  Even though I hear more and more similarities between Don and Miles, it’s interesting the way Miles uses history to reevaluate his present.  Because you hear his quotes, you hear things he’s going around, you hear even maybe “Stella By Starlight,” you hear things that maybe preceded this recording by 20 years in there.  But the way they’re fragmented are very interesting.  And the more it goes on, the more you realize it is Miles, by the way he says things.  But I don’t know this recording.

3.    Jackie McLean, “A Fickle Sonance” (from A FICKLE SONANCE, Blue Note, 1961/2000) (McLean, as, comp; Tommy Turrentine, tp; Sonny Clark, p; Butch Warren, b; Billy Higgins, d) (5 stars)

[IMMEDIATELY] Tommy Turrentine.  That’s probably Tommy Turrentine at the height of his game — on record.  Oh, Jackie.  Is the drummer Pete LaRoca?  No?  Oh, that’s Billy Higgins.  Tommy is a motherfucker.  That is Tommy.  I know a lot of motherfuckers slept on Tommy, but I didn’t! [LAUGHS] I shouldn’t say Tommy makes me think of him, but there’s two cats I really like right in here — Richard Williams and Tommy.  They just kill.  They took care of some territory that a lot of people just didn’t.  Actually, Roy Hargrove reminds me a lot sometimes of Tommy and Richard Williams — a tiny bit. Is the pianist Cedar?  Herbie?  Wynton Kelly? Sonny Clark!  Oh, shit.  Goddammit.  I take my bebop very seriously.  I love that.  Especially in this period, I really like Jackie’s stuff, and I really like Tommy Turrentine.  What was that, “Fickle Sonance”?  Great track.  5 stars.

4.    Franz Koglmann, “Make Believe” (from MAKE BELIEVE, Between the Lines, 1999) (Koglmann, flugelhorn; Tom Varner, fr.horn; Tony Coe, cl; Brad Shepik, g; Peter Herbert, b)

Sun Ra?  Is that some of the Delmark stuff? [As in AACM?] As in AACM. [No.] I’m starting to hear what the tune is. [Kenny Dorham once recorded this.] It’s strange.  The guitar player is starting to sound more familiar to me than anybody else.  But I can’t say I know who it is.  The name of the tune is on the tip of my tongue. Is it “I Can’t Get Started”?  It’s in that vicinity.  I don’t know who this is, but let’s go on to the next one. I thought it was Sun Ra.  I think it’s a concept. [What do you think of the concept?] It’s all right.  It still reminds me of Sun Ra.  It reminds me of Fletcher Henderson, too.  It also reminds me of Gil. [FINAL SECTION] Is this from the same record?  Can I hear something else?  Is the bassist Martin Aaltena?  Whoever they are, they have good company.  So let’s go on to the next.  I don’t have to rate it as high or low.  Let’s put it like this.  They were in good company.  I don’t have to give it stars. I’ve been reading the Blindfold Test for thirty years!  I think throughout the process, until this record, I was very clear at least in stating my opinions about these.  I stated my opinion about this in the beginning, so I stated the kind of company I feel they’re in.  Now, if I have to give them stars, I’ll give them stars.  I give them stars.  Stars.  Stars.  Stars. [AFTER] Franz Koglmann.  The trumpet player.  Good company.

5.    Ryan Kisor, “Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love” (from POWER SOURCE, Criss-Cross, 1999) (3 star)

Is that a Mingus song?  Oh, yes.  “Ellington’s Sound of Love.”  It’s nice.  Can we go on to the next?  I think they’re giving a very nice rendition of this classic.  I think it’s nice.  That’s all.  It’s very nice.  It’s nice.  It’s very nice. [Can you be a little more substantive than that?] Than what? [Than "it's very nice.] It’s very nice.  I think the expression was way over the top.  It was a modern rendition of something that was a modern rendition of something.  I mean, it was Mingus’ expression of Duke, and it’s their expression of Mingus. [Do you think they did justice to Mingus?] Oh yeah.  I think they did justice to Mingus.  I mean,they didn’t do him any harm.  Let’s put it like that.  It was nice. [Did the trumpet player catch your attention, for better or for worse?] Neither, for better or for worse.  I certainly don’t mean this in a negative way, but I’d like to hear somebody like Lonnie Hillyer play that.  But I thought it was good.  I think it was a little bit over the top in terms of expression.  It seemed to try too much to make it sound like sound-like, like “I can play in that groove” or “I can do that.” It was cool.  I can give it a star.  1 star.

6.    Leo Smith, “The Year Of The Elephant” (from GOLDEN QUARTET: THE YEAR OF THE ELEPHANT, Pi, 2002) (Smith, tp; Anthony Davis, p; Malachi Favors, b; Jack DeJohnette, d) (4 stars)

The drummer sounds like Philip Wilson.  Is that Leo Smith?   Oh, is that Jack?  [LAUGHS] Oh, God!  That’s Anthony and Malachi.  Well, it took me a minute to find out that was Leo, but the way he was putting that composition together with Tony, the way they were expressing it, it became clear it was Leo.  Actually compositionally more than… I mean, it came together at the same time compositionally and his sound.  The way he started to bring the piano into his lines, when he was playing.  Like, how the piano will go away from the line and then come back into the line was interesting.  And then I could hear it was Leo.  This is only an observation, but he still sounds like Philip to me! [LAUGHS] That’s by no means an insult.  I heard Philip immediately.  And I’m still hearing it, is what I’m saying. They played in Lisbon last year.  I didn’t hear the performance, but I saw them there, and I went to a rehearsal there. It’s a band of wonderful musicians.  A star for each person in the band.  4 stars.

7.    Ron Miles-Bill Frisell, “We See” (from HEAVEN, Sterling Circle, 2002) (Miles, tp; Frisell, g)

Monk.  Thelonious Monk is the composer.  Is this “We See”?  It should make me want to dance.  When I think Monk, I want to dance.  I think it’s a nice rendition, let’s put it that way.  I don’t want to guess here, because I could guess wrong.  I thought Tom Harrell at first.  But it’s not.  I can’t guess who it is.  Or the guitar player. He sounds out of Jim Hall somehow.  But I don’t know. 3 stars. [AFTER] Oh, I should have known that was Ron Miles. Actually, Ron is one of the few trumpet players I’ve heard in the last few years that I like a lot.  He’s got something I like.  And I like Frisell a lot.

8.    Johnny Coles, “Jano” (from LITTLE JOHNNY C, Blue Note, 1963/1996) (Johnny Coles, tp; Duke Pearson, p., comp; Joe Henderson, ts; Leo Wright, as; Bob Cranshaw, b; Walter Perkins, d) – (5 stars)

That sounded like Philly Joe at first.  Is it Philly Joe?  It’s not Billy again. The alto player’s got that hard Jackie thing again — that edge.  Almost like between Jackie and James Spaulding.  He’s got some kind of angular thing, like Braxton.  Did you play the head?  Did you start this tune at the beginning? [Yes.] This is strange, because the rhythm section almost sounds dated, like you could put them in one area of history, and then the horn players come on with this other, more modern thing.  I mean, the way the piano player is comping, the way the drummer is playing the time. [trumpet solo] Wow!  Sounds like K.D. now.  I’m on the warm side?  [tenor solo] When was this recorded? [Early '60s.] Sam Rivers?  John Gilmore?  Wow, that’s familiar like a motherfucker!  I mean, that’s FAMILIAR. It’s not Billy?  Dennis Charles?  My God, I’m lost somewhere.  The pianist sounds like Cecil now. [Cedar?] No.  Cecil Taylor.  I mean, only… It’s very interesting, not only because I’m trying to think of who it is, but it’s a convolution of a lot of things to me.  That’s not Sonny Clark?  Can you play it again?  I don’t know who the alto player is at all.  Can you run the trumpet player one more time?  Strange, because it’s got this Kenny Dorham thing, and it’s got some Bobby Bradford stuff in there… That’s classic!  Listen, can we go on to something else and come back to this?

This appealed to me because…how can I say… It’s very attractive.  It’s a simple line.  It just happens to be 9 bars.  They could have made it 12 if they wanted to, and they could have made it 8 if they wanted to, and they could have made it 10 if they wanted to.  But it was very, very attractive, I think. I didn’t feel I was hearing it from the beginning… That’s why I said, “Did you play it from the top?”  It begins like it’s a continuation of something.  When you started it, and it began, it felt like a continuation.  It never felt like it was the beginning to me.  Which was appealing.  But I’d like to come back to it. There’s something there that I’d like to get my hands on.

The trumpet player reminds me of Wilbur Hardin.  But then there’s a couple of other players right in that period who had… The other cat’s surname is Young, but I can’t think of his surname.  The tune has challenging edge because it is 9 bars or so.  To turn around. So it’s not Wilbur Hardin.  It’s not Idris Sulieman. 10 stars. I’m sure I know everybody on this.  But I just can’t put them within my context right now. First tell me who the piano player was.  Duke Pearson?  Was that his tune?  Was it Donald Byrd?  Wait a minute.  Shit.  I would have got Joe Henderson on a good day.  I want to say Woody Shaw, but no… Actually, at this point I can’t identify. Johnny Coles!  Oh, God.  I love Johnny Coles, but I certainly wasn’t thinking in his direction.  I used to have this record.  Of course.

9.    Bob Brookmeyer, “Child At Play” (from WALTZING WITH ZOE, Challenge, 2001) (Brookmeyer, comp.) – (3 stars)

You’re out for blood today, Ted!  Right?  I’m out for blood.  Is that recent? [Yes.] It’s really great writing, I think.  Good writing and an interesting stream of thought in terms of what they’ve written.  Is that Marty Ehrlich on clarinet?  Definitely good writing.  I mean, they work that one motif to death, which is cool, that’s what you do.  It’s nice.  With this kind of band, it would be great to hear… They didn’t get a lot of chances to play through these charts.  And it would be great to hear this music after it had been played for a while, like for a year, by the same people.  It just sounds over-read to me.  Really over-read.  It’s trying to feel relaxed, but I don’t hear that.  Often, music, when it’s not read enough, it sounds too contrived.  Not to say this sounds contrived.  It’s pretty music.  It’s wonderful music.

10.    Bill Dixon, “Pellucity” (from VADE MECUM, Soul Note, 1993) (Dixon, tp., comp; Barry Guy, William Parker, b; Tony Oxley, d.) – (3 stars)

Is that Bill Dixon?  Bill’s interesting, because he gives you the impression that he’s wrapped up in every note, that he’s emotionally involved in every note, or every sound he makes, every phrase.  His flugelhorn work is really intimate, I think.  Highly personal.  Highly emotional.  I don’t know who the drummer is.  Certainly somehow out of Milford.  But I don’t know really know who it could be.  Oh, Tony Oxley?  It’s nice. 3 stars.  It’s a trio?  Two basses?

11.    George Russell, “The Outer View” (from THE OUTER VIEW, Riverside, 1962/1991) (Don Ellis, tp.; George Russell, p, comp; Paul Plummer, ts; Garnett Brown, tb; Steve Swallow, b; Pete LaRoca, d) – (4 stars)

I really don’t like this music.  The piano player keeps doing something that irritates me.  [trumpet solo] Is it Dave Douglas?   Is it Wynton?  [When do think this was recorded?] In the ’80s or early ’90s. [It was recorded in '62.  Does that change your assessment?]  Yes, of course it changes things, because it makes it a predecessor to all this stuff that’s being played now like then.  I mean, it’s not Sam Rivers on piano. [No.  But I think the pianist is a Schillinger guy.] I’ve heard so much of the bad examples of this lately that my view of this… That it’s in the early ’60s certainly changes my view.  I’d have to listen to it in a new light now.  Could you play the trumpet player’s solo again?  Is that Bill again?  This was recorded in ’62?  Okay, who is it? [Don Ellis] Oh, of course!  Yeah, I can dig that.  He certainly was one of the predecessors to all this shit that’s going on now that sounds like that.  I’ll tell you probably why I thought it was so recent.  That is an excellent recording for 1962.  So again, yes, sure, the quality not only of the music, but the recording. [Any idea who the composer was?] Should I know by the tune?  [Not necessarily.  But you'll feel bad if you don't get him.] George Russell?  It sounds like George Russell.  But when you said the ’60s I was really confused, because I was trying to figure out who had control over that kind of recording in 1962.  Where was it recorded, and who recorded it? [Ray Fowler.] Really.  Wasn’t he recording a lot of singers back then? 4 stars.  4 stars for a lot of reasons.  Like I said, that’s been done over and over, especially in the ’80s and ’90s — that kind of arrangement, that kind of playing. I must admit, I was dumbfounded, because I was listening a lot to the sound of the recording, and the sound of the recording made me think of ’80s-’90s, and so I started to think in that area.  When you told me it was recorded in the ’60s, I couldn’t hear who was playing, because I was trying to figure out who made recordings that good in the ’60s, not in terms of the quality of the music but the quality of the recording.  I think this is interesting in itself.  I don’t think there’s too many records on your shelf where you can go to 1962 and find any record recorded as well as that record is recorded, unless it was done by a singer.  I like Don Ellis.  I liked him better with his electric recordings.

12.    Italian Instabile Orchestra, “Sequenze Fugue” (from LITANIA SIBILANTE, Enja, 2000) (Giancarlo Schiaffini, comp.; Enrico Rava, tp) – (5 stars)

Is this the beginning of the song?  Oh, they’re Italian!  It’s Enrico Rava.  Enrico’s covered a lot of ground better than a lot of people in terms of the trumpet thing.  He’s a motherfucker.  Motherfucker.  I’ve heard him kick butts on many, many nights in Paris in the ’70s and in Italy.  He’ll step on the gas, jack.  He’s a bad cat.  What can I say?  Is this the Instabile?  It’s interesting.  They seem to have covered a lot of ground that is non-European. It’s just their Italian thing that covers an area of jazz that is kind of clear.  This is their fresco, and it’s clearly theirs.  Really clearly theirs.  So it’s Enrico Rava with the Instabile.  It’s cool.  I think you hear Instabile one or two times, and you see the kind of… I’m not saying that’s all.  But they made a statement.  And certainly Enrico; Enrico has, too. 5 stars for Instabile and 5 for Enrico. The thing is, they’re Italian, and that’s Enrico, and this is their fresco.

13.    Fats Navarro, “The Tadd Walk” (from GOIN’ TO MINTON’S, Savoy Jazz, 1947/1999) (Navarro, tp; Tadd Dameron, p., comp; Ernie Henry, as; Curley Russell, b; Denzil Best, d) – (5 stars)

Fats Navarro.  I was trying to figure out who the piano player was first, and then the trumpet player.  Around this time, I’d think K.D. and Miles, in that range.  I was waiting for the trumpet player to go up a little higher to understand a little better where he was, and even some areas where Miles sounded a little like Dizzy, I thought it could be… I also thought Fats, but I was also thinking Dizzy and Fats would have gone up in terms of register by then.  But Fats.  Fats was such an articulate motherfucker.  Who was the piano player?  Tadd Dameron! 25 stars for everybody.

Benny Golson (Downbeat):

The first question to decide in an account of Benny Golson is the proper sequence of his job title.  To wit: Is he a tenor saxophonist-composer or a composer-tenor saxophonist?

Either description works; Golson, now 71, is an icon in both arenas.  Several dozen of his tunes — he holds full copyright on most — are essential signposts of modern jazz.  During the ’70s he broached the mainstream, writing scores for shows like “M.A.S.H.”, “Room 222,” “The Partridge Family” and “The Mod Squad,” for numerous made-for-TV movies, and for a host of national advertising spots.  Instrumentally, Golson’s sound — an immense tone, by turns airy and burly, informed by a harmonic knowledge wide as the heavens that grounds stories replete with lyric detail and operatic flourish — is singular on the tenor tree.

Golson is an avuncular, erudite conversationalist, whose narrative deploys polysyllabic words in correct context.  He continues to carry himself with the seemingly unflappable aplomb and no-nonsense professionalism that allowed him to flourish and keep focus through a half-century of music business encounters high and low.  He’s seen chitlin’ circuit juke joints, tobacco warehouses, TOBA theaters and inner city lounges that defined “funky” before the word became a musical category; moved comfortably in sophisticated nightclubs and posh concert halls in the capitals of the world; performed his famous requiem “I’ll Remember Clifford” on an enormous organ in the aerie of Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, where Johann Sebastian Bach served as kapellmeister 300 years ago.  But even Golson’s cool was challenged when Howard University, where he matriculated from 1947 to 1950, called a few years back to inform him that they were instituting a scholarship in his name.

“This was unreal,” Golson exclaimed during a late-December conversation in the living room of his well-appointed Upper West Side highrise.  “I almost cried.  During my third year at Howard, I became a rebel, and took to doing my assignments the way I felt that I could.  I didn’t want to follow the rules.   Why can’t I have octaves?  Why can’t I have fifths if I want?  Why must the dominant always go to the tonic?  Why can’t I come from the leaning tonic?  I started asking things like that, and they looked at me like I was crazy.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back came one day in class when the teacher played our composition assignments on the piano.  When she got to mine, after the first chord resolved to the second, that red pencil made a big X, then she made another red X at the next resolution.  She looked like Zorro with the whip.  She didn’t get to the end.  She looked at me, almost disgusted, and said, ‘Oh, Mr. Golson, what have you done?’  I tried to think of all kinds of ways that I could show my contempt.  I stood up with my hands in my pocket, and rolled from side to side, the way Thelonious Monk used to, put my head back looking halfway up the ceiling, and said, ‘That’s the way I heard it.’  I don’t remember what she said, but it didn’t go over too big.  The next day, I put my things in my little broken-down car, and drove off into the sunset.”

As we speak, Golson is conceptualizing separate commissions for March festschrifts in Switzerland and at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and a symphonic piece commissioned by the Guggenheim Foundation.  He’s just finished mixing his fifth album for Arkadia Records, “One Day Forever,” which is distinct in his oeuvre, tempering the longueurs of nostalgic retrospection with the spiritual imperative of relentless inquiry.  It includes a lively 1996 session with the front line of the Jazztet (Golson’s musical soulmate Art Farmer, who died in 1999, and trombonist Curtis Fuller), the well-wrought band that established Golson as a leader at the cusp of the ’60s, and relaunched his performing career in the ’80s.  Shirley Horn oozes sophisticated weltschmerz on Golson’s world-weary lyrics to the title track and “Sad To Say.”  The date ends with a crystalline performance by the classical pianist Lara Downes of Golson’s “On Gossamer Wings,” a melodically redolent opus that evokes the ambiance of Chopin and the 19th Century masters who fueled Golson’s imagination as a pre-teen piano aspirant in Depression-era Philadelphia.

No matter how mean times got, Golson’s mother — a “country girl” from Mobile, Alabama who came to Philadelphia in her teens — kept an upright piano in the house; two of his uncles played it with regularity, and the youngster became fascinated with it as he emerged from toddler years.  Eventually she hired a piano teacher, one Jay Walker Freeman, for the then-substantial fee of 75 cents a week.

“After a few years I fancied that I wanted to be a concert pianist,” Golson recalls.  “Of course, that was aberrational in my neighborhood.  All you heard there was the Blues!  Yet I proceeded to try to follow that idea, and got very good at it.  My mother used to buy records by Lil Green and Big Bill Broonzy. I’d say, ‘How can she listen to that horrible music?’  I was somewhere else with the European music.

“I changed after I heard Lionel Hampton’s band at the Earle Theater.  The curtain swung open, the lights came up, the bandstand rolled dramatically forward toward the audience, everybody was dressed alike, the lights played on the instruments, and the sound of the music live came forth.  The icing on the cake came when Arnett Cobb stepped to the microphone and played that solo on ‘Flying Home.’  From that moment, the piano began to pale.  My mother let me off the hook, the saxophone took over.”

Golson’s mother supported his new obsession with alacrity, buying him a saxophone as a birthday present when the family was “two years off welfare.”  She even took a singing job (“I’ll Get By,” “Evil Gal Blues”) with him and childhood friends Ray and Tommy Bryant.  Golson listened to records by Tex Beneke with Glenn Miller (“one of my favorite bands in the war years, with the clarinet on top”), by Bud Freeman and Eddie Miller; he memorized Coleman Hawkins’ solo on “Body and Soul,” Ben Webster’s solo on “Raincheck” and Lester Young’s solo on “D.B. Blues.”

Then, Golson relates, “Don Byas walked into my heart, and occupied a large part of the space there.  I couldn’t believe the velocity with which he moved over that horn, and his huge sound was overwhelming — so natural, not strained or manufactured.  Don’s articulation was amazing.  He played wide intervals, jumping over the notes like skipping up or down a pair of steps.”

One day Golson speculated ten cents (“I figured I couldn’t lose anything”) on a fresh-from-the-jukebox Savoy disk with Charlie Parker’s “Now’s The Time” and “Billie’s Bounce.”  “It was the strangest music,” he recalls.  “Had I wasted my dime?  But the more I played it, the more I began to like it.”  Soon after, Golson went with his friends John Coltrane and Ray Bryant to a concert at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music by a sextet featuring Byas, Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Al Haig on piano, Slam Stewart on bass, and Sid Catlett on drums.

“My life’s first beginning was when I was born of my mother and father; the second was after that concert,” Golson declares.  “Charlie Parker was wearing a double-breasted pinstriped suit with all the buttons buttoned, and it looked too small for him, like he was going to explode!  When he bent over to make that 4-bar break in ‘A Night In Tunisia,’ John and I were grabbing at each other; we almost fell out of the balcony!  He was playing alto then like Johnny Hodges and I was trying to play like Arnett Cobb.  This wasn’t just a good performance.  We heard music that we had never heard before!  What was it all about?  How could we get close to it?  When the concert was over we went backstage and got all the autographs.

“Then we followed Charlie Parker out of the theater and onto Broad Street.  He was walking to the Downbeat to play with a local rhythm section — Philly Joe Jones, Red Garland and Nelson Boyd on bass.  John carried his horn for the four blocks, and I asked him what kind of horn he played, his reed and mouthpiece — all these dumb questions.  But he was nice to us.  We were too young to go inside, so we stood outside the club all night, dreaming; when they finished, we walked all the way home to North Philadelphia.”

By the time Golson entered Howard, he was, as he puts it, “trying for all I was worth to play bebop.”  He gigged on the vibrant D.C. scene, violating the school’s curfew (“I had a agreement with the door monitor to let me back in; when the door was locked, I jumped over the wall, which wasn’t too high”), and frequently made the three-hour drive to Philadelphia for weekend jobs.

After his dramatic departure from school, Golson returned to Philadelphia, and some months later, on Ray Bryant’s recommendation, landed a gig with the guitarist Tiny Grimes and his Swinging Highlanders in Atlantic City.  “It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I had no other offer,” Golson says.  “So I took the cup of tea.  We wore Scottish kilts and the little tam with the tassel on it.  On the first night I put on my kilts, and I had to walk the bar.  All the ladies were pulling up my kilt.  Well, I had my underwear on, but nobody told me I had to wear a bathing suit until after the fact.”

It wasn’t all fun-and-games; Grimes, who had been Art Tatum’s guitarist for the first part of the ’40s, took from that experience a penchant for playing any tune, without warning, in any key, keeping everyone on their toes.  And although Golson spent the first half of the fifties playing a succession of similarly functional jobs, he gleaned consequential information from each of them.

“I saw John Coltrane stepping over drinks on the bar,” he relates.  “We all did it.  But none of it was a waste of time.  It gave you a feeling straight across the board what jazz was all about, where it came from.  You function according to the situation; if the situation changes, then you change to meet the situation.  No sesquipedalian words in the Rhythm-and-Blues!”

Golson dates his interest in composition to the realization that his home-grown symbology for transcribing solos was insufficient.  “I became pretty good at writing down what they were playing, and realized that if I could do this, then maybe I could write music other people could play,” he says.  Duke Ellington was an early hero; so was Tadd Dameron, whose arrangements Golson played as a teenage member of a well-drilled 17-piece orchestra in Philadelphia led by the young Jimmy Heath.  Later, during 21 months on the road with the popular R&B singer Bull Moose Jackson, Golson became close to Dameron, the band’s pianist; soon he was allowed to recruit serious Philly brethren like trumpeter Johnny Coles, bassist Jymie Merritt and drummer Philly Joe Jones.

“We started to play some of Tadd’s things in between Bullmoose Jackson’s hits,” Golson relates.  “Moose enjoyed playing these pieces more than the things he was making his money at, although we never recorded any of them.

“Tadd showed me everything he knew.  Once he was doing an arrangement for Duke Ellington, and let me copy it, which I did for nothing, because I was able to eviscerate what he did, lay it bare, and look at its component parts.  He taught me to be a dearth writer.  He didn’t make two horns simulate a large band, but it didn’t sound abbreviated either.  With two or three horns, you draw upon each instrument’s outstanding characteristics.  The trapset has the bass drum, the snare drum, the cymbal, the ride cymbal, the hi-hat cymbal; the piano is really three instruments — the high end, the mid-range and the low.  You have to be selective about notes, and pick the two outstanding ones.”

In June 1953, Dameron hired Golson for an extended summer engagement in Atlantic City with his Dameronia nonet.  Then Golson briefly worked with a Lionel Hampton unit that included Clifford Brown, Art Farmer, Quincy Jones, Gigi Gryce, and Jimmy Cleveland.  He toured with Johnny Hodges (Coltrane and Richie Powell were in the band), then joined alto saxophone virtuoso Earl Bostic (“the technician of all technicians”) from August 1954 until June 1956.  Bostic afforded Golson many opportunities to write, including a kaleidoscopic modernist arrangement of “All The Things You Are” that the leader so enjoyed digging into that he doubled Golson’s fee.  During this time Golson penned tunes like “Out Of The Past” and “Whisper Not,” distributing lead sheets “all over the country” to general indifference.  Then he moved to New York.

“I hadn’t recorded anything, but I was no stranger,” Golson states.  “When I was in high school, one of my uncles was a bartender at Minton’s Playhouse, and I visited him a lot!  Teddy Hill would let me in because I was his nephew.  And the various Rhythm-and-Blues groups I played with always came through New York, whether to play the Apollo or meet for rehearsals.  I’d stay over, see the bands, get to know musicians.  But New York is a strange place.  You can’t go back and forth.  Either you’re here or you’re not.  When I moved, things started to pick up.”

Specifically, John Coltrane presented Miles Davis with “Stablemates,” Davis recorded it, and, as Golson puts it, “people retrieved my tunes from under the rug or out of the trash, and started recording my stuff.”  Meanwhile, Golson, who was “getting restless” with the tedium of Bostic’s repertoire, took to detuning the leader’s electric guitar on Delta and Panhandle gigs, escalating the mischief until one night in Seattle, during a Bostic clarinet solo, he raced to the front of the stage, tenor in hand, and pretended to hurl it into the crowd.  A week after Bostic let him go, Dizzy Gillespie hired him to replace the departing saxophonist-arranger Ernie Wilkins, another Golson influence.

“People associate Dizzy Gillespie with the high notes and fast velocities, the force and the power — but he was a compassionate trumpet player,” Golson emphasizes.  “He and Art Farmer were unique in being able to play unexpected notes that were so beautiful and fit so well that your heart intuitively would say, ‘Yes, yes!’  It’s always good to know for whom you’re writing; the rewards are so much better if you write for personalities, as Duke Ellington did or Count Basie’s arrangers.  You know they’re going to do your music justice, and often enhance what you’ve written, which is one of the real rewards.”

In 1958-59, Golson worked with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, where he found a perfect template on which to stamp his sensibility.  He recruited Philly heroes Lee Morgan (from Dizzy Gillespie’s band), Bobby Timmons and Jymie Merrit, and incorporated Blakey’s extraordinary four-limb independence and command of drumkit sonics in new compositions like “Blues March,” “Along Came Betty” and “Are You Real?”  He established the orchestrational sound that defined every subsequent iteration of the Messengers.

Conversely, playing with Blakey irrevocably altered Golson’s attitude towards his instrument.  “One thing that Art taught me to do — painfully — was to project,” Golson notes.  “During my early gigs with him, he might play one of those drum rolls he was famous for four bars before the end of the chorus.  They had a way of getting louder as they went along, so loud that it drowned me out, and I would stand there pantomiming, for all intents and purposes.  One night he added a few downbeats on the bass drum and a few strokes with the cymbal to underscore what he had done, and then, to make doubly sure I got it, he screamed across the bandstand to me, ‘Get up out of that hole!’  Then it all sort of came together, and I started trying to play more forcefully.

“One night during my first week with Art at the Cafe Bohemia, Thelonious Monk came in.  When I came off the bandstand, he said to me, ‘You play too perfect.’  I knew it wasn’t a compliment.  Art Blakey was standing on the side, snickering like that little dog in the cartoon.  Monk let me stew for 15 or 20 seconds, looking at me all the time through his sunglasses with the bamboo temples on them, and he said, ‘You’ve got to make mistakes to discover the new stuff.’  I thought about that.  The next night I came in, and played like a man taking leave of his senses, trying to get away from the well-worn patterns I’d fashioned for myself, like mathematics — and music is anything but that.  I was jumping off cliffs and bridges, standing in front of trains!  That started to move me out of where I was before — ‘mellifluous,’ ‘sweet.’  ‘charming’ are words people used.  I wanted more fire and articulation.  I had a lazy tongue; that old style, where your tongue doesn’t touch the reed much, and your fingers do all the work.  But the tongue also has to work, to define, to separate notes and ideas.  That’s what I worked on.  I guess I’m still working on it.”

In 1959, Golson decided it was time to venture on his own, and formed the Jazztet with Art Farmer, a companion on numerous ’50s projects.  “What attracted me to Benny was the warmth of his ensemble writing,” Farmer recalled in a 1994 interview on WKCR.  “He writes melodies that sing and stay in your head once you hear them, and constructs a harmonic framework that the improviser feels very comfortable with — not that it’s always easy — to construct their own melodies during their improvisation.  I don’t know where I would be without his tunes.”

Piggybacking off a high-visibility debut at Manhattan’s Five Spot opposite Ornette Coleman’s quartet in its first New York appearance, the Jazztet had a successful four-year run, playing numerous engagements and making six records before it disbanded in 1962.  With a young family to raise, Golson became more involved in New York’s commercial scene; in 1967, at the urging of Oliver Nelson and Quincy Jones, he moved to Hollywood, shed “tenor saxophonist” from his c.v., and after a humbling initial rough patch became a profitably busy studio freelancer.

“For seven or eight years I didn’t play my horn at all,” he says.  “I could have used it as an ornament or put dirt in it and planted flowers.  I did not like my sound or my style, what I was playing wasn’t reaching my heart, and I didn’t know what to do about it.  I was studying composition privately, I wanted to do some things I hadn’t done before in composition; once I moved I put all my energy into that, and the playing fell aside.  But the thinking process was working the whole time, and when I finally picked up the horn again in the late ’70s, I sounded different, although it took about ten years before I felt comfortable again.  I had to get my imagination oiled up.”

Golson emerged from improvisational hibernation in 1980 fully committed to hardcore jazz.  “I take more chances now,” he says.  “I don’t know if I can jump over the hurdle, but I’ll feel compelled to try.  To move ahead you have to take chances, otherwise, you’ll level off, and time, in its indefatigable forward course, will relegate you to history.  “

Golson and Farmer hewed to the freedom principle when they reconstituted the Jazztet in 1983, and that spirit underlies every Golson album and performance from then until “One Day Forever.”  “We used less written music the second time around,” Golson says.  “Let’s allow the personalities to express their inner thoughts rather than see how they can play as an ensemble what I’ve written.  Jazz is all about improvisation.  Nobody comes to hear the melody chorus after chorus.”

Speaking of melody, Golson has tickets for a Metropolitan Opera performance of “Il Trovatore,” and our conversation is winding down.  Before we part, he offers a few final words of wisdom.

“Schools teach the rules, and we should know them,” he offers.  “But I concern myself with ‘Why?’  And ‘Why not?’  ‘You can’t because the rule says you can’t.’  ‘Why not?!’  I do what I do because I want to do it.  And at this late date, I want to get better at what I do.  I’m not a young man any more.  But why should I be satisfied with what I’m doing?  I’ll never be satisfied.

“I often use young players.  Many of them are innovative, and are ascendant when they join me.  Hearing them keeps my mind sharp; I don’t get jaded with the music that surrounds me.  That helps me retain the spirit of adventure that all jazz musicians should have — walking two steps into the darkness of the unknown, waiting for things to jump out at you, to free things from the confines of your imagination, things sometimes you didn’t even know are there.  After I left Howard, I drove a furniture truck.  Jazz is so much better!”

[-30-]

Benny Golson Profile (10-15-95):

[MUSIC:  Messengers, "Are You Real" (1958-Olympia)]

TP:    I’d like to start with the third degree right away and take you back to Philadelphia and your early days in music.  You were born in Philadelphia in 1929.  Was music always part of your background?  Was your family musical?  Was it something you took to right away?

GOLSON:  No, I didn’t take to it right away.  I had two uncles who played piano, and at that time I fancied that they were absolutely extraordinary.  But as time went on, I realized that they weren’t very good at all.  What used to amaze me… It seemed like we always had an upright piano wherever we were, and before school, pre-school age (I guess  I was 3 or 4 or something like that), I used to hear them play this piano, and when they would finish I would go over and look at the keys and wonder how did they get those keys to say all of the things that they were saying musically.  As I got older, I decided that I would try to see what I could do.  I think I was even worse than they were.  But I kept at it; it fascinated me.  Finally, my mother asked me, “Would you like to take piano lessons?”  Well, I’d never thought of that.  And I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”  Well, that was quite an investment during those days.  I mean, the piano teacher would come to the house, like they did during those times, 75 cents a week for the lesson.  Which was quite an investment.  I mean, at that time things were a little mean.

I really got into the piano, so much so that after a few years I fancied that I wanted to be a concert pianist.  Of course, that was quite an aberration in the area I lived.  All you heard was the Blues there!  Yet I proceeded to try to follow that idea…

TP:    So your reading skills were well developed as a child, I’d take it, if you were going in a Classical direction.

GOLSON:  Oh, yes.  I’ll tell you about that in a minute.  My teacher used to give piano recitals.  This was the time to show off all the students and let the parents know that they’re not wasting their money.  I was scared to death every time these things came up, once a year.  But I got very good at it…until I heard Lionel Hampton’s band, live at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia, and a fellow named Arnett Cobb came out to the microphone and played that solo on “Flying Home.”  And from that moment on, the piano began to pale.  My mother let me off the hook, because she wanted me to learn to play the piano and play the organ in church, and I had agreed to all this because it sounded okay at the time.  But she let me off the hook.  The piano just sort of fell by the wayside, and the saxophone took over.

TP:    I guess the hormones were starting to rise, and the saxophone was a more charismatic instrument.

GOLSON:  Oh yeah, I was into it by then.

TP:    Had you had any experience with wind instruments prior to hearing Arnett Cobb?

GOLSON:  Absolutely not.  That was all foreign to me.  It was all piano as far as I was concerned.

TP:    The name of your piano teacher.

GOLSON:  Jay Walker Freeman.  Nobody ever asks me that.  He left me after about five years, I guess, and he went to teach at a university.  By the time I got to college, though, I didn’t really want to pursue the piano.  I wanted to pursue the saxophone, but piano was mandatory for the first two years — so I’d had a little head start.

TP:    As a kid, what sort of repertoire did he have you playing?  I take it you were at a point where you were able to play certain pieces in the repertoire.  What interested you and what were you performing?

GOLSON:  I remember, I guess at the height of my brief career as a pianist, on one of the recitals that I’d rehearsed quite… Everything we had to commit to memory for the recitals.  There was a piece called “The Bumblebee.”  Not “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” but it was certainly reminiscent of it, and it moved along quite swiftly.  The night of the concert… Sometimes when you hear your name called, it strikes fear in your heart.  “And now, Benny Golson.”  And at that moment, I forgot everything.  I couldn’t even remember how it started!  And as I was walking up to the stage, I was thinking, “So this is how it ends.”  I couldn’t even remember what note it started with.  It was incredible!  But as soon as I got to the piano, I put my hands over the piano, and it was sort of automatic.  I was so scared that I played that piece faster than I have ever played it.  And my teacher marvelled at it.  That was my high point.  Then after that I took a dive.

TP:    Concurrently, playing Classical piano, were you listening to Jazz and vernacular music on the radio or records or whatever?  Was that part of your experience?

GOLSON:  I used to hear the Blues.  My mother used to buy these records by Lil Green and Big Bill Broonzy and things like that, and I used to say, “How can she listen to that horrible music?”  No, I wasn’t there.  I was somewhere else with the European music.  I changed later.

TP:    After hearing Arnett Cobb, I guess, or around that time.

GOLSON:  Yes.

TP:    What brought you to the Earle Theater to hear Lionel Hampton if you were so exclusively interested in Classical music?

GOLSON:  Young curiosity.  That was it.  I mean, Earl Bostic was in that band at that time, the technician of all technicians.  He came out and he played, as we said, snakes.  He played everything playable on that darn alto saxophone.  And I just sat there and listened.  But when Arnett Cobb came out… See, I wasn’t prepared for any of this.  The whole thing got me.  Watching the curtain swing open, the lights come up, the bandstand roll dramatically forward toward the audience, everybody dressed alike, the lights playing on the instruments, and the sound of the music coming live… I’d never seen anything like this.  I was overwhelmed by it.  And the icing on the cake was Arnett Cobb coming out playing that solo.  I became a groupie.

TP:    On Arnett Cobb, huh?

GOLSON:  Sort of, yeah. [LAUGHS]

TP:    So did that then start taking you into studying other tenor saxophonists, the major stylists of the time?

GOLSON:  Oh yeah.

TP:    Let’s talk about the process of your development as a tenor saxophonist.

GOLSON:  Arnett Cobb was my first influence.  He was the one responsible for my going in that direction.  Quite naturally, being an aspiring saxophone player, you start buying saxophone records.  Believe it or not, I listened to Tex Beneke with Glenn Miller, and that was one of my favorite bands at that time, and Bud Freeman and Eddie Miller, and Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster.  But somehow, Don Byas walked into my heart, and occupied a large part of the space there.

TP:    Which of his performances did you hear that affected you?  Perhaps you could go into detail, taking yourself out of being an aspiring 14-15-year-old saxophone player, and talk about Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas and what they were doing in the 1940′s.

GOLSON:  Well, I heard Coleman Hawkins before I heard Don Byas, his classic solo on “Body and Soul.”  It was so popular that it was on all the jukeboxes in our neighborhood — and it was a Black neighborhood.  You could walk down the street any day and hear Coleman Hawkins playing “Body and Soul,” which is quite unusual today, to go to neighborhoods and hear anything like that.  But eventually, I heard Don Byas play on a recording with Dizzy Gillespie, “52nd Street Theme.”  I couldn’t believe it, the way he got over that horn.  He became my idol at that moment.  Of course, I continued to like Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, but Don Byas to me had something a little special.  His sound and the velocity that he had when he moved over the horn.  It didn’t sound strained or manufactured.  It sounded quite natural, the way he did it, and I was straining like I don’t know what to try to do that.  I was a neophyte then.

TP:    Were you going around to hear a lot of bands at that time?  When the big bands would come along with a tenor player, would you try to catch them in person?

GOLSON:  I was a little too young to go to the clubs.

TP:    But at the Earle Theater you’d go to hear bands?

GOLSON:  Oh, yeah, whenever I could.

TP:    So did you get to see Don Byas with Count Basie, let’s say, coming through?

GOLSON:  No.  By the time I got to see him live, I got to know him as a friend… No, during that time I didn’t, unfortunately.

TP:    I heard a story from Jackie McLean where Charlie Parker had come back from Europe, Jackie McLean was maybe 19, he said, “How was it there?” and Bird said, “I had a wonderful saxophone lesson over there.”  Jackie McLean thought it might be Marcel Mule, the great Classical saxophonist, but Charlie Parker said, “No, it was Don Byas.”

GOLSON:  Absolutely.

TP:    Did this interest you very much then in Bebop and the new music coming up in the 1940′s?

GOLSON:  Oh, definitely.  It changed my life.  Dizzy Gillespie changed my life.  My life had two beginnings, Ted.  When I was born of my mother and father and when I heard Dizzy Gillespie.

TP:    When was that?

GOLSON:  1945.

TP:    Earle Theater?

GOLSON:  No, it was Academy of Music, a concert.  Elliot Lawrence’s band was there, featuring a young new trumpet player at that same concert, 17 years old, named Red Rodney.  Don Byas was there with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Slam Stewart on bass, Al Haig, I’m not sure who the drummer was.  But the rhythm section hadn’t really caught up to what Charlie Parker and Diz were doing.  John Coltrane and I and Ray Bryant were there, and when we heard them play this music we just couldn’t believe it.  John was playing alto like Johnny Hodges and I was trying to sound like Arnett Cobb, which is completely different.  Ray Bryant was sounding somewhat like Eddie Heywood and other piano players of the time, I guess.  When we heard them play, for example, a song that was so strange, it was quite aberrational to us then, John looked at me and said, “It sounds like snake charmer’s music.”  I looked at him and agreed, “Yes, it does!”  It was “A Night In Tunisia.”  We’d never heard any Jazz like that.  It was foreign!  They played an interlude, and Charlie Parker made the 4-bar break where he doubles up.  We almost fell out of the balcony!  We’d never heard anything like that.  It wasn’t just a good performance.  We heard music that we had never heard before!  I mean, our blood must have been boiling in the veins, we were so effervescent.  We were so taken by all of this, that when the concert was over we went backstage (and of course, as kids; I think I was 16 and John was 18) and got all the autographs.

But we followed Charlie Parker out of the theater and into the street.  Now, Don Byas was my idol.  But what Charlie Parker was doing that night was so completely different than I had ever heard, I had to try to find out what it was about.  So we proceeded to walk up… He was on his way over to another club about four blocks away called the Downbeat, where the local rhythm section was going to be playing with him.  The rhythm section was Philly Joe Jones, Red Garland and Nelson Boyd on bass.

TP:    In 1945?

GOLSON:  Right.  They were just a little older than us, and they had a jump on us.  While we were walking on Broad Street, John asked him could he carry his horn, so he was carrying his horn for him, and I was asking him what kind of horn did he play, and what kind of reed, and what number reed, and what did he do — all these dumb questions.  But he was nice to us! [LAUGHS] And when we got to the club, we were too young to go up there.  The club was on the second floor.  So we just stood outside all night, until they finished, dreaming, “What if?  Suppose.”  When it was over… We were in South Philadelphia, where the club was. We never had any money.  So we walked from South Philadelphia back to North Philadelphia.

TP:    A dangerous walk sometimes.

GOLSON:  Oh, it wasn’t dangerous at that time.  We weren’t aware of anything but the music that we had been hearing that night, and we were dreaming, forecasting… We were trying to be some kind of harbingers.  We wanted to be a part of what this was.  And we didn’t know what it was, and we didn’t know how to even start.

John called me a little bit later, and he said, “Did you try any of that stuff that Mr. Parker was telling us?”  I said, “yeah,” like what kind of horn and the reed and the mouthpiece.  He said, “Did anything happen?”  I said, “No.”  He said, “Me either.”  We didn’t even realize it wasn’t those physical things; it was what the man had in his mind, his concept!

TP:    I take it you subsequently took every possible opportunity to hear Charlie Parker play, when he’d come through Philadelphia.

GOLSON:  Not only Charlie Parker.  Whoever it was.  Whoever it was, I figured it could help me, as it were, to climb another rung in the ladder, to wherever.  And we didn’t know wherever we were going, but wherever it was, we wanted to try to go anyway, and find our way along the way — searching.

TP:    What was your studying process?  Would you listen to his records, transcribe the solos, or did you have a teacher in high school?

GOLSON:  You bet.  All of the above.  I had a teacher.  We would listen to the records.  In fact, that’s how I got interested in writing.  Writing the solos out.  I had my own crude way of doing it, because I didn’t know the syncopation, so each note that they played, I just made a circle, a goose-egg.  So I had the right notes, but I was the only one who could play it.  I was the only one who knew the syncopation to it.  But I realized later that that wasn’t good enough; I had to actually learn how to write it the way they were playing.  Then I got pretty good at that, and then I realized, “My goodness, if I can do this, then maybe I can write music so other people can play it, and groups of people can play together.”  That’s when I started to become interested in arranging.

TP:    This gives me an opportunity to combine two questions, your arranging and your contemporaries and peers in Philadelphia.  You just mentioned some very heavy names, John Coltrane, Ray Bryant, Philly Joe Jones, Nelson Boyd, Red Garland I guess had come to Philadelphia after his time in the Army… Talk about your coterie, your circle of friends, the types of situations you performed in, and where you were musically at the time.  Well, you told us that you were into Bebop.

GOLSON:  I was trying to get into it, but it was quite hard for us.  It wasn’t like it is today where the musicians from my time period try to encourage the young ones coming along.  It was just the antithesis of that.  When I was coming up, the older musicians who played the other style, the other style being the style before Bebop…I hate that name, but before that style…tried to discourage us.  They would make very disparaging remarks, like:  “Where is the beat?”  “Where is the bass drum?”  “Where is the melody?”  “You guys sound like you’re playing with a mouth-full of hot rice.”  They didn’t understand.  They put us down.  And the more they put us down, the harder we tried to find out what it was all about.  Jimmy Heath, he was there; he was playing alto at the time…

TP:    He and John Coltrane were a few years older than you?

GOLSON:  John was two or three years older than me, and Jimmy about the same.  Percy Heath wasn’t even a musician then.  He was a pilot in the Air Force, I think, he came home, and he learned how to play quickly.  It was amazing how quickly he learned how to play.  Then he became a part of the scene.  Then other musicians you probably wouldn’t know about, if I mentioned.

TP:    Well, name some names.

GOLSON:  Calvin Todd was a trumpet player there who had a big band.  He was young, a teenager or in his early twenties, and he had a big band that was pretty good.  Jimmy Heath had a big band, and John and I were in that band.  Nelson Boyd ended up being the bass player, Specs Wright…

TP:    That’s the band that tried to play a lot of Dizzy Gillespie’s arrangements.

GOLSON:  You bet.

TP:    That’s very advanced for a group of teenagers.

GOLSON:  That’s right.  All the seats in that band were coveted.  I’ll tell you, everybody wanted to be in that band.  But John Coltrane and I were fortunate enough to be in it, somehow, and we were so happy about it.  And it wasn’t about the money.  We weren’t making any money.  But we were having a lot of fun, and then we were learning as we were going along.  Tadd Dameron wrote some things for the band because he liked the idea that these kids were trying to do something of value, trying to move ahead.  Another arranger named Johnny Acea wrote some things for us.  Leroy Lovett.  These were all professional arrangers.  Then Jimmy was trying to write some things, I was trying to write some things.  So they helped us.  It was like giving birth.  Every time you’d write something, you had a chance for somebody to play it, and you’d sit there hoping that the baby turned out to be normal.

And our parents encouraged us.  We’d go down to Jimmy’s house, and his parents were so sweet and loving… We would push the furniture to the side, and make enough room for 15 guys, and have a big band rehearsal.  We’d rehearse during the summertime, the windows were up, and the whole neighborhood would sit out on the steps and listen to the band.  And the same thing at my house.  Just move the furniture out, move everything into the kitchen.  We couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for the support of our parents.

TP:    A lot of your contemporaries playing saxophone were captivated by Lester Young, and their styles went in that direction, and you haven’t mentioned him in your list of influences.  Did you admire him at that time?

GOLSON:  I loved Lester Young and I love Lester Young.  But I can’t be two people at the same time, so I had to make a choice.  And it had to be the school that I chose — Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, Ben Webster, and later Dexter Gordon.  Lester Young was fantastic, but I chose not to go in that direction.  Unfortunately, people overlook Lester Young, I guess because he was laid back the things he played.  But I heard him play things that were fast!  Incredible.  He knew what he was doing.

TP:     You entered Howard University at age 18, which would have been 1947?

GOLSON:  It was ’47.

TP:    Did you go there as a music major, with the intention of developing your musicality in the academic environment?

GOLSON:  Yes, with those things that you mentioned.  But the curriculum that I found myself in was one wherein I would wind up being a teacher.  Which was a little discouraging.  Because I stepped back and looked at it, and I said to myself, “These teachers had someone teach them what they’re teaching me.  They’re going to teach me what they have been taught, and I in turn will teach someone else what I have learned from them, and they will teach someone…”  I said, “When am I going to get a chance to use it?”  There were a lot of rules, you know.

My third year there, I became a rebel.  They would say things like “the fifth, the dominant has got to resolve to the tonic, this note has got to resolve here,” and I thought to myself, “Well, suppose it resolves somewhere else instead of there?”  “No, no, no, you can’t do that.”  That discouraged me a little bit.

So I took to doing my assignments the way I felt that I could do them.  Why do them any other way.  I remember the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I went to class one day, and she put the assignments on the piano and played them.  The classes were small, maybe 10 or 12 of us in the class, and she’d play.  “Ah, Neapolitan 6th, Mrs. Brown.”  “Oh yes, deceptive cadence here; oh, very good.”  Then she’d play the next one.  “Oh yes, I see you’ve done this.  Oh, very nice.  But you must not use fifths.  Ah, no parallel…”  Then she got to mine, and she played the first chord.  But the first chord had to resolve to the second chord, and that red pencil made a big X, then she went to the next one and she made another red X.  She looked like Zorro with the whip.  Finally, she didn’t get to the end of it.  She turned around, almost disgusted, I guess, and looked at me and said, “Oh, Mr. Golson, what have you done?”  I tried to think of all kinds of ways that I could show my contempt. So I stood up and my hands in my pocket and I sort of rolled from side to side, the way Thelonious Monk used to do, and put my head back looking halfway up the ceiling, and said, “That’s the way I heard it.”

TP:    To which she responded?

GOLSON:  I didn’t go over big at all. I don’t remember what she said, but it didn’t go over too big.  The next day, I put my things in my little broken-down car, and left — drove off into the sunset.  No, I wanted to do something else.  I didn’t want to follow the rules.  Why should you do everything always the same.  Music is an adventure.  It should be an adventure!  It’s not just something that happens when you walk down a corridor of time.  You want to find doors when you walk down that corridor.  You want to open those doors and find some surprises.

TP:    Well, before we send you off into the sunset, I want to find out what Washington was like for you, because there was a very strong musical community there.

GOLSON:  Oh, it was great.  Absolutely.

TP:    Were you gigging after classes, on the side, let’s say?

GOLSON:  Yeah, and that was a no-no.  But I had a agreement with the monitor on the door at night.  He would let me in.  And when the door was locked, the wall wasn’t too high; I’d come over the wall.  I was even going to Philly doing gigs on weekends.  I was playing at a club about six blocks from campus called Little Harlem that was frequented by a lot of people.  I came up to do a set, and there was one of the theory teachers sitting on the front table.  We’re not supposed to be doing that!  I said, “Oh, man, this is a drag.  They’re going to kick me out.”  It was over.  I had to play.  And he sat there.  He was cool.  Sterling Thomas; I’ll never forget his name.  After the set was over, he said, “Can I see you a minute?”  I said, “Yeah, this is it.”  I went over, and he said, “That was a nice set.” [LAUGHS] That was it.

TP:    What sort of music were you playing?  Was it a Bebop set?

GOLSON:  I was trying for all I was worth to play Bebop.

TP:    Who were you playing with?

GOLSON:  A trumpet who’s dead now, from Cleveland, Ohio — Carl Fields.  A piano player who later became Billie Holiday’s pianist, Carl Drinkard.  Fats Clarke was the drummer.  I can’t remember the bass player’s name.  But we were trying as hard as we could to do that.  Whatever the risk was, I had to do it.

TP:    Also in Washington at that time… Well, John Malachi had left Billy Eckstine and not gone back out…

GOLSON:  He was there during that time.  And subsequent to that he went out to play with Al Hibbler.  Leo Parker was still around, in and out of town during that time.  Charlie Rouse was there.  We looked up to him, because he had sort of “made it.”  Wesley Anderson, the trombone player, he was pretty good; he was in and out of town.  There was a tremendous saxophone player there named Carrington Visor(?).  He lives in Los Angeles now.  Oh, that guy could play.

There were a lot of good musicians there, and there were a lot of clubs.  During that same time, there were a lot of clubs in Philadelphia.  It was like they’d found a new way to life as far as Jazz was concerned.  Then unfortunately, they died.

TP:    Also in Washington and Philadelphia you had the theaters, and still throughout the ’40s the bands were coming in; in Philly, the Earle Theater and Academy of Music, and in Washington primarily the Howard Theater.

GOLSON:  Well, there was more than that in Philadelphia.  There was a theater out in West Philadelphia that was called The Fay’s, then they later changed the name to the Fans for whatever reason.  The Earle Theater was the main one; that lasted the longest.  But earlier on, there was one called the Nixon Grand, which was only three blocks from my house. Duke Ellington came there, as did Slim and Slam; those are the only two I remember seeing there.

TP:    Were you simultaneously a fan of any of the big bands that were coming through, or were you more exclusively into the Bebop combo aesthetic.  I’m talking about apart from Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band.  Did Duke Ellington thrill you as a 20-year-old, or the Basie band, or the other top bands  of the time?

GOLSON:  Ted, you have to understand.  I was young, I was aspiring and therefore I was highly eclectic.  I was trying to get it wherever I could.  Fats Waller came there with a band, and yes, I went to hear Fats Waller with Al Casey on guitar.  I never saw Duke Ellington’s band there.  He was there, but I didn’t see it; I was too young to know what it was all about, I guess.  There was a local band, Jan Savitt, who played there.  Georgie Auld came through there.  I’m trying to think of some of the other bands.  But I went to see a lot of them.  Some of the music I didn’t particularly like, but I thought I should know what it was about, so I could be broad enough what this thing called music, and Jazz in particular, was all about.  So I listened to lots of people and lots of music.  As I told you, during the war years one of my favorite bands was Glenn Miller, with the clarinet on top, and the way Tex Beneke used to sing and the way he played.  That appealed to me at that time.  I didn’t try to play like that.  But I loved it.

TP:    So in 1949-50, you’re driving off into the sunset from Washington, and where did you land?

GOLSON:  I landed back in Philadelphia, on my feet, thank goodness.  Right after that, the fellow that used to play with Art Tatum, Tiny Grimes, the guitar player, had a group.  Ray Bryant was already in that group.  Now, it wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I had no other offer.  So I took the cup of tea, and went out with Tiny Grimes and his Swinging Highlanders.  We wore Scottish kilts and the little tam with the tassel on it, the whole thing.  I remember the first night with them, we were playing Atlantic City, and I put my kilts on.  Nobody told me anything.  And I had to go step out on the bar and walk the bar.

TP:    In kilts.

GOLSON:  In kilts.  I wasn’t prepared for what happened.  And all the ladies were pulling up my skirt, this kilt.  Well, I had my underwear on.  Nobody told me.  And the guys were laughing.  I think they purposely didn’t tell me.  But then they said, “Benny, you’ve got to wear a bathing suit under it.”  I said, “Well, thanks for telling me after the fact!”  I mean, I could hardly play.  It was incredible.

TP:    Well, it sounds like you played some very entertaining venues during your formative years.

GOLSON:  Oh yes.

TP:    Any others that are particularly memorable you’d like to speak of?

GOLSON:  Well, I did some other gigs like that.  I worked with Bullmoose Jackson.  Now, you might laugh and think what a waste of time, but none of it was a waste of time.  You have no idea how those jobs helped to broaden you and help to spread your appreciation for the whole scope of what jazz was about.  I played gigs where I had to sway from side to side with funny-looking ties on, and singing “Rag Mop” and things like that.  We all did it.  I walked in one day and saw John walking on the bar and stepping over drinks.  We all did it.  We had to survive.  But it wasn’t a waste of time.  It gave you a feeling straight across the board what jazz was all about, where it came from.  Even the Gospel stuff.

TP:    In relation to what you’re saying, I gather that in the Bullmoose Jackson band, Tadd Dameron was briefly apart of that, Philly Joe Jones as well… Very strong musicians.  Was there any working out of let’s say higher musical ideas off-hours, on the road?  Talk a bit about the climate within the band, the attitudes and interactions.

GOLSON:  Okay, I’ll tell you about it.  Tadd Dameron was there, and it was a complete aberration, an anomaly.  Tadd Dameron and Bullmoose Jackson, whose name was Benjamin, were both from Cleveland, Ohio, and they knew each other as kids growing up in Cleveland.  Bullmoose ran into Tadd one day in New York and just happened to say, “Are you working?”  Tadd said, “No, I’m not working right now.”  He said, “Look, I need a piano player, and I know this is really not your kind of thing, but come down, make a few gigs and make some money with me, and when you’re ready to leave, you can leave.”  Tadd thought about it and said, “Well, okay.”  I’m so happy he did that, because when I joined the band he was the piano player.  Oh, you have no idea!  Because he was one of my idols as far as the pen is concerned.

Now, someone told Bullmoose Jackson about me, and he approached me about joining the band.  He happened to be Philadelphia with his group, and he’d been asking about tenor players in town.  I might have taken Frank Wess’ place.  I’m not sure.  Anyway, Bullmoose and the road manager, who was also the alto saxophone player, wanted me to come to their hotel room to play some music with them — they wanted to see if I could read music.  So I went down, and we did, and they liked it, and they said, “Hmm, do you happen to know of any trumpet player who might want to play who can read?” — because they had a lot of written music.  I said, “Yeah, I know one.  He’s an excellent reader.  Johnny Coles.”  They approached John, who didn’t have to take a test because they took my word for it; he could read really well.  They said, “Do you know a bass player?”  I guess he was revamping the whole band.  So I recommended Jymie Merritt.  Fine.  And they wanted a drummer.  I said, “Okay.”  “Has he got any experience playing this kind of music?”  “Yeah, he used to play with Joe Morris; he’s played a lot of rhythm-and-blues dates.” (That was before Rock-and-Roll.)  That was Philly Joe Jones.  Philly could play anything.  We used to have a gig locally, and Philly used to be the singer!  You never heard him sing, but he sang great.  And he played bass, and he played piano, and he was a comedian, too…

[END OF SIDE A]

We had some arrangements that he had written that belied the sound of the rhythm-and-blues band we were a part of.  Then Tadd had showed so many of his things to me that I began writing some things sounding like Tadd.  He would pull my leg a little bit and say, “It’s really a drag; people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, that was a great arrangement you did on such-and-such, Tadd,” — and it was an arrangement I had done.  He said, “what a drag.”  But he didn’t really mean that.

TP:    Would he sit down with you first-hand and show you how he was constructing things?

GOLSON:  Absolutely, he showed me.  This guy was great.

TP:    What were some of the devices that made Tadd Dameron specific for musicians out there that were the trademarks of his style?

GOLSON:  He taught me how to be selective about notes.  When you are a dearth writer… A dearth writer is when you are writing for a small number of instruments.  It’s much easier to write for a larger array of instruments.  Not easy, but easier.  Because you don’t have to approximate, you don’t have to simulate, you don’t have to try to sound like something — you’ve got the sound there. But when you’ve got two horns, you’re not going to sound like a 15-piece group with 15 musicians.  So you have to try to simulate, you have to try to give the impression.  Then doing that, you have to draw upon all the outstanding characteristics of all the instruments — really.  The bass drum, the snare drum, the cymbal, the ride cymbal, the hi-hat cymbal, the piano — which is really three instruments, the high part of it, the mid-range and the low.  And picking the best sounding notes.  If you’ve got two horns, you’re only going to pick two.  You’ve got to pick the two outstanding ones.

I learned those kinds of things from him, and I went on to develop my own kinds of things, too.  But he gave me a jumping-off point.  I remember while he was in the band he did an arrangement for Duke Ellington, and he let me copy it.  I copied it for nothing, because I got a chance to sort of eviscerate what he had done, and lay it bare, and look at it in its component parts there, and that was helpful.  I did that, Quincy did, we all did those things.  We would get arrangements by people we liked, and look at the score, and tear it apart, and see how did they arrive at this.  We had already heard the recording; “so this is how they got that sound — mmm-hmm,” and you file it away.

Then you come up with your own things, too.  Walking two steps into the darkness of the unknown is healthy, because in doing so you will always discover things awaiting your discovery of them.  They’re there.  You just have to find them.  And when you find some of these things, you can make them your own.  You don’t always have to be eclectic and copy other people’s things.  That’s a beginning.  But as you advance, you come up with things of your own.  And the next thing you know, people are trying to find what you’re doing.

[MUSIC: Tadd Dameron/Clifford/BG, "Theme of No Repeat" (1953); Dizzy Gillespie, "Birks Works" (1957), DG Octet, "Blues After Dark" (1958), DG/E. Wilkins, "Left Hand Corner" (1958), DG Octet, "Out of the Past" (1958), Diz BB, "Whisper Not" & "Stablemates" (1957), Diz BB at Newport, "I Remember Clifford" (1957)]

TP:    Listening to those right now, what’s your assessment of these recordings?

GOLSON:  I am reminded all over again what a genius Dizzy Gillespie was.  I mean, he plays with such compassion.  On the opening of “Stablemates” he played that melody with such compassion that one might have thought, if they didn’t know the melody, that it was another kind of song.  When people think of Dizzy Gillespie they usually think of the high notes and all the fast notes, and the force and the power — but he’s a compassionate trumpet player.  And the thing about him (Art Farmer has it, too) that’s so unique, they’re able to play what I call other notes when they play.  Some people play and they play predictable notes.  But trumpet players like Dizzy Gillespie and Art Farmer are able to play other notes, unexpected notes.  That does something to you emotionally.  The notes they play are so beautiful and they fit into the scheme of things so well that your heart is intuitively saying, “Yes, yes.”

TP:    I’d also imagine that, as a composer and arranger, it spurs you to fresh thinking when you hear such imaginative soloists interpreting your work.

GOLSON:  Absolutely.  I’ve always contended that as a writer… I don’t like to use the word “arranger,” because an arranger as such does more; he composes and all of these things.  I call them a writer.  When people write, it’s always good to know for whom you’re writing, if possible.  The rewards are so much better if you write for personality.  Duke Ellington did it for his band.  Whoever did Count Basie’s arrangements knew who the personnel was at the time.  They didn’t come and go too quickly, so you could plan things around certain people, and you know what to expect before you write it.  Otherwise, you’re writing vague and hoping that things come off.  But if you write certain things with people in mind, you know that they’re going to do your music justice, and many times even enhance what you’ve written — and that’s one of the real rewards.  Dizzy was like that.  Art Farmer is like that.  John Coltrane was like that.  They bring so much to it that it helps to elevate what you’ve already done, to make the spotlight a little brighter.

TP:    Well, it was a long road from 1953 and your Rhythm-and-Blues experiences up to joining the Dizzy Gillespie band in 1956, and in this conversational segment we’ll seek to explore some of those pathways.  Someone called shortly after we began the music in that set, and asked me to ask Benny Golson about Daisy Mae and the Hepcats, which he said John Coltrane also played with.  He wondered about your memories of that situation.

GOLSON:  Now, whoever made that call is somebody that really knows something.  They’ve got the inside track on it.  I don’t think I would have mentioned that group by name.  But yes, Daisy Mae and the Hepcats were from Philadelphia, and John Coltrane was a part of that group.  They used to wear these funny kind of clothes, the funny ties and rock from side to side and sing things, and the little cocktail drums with the foot pedal that hits up underneath of it, and the singing… It was an entertaining group; that’s what it was.  But like I said, the rent-man didn’t care about aesthetics.  All he wanted was his rent.

TP:    What were the rooms like you’d play in with those bands, the milieu and the layout?

GOLSON:  People came there to drink and to be entertained.  A group coming in there to play some fantastic jazz wouldn’t have made it.  They had to have an entertaining group.  People were buying the drinks and clicking the glasses, and not only did they want to feel good from what they were drinking; they wanted to feel good according to what they were hearing.  And I worked in places like that, too.  The same person might remember Jimmy Preston, who was an alto player, and he sang — and it was an entertaining group.  We worked every weekend in Lawnside, New Jersey, at a nice place, indirect lighting, state-of-the-art furniture — and we came there to entertain the people.  That’s exactly what we did.  Jimmy used to get off the bandstand and walk around, and while he was playing with one hand he would take the other hand and drink anybody’s drink.  They didn’t know that he was serious about that.  That really wasn’t part of the act; he liked to do that! [LAUGHS] That’s what we did. We must have stayed at that place two or three years.

I’m just driving a point here.  There were many groups strictly to entertain the people.  What’s interesting is that what entertainers do is second-guess the public.  In other words, they do what they think the people want to hear.  Now, there is nothing wrong with being an entertainer.  But the primary difference between an entertainer and an artist is that an entertainer’s first  obligation is to play what he thinks the people want to hear.  On the other hand, an artist’s first obligation is to do what he feels in his heart.  Not annoy the audience, but hoping that they like it.  But he has to answer that thing inside of himself first, and that’s the primary difference.

TP:    It’s interesting, because let’s say twenty years before that there wouldn’t have been such a distinction between entertainment and art where instrumental jazz was concerned.  No?  The big bands, the dance bands were playing very creative music, and it was the popular music of the time.

GOLSON:  That’s right.  But they pulled apart somewhere.  After Dizzy Gillespie came on the scene, the road sort of divided, and they got further and further apart.  But each music is still consequential.  There is nothing wrong with the music that’s played when people are entertained.  That’s a certain kind of music, and who is to say that kind of music shouldn’t exist.  It should.

TP:    And it does.

GOLSON:  [LAUGHS] And it does.  Absolutely.  No one should decry anybody’s efforts when it comes to creativity.  Creativity is a global phenomenon.  It doesn’t belong to any one person or people, and we all share in it on one level or another, whether it’s taking a safety pin when you lost your button and fastening something or building a rocket that goes to the moon.  We all share in creativity.

TP:    I’d like to talk about some other stops along your developmental path.  You and John Coltrane both worked with, at one time or another (and I’m not sure if it was at the same time), Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges.  Discuss the circumstances and the personalities of both those incredible alto saxophonists as leaders.

GOLSON:  I think John played with Earl Bostic first.  He was the one who told me, although I sort of intuitively knew by things I’d heard Earl do in person with Lionel Hampton… He told me what a technician Earl Bostic was.  I didn’t join right after him, but when I came in a few saxophone players later, I discovered that Earl Bostic is probably one of the best technicians I have ever heard on the alto saxophone.  There were others who are very good.  Al Galadora, Rudy Wiedoft, Marcel Mule in Paris, Dick Stabile is another one… These names are popping into my mind as I talk.  Great.  But none of them could best Earl Bostic.  This guy was incredible, like a machine.  I was in awe of his technique.  I’m not talking about style, now.  I’m talking about raw technique and ability to get over the horn and do things.  He was one of the best I’ve ever heard.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody who’s gone beyond him technically, not even John — because John used to rave about him.

TP:    Just another question about Bostic as a leader.  Was there ever room for, say, creative and modern jazz within his set, let’s say on late sets and whatnot?  Was he interested in that?  Was he up on the new music of the early 1950′s?

GOLSON:  Absolutely.  He afforded me many opportunities to write.  I remember I wrote an arrangement one time on “All The Things You Are.”  It changed keys, it did all kinds of things, and he loved it.  One night in particular he really got into it, and it was just fantastic.  He was so taken by it… I remember after it was over I knew he was taken by it, because he came to me, reached in his pocket and said, “How much did I pay you for that arrangement?”  Whatever it was, I quoted the price.  He said, “Well, here’s some more,” and he gave some more money — and I don’t remember the amount either.

Oh yeah, he liked other kinds of music.  We played Baltimore once, and we had to play a matinee.  During the course of playing a matinee, he showed up on the bandstand with his clarinet, and he played fantastic clarinet.  We played “Cherokee” or some tune like that, and we played it through the keys — and he chewed it up.  Chewed it up.  He was a fantastic musician.  I asked him, “Earl, do you have just natural talent?  What happened?  How did you come to put all this together?”  He said, “When I was Oklahoma [I think he was from Tulsa], I knew I was coming to New York, and I had to get ready.  So what I did, for years I went to work.  At 8 in the morning I started playing, I took a lunch break, and I stopped at 5.”  He said, “I did that every day.”  And he when he came to New York, believe me, he was ready.  Because people like Sweets Edison, Don Byas, they told me when he came, boy, he was awesome.  He didn’t have to apologize to anybody.

Now, you asked about Johnny Hodges and John Coltrane.  When I first met John, he was playing alto, and his idol was Johnny Hodges.  One of my high school chums, who also played alto, told me about a new person who had moved into the projects, and it was John Coltrane.  He said, “He’s fantastic.  He plays just like Johnny Hodges.”  I said, “What?!”  This was before Bird and Diz.  The music was somewhere else.  If I can meet somebody who plays like Johnny Hodges, this will be fantastic.  And he’s our age, 18… So he said, “Well, I’ll bring him by your house tomorrow.”  So he did.  The doorbell rang, and I opened the door, and there was Howard, and standing down on the sidewalk was John, sort of like a country bumpkin, biting the side of his thumb.  He came in the house, and we just sort of stood there.  Kids are so stupid.  He was standing there by the couch with his horn in his hand, and his hat and coat on — [LAUGHS] and I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Play something!”  He was waiting for it.  He took his hat and coat off, whipped his horn out, and went into “Sunny Side of the Street.”  Well, my mother happened to be upstairs, and after he finished playing she said, “Who was that?”  I said, “It’s a new fellow I met named John Coltrane.”  After a while we started having sessions at my house, and sometime during that session she would holler down, “Is John down there yet?”  He would say, “Yes, Mrs. Golson.”  And we knew what that met.  We would have to stop and let John play “On The Sunny Side of The Street.”

TP:    A small price to pay for rehearsal space.

GOLSON:  Oh yeah.  I was a little embarrassed by it, so I said to her one day, “Mother, it’s kind of a drag.  We try to get together and do some things, learn some new things, and you holler down for these requests, mainly on ‘Sunny Side Of The Street’…” She didn’t let me finish.  She said, “This is my house; I’ll ask for what I want.”  I guess she was right.

But it turns out that John Coltrane later joined his former idol, Johnny Hodges.  He was playing tenor then.  I asked him, “Did you ever tell him that at one point he was your idol?”  He said, “No, I never said anything about it.”  It was like Charlie Parker.  He was playing somewhere, and Charlie Parker came in.  John was still playing alto at the time, and he was playing so much, Bird said to somebody, “who is this guy?”  Of course it was John Coltrane.  I heard the story, and when John came back to Philly, I said, “But did you tell him we were the two kids who were walking down Broad Street with him?”  He said, “No.”  Well, he wouldn’t have remembered anyway.

TP:    What was it like being on the road with Johnny Hodges in his own group?  Was it all a vehicle for him, or…

GOLSON:  Oh, no.  He gave other people a chance to play.  You know, as you’re coming along and you meet people, that’s one thing.  But when you meet them and then you play with them or in their group, it’s like little dreams coming true.  And here I was with Johnny Hodges.  I used to listen to him with Duke play all these great things, one of which was “On The Sunny Side Of The Street,” and then I’m in his band.  But how I got there is, John was already there, and they were enlarging the band to go on a special tour with Billy Eckstine and Ruth Brown and a group called the Clovers.  So they needed to enlarge the band.  Johnny wanted another saxophone player, and he asked John, “Do you know of any saxophone players?”  He said, “Oh yeah,” and he told them to get me, and that’s what happened.  So I got there.  So I did this tour with him.

TP:    Was it mostly blues and ballads and things he was famous for?

GOLSON:  That kind of thing, yeah.  Billy Eckstine sang his ballad, and Johnny did “Castle Rock,” and he had other things he played, and we played the Clovers’ music, and we played “Mama, Treat Your Daughter Mean” with Ruth Brown, and those kind of things.  It was a show.,

TP:    So you’re in your mid-twenties, traveling around the country on the Black theater circuit primarily and in the clubs, garnering a really broad range of functional experience.  When your first recordings came out, you were not known to the broader public, but you developed a range of contacts around the United States within the jazz community basically.  Fair to say?

GOLSON:  True.

TP:    The events that led you into Dizzy Gillespie’s band.

GOLSON:  Fortuitous.  I was with Earl Bostic, and we were out in Seattle… Well, let me back up a little bit before that.  Because something was happening to me, my mental state I guess you could call it.  We were playing the same tunes every night, and for the large part they featured Earl.  We played on certain tunes, but the tapestry really was Earl Bostic.  I sort of got tired.  I wanted to do something else.  But I had a job, I was making money.  When we went down South, he would bring this electric guitar of his on the scene, and he would play things that people liked in Texas and Mississippi and Oklahoma and wherever.  I did some terrible things.  During the intermission I would tighten one string and loosen another string, and tighten another string.  Now, when he came up, he never did re-tune it.  He would just pick it up, turn around and call the number, and kick it off and start playing.  I did that one night, and he started to play, and it sounded just terrible — and it was trying to tune it while he was playing it.  I guess he didn’t know what happened.  It would have been all right if I had let it alone, but I did it again some other night.  He started to suspect something.  But he still didn’t know it was me, see.

Another night we were playing somewhere.  I was getting restless.  I guess I wanted to be fired or something.  We were playing somewhere, and boy, he really had the crowd… He really knew how to get the crowds.  Some of the people were dancing, but most of the people were standing at the foot of the stage.  He really had them going.  I remember seeing Illinois Jacquet do something with his horn, and I thought that I would do it while Earl was playing his solo.  This is what got me fired.  He was playing his solo, and he got the crowd going.  I went to the back of the stage, behind the drummer, and I took the saxophone loose from my strap, and I came running from to the front of the stage with my horn back like I was going to throw it, then I flung my horn forward like I was going to release the horn — and the whole audience ducked.  They ducked down.  It was distracting.  That bothered him.  Well, I guess he had every right to be bothered.  And after the show, he said… He called everybody Partner, “Part-noh.”  He said, “Part-noh, I think I’m gonna have to let-cha go.”  Well, that was in Seattle.  He said, “I think you’ve had your time here.”

I understood, and I guess I was kind of happy.  But it came at the right time.  Because Ernie Wilkins, who was writing for Dizzy’s band and had been playing saxophone, was leaving that same week, and somebody mentioned me, and they said, “Well, I think he’s with Earl Bostic, but give him a call anyway.”  I had come back to New York, and they called me, and I was home — and I got the gig.  I’m glad I got fired!

TP:    You said you’d moved to New York by this time.

GOLSON:  Oh yes, I’d moved to New York.

TP:    When did you come to New York?

GOLSON:  I came to New York around ’55.

TP:    Had you making regular trips to New York?

GOLSON:  Oh yeah, definitely.

TP:    Did you go to 52nd Street, let’s say?

GOLSON:  No, that was before my time.  But my uncle used to be a bartender at Minton’s Playhouse, and I would come over to visit him.  Oh, I visited him a lot. [LAUGHS] And he would take me around.  Because I was his nephew, I could go in there.  I mean, they don’t allow kids in there, but Teddy Hill would let me in.

TP:    This was in the ’40s?

GOLSON:  It was before I got out of high school.  The mid-’40s, I guess.  I was a kid.

TP:    What are your memories of Minton’s?

GOLSON:  Well, when you came in, there was a place where the bar was in the front room, like, and I can’t remember if you went up some steps to where the band was playing, or you went down or it was on the same level.  It seems to me like you walked up some steps.  But this is where the bandstand was, and it was a little more intense back there than it was out at the front bar.  This is where the musicians were, and this is where the people came to really hear the music.  The people that sat out in the front I guess were just concerned with having conversation and drinking, which is fine if they made the distinction, because otherwise they’d be going on concurrently with the other people who were interested.  So it worked out all right.

,    And I got on that bandstand once.  Eventually I did.  I can’t remember that tenor saxophone player’s name… Jackie McLean called his name a couple of years ago, and I’d forgotten it.  When he called the name, I jumped up.  I don’t think he ever recorded, but boy, this guy could play.  Anyway, I played there once.  Gildo Mahones I remember was there; Joe Guy, a trumpet player, Lockjaw… I can’t remember all the different people there.  Some of them, I didn’t know who they were as a kid.  I just knew this guy was a trumpet player, or this guy was a saxophone player; I didn’t know their name.  But later I found out how famous the place was, after the fact.

TP:    Did you continue to see Charlie Parker play, or go out of your way to do it when he was around?

GOLSON:  I didn’t know Charlie, didn’t get to know him personally, unfortunately.  But I got to know just about everybody else.  Sometimes people escape you knowing them.  Once I said to somebody who we all know (I can’t remember who it was), “Why is it that we never met?”  Just circumstances weren’t that way.  But mostly everybody else, I did.  All the pictures that I had, all the photographs I had down at the foot of my bed on the wall as a teenager growing up, all those idols… Max Roach and I laughed.  I said, “Look, you occupied a very prominent place on my wall at the foot of my bed for years!” [LAUGHS] As did Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie.  You lay in bed, you look at their pictures and you dream.

TP:    Then you play with Dizzy Gillespie and arrange a piece for Coleman Hawkins and…

GOLSON:  Yeah, you get to know them all.  Don Byas gave me a box of reeds after I got to know him, and it said, “To my man Benny, from Don.”  I kept that box until it was falling apart because it was from him.

TP:    When you got to New York, a number of your contemporaries were living here, such as Philly Joe Jones, Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, Tadd Dameron.  So I imagine it wasn’t huge adjustment for you on settling here to begin establishing yourself amongst the very elite group of New York musicians.  Or was it?

GOLSON:  Oh, no.  I was no stranger.  Because when I was playing with various Rhythm-and-Blues groups, we would always come through New York.  We would play the Apollo, we would meet here for rehearsals or whatever it was, and I’d stay over, I’d go see bands, and I got to know musicians, so I wasn’t really a stranger.  But I was a stranger at the same time to the scene, certainly to the recording scene.  I hadn’t recorded anything.  But I had to be here.  New York is a strange place.  You can’t go back and forth.  Either you’re here or you’re not.  So I decided I should move here, and I did — and things started to pick up.  When you’re here, people pick up the phone, and you’re wherever they want you in 15 minutes or whatever it is.  You don’t have to get a bus or a train.  You’re here.  And that worked to my advantage, I think.

TP:    Was this when your real heavy period of writing began?  A lot of compositions from this period, ’55-’56-’57, you’ve performed ever since in various ways?

GOLSON:  Actually, the heavy period of my writing began before anybody knew about me.  But it’s a strange thing about talent.  Talent in and of itself doesn’t mean anything unless you have opportunity.  You can be the most talented guy, but you might be stuck out in Wacannomock(?), Wisconsin, and nobody ever knows about you.  You do need the opportunity, and I didn’t have the opportunity.  When I was traveling with these bands, Earl Bostic, Bullmoose Jackson, I was passing out lead sheets like they were calling cards.  Nothing ever happened.  I think James Moody recorded one of my things, a blues, and there was a long period before anything else happened.

John Coltrane was playing so great, and Hank Mobley was leaving Miles Davis.  Philly Joe had already left, gone to join Miles, and Miles asked him, “Do you know of any tenor saxophone players?”  Philly said, “Yeah, yeah.”  Miles said, “Can he play?”  Philly probably made the understatement of his life.  He said, “Yeah, he can play.”  As though, “Well, I guess, you know…”  So Miles said, “What’s his name?”  “John Coltrane.”  “Well, see if he wants to join the band.”  We found out about it, because we’d been rehearsing and playing jobs together and playing in various bands, and we used to be together all the time, almost every day.  So we all found out that John was going to join Miles Davis, and vicariously we all took the trip with him.

I saw him about two weeks later on one of the main streets in north Philadelphia, where we lived, Columbia Avenue, and I said, “John, how is it going?”  He said, “Oh, it’s great.  But you know, Miles needs some new tunes.  Do you have any tunes?”  I thought to myself, “Do I have any tunes?!”  But if you give people too many, it becomes confusing.  The more you do a thing, the less it means.  So I didn’t send a whole lot of tunes.  I sent one tune.  And I didn’t think any more about it, because I’d been giving tunes out half my life, it seemed, and nothing happened.  I ran into him about a month later, and I said, “Well, how is it going now?”  He said, “It’s going great.  You know that tune you gave me?”  “Yeah.”  “Miles recorded it.”  I said, “What?!  He recorded my tune?”  He said, “Yeah.  Man, he dug it.”  That was “Stablemates.”

Now, a strange thing happened.  All these lead sheets I’d been passing out all over the country, people must have heard the tune, seen my name on it and said, “Wait a minute; is this the same guy that gave me such-and-such?”, and maybe they went and got it wherever it was, from under the rug or in the trash.  They started recording my stuff.  That’s what got me started.  Miles Davis and John Coltrane are responsible for getting me started as a writer.  If it hadn’t happened that way, it might have happened some other way, or maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all.  You need opportunity, Ted.

TP:    Well, Dizzy Gillespie certainly provided an opportunity to record a number of your tunes in the big band situation, like “Whisper Not” and “Stablemates” and “I Remember Clifford”, to be specific.

GOLSON:  That came later, though.

TP:    In ’57.  But I was going to try to get to…

GOLSON:  Lead in, huh? [LAUGHS]

TP:    Yeah, you know how it is.  But I wanted to talk to you about the experience of being part of the Dizzy Gillespie band and how he functioned as a bandleader with you, and some of the personalities you encountered in Dizzy Gillespie’s 1956-1957 big band?

GOLSON:  Mmm-hmm.  You want to know it now?

TP:    Right now.

GOLSON:  Yeah, I can tell you.  Dizzy gave all of his men so much room to express themselves, those who were soloists.  Of course, we didn’t express ourselves individually when we came to play.    We had to become a composite person as it were.  We were given a greater expression as a group, so we had to strive for that, of course, but when it came to soloing and things like that… Now, Lee Morgan was in the band at the time, 18 years old, young upstart, and yet Dizzy featured him.  Some of the songs that he used to play, he gave to Lee to play.  He let him play on “Night In Tunisia.”  You have to take pride, insecurity and all that stuff, and throw it aside.  Apparently, Diz wasn’t affected by those things.  He recognized talent when he saw it, when he heard it, and he gave Lee free rein.  And he never tried to tell us how to play or what to play.  We were our own person when it came to playing the solos.  And we had many opportunities.  After he broke up the big band, for example, he formed a sextet, and lo and behold he chose me.  I thought he was going to pick Billy Mitchell, because Billy had more of the solos, but he chose me and a trombone player from Atlanta named Silly Willie.  We did that for just a little bit, then that was the end of it.

He was good, and he was fair.  Now, we didn’t make a lot of money.  But I learned so much.  Diz was one of those didactic kind of people.  He was a natural teacher, especially when it came to rhythms.  Boy, he had that rhythm down!

TP:    For instance, in the arrangements we heard earlier of “Stablemates” and “Whisper Not,  were Charlie Persip’s drum patterns Dizzy’s idea or something Charlie Persip worked out?

GOLSON:  No, that was Charlie.  But other things, like “Tin Tin Deo” and “Night In Tunisia” and “Begin The Beguine”, he told them how to play it, the beats, how to do it.  Charlie admitted that.  We learned a lot from Dizzy, from the way he played, and just listening to him talk and recalling things that had happened.  You pick up a lot like that, you know.

TP:    Well, the band was also a clearing house for some very talented arrangers apart from yourself, like Ernie Wilkins, who I know you wanted to say some things about, Quincy Jones, and some others.

GOLSON:  I learned so much music from Ernie Wilkins as far as big band writing.  It’s too bad that people like Ernie don’t get the credit that they deserve.  This was one of the finest arrangers on the scene.  He happens to be ill at the moment, and he’ll probably never be himself again.  His time is probably limited now, unfortunately, his wife told me.  But when he was going, boy, this guy’s music…his voicings was like plugging in to an electric outlet.  It was electrifying, almost physical sometimes, the sound, as though you could close your eyes and reach up and touch it and grab it and hold it.  That’s the way the music was.  And it was fresh.  His concept wasn’t dated, even though he was a little older than me.  He wasn’t afraid to take chances.  He had multiple things going on sometimes.  If you looked on paper you’d say, “Hmm, that might not work,” but it worked.  I learned a lot from him.  I’m sure Quincy did, too.

TP:    He seems to be one person who can work effectively in what might at first glance seem like different genres, such as the Basie band… Well, in your mind, in the 1950′s how distinct was the Dizzy Gillespie big band concept from what Basie was doing at the time?

GOLSON:  Different, but not necessarily better.  Just different.  I wouldn’t want you or anyone else to think that just because we were having so much fun, and it was modern, and it was so hitting and forceful and electrifying that it was better than anything else.  It was just different.  It was different than Basie.  It was different than Ellington.  It was different than the late Jimmie Lunceford.  Yet each one of those names I mentioned was consequential, and they could stand side by side with one another, and exist and give pleasure to a lot of people.  Good music.

[MUSIC:  Lee Morgan, "Domingo" (1957); BG, "Whisper Not" (1958); J. Cleveland, "All This and Heaven, Too"; BG, "You're Mine, You"; BG 6, "Out Of the Past"]

TP:    The next segment will focus on the relationship that in a sense catapulted you from your initial prominence coming to New York and also catapulted Art Blakey from being a well-known drummer to the leader of the Jazz Messengers.  Benny Golson had only a year-long relationship with the Messengers, from spring 1958.  I’ve heard you tell the story many times, but like Coleman Hawkins’ solo on “Body and Soul,” it’s endlessly entertaining…

GOLSON:  Boy, I’ve told it so many times.  I had just come to New York, and I decided that I didn’t want to travel at that particular time.  This was after Earl Bostic, after Bullmoose Jackson, after Dizzy Gillespie.  I wanted to stay in town a little bit so I could establish myself.  You’re peripatetic, you’re running around, you can’t get any roots.  You’re ubiquitous.  You’re everywhere at the same time.

TP:    Parenthetically, did the “New York Scene” and the early Riverside recordings from late ’57 happen before or after you left Dizzy?

GOLSON:  After.

TP:    So you’re starting to record and get your stuff out there.

GOLSON:  Right.  But this is even prior to that.  I got a call one evening from Art Blakey himself, asking me could I come down to sub at the now-defunct Cafe Bohemia.  I said, okay, I’d come down.  I went down, and we played.  They didn’t have a lot of things that were difficult as far as arrangements; it was just a little better than a jam session.  At the end of the night he asked me could he come the next night, because he was still having problems with whomever it was, something…a police car or something.  I enjoyed the first night so much that I said, “Yeah, I’ll play the second night.”  When I played the second night, he asked me, “Do you think you could make some gigs with us?” — which meant that I would have to go out of town.  I told him, no, I was sorry, I wanted to stay in New York and be kind of settled.  He said, “Okay, but can you finish out the week?”  That was my mistake.  I said, “Yes.”

I finished out the week.  But during the week, I had the occasion to sit down with him.  I knew during that time, he wasn’t making as much money as he should have been.  I don’t know how I found that out.  I said to him, “Art, you should be world-famous.  Have you been to Europe?”  He said, “No.”  I said, “You should have been to Europe many times.  You should be making a lot of money.  Your name in the jazz annals should be a household word!”

At any rate, at the end of that week he said, “I’m playing Pittsburgh next week.  It’s just one week, just six days; can you make it there?  I won’t keep you away too long.”  Well, now, I’ve already played a week with him.  Now I’m of a different mind than I was before because I’ve got a taste of him.  So I wanted a little bit more, intuitively, I think, because I said, “Yes.”  I must have.  So I went to Pittsburgh.  And as we neared the end of the week, he said to me, “Now, next week we’re in Washington; do you think you could make that with us?”  Now I’ve had two weeks of him and now I’m really digging it.  I’m really not speaking with the same mind now, because I said, “Yes!” again.  Besides, I went to college there; it was like my second home.  And after that I  never said anything about not wanting to leave New York again.  I became a member of the Jazz Messengers.

TP:    Who was the band?

GOLSON:  Bill Hardman on trumpet, John Houston from Philadelphia on piano, Spanky deBrest and Buhaina.  So we talked some more about the band. I said, “Art, you really should be in a different place than you are musically.”  and he looked at me with those big, sad cow-eyes, and said… I never expected this, really, because nobody knew who I was.  I was a young upstart in town.  He said, “Can you help me?”  My goodness, I never expected that from Art Blakey.  And I never expected what I said in return.  I said, “Yes, if you do exactly what I tell you.” [LAUGHS] I mean, I can’t imagine… The nerve of me!

TP:    Well, you’d seen maybe a thing or two during your years on the road with these various groups.

GOLSON:  A thing or two.  Not more.  And he said, “Okay.  What do I do?”  I said, “Art, you need a new band.”  He said, “Okay, tell them they’re fired.”  I said, “You tell them.”  “No, you tell them.”  “No, you tell them.”  Anyway, I don’t know who told them, but he said, “Who are we going to get if we get rid of this band?”  I said, “Well, I know a young trumpet player.  He plays pretty good.  He was with Dizzy.  He said, “Who is he?”  “Lee Morgan.”  “Can he play?”  I said, “Yeah.’  He said, “How old is he?”  I said, “He’s 19 now, I think.”  “19!?  Well, can he really play?  Can he come up to what we’re trying…”  I said, “Believe me, we can.”  And I added that he was from Philadelphia; I don’t want to leave that out.

“Okay, who can we get on piano?”  “There was a guy who used to play with Chet Baker and various other people.  He plays nice piano.  His name is Bobby Timmons.”  “Do you think he could do this?”  I said, “Yes.”  “Where is he from?”  “He’s from Philly.”

“What about the bass player?”  “Oh, there’s a guy who played with us with Bullmoose Jackson.  He also played with B.B. King.”  “Wait a minute.  Wait a minute!  We’re not playing that kind of…”  I said, “Trust me, Art.  This guy can play.”  “What’s his name?”  “His name is Jymie Merritt.”  “Where is he from?”  “From Philly.”  He said, “Wait a minute!  What is this Philadelphia shit?!”  So I said, “No, they all just happen to be from Philly and I know them, but you won’t be disappointed.”  So I called each one of them in turn, and they said, yes, they’d like to be part of the band.  We put the band together and I wrote some things for them…

TP:    Did you have a sound for the band in mind?  The band on Moanin’ has a distinctive aesthetic, where you take advantage of his ability to do a shuffle  and put his own imprint on that, or a march, or various styles.  It had a cohesion that may not have been evident in earlier versions of the Messengers from the past couple of years.  Did you have that sound in mind when you were writing the book, or did it just come out that way?

GOLSON:  I’m going to be monosyllabic to what you just said.  No.  I didn’t have anything in mind other than the music.  It just happened to turn out like that, fortunately.  But what I did say to him was, “Art, you need something that really features you.  I’ve heard you play, and you’re just like any other drummer.  After everybody else has played and said what they have to say, they leave the trimmings for you at the end.  You need something where you start playing at the very beginning.”  Then we were sitting there, thinking.  I said, “Now, what could you do?”  Then I thought about that introduction he played on “Straight, No Chaser,” where he showed his independence, two hands, two feet doing something entirely independent.  I said, “You’ve played everything there is to play, Art,” and I started to play.  “Except the march.”  Oh, how we both started laughing.  I said, “Wait a minute.”   And he said, “No!  You’re kidding!”  I said, “No, I’ve got an idea.  I’m not talking about the military.  I’m talking about with a little funk and soul in it, like Grambling College.  You know how they play, how they jazz up things and make it funky and syncopate.”  He said, “No, man, this is a jazz band.  We can’t play a march!”  I said, “Trust me.”  Somehow I used to say that to him all the time — “trust me.”  I couldn’t even trust myself.  I said, “Let me go home tonight and see what I can come up with.”

So I went home and came up with this thing and called it “Blues March,” because it’s a blues and it’s a march.  So we got to the rehearsal, and he said, “Okay, how do we start it?”  I said, “You start it.”  He said, “What do I do?”  I said, “Play like you used to play when you were in the drum-and-bugle corps.  Just play some rudiments.”  “How long should I play?”  “Play as long as you like.”  “How are you all going to know when to come in?”  I said, “Play the roll off?”  “What do you mean?”  “JUMP-DUMP, JUMP-DUMP, DURRRRHHH-RUMP-DUMP.”  When you do that, we know we’re supposed to come in.”  He said, “Oh, man, I don’t think this is going to work.”  I said, “Let’s try it.”  So he did it and he gave us the roll-off and we came in.  The structure of the melody is a little different than just the ordinary blues.  but don’t worry about that.  After we play the melody, we’ll go to the regular blues.”  So we did.  And it kind of worked out nice, and he put kind of a shuffle feeling in it.  He said, “Yeah!  Maybe it might work.  And it did.  The rest is history.

[MUSIC: Art Blakey, "Blues March," "Just By Myself," "Drum Thunder Suite," "Along Came Betty"]

TP:    I’d like to discuss your style as a tenor saxophonist and the evolution of your style.  In the liner notes to the St. Germain CD from 1958 you say that the experience of playing that one year with Art Blakey had a huge impact on your approach to the tenor.

GOLSON:  Yes, it did.  Before I joined Art, I didn’t have much articulation.  On some of the things, it’s still not as much there as it is now.  But one of the things that he taught me to do, painfully, was to project, to play a little more forcefully.  When I went in to sub that night with him at the Cafe Bohemia, and some of the weeks that followed, he would play some of those drum rolls that he was famous for.  It might be four bars before the end of the chorus.  They had a way of getting louder as they went along.  Well, right in the middle of that drum roll, it would get so loud that it would drown me out, and I would just be standing there pantomiming, for all intents and purposes.  I guess he thought I didn’t get it.  He did that a couple of weeks, and one night he did the same thing again, but he added a few downbeats on the bass drum and a few strokes with the cymbal to underscore what he had done before that.  And to make doubly sure that I got it, he uttered some words.  He screamed across the bandstand to me, “Get up out of that hole!”  And when I heard the words, it all sort of came together and I thought to myself, “Maybe I am in somewhat of a hole.”  Because when he does those drum rolls, I just disappear, as if I’m in a hole.  So I started trying to play more forcefully.

And someone else helped me.  While we were there, when I was subbing that week at the Cafe Bohemia, Thelonious Monk came in one night, and after the set… If you knew Monk, you would appreciate this story more.  But let me try to describe it to you.  He was standing, when I came off the bandstand, with his hands behind him, and rocking from side to side slightly.  He said to me, “You play too perfect” — sort of dry like that.  When he included the word… You’ve heard people say, “You play perfect” or something similar.  But when you hear the word “too,” that means an exaggeration, a caricature, superfluous, or whatever.  I knew it wasn’t a compliment.  And while I was standing there, stewing, Art Blakey was standing on the side (he knew Monk so well, I guess he knew what he was talking about), snickering like that little dog in the cartoon.  Monk let me stew for about 15 or 20 seconds, looking at me all the time through his sunglasses with the bamboo temples on them, and he said to me, “You’ve got to make mistakes to discover the new stuff.”
I thought about that.  Mmm, bingo!  The next night I came in, Ted, I was playing like a man taking leave of his senses.  I was playing so crazy, trying to get away from that well-worn that I’d fashioned for myself, knowing that this works and that works, and I can do this here and do that there, like mathematics (and music is anything but that).  I decided to take chances.  I was jumping off of cliffs (metaphorically, of course) and jumping off bridges, standing in front of trains!  I was doing some crazy stuff.  But that started to move me out of where I was before; that was the beginning of it.  Of course, I stopped for a while.  But over the years, I’m of the conviction that you have to take chances if you want to move ahead.  Otherwise, you’ll just sort of level off.  And time, in its indefatigable course, moving always forward, has a way of relegating you to history.  You know?

TP:    I have to say that listening to things you recorded before Art Blakey, you sound like a very dynamic tenor player with a modern vocabulary, a distinctive approach for people among your generation for your assimilation of Don Byas and Coleman Hawkins.  But you in your liner notes were describing your sound as “smooth and syrupy.”  That doesn’t make sense to me.  Are you being overly self-critical, or is that an objective way of describe how you played pre-Art Blakey?

GOLSON:  That’s the way I felt.  Other adjectives.  “Mellifluous.”  “Saccharine.”  “Sweet.”  “Charming,” some people have said.  But after a while, I wasn’t satisfied with that.  I wanted a little fire into it and get more articulation.  I had a lazy tongue; that old style, your tongue doesn’t touch the reed too much, the notes just kind of flow on your fingers, and your fingers do all the work.  But the tongue has to do some work sometimes, too, to define, to separate things and separate notes and separate ideas.  That’s what I worked on.  I guess I’m still working on it.

TP:    It sounds like you had an impact on Art Blakey’s conception of himself as a drummer-bandleader.  Because it sounds like your compositions oriented him to focusing on certain sonic components of the trap drum set, and that you got him into presenting his different techniques on the drumset as part of the whole performance rather than just the straight-ahead, more unformatted playing than  before.  As evidenced particularly on “Drum Thunder Suite,” on which you said to him, as you were telling me off-mike, “don’t pick up the sticks.”

GOLSON:  Right. [LAUGHS] I wanted him to use the mallets.  I said, “You use the sticks and the brushes all the time.  Let people know what you can do.”  Let them know that you can play mallets, that you can play no your tom-toms.  Do other things.  Don’t always just do the same thing.  Of course, the mallets are not tools you’re going to use all the time.  Sticks are what you use most of the time.  But it’s good to color with other things sometimes.

You can’t do the same thing all the time.  People want to hear “Along Came Betty” and “Killer Joe” and “Blues March” and those things, and I appreciate it.  But you can’t just keep doing that.  I have a new thing I’ve written called “Lenox Avenue Soundcheck.”  When I first moved to New York, I lived one block from Lenox Avenue, on 7th Avenue.  But when I was going to take the IRT, I used to have to walk down to Lenox Avenue.  So I was down there a lot.  And being on Lenox Avenue, you’d hear certain music coming out of different places, the jukebox, and you’d hear people saying different things, some nice, some not so nice, and the police sirens… You’d just hear a multiplicity of things.

TP:    Urban sounds.

GOLSON:  There you go.  And I decided to write a tune dedicated to all of that.

TP:    Next up is a version of “Stablemates” on United Artists from Benny Golson With the Philadelphians with your old friend Philly Joe Jones, who you recorded with a number of times.  You mentioned hearing him as far back as 1945 in the clubs of Philadelphia.

[MUSIC: "Stablemates", "Blues On My Mind" (1958)]

TP:    You mentioned that after you left the Messengers it was hard for you to play with another drummer for a while.

GOLSON:  Absolutely true.

TP:    You’ve played with great ones.

GOLSON:  You can get used to playing with people, just like you can get used to wearing your favorite suit, or go to the Chinese restaurant and order the same thing all the time because you like it.  It sort of grows on you.  You’re not aware of it until it’s not there any more.  That’s what happened to me.  Art Blakey is one of those drummers, Kenny Clarke is another… In fact, both played with us at a concert in Paris.  But Art Blakey swings so…how can I put it… His sounds don’t only reach your ear.  They reach your heart as well.  His style is motivational.  What he does makes you do things that perhaps you wouldn’t normally do because of the impetus… He said, “You stand out there and play, and if you’re not doing something, I’ll give you the bass drum.”  “What does that mean?”  “Every time you hit that bass drum, you’ll grab your rear end and say, ‘Oooh!!’”  But it’s that kind of thing.

It’s more than the bass drum, of course.  It’s the whole kit that he plays, and the way that he plays it.  He’s able to reach inside of your emotions.  There’s nothing cursory about him.  There’s no wasted effort.  There’s nothing wasted about him when he plays.  It’s meaningful, it’s logical, it’s reasonable, and it sounds fantastic.  And when you get used to playing with this kind of a drummer, even though you play with other kinds of drummers, and they might have even been great drummers, his style was such that you didn’t want to hear any other style.  I’m trying to make this up as I go along, because I’ve never had to formalize it into words; it was just feelings before.  when you hear him play, that’s it.  That’s the epitome of SWINGING.  What is there?  You’re already in heaven.  Where are you going after that?  So when you play with another drummer, it’s not that that you’re hearing.  Not that the other drummers are not good, but you’re not hearing what you’re used to hearing.  And that was the problem.

I happened to mention this to Freddie Hubbard, just in passing, as an aside.  And he looked at me and said, “You too?”  He had the same problem.  I found myself turning around, looking at drummers, which is very  unprofessional, and I don’t like doing that.  But it was almost irritating.  It was almost like the drummers were tuning up, preparing to play all night.  Because I wanted to hear them go into what Art used to go to!  But of course, I got out of it. [LAUGHS] I can play with other drummers.

TP:    One thing you mentioned in a liner note is the way Art Blakey would shape your solos, and the way his accompaniment behind you would almost make your statement take a logical course of its own with him.

GOLSON:  Very logical.  You’re very observant.  Absolutely true.  That’s why I said it.  He’s motivational!

TP:    And he’d set up something different for everyone in the band.  I remember a number of years ago he was forming a new band, and he had a big band at Sweet Basil that was being pared down.  You’d hear him set up behind everybody a different solo, and as the week went on, you could hear him settling into what he was going to do behind each person.  More about Philly Joe Jones and his inimitable style, the great precision and expoobidence with which he would boot you.

GOLSON:  Highly inventive, courageous and daring.  He would do things that were unexpected.  He would do unorthodox things.  We were playing once, and he played paradiddles between the bass drum and the hi-hat cymbal, rather than play them with the hands and the sticks on the snare drum.  I mean, he did all kinds of things.  One thing I liked about Philly, he was a listener.  Some drummers will close their eyes, turn their head sideways ride that cymbal, and it’s all about how they feel about what they’re doing at the moment.  But Joe would listen.  You would play a phrase, and leave a little breathing space, take a little breath before you set up the next phrase, and he might play a drum ruff — FRPPHHH!  Just that.  It’s perfect, and it sets up the next phrase.  Or he might go, BANH-BANHH-BAM-BAMM!  Or whatever it is.  It’s so logical, so right.  And these things just carry along.  It’s like flying a plane.  You just put your seat back and relax.  You can lean on that kind of a drummer.

TP:    Take us back to the 1940s.  You may not be able to recollect this specifically because you were so young at the time.  But you recollect Philly Joe performing in 1945-46, when you were 16 and 17.  What can you tell us about his sound then.  Had he assimilated Kenny Clarke and Max Roach by then?

GOLSON:  I can’t tell you that, Ted.  It was too early in my development.  I don’t know what I was listening to.  I just know I like what he did.  I couldn’t define it and break it down into its component parts.  All I knew is that I liked it.  I didn’t have enough experience.  That came later.

TP:    The great eye for detail that marks his compositions also marks his story-telling.  He’s been writing liner notes for some young tenor players, like Dan Faulk and David Sanchez, which are worth reading for an education in aesthetics and spinning a narrative.  Let’s move now to a couple of wild card tracks, one featuring an Benny Golson with Eric Dolphy, alto sax, Gunther Schuller, french horn, Herb Pomeroy, trumpet, on John Lewis’ composition “Afternoon in Paris” from an Atlantic release entitled “The Wonderful World of Jazz,” from 1960.

[MUSIC: w/ John Lewis, "Afternoon in Paris" (1959); w/ Betty Carter, "Isle of May"]

TP:    We’ll hear some collaborations between Benny Golson and Art Farmer for United Artists between 1958 and 1959.  Your comment about him is that he plays with tremendous integrity and sound selection and intent, concentrated consciousness… It sounds as though he’s the ideal improviser for you.

GOLSON:  Quintessential.

TP:    A couple of words to describe his improvisational personality.

GOLSON:  He’s a bright person, first of all.  He’s one of the thinkers.  He cogitates.  He does the same thing when he plays.  He thinks about what he’s going to play.  But he doesn’t think so much about it that it becomes an intellectual encounter with the music.  No.  He thinks enough to give it meaning and direction, and coupled with experience, he usually comes up with a nice bill of fare musically for what he’s doing.

TP:    That sounds like a textbook recipe for what is an improvisation.  How about for yourself?  Over the years you’ve made very conscious changes in your style and approach in your sound on the tenor that you want to project for  yourself.  I was complimenting your solo on “Afternoon In Paris,” which was reminiscent of the way Coleman Hawkins played in one of my favorite periods for him, and you said, “Ted, I don’t play that way any more; that’s in the past; we must move forward.”  What is that mixture of forethought, intent, intellect… I guess bringing to bear the intellect on improvisation and the direct flow of thoughts that make a successful one?  How do you assess that balance in your own process?

GOLSON:  Well, we all have to think to a certain extent when we play.  Some players think more than others.  Some players don’t quite know how to think.  You have to know what to think about when you’re playing.

TP:    What do you think about?

GOLSON:  I think about whatever satisfies my needs.  When we think, we should think about what satisfies our needs.  What is it that we need at the moment?  Do I need something for my sound?  Do I need something for my melodic concept?  Do I need something for my rhythmic perception of things?  Or do I need them all?  And if you do, you’ve got a lot of thinking to do.  But experience makes it easier as you go along.  The more you do a thing, the easier it gets as it goes along.  Mind you, I didn’t say “easy.”  The easier it gets.  And me, I feel that I have certain needs.  I have a lot of them.  Beginning with my sound.  I am so critical about my sound.  I am going through a phase right now where I am talking with the reed manufacturer, and they are making special reeds for me, and when I go back out to the Coast in December I am going to meet with them again.  It’s getting close.  But there’s just one  element I want to get out.  That’s me.  People say, “Oh, it sounds great to me.”  And that’s fine. But I have to satisfy myself first.

TP:    You may never get satisfied.  It may be that’s what keeps you going and searching for new challenges.

GOLSON:  You know, that’s what Sonny Rollins.  He said, “No musician ever dies who is completely satisfied with himself.”  And I believe that.  If I get to like my sound, it might be something else that I’m not happy with.  That’s the way it is.

TP:    Some musicians will set themselves a challenge on a given night, like a particular tenor player will say, “I’m going to be Lester Young,” and then another night will try to be Coleman Hawkins, or taking it farther… Setting up that type of challenge to spur interest and play something different night after night.  Did that have anything to do with your approach?  Or was it purely about developing musical ideas?

GOLSON:  That was never part of me and it never will be.  I don’t set out to sound like anybody.  I’m struggling hard enough to try to sound like what I want to sound like.  Why would I waste time trying to sound like somebody else and put banners up for them?  That’s testimonial to them!  I’m not trying to set a testimonial for myself, but I am trying to play things that at least satisfy me and my needs.  I can’t waste… I use that word advisedly.  I can’t take time trying to sound like Lester or somebody else.  There’s enough of that going on now.  So many people sound like John Coltrane.  John Coltrane was John Coltrane.  That should be left where it is.  Who is going to best John Coltrane?  Maybe the next century.  But we should spend more time trying to sound what we want to sound like, expressing our own feelings and revealing our own musical personalities.  We don’t need any carpet paper around.  We should try to sound like ourselves.  And the litmus test is applying ourselves, trying to find out what it is that we want to do, and trying to optimize whatever it is we’re trying to do at whatever opportunity we have.  Rather than to walk through anything (I don’t think anybody does that nowadays), we should put forth our best effort, like our lives are on the line.

Case in point.  Tom MacIntosh had a group called the New York Jazz Sextet, trumpet, tenor, trombone and rhythm section.  At one point, Freddie Hubbard was the trumpet player.  I hadn’t thought much about it.  But every time we had a rehearsal, when it came time for Freddie to play his solo, he played like he was at Carnegie Hall at 8 p.m. on a Friday night with a full auditorium.  That’s the way he played.  Me, before that, I would just kind of walk through the changes.  This is just a rehearsal.  I used to laugh and say, “Hey, it’s only a rehearsal.”  But he played like his reputation was at stake.  He really did.  And I learned something from that.  You do the best you can whenever you get a chance to do it.  And if you do that, it can become a part of you.  But if you spend part of the time minimizing it and throwing it away, then that is time taken away from a good effort that you could be applying to yourself in the direction that you want to go.

[MUSIC: Golson-Farmer, "Fair Weather," "Like Someone In Love," "Five Spot After Dark," "I'll Walk Alone," "Minor Vamp"][MUSIC: "Blues March" (1983)]

TP:    We have to cover about 35 years of music, so compression is of the essence.  We ended the last show with one of your most famous compositions, and one which took crossover context, “Killer Joe,” performed by the Jazztet, a group that lasted in its first iteration from 1959 to 1962.  Let’s talk about the formation of this group and the early personnel.  It got you together with Art Farmer, for one thing, on a somewhat permanent basis after several years of musical flirtation, as it were.

GOLSON:  That’s absolutely true.  Art and I met in the summer of 1953, right after Tadd Dameron’s band broke up in Atlantic City, which included Clifford Brown and Gigi Gryce.  They went on to join Lionel Hampton, and the condition that we could all leave was that I would stay  there and make sure that whoever was coming in to replace us would play the music right.  So they left and I stayed.  Then a few weeks later, I joined them in South Carolina.  In the band at that time was Art Farmer.  In fact, that’s where I met him.  Quincy Jones was in the band.  That’s where I met him.  Monk Montgomery was there, Jimmy Cleveland, and of course Gigi Gryce came along from Atlantic City, and Clifford Brown, who was also there with us.  There’s no else I can think of right now who people would readily know.

That’s when Art and I began our relationship, and when we went our separate ways from Lionel Hampton, we wound up in New York doing different things, making ends meet, and we were thrown together many times — radio commercials, TV commercials, jingles, various record dates for different people.  Although we already knew each other, we got to know each other even better because we saw each other in between socially many times.  So I guess it was inevitable that we would want to do something else, and it just so happened that we decided we wanted to do something different at the same time, without either having knowledge of the other.

So I picked up the phone one day and called him.  I said, “Art, I’m thinking about putting together a sextet.”  Not a quintet.  So many other people had quintets.  A sextet with that other horn would make it just a bit different; there are not so many sextets around today.  He started laughing.  I said, “Why are you laughing?  Is this idea that absurd?”  He said, “No.  You know, I was thinking about putting a sextet together, and I was going to call you later today.’  I said, “Well, why don’t you come by, and we could talk about it.”  And he did.  He picked two of the personnel and I picked two.  He picked his twin brother, Addison Farmer, who was alive at that time, for bass, and he picked Dave Bailey, who now heads Jazzmobile here in town, as the drummer, because they had worked together with Gerry Mulligan.  I picked Curtis Fuller.  Well, there was no disagreement there.  But when I came up with the name McCoy Tyner, he said, “I’ve never heard of him.  How is he?  Can he play?”  I said, “Oh yes, he can play.”

TP:    Before you continue, how did you know about McCoy Tyner?  Now, there’s an obvious Philadelphia connection.  Were you keeping the ties to Philadelphia?

GOLSON:  Keeping the ties had nothing to do with it.  It was the talent.  But the important thing is that I met him in Philadelphia.  I went to do one of those Sunday afternoon concerts, and the rhythm section was there, awaiting my arrival.  He played so well!  So I said, “Let me see what he can really do.”  So I played something in a strange key, and he just romped through it.  He was only 19 years old!  So I kept that in the back of my mind, not knowing if anything was going to happen or if I was going to do anything where he was involved.  But the Jazztet came up, and obviously he was the first person in mind.

TP:    Were the germs of McCoy Tyner’s mature style present when you first heard him at 19 or 20 or in the Jazztet?

GOLSON:  Oh, sure.  That’s what appealed to me.  Of course, after that he built on it.  He didn’t just stay here.  He migrated ahead to other things, which is logical for a truly creative person.  But it was interesting, so funny because when I approached him about the job on the telephone, it was like he had been awaiting my call.  “Yes!”  But then I reminded him that Philadelphia was 90 miles from New York, 180 miles round trip every day.  “McCoy, can you do this?  Are you up to it?”  He said, “Well, I really want to move to New York; I’ve been thinking about it.”  So as it turned out, to make a long story short, Art and I found an apartment for him and got it.  So he and his wife were on their way over, and a friend was bringing them over in a car, and the car broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike.  He called me.  He said, “Benny, we’ve broken down; can you come out and pick me up.”  I said, “McCoy, I don’t have a car.  Call me back in an hour and let me explore and see what I can do.”  So I found a friend who had a car, and we went out and picked him up, sure enough, and loaded him into this person’s car, and we took off.  I don’t know what happened to the person who was bringing him there.  It was terrible.  I guess we drove off and left.  I don’t quite remember what happened.  But as it turned out, the person who took me out to pick him up was John Coltrane, because he lived just a couple of blocks from me!  And about a year or so later, McCoy joined his band.  So the next time I saw John, I said to him (I knew him very well, of course), “A fine friend you turned out to be.  You stole my piano player!”

TP:    I’ve heard the story, which may or may not be apocryphal, that McCoy Tyner at an early age told John Coltrane he wanted to play with him.  And he was friends with Lee Morgan, a young colleague of yours from Philly.

GOLSON:  I don’t know if the story is apocryphal, but it’s probably not.  At 18 or whatever age that he approached John, he probably did want to play with him, and he let it be known that he did.  But I’ll tell you, in the intervening time between when he asked him that (if he did in fact ask him that) and when he joined him, he wasn’t sitting still.  He was moving forward in high gear.

TP:    I’m sure the challenging compositions and arrangements and the high degree of professionalism required within the Jazztet had a lot to do with McCoy Tyner’s development during that interim period.

GOLSON:  It might have had some.  But I think he developed more with John.  John was going in a better direction for where McCoy’s concept was.  I have to be honest about that.

TP:    I was just trying to give you a nice segue to talk about the Jazztet.  Talk about what you wanted to achieve with this group.  It immediately took on a very distinctive identity.

GOLSON:  That’s it exactly.  That’s the first word.  I figured we had to have an identity.  Otherwise, we were just another sextet thrown together to do various musical things.  To give it that identity, I tried to bring complete organization to what we were doing.  Of course, later I abandoned that, because I thought it was too much organization, and the second time we got together it was much looser.  It was just a bit too organized the first time out.  Too preconceived.  I felt we needed to be a bit looser.  And for me, and I think for Art too, it worked a lot better when it was looser.

TP:    What I gather is that your initial performance was at the Five Spot opposite the Ornette Coleman Quartet in their New York debut.  Which sounds to me like quite a scene.  So I’ll ask you to use your considerable descriptive powers to give your first-hand impression of the Ornette Coleman Quartet in 1959 at the Five Spot.

GOLSON:  I’ll never forget it.  Ornette had created quite a controversy about himself and about his music.  He had a lot of supporters, people like Leonard Bernstein and John Lewis, even Dizzy Gillespie.  Well, Dizzy Gillespie had perspicacity anyway.  He was able to look ahead, and he probably saw this music going in another direction that had some validity to it.  But not everyone really felt like that, and it was a big question mark.  So it was like someone going to a new restaurant.  Here you had two new groups, two bills of fare, so to so speak, under the same roof, and the place was jammed.

TP:    Very different approaches to music as well.  Were you familiar with his early recordings that preceded his New York appearance?

GOLSON:  Yes, I had heard some.

TP:    But you were somewhat familiar with the compositions and the group.  What did you think?

GOLSON:  I wasn’t sure.  Later, as I got to know Ornette, I called him up and sort of made an appointment, if you will, and I went down, and we talked about it.  I wanted to find out what he was doing before I had… I figured I had no right to an opinion until I actually knew what he was doing.  So I made it a point to go find out what he was doing.  Interesting.  Right after that, we started… In fact, the Jazztet played one of his songs; I can’t remember one.  We tried to interpret it the way he was interpreting it.  And it worked out okay.

Everyone has a right to speak and to have his own voice.  No one should be deprived for what they do.  Whether we choose to like it or not is up to us.  But everyone should have the privilege of speaking.  Voltaire said, “I disagree with everything you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”  That’s how I feel.  No matter how this person or that person who even I feel about it in a negative way, they have the right to do it, and they should go ahead.  That’s the way we move ahead.  Otherwise, everything stays the same, and it becomes more predictable and more predictable.

TP:    But there you were at the Five Spot with a kind of factionalized audience, two new groups, a packed house every night…for how long?

GOLSON:  Both of us stayed there for two weeks, I think it was.  Or a month.  I can’t remember.  But it was longer than a week.  It was interesting.  We had all kinds of people coming in there.  I mean, Leonard Bernstein himself came in.  I don’t think Dizzy came.  John Lewis might have come.  And some other people would have given him support, I guess, by the nature of who they were themselves, showing up there.  And we had people come to see us, too.  It was great.

[MUSIC: Jazztet, "Park Avenue Petite," "Round Midnight," "Bean Bag"]

TP:    Coming up are more albums by Benny Golson from 1961 and 1962 while the Jazztet was still working.  The band had a fair amount of success during their couple of years.  I imagine you were booked quite a bit and did a fair amount of travel.  Talk about the course of the group.

GOLSON:  Yeah, in the beginning we did have quite a few bookings, because, honestly, we were new, and with the albums coming out at the time, people were able to hear us, and if they really liked what they heard, then they wanted to see us also.  So we were booked in quite a few places around the States.  We never did go to Europe, though.  But with any group that’s ongoing, things happen indigenously [sic], and it brings about changes sometimes from within the group.  For whatever reason.  It’s inevitable, most of the time.  And we had a change of our trombone player, we changed bass players, drummers and piano players.  The only two that didn’t change were Art Farmer and Benny Golson, I guess!  But everything else around us changed for a certain period of time.

TP:    Did the band begin to open up somewhat?  Certainly on the live album we can hear the format opening up and freeing up some?

GOLSON:  Yeah, it was a bit looser, and Art and I felt a little better.  It was just too organized the first time.  It was all right, and it made its mark, I guess, because it was organized and it was different, and hopefully, it was consequential enough that people thought we had something to say that they wanted to listen to.  But then, you know how it is.  You get used to hearing the same thing, and you feel that you have to make a change.  Everything should never creatively always be the same.

TP:    Is this a conscious thing for you?

GOLSON:  Yes!

TP:    Do you see yourself getting into a rut and say, “I’m going to do something different.”

GOLSON:  Yes.  Not just for the sake of just being different, but for the sake of fulfilling a need within me.  If you just change to change, that’s arbitrary.  But if the change comes about, it should come about in a natural, creative way, just as the substance of what you’re doing comes about in a natural way.  So the changes come about likewise, or the desire for a change comes about in the same natural way.  That’s usually what happens with creative people.  You don’t wear a blue suit one day, and then the next day it’s, “I think I’ll wear a red suit just to attract attention.”  You’ll buy a brown suit because you’re tired of the blue one all the time — that kind of a thing.

TP:    What do you remember about the circumstances of Take A Number From 1 to 10?

GOLSON:  Wondering whether or not the idea was going to come off.  It wasn’t my idea.  It was someone else’s idea.  And yet, I thought it might have possibilities, which is why I did it.  After we finished it, I thought it was consequential enough to have been recorded and to put it out for the public to hear.  It was okay.  I don’t know if I’d do it again.

TP:    Well, it seems like an ideal vehicle for someone whose interests lie so strongly in the areas of composition and arrangement, and who is so serious about your personal sound on the saxophone.

GOLSON:  You’re right.  Starting out with myself, just playing unaccompanied, the spotlight is purely on me, and eventually it lines up to the other part of me, that is, the writing.

TP:    In my brief acquaintance with Benny Golson he’s never expressed any real satisfaction with his tenor saxophone sound, and I’d like to read a comment you made to Nat Hentoff in 1961 from the liner notes.  It may sound familiar to you 35 years later in its sentiment.  You say, “We all go through stages.  There are, after all, so many roads to take.  Now I’m on the right track for myself.  I know what I want to do.  I’ve been working hard during the past year, for example, on an even bigger tone, with more roundness and warmth, even in the extreme high register.  I want to make the whole horn sound warm.  I also want to play melodically instead of just running over the horn, as I was at one time, but I’d still like to have a command of velocity at my fingertips when I need it.  I feel very much better about my playing these days.  At one time I didn’t know whether I was coming or going, but I guess it was necessary to try different ways to be sure of my own.”  It sounds like you’ve been consistent in your sentiments over time.

GOLSON:  How long ago was that?

TP:    It’s a 1961 recording.

GOLSON:  I mentioned something about being on the right road.  But you know, roads have a way of wearing thin.  Roads can become a rut.  Really.   I’ve found that out since then!  So even if you’re on the right road one day, you might want to get on another road another day.  And we have to remember, too that today’s adventure is tomorrow’s commonplace.  So things have to change.  So I said that then, but I wouldn’t say it now!

[MUSIC: From Take A Number From 1 to 10, "The Touch," "Time"]

TP:    Benny Golson expressed about as enthusiastic a comment as I’ve heard from him on “Time” — that doesn’t sound too bad.  You said you hadn’t listened to it for 25 years.  We’ll hear some quartets from 1961-62.  At this point, in addition to the Jazztet, were you doing a lot of singles, either with a working rhythm section or travelling around the country with pickups?

GOLSON:  I wasn’t doing too much.  We were primarily concentrating on the Jazztet.  But when we signed with Mercury, they signed the Jazztet, and then they signed Art and they signed me as individual artists.  I don’t remember how  many albums we did with the Jazztet, but in addition to that we each did one or two albums — I’m not sure.  One of the notable things about Turning Point is that the rhythm section with me was Miles Davis’ rhythm section at the time, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb.  I felt I was stealing just a bit!

TP:    How was it different for you to play as a solo voice than in the more arranged format?  Do you approach your improvisations differently?  Is it simply a matter of having more time to stretch out?

GOLSON:  You hit it right on the head.  If I’m playing with a quartet (not even with a trumpet, which would be a quintet), much more freedom abounds.  If I’m not playing with an arrangement of other instruments around me where I have to fit into slots here and there, if I don’t have backgrounds that have to stay out of the way of me, or I have to rise above them, then I have complete  freedom.  And in a quartet I do.  I can play a melody any way I want to.  If you play it with another instrument, then you both have to play it the same.  So you have to decide how you’re going to play it.  When I’m playing by myself, I might play it this way tonight, I might play it that way tomorrow night.  I might add a little something to it one night… Just complete freedom.  That’s one thing I enjoy about the quartet.  Within reason! [LAUGHS] Provided you’re up to it.

TP:    On Turning Point you have the sublime rhythm section of this period, which brings me to the question of what you’re looking for from the different members of the rhythm section.  In a piano player what are the ideal qualities?

GOLSON:  It’s different things, because individuals have different things to offer.  It’s a matter of what you want to hear.  Do you want to hear what this one is offering.  Do you want to hear what that one is offering?  It’s a terrible thing when you hire a person and you tell them you want them to sound like somebody else.  You hire him because you want to hear what he does.  Either it’s something that you have in mind and he meets your needs, or he has something that appeals to you that you feel you would like to have.  So when you hire them, you hire them with these kinds of things in mind — intuitively. It’s not anything you have to go home and turn off the radio and pull the windows down and think about.  Intuitively, you know these things.

First in a piano player, I am concerned about his feeling for the piano.  A piano is not one instrument.  Literally it is.  But it can function as three different instruments.  It has a distinct sound at the top.  It has a distinct sound in the middle, where most piano players are.  And it has an even more distinct sound at the bottom end.  That bottom end of the piano cannot be duplicated by any of the other instruments in the repertoire of instruments.  He’s down there.  He’s got that to himself.  Solitary air space.  Now, a good piano player knows how to use all of that according to what’s happening at the moment, and can make you feel good and can urge you on to try to best yourself — that’s the kind of piano player you want.

When he’s functioning in these different areas of the keyboard, he has something to say that’s going to not only support you, but encourage you because it sounds so good to you.  I just had that last week.  We were down at Sweet Basil.  These three guys, they had something to say.  And I’ve got to tell you, I felt like playing every night, every set.  That hasn’t happened to me in quite some time.  Because I had three guys who knew what to do.  They knew what to do as individuals.  They knew what to do as a group.  I mean, the things that they did together was as though they had gone out and rehearsed without me, and decided what they were going to do to support me.  It was so together, it was incredible what was happening up there.  And if you can get this, if you can find these kinds of qualities in individuals that you select to be your rhythm section… And the things that I said for the piano basically are the same for the bass and the drums.  It’s just different instruments.  But it’s a matter of having affinity for the instrument, having affinity for each other as a rhythm section, and having affinity for the soloist who is out front.  And if you can get all those things to spark and jibe, if you can get that kind of potential to cross paths with reality, then you’ve got something that’s really noteworthy.

We’re going back in time now.  This rhythm section to me was quintessential.  It was the best, the essence of what one would expect in a jazz rhythm section.  That’s why I chose them.  And Miles had no objection, I must say.  Very nice.  Because he knew what I was going to do!

[MUSIC: "Turning Point," "Little Karin," "I'm Afraid the Masquerade Is Over," "The Best Thing For You Is Me," "Shades of Stein"]

TP:    ”Shades of Stein” refers to Gertrude Stein, and in your conversation we hear many references to philosophy and literature.  Is there any direct relationship you can discuss in terms of your reading vis-a-vis your playing?  Your liner notes are eloquent and very much to the point.

GOLSON:  I’m not an avid reader.  Actually, my wife Bobbie reads more than I do.  Anything that comes from what I read is just casual.  Gertrude Stein happened to appeal to me because of the way she took a phrase and used it over and over, “a rose is a rose…”  I tried to capture that in the melody, because you hear the melody over and over.  It got a little boring.  To make sure it didn’t get too boring, to break away from it, I made the bridge as far out as I could that time.  You could hear where it was going, like up a flight of steps, and the chords were going along with it, and it was a little difficult to play on.  But I think we needed a contrast from that Gertrude Stein influence in the beginning to sort of let it stand out by itself.  The more you do a thing, the less it means, so I broke away from it.

TP:    Is there any implied narrative or story in your compositions, or are they just musical ideas?

GOLSON:  Most of them are just musical ideas.  But what I do try to capture is a meaning in my titles.  I think the title should give one who is about to listen privy to what it is going to be about.  Now, with few exceptions, I’ve done that.  A few times I fell on my face.  I can write a song maybe in a day or two, or in a week, whatever, but I agonize over a title sometimes for two or three weeks or a month, trying to come up with the appropriate title.  When you hear a title, it should be more than a title.  You should be able to step inside, just a little bit — if not into the house, at least into the vestibule, to get out of the cold.

TP:    Improvisers seek their individual voice, and of course the common phrase is to tell your own story, and your antecedents on the tenor saxophone all had their various ways of telling their story.

GOLSON:  Playing your own ideas.  Most of us play our own ideas as best we can.  The reason I say that is because sometimes, intuitively, and depending on where we are in our development and how much we are influenced by the things that surround us… Intuitively many times we will play things that “belong to other people.”  It’s their kind of thing.  It might be a lick.  It might the way something is played, a certain inflection.  The way Sweets Edison takes a note like he’s milking a cow, the half-valve kind of thing.  That’s associated with him.  And the moaning and groaning that he does with the horn.  When I hear it, the first person I think of is Sweets Edison.  But for the most part, most people, with a few exceptions, try to play their own thing.

TP:    Another aspect of this is that for many years (I guess it’s still true, although the way information gets passed along has changed so much) is oral tradition, of listening to people you admire and trying to grapple with their ideas and coming up with your own conclusions based on that, a continuing, ongoing narrative, many voices converging.  You described your process of learning as similar, that you would take solos off records, and study and transcribe.  So I wondered if there were any analogies we could draw between the verbal and musical arts of storytelling.

GOLSON:  It’s very much like storytelling.  Sometimes the words differ, but the essence or meaning is usually the same.  Sometimes extra little words creep in so that the story begins to enlarge and unfold in a different way, so that down the road maybe it doesn’t even resemble the first or the original story.  We do that in our playing sometimes.  Sometimes we modify things that we’ve heard.  Sometimes what we come up with are mutations, if you will, of what we’ve heard.  And sometimes they are merely jumping-off points.  I wouldn’t like to think that people stay there.  The only exception I hear to that now is some tenor players.  John Coltrane has really gotten into their blood, and we don’t always hear their personal voice — we hear shades of John Coltrane.  That’s a great testimony to John Coltrane, but it doesn’t say much for their own development and for their own possible or potential voice.  I think that’s regrettable.  Because it takes away what they would be as a creative source.  We all have something to say, and we say it differently.  And it should be different.  We don’t walk the same, we don’t eat the same kinds of food.  Our habits are different.  The life is different.  So why should we try to clone or become a clone of someone else when we pick up the instrument?  And when we talk about John Coltrane at this point… My goodness, who at this point is going to best John Coltrane, who had years in which to do it?  John Coltrane was John Coltrane.  Sit back, listen to it and enjoy it.  Why try to become John Coltrane?  The time could be spent in a better way.

TP:    These quartets mark the last performances by Benny Golson as a solo saxophonist, apart from a few cameos, that we hear from about 1963 to 1980.  It was a real loss to the jazz world not to be able to hear your voice and your story through almost two decades of writing and orchestrating and establishing yourself as a very busy and commercially viable writer and arranger.  The next two tracks show more of the expansion of what you were doing then.  This is called Pop Plus Jazz Equals Swing, and it’s a sort of stereo gimmick album arranged and orchestrated and conducted by Benny Golson from about 1960.

GOLSON:  It was originally recorded on Audiofidelity, which was a label that prided itself in coming up with things that sounded authentic.  They would come up with versions of sounds of trains passing by, glasses breaking, people hammering nails, somebody tap-dancing, firecrackers, those kinds of things.  And a fellow named Tom Wilson, who had the Transition label in Boston, eventually gave it up and settled in New York, and began to produce for different companies, and at the time when we did this, he came into the fold of Audiofidelity.  Stereo had just come out then.  So he came up with a gimmick whereby the stereo could be optimized, and helped people to see really what it was.  And he decided that it would be a good thing to use jazz to do it.  So the way he figured it out, the rhythm section would always sound in the middle, which meant that it was a little each to the right and the left; on the right side it was little to the left and on the left it was a little to the right side.  So it sounded in the middle.  On the right side, I think, he would have a jazz group, and on the left side he would have what’s called a “legit” group with french horns and flutes and a few strings and things like that.  What we would do was come up with standard tunes to be played by the group with the strings and flutes on the left, and on the right side the jazz group would play the figures that had been written on it.  On the song “Whispering,” the legit group would play [SINGS ORIGINAL MELODY] but on the right side, the jazz group was playing “Groovin’ High.”

TP:    A subversive way to hip people to the mechanics of bebop as well.

GOLSON:  Exactly.  He showed what stereo was and how tunes are based on standard.  Same thing with “How High The Moon” with the legit group, and “Ornithology” on the right.  “Moten Swing” and “You’re Driving Me Crazy”.  “Out of Nowhere” and “Nostalgia.”  With “Stella By Starlight” we gave a different treatment on the left and the right, but the same song.  We did a blues with the jazz group and “St. Louis Blues” for the legit.  It worked out.  It was an adventure; it worked out.

[MUSIC: "Groovin' High"/"Whispering"; "Stockholm Serenade," "Swedish Villa," "Out of This World," "Stockholm Sojourn"]

TP:    Here we’ve come from your early arrangements with Dizzy Gillespie to these very involved, multi-layered arrangements for a 23-piece orchestra.  Would you talk about your studies in composition in the eight-year interim?  Was it all pragmatic?  Was it all empirical?  Or did you do some formal study at this time?

GOLSON:  I set out to do some formal study when I went to college, and I was all geared and revved up for it.  But when I got there, it was a little  disappointing for me, because I saw what the students who had gone before me were doing, and I was saying to myself, “Gee, that’s not really what I had in mind.”  I think I mentioned to you last week that when I get to my third year, I had become somewhat of a rebel.  Because when I was studying, we learned all the rules.  All the rules!  The dominant has to go to the tonic.  And I’m saying to myself, “Why?  Why?”  When I did “Killer Joe,” that wasn’t it.  So I started to do things that I knew were wrong.  I’d get the assignment, and I’d break all the rules and take the stuff in — and boy, they’d pull out the whip like Zorro, and just X my assignments in front of the class.  I was belligerent then.  I’d stand up and simply say, “That’s the way I heard it.”  It’s amazing how things can happen like that.  And I have to question: Why does it always have to be the same?  Why can’t it be different?  Why can’t I have octaves?  Why can’t I have fifths if I want to?  Why does the dominant always have to go to the tonic?  Why can’t I come from the leaning tonic?  I mean, I started asking things like that, and they looked at me like I was crazy.

TP:    These are the kinds of questions that could only someone who had assimilated the lessons rather well would be inclined to ask.

GOLSON:  So a lot of it was empirical.  I’ll tell you, I got absolutely nothing from there that you would hear in my writing.  It was all empirical, trial-and-error, a priori, from observation, things like that.  Now, I’ll tell you, I had some good teachers.  I listened to people like Tadd Dameron, Duke Ellington, and doing more…

TP:    How was Duke Ellington a teacher?

GOLSON:  Oh, the voicings.  Voicing those chords.  Take that baritone off the bottom and put him up at the top there, you get a different sonority.  People think of the baritone as low.  It doesn’t always have to be low.  You can do aberrational things with instruments if you’re familiar with individual sounds and familiar with blend of sounds.  You can get all kinds of things.  Then there are things that you try sometimes that might seem crazy, but you try them anyway.  All you can do is fall on your face.  I mean, no one is going to kill you.  So hopefully, you’ll have a chance to do that again.  Well, I fouled up that time, but the next time… The ballplayer loses the game.  Wait til the next time.  Every day we open our eyes as creative people.  We have to think, “I’ve got another shot at it today.”

TP:    What qualities did Tadd Dameron impart to you?  Of course, you knew him rather well from roadlife with Bullmoose Jackson.

GOLSON:  He was a great dearth writer.  He knew how to use few instruments and get the most out of them to maximize whatever it was they were doing.  With Fats Navarro and Charlie Rouse… I said, “How can he get two horns to sound so full like that?”  He got them to sound full because he maximized the instruments who were playing with them, the piano, himself, how he voiced the chords.  Making use of the full drum set.  Not just TINK, TINK-A-TING on the cymbal and the bass drum here and there, but using all of the set.  Because the drums are functional enough to accomplish many things.  The tom-toms accomplish one thing, the snare drum, the hi-hat the ride cymbal, the sticks, the brushes — all of these things make a difference.  The bass.  All these things work.  Then I finally got a chance to meet him, and this guy was an open book.  He didn’t hide anything, and he shared what he knew.  I remember he did an arrangement for Duke Ellington once, and he let me copy it.  I didn’t charge him anything.  Because I was getting a lesson!  As I was copying, I was taking information in.  Well, what did he do here with the third alto?  Or how did he use the baritone?  Well, how did he use the reed section with the brass section?  And how did he voice the trumpets with…? Hey, this was a learning process for me.  So I did a lot of listening.  I eviscerated some things.  I took them apart, laid them out, looked at the component parts.  Why do they work?

And another one that helped me a great deal (he wasn’t even aware of it) was Ernie Wilkins.  This man knew what to do with a big band.  I kid you not. The people don’t know about Ernie Wilkins.  I ran into him in Aarhus, Norway, a few years ago, when he had 12 pieces — he called it his Almost Big Band.  We were on the same bill.  We went to the hotel and we were in the corridor, and I said, “I should let him know this,” and I told him that, and he was astounded.  He said, “Really?”  I said, “Yes, indeed.”  I said, “You have no idea of the times that I took your scores, and looked at them and broke them down.”  This is how you learn.  I didn’t learn it in college.  Today it’s possible.  But during the time I was coming along, it just wasn’t possible.

TP:    Did you take apart the scores of European composers at that time?

GOLSON:  Of course.  It was nothing that would change the cosmic balance of the universe.  But they did know… Everybody talks about Verdi when you talk about opera.  But Giacomo Puccini, he was a much better orchestrator, for my money.  And besides, I found out just a couple of years ago, he used to go around to some of the jazz clubs, so you know he had to be all right!  His orchestrations had much more involved sonorities.  The concept of how he’s using the orchestra.  Background for some of the things, but strong backgrounds.  Verdi was a little flowery for me.  But Puccini sort of rolled his sleeves up and took that pencil up very seriously when he went to work.  Good orchestrations.  They’re using a lot of chords, I-III-V, VI maybe sometimes, minor VIs.  But the way they used them and the sound they got when they used them, you see… When we got to jazz, we just built on things like that.

TP:    Your fondness for opera is something you share with your stylistic mentor, Coleman Hawkins.

GOLSON:  Well, I’ll tell you, I used to hate it until I met my wife, Bobbie.  I really learned to appreciate it through her, as I did ballet and some of the other things.  It’s beautiful.  Some is more beautiful than others.

TP:    What’s becoming apparent is that the musical components that comprise the totality of what you do range from the most functional music that you played for years on the R&B circuit and with Earl Bostic to the very progressive music of the ’40s and ’50s to classical music — all in the pot.

GOLSON:  It gives you insight.  You listen to something like “La Traviata,” and they can almost make you cry, they’re so beautiful, when you hear those voices.  You go from there to rhythm-and-blues to jazz.  She taught me to appreciate Country-and-Western.  Those Country-and-Western tunes will make you get on your knees and cry!

TP:    Well, this is what makes music the magical entity it is, that it can evoke that range of emotion.

GOLSON:  Thank goodness.  Thank goodness that it’s open-ended.  It goes on and on and on.

TP:    But for all those years, you applied all those skills to very functional purposes, in Hollywood and the studio.  You didn’t bring any of the music from this time…

GOLSON:  I thought it would be too boring!  Really.  Episodic music.

TP:    But you were quite successful at it.  You wrote for most of the top Pop singers of the ’60s and ’70s.  The EOJ of the ’70s says you wrote for Nancy Wilson, Lou Rawls, Sammy Davis, Diana Ross, O.C. Smith, for M.A.S.H. and other television shows.  Is there some separation?  How do you go about writing something for these very specific, project-oriented assignments?

GOLSON:  I guess there is a line of definition there.  But sometimes, if you’re adventurous enough, you can blur the line.  You can cross over.  That can be exciting.  We were doing a show once at Universal, maybe It Takes A Thief or Run For Your Life or something.  Tom Scott was in the orchestra; the contractor had called him.  I took the melody of “Stablemates” and I just permutated it a bit, gave it another harmony and lingered on certain notes, and if you didn’t know “Stablemates,” you wouldn’t know what it was.  After the take, Tom was laughing, because he knew “Stablemates”!  You can get away with it.  Music is music.  It doesn’t always have to be the same.

TP:    What’s some of the music that emerged from that which you’re proud of?

GOLSON:   They publish the things, so you don’t come away with them.  I wrote a lot of songs when I was out there, and Universal published them or 20th Century published them.

TP:    You were on salary and they owned the rights…

GOLSON:  No, I wasn’t on salary.  I was for-hire.  I came in and I did the job.  But it was a known fact that they would publish it.  You never discussed it.  the only two people who published their own material were Earl Hagen, who did I Spy, Gomer Pyle, Andy Griffith, and Henry Mancini.  They were the only two that kept their publishing.  To this day, I don’t know how it happened.  But if I had come out there as a newcomer with my foot in the door, talking about I wanted my publishing…out of town.

TP:    What chain of events led you to Hollywood and putting the saxophone away for as long as you did?

GOLSON:  Quincy Jones.  My ex-roommate in Dizzy Gillespie’s band.  He went out there first, and he told me that Henry Mancini had been trying to make the way open for him.  Then he left.  (We used to live in the same building.)  After he got out there, eventually he called and said, “Well, this is happening, that’s happening, you ought to come out.”  His agent was Peter Faith, who was the son of Percy Faith.  I wasn’t sure.  I took a trip out there,, my wife and I went out, and looked around to see what was going on.  I think we stayed about a week or ten days.  It looked pretty good.  So I came back, and packed up myself, and went out there.  I wanted to be very sure before I pulled up roots here.  I got a little studio apartment.  And I went to work right away!

I got a call from the Goldwyn Studios.  Alex North was doing The Devil’s Brigade with William Holden, and he wanted someone to do some source music.  Alex had called my teacher who had been teaching me weekends, who was at Bennington College, and wanted him to do the source music.  He told him he couldn’t do it, but that one of his students had just moved out there.  That was me.  He wanted me to write some period music.  The source music is not the underscoring for the picture, but if somebody puts a record on, or if there’s a band playing in the place when people come into the club or the restaurant.  That’s period music, but not the underscoring for the action and emotions and drama of the film.  So there was quite a bit of period music.  I think I wrote a gavotte; for some reason, it went back that far.  I had to do a Dixieland thing.  And I did a George Shearing type thing and some other things.  This was known as source music.  And many times, depending upon the stature of the composer, he will assign the source music to other composers and just concentrate on the music for the film.  Well, I had just gotten out there.  What could I demand?  No, I don’t want source music; I want a feature film!  This was a way of getting people to know you and know your work, and so I did it.

Eventually, through Quincy, I got into Universal.  As a matter of fact, I got the same agent, Peter Faith.  He was really in at Universal, so Universal is the first studio I began to work at.  At the time I got there they had just put together a new show with Robert Wagner called It Takes A Thief.  Now, Dave Grusin was already there, and he had written the theme for the show, but he was busy doing some other things, and they needed someone to write the music for the show.  He had done the first one, which they premiered, and I started on the second show.  And it worked out all right.  They said, “Do you want another one?”  I said, “Yeah.”  So I did the third show… It went on like that.

TP:    It keeps building up.

GOLSON:  Yes.  Eventually I went out to 20th Century Fox, who had a new show starting out.  Jerry Goldsmith, who became a good friend, had written the theme for it, and they didn’t have anybody to do the show.  They asked me if I wanted to do it.  So I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”  So I did Room 222.  And Johnny Mandel had already done the theme for M.A.S.H.  Now, they had had some composers from before, but they wanted something a little different.  I was out there with Room 222, so…

TP:    So you were a new sound, which was why producers wanted your services.

GOLSON:  Maybe so.  Anyway, I went to work also on M.A.S.H.  I did Room 222 for two-three years, and M.A.S.H.  I did for three years.  That was a great show.  And I got to know the people on the show, like Alan Alda.  They’re real people.  So it was really nice working out there.  They didn’t put any pressure on me.  At Universal, the pressure was always  on.  I was beginning to feel like a humpback in the back room, working from early morning until late at night.  You’d get to the middle of the show, and they’d call you: “Do you have Reel 3 done yet?”  You’re on Reel 2, you haven’t gotten to Reel 3.  “But we need it.”  The pressure was always on.

TP:    Why did you put down the horn?  Or did you entirely put it down?

GOLSON:  Yes, I did.

TP:    you didn’t play it at all.

GOLSON:  I didn’t play it at all.  I could have used it as an ornament or put dirt in it and planted flowers.

TP:    It must have hurt you.

GOLSON:  No, it didn’t.  Because at that time I did not like the way I was sounding on it.  So it wasn’t too hard for me to put it down.  But a strange thing happened.  In those 7-8 years I didn’t play it, the thinking process was working, and strangely enough, when I did finally pick it up again, I did not sound the way I sounded when I put it down, though I had not actually been playing it.  So the thinking process does help sometimes, along with the practice of playing, of course.

TP:    What caused you to pick it up again?  We’ll hear records from 1980-81.

GOLSON:  That’s around when I picked it up again.  It was a little frustrating, though, because I picked it up and I didn’t sound the way I sounded before, but I did not know how I wanted to sound then — not entirely.

TP:    Had you been listening a lot to music in the previous decade?

GOLSON:  Constantly.

TP:    And what was your impression of the music in the ’70s?

GOLSON:  Interesting.  Interesting and moving forward.  It should always move forward.  Because we had new blood coming.  We had people who you never heard before, coming out from Wokonomac, Wisconsin, and from Iron Mountain, Michigan, places you never heard of, coming onto the scene, and they had their own voices and things to say.  And some of them represented great potential.  Since that time, many of them have gone to become big names in jazz.  This was all happening.  It was fertile.

TP:    What impressed you of the electric music, the fusion of the period?

GOLSON:  Some of the things impressed me.  But all in all, it wasn’t really my cup of tea.  But I didn’t decry it.  I didn’t put it down.  I didn’t vilify any of the players.  It just wasn’t for me.  Some of the things were interesting.  To this day, I like some of the things.  I like some of the Rock-and-Roll, some of the Rhythm-and-Blues.  Oh yeah.  Consequential things.

[MUSIC: BG-Fuller, "California Message"; w/ Bu, "City Bound," "Just By Myself," "I Remember Clifford"]

TP:    Do you remember when you first heard Clifford Brown?

GOLSON:  Yeah.  It was in a club in south Philadelphia, Broad and Lombard Street.  I remember the name of the hotel above the club — the Douglas Hotel.  I don’t remember the name of the club, but I remember one of its features.  It began with a matinee on Monday, 4 to 7.  You opened with a matinee, and then you played that night from 9 until 1, four sets.  I heard him there with an entertaining group, Chris Powell and the Blue Flames.  They sang these little songs and had their choreography, even if it was only moving from side to side and the music had a beat that kind of appealed to the people — it wasn’t a swing kind of thing.  The aberration was Clifford Brown.  He joined in, he was a part of all this, but when he started to play his solo, he stepped out there in solitary air space by himself.  High above the circle of the earth; that’s where he was.  It was so distinct and it was so good, even the people who liked the entertaining quality of the group were aware that this fellow had special ability.  And he did.

TP:    How would you reconstruct his sound of the time?

GOLSON:  Like Fats Navarro, but more Clifford Brown.  I mean, he wasn’t trying to be a carbon copy of Fats Navarro, but he was out of that school.  It was more than Fats; it was different.  He had a fat sound.  He was maybe a bit more fiery and a bit more daring because he came after Fats, so some of the things he did were based on newer things, and he was searching for things in the chords and how to put things together.  So it was very exciting to hear him play.  What eventually happened with that group, not only did people come to hear Chris Powell sing those songs and what it was that they did; they came to wait for these solos by Clifford Brown.  That’s when he started to be known, while he was with Chris Powell and the Five Blue Flames.  It was a complete anomaly, his being with that group.  That’s how he began to be known, with that group.  Of course, he soon left after that.

He lived 30 miles from Philadelphia, in Wilmington, Delaware.  So we weren’t together, oh, every day and through the week like John and I were.  But he would come to Philadelphia quite often, because compared with Wilmington, Philadelphia was the place to be.  South of Wilmington, the next place further than Philadelphia, was Baltimore and then Washington.  So Philadelphia was a lot closer, and there was actually more happening in Philadelphia.  So he was there quite often for the jam sessions and gigs and whatnot, and we got to know each other pretty well.  Later, of course, in 1953, we both joined Tadd Dameron’s band in Atlantic City, and we were together almost every day there.

TP:    Was he consistently creative player from night after night?

GOLSON:  I’m sure in his own mind he had his inconsistencies.  But as a listener, yes, he was consistent!

TP:    You’ve told the story of your friendship with John Coltrane in many places, and two weeks ago you spoke of meeting him in 1945.

GOLSON:  I was 16.  He had just gotten out of the Navy.

TP:    You spoke of hearing Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Don Byas in one of the Philly theaters in 1945, and he brought “Stablemates” to Miles Davis in 1955.  But This is For You, John is a tribute recording, and in the liner notes you relate some telling anecdotes about his practice habits, about his passion for the horn.  You recollect the first time you heard play saxophone, on a job with Eddie Vinson where the tenor player walked off…

GOLSON:  Eddie Vinson had come to town, and he was working the Eastern Seaboard — New York (and probably Chicago), Washington, Baltimore, maybe even Philadelphia.  At that time, he decided he would get a band from the East Coast.  John was one of the players playing alto saxophone.  Johnny Coles was the trumpet player.  I can’t remember who else was in that band.  But they were all from Philadelphia.  They were playing a job in Philadelphia or Delaware or someplace like that, and Louis Judge, the tenor player he’d hired, had an argument with Eddie.  He was pretty fiery.  Right after the argument, they went on intermission, the half-hour intermission.  Then it was time to come back (it was a dance type of thing), and Louis, pouting, did not come back.  He wasn’t going to come back right away; he was going to punish Eddie.  And all of the musicians left their horns laying on the chair when they went out.  They came back, John picked his alto up, and Louis was nowhere to be found.  So they began without him.  Eddie had this particular song that had a tenor solo.  Eddie played alto himself and John played alto; the only tenor player in the group was Louis.  And for some reason, he wanted the tenor solo!   The tenor solo was coming up, and still no Louis.  So Eddie looked over to John and said, “Play Louis’ horn.”  John was a little reticent about doing that.  Eddie said, “No, play his horn; I want a tenor solo.”  So John picked the horn up (this was the first time he’d ever played tenor, you know) and he began to play.  Strangely enough, he didn’t sound like an alto player.  He sounded like Dexter Gordon, or from that school.  And it sounded so good, he was playing so much stuff, wherever Louis was, he came running to the bandstand.  “Give me my horn!”  He didn’t want anybody playing like that!  He would really lose the gig!

And John liked it.  I remember he told me,  “I tried it, I liked it,” and the next thing you know, he had gone and bought a tenor saxophone.  The tenor sax was kind of a novelty to him.  He ended up working with a former member of Dizzy Gillespie’s band, from Philadelphia also, named Johnny Lynch, a trumpet player, and they were working at a skating rink every week in South Philadelphia on Broad Street.  It might have been the E-Lite(?) Ballroom.  It was a three-hour concert every Sunday afternoon.  John would bring the tenor, and he might play one number on it.  He was primarily an alto player.  Then as time went by, he was playing more numbers on it.  And after a while, he was playing tenor and lot equally.  As time went further on, he was playing more on the tenor and less on the alto.  And finally, he sold the alto.  He was a tenor  player.  He loved the sound of the tenor saxophone.  So that’s how it got started.

He went through phases, just as Picasso went through his periods of squares and cubes… He went through phases on the saxophone, trying to find out who he wanted to be, what he wanted to sound like.  So Dexter disappeared.  I ran into him when he was working with a fellow named Gay Crosse out in Cleveland, Ohio.  I was with another rhythm-and-blues band, and I went by the hotel room where he and Specs Wright were playing.  Specs was practicing on the practice pad, keeping the rhythm, and he was playing his horn.  I noticed he sounded a little different.  Each time I heard him, he was a little different.  Because he was finding himself on the tenor saxophone.  I think he was constantly doing that, right up until the end.  At the same time, he was putting all these things together, the chords and… He was a person who practiced all the time, that Spartan-like practice, like a person who had no talent — and he had an abundance of talent.  So you hook that up, a person who had an abundance of talent and who practiced all the time, you’re going to get something pretty redoubtable!  And he was.  And he became that.  As I heard him, boy, he was awesome.

One thing led to another, and eventually, Philly Joe left town to join Miles, and Hank Mobley was leaving at the time, and Miles asked Philly did he know any tenor players in Philly.  Philly told him, yes, he knew a tenor player, and Miles said, “What’s his name?”  “His name is John Coltrane.”  Of course, Miles had never heard of him, so he asked him (he wanted to be sure) “Can he play?”  And Philly probably made the understatement of his life.  He nonchalantly said, “Yeah, he can play.”  John joined the band, and… Did I tell this two weeks ago?  Anyway, he eventually brought “Stablemates” to him and Miles recorded it.

TP:    Let me take a detour here, and ask about your good friendship with Jimmy Heath in the 1940s.  He was perhaps the most advanced of you in the 1940′s, with the big band.

GOLSON:  He was, definitely.  Jimmy was only 19 years old and I was about 16, John was 18.  And this guy, Jimmy Heath, had the ability to play chords.  We were still struggling, still spelling, A, B, C… He had the ability to play chords.  Until this day, I don’t think I’ve heard Jimmy Heath play a wrong chord.  He is fantastic with those chords!  Anyway, he was into it!  And John came to town, and he heard about Jimmy, because they were both playing alto at that time.  John was sounding like Johnny Hodges.  Jimmy had heard Charlie Parker, and he was trying to sound like that.  John eventually met him, and when he came to my house again he said, “Oh, I met Jimmy Heath; boy, he’s a crazy cat” — which meant he was all right, he was really on it!  Eventually, Jimmy formed a big band, a 15-piece band.  Boy, I’ve got to tell you, those seats were coveted.  But somehow, John and I made it. [LAUGHS] Because we weren’t playing that great.  We finally made it.  I was playing fourth tenor.  A fellow named Sax Young was playing second tenor.  He had most of the solos.  I was coming along.  John was playing third alto, and a fellow named Duke Joiner was playing lead alto.  I forget who was playing baritone sax.  Then we had some other guys in the band.  Jimmy was writing some of the music, then I started trying to write and John started trying to write.  Nelson Boyd was playing bass.  Hen Gates (James Forman) was playing piano.  Specs Wright was playing drums.  It was really sounding great.  Everybody wanted to be in that band.  We were so happy because we were in the band.  To this day I call Jimmy “boss” whenever I see him, because of that band.  Whenever I call him, I say, “Hey, boss!”  We were talking about that the other day.  I called him on his birthday, as a matter of fact, about three or four days ago.

We rehearsed a lot.  We had a vocalist.  But we didn’t work too often.  Tadd Dameron wrote some things for the group.  Because these were young kids, and the band was sounding good.  Johnny Acea, who was an arranger living in New York, was from Philly, and he wrote some things, and there was another arranger from Philly named Leroy Lovett, big-time arranger, writing stuff for Nat Cole and everything, and he was writing things and giving it to us.  We were in a privileged position.  But the band never really took off.  We were trying to get a booking agent like Shaw or ABC or Glazer or somebody to take us, but it never happened.  I guess people just didn’t have faith in these kids.  Eventually the band broke up.  But it was a good experience.

TP:    Had we another hour or two past 7, I’d quiz him more about Philadelphia in the ’50s, but we don’t.  The next recording pairs him with Pharaoh Sanders.  This is the only “tenor battle” I can think of.

GOLSON:  I’ll tell you how this came about.  I knew John at the beginning.  At the very beginning, we became good friends.  Now, Pharaoh met him later along, when he became the John Coltrane.  And for me, Pharaoh is the one who comes closest to what John Coltrane was all about.  We’re not talking about the velocity and running all over the horn.  I’m talking about the sound and the way he projected and the way he could play one note, like John, and lay you out.  One note!  I thought it would be a good idea to come up with a tribute to John, play a couple of the tunes that he played, with me as one who knew him early on, and Pharaoh, who knew him later in his development.  We put the date together, and we came up with This is For You, John.

[MUSIC: BG-Pharaoh, "Times Past: This Is For You, John"]

TP:    Were you listening to John Coltrane’s music throughout the ’60s?  Did you keep up with everything he did before he died?

GOLSON:  Well, not everything.  But I listened to him, of course.  He had a lot to say.  We had to listen to him.

TP:    Did you keep in touch personally throughout?

GOLSON:  From time to time.  Not as much as we did earlier, of course, because our paths were going in different directions and our music wasn’t the same either.  But we did see each other from time to time.  We would always recall some of the things that happened earlier-on as young teenagers.  He came down to see me at the Five Spot.  We were on intermission.  I saw him coming across the street, and he had this cigar, and he’d put on a little weight.  I said, “Wow!”  He said, “Man, I’m taking Metrecal but nothing is happening.”  I didn’t think much of it.  Then finally I said, “Well, how are you taking it?”  He said, “Well, I eat my meal and then I drink a Metrecal.”  I started laughing!  No weight loss.

TP:    We’ll hear recordings from 1986 and 1988, one for a studio date with Freddie Hubbard and one with the reconfigured Jazztet.  You mentioned earlier that for the second incarnation of the Jazztet, you made the arrangements less restrictive, more freedom for the soloists.  Did this inspire new writing for you?  Was it a project you could devote new energies to?

GOLSON:  Absolutely.  I came to appreciate that less means more.  Or, to look at it from another view, the more you do a thing, the less it means.  So that’s what I did, and we felt better about it.  Writing evolves just like playing does, or any other creative thing.  My writing started to take a turn.  I did a thing on one of those sessions called “Vas Simeon,” which had no form to it at all, no form whatsoever, but yet we had to blow on it.  So for the blowing part, I constructed a little area of chords that we would blow on, and once that was over, we went back to this nondescript kind of thing as far as form was concerned.  It was so different than what I had written theretofore, that the piano player, Mickey Tucker, said to me, “What were you smoking when you wrote this?”

[MUSIC: BG-Freddie, "Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing"; Jazztet, "Vas Simeon," C. Fuller 5, "Love, Your Spell Is Everywhere"]

TP:    The next recording is a special project, based on the Brandenberg Concertos.

GOLSON:  I didn’t defile Bach at all.  I have to say that.  Because the solos are not based on things he wrote; those things were added.  It’s another project that wasn’t my idea, but a very interesting one.  When they proposed it, it seemed like a challenge, which I accepted.  I had heard Bach all of my life.  But this time I had to eviscerate him.  I had to really look at what he was doing.  Because I knew I had to come up with things in addition to what he had written, and yet these things couldn’t sound arbitrary, like they were just picked up and tacked on to it.  They had to sound like part of the whole tapestry.  So it had to be in the style or concept or feeling that he had.  When I wrote these things, I remember, for the first person I played it to, it went into a section I had written, and they mentioned Bach, as though he had written it.  That let me know that I was on the right track.  I said, “No, that’s mine.”  But it had to be that way, otherwise it would be neither fish nor fowl.

Now, he had a certain number of instruments when he did the Brandenberg Concerti.  This CD represents about half of them.  I added some horns he didn’t have, and I added some female voices which he didn’t have.  So I had to write original parts for the voices that would go with his things, and I had to assign these additional instruments things to play, and it had to be in keeping with what he had done, and the transitions going into the jazz had to work, too.  So all these things represented a challenge.

[MUSIC: Brandenberg #1 w/ Mulgrew, Art Farmer, Rufus Reid, Smitty]

TP:    Here’s another selection from the private archive, dedicated to Bessie Smith.

GOLSON:  This is from last April.  NPR called me and asked me to compose a composition in tribute to Bessie Smith for her 100th birthday.  It didn’t have to be too long, and for solo piano.  I told them I thought I could do it.  After about a week I came up with this.  We hired Bill Mays, who was my pianist while we were in California, to do this.  They played it, and they sent me a copy.  The voice you hear will be Odetta, who narrated it.

TP:    You mentioned last week that you listened to a lot of blues as a kid, that it was played in the house a lot, and that some of your earliest experiences may have been listening to Bessie Smith and the classic blues.

GOLSON:  I had no choice.  And two of my uncles played piano similar to what you’re going to do here.  Not quite as well, though. [LAUGHS]

[MUSIC:  "Bessie and Me"]

TP:    Now some selections for the Benny Golson Quintet for Dreyfus, an in-studio date with new arrangements of previously recorded material.  I’d like to talk about reprising and reworking older material.

GOLSON:  “Domingo” is what we’ll hear.  I wrote it for a date for Lee Morgan, maybe his first or second.  It’s one of those tunes that was recorded and never even played again; it continued to live on the album.  Many years went by, and I never thought about the tune any more.  Many years later, Phineas Newborn recorded it.  Geoff Keezer played it for me, and I went, “Hey, how about that,” but I still didn’t think about it.  Then Mulgrew Miller knew about it and he said, “Hey, you ought to start playing this tune again.”  Then James Williams said the same thing.  I said, “Well, maybe I should!”  The style didn’t change too much.  The concept, the solos may be a bit different because time has moved on.

TP:    Is that how it is with most of your older material.  You have so many classics of the jazz lexicon, so I’d imagine just to keep yourself interested… Do you try to put little twists and turns in and update arrangements, or do you hew to the older version?

GOLSON:  No.  Even as a composer, they’re not sacrosanct.  I feel compelled to do something a little different.  I’m of the opinion that things should not always remain exactly the same.  In classical music they do, and the only difference is the quality of the performance, the conductor and the tempos.  But jazz is different.  We can express the same thing in so many different ways.  It’s a real adventure, and I’m privileged to be a part of it!

[MUSIC: "Domingo"]

TP:    A woman called as that was playing and asked me to ask you: If you were listening to yourself blind over the air, how would you know it’s your tune?  What are the distinctive characteristics by which you recognize your compositions?

GOLSON:  I don’t know if she meant if I’m playing it or if it’s just my composition?  If I’m playing it, it’s just like hearing my own voice.  I know my style.  But if it’s my composition and someone else is playing it, there are lots of parallels.  It’s like hearing your mate’s voice.  When you hear that voice, you know it’s his or hers in a crowd.  You can pick it out.  Sometimes you even know the smell of your mate.  He or she can cough in a crowd, and you can identify them by the cough.  You can see a bunch of children playing, and they’re making lots of noise, they’re rambunctious, and yet, with your back turned you can tell whether or not your kid is there if he’s joining in with his voice.  There are lots of parallels.  You can tell the way a person walks from the rear that it’s him or her, if you know them really well.

It’s the same thing with music. The structure, as you said.  Yes, you know the structure.  You know the very nature of the song.  You don’t even have to hear the melody.  Before they get back to the melody again, you know it’s yours.  It might sound complicated, but it’s extremely easy.

TP:    I think an implication of the question is, what are some of the salient aspects of the Benny Golson writing style and, perhaps also, the improvisational style, since you function as a composer-improviser?

GOLSON:  Saliently, it would be the structure, the very nature of the tune.  What chord follows what chord.  Which determines the structure or the concept of the tune.  The melody is the same thing.  You have one note, you have nothing.  You have nothing of any consequence until you get the second note.  You’ve got the beginning of a melody.  The first note doesn’t mean a thing.

TP:    So it’s how you get from Point A to Point B that makes Benny Golson Benny Golson.  Do you see your identities as composer and improviser as separate, as related, as sometimes separate and sometimes… Certainly, there’s sometimes an element of spontaneous composition in the act of improvising.

GOLSON:  Always separate for me.  When I’m playing, I don’t think about the writing.  When I’m writing, conversely, I don’t think about the playing.  The two never meet.

TP:    Do you have to clear your head, or is that just the way it is?

GOLSON:  No, it’s just natural.  I pour myself into each aspect, totally.

I got a Guggenheim fellowship last year, and under their aegis I will be writing another symphony, a second symphony.  The first was a combination of the jazz thing and this, but this will be straight-out classical.  Don’t know where I’m going.  I have my premise, I’ve done my research, and all I have to do is translate these things into music.  Haven’t written a note, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, reading a lot of books, and when I get ready to put pen to paper, hopefully things will happen.  And I’ve been commissioned to write a new ballet by a ballet company in Columbus called Ballet-Met.  I’ve been out there, I’ve talked with them, they have great facilities.  They’ve got two studios that look like airplane hangars.  It’s incredible.  Their facility takes up a whole block.  People in New York would kill for that. [ETC.]

[-30-]

Benny Golson Musician Show (2-7-96):

TP:    When we started running down the musicians on whom we wanted to focus, the first you mentioned was Lucky Thompson.  Most of this show will be devoted to tenor players from the Coleman Hawkins school – Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, Hawkins — who are the people who pulled you in when you were beginning and feeling your oats on the tenor.

GOLSON:  Lucky sort of grew out of Don Byas, that school of thought Don seemed to come up with, a former alto player.  Lucky’s approach was even smoother.  He tended to flow one thing into another.  He would come at melodies from different angles; he had a good knowledge of chords.  Though he’s still alive, I have to say “had,” because he is no longer playing.  What we’re about to play is one of the last things he recorded before he bowed out  It was so good, it’s one of the best things I ever heard from him.  I heard it a few months ago, a friend had it, and I was taken aback.

TP:    When did you first hear him play, become aware of him?

GOLSON:  It had to be ’53, or something like that.  I heard him after I heard Don Byas.  And although the styles were similar, oxymoronically, they were different at the same time.  He says some of the same things that Don used to say, but in a slightly different way.  They’re from the same musical neighborhood and concept, so to speak.

TP:    You referred to Don Byas a converted alto saxophonist.  Do you feel that his having played alto saxophone first had a significant impact on his style as a tenor saxophonist?

GOLSON:  I’m not sure, but I suspect that he did.  He sings in his melodies when he plays like a lead alto.  If you listen closely on his ballads, he sings those melodies like Charlie Parker used to sing the melodies.  Singing in the sense that he’s pouring out his heart, almost vocally, through the saxophone, through the sound of the saxophone.  That’s what we used to call “singing.”  That’s the way Don played his melodies.  Now, Lucky didn’t play his melodies quite the same.  If you played them back to back, you might be able to hear that.

TP:    Eddie Lockjaw Davis said in an interview that Don Byas was able to incorporate the ideas that Art Tatum was playing in his left hand on the saxophone, and was one of the very few who had the technique to be able to realize that.  What do you make of that?  We know he was very influenced by Tatum and had tons of Tatum records?

GOLSON:  Well, I’d have to say he was ambidextrously talented, because he not only played what he played in the left hand, he played quite a bit of what he played in the right hand, too.

TP:    Well, it’s a literal quote.  But he did have prodigious technique, and was a saxophonist from the ’30s who was really respected by the young generation who came up after World War II.

GOLSON:  Oh yes.  Let me tell you, I happened to be talking about him with Harry Sweets Edison, and Sweets said to me, “When Chu Berry was in town we used to have jam sessions, and Chu would always want to get with Don.”  I said, “What was the outcome when they’d get together?”  I can’t repeat verbatim, but he said Don did him in each time.  And Earl Bostic used to tell me about him; he would go to the sessions, and nobody could keep up with him, I guess other than Earl Bostic himself, who was really quite the technician.  Oh yeah, he could play.

TP:    And also in 1944, when Dizzy Gillespie went on 52nd Street and Charlie Parker was in Kansas City, he hired Don Byas for the front line.

GOLSON:  Oh yes.

TP:    When did you first hear Don Byas?  I believe you saw Dizzy and Bird in  person for the first time in ’45 in Philadelphia.

GOLSON:  It was ’45, yes.  We were sort of getting into that… When I say “we,” we who were aspiring professionals.  Ray Bryant was at that concert.  John Coltrane and I went together.  I think Jimmy Heath was there in the first row with some other piano player from Philly, locally.  When we heard this concert, it literally changed our lives.  We could feel something happening to us inside that we’d never felt before.  Because not only were we hearing a fantastic performance, we were hearing a kind of music that we had never, ever heard before.  You have to imagine the impact on 16- and 18-year kids.  That’s what we were.  All the way home, we were “supposing” and “if.”  We were looking into the future.  We wanted to know what that music was all about, really.  And I am still trying to find out what it’s all about.  Because music is open-ended.  You never really complete it.  You never finish it.  It’s malleable, you reshape it and you put it here and you put it over there and you add something to it, and it continues to grow.  Even the styles… How can I say it?  Today’s adventure is tomorrow’s commonplace.  That’s because Jazz in particular has such a forward motion to it, it’s always evolving out of itself and it’s moving forward, so that the styles that are great today might be a little dated tomorrow, but it doesn’t go into obscurity.  You just move it over on the shelf and make room for the newer things.

TP:    And the day after tomorrow, it may be fresh again.

GOLSON:  Well, the future is always a second away or so.  So as we move forward in the stream of time, and making time our confederate, we indefatigably move ahead with it — if we are truly creative.  And that’s what we do.  No musician that I know of is ever completely satisfied.  I mean, I’ve heard Dizzy play, and Charlie Parker, J.J. Johnson, John Coltrane.  And when you’d talk to them, you’d always hear, “I think I could do it better if I had done so-and-so.”  And you’re saying, “What?”  It’s a relative thing.  No matter where we are, what strata, what level we’re at in ability, we’re always stretching.  We’re never satisfied.  We’re always reaching.  That’s part of the adventure.

[MUSIC:  Lucky Thompson, "When Sunny Gets Blue," "Blue and Boogie" (1970)]

GOLSON:  Unfortunately, on “Blue and Boogie,” the sound was not quite right.  He must have been a little disappointed with that.  But the performance was good, what he was playing was fine, but the sound was a little constricted.  That wasn’t really his sound.  I know his sound.  It’s one of those things that’s happened to me; it’s happened to many of us from time to time.

I guess the next thing you’re going to play is “52nd Street Theme” with Dizzy and Don Byas.  When I heard this, during that time the saxophone players were playing kind of smooth and mellow and flowing.  The tongue didn’t touch the reed too often.  It was just the style.  So here comes Don, with great articulation… You notice the way he plays, especially when he goes into the bridge, and you notice that he’s playing wide intervals.  The notes are far apart.  He’s not going smoothly, like going up a pair of steps or down a pair of steps.  It’s tantamount to skipping steps, jumping down steps, jumping up steps, over the notes.  He knew his horn that well, you’ll notice, as he plays what he does.

[MUSIC: Byas-Diz, "52nd Street Theme"; Byas, "Candy," "How High The Moon"]

TP:    That reflected in many ways what was happening on 52nd Street at the time, the mixture of musicians of different sensibilities and eras, and playing a song that was the anthem of the young beboppers… Benny pointed out that he wanted to hear Don Byas’ break when he went into the bridge.

GOLSON:  That “52nd Street Theme” is notable because it epitomized what was happening musically at that time.  You’ll notice, as you listen to some of those things, the rhythm was kind of boom-changy, which was sort of a reflection from the past.  Keep in mind that when this music started…oh, whenever they started… I’m not sure exactly when it started but I heard it in 1945.  When I say “they,” I’m referring to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.  And when we first heard them in Philadelphia live, we weren’t even sure who Charlie Parker was when they first started to play.  But they had Slam Stewart on bass, I think Big Sid Catlett was on drums and Al Haig was playing piano.  We didn’t realize then that the rhythm section hadn’t caught up with what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were doing.  On some of those early things, Bird and Diz were hitting it hard, in this new direction, but the rhythm section was lagging a little bit behind.  Later on they got with it, with Max Roach, Kenny Clarke and some of the others.

TP:    What exactly were they lacking?

GOLSON:  they were lacking the spirit of the new concept that Bird and Diz had come up with.  Of course, jazz had existed before Bird and Diz were playing what they played, so they were playing  what they knew best, what they used to play before Diz and Bird came on the scene with this epochal music.

TP:    What did they add rhythmically?

GOLSON:  Well, on that tune you hear the bass drum on every beat.  BOOM-BOOM, BOOM-BOOM, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.  That doesn’t happen so much now.  The more you do a thing, the less it means.  Now when the bass drum is played, it’s played a little lightly, and when you accent certain things, then it means something.  But if you have it BOOM-BOOM’ing all the time, then you really  have to hit it hard, and it would be overwhelming.  Things like that.  The bass selection of notes, the notes then on the bass were thumps, THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.  You played them, and they died immediately.  I call it the rubber band sound.  You hear Ron Carter, Ray Drummond, Rufus Reid, they play those notes like they don’t want to die.  They ring fully until the finger touches the string to play the next note.  They ring.  They fill up.  It gives you a different feeling when you’re playing with these kind of players, too.  And it makes the music sound different.

TP:    Now, when you were a kid, listening to this for the first time, going to the Earle Theater to hear Bird and Dizzy, what kind of records  were you listening to and assimilating?

GOLSON:  I was listening to Lionel Hampton.  Arnett Cobb, he was my hero.  He was the one that was responsible for me picking up the tenor saxophone.  That’s where we were.  If anyone knows about the Lionel Hampton groove on “Flyin’ Home,” to me, that was the epitome of saxophone playing.  That was the epitome of what a big band could do other than Duke Ellington.  I didn’t understand everything he was doing, but I knew it was something unusual, and I liked it.  But I liked Lionel Hampton better at that time.  It just had a certain spirit for me.  I was coming into it not really knowing much about jazz, and it was one of the things that first struck my fancy.

TP:    How did you pick up on the new bebop records?  Was it word-of-mouth among your peer group?  You heard it on jukeboxes?  On the radio?  How did you become aware of it?

GOLSON:  It was the strangest thing.  By accident, really, there was a place in Philadelphia that sold used records, records which had been played on the jukeboxes.  It was 78′s.  Though they were only 37 cents brand-new, you could go and buy these used records for a dime apiece!  I saw this thing, the very first one was “Billie’s Bounce” and “Now’s the Time.”  I’d never heard of Miles Davis.  I’d never heard of this fellow called Charlie Parker.  Only 10 cents!  I figured, after all, I couldn’t lose anything.  So I bought it.  And I took it home, and I put it on, and I listened to it — and it was the strangest music.  Had I wasted my dime?  It was quite unlike the things I had been hearing before.  But the more I played it, the more I began to like, not really understanding what it was all about.  So in the middle of all of this, I got a chance to hear Bird and Diz, not even really knowing who Bird was.  This guy dressed in a double-breasted pinstriped suit with all the buttons buttoned, and it looked too small for him — it looked like he was going to explode in it!  And when he bent over to make that 4-bar break in “A Night In Tunisia,” I almost fell out of the balcony.  John and I were grabbing at each other.  We’d never heard anybody play like that before.

TP:    Did he have a big-big sound, Charlie Parker?

GOLSON:  Yes, he had a big sound.  And the things that he played… John Coltrane was playing alto at that time.  He was into Johnny Hodges!  That’s where he was.  I was into Arnett Cobb.  And to hear Charlie Parker come out and play that 4-bar break by himself… Man, we were going crazy!  What was this all about?  How could we get close to this music?

But there was another fellow who came along.  I had been into Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas and Lucky Thompson and Ben Webster and Arnett Cobb.  He was such an aberration.  He was so different  that he drove me out of my mind, too, and it was the next recording you’re going to play by Diz — “Blue and Boogie.”  When I heard him play…I’m repeating myself.  Inside I was going crazy, my emotions.  Because it sounded so great, so good to me… it’s like meeting the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in your life or something like that.  It got me, and it started to change my concept about the saxophone.  It helped me to move on.  I told him that once.  He laughed.  I said, “It’s true!”

TP:    Talk about the advances that Dexter Gordon brought to the tenor saxophone vocabulary.

GOLSON:  It was just his approach to it.  Actions speak louder than words… If you just put it on and let the audience hear it… Some will already remember it anyway.  But they will hear that what we’ve just played is totally different.  He’s going in another direction, and I wanted to go along with it.

[MUSIC: Diz-Dex, "Blue and Boogie"; Bird-Diz, "Dizzy Atmosphere"; Bird-Diz-Byas, "Sweet Georgia Brown"]

GOLSON:  When Dexter Gordon came along with that style… Oh, it doesn’t amaze me about him any more, so much has happened since then.  But at that time, no one had played like that before him.  So it had quite an impact, first of all on the musicians, and maybe even some of the people who listened to it.  But it affected so many musicians… Let me tell you what happened.  John was playing alto, and he had begun to play like Charlie Parker after that concert I told you about, in which he and Dizzy were playing together.  He was playing I think in Eddie Vinson’s band.  In that band, there was a tenor player.  Johnny Coles was the trumpet player, because Eddie had come to the East Coast for a string of dates up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and he used all Philadelphia musicians to do these jobs with him.  The tenor player and Eddie had a falling-out, so when the time came for intermission, he laid his horn on the chair (as all of us did for the half-hour intermission), and when it was time to come back, everybody came back except the tenor player, who I guess was pouting.  Nobody knew where he was.  Well, Eddie had to go on playing, so they played whatever this tune was, and in this tune was a tenor solo coming up, so Eddie told John to pick up Louis’ horn.  John was a little reluctant.  He said, “No, pick it up and play it!”  So John picked it up.  And when he picked it up and started to play, who do you think he sounded like?  He sounded like Dexter Gordon.  Not Charlie Parker.  He adopted a new mental attitude for the tenor saxophone.  It sounded so good… I wasn’t there, but Johnny Coles told me about it.  Wherever Louis Judge was, he came running up to the bandstand.  He felt that his career and his job was in jeopardy, and he said, “Give me my horn!”  But John had had a taste of it, and that’s what prompted him to buy a tenor saxophone.  That’s how it happened.  And he started playing tenor saxophone sort of as a novelty, and then what eventually happened, the alto began to fade into the background and he became a tenor player.  Like with lots of other alto players — Jimmy Heath, Don Byas, George Coleman; many of them were alto players.

But Charlie Parker, I have to go back to him again.  Although he was an alto player, and on that concert where I first heard him, my idol was on that concert, Don Byas… But when the concert was over, and after John and I went back and got the autographs (you know how kids are), we found ourselves following Charlie Parker up the street.  We followed him for blocks.  And John was carrying his horn on the left and I was on his right, like kids.  “Mister Parker, how do you do this?” and “What is this?” and “What is..>”  I guess we drove the man crazy, until he got where he was going; he was on his way to the Downbeat club, which was about four blocks from the concert hall, and we were too young to get into the club, so he left us there — maybe he was glad too get away from us!  “Okay, kids, keep up the good work.”  It was up on the second floor.  And we spent the rest of the night just standing outside, listening to this new music being played by Charlie Parker, who was being featured with the local rhythm section, who was Red Garland, Philly Joe and Nelson Boyd was playing bass.  We didn’t know any of them at the time.

TP:    In 1945.

GOLSON:  Yeah, we were kids.  They didn’t know us and we didn’t know them.  We wanted to know them, though.  And we stayed there all night until it was over.  Certainly Charlie Parker influenced John’s playing as an alto player.  But I think he influenced many of us.  Til this day.  Barry Harris sounds like Charlie Parker playing piano!  But he helped take us on our voyage to nowhere, because we didn’t know where we were going.  We didn’t know whether we were going to be successful or not.  But we didn’t care.  We were compelled to do what we were trying to do.  And each day we woke up, it was great to open our eyes, because we knew we had another shot at what we were trying to do.  So we used to have lots of jam sessions.  We used to get together.  And when I heard this playing here, and you could hear the bass drum playing this 1-2-3-4 heavy THUMP… Around that time, the rhythm sections hadn’t really caught up to what Bird and Diz were doing.  As I said, they did later, and it really began to smooth out, and everybody began to go in a similar direction in their development.  But this is what we were living, those of us in Philadelphia at the time.  I didn’t know anything about Chicago or New York or anyplace else, just what happened in Philadelphia.  This is where we were, and these were the kinds of things that were helping to move us forward — all of us.  Jimmy Heath, Nelson Boyd, Percy Heath, Philly Joe.  We were all trying to get into this new music, and eventually we did.  Some of us were successful enough to leave Philadelphia and come to Mecca, New York City, and go to various places around the world, and some weren’t.  I feel, as many of us do, that we were privileged to be a part of that and develop it to a point that we could go out and show our wares, as it were, to people all around the world, and they would appreciate it in varying degrees.

TP:    In the decade before you were able to come and settle in New York, you undertook a comprehensive, extended apprenticeship in many different bands and many situations, playing music for many different functions.

GOLSON:  Oh yes.  Lots of rhythm-and-blues.  We didn’t always play jazz.  None of us.  Because at that time… When we started, it was hard for us, because the older and well-established musicians would ridicule us.  They would say, “Where is the melody?  Where is the bass drum?”  Or “You play like you’ve got a mouthful of hot rice.”  It wasn’t like the musicians today who are older, who encourage the younger ones who come behind them.  I think it’s great when I see the younger ones come on the scene.  I think I and many of the others, probably all of them, try to encourage them.  We got no encouragement at all.  They were always trying to put us down.  Until so many of us came on the scene, that the scene changed!  Time marches on.  But it was a troublesome period for us.  You didn’t get called for many gigs, and we had to take some gigs that we didn’t like.  Gigs where you had to get up on the bar and walk the bar and step over drinks.  I did it.  John did it.  We all did it.  We were trying to survive.

TP:    You spent a couple of years in Washington, D.C., at Howard University, and I know you spent a fair amount of time sneaking out.  But tell me a bit about the Washington scene, which was very active, dynamic and proficient.

GOLSON:  It was during that time.  But then, so was Philadelphia.  Somewhere along the way, they both died.  But during that time they were alive.  They were vital.  It was fertile, both cities.  I thought it was going to stay like that forever.  I was so happy about it all.  Music was everywhere.  There were groups playing everywhere — trios, quartets, quintets — in Philadelphia and Washington.  I suppose, to a large extent, they were happening in other cities, too, in Chicago and Detroit, probably in Los Angeles, New Orleans, wherever.  It was a happy time for us, because more and more people were beginning not only to play the music, but to understand it.  So people were buying records.  People were plunking their money down to come and see the groups that came to appear in the clubs and in the theaters.  Because a lot of the theaters were still open then.  The Earle Theater in Philadelphia, the Apollo in New York, the Royal in Baltimore, the Regal in Chicago, the Alhambra in Los Angeles, the Roosevelt in Pittsburgh.   There were many places where groups and orchestras were still appearing live.  It was great!

TP:    That was also a time when there was a circuit of black entertainers, so it wouldn’t just be the bands coming into these theaters, but a whole show would be coming in.

GOLSON:  A whole show with some of them.  Oh yes, we had to play those shows.  Sometimes it was a drag.  But when you find yourself in a situation, rather than let the situation get you down… Charlie Parker had a way of existing, and his personality always came through, no matter where he was.  He said that everyone had something to say.  They might say it a little differently than you or him, but he had something to say, something of value.  So when we found ourselves in situations, we made the best of it.  We tried to maximize that situation.  Because we were still going through a learning process.  So when we down to the chitlin circuit, when we went through Mississippi and Georgia and we played those tobacco warehouses and so on, it helped us to get our soul together and to find out what feeling was all about.  So it wasn’t wasted time.  It was a part of our education.

TP:    What were some of the bands you played that circuit with?

GOLSON:  Bullmoose Jackson.

TP:    Describe it.  Within that band were the seeds of some of the most consequential music of the 1950′s.

GOLSON:  Bullmoose Jackson was a player who had played with Lucky Millinder.  He got the name Bullmoose because his appendages were long, he had thick fingers, big feet, a long face, his lips were very thick, his head was long.  They gave him that name.  But he had a beautiful voice, and that’s what helped to get him started in his own group.  He had a 7-piece group.  Frank Wess, I think, started out with him.  He had become successful to an extent, as far as it was possible during that time, and he had many recordings out.  When I met him, he was in the process of changing the band around.  So he asked me would I like to join the band.  I had an audition.  I had to come to the hotel room.  The manager of the group was also the alto saxophone player.  They gave me some things to read, and I played it with them.  They said, “Well, you’re not wearing glasses for nothing.  Do you know of a good trumpet player we could use?”  He wanted to change the band around completely.  So I mentioned Johnny Coles, who was an excellent reader.  Then he wanted a drummer.  As I told you, we didn’t always play jazz.  The drummer turned out to be Philly Joe Jones.  Well, he wanted a bass player.  Jymie Merritt was the bass player.  So we had a nice group.  When I got to the group, the only one that he didn’t let go was his manager, who played alto, and the piano player, who was his friend (also from Cleveland, where he was from) who happened to be Tadd Dameron, who wasn’t working that much at the time, so Moose said, “Why don’t you come out and play with me until you decide you want to do something else.”  So when I got there, Tadd was there.  So we had this plethora of new blood, new musicians, and we started to play some of Tadd’s things in between Bullmoose Jackson’s hits.  Then he got me to write things, and at the same time I was picking Tadd’s brains to find out how he arrived at certain things.  And the man was so friendly, he showed me everything he knew, which helped propel me along in the direction I wanted to go.  So I began to write things, and Moose enjoyed playing those kinds of things more than the things he was making his money at.  The group got so good and so diverse, that I remember, when we played a club in St. Louis, I can’t remember the name…

TP:    The Riviera?

GOLSON:  No, that was a large one.  This wasn’t quite that large.  But I remember the Riviera.  But it turned out we had two audiences, the people who came to hear Moose sing those songs, and people who came to know what the group was about.  Now, we never recorded any of those things, but by word of mouth, people began to talk about this band that had Tadd in it, and Philly Joe and so forth.  And we would play his hits, and then we would do our thing.  It was great.  It made it tolerable, because we had a chance to do the things that we really wanted to do in that band, and the leader loved it, too.
So it was great…until it ended.

TP:    The tenor player who as much as Bird affected the sensibilities of many young tenor aspirants performing in the aesthetic Benny Golson is talking about is Lester Young, and the music he cut after World War, after his supposed decline, were hits on jukeboxes in black neighborhoods around the country.  You were checking Prez out a lot, and the next selection is “D.B. Blues,” done right after he got out of the Army.

GOLSON:  It was so popular, that I had to learn how to play what you’re about to play note for note.  When we played locally at the dances… We didn’t play at the clubs then.  We weren’t that great.  But we used to play these local dances, and the younger people would come to the dances, and they always wanted to hear this tune.  My claim to fame was playing this next tune, “D.B. Blues.”  I had no identity of my own!

[MUSIC: Prez, "D.B. Blues"]

GOLSON:  You see what I was talking about.  The rhythm section still had not quite come up to where it is today.  I guess that’s a lot to ask, to come up to where it is today.  But they eventually caught on to what was going on, the spirit of it, and the rhythm did change.  It wasn’t so much hi-hat cymbal as it was then, you know.

But your speaking about jukeboxes in the black neighborhoods before brought things to my mind.  And Coleman Hawkins comes to my mind.  In my neighborhood (they used to call them tap rooms), there was a bar, a saloon, a block from where we lived.  I remember walking by that saloon and hearing this beautiful saxophone playing this tune.  Well, I wasn’t playing then.  I hadn’t begun to play at all then.  I was still playing piano (playing at it anyway).  I later found out that tune was “Body and Soul” by Coleman Hawkins.  And everybody liked it!  It’s not like today, where most of the people like Rock-and-Roll or Rap or whatnot.  Everybody in the neighborhood loved “Body and Soul” by Coleman Hawkins.  Later, when I started to play the saxophone, somebody transcribed it.  Like I said, I was so eclectic then, and we really didn’t have a voice of our own.  We used to play these things at high school and go visit other high schools.  I got this transcription of “Body and Soul” with every note that Coleman Hawkins played.  I played the notes.  Sad to say, it didn’t sound like Coleman Hawkins.  But I would do that.  And as I got older and more mature, I realized what this man was really doing in that song.  And I never played it.  I recorded that song last week with Branford Marsalis; we shared it together.  I looked back and wondered to myself why I had never recorded it.  I don’t think I ever played it.  Rarely did I play it.  I think it’s because Coleman Hawkins did so much with it.  It’s so beautiful, what else could I add to it?  It was just that way.  It was such a classic thing he did.  What else could I add to it?

[MUSIC: Hawk, "Body and Soul"]

TP:    Could you comment on the contrasting styles by the two founders of the main branches of the tenor tree, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins.

GOLSON:  If you noticed, when Coleman Hawkins was playing, he was playing like many of the other tenor saxophones during the day, and that was using vibrato.  During that time they used a wide vibrato.  That was acceptable, because that’s what was happening.  Prez came on the scene, and he used no vibrato.  And they said, “What is this guy doing?  He’s not using any vibrato.”  But he set a new approach to the sound of the saxophone.  Nobody uses the wide vibrato any more.  Many of us play with no vibrato — or, when we choose to use it.  But the wide vibrato is gone.

TP:    Why?

GOLSON:  Well, it fell out of style.  It was out of date.  Style moved on to something else.  We’re not wearing spats any more.  Things progress and go forward.  Well, call it forward or backward.  But it changed.  Everything changes.  Nothing stays the same.  We didn’t look like this twenty years ago.  Did we? [LAUGHS] Yeah, time is corrosive.  Time moves on.  But I think it was for the better.  The wide vibrato was all right then.  I like it better without the vibrato.  However, I like this version of “Body and Soul.”  I am transported back in time, so in my own mind I guess I accept the vibrato because of the way he played, the feeling, the creativity that he evinced in this version of “Body and Soul.”

Prez was a minimalist.  A lot of people thought that Prez couldn’t double up and play double-time on the fast things, or he could just groove.  I was talking to someone about this the other night.  I said, “You know, Prez could double up and run all over the horn.  I heard him do it!”  But he chose to take this approach.  He liked to lay back in that groove and find a pocket.  And it worked.  He was a minimalist.  He made his notes count.  What was it Sweets said about some saxophone player who played a lot of notes? [LAUGHS] Oh, he said, referring to this person… I don’t remember who he was, but he’d play all up and down the horn constantly.  He said, “If he got paid by the note, he could retire early.”  Sweets is a minimalist.  They choose the notes well, and they make them work, and they play the notes with feeling.  When you play a lot of notes, you don’t get a chance to linger on each note and get a full feeling from each note.  It’s only when you slow down on the ballad and you slow down for an appreciable amount of time that you get a chance to emote.  You know what I’m saying?  When you start moving fast, that’s gone.

TP:    Describing phrasing a note that way makes me think of Ben Webster, who we’ll hear on a track from his younger days before he became famous for ballads done in that manner.  Hearing Ben Webster performing “Raincheck,” from 1941, brings us to another aspect of Benny Golson’s work which we haven’t yet addressed, which is the seed of writing and your career as a composer.  The impact of Ben Webster and the Ellington Orchestra.

GOLSON:  Well, writing didn’t take me over yet.  I didn’t have enough knowledge to realize what writing was about at that time.  But I remember when my mother brought the saxophone home to me.  As bad as I wanted the saxophone, when I opened it, I felt terrible, because I didn’t even know how to put it together.  So she packed the saxophone up and we both went around to the neighborhood we used to live in, about three or four blocks away, to a the house of a fellow named Tony Mitchell.  Now, he played the saxophone.  So we went in, and I wanted to know, “Well, how do I put this together?”  He took it out and showed me how to put the neck on the top of the horn, and how to put the mouthpiece off, and how to put the ligature off and put the reed on and put the ligature back on and tighten it, and put the strap around my neck.  “Oh, I didn’t know it had a strap.”  “Yeah, it hangs on the strap.”  And I put it no the strap, and he said, “Okay, now you put it in your mouth and play something.”  Well, I’m like a mule being led to slaughter.  I couldn’t play anything.  I was discouraged again.  I didn’t know what the learning process would be like.  He said, “Wait, let me show you.”  So he put his saxophone together, and he put on this next record that you’re about to play, and he played with it, the way I used to play with  “D.B. Blues” and some of the other things.  It was Ben Webster.  The tune was “Raincheck.”  This is when I first started to become of aware of where I had to go and what I had to do — not being aware of how long it was going to take either!

[MUSIC: Duke-Ben, "Raincheck," "Just A-Sittin' and A-Rockin'"]

TP:    Ellington and Tadd Dameron seem to be the two primary inspirations of your formative years as a composer.

GOLSON:  Duke Ellington first, yeah.  Because this song you just played, I was just delighted with the way Ben Webster played.  But then I noticed the periphery that was going on around him, and that helped to even highlight him more.  Then I started listening to the chords and the clarinet… I’d only heard Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, then I heard how this clarinet, how he worked it in.  I’ll tell you, I haven’t heard this in a long time, but to me it’s like Dom Perignon wine.  It gets better with age.  It sounds better and better.  And music can sound like that sometimes.  Which means that you develop a deeper appreciation for it as time goes on, because there are other things that come into your life that helps to highlight the value of music like this.  It’s like on outdoor elevator.  The higher you go, the more you see.  And going higher is like developing a keen appreciation, more knowledge.  That’s what I liken it to.

TP:    One question before we move to the music of Tadd Dameron.  Ellington’s music was performed for dancers and in concerts and really beautifully produced revues…and for dances.  You, of course, played for many dances in your various journeys.  Talk about the impact of an audience on what you’re doing, and a dancing audience that’s in a particular tempo or a particular groove.

GOLSON:  Well, jazz today doesn’t lend itself to dancing per se.  It can make you pat your foot and do things like that, but it’s not as danceable, I think, as the music we heard by Duke Ellington.  Yet these things are classic things.  His music can be compared with Stravinsky or Beethoven or anybody else.  His music had a lot to say.  There’s a lot going on there compositionally.  His music is not something that you can get too easy as a writer.  He had a certain way of doing things — using the baritone saxophone, for example — that is not easy always to comprehend.  When you heard this music, you always knew it was Duke Ellington.  There was no question about it.  You didn’t confuse him with Jimmie Lunceford or Larry Clinton or anybody.  You always knew it was Duke Ellington.  So he had a certain way of writing that identified him.  It served two purposes — for people to dance by and for people to sit down and enjoy.  In a cerebral way, if you wanted to.  It was that deep.  He accomplished a lot with his music.  It was melodic, it was rhythmic, it was memorable, it was cerebral.  All of these things at the same time.

TP:    An aspect of that pertains to the dynamics of improvising, which is that Ellington comprised that sound out of the sound of the instrumentalists that he brought into his band.  I’d still like you to address the question of how playing for a dancing audience impacted you as a performer, but also bringing the individual personality into one’s own compositional conception.

GOLSON:  I don’t play for dancing audiences, but when I did, it was a different situation, so you approached it in a different way.  People were there to be entertained, and then you did what you did.  I guess a little bit of the entertainment thing came into your playing because you wanted the people to enjoy what you did, so you had to be in whatever spirit the music was in.  Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense.  If you were playing a Mississippi kind of blues, to try to play bebop on it wouldn’t work.  You know what I mean?  The people wouldn’t appreciate it.  So you had to get into the spirit of what was going on.  And once you let yourself do that, even though you were playing music that might ordinarily be an anomaly or an aberration to what you normally did, you could enjoy it, because you threw yourself into the spirit of the moment.  Oh, we used to play these things with the guitars and everything, and believe me, when I got into it so much, when we would go down South (there was no bebop on the jukeboxes), I found myself plunking nickels on “Miss Cornshucks” and B.B. King and you name it, and I was enjoying it.  Although I didn’t want to play it.  It wasn’t my kind of music.  It sort of took me over.  You can get into the music so much.

TP:    Let’s move to today, and the question of weaving the improvisational personalities of your musicians into your compositional conception.

GOLSON:  I can’t tell you how valuable that is.  That’s a luxury that isn’t always afforded us, though.  Duke did it because he had the orchestra.  When he wrote, he knew that Paul Gonsalves or Ben Webster or Ray Nance or Lawrence Brown or whoever it was…he knew they were there.  It was sort of like the couture tailors, when it’s made for the person.  That’s the way his music was.  It accommodated not necessarily the instrument (which it did), but the personality behind the instrument.  Certain people did certain things.  He used that to his advantage, and it made the music really vital.  Now, I do that when I can.  But since I don’t have a big band traveling around and musicians at my fingertips, not even a quartet at my fingertips (it changes so much), I try to do things so it makes sense for whatever setting I’m in and whatever group of musicians I happen to be using.  If I had a group with certain men in it all the time, then… Oh, I’m sorry.

There was one situation, the Jazztet, where we did have certain men.  We had a pianist, Mickey Tucker, who was so well-equipped… I mean, he ad-libbed, he played classical piano, he was a composer himself, he could read anything that I wrote — and I took advantage of that.  I wrote things for him and incorporated it into the group that I would never have written for anybody else.  I remember one night we had to get a sub.  We had a sub for Art when he had to have an operation.  We had a sub a few times for Curtis.  Clifford Jordan and subbed for me.  We had a sub on the drums, the bass.  It worked out okay.  But we got the sub for the piano, it was a catastrophe.  That music was so hard.  And the piano player took it home!  But when he came back, it wasn’t like Mickey.  You know, I would bring things in, and when I was writing I would look at it and say, “My goodness, I’m glad I don’t play piano.”  We’d go to the rehearsal, and the music would be sitting there on the piano, and we’d get ready to start, and he’d say, “Just a minute,” and he would sort of look at it, like looking at the headlines, then he’d sit back and say, “Okay.”  And that was that.  It was incredible.

Now, if you’ve got musicians like that, and we did… The musicians in the Jazztet were like that, and I was able to write things with them in mind.  Toward the end of the Jazztet, I was writing things for the bass, beginning with the bass, rather than having them at the end with some solo — start out with the bass.  And some of these things were difficult.  They were challenges, really; things we never recorded.  We broke up before we did that.  We might go back and record them one day…maybe.  I wrote one thing and took it in.  It had no form, no form at all, except when you got to the solos, when it had to have some sort of form.  When we first played that thing, I remember Mickey Tucker said to me after we started rehearsing it, “What were you smoking when you wrote this?”  It was so different.  But I’m of the mind: Why must everything always be the same?  Why must everything sound the same?  If a person is truly creative, it shouldn’t.  We don’t drive around in 1929 Fords any more.  We don’t wear spats.  Time moves on.  Music is no different.  It has to move on, too.  That’s part of the adventure, too — doing things different.  Some people might not like them, but that’s the way it is.  Those of us who choose to do it, have to do it.  I’ll put that word in quotes — “have to.”  We have no choice.  We have to do that, lest we become counterfeit to ourselves.

TP:    Some reminiscing about Tadd Dameron.  Last time you noted that he was a master of maximizing resources, of making a small band sound huge.

GOLSON:  Yes.  He was a dearth writer, dearth meaning dealing with a small number of instruments.  He was a master of it.  You have to listen to it.  He had a certain way of writing that made it sound bigger and more important than it really was.  That’s what amazed me about him.  But he used everything.  He maximized everything.  He knew what to do with the piano.  He knew how to use the bass and the drums and the two horns.  He knew what harmonies to use, and the rhythms and things like that.  You can hear it in “Our Delight,” which is one of the first things that caught my attention.

[MUSIC: Tadd Dameron, "Our Delight," "Focus"; Diz, "Night In Tunisia" (1946)]

TP:    You had a few comments about J.C. Heard’s drumming.  He played a different pattern behind each soloist on “Night In Tunisia,” and you noted how that affected the total sound of the band.

GOLSON:  I thought it was a different rhythm section, because it sounded different.  He was up on the ride cymbal.  I said, “See?  Now the rhythm section has come along; they’ve evolved.”  And you mentioned it’s the same rhythm section as “52nd Street Theme.”  I said, “That’s odd.” Then the next chorus he’s back on the hi-hat cymbal, which they did a lot then — closed.  Next chorus was the hi-hat slightly opened.  You mentioned that maybe Diz told him to play on the ride cymbal.  I thought, “Diz told the rhythm section a lot of things.”  I said, “You are probably right.”  Then I just reflected years before, it was always the hi-hat cymbal [SINGS TIME ON RIDE]; they only used the ride cymbal to crash!  And when Kenny Clarke left the hi-hat cymbal and went up on the ride cymbal to play tempos, it bugged them to death!  They thought he had lost his mind.  Just like when Prez refused to use the wide vibrato, and things began to happen.  Now, the ride cymbal is what you use when you really want to swing, not the hi-hat.  I mean, the hi-hat hasn’t lost its function.  It still has its place, and it’s great.  But when you really want to swing, you have to get on that ride cymbal.

TP:    How much do you pay attention to what the drums and bass are doing in the composition, particularly in the improvisational sections?

GOLSON:  A lot.  I have to feel comfortable.  If I am going to play, I have to feel comfortable.  And when I listen to other people, of course, they do what they want to do.  But basically, I’ll want to swing.  That’s what it’s all about.  It’s not just notes.  Notes must have spirit, lest they become merely notes, documentations of pitch — and we want to go way beyond that.  We want the music to have some feeling.  We want it to swing when it’s supposed to swing.  We want it to do other things when it’s supposed to do other things.  On a ballad when you go to the brushes, then that has a certain feeling.  If it’s got a little raunch to it, then you might play a shuffle.  Art Blakey was one of the few drummers who could make the shuffle swing.  Incredible!

TP:    The next set will focus on musicians who relate to the music we’re discussing, John Coltrane and Hank Mobley, who preceded Benny in the Jazz Messengers.

GOLSON:  John had an insatiable thirst for moving ahead.  Even as young teenagers, he was always two steps ahead of the rest of us.  I remember when he started talking about augmented chords, and we said, “What?”  Then when we came to comprehend what augmented chords were about, he was somewhere else.  It turned out that wherever we wanted to go, he had been there before we were there, and gone somewhere else.  He used to employ Spartan-like practice; especially as he got better, he practiced more, believe it or not.  As some of the rest of us got better, we practiced less.  But he practiced… We used to live two blocks apart in New York.  When you went to his house, if his wife wasn’t home, you couldn’t get in, because he wouldn’t stop playing.  He would play all day, and when he went to the gig at night, he would get on stage and play.  And during intermission, he would practice the whole intermission in the men’s room, and then come back.  McCoy said he practiced like a person who had no talent.  But we know he had so much talent.  And with that kind of practice and being as exceedingly talented as he was, we could see why he was able to soar above the circle of the earth in unoccupied air space.  And that’s where he was.

He went through phases, just like Picasso did.  The pointillism, the Cubism, the Blue period and so forth.  He went through periods on his saxophone.  I remember them.  When he first picked up the tenor, he sounded somewhat like Dexter, as I mentioned.  But then he went to a style, when we were playing together with Johnny Hodges, around ’54… I don’t know how to describe it.  Sort of a hopping-skipping style.  I don’t think he recorded when he was playing that way.  Then we weren’t so close as we were, because we went our separate ways, and I didn’t see him quite as often.  But I would hear him from time to time.  I remember he came by my apartment once in New York, and I hadn’t heard him in a long time.  I had heard one or two things Ornette Coleman was doing, and I said to him, “It sounds like maybe you’re doing some of the same things Ornette is doing.”  And he quickly said, “Oh, no.”  He didn’t want to be linked there.  And as it turned out, he wasn’t.  He was doing  something completely different.  Each time I’d hear him, he was doing something different.  And all of it was exciting.  He had an extremely large whatever, a voluminous bag that he could reach into and pull out all sorts of things.  It was bottomless.  Because until the time he died, he was always bringing new things into his life via the horn.  Not all of us can say we can do that.  We might change a little here and there.  But I’ve heard him make major changes, change directions.  And most of it was exciting.  Some of it I didn’t understand.  But not all of us understand everything that goes on.

I remember when he started to change, some of the things he was doing were raw.  When he was with Miles, I remember I went to see him once at the Blue Note in Philadelphia.  He had been talking to a trumpet player called Calvin Folks, and Calvin was trying to explain something to him.  In this guy’s mind… He was so open to everything, he wanted to absorb everything and distil it, use what he could and whatnot.  So he was playing with Miles, and right in the middle of a solo… Oh, I have to say this.  The trumpet player was sitting right at the bar, and the bandstand was in the middle of the bar.  So he was looking right down at the trumpet player.  He took his horn out while the band was swinging, and he said to him, “Do you mean like that?” [LAUGHS] I guess he nodded his head or whatever, and then he continued on playing.  But he was always learning.  And he listened constantly.  He didn’t just listen to himself.

TP:    Sounds like he made every performance situation as much a laboratory…

GOLSON:  That’s a good analogy.  You’re absolutely right.  On this, just notice.  This is not one of those complicated tunes.  Things don’t always have to be complicated to be meaningful.  Notice what he does with just a simple structured tune.

[MUSIC: Coltrane, "Good Bait"]

GOLSON:  You heard what he did with that simple tune.  He made it his own.  I mean, he had his signature all over it.  But now, one doesn’t have to play an abundance of notes for it to be meaningful.  I’ve said that about Sweets and some other people, and I think about another saxophone player.  This fellow was probably one of the most melodic saxophone players on the jazz scene.  He wasn’t known for running all over his horn, though he could.  I’m speaking about Hank Mobley.  I remember, I took some music to a recording session.  This guy was such a natural and had such a great ear.  He could read changes and things like that.  I took this tune (I don’t remember what it was) to Rudy Van Gelder’s, and they were reading the melody down, because they were unfamiliar with it.  When it came time for a solo, I said, “I guess he’s really going to scrutinize the chart now.”  He closed his eyes and reared back.  He never looked at the music.  He just heard what was going on, and played his feelings.  He was playing from the heart.  What more can you ask for?

TP:    He was also a prolific composer.  Maybe they were ditties, but they were all distinctive melodies and structures.

GOLSON:  Yes.  I don’t usually like ditties.  But Monk was a profound writer of ditties, and so was Hank.  He had a tune, “This I Dig Of You,”  Listen to what he does on it.  He doesn’t run all over the horn.  You don’t have to.  Some of the profoundest things that are said, are said with fewer notes — or fewer words, if you will.

[MUSIC: Hank Mobley, "This I Dig Of You"; Benny Golson, "Turning Point"]

TP:    In the liner notes it says you met Jimmy Cobb when you were at Howard in 1948.

GOLSON:  Yes, we played a gig with a guitar player who was later to become the guitar player with the Clovers — “One Mint Julep.”  That’s where we met, at this gig at a nightclub called the Liberty, in northwest D.C.

TP:    We’ll hear Joe Henderson, from the next generation back of Benny, who was already an accomplished professional with vast experience by the time he arrived in New York at 25 years old in 1962.

GOLSON:  You’d better believe it.  He was sounding good to me the first time I heard him.  Kenny Dorham told me about him.  He’s from Lima, Ohio.  I tease him about that, because it smells like sulfur there all the time.  But the first time I heard him, he sounded great!  He had it together.  That was a long time ago.

TP:    He and Wayne Shorter are the two saxophonists after John Coltrane who had a huge impact on subsequent generations.  Would you talk about the dynamics of his style?

GOLSON:  Like some other saxophone players, Joe is not afraid to take chances.  And he has enough facility to carry out the things that enter his mind.  He’ll be going in one direction, and all of a sudden he’ll dart and do something.  It might sound crazy, but it fits into the scheme of things, the overall tapestry of what he’s doing, and composing.  To a large extent, that’s what people who are playing solos do.  They are composing; composers of a sort.  Extemporaneously.  They don’t get a chance to go back and hone it like someone who is writing a song.  And sometimes that’s even more difficult, to come up with a concept, an overall concept of something that you’re doing that makes sense, and you don’t have time to edit it.  So sometimes things go by that have little mistakes in them, but you don’t look at the mistakes.  You stand back and look at the whole tapestry.  And Joe, it seems to me, has always been able to paint a picture, a picture that made sense from beginning to the end.  And it seemed like he always was going somewhere.  It wasn’t just a solo.  It always had direction.  It was going somewhere and building.

[MUSIC: Joe Henderson, "Invitation" (1968)]

TP:    An example of transcendent technique that never obscures the necessities of the moment, and the poetic drive of his solos.

GOLSON:  Aren’t you profound!  That’s great.

TP:    We’ll hear music by Branford Marsalis and Dan Faulk.

GOLSON:  You’ll notice the tenor players we’ve played today, as soon as you hear them, you know who they are.  They have distinctive personality.  You know the sound of their horns.  Unfortunately, today, many tenor saxophone players get caught up in one style, and it’s hard to tell  many of them when you hear them play.  They can play the heck out of the horns, but the styles aren’t as distinctive today as they were in times gone by.  That’s not a derogatory statement, because they can play the keys off the horn.  But the ones I’ve selected today really have their own personalities, as does Branford Marsalis — who is extremely broad, you know.  He can play bebop, he can play Rock-and-Roll, he can play the New Orleans thing, when he was with Sting he was doing something else.  It takes a lot of ability to do that.  And Dan, who is ascendant; he’s still coming, he has his own style, he’s consequential, he has something to say.

[MUSIC: Branford, "Just One Of Those Things"; Dan Faulk, "Barry's Tune"]

[-30-]

For further illumination, check out this appreciation of Mr. Roach by Nasheet Waits, which ran a few years ago on www.jazz.com, or this memorial program on the Democracy Now radio show, on which Amy Goodman elicited remarks from Amiri Baraka, Phil Schaap, and Sonia Sanchez.

A little later,  I hope to post the verbatim interviews that I conducted in putting together the piece.

* * *

Max Roach Legacy  
By Ted Panken

At the onset of Max Roach’s career, it was unimaginable that, largely through his agency, the drums would become a co-equal voice in the jazz ensemble. But from 1944, when Roach—his bass drum blanketed  by the recording engineer—propelled “Woody ’N’ You” on the Coleman  Hawkins date that introduced bebop vocabulary to the world at large,  the rhythmic matrix upon which jazz would grow was forever changed.

Elaborating on the rhythmic innovations of Jo Jones and Kenny Clarke at the cusp of the ‘40s, Roach worked out ways to shift the pulse-keeping function from the four-on-the-floor bass drum of the great ‘30s dance band drummers to the ride cymbal, allowing the drummer to comment more freely upon as well as to propel the action.

“Before Max, all the drummers, even the great ones like Baby Dodds or Gene Krupa or Chick Webb, approached soloing on the drumset from more of a rudimental and snare drum concept,” said Billy Hart. “Max was the first one to take the rudiments and spread them melodically around the whole drumset—bass drum, tom-tom, snare drum, cymbal.”

“Max was the first percussionist back in the ’40s to make everybody  respect the drummer,” said drummer Kenny Washington. “Jo Jones and Sid  Catlett and Kenny Clarke also had a hand in that development, in  playing forms, but Max took it to the next level, playing lines and  rhythms inspired by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell.  Max was adamant that it was just as important for him to know the form  and the melody as everybody else. He took independence between two hands and two feet to the next level.”

Roach was never content to recreate  the past, which he associated with segregation times, and he spent the second half of his career in  perpetual forward motion, determinedly bridging stylistic categories.  “Max may have used 30 signature things, but he used them in so many  different ways,” said Jeff “Tain” Watts. “One piece of vocabulary  could function as a solo idea, a melody for a solo drum piece. He’d  take the same fragment of melodic material and take it out of time,  use it like splashing colors on a canvas or whatever, or use it in an  avant-garde context, like his duets with Cecil Taylor and Anthony  Braxton. That cued me not to be so compartmentalized with certain  stuff for soloing and other stuff for something else, but just to use  vocabulary—your own vocabulary—to serve many functions.

“Max thought of the drum set as equal to any instrument, and he  pushed the instrument forward by not limiting its context,” Watts  continued. “Why not feature the drum set with a symphony orchestra? I  saw him collaborate with dance and spoken word. He pretty much did  everything. He gave everybody a really cool gift, in addition to his  musicianship.”

True to the black culture ethos of his era, Roach valued  individuality above all things. “I tried to get analytical answers  from him, but he never gave them to me,” said Nasheet Waits, who spent  much time with Roach around the cusp of the ’90s, after his father,  Freddie Waits, a member of M’Boom and Roach’s close friend, died. “I  asked him about playing in the odd time signatures, and he said, ‘It’s  like mathematics.’ It was always in parable; I’d come away from the  discussion not necessarily thinking that I got an answer. He’d give me  advice on positioning myself, how to approach the art seriously from a  social perspective, in terms of history and economics. He said, ‘When  I was your age and trying to play on the scene at Minton’s and these  places uptown, nobody ever really wanted to sound like anybody else.  Everybody wanted to develop something of their own.’”

Home from Boys High School as a teenager in Bedford-Stuyvesant around  1938 and 1939, Roach recalled some years ago—in a radio interview for  WKCR—that he and his friend Cecil Payne, the baritone saxophonist,  “would listen to the radio shots of Count Basie’s band from Chicago,  Kansas, and other places. Papa Jo Jones would break the rhythms behind  Lester Young. That’s why I say say for every three beats by any  drummer, five belong to Jo Jones.”

During those years, Roach, whose early drum heroes included Big Sid  Catlett, Chick Webb and Cozy Cole, was making it his business to  master the fundamentals of his craft. “Although Max didn’t use  rudiments in the same way the early swing drummers did—five-stroke  rolls, paradiddle-diddle stickings and things like that to get around  the drums—he knew all that stuff,” Washington said. “He was the first  guy to introduce Charles Wilcoxsen’s Rudimental Swing Solos book to  bebop drumming, which he probably got from Cozy Cole. Cozy had a  feature with Cab Calloway called ‘Paradiddle,’ on which he uses a  paradiddle in different variations. Max quoted a lot from that in his  drum solo on Charlie Parker’s ‘Koko.’”

Two years before “Koko,” Parker had joined Roach and trumpeter  Victor Coulson, the band’s straw boss, on a gig at Georgie J’s Tap  Room. At 3 a.m., he’d take down his gear, bring the drums to Monroe’s  Uptown House in Harlem and hit for a 4 a.m.–9 a.m. breakfast show. By  the end of 1943 Roach was working on 52nd Street with Lester Young and  Coleman Hawkins, with whom he made his first recordings; by the spring  of 1944 he was playing the Three Deuces, first with Gillespie and Don  Byas, then with Gillespie and Parker. Benny Carter’s big band,  propelled by teenage drummer George Russell, was across the street  from the Deuces; Russell developed tuberculosis, and recommended Roach  as his replacement.

“I had been in an emulation groove, but Hawk and Pres made me  realize that invention is something that you are charged with,” Roach  had said. “You try to invent things so that you can better define your  musical personality. Out of that comes melodies. Mine came about from  experimenting with the superimposition of time like 5 against 4, or 7  against 3, or with polymeters—you can break up a four-bar phrase in  4/4, which is 16 beats, into four 4/4 bars, two 5/4 bars, and two 3/4  bars, and you have even more to work with if it’s an eight-bar phrase.  When I came off the road, George Russell and I kept trying to open up  more and more to create new sounds.”

Roach liked to recall a moment during the 1944 Three Deuces gig  when Parker delivered a multilayered musical lesson. “Kenny Clarke and  people like that were in the Army,” he said, “and since I could keep  time and play the instrument and read, I was in demand. I got cocky.  I’d come late to the rehearsals, and Dizzy and Bird would wait. One  time they were waiting for me at my house! Dizzy said, ‘Here he comes  now, Bird,’ and Bird was sitting on my drum set with sticks in his  hand and his horn across his lap. He looked at me and said, ‘Hey, Max,  can you do this?’ He played quarter notes on the bass drum, the  Charleston rhythm on the hi-hat, the shuffle rhythm with the left  hand, and the CHING-CH-CH-CHING beat with the right hand all at the  same time! I couldn’t do it. I had to practice that. He reduced me  down to where I should be.”

He never stopped developing his craft. At the cusp of  the ’50s, he attended Manhattan School of Music, where he studied  composition. During these years, obsessed with capturing the many voices that the drums could carry, he explored Afro-Caribbean rhythms first-hand—observing Machito’s timbalero Ubaldo  Nieto on sets at Birdland, hanging out with Tito Puente, making a  pilgrimage to Port-au-Prince to visit Haitian master drummer Tiroro, and doing a Washington, D.C., concert with Asadata Dafora’s pioneering  African dance troupe with Gillespie and Parker. He extrapolated those  rhythms onto the different instruments that comprise the drum set,  and, using his extraordinary independence, wove them into elegant  designs. In 1953, he recorded his first solo drum composition, and, as  the ’50s progressed, he found ways to weave odd meters into the sound  of his groups.

“He became a great composer as far as the language of the drums and  the tradition of jazz,” said Andrew Cyrille, a Brooklyn native who recalls hearing Roach practice at the Putnam Central, a second floor space in Bedford Stuyvesant.  A friend of  Roach’s first wife, Mildred, he remained close to Roach throughout his  life. “He made his statements, expressed his philosophy, told his  stories from all the records he made. Several times I saw Max play the  ‘Battle of the Drums’ gigs they used to hold on Monday night at  Birdland, where they’d play ‘Cherokee’ or ‘A Night In Tunisia,’ which  are both AABA, in 4/4 time. When it was time for him to solo, he’d  play in 5/4, which would amaze everyone, like he’d pulled out the  joker.”

“One of the things that made a big impression on me as a young musician about his music in the ‘60s was the fact that he seemed so independent-minded about his music, and didn’t conform to the machine,” said Dave Holland. “He had the courage to step out and speak out, and organize his own things. In 1967, at Ronnie Scott’s, I played for a full month opposite Max’s band with Jymie Merritt on bass, Stanley Cowell on piano, and Charles Tolliver on trumpet. and when I joined Miles in 1968, we played opposite him for three weeks at Count Basie’s in Harlem. Hearing their ideas about writing in 9/4 and 7/4 and 5/4 gave me great food for thought, and those seeds found their way into my music.”

In the late ’60s, Roach contracted Jack DeJohnette to play drums  with bassist Reggie Workman and pianist Cedar Walton in Abbey  Lincoln’s trio. “Max was an architect,” DeJohnette remembered. “When  he didn’t use piano, you could hear him comping, as if the piano were  there, in the way he painted a contour behind the soloist. I listened  and played to a lot of Max, which I still do sometimes, and I imitated  his solos, just to study them, although I went in another direction. I  loved Max and Clifford’s early records, the precision, the tight  arrangements, like ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You,’ almost like big band  arrangements in a small group, and executed with amazing  professionalism. They took great pains to give the best presentation  possible, because they wanted to be taken seriously.”

In the summer of 1970, Roach called Joe Chambers, Warren Smith, Roy  Brooks, Omar Clay, Freddie Waits and Ray Mantilla to start the  percussion ensemble M’Boom. “When we got together, Max played  recordings of written music for percussion by people like Stockhausen,  Edgar Varese and Luigi Nono,” Chambers recalled. “He said, ‘This is  what we don’t want to do; the stuff is interesting, but it’s all  written out.’ It took us a while to get a concept as a group. I  emphasize the term ‘group.’ Max always emphasized collective instead  of autocratic, to go about the thing cooperatively.”

During these years Roach augmented his drum kit—which he called a  multiple percussion set—to incorporate an ever broader array of  sounds, articulating his designs and bringing out the voices of the  drums with his own distinctive tunings and command of timbre.

“You hear Max’s tuning everywhere,” said Billy Drummond. “He tuned  his upper tom-toms way up high, so that the mono-tom and floor tom  were intervals apart from each other—the distinction between the two  tom-toms and the bass drum and the snare drum made everything so  clear. That’s a hard tuning to play off of. Your mono-tom is so tight  that if your touch and control are not exact, the drum won’t lie—your  stuff will be shown up clear.”

Lewis Nash expands upon how Roach knew how to apply  the sonic nuances  of a drum kit to project his tonal personality.  “During the funk and  fusion era, when I came up, drums were tuned low and deep, almost dead  sounding,” Nash said. “With the true sense of pitch difference that  you get by tuning them high, you can create in a linear way. Max knew  how to use sound and space—he’d play a roll on the floor tom, in just  the right place, to approximate a tympani roll, or crash the cymbals  and just let them ring and die out. He’d breathe in his phrasing,  whether he was playing a solo or in an accompanying mode. I liked his  orchestrating mindset, and it continues to influence me in the way I  play time and approach outlining the form of a tune.”

During the ’60s, Roach used the voices of his drums to express his  views on the political struggles of the day. After recording the anthemic We Insist: Freedom Now Suite in 1960, he refined his  trapset-as-an-orchestra-of-percussion-instruments aesthetic on such  classics as Percussion Bitter Sweet and It’s Time, on a rhythmically  daring trio recital with Philadelphia pianist Hassan Ibn Ali, and on  Drums Unlimited, a 1965 date containing three solo drum performances.

“It was the first record I knew with drum solos that were not the ‘Hey, look what I can do’ kind of drum solo,” Drummond said. “They  were drum songs, and you could hum them. They were based on were a  series of Max’s, shall we say, licks—identifiable patterns that he put  put together in a compositional way to make musical statements with  themes, variations on themes, recapitulations and song form. Each  piece was complete, different than the other one.”

Then there was Roach’s unique beat. “Playing with him was the same  feeling that I would imagine John Coltrane had with Elvin Jones,” said  Charles Tolliver, Roach’s trumpeter of choice between 1967 and 1969.  “There’s such a cushion that you don’t have to think about playing  something rhythmically to get the drummer up to snuff. You were set  free to deal with the problem-solving of how to negotiate the song.”

“Max left a pocket for the bassist that made it easy for you to do  what you had to do,” Workman said. “Let’s deal with tempos, which was  Max’s forte. With certain drummers who flex their muscles but  understand how the elements connect together as Max did, it’s much  more difficult to make those fast tempos and play that time. Max  understood where those pockets were and how to deal with them. His  time feel was concise, and he was always into the notes of every  musician on the bandstand. With the odd rhythms, I noticed that he  would first examine the playing field, and then find some chant that  you’d know was one created by Max Roach.”

Sonny Rollins cherished the opportunities he had to create music  with Roach. “Max’s style was much more technical and polished than,  say, Art Blakey,” the saxophonist said. He quickly added, “I loved  playing with both of them, of course, as well as Elvin, Roy, Philly  Joe and all the guys. But because of who Max was, it put him into a  different category. It was like following in the footsteps in my idol,  Charlie Parker, playing with one of the gods of bebop. I look at him  as the original bebop drummer, and that put it on a different level.

“A guy who plays saxophone told me that he once played ‘St. Thomas’  from Saxophone Colossus for his father, and asked him what he thought  about it,” Rollins continued. “The guy said, ‘Well, the saxophone  plays OK, but boy, that drummer!’ That expresses the way I feel.” DB

Obituary:
 Max Roach: 1924–2007  

The iconic drummer Max Roach died of pneumonia on Aug. 16 in a  hospice in New York. Suffering from the effects of dementia and  Alzheimer’s Disease, he had been in assisted living for several years.  He was 83.
Born on Jan. 10, 1924, in Newland, N.C., and raised in Brooklyn,  Roach was the first jazz musician to treat the drum set both  functionally and as an autonomous instrument of limitless artistic  possibility. As a teenager, Roach paid close attention to “drummers  who could solo”—Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Chick Webb, Cozy Cole. Toward  the end of his studies at Boys High School, he began riding the subway  from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Harlem for late-night sessions at Minton’s  Playhouse and Monroe’s uptown House, where the likes of Thelonious  Monk, Kenny Clarke and Dizzy Gillespie, all Roach’s elders by several  years, explored alternative approaches to the status quo.
By 1942, they had reharmonized blues forms and Tin Pan Alley  tunes, changing keys, elasticizing the beat and setting hellfire  tempos that discouraged weaker players from taking the bandstand when  serious work was taking place. Before World War II ended, the new  sound was sufficiently established to have a name—bebop.
Thoroughly conversant in how to push a big band—he hit the road  with Benny Carter in 1944 and 1945, and filled in for Sonny Greer with  Duke Ellington in early 1942—with four-to-the-floor on the bass drum  and tricks with the sticks, Roach made his first record in 1943 with  Coleman Hawkins, and played on Hawkins’ ur-bebop 1944 session with  Gillespie on which “Woody ’N’ You” debuted. But as Charlie Parker’s  primary drummer in 1944 and 1945 and from 1947–’49, Roach developed a  technique that allowed him to keep pace with and enhance Parker’s  ferocious velocities and ingenious rhythmic displacements. His famous  polyrhythmic solo on Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco” in 1951 foreshadowed  things to come in the next decade.

During the early 1950s, Roach studied composition at Manhattan  School of Music and co-founded, with Charles Mingus, Debut Records—one  of the first musician-run record companies. In 1954, he formed the Max  Roach–Clifford Brown Quintet, in which he elaborated his concept of  transforming the drum set into what he liked to call the multiple  percussion set, treating each component as a unique instrument, while  weaving his patterns into an elaborate, kinetic design. After the  death of Brown and pianist Richie Powell in 1956, he battled  depression and anger, but continued to lead a succession of bands with  saxophonists Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, George Coleman, Stanley  Turrentine, Eric Dolphy, Clifford Jordan, and Gary Bartz, trumpeters Kenny Dorham, Booker Little, Richard Williams, Freddie Hubbard, and Charles Tolliver, tubist Ray  Draper, and pianists Mal Waldron and Stanley Cowell.

Roach also performed as a sideman on such essential ’50s recordings  as Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners and Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone  Colossus and The Freedom Suite, as well as important dates by Herbie  Nichols, J.J. Johnson and Little. He interpolated African and  Afro-Caribbean strategies into his flow, incorporated orchestral  percussion into his drum set and worked compositionally with odd  meters, polyrhythm and drum tonality. He gave equal weight to both a  song’s melodic contour and its beat. “Conversations,” from 1953, was  his first recorded drum solo; by the end of the decade, he had  developed a body of singular compositions for solo performance built  on elemental but difficult-to-execute rudiments upon which he  improvised with endless permutations.

He continued to expand his scope through the ’60s. A long-standing  member of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Concord Baptist Church, he incorporated  the voice—both the singular instrument of his then-wife, Abbey  Lincoln, and also choirs—into his presentation. It was the height of  the Civil Rights Movement, and he used his music as a vehicle for  struggle, expressing views on the zeitgeist in both the titles of his  albums and compositions—“We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite”  (commissioned by the NAACP for the approaching centennial of the  Emancipation Proclamation), “Garvey’s Ghost,” “It’s Time”—and his  approach to performing them.

Roach joined the University of Massachusetts, Amherst faculty in  the early ’70s, and seemed to use the post as a platform from which to  broaden his expression. In 1971, he joined forces with a cohort of New  York-based percussionists to form M’Boom, a cooperative nine-man  ensemble that addressed a global array of skin-on-skin and mallet  instruments; and in the early ’80s he formed the Max Roach Double  Quartet, blending his group, the Max Roach Quartet with the Uptown  String Quartet, with his daughter, Maxine Roach. He recorded with a  large choir and with a symphony orchestra. A 1974 duet recording with  Abdullah Ibrahim launched a series of extraordinary musical  conversations with speculative improvisers Anthony Braxton, Cecil  Taylor and Archie Shepp; these sparked subsequent encounters with  pianists Connie Crothers and Mal Waldron, and a 1989 meeting with his  early mentor Gillespie.

He also reached out to artists representing other musical styles  and artistic genres—playing drums for break dancers and turntablists  in 1983; collaborating with Amiri Baraka on a musical about Harlem  numbers king Bumpy Johnson, and with Sonia Sanchez on drum-freestyle  improv; improvising to video images from Kit Fitzgerald and moves from  dancer Bill T. Jones; scoring plays by Shakespeare and Sam Shepard;  composing for choreographer Alvin Ailey; and setting up transcultural  hybrids with a Japanese kodo ensemble, gitano flamenco singers, and an  ad hoc gathering of Jewish and Arab percussionists in Israel.

He was inducted by the Critics into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1980. In 1984, the National Endowment for the Arts named Roach a Jazz  Master, and in 1988 the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a “genius”  grant—the first jazz musician to receive one. The honors continued  until the end of his life: Induction into the Grammy Hall of Fame for  his Massey Hall recording on Debut with Parker, Gillespie, Powell and  Mingus; a Commander of Arts and Letters award from the French  government; and several honorary doctorates. —T.P.

[sidebar]
Primary Influence  

You couldn’t copyright a drum beat when Max Roach invented his own  ingenious rhythmic designs. Otherwise, Roach would have earned a  percentage of almost every jazz record made after his 1947 classics  with Charlie Parker for Savoy and Dial. Here’s what several drummers  had to say about their early encounters with Roach’s music, and how it  impacted their playing.

Roy Haynes: “I listened to Max when he first recorded with Coleman  Hawkins. Then, BOOM! I fell in love with what I heard, the little  different beats he was playing. I heard him play the hi-hat and turn  the beat around, so to speak, like Papa Jo Jones did it, and I knew we  were related. Years ago, I heard him play something, and I said to  myself, ‘I thought of that same thing, too.’”

Jimmy Cobb: “Everybody was influenced by Max Roach in one way or  another. Some copied him almost verbatim—they did what they could. I  couldn’t do that, but I got some of the things that he could do, like  the independence, the way he played fast.”

Louis Hayes: “Max was the first New York person who influenced me. It  was his ability to stand out—his sound—and his technique. His thinking  ability was at such a high level, and he worked at it very hard and  for long periods of time. That allowed him to think of other ways to  approach this music, and he ventured off into different time  signatures, to be able to play solo, to play the whole kit, to use all  of his limbs, to play the bass drum in 4/4 and the sock cymbal in 2/4,  the way the drummers who were born before him did. He had that under  control, and those are facilities that a lot of younger drummers never  put together.”

Louis Bellson: “The first time I heard Max play with Charlie Parker  and Dizzy Gillespie in 1944 at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, it  didn’t soak in right away, because it was a different kind of music. I  came from the hard-swinging, 4/4 band, and Max was throwing up such a  relaxed and yet marvelous feeling. The second time I went, I suddenly  realized that he was doing something new, that it had a purpose, that  he—and they—had down what they wanted to hear. The more I listened,  the more I realized that he’d come up with a new rhythm, a new style  of playing.

“When I played with Dizzy, Max told me, ‘Don’t play 4/4 on the bass  drum, Lou. Invent with it, accentuate on it.’ One time he said to me,  ‘Louis, you play great, but can I offer some criticism?’ I said,  ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘When you play ‘Cherokee,’ make sure you know what the  melody is and play around it. That gives you a chance to experiment.  It makes you interesting.’”

Chico Hamilton: “When I heard Max, I said, ‘Ain’t no way in the world  I can play like that.’ He could do things no other drummer could do.  He could do triplets faster than anyone, and he was Mr. Endurance. He  created a style of playing that everyone tried to play like.”

Joe Chambers: “Kenny Clarke more or less set up the modern jazz drum,  but Max Roach crystallized it. He put the multiple percussion set up  front with the rest of the instruments. You can hear phrases in his  playing. You hear statements. Motifs. You hear divisions of phrases,  the division of the song. Max was versatile. He would do stuff with an  orchestra, with an artist or videographer, a brass quintet, double  quartet, strings, M’Boom. Plus he’s a composer. To me, he is the  beacon. He taught me—he’s still teaching me—how to be in the  business.”

Billy Hart: “When I first saw Elvin Jones with Coltrane, before I could say anything to him he told me, ‘Look, don’t ask me to show you anything, because if I could show you, we would all be Max Roach.’ It’s like Max was born in the future. He went ahead of everybody to invent an academic way to play odd time signatures, and brought it back. He was the spokesman for the whole drum community, and that means the whole drum community in the world.”

Lenny White: “Max Roach was the benchmark. Everybody had to at least  try to be like him. He had drum battles with Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes , Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, and Art always won the drum  solos. But the fact is that Max was the professor. He made melodies  with the drums, and nobody tuned drums better than Max Roach. He was  also a composer, and he had great insight into how his drums related  to the composition and the other instruments in the band. He made  rudiments speak. Buddy Rich played great drum solos, but they were  mostly snare drum. Max played the whole kit. The greatest thing I  heard Max play on is a two-hour concert that was recorded live with  Dizzy Gillespie in Paris, just trumpet and drums in 1989. It’s  unbelievable! Those beats were a cross between New Orleans traditional  jazz rhythms and hip-hop rhythms—all those things were in what Max was  playing. Max Roach—and Tony Williams—were the scientists of the drums.  They took beats and stretched them, and did things that were unimaginable.” —T.P.

[sidebar]
Roach Memorial Attracts Jazz Community and Beyond
“It’s a line as long as the Mississippi River,” a woman told a friend of the queue that surrounded Manhattan’s Riverside Church to view the  body of Max Roach, draped in a beautiful farewell suit, on the morning  of his Aug. 24 memorial service. Like many of the witnesses, she was  elderly and African-American, but the throng was multiracial, spanning  several generations and including many dignitaries, among them most of  the drummers in the New York metropolitan area who weren’t on the  road.

Stage right stood a drum stool and a hi-hat, unmanned, as trumpeter  Cecil Bridgewater, saxophonist Billy Harper and bassist Reggie  Workman—all members of Roach’s stretched-out 1970s quartet—played  “Nommo,” “’Round Midnight” and “Equipoise.” After five minutes of  silence, Reverend Dr. James Alexander Forbes included Psalm 139:1-18  in his invocation. Elvira Green sang the spiritual “City In Heaven” as  the pallbearers, who included Roach’s nephew Fred “Fab 5 Freddy”  Braithwaite and drummer Nasheet Waits, placed the coffin by the  pulpit.

Maya Angelou spoke of Roach’s brotherly guidance and support, of  marching with him and his then-wife Abbey Lincoln at the United  Nations in 1962 to protest the murder of Patrice Lumumba. Amiri  Baraka, the author of Roach’s unpublished biography, read “Digging  Man.” Congressman Charles Rangel read a letter from former President  Bill Clinton, Stanley Crouch positioned Roach as an innovator within a  uniquely American cultural matrix and Phil Schaap focused on the  imperatives of strength and manliness that animated both his art and  career. Randy Weston, who knew Roach when both were youngsters in  Brooklyn, and Billy Taylor, a friend from 52nd Street days, played  solo piano. Jimmy Heath played “There Will Never Be Another You” on  soprano saxophone, and Cassandra Wilson sang “Lonesome Lover.” The  Reverend Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church delivered  a sly, stirring eulogy in which he declared Roach possessed by the  Holy Ghost.

It took Bill Cosby, though, to nail the essence of Roach’s  greatness. Taking the podium, he announced, “Why I became a comedian is because of Max Roach.” He paused for just the right amount of time.  “I wanted to be a drummer.” He related how, on his $75 drum set, he  learned to execute a reasonable facsimile of Vernell Fournier’s  “Poinciana” beat, then copied Art Blakey’s patterns on “Moanin’” after  watching the masters do it in person. But while playing along with  Roach’s high-octane late-’50s records, he was stymied by the  crisply  executed lightning tempos. “I kept falling behind,” Cosby said. “The left hand said, ‘Look, you play,’ and the right hand said, ‘Well, if  you play, then I lose,’ and I said, ‘Well, just hit the bass drum and  then try to catch up and … oh, just do something!”

Despite these difficulties, when Roach brought his latest edition to Philadelphia’s Showboat, Cosby figured he could scope out Roach’s secret.  “He had  a blue blazer on with some kind of crest,” Cosby recalled. “One of my boys said, ‘Max got a boat.’ The musicians warmed up. Max sat down.  His face never changed.” Cosby sang Roach’s beat. “I went home,” he  said. “It was no tricks. Nothing I could take.”

Cosby casually slipped on his bebop shades. “I finally met him in  person to the point where Max Roach knew who I was,” he said. “I said,  ‘Let me tell you something. You owe me $75.’”

After the service, across the street from the church in Riverside  Park, an impromptu choir of African drummers and flutists played as a  convoy of hearses and limousines carried Roach’s coffin to Woodlawn  Cemetery in the Bronx.

At Kenny Washington’s instigation, a gaggle of drummers—including  Rashied Ali, Candido, Joe Chambers, Bruce Cox, Sylvia Cuenca, Billy  Drummond, Louis Hayes, Ray Mantilla, Eric McPherson, T.S. Monk, Adam  Nussbaum, John Riley, Bobby Sanabria, Nasheet Waits, Jeff Watts and  Leroy Williams—strolled two blocks north to the steps of Grant’s Tomb  for a group photo. At the count of five, several dozen shutters  clicked simultaneously as they yelled in unison, “Max Roach, Max  Roach, Max Roach, Max Roach!!”

He will be missed.

“One thing that troubles me is thatMax was the sole patriarch and spokesman for the whole drum community,” said Billy Hart. “He’s the guy who spoke at all the funerals, like a priest or something. Nobody else. He was the spokesman for the whole drum community, and that means the whole drum community in the world.”

* * *

* * *

Some fathers and sons bond over sports or cars or tools. But John “Bucky” Pizzarelli, Jr. and John Pizzarelli, III, keep Oedipal tensions at bay with music.

Both taught early on by Bucky’s uncles, each a pro, the Pizzarellis made their first 7-string duo dates for Stash in 1979 and 1984, and continued the dialogue on six disks for different labels between 1995 and 2001. As John’s career as a singer-entertainer evolved through the ‘90s, he deployed Bucky’s unparalleled rhythm guitar skills on various Telarc projects, most recently Thank You, Mr. Sinatra.

They celebrated their shared obsession at a recent taping of the the younger Pizzarelli’s syndicated radio show at Nola Studios in Midtown Manhattan on Passover Eve, marking Bucky’s eightieth birthday with a listen-and-talk session centered around his numerous influences and career landmarks.

“That’s the chords of ‘China Boy,’” Bucky remarked, as the opening bars of Wild Cat, a 1928 Eddie Lang-Joe Venuti barnburner, came through his headphones. He sat facing his son and singer Jessica Molaskey, his daughter-in-law, across a narrow rectangular table in a cramped cubicle.

“I like when they go from G7 right down with whole tones,” he continued, as Venuti swung wild violin variations, propelled by Lang’s propulsive guitar pump. “Want to buy a guitar?”

“That’s what we used to do in car rides all over the nation,” John announced on mike. “I’d make tapes like this, and he was a captive audience. That’s how I got my father to actually speak to me. Now, what guitar did Eddie Lang play? For ten points!”

“The L5 Gibson.”

“Who’s the guy I met in Salt Lake City?”

“Oh, Alvino Ray. He had one.”

“Alvino Ray told me that two of the first Lloyd Loar L5s were sent to Eddie Lang. He had Alvino Ray up to the hotel room, and said, ‘This one is great, but the finish is a little cracked on this one, so you can have it.’ Alvino showed it to me in Salt Lake City about a year before he died.

“It’s a good thing he didn’t show it to Bucky, because he wouldn’t have it any more,” Molaskey said..

“He knew. I called and said, ‘I saw the Alvino Ray guitar,’ and you were like you had seen it.”

“When I was with Vaughan Monroe on the Camel Caravan many years ago, he played Flight of the Bumble Bee on that thing. It had a big, thick neck on it, because he liked classical guitar.”

“That’s the only thing he changed. So it’s a one-of-a-kind guitar.”

Similar Bob-and-Ray meets Nick-and-Nora banter marked the ensuing 80 minutes, as Bucky—a first-call New York studio player from 1954 to 1970 who embarked on a still-efflorescent second act as a combo, solo and duo 7-string specialist—rattled off the guitar models of Freddie Greene, Tony Mottola and Carmen Mastren; told first-hand anecdotes about Ray Charles, Paul Simon, Julie London, Rosemary Clooney, and Les Paul; offered concise histories of Carl Kress, Dick McDonough, George Van Epps, and Zoot Sims; and parsed aesthetics with blunt, erudite precision.

Later, in Nola’s Studio A, father and son had much more to say.

[BREAK]

TP:   Tell me about your family background.

BUCKY:   My grandfather came from Abruzzi, and just by accident he went back, and my mother was born in Italy after they settled in America. My father was born in the States.

TP:   Your uncles, Pete and Bobby Domenick, played mandolin and banjo. Did they come out of an Italian vernacular music tradition?

BUCKY:   No. They wanted to Americanize us, so they never even taught us the language.

TP:   One was a professional musician and the other had a day job.

BUCKY:   Pete worked 35 years in the office at Barbers Linen & Thread in Paterson, New Jersey. On weekends, he played gigs – weddings mostly. Bobby, the younger brother, got to play with all the bands.

JOHN:   Well, Pete insisted on it. Pete sent him out.

BUCKY:  He went on the road with Teddy Powell and Bob Chester, with whom he did a great record called Octave Jump. They played in a band at the Meadowbrook led by Frank Dailey. They had local guys, and Joe Mooney was the arranger. What impressed me most is that it was the Depression, people didn’t have enough money to buy two eggs, and these musicians were all dressed up all the time and driving nice cars. They made $50 a week, $35 a week in a big band! So I wanted to do what Bobby was doing. I have pictures of him and Buddy Rogers on a polo field, the whole band standing there in suits with black-and-white shoes.

TP:   How old were you when started gigging?

BUCKY:   Around 15. $3 and $5 jobs. I made 20 bucks on my first New Year’s Eve gig.

TP:   John, were you aware as a kid of all this history that informed what your father was doing?

JOHN:   No. Slam Stewart stayed with us, and I knew he was a great player, but I had no idea he’d played with Art Tatum and everything else. Zoot Sims was the swingingest tenor player I’d ever heard, but we had so much fun with him, it was just, “Hey, Zoot Sims is over.” Benny Goodman is when all time stopped in the house. When he played nearby and they said, “Come over for dinner” and he accepted, it was a big deal. We had to wait upstairs and get out of the way. Everybody was on their best behavior. But we had Jimmy Rowles, Joe Venuti, Les Paul, Joe Pass. Joe Pass played the guitar in front of me when I was 15, and I remember going, “Jesus, I never heard that.” With his two fingers, not a pick. I figured, “I’ve got to get in on this.” I had to learn their tunes to talk to these guys.

BUCKY:   He fit right in.

JOHN:   Bucky was one of the lucky ones, because he figured out how to continue to make a living when it wasn’t that popular. He wasn’t a big star. But I loved what he did, I’d go to gigs, and I thought it was the greatest thing I ever saw. It still is.

TP:   Bucky, you were born the same year as John Coltrane, Jimmy Heath and Randy Weston. Did bebop attract you?

BUCKY:  It did, but I couldn’t make a living playing bebop. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were fantastic. But I hear 26 alto players and I couldn’t name you one of them. I always told myself, “Duke Ellington never played bebop and neither did Count Basie,” and that’s what I went by.

TP:   John, were you attracted to Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Weather Report?

JOHN:  No. The hippest thing we had was Kind of Blue. We also had Seven Steps To Heaven with Ron Carter, Tony Williams and everyone else.

BUCKY:   See, I was playing a lot of classical guitar. Miles made a record of Rodrigo.

TP:   Sketches of Spain.

BUCKY:   Right. If you heard Julian Bream’s original recording of Concierto De Aranjuez, you wouldn’t like Miles. I’m telling the truth. That beautiful guitar solo is what I go by. Now, Gil Evans wrote a beautiful arrangement for Miles. Miles couldn’t hit a wrong note. Whatever he did, worked.

TP:   Did you have any formal education?

BUCKY:   No. It’s whatever I learned from my uncle, or stole from guys I met. I always met somebody that I got something from.

TP:   Your experience was not dissimilar.

JOHN: I spent ten years at the University of Bucky Pizzarelli. In 1980 we did the Pierre Hotel for 8 weeks, 7 to 11, and I knew six songs. By the end, I had a repertoire. I did four-hour solo gigs by myself, so I had to learn tunes. Then I learned single note playing after three or four years of just playing the chords. It helped me learn how to harmonize songs I didn’t know, which was the most valuable lesson of all.

TP:   A lot of guitar players say they want to phase like a horn and not guitaristically.

BUCKY:  George Barnes played that way. But I think you have to go with what’s coming out of your guitar. My style is to keep everything in three notes in the chord. I syncopate them any way I want, and whatever we’re playing is always in the chord.

JOHN:   Django and George Barnes and Les Paul before the multi-track each had that similar, right-on-top-of-the-beat Charlie Christian attack. With George Barnes I love the  idea that if he plays one note, it’s going to swing its ass off. It’s not about the guitar being a horn. That’s how I can get around being less educated than these kids I heard when I judged the Thelonious Monk competition. They played beautiful solos on Isfahan; they can play rings around everybody, because they’ve been educated to learn all these modes. Every time the chord shifts a half, they can find it. But I find that younger players lack the idea to play one note and attack it.

BUCKY:   Swing it. Above that, there was a guy called George Van Eps, who played all by himself, and it was like heaven when he played any kind of song. His harmonies…  Nobody is ever going to play like that.

TP:   You inherited his mantle as a 7-string player.

BUCKY:  That’s where I got it. When you made up solos on 6-string, you played in open keys where you had an open string. Johnny Smith used to tune down to D, so he would have a string to give him a bass note. With 7-string, you can play in any key you want, and get a beautiful note. You get D-flat, low C, C-flat…

TP:   You seem like an encyclopedia of harmony.

BUCKY:   Well, that’s the whole thing! I don’t write anything down. I try to get it all in my body. Then when I have to play, it’s there.

JOHN:   He has a basic sense of what the harmonies are supposed to do. I’ve heard him learn songs four different times over the 25 years, and come up with another way out of the woods. He doesn’t want to get too crazy with the harmonies either. But he always wants to make sure there’s a bass note with the chord.

TP:   Bucky, did you ever sing like your son?

BUCKY:   Never did.

TP:   Do you know the lyrics?

BUCKY:   No. Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You, that’s about as far as I go. It’s a short song.

JOHN:   But  there’s a way he plays the melody on ballads. He approaches Body and Soul like Coleman Hawkins does, but the way he plays it on the guitar is so right. The ballad things. On Polka Dots and Moonbeams or These Foolish Things, the way he milks the melody, there’s a class to it that’s untouched.

TP:   Bucky, you don’t mind staying in the background. You can play just rhythm guitar and be very happy.

BUCKY: Rhythm guitar is more important than the guy playing the melody sometimes. I make records with a lot of guitar players, and I’m very content to play in the background.

TP:   But you, John, have an extroverted personality.

JOHN:   Yeah, it’s like Pete and Bobby. They were real crazy guys, and he’s always been studious and smart!

TP:   But you’re also a studious and learned guitar player. Are you content to just play rhythm guitar?

JOHN:   If it’s a good band, I’ll do it in a heartbeat. I like playing rhythm with my brother Martin because he plays the bass like the way rhythm guitar should be. I always thought we play ballads really well because we learned it from him.

BUCKY:   A lot of the new guitar players don’t know how to play rhythm.

TP:   Is it a lost art?

BUCKY:   Yes. When the bands died out, nobody wanted to play rhythm any more. Today, when your kid goes to school, “I wrote this and I’m going to play this, and I’ll make an album of my own music,” and [SINGS SEQUENCE OF 16th NOTES], all over the place.

JOHN: They don’t even learn to comp behind soloists.

BUCKY: Turn around and comp.

JOHN: Or play behind a singer.  An 8-bar solo. He does that better than anybody. If I say, “Just noodle underneath the singer,” he knows what to do.

BUCKY: When they stop, you jump in. If they don’t stop, you’ve got to get out of the way.

JOHN: You hear him do all of that with Rosemary Clooney. He does the chords, accompanies her, and then plays single note lines underneath it.

TP:   Bucky, I don’t know exactly what you mean by “new guitar players.”

BUCKY: Well, the younger guys.

JOHN:   [LAUGHS] But you’re 80!

TP:   You’ve done so many records in the last 6-7 years, it’s impossible to claim anything as your latest…

JOHN:   I can’t keep up with him.

TP:   But your new DVD with Frank Vignola [Favorite Solos, Mel-Bay] blew me away.

BUCKY: But what did I do on that? I just played rhythm behind him. I only improvise on one number, Moonglow.

JOHN: Frank’s a banjo player.

BUCKY:   Frank’s got that wrist.

JOHN: Howard Alden, too.

TP:   What do you think of the European Django players, the new Gypsy Swing people?

BUCKY:  There are so many of them, they cancel each other out. They learn the solos from the record. We don’t. We have to formulate those solos, make them work.

TP:   As a kid, did you learn solos from records, like Charlie Christian solos?

BUCKY:   I think I got halfway through Rose Room that he played with Benny Goodman.

TP:   But you told John to learn Django’s solo on Rose Room.

JOHN: He never learned any of that.

BUCKY:   I could never do it.

JOHN:   You learned the songs, though, like Sweet Chorus and Tears. Also Solo Flight.

BUCKY:   Yeah, I recorded that, just the solo. No chords on it.

JOHN:   He was playing it backstage with Tal Farlow. Tal said, “Yeah, it was the first thing I learned,” and they played it together, note-for-note, at the same time.

BUCKY:   Charlie Christian was a big, big factor. I had Charlie Christian on those 78s. The bartender let me take them home. I played them on my victrola.

TP:   It must feel great to be able to express yourself on recordings in so many different contexts.

BUCKY:   When I do what I want to do on a guitar, yes, it feels great. Sometimes it doesn’t come out the way you want it. Playing an instrument makes you get up for whatever you have to do. If it’s going to be a bossa-nova, you’ve got to do this; for a swing thing, do that; for a ballad, do that; behind a singer, it’s something else.

TP:   You make it sound very simple.

JOHN:   It’s not simple.

BUCKY:   You know what the hardest thing is? Playing four-four rhythm on a slow ballad. It is! BOOM. [REST] CHICK [REST] BOOM [REST] CHICK. And make it…

TP: I want to rush while you’re saying it!

BUCKY: [LAUGHS]     That’s what I mean.

JOHN:   There’s a great record of Prelude To A Kiss where he did that. Dave Grusin made an  Ellington record, and he plays rhythm. Norris Turney played it.

BUCKY:   It’s in a movie.

TP:   What kind of guy was Vaughan Monroe?

BUCKY:   Oh, great bandleader. He was a good musician. He sang, he read music, and he played good trumpet. had good… I just worked with the Moon Maids. They’re all pushing 80.

JOHN:   You had a big band and strings. Right?

BUCKY:   Well, we only had 6 strings, but when we did the radio show every Saturday, we added 6 more local guys.

TP:   But you were never a guitar soloist in that band?

BUCKY:   No. I played rhythm. I played The Third Man theme. [SINGS REFRAIN] It was in an Orson Welles movie, and it was the popular song on our show, so I played it about 6 weeks in a row. Whenever the band took a rest, I’d play Stompin’ At the Savoy or something like that, then the band would play the last chorus.

TP:   Another thing you mentioned learning from your father is presentation and comportment. Dressing clean.

JOHN:   That’s how his uncles were, too. He spent a lot of time with Uncle Pete, who was like his father, and Uncle Pete wore pressed shirts, tie, suspenders, gorgeous suits. A saved-his-money-and-looked-great guy.

TP:   It must be nice to get validation from Bucky Pizzarelli and his peer group.

JOHN:   He’s the hardest. I played rhythm on the James Taylor record of Mean Old Man [October Road]  and I played the verse on it. When I played him the record, he looked up and said, “Who’s playing rhythm?” “That’s me.” “Oh.” He knows the guitars and the players, and he thought, “Well, that’s got to be somebody.” That’s a good thing.

TP: He doesn’t sound at all overbearing.

JOHN:  I wanted to play guitar because I liked it. I had a good time playing with my friends, and we had equipment, so everybody wanted to come to my house. Every once in a while he’d say, “It goes like this.” He gave me little pointers here and there.

TP:   And he wouldn’t say “turn that shit off.”

JOHN:   He’d say “turn it down.” But never, “Turn that shit off.” Once I was listening to My Old School on a cassette in the dining room. There’s a lick he plays on the out chorus, and my father came in and said, “That’s the one you want to learn, because that’s the hot lick.”

I took Bucky to see Pat Metheny on the First Circle tour, and he really got it. I was crying, I thought it was so good. Pat would switch guitars, and my father kept saying, “Who’s the guy who comes out with the guitars?” “He’s the tech; he takes them and tunes them.” “He tunes them?!” Here’s Bucky with one guitar while this guy has 12. The synthguitar came out. He’d say, “Oh, he’s got the Screamer now.”  He said, “Oh, he gets a big, round classical sound. That’s great. How does he do that?”

TP:   Jim Hall had a great influence on Metheny and a lot of the guitarists of that  generation.

JOHN:   In the late ‘80s I  was in a trio that wanted to play a lot of Bill Evans songs, and they were always talking about Jim Hall, so I went to hear him with Gil Goldstein, Steve LaSpina and a drummer. I remember thinking, “Well, he’s Bill Evans.” It wasn’t ding-ding-a-ding Charlie Christian, even though he’s a huge Charlie Christian fan. Jim Hall was totally beyond me – in a good way. It’s like Van Eps is for us, Jim Hall is for other guys. He was one of the 12 guitarists at the table at the Thelonious Monk competition I judged. I said, “Why are you asking guitar players to learn Donna Lee? They should learn Slipped Disk.” He looked at me and goes, “Charlie Christian.” “They should be learning guitar pieces,” I said. Then I wasn’t allowed to speak any more. It was like, “No-no, they’re going to learn Donna Lee and they’re going to like it.” [BUCKY COMES IN AS JOHN SINGS REFRAIN]

BUCKY: Slipped Disk.

JOHN:   Yeah. I said, “That’s the guitar piece.”

BUCKY:   [SINGS REFRAIN]

JOHN:   7 Come 11.

BUCKY:   That’s guitaristic.

JOHN: Guitar players should learn guitar solos. That’s the history of the guitar. Charlie Parker is Charlie Parker. That’s the alto contest. It shouldn’t be the guitar contest.  There’s enough hard guitar shit to learn.

BUCKY:   That’s true.

JOHN:   Learn a Van Eps solo. Try that.

* *

1.    Roscoe Mitchell, “Dragons,” (from HEY, DONALD, Delmark, 1996) (Mitchell, soprano saxophone; Malachi Favors, bass; Jodie Christian, piano; Albert Heath, drums) – (5 stars)

I’m waiting for the rest of the cats to come in, if there are such cats. right now it sounds reminiscent of Roscoe Mitchell, particularly with the way that the saxophonist is shaping the tone and… Hmm!  Sounds a lot like Roscoe.  Definitely has some Mitchellian approach to it.  Especially by the staggered entrances that the cats have.  On a previous blindfold test I was able to pick him out on tenor, so I’d be really surprised if I’m stumped! [LAUGHS] Is this the double quartet?  No? This is just Shipp and Craig?  It’s Craig?  Oh, no!  Good glivens!  But yeah, that’s definitely Sco.  That shows you how distinctive the cat is.  Hey, that’s one of THE cats.  Particularly on soprano and alto, he definitely has a personality all his own.  I’d love to hear more of his bass saxophone playing, and perhaps we might have to get back in touch with one another and see if we can make this happen somewhere down the line.  Because the last time we talked, he was just getting into the recorder real tight, and other baroque instruments as well, and he was kind of talking about acquiring Gerald Oshita’s sarrousophone and some other instruments he had in order to augment his own arsenal.  I was looking along those lines, too, to really get a sarrousophone, but thankfully I did get one, which I premiered at our tenure last year at the Blue Note with the electric  band.  I played a James Blood Ulmer composition on it.  Everybody couldn’t get over the size of the thing, first of all, not to mention what the hell was coming out of it.  I’m into anything Roscoe does because his spirit is always at the helm of it, and dealing with other things.  Five stars all the way .  That energy in particular, and the way he concentrates his energy and eggs other people on regardless of whatever the personnel is, to get the energy going as well, whether it’s fast and furious or slow and concentrated.  It has its way of oozing out methodically.  It definitely is logical and makes you think.

2.    Lucky Thompson, “Anthropology” (from LUCKY MEETS TOMMY FLANAGAN AND FRIENDS, Fresh Sound, 1965/1992) – (Tommy Flanagan, piano; Willie Ruff, bass; Oliver Jackson, drums) – (4 stars)

Sounds like Branford.  No?  Well, there’s our stumper.  I’m still going to justify that it sounded like Branford in the early part of the delivery because of the tone.  In listening to the way the solo stars as well, it definitely has some Steeptonial approaches to it and all.  But I quite sure we’ll find who this is a little later.  So it’s not Steeptone, and it’s not… I don’t know how Lacy even came into this mix.  Pardon me for even thinking that!  This is really going to help.  A piano solo!  According to the little clue, we’re looking at ’65-’66 when this was happening.  Let me scuttle on this one.  Whoever this is, I can’t really say that they are tippin’ as a rhythm section and in the solos as a whole.  I like the transition up a fourth from concert B-flat into E-flat in the solos and all, so that’s really hip, just to give it a whole other lift.  Ah, and it resolves back down to the B-flat.  Hmm!  I’m drawing a blank on mid-’60 sopranos, for some reason.  Of course, during that time, Trane’s influence was so prevalent.  I know it’s not him! 4 stars.  [AFTER] Lucky Thompson!  Man! [LAUGHS] Now, that’s somebody I’d definitely love to do an album with.  Tommy Flanagan?  I certainly wouldn’t have thought it was him.  My first reference of him playing soprano was the beginning of the ’70s.  Other than that, with things like “Tricotism” on Impulse, he’s the sort of cat I think of on tenor.  Yeah, flame on!

3.    Roland Kirk, “IX Love” (from ACES BACK TO BACK, 32 Jazz, 1969/1998) – (3-1/2 stars)

Whoo, lush strings!  Cat’s hollering in the midst of strings!  Hollering in the midst of the forest!  Yeeooow!  This sounds kind of recent, but I don’t want to say that.  The passage there with the staccato sounds kind of Newkish.  But I know it’s not Newk because he doesn’t use altissimo in that particular range.  He goes a tad higher than that.  Plus the guy’s ideas in the beginning don’t make reference to Newk. [Do you know the tune?] I have a hint of it.  It’s one that I wouldn’t mind learning.  There isn’t a whole lot that can really be done with it.  I like the string arrangement. 3-1/2 stars.  I liked it all around.  It seemed like the piano and vibes were mirroring themselves, with the vibes seeming to piggyback off the piano, and it sounds kind of heavy, especially when certain tenor statements were being made, and it seemed to get in the way.  It wasn’t a real homogenous sound, but more like here’s the piano over here and the brass over here, and the strings are situated somewhere in the center or back to give you a shiny dish over rice sort of feeling. [AFTER] Roland Kirk?  If it was Rahsaan, one of the things… Now that I think about it, that high-C he did on there would have tipped me off to him, especially when you think of “Hog-Callin’ Blues.”  This is 1969?  One thing that would have tipped me off is if he’d done the obvious two-saxophone thing where he plays octaves with himself in certain spots.  Also the use of double- and triple tonguing in certain areas. [Believe me, it was hard to find a piece by Rahsaan for you!]] You definitely did your work on this one to trip me out.  It was definitely esoteric in certain areas where I wouldn’t have thought of it as Kirk.

4.    Sam Rivers-Tony Hymas, “Twelve” (from WINTER GARDEN, NATO, 1998) – (3-1/2 stars)

Nice tenor beginning.  That’s a nice ostinato going on with the piano and bass.  Now more interactive.  Sounds like Cecil Taylor a little bit, one of his extrapolated ideas of how boogie-woogie would be dealt with in the left hand and the accents… This cat’s hittin’!  The pianist is happening.  As disjunct and dense as it is, it has a full orchestra sound to me, the way the pianist is dealing.  The saxophone is where I’m drawing some blanks!  This is getting meaty!  It isn’t Muhal either, is it.  Damn!  [What do you think about the saxophone player's sound?] The way it was miked reminded me of the way I got miked for The Real Quiet Storm on certain things.  I guess filtered is a good way to put it, as opposed to the open nasal passage sound that would normally expect when you hear it live.  It has a filtered sort of quality to it.  Stifled.  I’m stumped.  I liked the performance.  3-1/2 stars. [AFTER] I always loved Sam Rivers since Winds of Manhattan and Capricorn Rising with Pullen. [Was that recognizable as him now that you know his identity?  Or was it a bad selection to give you?] It was definitely not a bad selection to give me.  Part of the reason I dig these Blindfold Tests is the way they make you think on what’s happening now as well as what’s happened in the past.  These selections make me think about what’s really being put down, what has been put down, and how one’s listening habits have changed over the years, and one’s perception as well.  And also, it helps me go out and look for some other repertoire.  Probably when I leave here, I’ll make a beeline for the Virgin Megastore over here on Broadway and see what else I can cop.  So all selections are good.

5.    Steve Coleman-Von Freeman-Greg Osby, “It’s You” (from TRANSMIGRATION, DIW-Columbia, 1991) – (4 stars) – (Coleman, alto sax; Freeman, tenor sax; Osby, alto sax; David Gilmour, guitar; Kenny Davis, bass; Marvin Smith, drums)

We’ve got some spiciness here!  “The Song Is You”.  It has a Bobby Watson fluidity to it.  This also sounds recent.  It’s not part of that M-BASE thing, is it?  Steve Coleman.  I could tell certain things.  It doesn’t sound like Osby, so this is the first logical choice.  As soon as I heard the alternate stuff that was on it.  So is it logical to say the tenor player might be Gary Thomas?  No?  Almost sounds like… I got some shades of John Stubblefield in there, but no.  Taking it up the  high area, the deliberate bending and shaking of certain notes.  So we’re stumped tenor-wise.  The second alto player is Osby, isn’t it?  I think this is too early for the tenor player to be Shim. [Does the tenor player sound like a contemporary of theirs or someone older?] In certain areas it sounds like it might be a little older.  I’ve definitely got to give mad props to the rhythm section keeping this stuff cooking at a nice intense little simmer. [on the 4's] The tenor player is trippin’ out!  There’s something about the high end that tenor player is using. Oh, aa double bass pedal!  For some reason, that definitely rules out Cindy!  I’m not saying she isn’t capable of it, but I’ve never seen it in any of our dealing.  I’m definitely stumped on the tenor player. 4 stars. It was cooking, and there were some interesting tonalities going on in the midst of a nice staple like this. [AFTER] Man!  It makes sense that it’s Von Freeman, when you think about it.  He’s always seemed ahead of the time anyway.  Definitely when you think of George Freeman and the One Night In Chicago that he did with Bird.  I definitely agree with the liner notes that spoke of him as presaging Jimi Hendrix in a lot of explorations, like the distortion in his playing and his use of space and his deliberate lower tones, like the F and E he was using in certain areas.  It was definitely ahead of the time.  Different.  So it makes a heckuva lot of sense to think of it from that standpoint.  I had a chance to play with George Freeman when I was in Julius’ group, and I think we did The Last Supper At uncle Tom’s Cabin, and went to hang out on the South Side and caught a session, and George was part of the band.  He was all the way up in the stratosphere!  I haven’t actually met Von yet.  George and Chico are the only ones I’ve played with.

6.    Coleman Hawkins-Don Byas-Harry Carney, (from “Three Little Words,”  COLEMAN HAWKINS: THE COMPLETE KEYNOTE SESSIONS, Mercury, 1944/1987) – (5 stars)

[IMMEDIATELY] This is Hawkins.  And I dare say early to mid ’40s.  I own this one.  I hear Carney in the beginning of it.  One can one say about Hawkins and his playing, particularly during this time, when he got back from the five-year stint in Europe.  Carney’s playing on baritone is indispensable.  He’s the one who wrote the book on how baritone should be played and what one could look forward to in the future out of it from all the areas he’s played in.  I was listening to something last night from 1927-28.  Mostly you would think about the baritone as an immobile instrument during this time, but here’s Carney playing it with the same fluidity and agility as an alto — or a clarinet I even venture to say. This tune was up in tempo, and he was making all the changes.  For somebody you’d think of as a “Sophisticated Lady” player, holding the one note and making the one statement and anchoring the section, this definitely shows you another side.  Just one of the different facets that’s Duke’s men come out with in any situation.  And this isn’t a Duke situation.  I know this is a Hawkins date.  Cozy Cole isn’t on drums on this, is he?  No?  Okay.  Is the alto player Tab Smith?  Another one of the technical cats who could also fly up there.  He reminds me of a variation off of Benny Carter’s playing.  The attack is more exaggerated, but it still comes out of that same school.  Nice diction.  It’s more chopped-up, but it still swings.  the pendulum’s just rocking that much harder!  Yeah, give it, Bean!  The first tenor solo was… Play it back!  He was only dealing with a couple of people at that time.  It’s either Byas or Frog [Ben Webster] But I knew Hawkins was on this . That’s Byas.  It sounds like it’s during the time he was using that radio-approved saxophone, too.  One of Hawkins’ children.  Right up under there.  Five stars.  Times two.  Exponentially.

7.    Gary Smulyan-Bob Belden, “Charleston Blue”, (from BLUE SUITE, Criss-Cross, 1999) – (3 stars)

Piano and baritone.  And drums.  And a rhythm section.  And a whole band.  A bari feature!  Hot damn.  Some tonation problems there… If it’s not Pepper Adams, it sounds like someone who’s been listening to Pepper.  I think it’s Pepper!  Then I’ll go out on a limb and say Smulyan.  He’s from the Pepper school.  Which is a great thing.  When you think about the axes, Pepper was always a Selmer cat, and to get this same sound out of a Conn, which I know is Smulyan’s instrument of choice, is a great feat.  Then again, it’s also the mouthpiece.  But in that particular era, to have the extra nuts in reserve and to have something that’s not… The tune is definitely a groover and it’s got enough changes to keep you going mobile in your thinking… Coming from a player’s standpoint, not to mention a listener’s, there’s enough harmonic material and information in there to leave you wanting more.  It has a Perry Mason sort of feel, like incidental music.  It might be the EQ’ing on this system, but he goes into the background especially when it’s time for the arrangement to come back in.  Those situations are the nuts are supposed to come in.  That was the climax.  3 stars.

8.    Fred Anderson, “To Those Who Know”, (LIVE AT THE VELVET LOUNGE, Okka Disk, 1998) – (3-1/2 stars) – (Peter Kowald, bass)

Nice little tenor in the back.  Some low percussive instrument.  Is this just a duo?  Oh I did say there was something percussive in the back.  Nice esoteric interactions.  It sounds akin to Parker and Graves, Charles Gayle running up the middle!  No, it’s too tame for Charles!  It sounds familiar.  You’re enjoying this, aren’t you!  It’s starting to heat up now!  But I’m stumped as to who it is.  Now, they’re definitely doing it up.  I can hear some other things the tenor player could be doing.  I mean, the bass player is all over the place, and the tenor player is not meeting the bass player’s energy.  It’s like he’s echoing his ideas that were in the slower part of it.  He’s still in largo; my man went off in vivace on him!  Maybe if the drummer was in at the time, that would probably help.  But then, that could be another component he’d have to meet as well.  He didn’t meet him, considering what the man is doing bowing-wise.  That’s a lot of momentum in what my man is doing bow-wise to sustain everything.  Uh-oh!  3-1/2 stars for the bass player’s energy… Well, the collective energy as a whole, but the bass player really is sticking out to me.  He’s got some  [Fred] Hopkins up in there.  He knows the overtone series.  Yeah!  Okay!  Yeah!  All right, surprise me. [AFTER] The cat from Chicago?  The old Fred Anderson?  I could have used more energy from him, considering where the bass player was going.  3-1/2.  I give props to anybody who’s that age and is dealing.

9.    Chu Berry, “Shufflin’ At The Hollywood” (from LIONEL HAMPTON SMALL GROUPS, VOL.2, Music Memory, 1939/1990) – (5 stars) – (Lionel Hampton, vibes;

Uh-oh, frying the bacon!  Chu Berry.  Lionel Hampton.  This is right before his untimely death, probably late ’40 or early ’41.  But this was done along that same time when Lionel Hampton did the version of “Sweethearts On Parade” and a couple of other tunes.  What can be said about Chu Berry?  My God.  Somebody who definitely died too young.  Don Byas’ predecessor in terms of playing in between changes.  He always had that driving, rolling, authoritative tone.  Which is why, of course, he was Hawkins’ logical successor in the Fletcher Henderson band, I feel.  In talking with older individuals such as Buddy Tate, there were some other things I got to learn about him.  He also circular-breathed, and also repaired his own instruments, which I think was a real unknown phenomenon then for musician.  I mean, he actually repaired his axe.  I don’t mean put a little
piece of foil and bring a rubber band over here sort of repair.  None of that.  He actually finessed his axe, from what Buddy Tate and a couple of cats told me.  I feel akin to him in a lot of ways.  I repair my own axes, and I like that rolling, authoritative sound, like I’m here, happy to be here.  He was really coming into his own at the time that he passed.  Lionel Hampton, Chu Berry, all them cats.  5-plus stars for all classics like that.  Thank God for them.  Thank God for Chu Berry and all the cats who paved the way.

10.    Charles Lloyd, “Heaven” (from THE WATER IS WIDE, ECM, 1999) – (4 stars) – (Brad Mehldau, piano; John Abercrombie, guitar; Brad Mehldau, piano; Billy Higgins, drums)

That’s interesting.  “Heaven.”  Is this Charles Lloyd?  I remember Forest Flower, and it had that same sort of attack.  We had a saxophonist in Detroit by thee name of Sam Sanders who had that sort of approach, where he muffles and then there are some expletives in there at the peaks.  So I’m able to align myself with that.  The rhythm-section is easy, laid-back.  The piano.  Mmm!  Yeah!  I haven’t really peeped that much of Charles Lloyd over the years, with the exception of Forest Flower and hearing other things on the radio, but without a conscious, premeditated effort, but I’ve always noticed that he’s had a very distinctive sound.  He looks distinctive in the way that I’ve seen him on albums and seen him play maybe once, while on tour.  It’s got a round, shapeable sort of tone that was almost akin to C-melody when it started out, particularly in the middle register.  And I like the meditative flow of it, so 4 stars.

11.    Hamiett Bluiett-Blood Ulmer, “The Dawn” (from IN THE NAME OF…, DIW, 1993) (5 stars)

A baritone-guitar thing, huh.  It almost sounds like Bluiett.  I’m judging by the semblance in tonal weight in what I’m hearing.  I think it would have gone somewhere else if it was, but this is still kind of early. [SOLO STARTS] It is Bluiett!  This is before 1994.  I know that..  I can judge because this is that Selmer.  He didn’t have the low-A.  This is a low-A on here.  Whooo!  That’s Bluiett.  That’s what they should have had the Velvet Lounge!  That would be interesting.  Him and that bad cat Peter Kowald.  What happened in ’94 is Bluiett sold his horn to Bob Ackerman for a Conn that he’s now playing and some money. I was so outdone when he did that, because I wanted that mug.  I mean, there’s a whole lot of history up in that horn.  This is the same horn that was at the Mingus thing, from the onset of the World Saxophone Quartet — his natural axe.  He said one of his students wound up getting it from Ackerman.  This is a bad horn!  I don’t feel bad now, because I’ve since got the one that was on all the Motown stuff.  [Do you know who Bluiett's playing with?] It sounds like Sharrock or someone like that.  Is this Blood?  And this isn’t Jamaladeen, is it?  It sounds too disjunct and too thumbish to be him.  I could see this going off into a funk groove every time that comes up, but it goes back into he free thing, and it’s like a catch-me-if-you-can sort of thing.  You want to just break that mug down, but it doesn’t go that way, and it’s like, “Oh, man, we’re back into it again.”  I like it, though.  Tonal-wise and agility-wise, Bluiett is my logical extension of what Carney did.  When you think about distinctive tones, it just stuck out in my mind even before hearing him play.  The only thing that took me off-guard was that it was a Selmer recording as opposed to listening to him in the last couple of years on this Conn, which as I mentioned before, with Smulyan’s, has a different weight to it that Selmers don’t have.  Also, a certain type of cat can transcend the characteristics of any given make of instrument and make it his own, and Bluiett is definitely indicative of that.  5 stars. [AFTER] Cornell Rochester!  We did a trio, Cornell, Jamaladeen and myself at the Groningen Festival in the Netherlands in either ’93 or ’94.  We were all over the place that year.  Then also, during that time, I was dealing with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Mingus thing, and I was in the meat of my dealings with Lester and Julius at this time as well. J.C. On The Set pretty much came out that year in Japan and was making its way back state-side the following year.

12.    Walt Weiskopf, “Anytown” (from ANYTOWN, Criss-Cross, 1998) – ( stars) – (Joe Locke, vibes; Renee Rosnes, piano; Billy Drummond, drums)

Whoever this has this Brecker-Joe Henderson thing going on.  The composition sounds like “Inner Urge” here and there.  The fluidity reminds you of a Breckerish sort of thing.  Now little splashes of Wayne going on in there, too.  I like the vibe player’s feel, too.  Stefon?  Sure it’s not, huh?  Cat’s got a nice feel.  This cat is moving!  I like this cat!  I like to hear instruments that you don’t  hear played in a conventional style, where you wind up hearing a cross pollination of influences, where you don’t think of a vibe player just playing block chords with four mallets. You actually the cat influenced by saxophone and piano players.  This isn’t Margitza, is it?  All right, that was a first stab, ladies and gents.  I like the shades of the “Inner Urge” feel it has.  Very mobile.  It’s like I can almost call off the changes just by hearing it go by.  E-flat.  F.  G-sharp.  G-flat.  Yeah!  A-minor back to B-flat.  Nice, tied-together rhythm section.  The whole thing is tight.  4 stars.

13.    David Murray-Don Pullen, “Blues For Savannah” (from SHAKILL’S WARRIOR, DIW, 1991) – (4 stars)

Ah, they’re shuffling the deck.  That organ’s another mug, man.  It almost sounds like David.  Especially when he smears at the beginning of the notes.  That’s reminiscent of what I think he got out of the Rollins bag.  Yup, that is him.  Big bruh’! [LAUGHS] One of the things with David, I noticed… Good anecdote.  When we did Kansas City, the one tune he wound up playing on, where he played Herschel Evans, which I think seemed kind of ironic, where I’m in the part of Ben Webster, and he’s looking like Ben Webster like a mug!  But when he played Coleman Hawkins’ entry line on that section there, he sounded just like Hawkins, with the embellishments and everything.  When you think of somebody who pretty much the media wants to say he doesn’t have any semblance of history… The same thing with Cecil Taylor.  I hear history in these players.  It’s what I aspire to, to always have the history at the fingertips and be able to expound upon it.  After he did the actual Hawkins passage going into the solos, and he just went from there… Of course, it was kind of far-fetched when you think of the 1934 period that we were trying to represent, and all of a sudden you have this cat going into the upper register of the horn and just playing!  It was definitely something akin to David, but at the same time he let you know within that short amount of time that “I still  know the history, but this is me nonetheless.”  I think those people who were there might have missed that.  That was an epiphany for me.  I always knew that, but it just reminded me.  The same as the first time I saw Sun Ra play.  They were space-chording for like 15 minutes or so during the first part of a 60-75 minute performance, and broke it down into “Queer Notions,” just like this.  Had three drummers playing, and John Gilmore was playing the whole Coleman Hawkins thing, note-for-note, the outgoing passage, the whole bit.  Did the same thing with “Yeah, Man.”  All the cats played all the solos.  That was a great epiphany for me.

Getting back to the meat of the matter with this, the cats are rocking.  That’s the first thing I noticed with the organ trio.  Amina?  No?  [Does it sound like someone who plays a lot of organ trio function?] Definitely, with a shuffle like that.  Oh, man!  No, that’s definitely not Amina.  I don’t know what… Sorry, Amina.  It almost sounds like a MIDI keyboard.  When you think of the Smith groove-Jack McDuff sound that has that analog, this sounds really cleaned up.  That’s what I’m really thinking.  That Leslie sort of oscillating vibe.  Sounds like a clean roller rink sound.  I’m stumped. [AFTER] I could have used a little more meat in the organ.  But they were rocking, and Cyrille was shuffling the deck as if he was one of them Jo Jones type cats.  Hmm!  He had his deck of cards with him.  And David is always the voice as far as I’m concerned.

14.    Count Basie, “Ode To Pres” (from THE GOLDEN YEARS, Pablo, 1979/1996) – (5 stars) – (Clark Terry, trumpet; Budd Johnson, bs; Harry Sweets Edison, tp; Eddie Lockjaw Davis, ts; John Heard, bass) – (5 stars)

[AFTER 8 BARS] “Ode to Pres”.  Part of the Pablo series, Basie Jam #2.  So this is probably John Heard.  Lockjaw Davis is on it.  That’s Clark Terry.  Budd Johnson, playing baritone!  It’s so hip how you can take just one idea from a great cat such as Pres.  This whole song as based on his opening line off “Jive At Five.”  Lockjaw Davis is on it, and all of a sudden turn that one phrase into a blues like this.  The Basie style, of course, just tipping, and Freddie Green behind him on guitar just tippin’.  That’s Sweets.  Okay, so it’s Clark Terry, Sweets, Budd Johnson, Lock… I know Lock’s on it.  The cats just got together!  Was Joe Pass playing?  No?  He’s on Jam #3.  That is Freddie Green.  I remember the picture.  Hit it, Lock!  Dang!  “Ode To Pres” always.  Basie… That’s just magic is always  there.  Tight.  Cats just getting their collective freak on, and just merry music-making at its best.  Ten stars.
_________________________________________________________________

Blindfold Tests to me are always musical way-stations, if you will, to one’s perceptions of how he perceives other people, and also possibilities he can hear if he superimposed himself in a situation like that.  Just like when you watch a game, kind of in the sense of, “Oh, man, if I was there!”  Kind of after the fact.  It’s kind of like 360, but at the same time it isn’t, because you don’t know who it is.  But it’s always great to weigh in and see where my perceptions are and hopefully utilize them.  Definitely you can always say that there’s been some great music that’s been played and that continues to be played.  That’s what I get out of these, whether I know the individual or not.  Like, the Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry recordings has definitely inspired to take another listen to those particular albums.  Because I know I have them from the Classics series, the French issues.

* *

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

(Some eight years later, he offered his memories of Ray Brown.)

Ed Thigpen (WKCR, 12-14-94):

[MUSIC: Thigpen Trio: "Gingerbread Boy," "Denise"]

Q:    Ed Thigpen is in residence at Bradley’s this week with top-shelf trio that features pianist Charles Thomas from Memphis, Tennessee, and bassist Ray Drummond, gracing the small space with a mind-boggling variety of sounds and textures and rhythms from his drum kit. Let’s talk about your recent CD, Mister Taste, on Just In Time, which received five stars in Downbeat.  You’re joined on it by a bassist you’ve worked with frequently since moving to Europe twenty-odd years ago…

ET:    Yes, 22 years ago, as a matter of fact.  Mads Vinding, who is probably one of the finest bassists you’ll ever hear.  Denmark has a penchant for putting out good bass players, Niels-Henning, and we have another young man named Jesper Lundgard, who is also fine — but Mads is special.  And bringing Tony Purrone and Mads together, it was pure magic.

Q:    You comment in the liner notes on particularly the resonance and nuance of the sound Mads Vinding brings to the bass.

ET:  Well, for one, he’s so in tune, and quite inventive.  I am particularly pleased with the interplay between he and Tony — well, the whole group, actually.  Like I said, it was magic.  It was one of those magical dates that came together.  We had done a television show, and like many Jazz endeavors that come about, you don’t have too much time to rehearse.  I brought some tunes in, and it was just… The only thing I can say is that it was like magic, the things that happened, their response, and it was so open…

So when I heard it, I said, “I have to record it.”  So we went into the studio.  We had another one-nighter in Copenhagen, and then a day off.  So we laid down about seven tracks, and I used it as a demo.  Then Just-In-Time was interested in putting it out.  So I brought them back over again, and went into the studio another evening or two, and had a couple of rehearsals — and that’s the result of it.

Q:    Ed Thigpen’s father was one of the  prominent drummers of his period, really, in defining what’s called the Southwest Sound and that way of playing drums.

ET:    Well, a Swing drummer, yeah.  He was great.  Swing.  Swing, that was Ben Thigpen.

Q:    Ben Thigpen, who played with Andy Kirk for many years.  And your birthplace is Chicago.  Did you live there for a number of years, or…?

ET:    No.  Actually the band was on the road, and that’s where I was born.  But the band was actually stationed out of Kansas City.  So I guess when I was old enough to travel, we traveled to Kansas City, and then my mother took me to California, where I was raised from 1935.

Q:    Tell me about your musical tuition.  Was your father your first teacher, or how did it happen?

ET:    No, he wasn’t my first teacher.  Actually, I started in grade school.  You know, all the kids… We had church choir, tap dance lessons, some piano lessons, and we had rhythm groups, and a little orchestra in grade school!  Then in junior high school I did my first drum contest.  We had people like Buddy Redd, who was Elvira Redd’s brother, a young man named Jimmy O’Brien.  Then naturally, the concert band.  Then getting into high school with the swing band, which I think sort of kicked things off, because that band came out of Jefferson High School.  Art Farmer was in the band, and Addison, Chico Hamilton had come out of the band, Dexter had gone to that school as well — so it was quite rich.

Q:    And the band-master at Thomas Jefferson High School was Samuel Browne, a famous teacher.

ET:    Samuel Browne.

Q:    Describe him a little bit, his methods…

ET:    Well, complete openness as far as exposure.  All styles of music.  We had arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, by whoever was popular — Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Boyd Raeburn.  Dizzy Gillespie, they had charts from that band.

Q:    At that time.

ET:    Oh, yes.  Oh, yes.

Q:     So he was fully open-minded.

ET:    Oh, totally.  And you were allowed to go as far as you could.  It was totally open.  We had great arrangers in the band, wonderful singers.  Mister Browne was just very encouraging to all of us.  He was a very dedicated man.

Q:    Were you basically a born drummer?  I mean, is that your first instrument?  Or were you studying other instruments…

ET:    No, I’ve worked hard at it.  I still do.

Q:    I don’t mean that it was a natural talent.  I mean, was that the first instrument that you…

ET:    Gravitated towards?

Q:    Yes.

ET:    In some senses.  Actually, it was the piano at first, but the piano lessons, instead of… I think in the old days it was, like, I used to get stomach-aches because I didn’t know about this fourth finger being tied, and the concentration on being a concert pianist, and I didn’t have the facility for that.  I sort of wish… Now when I teach, I teach young people to enjoy the music.  It’s not about being Horowitz.  It’s about enjoying the music.  But now I’m studying again!

But it was piano and dance.  We took dance; we did tap dancing.  And singing in the choir and stuff like that.

Q:    You went to school with and were roughly a contemporary of a number of musicians who became very well known in the Jazz world.  Were you performing outside of school in teenage groups, ensembles?   If so, what sort of things were you playing, and what was the ambiance like?

ET:    Well, no, I wasn’t playing outside of school until I became a senior.  I just had graduated from high school.  My first professional gig was with Buddy Collette, as a matter of fact.  He hired me to do a gig.  We’d have dances, you know, at the YMCA and the YWCA.   Then the Swing band, of course, we did a lot of touring around the city.  We played all the high schools and so forth.

Q:    The Jefferson High School band.

ET:    That was Jefferson High School, but we played other high schools in concert.  We had… Well, who else had a Swing band?  I think Dorsey(?) may have had a band.  But our band was quite known, so we traveled all over the city, doing concerts and so forth.

Q:    As far as emulating a style, I guess your father would have been an obvious example to you.  But who were the drummers you were trying to model yourself after?  Was it by records?  Were you able to go to the theaters, hear big bands coming through, and hear those drummers first-hand?

ET:    As I said before, we had drummers who came through who were there.  Chico Hamilton was quite helpful to me.  As a matter of fact, he taught me how to play paradiddles.  I enjoyed his colors.  Then, like all kids at that time, Gene Krupa was a… You know, you went to the movies and watched Gene Krupa for the show business and all that stuff.  Then I started hearing records, and when I heard Dizzy, it was little subtle things that I liked very much.  “Ow!” was a big influence, that particular piece.  I found out later it wasn’t Kenny, but it was Joe Harris.  But also Max Roach, Art Blakey — all of the masters playing.  Just people who played well.

Then, later, after I had moved to St. Louis, I had the opportunity to see Jo Jones, Papa Jo, as they call him now.  Once I saw him, that was it.  He was a symphony on drums for me.

Q:    What was the event?

ET:    Well, actually I was in St. Louis, and I was going to see Buddy Rich at the Jazz at the Philharmonic, but Buddy didn’t make the show, and there was Jo Jones.  Well, I hadn’t seen him before, and I was just mesmerized.  I couldn’t believe what I saw.  Just everything that he did was so musical, and the touch and the swing — and from there on, that was it for me.  That was the one who I more or less patterned a lot of my work from.

Q:    Did you speak with him then?

ET:    Oh yes.  He and father were very close, and I obviously spoke to him, but it wasn’t about drums.  We talked about tennis, as a matter of fact.  When he came to L.A., when I first him, he didn’t even know I played drums.  I introduced myself, and he knew my Dad, of course, and we were out on the tennis court together.  But that was it.

Q:    What was his tennis game like?

ET:    Fine!  He was a good tennis player.  Yeah, he was fine.

Q:    Talk about the elements of his style that you were able to incorporate, coming from another generation and dealing with somewhat different demands that were placed on a drummer.

ET:    Well, what I liked first of all was the swing.  You know, you popped your fingers.  It was his cymbal beat, his hi-hat patterns.  Then when I saw him pick up brushes, which I hadn’t used before really… And his touch.  It was the musicality of his approach to playing.  It was the instrument… It wasn’t just drums when he played.  He used to tell me later, after I got to know him, that the hi-hat became his brass section.  He was one of the first ones I saw utilizing a certain amount of independence, subtle independence, and colors and things of that nature.  It just floored me.  So I think it was the overall musicality of the swing, the epitome of swing.

Q:    Were you working professionally right after graduating high school?

ET:    Oh, yes.  I started working with a group called the Jackson Brothers.  It was sort of a show group. It was Pee Wee Crayton, you know, Rhythm-and-Blues.  Most of us started with Rhythm-and-Blues.  Then when I moved to St. Louis, it was Peanuts Whalum.  Miles came home one time, I had a gig with him.  And then I went on the road with (we had territorial bands) a gentleman by the name of Candy Johnson.  In that band was Jack McDuff, believe it or not, and Freeman Lee and James Glover.  So you traveled around the Midwest and the South.  Then I wound up in New York, and my first job here was at the Savoy Ballroom.

Q:    Was the Candy Johnson band dealing mostly with jump band things, rhythm-and-blues, or was it a wide repertoire?

ET:    No, it was Swing.  It was a wide repertoire.  I think the closest… Candy played tenor, alto, clarinet, baritone; he played a lot of baritone at that time.  Jack was playing piano.  We weren’t playing organ; playing piano.  There was some Bebop, there was some Swing, we had a lot of stuff Charlie Ventura type with that group that he had with Bennie Green.  It was just good music, just swing.  Basie charts.  The standard things.  He was a wonderful player.

Q:    So you really had a ton of experience by the time you came to New York, working in all sorts of situations, I guess.

ET:    I would say so.  Then when I got here, you know, it started again, working with Cootie Williams.  That band was my first exposure to doing the tobacco warehouses doing what they call the Chitlin’ Circuit.  We traveled with people like the Ravens, the Dominos, the first Doo-Wop groups, the Orioles, then with Dinah Washington — it was wonderful.  That’s when I met Keeter Betts and Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly.  That was the rhythm she had.  Then, when I saw Jimmy Cobb, that floored me again.

Q:    Talk about that little bit.

ET:    Well, I have to go back before Jimmy.  I mean, when I first came to New York in late 1950 or early 1951, the first person I looked up was Max Roach.  He was playing at a place called the Palm Garden, I think, down the street from the Apollo Theater.  I had heard Max on record.  He, again, was so musical.  You could just follow the melodies when he soloed.  I couldn’t believe someone like that.  And his descriptive playing, total… Again, he had a great influence in the sense… I didn’t have the technique that he did, but it was the musicality of the drums.  That was the thing that really got to me.  I met him, asked questions and so forth.

Q:    Max Roach, of course, was tremendously influenced as well by Papa Jo Jones.

ET:    I think everyone who came up had to be influenced by him.  He was a great innovator, let’s face it.
But anyway, when we were out on the road with Cootie, we were traveling with Dinah Washington, and as I said, they had Wynton Kelly and Keeter Betts and then Jimmy Cobb.  Then I was really flabbergasted, because here was a guy who was sort of like out of Max, but his solos and time, and he swung so hard… He had such great technique, too.  I just said, “Wow!”

All these guys were nice.  That’s the beauty, for me, of the business, is the camaraderie of the men who are involved in the music.  They’re all such great men, such wonderful people.  So from that, you just try to make your little niche and participate in this wonderful music.

Q:    You worked with Bud Powell and Billy Taylor, I guess, in the mid-1950′s.

ET:    Yes.  Well, I went into the Army from Cootie Williams.  When I came out of the Army, I was discharged in Chicago.

Q:    I’m sure you were in a band in the Army?

ET:    Yes.  I was at Ford Ord, California, for almost the first year.  I was the instructor in the Army band.  I really got the gig as an instructor because I could play a good Samba, and my Master Sergeant had a band outside of the regular duties, and he wanted me to play with him, so they stationed me there.
Then I went to Korea, and I was in the Sixth Army Band, Maxwell Taylor, you know, the Armed Guard Band.

Then when I came out, I got out in Chicago.  Cootie had another drummer, and the guy who was his road manager said, “I don’t think you’re going to get this gig back.”  Anyway, Keeter Betts told me that Dinah (he called her the Queen)… he had heard that the drum chair was open.  So I spoke with her.  She was coming into St. Louis two weeks after I was discharged.  I went down to the dance, played with them, and she said, “Why don’t you come and go to Kansas City?”  So the next thing I know, two weeks after the Army, I’m with Dinah.  And from Dinah, I’m back to New York, and then it’s Birdland — and you’re exposed to here.  Then my whole thing began again.

Q:    Began to blossom.

ET:    Yes.

Q:    Talk about playing with Bud Powell.

ET:    Oh!  Playing with Bud Powell.  Again, that was a thrill.

Q:    Did he have on nights, off nights?  Was he fairly consistently?

ET:    Well, some people say he wasn’t… You know, he had been ill for so long, so there would be evenings when I guess those who knew him when he was at his peak would say it was off.  But for me it was always on, because again, he played so much music.  I wasn’t real…with the sticks… Like, I said, I could swing and I was good with brushes, and he liked what I did with the brushes.  So just playing with him, just being on the stand with him was wonderful.  And all of that obviously came in.  I tried to find ways to accompany him.

Q:    Would he have pretty much set arrangements?  Did you have any input into the shape of his performances…

ET:    Oh, no-no-no.  At that point there was no actual conversation going on.  Everything conversationally was done musically.  He’d look over and smile, and he would just play.  So you know, the ears had to have it.

Q:    And then you worked for several years also with Billy Taylor’s trio, which was a popular trio.

ET:    Oh, that was a delight.  That was my introduction to… oh, to so many things.  Billy introduced me to so many things.  Number one, he’s such a fine person.  Again, he gave me total freedom.  With Billy I think prepared me to work with Oscar, in a strange way.  The appreciation of a ballad.  No one plays a ballad like that for me.  Then, I was able to experiment with him.  We used to talk about the story-line of a piece, “Titoro,” or what we wanted to get out of it.  That was also my introduction to general Jazz education.  He’s so knowledgeable.  We used to go out and do a lot of freebies, and do clinics and workshops.  I gained a great deal from Billy.  Still do, as a matter of fact!

Q:    We’re in a straight line here, and I guess that will lead us to your joining Oscar Peterson.

ET:    Oh, 1959.   Yes, January, 1959.

Q:    That was six years?

ET:    Six-and-a-half years.  ’59 to ’65.

Q:    Ed Thigpen will select a set of favorite performances over the years with Oscar Peterson, and we’ll be back with him for more conversation.  [ETC.]

[MUSIC: OP/Milt Jackson "Green Dolphin Street" (1962), "Tin Tin Deo" (1963) "Thag's Dance" (1962)]

Q:    In the previous segment we were encapsulating Ed Thigpen’s life up to joining the Oscar Peterson Trio.  I’d now like to ask you a little bit about your years with that group, and the demands of playing with a trio of such incredible musicians, both as improvisers and in terms of their general musicality.  Talk about playing next to Ray Brown for six years.

ET:    Oh, a total delight.  Ray was a big brother to me, in many ways.  You know, we almost lived together on the road for about six years, and rehearsing every day, playing time, playing golf…just having a good time.  It was a delightful experience in most ways; it really was.

Q:    He has one of the most distinctive sounds in Jazz.  He’s one of these people, one note, you pretty much know it’s him.

ET:    Oh, yes.  Well, I used to like to have him just lay down a groove.  Nobody lays down a groove like him.

Q:    I’m going to ask you a bit about the strategies of the group.  Were the performances intricately worked out beforehand?  How much improvising went on on the bandstand in terms of shaping the arrangements, apart from within the arrangements?

ET:    Well, as you can see, they were highly arranged as far as the compositional things.  Oscar was a genius in how he wanted things to be; after he had shaped the outside parts, how he wanted… Except when it came to things where we’d just play things spontaneous, like when we did eleven albums in two weeks of that whole song-book series, with no short takes.  Well, those things are just spontaneous, you know, doing the melody, the groove, have little interludes, and you had to be quick and just make it happen.  Of course, as you know, with Jazz music, so much of it is improvisation, so the skills have to be there.

But with the group, we would have rehearsals, and we’d learn the pieces in sections.  When it came to things like West Side Story, which was probably one of the most difficult ones for me at that time, because some of the things were quite intricate, you had to put blinders on, not  sing somebody else’s part, and play yours.  It was quite intricate.

I just enjoyed listening to the trio.  I felt every night I was at a concert.  I wasn’t just participating.  I was also part of the audience, listening to them play.  But outside of that, I think one of the biggest things I got out of that whole thing was the idea about being consistent, keeping at a very high level.  That was his credo.  We were supposed to sound better than just about anybody on our worst night.  That was the whole idea, was that you never cheated.  I mean, every song was an opener and a closer, whether it’s a ballad or whatever.  You just went out and go for broke, the whole thing.

Q:    Well, it’s certainly a group which gave new meaning to the phrase “split second timing.”

ET:    Oh, yes.  It was something else.

Q:    Was the reason for leaving that six years on the road was too much, or…

ET:    No, it was time.  Oscar was hearing other things.  I began to hear other things.  I think in any type of situation like that… You know, you watch Miles’ groups, he changed.  There comes a time when that period of whatever you’re going through, has to end, and you move on to other things.

Q:    Well, he certainly put the drummer in a situation where I guess just about every possible sound you could out of a drum kit would be incorporated within at least several performances by the group.

ET:    Well, I wouldn’t say… To be honest, not every sound.  Because that’s why you move on.  You know, you’re working for and with a person who is a very strong personality, who is a stylist as well.  He has ideas about how he wants things to go, and they are absolutely right.  It would be the same if you were working with Erroll Garner as a stylist, or someone else.  There would be certain things that… When you’re working with one particular group over a long period of time, and it’s almost exclusively with that group, there are many things you don’t get a chance to play, you know, a lot of repertoire — you can’t cover everything.  There were things I would do with Billy that I didn’t do with him.  There were things I did with Tommy that you didn’t do with Billy or you didn’t do with someone else.  Over the years, you find yourself in other situations, and each individual, or each group that you work with will give you other areas of your personality… You know, you continue to grow, so you experiment.  It’s constantly evolving.  You’re not really one-dimensional.  I guess that’s the best way I could put it.

Q:    I guess the next major gig for you was several years with Ella Fitzgerald, in the late 1960′s.

ET:    Yes.  That was another thrill.

Q:    Which has a whole other set of demands for accompanying a singer, and as formidable a stylist as Ella Fitzgerald.

ET:    Well, she was a total orchestra.  You know, you have some soloists… Her voice was the instrument, let’s face it.  And she instinctively… When she sang it was orchestration.  It almost commanded that you do certain things.  You find certain soloists… Benny Carter is another person who plays that way.  When they play, it’s like an orchestration.  It leads you to something.  So it’s not really as difficult to play with them, because they know so much about what they want, and what they’re going to do without even saying it.  It comes right out.  If you react to that, then it’s almost automatic.  It’s just a big thrill to be in that situation.

Q:    Our next set of music will focus on an aspect of Ed  Thigpen’s European experience, which has been ongoing for twenty-two years.  You live in Copenhagen.  Has that been your residence since moving to Europe?

ET:    Oh, yes.  I was married and we had children, and I stayed there and raised my kids.  And Copenhagen was a nice place to be at the time.  For a period there, we had Dexter, Thad, Kenny Drew, Horace Parlan, Idrees Sulieman, Sahib Shihab, Richard Boone — it was a nice community.

[MUSIC: Ernie Wilkins Big Band "Sebastian"; Thad Jones, "Three In One" (1984)]

Q:    Ed Thigpen is working this week at Bradley’s in a trio featuring the strong Memphis-based pianist Charles Thomas, who has influenced several generations of Memphis piano players, and bassist Ray Drummond.  Is this your first time playing with Charles Thomas?

ET:    The first time.  James Williams called me, the wonderful pianist, and said, “I have someone I would really like you to play with.  He would like to play with you.”  Because Charles had been a big fan of Oscar, myself, and so forth.  He said, “You’re really going to like him.  He taught a lot of us from Memphis.”  Meanwhile, I spoke with Billy Higgins, and he raved about him too.  Charles is a wonderful pianist, a wonderful musician.  People really should come down.

Q:    You were mentioning the breadth of his repertoire.

ET:    Oh, the scope of his repertoire.  He knows… We’re playing everything from Christmas carols to the height of Bebop, so tunes that you don’t hear, some compositions I’m beginning to learn right on the bandstand.  It’s pure magic.  Again, one of those situations when you have someone who plays so well and knows the music so thoroughly, and it’s just a treat to be there with him.

Q:    He’s a very elegant and incisive soloist.  He never plays too long, and always with a little different twist to what you might expect.

ET:    Well, I like his harmonics.  He swings his head off.  We went into some Blues last night, and it was deep.  It was really something!  So I am looking forward to every night.  You know, it’s a long gig when you do 10-to-3 in the morning, but doesn’t seem long to me, because you know, Ray is playing so beautifully… When you’re playing with great guys like this, and the music is so interesting, and the treatment of the music is nice, so it’s stimulating for both the audience and for us as players.  So it’s a nice place to be.

Q:    We heard you backing Thad Jones.  You mentioned that you played with him quite frequently over about a seven-eight year period…

ET:    Well, seven years anyway.  The last seven years of his life, really, or until he went with Basie, I was doing a lot of work with Thad.   I hooked onto him when he came over.  Because this man, just coming out of a rehearsal under him made me a better father, the way he handled people and he was encouraging to everybody…

Q:    An anecdote?

ET:    Just love.  Love, love and perfection, and just creativity, a lot of it — and caring.  This was a man who cared about his musicians.  I think the thing that I gained most was that working with Thad… Other musicians attest to the same.  What he wanted was you to be the best you you could be.  It wasn’t a matter about comparing.  It was the idea about individuality and being the best you, and he would just encourage you to be the best you that you could be.

Q:    Talk a little bit about what’s distinctive about his compositions for a drummer.

ET:    Well, for me, again, we’re talking about total musicality.  Orchestrating the rhythmic aspect of his music was perfect.   Tommy used to tell me, “It’s simple.”  He would start at odd places, but once you got into it, it was just so logical; it was so logical you wouldn’t even think about it.  It’s just right.  Unique.

Q:    Talk about some of the other musicians you’ve had close associations with.  Mads Vinding, obviously, is your partner on bass.

ET:    Jesper Lundgaard.  We have a couple of pianists now in Denmark who are wonderful.  Now I have this new association with a sort of American-German-European, but sort of like more esoteric and descriptive, but wonderful.  I’m having a ball with this new group, After Storm, with John Lindberg and Albert Mangelsdorff and Eric Watson.  We all come from different backgrounds, one Classical, two of us Jazz, older and younger men, this mixture of young and old, and mixing some Classical aspects to the improvisational things that we’re doing, so some of it is like descriptive music, but you know, with a beat behind it.  Just interesting to play.  Free.

What’s happening now, you may not be playing just the Blues, but it will have the feel of it, you know.  You might not be playing just “Rhythm” changes, but it all has rhythm.  All music has rhythm.  Breathing, walking, everything has  rhythm to it.  As I said before, it’s not a matter of being in a box.  I call it descriptive.  It’s an opportunity to… Maybe you want to paint a picture.  You might depict rustling leaves, for instance.  So it can be very theatrical. It’s like theater music, in some ways.  Descriptive music is the best way I can put it.

Q:    Do you paint pictures for yourself while you’re playing, regardless of the situation?

ET:    Yes.  I try to relate to some type of story form, an idea you’re trying to communicate, a feeling, a picture, a story, whether it be the ocean, or whether it be something lyrical.  You try to be… It is a matter of communication, you know, telling a story.

[MUSIC:  Thigpen Trio, "E.T.P." (1991), Thigpen Group, "Heritage" (1966); Thigpen/ Mangelsdorff/Lindberg/Watson, "Punchin' aPaich Patch"]

Q:    You said that the Mangelsdorff/Lindberg/Watson group has some tours set up for next year.

ET:    Yeah, we have a couple.  We have a short one when we record again in February, and in March we have a tour.  So I’m looking forward to it.

Q:    That’s the type of group that if you were feeling a little stale or in a rut, it seems like you would never have any problem finding fresh ideas.

ET:    No.  It’s very stimulating.  I enjoy it very much.  As I said, it’s descriptive.  I enjoy descriptive music.  And they’re interesting to play with it.  I really enjoy it.

Q:    When you came to Europe one thing that was either a cliche or not is that it was hard to find good rhythm section.  So of course, if a strong drummer arrived, there would presumably be a lot of work.  Was that the case with European rhythm sections?  If so, how has that evolved over the years?

ET:    I think that’s changed now, obviously.  Jazz is a world music now.  It’s always been.  It’s encompassed it, because this country represents the world.  I think you have to be here, you have the… There’s something unique about this experience in the United States that figures in everything.  It is a United States art form made up of all the peoples and cultures in the world.

But we have some wonderful players over in Europe, really.  As far as… I used to hear about… I understand it was that way at one time about rhythm sections, because you know, the essence of the music is here.  It’s like, if you’re going to deal with Opera, you have to deal with Italy.  Everybody has to have something, right?!

Q:    Conversely, how has your European experience shaped you, and made you a more, let’s say, expansive improviser or given you a more expansive palette?

ET:    Not necessarily.  These are the things that I’ve always been interested in.  As I said, a lot of people don’t realize how diverse the United States is.  There is a very interesting article quoting Max.  Every time I think of something, he’s already said it.  He’s so observant!  And the fact that this country represents…brings in cultures.  You know, it’s a mixture of various cultures.  So most of us are exposed to all types of things here.  I mean, you turn on the radio… Well, it’s different now, in some ways.  But I was introduced to Brazilian music when I was ten years old in Los Angeles.  I play good Country-and-Western music.  So it’s all here.

Q:    You said you got in the Army band because you played a good Samba for your Sergeant.

ET:    That’s right.  If there is a difference in Europe, I don’t think the European fan is as fickle.  Everything is marketing here, and it’s like what’s new rather than necessarily what is classic.  We don’t really honor…it’s even about honor, but just even respect our own uniqueness sometimes.  Sometimes I have a problem if people don’t realize that we do have a very rich heritage.  I just wish they would support it more.

Q:    I think that the stretching boundaries and “experimentation” was represented on the middle track, which is from your first album as a leader, Ed Thigpen’s Out of the Storm from 1966, on Verve.  That one featured Clark Terry, Kenny Burrell, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock and Ed Thigpen.  That track featured your pedal tom-tom.

ET:    Well, it was a pedal miazi(?), pedal tom-tom, an Italian drum.  It works somewhat similar to a tympany.  I was actually able to do melodies on that drum.
Q:    And sing.

ET:    Oh yeah, that was another thing.

Q:    The call-and-response effect you were able to get there.

ET:    Yes, between that and toms and so forth.  You know, years ago, we had one of the first what I guess you would call Avant groups with Gil Mellé, who was very advanced.  We were doing things on…like, he was very much into Bartok, you know.  But it’s just playing music, man, making you feel good and having a good time!

[-30-]

I had the opportunity to meet him in 1997, when he visited WKCR for an interview in conjunction with a performance by his trio, and touched base with him again in 1999, when DownBeat gave me an opportunity to write a feature piece about him. I’ve pasted the article below, followed by the two interviews, followed by comments on Sam by Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, Dave Holland, Chico Freeman,  Bob Stewart, and Anthony Cole.

* * *

Sam Rivers (Downbeat):

Samuel Carthorne Rivers, Jr. creates scenes, has done everywhere he’s parked himself during a fifty-year-plus career in music devoted to embracing the unknown.  Which is one reason why in 1991, not long after concluding a satisfying four years of steady touring with Dizzy Gillespie’s Quintet and Big Band, the saxophonist-composer, still lean and rawhide-tough at 68, settled with his wife Bea in Orlando, Florida, with no intention of retiring, determined to forge a new tributary from an untapped source.

“We moved from New York because I was getting tired of the cold, and nothing else.” Rivers relates over the phone in late ’99.  “We came to Orlando for a vacation, and discovered a talented pool of musicians who work at the theme parks and studios, can’t leave because the money is so good, and have no new music to play.  To me it’s a lesson not to get trapped by a financial situation; it takes away your freedom.  I posted a sign that said, ‘Sam Rivers is forming an orchestra; be at the union at such-and-such time.’  Everyone was there before I arrived.”

Taking full advantage of the opportunity to hear his music performed at weekly Wednesday night rehearsals, Rivers began to write scores like a man possessed, completing by his estimate a composition a month for a 16-piece big band, an 11-piece wind ensemble, and a highly interactive free-to-inside trio which is the core rhythm section of the orchestra.  “I’m writing more than ever,” Rivers reflects.  “I take in a composition, and we only need one rehearsal.  When I first went to New York, we’d spend three hours on one tune.  That doesn’t happen here.  Anything I write, they can play.  I want to keep writing new material, but I can always go back to something we did, say, three years ago that we haven’t done for a while!”

No one would mistake the music on the double-CD documenting the Orlando Big Band (due for summer 2000 release on Rivbea Records, Rivers’ boutique label) as being composed by anyone but Rivers.  It follows on the heels of a pair of RCA CD’s, the 1999 Grammy-nominated “Inspiration” and the May 2000 scheduled “Culmination,” featuring an all-star New York big band comprised of four generations of musicians Rivers has touched at various stages of his career that went in the studio following a wild week workshopping the charts before packed houses at Sweet Basil in late 1998.

The music is unlikely Grammy fodder.  Written between 1968 and 1995, bristling with the essence of an avant-garde sensibility, it’s atonal, dissonant, contrapuntal, incorporating overlapping meters, enormous chords and unorthodox voicings over pulsating funk beats laid down by trapsetter Anthony Cole.  “It’s life music,” Cole comments.  “It moves!  It’s danceable if you want to dance.  It’s listenable if you want to listen.  If you want to close your eyes and slip off into a cosmos somewhere, it lets you do that.

“Playing with him has confirmed a lot for me,” continues Cole, who also plays piano and tenor saxophone in Rivers’ Orlando trio which recorded “Concept” [Rivbea, 1996].  “Sometimes out of tradition and custom, there are things you think aren’t kosher or acceptable.  Sam points out the fact that in music everything is correct.   His instruction is to do your thing.  When I was learning the inside structure of music, Free was the last thing you could get me either to listen to or play.  But once I got to that point where I knew how to do it…now, where else do we go from here?   Sam was the first horn player I’ve played drums with who would start screaming through the horn in the middle of something, which encouraged a whole different reaction than I had ever experienced.  Normally you’re used to leading people somewhere.  Sam will take you where he wants you to go.”

“I’m one of the few musicians who plays free and plays changes,” Rivers remarks.  “It takes a long time to be a traditional musician, but a few minutes to be a free one.”  In his case, the training began from birth.  Rivers’ parents, both college graduates, toured with the Silvertone Quartet, a gospel group in which his father sang and his mother was the accompanist.  The family lived in Chicago, where from age 4 he sang in choirs directed by his mother, learned piano and violin, and joined his father on South Side excursions to the Regal Theater and Savoy Ballroom to hear cream-of-the-crop big bands — Ellington to Basie to Lunceford to Earl Fatha Hines.  Some bios have it that Samuel Rivers, Sr. died in a car accident in 1937, and his widow accepted a teaching position at Shorter College in North Little Rock, Arkansas; in our interviews, Rivers says that his father had an accident which left him incapacitated, and that the family moved south around 1934.  In any event, before graduating at 15 from high school in Little Rock, he learned, in succession, trombone, soprano saxophone, baritone horn and finally the tenor saxophone, which became his instrument of choice while attending Jarvis Christian College in Texas.

Rivers’ poetic 1989 paraphrase of “Body and Soul” under the title “Devotion” on “Lazuli” [Timeless] gives a sense of his origins as an improviser.  “I had ‘Body and Soul’ down note for note,” he laughs.  “I liked Coleman Hawkins’ harmonic approach, but Lester Young was really the man because he was so melodic, floating all the time, like ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’ with Nat Cole.  I analyzed Chu Berry’s ‘Stardust,’ too.  In those days there weren’t many records, so you had to figure things out for yourself.  That’s why there were so many different sounding saxophone players then.  Everybody had their own style because there wasn’t anybody really to follow.

“Of course, after I heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy, that was the epitome.”  That happened when Rivers was a 9-to-5 Navy typist-clerk stationed in California who spent off-hours moonlighting on gigs with singer Jimmy Witherspoon and blew at various Bay Area jam sessions.  He heard Gillespie’s solo on Billy Eckstine’s “Blowing the Blues Away” on a V-disk with no identifying personnel and was intrigued; after discovering the trumpeter’s name, he bought “Blue and Boogie” [Guild, 1945] featuring the Gillespie-Parker front line.  “It was the first bebop record I ever heard,” he remembers, “and that sent me on.  The solos themselves were not important; I analyzed what they did with it in relation to the harmonic framework.  Both were coming from the Blues.  Charlie Parker was pentatonic, playing the basic blues itself, while Dizzy was layering advanced, substitute chords on top of the basic chord structure.  Bird told me later that every note is important, no matter how fast you play.  Some horn players look at certain notes as passing tones to something else, a part of a phrase.  Charlie Parker looked at every note.  No matter if it was a slur, every note in that slur had been worked out and practiced and rehearsed to make sure he could do it if it ever came into his head.”

“Sam comes out of a school of saxophone playing that I can trace back to Coleman Hawkins that I call ‘the snake school,’” comments alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, who produced the RCA recordings and played a significant role in the orchestra.  “It’s represented by players like Lucky Thompson, Benny Golson and Lockjaw Davis, who put a lot of directional shifts in their lines and intervals.  Sam makes it even more pronounced because of his attack, the way he smears the notes.  You can instantly hear it’s him.  His sound and phrasing and rhythm are very slippery, sort of like he looks, kind of long and rangy.  It goes beyond music; when he’s directing the band and doing his little dance, for me that’s like a snake dance.  Before the band plays, he sings the music exactly like it should go.  Nothing he could say would give you more information than watching him move.”

Rivers enrolled in Boston Conservatory of Music on the G.I. Bill, where he studied Composition and Theory, and linked up with a clique of conceptually ambitious jazz musicians like Jaki Byard, Nat Pierce, Charlie Mariano, Gigi Gryce, Herb Pomeroy and Alan Dawson.  The former three played in a floor show at Ort’s Grill, a joint across the street from the RKO Theater, where musicians from the touring big bands would come for dinner and the hang; Rivers, working with the intermission trio, “went through every tune in the Real Book.”  He played with Pomeroy’s forward-looking 13-piece band as well as a rehearsal big band with a bop orientation led by pianist-singer Jimmy Martin for which Byard did much of the writing.  After leaving school, he took a hiatus from Boston, working with his bass-playing brother, Martin Rivers, in Miami and touring the South with various R&B bands.  He returned to Beantown around 1957, where he supported himself writing jingles, rejoined Pomeroy from 1960-62, and formed a remarkable quartet with pianist Hal Galper, bassist Henry Grimes, and an adolescent Tony Williams.

“The music that we did with Pomeroy was shocking,” Rivers recalls.  “Jaki Byard was one of the main writers then; he wrote in a unique, very technical style that took all the musicians into consideration — he was one of my idols as a composer.  My music wasn’t quite ready to be performed, but in ’57 I decided to write a whole book for 2 trumpets, trombone and 3 saxophones, which I never had a chance to play, and in ’58 I started writing music for 13 horns.  I put some rehearsals together in Boston, but everyone who could do the music was so busy with teaching and performing responsibilities that I couldn’t put things together.  The main reason I went to New York was because I had the music and wanted to start a group.”

It happened in the Fall of 1964, shortly after Rivers completed a controversial Japan tour with Miles Davis, who at Williams’ urging called him to replace George Coleman in tenor chair.  Rivers moved into two adjoining 6-room apartments on the top floor of a building on 124th Street, signed with Blue Note, recorded the highly regarded “Fuchsia Swing Song,” on which Rivers, Byard, Ron Carter and Williams performed music from the 1959-60 Boston quartet, and the startlingly original “Contours,” with Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Carter and Joe Chambers.  Most importantly, he began workshopping his big band music at a Harlem junior high school with a group of eager aspirants, who included baritone saxman Hamiett Bluiett and tubist Bob Stewart, who appear on the RCA recordings.

After a pair of European tours in 1969 with the Cecil Taylor Unit and a six-month stint with McCoy Tyner, Rivers moved to the neighborhood known today as Noho, setting up shop on the ground floor of 24 Bond Street, a loft building where one neighbor was the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.  One of the numerous alternative venues that opened in lower Manhattan during the ’70s, Studio Rivbea served as a combined living quarters-rehearsal hall-performance space, and became a focal point for the hordes of talented improvisers with speculative sensibilities who were descending on New York, providing Rivers a platform on which to expand his orchestral conception.

Best known in his ’70s oeuvre are the singular free-form trios with which he recorded frequently; his magically intuitive 1997 duo ["Tangens", FMP] with Danish pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, and  a 1996 timbrally evocative dialogue with trombonist Julian Priester ["Hints On Light and Shadow," Postcards] are the most recent iterations.  “In all modesty, I think my main contribution is that I am the creator of a particular free form in jazz,” Rivers states.  “When Ornette Coleman emerged, he played thematic material which came out of the blues, and improvised on it.  Cecil Taylor is avant-garde; he played themes and improvised on them.  Dave Holland and I had no thematic material; it was spontaneous creativity, completely improvised, and every night was different.  I don’t feel I get credit for my contributions.  I would like someone to tell me who was the one who started it if I didn’t.”

After working with Miles Davis and Chick Corea’s Circle, Holland performed steadily with Rivers in duos, trios, quartets, quintets and big bands between 1972 and 1981.  “Studio Rivbea was a very personal environment for the music to happen in,” he recalls.  “It literally put on these wonderful series of concerts which gave musicians a chance to focus on their ideas without any commercial constraints.  So it was a breeding ground for a lot of interesting musical ideas which weren’t being heard in New York.  Of course, this kind of activity brought people together, and of course opportunities then came up for those groups to work in Europe and elsewhere.  It was a very important time of people coming together and organizing their music.

“Most of the small group things I did with Sam were improvised; each night we started with a blank page and then continued, creating whatever moods or compositional situations we wanted on the spot.  It was a tremendous opportunity for me to explore how to develop ideas and structure improvisation from my position as a bass player.  I was interested in playing as free as possible, and he taught me the idea of bringing all your experience into the music.  Sam’s playing and writing spans the whole tradition, which he’s lived, ranging from Blues to more traditional forms and harmonies to the more atonal elements of his original music.  His big band music is unique, often quite complex, involving a variety of rhythmic fields and overlapping rhythmic cycles — you have to be aware of how the parts interlock.”

Until the release of the RCA CD’s, the only documentation of Rivers’ orchestral music was “Crystals,” a raw 1974 session comprised of members of the early Rivbea orchestra.  “At Boston Conservatory I was looking at some Stravinsky scores which had different time signatures for every bar; I put some of the music in 4/4 to see how it would look,” he explains.  “I use different layers of rhythms superimposed over a basic 4/4.  I write contrapuntally, with two and three and four melodies going on simultaneously; the harmonies happen, but every voice is playing their own particular thematic material in different time signatures than the basic one.  The bass plays the roots, and it’s pretty much the only stabilizing force you should hear.  Without the bass there it would be completely an avant-garde, almost classical sound; which it is anyway, but without the bass it would be hard to call it jazz.

“I write from the piano for something melodic and traditional, but when I’m writing for my orchestra I don’t use the piano, because it’s limiting; you play something, hear it, and have to depend on those sounds.  I just use my intellect.  I’ve gone by the rules all the way, and so now there are no rules.  It’s like higher mathematics.  I dream all these different kinds of sounds, put them together, take it to my orchestra, they play it — and I am astounded.  I don’t try to know what I’ve done!  In a sense, whatever I do is right.  I am the creator.  I don’t understand why musicians sometimes feel inhibited.  No, I am not inhibited at all in music.  I can go anywhere I want with these 12 tones.  You set your own limits.  How do I make it accessible to the audience?  We are in a backbeat rhythm era, where everything is rhythm, so I have to include the rhythm.”

Producing “Inspiration” and “Culmination” was a labor of love for Coleman, who joined the Rivbea ensemble in the summer of 1978, shortly after arriving in New York from Chicago.  “Then the music was loose because of the players, and also because Sam is loose — loose the way Bird was, with a very high level of precision inside the looseness.  I’m very concerned with the music being precise, but not mechanical.  It has a certain spontaneity, what in Chicago we used to call ‘the professional beginner’ sound, which to me is the hardest thing to get.  It’s backed by layer upon layer of thinking and work and interpretation, written with an attention to detail that adds to its emotional impact and spiritual depth.”

“When I first played with Sam, his tuba parts were some of the most difficult I’d seen,” Stewart notes.  “It was like working on an etude book, and it expanded my technique.  On these records, it’s absolutely marvelous hearing the music with the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed.  I felt like I was playing in some kind of African big band, just for the rhythmic qualities and the way the lines move very independently of each other, which you hear a lot in African music.  While it’s contemporary, Sam has somehow reached way back and brought up spirits from old.”

At 76, Rivers seems to have found the fountain of youth in Florida.  He plays with undiminished power on “Winter Garden” [NATO] a December 1998 series of virtuosic composed and tabula rasa duos with English pianist-composer Tony Hymas, and on the earlier “Eight Day Journal” [NATO], a lusciously scored Hymas concerto for Rivers with string and woodwind players from the London Symphony.  “Every morning I get up and start writing,” Rivers says.  “I’m trying to play exciting, advanced music with a nice, primitive beat — combine the intellect with the soul.  The tunes are in the traditional mode because I want people to come back, but it isn’t like so-and-so plays the music of Duke Ellington.  If you don’t have anything of your own, you pick around and use other people’s material.  I’m fortunate not to be in a situation where I have to say, ‘Sam Rivers plays the music of someone else.’  Jazz is especially about individuality; you go out there and play somebody else’s music, you’re giving Jazz a bad name.”

* * *

Sam Rivers (WKCR, 9-25-97):

[SR-Byard-Carter-Williams, "Beatrice" (1964)]

TP:    First I’d like to ask you about the current trio, because you’re always about the future and about the next step, and I guess this trio is the next step for the foreseeable future.  So a few words about how it was formed and the musicians who are playing with you this week.

SR:    Well, it was sort of formed organically, because I had no idea that something like this was possible.  I moved to Florida around six years ago.  I had been traveling around with Dizzy Gillespie, so I’d picked out where I’d go if I wanted to leave New York.  I had a choice of New Mexico, California, Florida, Texas, whatever.  So we went down to visit some people in Florida and we liked it, so we moved down there.  In fact, the reason why we moved is because there are musicians down there who work for Disney who are sort of trapped with the good money, but they’re all good musicians.  They can’t leave, and they don’t have any music to play, fortunately…

TP:    So there you were.

SR:    There I was with all these talented musicians.  Most of them are teachers, and there are composers, and like I say they’re trapped, because you’ve got a mansion and two cars in the garage… [LAUGHS] It’s that kind of situation; you know, the good life.

TP:    A similar situation to Hollywood musicians.

SR:    Yeah, it’s the same thing.  There’s a lot of very talented Hollywood musicians.  But in Hollywood, when you’re working in the studios, you get all this money and you sort of get trapped.  I know a lot of guys like that.  They say, “I hate it, but I can’t leave it!”  So for me, that’s a lesson not to get trapped by a financial situation where you can’t leave — it takes away your freedom.

TP:    Well, you’re someone who’s created situations rather than get into them, and you’ve done that everywhere you’ve parked yourself, as it were, from Boston to New York City and Orlando, Florida!

SR:    That’s true.

TP:    A few words about Doug Matthews and Anthony Cole.

SR:    Right, I was getting to that. [LAUGHS] So I came down to Orlando, Florida, and fortunately at the same time Anthony Cole happened to move from Detroit — pretty much the same day.  He comes from Detroit and I come from New York, and we meet pretty much at a jam session probably the second or third day we got into Orlando.  Anthony Cole comes by his talents genetically, I suppose, because he’s part of the Cole dynasty, Nat King Cole and Natalie.  He’s one of the relatives.  And his mother, Linda Cole, is a singer, too, an excellent singer.  He was sort of like me.  He was born a musician, born into a family of musicians.  I was born on the road, and he was pretty much the same.  Our careers parallel.  So he accompanies his mother for vocals…

TP:    On piano or drums?

SR:    Piano and drums.  Saxophone he’s been playing for six years, and he’s really up on the saxophone.  Well, it’s easy.  If you have the stamina and the will, you can learn an instrument in six years.  I mean, a lot of guitar players are out here making thousands of dollars after six months!  But he’s a very talented musician.

And Doug Matthews is a native Floridian.  There’s not too many of those down in Florida [LAUGHS], people that got started in Florida.  I mean, some native Floridians, either they leave or they move back further into the swamps.

TP:    A lot of good bass players from Florida, like Sam Jones, Jaco Pastorius, Curtis Lundy.

SR:    Oh, sure.  I know Jaco’s family, his brothers and everything.  We’re good friends.  But Doug went to the University of Florida and Berklee, and studied at Berklee.  He’s a bassist, plays bass guitar and contrabass, and he plays bass clarinet.  Anthony plays also tenor saxophone, as I mentioned, so we have all these different combinations.  I would say it’s the most creative group that I’ve ever had the good fortune to be a part of.

TP:    That’s saying something, because you’ve been part of some very creative groups.

SR:    That’s saying something.  I would say that.  I’ve been very fortunate along the way.  Sometimes, in the right situation… I mean, we have compositions for two grand pianos and bass, because Anthony and I both play piano.  We have compositions for three reeds.

TP:    So you can express almost anything, from an orchestral context to a small group blowing kind of thing.

SR:    Yes.  We can play free, but also, we all can play traditional — play the changes, too.  And that’s really something.  If we can play together and everyone can play changes and also be able to express themselves creatively, on the free side.

TP:    How long has the group been a working unit?

SR:    Five or six years, since we went down there.  These things go organically.  We were playing the usual group, me on saxophone and Doug Matthews on bass and Anthony Cole on drums.  Most of the places we played didn’t have a piano, so we were just doing our usual trio thing.  Then Doug mentioned that he played clarinet all the way through high school, and someone gave Anthony a tenor saxophone, and he learned that.  So I said, “Well, we can put these things together.”  It’s not like you’ve got some musicians here who don’t know what they’re doing.  There are so few drummers who can read music, and here’s one that not only reads music, but plays the piano as adequately and competently as a piano player… Well, he is a pianist, too.

TP:    He’s a good pianist.

SR:    Sure.  That’s what I say as far as creativity, never getting stuck in a rut, because there’s too many different places to go.  Each combination produces its own kind of creative stimulus.  If we’re playing the traditional piano-drums and bass, that’s one thing; if we’re playing piano, saxophone and bass that’s another kind of stimulus; if we’re playing two pianos and bass, that’s another stimulus.  So it’s almost endless.

TP:    Has this group sparked an onslaught of composition for you?  Have you been doing a lot of writing for the group?

SR:    This is the nucleus of the orchestra I have in Orlando.  Doug Matthews plays bass and Anthony Cole plays drums in the orchestra, you see.  For me, I have a chance to bring in all the music.  Whatever I write, they can play.  And I’ve never been in a situation like that either.

TP:    It’s not unlike the situation in Chicago in the 1960′s with the AACM Orchestra.

SR:    Yes, it’s the same thing.  This is a situation where, like I say, I’m writing traditional, in the traditional mode on all the tunes I write, because I want to make sure everything is right.  I want to have people come back.  This isn’t like so-and-so plays the music of Duke Ellington or something like that.  I’m not sure whether Duke would be happy with people messing up his music the way that they do, but if you don’t have anything of your own, then you go and pick around and use other people’s material.  I’m fortunate not having to be in that situation, where I have to go around and say, “Sam Rivers plays the music of someone else.”  That’s not what music is about anyway.  Jazz is especially about individuality, and you go out there and play somebody else’s music, you’re giving Jazz a bad name.  You know what I mean?  [LAUGHS]

TP:    I can’t think of anyone who’s more of a rugged individualist in the music than Sam Rivers.  And by the way, today is his birthday.

SR:    Yeah, happy birthday to me!

TP:    I forgot to mention it at the top of the show.  It’s hard to believe.  You were born in 1923, and you don’t look much older than you did when I used to see you at Studio Rivbea twenty years ago!

SR:    You’re right.  It’s a mental condition, I guess.  I decided when I was like 14 that I was probably going to live until the year 2000.  I planned it.  These kind of things go on in your head.  It’s really a mental condition.  I said, “I’m going to do it,” and I looked in the mirror and said, “you’re going to make it.”  Plus, I live moderately.  I’ve done everything, but I didn’t go overboard.  You understand?  And that’s the main thing.  There are temptations out there, and a lot of people are greedy.  I haven’t been greedy, and so I’ve survived.  You don’t survive if you’re greedy.  “What’s that?  Yeah, give me that!  Oh yeah, I’ll try that!”  No-no, no-no.  Up to a point, that’s it.  I never drank, because it slows you down.  I tried playing drinking and it was embarrassing.  My fingers wouldn’t move.  So I never really got into drinking.  And the harder drugs, I never really got bogged down in them either.  So I’ve been very fortunate.

The track we’ll hear, “Sprung”, is probably the most traditional composition on this album.  I like to do that because since I’m one of the few musicians who plays free and plays changes, I like to emphasize the fact that I’m also a traditional musician.  Because if you don’t emphasize the fact, they’ll think you’re just a free musician and have no knowledge of the tradition.  Because it takes a long time to be a traditional musician, but it takes a few minutes to be a free.

TP:    Well, Dizzy Gillespie obviously knew that.

SR:    Sure!

[MUSIC: Rivers-Mathews-Cole, "Sprung", "Figure" (1996)]

TP:    Before playing “Sprung,” which you described as the most traditional piece on the CD, involving changes, you said you wanted to make sure people understand that you are both a traditional and a free musician.

SR:    It’s very important, yes.

TP:    You said it takes more than a minute to become proficient traditional musician, so I’d like to address that in the next segment of the show.  In the biographies, the encyclopedias of jazz, your birthdate is listed as 1930, but in reality it’s in 1923, and that makes sense in terms of the accomplishments of your career.  You’re in the line of the great jazz musicians born in Oklahoma — Enid, Oklahoma.

SR:    yeah, but…

TP:    You didn’t spend much time there?

SR:    No.  Just my mother and father were on tour.  I was born on the road.  My father was a singer in the Silvertone Quartet, and my mother was the accompanist.  They were living in Chicago at the time, and I was born in Enid while they were on tour.  Touring in the South at that time was fairly easy for them, because there were always more churches there than bars.  They were both college graduates.  My father graduated from Fisk University and my mother from Howard University.

TP:    Were they both music majors?

SR:    My father was a music major.  My mother majored in Sociology, and she played piano.  My grandfather was also a musician, and his two sisters.  They transcribed songs from the slaves, and he wrote books about the composition of the music, and he did some original music of his own hymnals.  His name was the Reverend Marshall Taylor.  He was Bishop in the Methodist Church in Cincinnati or somewhere like that.  He published his own music like I’m doing decades later.  The publishing company is still in the family, but I’m not going to use it at this time until I get sort of situated.  It’s nice to say “established in 1881″ or something like that.

TP:    Have you played or seen the music?

SR:    Yes, I have it.  I have some of his writings from the 1830′s or 1840′s, something like that, and they look like they could have been written by Malcolm X.  I’ll probably put some of it on the back of one of the albums someday.  He was a little before Dubois, but he had the same sort of feeling as Souls of Black Folk, that kind of situation.

TP:    What was your father’s name?

SR:    My father’s name was Samuel C. Rivers.  I am “Junior.”  My son is a doctor and he works at Harvard Medical, and he is Dr. Samuel C. Rivers, III.

TP:    Was your father born in Cincinnati?

SR:    No, he was born in Boston.  After I got out of the Service during the Forties… When I entered the Navy, I was one of the first who didn’t go in as a musician or a steward.  Robert Smalls and I went in as regular Navy men.  We had a choice of whatever field we wanted to go into, Bosuns, Mates… I chose music when I went in, but the band they wanted to put me in wasn’t good.  I’m very young and arrogant, so I said, “No, I’ll learn something else.”  So I went in as Quartermaster, correcting charts and steering the ship and all that, but I never went on board ship.  I knew I wasn’t going on board if I took something like that.  I was transferred to Vallejo, California, which was my musical experience.  It was very good I didn’t go into the band, because the band had to play in the officers quarters every night.  I wasn’t in the band, so I could take my horn and go out into the city and play.  Vallejo is near San Francisco.  That’s where I met Jimmy Witherspoon.  One of my first professional gigs was with Jimmy Witherspoon while I was in the Navy.  We were playing at this club someplace in Vallejo where he was everything.  He was the Master of Ceremonies, he was the maitre’d, he was the comedian and he was the singer, and I was part of the group.  That’s pretty much the playing I did when I was in the Navy.

TP:    When did you get out of the Navy?

SR:    I got out of the Navy in 1945.

TP:    I know the Billy Eckstine band came out there around ’44 or ’45.

SR:    I thought it was one of the most… What can I say?  Everybody was in the band!

TP:    That’s when Charlie Parker was in it.

SR:    Charlie Parker and Gene Ammons, Art Blakey was the drummer.  Oh, it was a beautiful band.  Leo Parker, Frank Wess, Miles Davis… I’m not sure whether Dizzy was in that band ever.

TP:    He was in at the beginning.

SR:    Actually, it was a takeoff from Earl Hines band.  Earl Hines was the master of that.  I used to hear Earl Hines in the Thirties, when he had a beautiful alto player with him. [Scoops Carey, probably]

TP:    Let me take you back a little bit from Vallejo, California?  Did you spend your early years, your adolescent years in Chicago?

SR:    No, I didn’t.  I was growing up in Chicago, but then my father had an accident.  He was helping somebody move some rugs or something, and he got knocked over the bannister and cracked his skull, and he wasn’t any more good after that.  He wasn’t able to really stand.  He kept his sanity, but he really couldn’t work.  So my mother took a job at Shorter College in North Little Rock, and so we moved down there when I was about 10 or 11, I think.  So I came up on the campus in North Little Rock, pretty much.  I was going to Catholic school and coming up on the campus.  I remember a lot of conversations about economics there, and the main thing they were worried about was, if the businessman ever gets control, we’re in serious trouble. [LAUGHS] That’s all I could ever hear.

TP:    So the idea of setting up your own situation took hold when you were 11-12-13 years old.

SR:    That’s right.

TP:    What were your earliest musical experiences in terms of listening to jazz?

SR:    Oh, when I was in Chicago.  They weren’t into jazz. They appreciated it, but they were real church people.  My mother was as Puritan as they come.  I can’t imagine a more puritanical woman than my mother.  She was very strict.  She made me practice.  I mean, there wasn’t any fooling around like that.   And I’m glad she did, because I wouldn’t be a musician today if she hadn’t done that.  She stood over me for maybe a year or so.  There were guys calling, “Mrs. Rivers, can Sam come out and play ball?” and she’d say, “No, he’s got to practice.”  So that went on for maybe a year or so, and then I got to the place where I liked it.  So after that the guys would say, “Come on, Sam, do you want to play?” and I’d say, “No, I want to practice,” then she was telling me, “You’d better go out and play ball!”  She started getting me away from the piano after a while.  That’s when I really got involved.  It’s been like that ever since.  I really love the music.

TP:    So the piano is the instrument you’ve been playing the longest.

SR:    Yes, and violin.  My mother played both violin and piano, so she taught me both.  She was really a pianist, and my father was a singer and she would accompany him.

TP:    The notes    to your complete Blue Note sessions on Mosaic say that you fell in love with the tenor saxophone in high school.

SR:    Yeah.

TP:    That would have been 1937-38-39.

SR:    Yes.  I was going to this Catholic school, St. Bartholomew’s in Little Rock, and they had all these instruments.  In those days, they had all these donated instruments, so if you wanted to play you could go in and choose whatever instrument you wanted to play.  You didn’t have to buy an instrument; they just had it there.  First I took trombone, then the soprano saxophone, then I worked on the baritone horn, and then finally the tenor.

TP:    They gave you a thorough training on the instruments in school.

SR:    Yes, it was like that.  I had a choice of doing it.  And the priest who conducted the band, he was really a conductor only.  The seniors were the tutors of the younger students.  He didn’t do anything but come in and raise his baton.  When some of the younger students made a mistake, he’d ask them, “Who’s your tutor?”  The tutor would be graded on how good the student is, you see.  That’s the way he ran his band.

TP:    So it wasn’t like Walter Dyett in Chicago who would throw  a baton at the student who made a mistake.

SR:    [LAUGHS] No.  It was a very hierarchical band.

TP:    Did you play jazz in that band, or was it outside of school?

SR:    No, it was a military band.  But when I got in college at Jarvis Christian College… I graduated from high school at 15 and went to Philander Smith for the summer, and then went down to Jarvis Christian College for the year.  That’s when I started playing the tenor saxophone and so on.

TP:    It says here that Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Buddy Tate and Don Byas were among the first tenor-men that made an impression on you.

SR:    Sure.

TP:    Were you listening to jazz all the way through?

SR:    Going back to Chicago when my father was well, he took us to see Cab Calloway at the Regal Theater or the Savoy.  We saw all the bands, Duke Ellington, Count Basie [sic], Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole.  Everybody there was to see, we went to see it.  But my mother didn’t really think of us as being… We were supposed to be teachers.  She was raising her two sons to be teachers like she was.

TP:    Well, she did.

SR:    [LAUGHS] I guess so.  Teaching is so demanding for me.  When I think about it, I really respect teachers.  It’s hard for me to do teaching, because you’re always going back in your memory to bring up things from the past.  When you’re teaching you don’t go into the future.  You’re always dealing with the past.  And I have a problem with that sometimes.  It’s tedious for me to keep returning to the past.  I don’t really teach that much.  My mind is completely creative.  I keep it in the future rather than having to think about the tradition.

TP:    So you heard all the big bands live in Chicago, and you’d hear the records.

SR:    I heard them live.  Jimmie Lunceford, Andy Kirk, and all the singers who were around at that time, too.  So we were very well versed.  Plus, we had symphonies.  She had Beethoven, and I practiced Bach!  Everyone studies Bach; that’s pretty much ordinary.

TP:    When you started playing the tenor, were you listening to Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul,” or Lester Young, “Taxi War Dance,” and copying those?

SR:    Yeah, we had it down note for note.  Note for note, “Body and Soul”! [LAUGHS] I can still remember part of it.  I liked Coleman Hawkins’ harmonic approach, but Lester was really the man because he was so melodic.  He was playing the changes, too, but it was kind of different because it really wasn’t the changes.  He was playing the changes but he really wasn’t.  He was just playing over the changes, something like that.  It’s a very different approach to music.  Of course, after I heard Charlie Parker, that was pretty much the epitome.  That was it.  That was the height of it, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.  I heard Dizzy first, on the record with Billy Eckstine, “Blowing the Blues” away, one of those big disks.  I was just listening to it, sitting there, and Billy was singing, then Dizzy came in, [SINGS DIZZY].  I said, “Wait a minute.”  I said, “Wait a minute.”  I said, “listen to this again; man, this is something.”  I went and took this record, because I knew all the musicians… I wasn’t a musician myself; I was working in the office.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to do anything, because if you could type, you were set.  Incidentally, I was the only guy who was pretty much straight in the office in the Forties.  Understand what I’m saying?  I mean, in the Forties the whole goddamn thing was…everybody in there was pretty much somewhere else.  They’re having a problem with it now, but really this has been going for fifty years.

But I took the music to the guys to listen, and they couldn’t believe it either.  They were listening to it and saying, “Wow, what is this?”  There’s no names on the disk.  We didn’t know who it was.  So I called my brother up, because my brother was in the Navy, too, but he was stationed in Boston.  He’d go back and forth to New York, so he knew the guys.  And I’m in California, and nothing out there at that time, in the Forties.  My brother had been listening to Dizzy and Bird, and I didn’t even know them.  This had been out almost a year, and nobody had even heard of them in California.  My brother told me, “Yeah, man, that guy’s name is Dizzy Gillespie who you’re talking about.”  Then I got “Blue and Boogie,” the first bebop record I ever heard, and that sent me on.

But I listened differently.  When I heard the solo, I analyzed it on how it is in relation to the chords.  Just the solo itself was not important.  The important thing was how he did what he did with it in relation to the harmonic framework.

TP:    So you were able to do that through listening to the records.

SR:    Yes.

TP:    You didn’t need someone to show you, “This is going down like this.”

SR:    No, I was figuring out changes already.  I could always play chord changes.  I was working out my II-V’s years ago.  That was pretty much it.

TP:    So after the Navy you went back to Boston.  What was the scene like?

SR:    The scene in Boston was very fertile.  When I went to Boston, there was Jaki Byard, there was Gigi Gryce, there was Quincy Jones, there was Charlie Mariano, there was Nat Pierce, there was Alan Dawson, John Neves, Herb Pomeroy…

TP:    Was Roy Haynes still there?

SR:    Roy Haynes had just left.  He had just left.

TP:    With Lester Young.

SR:    Oh, he worked with Lester before Bird?  I remember hearing him with Lester.  He was kicking, too.  Lester was right there, and he was doing those fast tempos.  It was amazing hearing Lester play fast.  He was floating all the time.  Those were really beautiful guys.  Just listening to them was really an experience.

TP:    You went to Boston and enrolled in the Boston Conservatory of Music on the G.I. Bill?  Is that how it went down?

SR:    Yes, I went there.  I was planning on going to New York right away.  There was no doubt about it.  Everything was set.  Then I went home and my mother said, “You’d better go to Boston and take care of your brother; you know how wild he is.”  That’s the only reason I went to Boston.  Otherwise I’d have gone straight to New York, because I had the connections and everything.  So I went to Boston and stayed there.  I enrolled in school on the G.I. Bill.  Also, all the musicians gravitated together.  We rented this house on 13 Rutland Square, and we lived there.

TP:    Which musicians?

SR:    Jaki Byard, Gigi Gryce, the Perry Brothers (Ray Perry, a violinist), and a lot of other musicians.  It was a 13-room house, and I lived on the top floor.  And the only girl that ever got up there was Bea! [LAUGHS] None of the other girls that came to see me got to the top floor.  It was that kind of situation, but I didn’t mind.  I was glad they didn’t get up there.  I was busy.

TP:    When did you start writing music?  Did that start when you hit Boston?

SR:    Yeah, I pretty much started writing in Boston.  I started writing because I was taking Composition and Theory at the university, and you have to write anyway because that’s part of taking composition.  It was Classical Composition because there weren’t any jazz schools around then.  Then only thing close to Jazz would be the Schillinger House, which a lot of musicians went to at that time, which changed to Berklee.  It was Schillinger House originally, and then it changed.  Jaki Byard and a lot of musicians studied there for a while, with the Schillinger system, and then transferred to the Conservatory.

TP:    Michael Cuscuna writes that you also played viola professionally.

SR:    I never really played it professionally.  I was in the school symphony orchestra, but that’s about as far as it went.

TP:    It says you worked with Serge Chaloff’s string quintet.

SR:    Oh, that’s right, I did that.  But that was the only professional thing I really did with it.  But I was in the school symphony.  I remember that, yeah, but I don’t remember the music!

TP:    Now, Boston was a place where musicians would come through on the Northeast circuit, and I assume you went to hear everybody who would come through.

SR:    Actually, the place I was working at the time in Boston was called Ort’s(?) Grill, and it was across the street from the theater where they brought out all the musicians.

TP:    Which theater was that?

SR:    RKO.  It was across the street.  So I didn’t go to see the musicians; they came to see us! [LAUGHS] Stan Kenton came in and hired Charlie Mariano out of the place, and some other musicians got hired working out of there.  Quincy was playing trumpet at the time; I’m not sure what happened to him.  Jaki Byard was there.  I was working with a pianist who… There were so many different groups that played.  It was one of those places where there was never a dull moment.  It had like eight singers and stuff like this.  So we just played the intermission.  Our trio was me, Larry Willis on piano and Larry Winters on drums.  That’s a different Larry Willis, a stride pianist who knew all the tunes, but he played by ear.  My repertoire came from listening, learning the tunes.  I bought the fake book, then I learned all the tunes.  I went through the whole book; they call it The Real Book now — it used to be the Fake Book, now it’s The Real Book.  So I went through every tune in the Real Book, and I just picked out the ones that I liked.

TP:    So you learned the American Songbook on that gig, and you’re beginning to get your own compositional sensibility together.

SR:    Right.  I was beginning to write at the time like that.  But fortunately for me, my Classical training, European Concert music was part of my tradition, too, since I came up with that — and the spirituals and the Jazz.  I’m pretty much comfortable in any of the particular idioms like that.  I performed with the Symphony Orchestra, with Sergio Ozawa.  In the past, when they needed…

BEATRICE:  A soprano.

SR:    Well, a saxophonist, an improviser, they would call me.  Because I was considered an improviser who could improvise music that sounded pretty much like it would be… I really think that the music I have done and have created should… I guess after I’m gone, I’m not really considered one of the main people, but I consider…some people do consider me one of the main people, as far as one of the leading exponents of Free Jazz.  Free Jazz, the way it’s explained to people, is you state a theme, and then you pretty much improvise on that theme irregardless of the harmonic base.  I have records out, myself and Dave Holland, and some in trio… I played for 12 years in New York just going out and playing, no theme, nothing…

TP:    A blank page.

SR:    I don’t know any other musician who has done this.  I don’t know why I’m not considered the originator of this particular free jazz style, because I’m sure I am.  Everyone else plays a theme.  When I played with Cecil, pretty much all his music was written.  I don’t know anybody other than myself.  I would like it if someone can write me and tell me who it is who really started the free jazz other than myself.

TP:    Both Dave Holland and Barry Altschul say that you would practice 8 or 9 hours a day, and on a gig you wouldn’t have any music at all until the first note was stated, it would take off from there, and that the communication was built on your practicing together so much and knowing each other’s sounds and mindset so intimately.

SR:    That’s right.  But no thematic material.  I even write that on the back of some of my things, and I still don’t see any of the critics picking up on it.  If they tell me who originated it other than myself, I’d be glad to give them the credit.  Maybe it’s one of these anonymous kind of situations, like the Blues, where nobody really wrote it.  It could be like that.

[MUSIC:  Sam Rivers, "Dance of The Tripedal" (1965); SR, "Secret Love" (1966)]

TP:    Sam Rivers and I were discussing his formative years in music, and we stopped in the early 1950′s in Boston.  I’d like to pick up with the years after Charlie Parker died, and you were an established figure on the Boston scene and encountered Tony Williams.  How did things evolve?

SR:    I had been doing concerts around Boston.  I’d been playing with different groups.

TP:    Had you started writing for big bands by that time?

SR:    I started writing for big bands, but I didn’t have one really organized.  But I was writing thematic material for it.  I was working at a club called Club 47 around Harvard Square.  I’m trying to get this pretty much in chronology.  I spent ten or fifteen years before I came to New York, and it was through Tony that I went to New York.  I really didn’t think it was necessary for me to go to New York, because I’d been traveling all around the world, I had been traveling with any kind of groups that wanted it.  I went out with T-Bone Walker for quite a long time, and I did some things with B.B. King.  But I pretty much stayed around Boston, because I was working for this publishing company, which I never really… I got a letter from some people the other day about this.  It was “Send your poems up and we will put the music to it.”  I was very adept at doing that.  I pretty much lived in Boston by writing music for lyrics, which is you send me a couple of lyrics and I’ll have the music ready in an hour.  I’d look at the lyrics and they’d suggest the music.  It’s not a big deal for me.  I ghost-wrote a lot of jingles.  Bring it up, if you want it in ten minutes I’ll give it to you.  A composer writes down his improvisations.  That’s what a composer does.  He doesn’t really sit down and try to figure out, “Look…”  He’s writing down…if he was an instrumentalist, this is what he would play.

TP:    From the brain to the pen.

SR:    Yeah, that’s it.  I don’t know about other composers, but it sounds to me like they’re writing their own improvisations.  That’s what I do.  I write down my improvisations.  I write down what I would do.  Now, with my orchestra, which is 13 horns, each instrument is a solo part, so I write it.  It’s harmony and it’s counterpoint and everything, but every part can be played by itself.

TP:    In your own performances in Boston were you functioning as a multi-instrumentalist?  When did the concept of playing tenor, flute, soprano and piano within a set of music evolve for you?

SR:    I’m not sure.  It was kind of an organic situation; I’m not sure how that happened.  I was always a pianist.  But when I was with the Herb Pomeroy Orchestra, Jaki Byard was such a fantastic piano player; I just considered myself playing chords.  The only reason why I’m not a piano player today, I’ll confess, is because I couldn’t play Bebop.  I can’t play like Bud Powell.  I couldn’t do that kind of stuff! [LAUGHS]  So I concentrated more on the tenor saxophone because I couldn’t play Bebop.  I can play any kind… I can play all the Classical music you want.  Which is good for me, because especially for Classical it’s more free-style than trying to play very traditional bebop, which is very difficult.  My hat goes off to all Bebop players, because this is a very difficult style on piano.

TP:    Why is it so difficult?

SR:    I don’t understand it.  I don’t know.  I can’t do it.  There are musicians who can do it.  All the Bebop piano players I know, they’re good.  If someone said, “Sam, recommend a Bebop piano player,” I’d look at the guy and think which personality would fit with this guy, because all the musicians I know who are playing Bebop, from Tommy Flanagan all the way up to Herbie Hancock…

TP:    They’ve got it together.

SR:    They’ve all got it together.  All bebop players are qualified.

TP:    Do different personalities or different sides of yourself emerge on each of the instruments?  If so, how would you describe it for each of them?

SR:    It’s hard to describe.  Different sounds create different stimuli.  If you listen to a certain sound, it produces a certain reaction.  All sounds produce a reaction.  If I’m playing one note, the first note produces an automatic reaction to go the second note.  And I’ve studied so much, working with the Schoenberg, writing out my own 12-tone exercises, that I hear like that now when I’m playing.  I don’t really repeat notes.  I mean, I can go on.  If I want to repeat a note… So this keeps the music atonal.   So I wrote my exercises, some very tricky and hard things to play, and worked on them myself and got it out, analyzed all the other musicians, which is very important.

But a jazz musician, I mean, to sound like someone else is giving jazz a bad name, because jazz musicians are supposed to be original people.  They’re supposed to create something.  They’re not supposed to be imitating anybody.  So this is it.  This is what I consider a jazz musician.  Don’t give jazz a bad name by listening to the… I mean, because the imitators are giving jazz a bad name.

TP:    At one point in your life you were playing Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins solos note-for-note.

SR:    Right.

TP:    When did you start getting past that?

SR:    That was at home.  I never went out in public playing anyone else’s solos.  The standards, I had, and all my originals… I had all the standards I did that weren’t standards… If a standard was recorded by somebody else, I stopped playing it, and I’d find something else to play.  I was intent on being an original.  I intended it.  It was part of my thing.  I don’t want to copy anyone, and I don’t feel that a jazz musician should be a copyist.  That is the main thing.  All the musicians that I ever respected did not copy anyone else.  They were coming from themself.

I hear so many musicians nowadays, I listen to them play and it’s like a history book.  It’s a reminiscing for me.  I say, “Oh, I remember I heard this phrase and I heard that phrase, and I heard this cliche,” and it reminds me of a certain thing.  It takes me off on different things like that.  I can only listen into a creative person that has his own style to really appreciate it, otherwise I’ll go into where I heard this before, or I heard this cliche before.  This is what I do for classes.  I put on a record of somebody that just came out, some of the young old-timers, I put it on, and I explain “This happened in 1950″ and “this happened in…”  I explain what the young old-timers are doing in relation to what the original people did.

TP:    You’ve mentioned that in playing with Tony Williams you got into the seamless presentation that became your trademark by the 1970s.  You related an anecdote when we did a telephone interview right after Tony Williams died about hearing him when he was about 12 years old, his father brought him down to where you were playing, and he sounded like he had some talent, but I think the way you put it, he needed to go in the shed, he went, and he came back the next spring and played Max Roach, but his own ideas on it, he’d play what Art Blakey would play, then his own ideas…

SR:    That’s right.

TP:    That’s how it went down?

SR:    Well, yeah, sort of like that.  But we were neighbors.  He lived not too far from me.  So I’d go over.  He had his basement where he would practice all day long, and he would say, “All right, Art Blakey plays like this.”  TING, TING-A-DING, DING-DING.  “Max Roach plays like this,” then he’d play all of Max’s things.  Then he’d say, “Elvin Jones plays like this,” then he’d do Elvin’s stuff.  “And Philly Joe plays like this,” and then the out drummer, what’s his…from Philadelphia…

TP:    Sonny Murray?

SR:    Sonny Murray.  “Sonny Murray plays like this.”  So he had them all down.  But then when he played, he played his own style.  Which I did, too.  I played my own… I mean, I would analyze it to see… I would analyze Bird’s solos to see how he played.  I could hear what Coltrane was doing.  By the time Coltrane came, I could really hear exactly what he was doing.  It was very exciting for me.

TP:    Did you like what Ornette Coleman was doing when his music came out in 1958-59?  Did it speak to you?

SR:    When it first came out, I thought it was really great.  That was another situation where I took some records around to musicians so they could hear it.  I put it down for one musician, and he listened to it, and he came over and he took it, picked it up, and just destroyed it. [LAUGHS] He just cracked it up.  He couldn’t stand it!  When I came to New York it was the same thing.  The older musicians said, “Sam, what are those young guys doing?”  They couldn’t understand.  I was playing with an avant-garde Classical musician, and he needed somebody to improvise.  Tony was in the group.  We’d go to museums and we’d play the lines on the paintings, he would explain the painting, and then we’d play the music like this… The usual Dada kind of stuff.  We’d throw ink splats on the paper, and do the rise-and-fall of this.  I’ve gone through all these things, and Tony did too.  So everything was pretty much downhill as far as the techniques of the Dada movement. [LAUGHS]

TP:    It seems like maybe it was around ’59-’60 that you began to incorporate these sort of yearnings towards freedom into your presentation.

SR:    Mmm-hmm.  Well, for piano… I mean, I was practicing piano, then all of a sudden one day I sat down and started playing the piano.  I would say to musicians it’s not an incline thing; you rise by…you go up plateaus.  It’s not a gradual thing.  One morning you get up, if you’ve practiced for like six or seven months or something like this…one morning you get up and it’s all there.  It’s not a gradual… The mind is a funny thing for me.  I’ve noticed that you stay in one place for a while, and then you move.  If you are practicing, you can feel the advance that you make.  You advance in plateaus.  It’s not a gradual thing.  The mind just keeps accumulating material, and then all of a sudden it explodes to the next level.

TP:    What finally brought you to New York?

SR:    Well, Tony.  Actually, it wasn’t really Tony.  I had written all these compositions, and then to get musicians together… There weren’t that many musicians.  I moved to New York because of the musicians there.  Which is the same reason I moved to Florida.

TP:    You have that pool of good musicians just aching to play some different music.

SR:    Right.  So I never had a problem.  As far as playing for rehearsals and calling the musicians, it’s a challenge for them and they play it just when they have their nights off.  If they come in to rehearse your music for nothing, then you know you’re doing something that they appreciate.

TP:    You mentioned earlier that you’d like to speak about your experiences with Miles Davis.

SR:    Tony Williams got me with Miles.  He had these tapes that he had done with me in Boston, so he said, “Miles, I want you to hear this tape.”  Miles said, “yeah, okay, later.”  He kept doing that.  So finally, one day he trapped Miles.  “Okay, go ahead, play it!”  Tony said he heard the first track and he said, “Call him up.  Get him up here right now.”  So he called me.  I was on the road with T-Bone Walker, and he called me and said, “George quit; Miles wants you to join the band.”  I was out there on the road someplace.  So I left T-Bone Walker to join Miles Davis.

But the thing is, there’s always been this story out how much advanced I was, that Miles wasn’t happy with my style.  It wasn’t that at all.  Miles was right there with it.  He understood.  He could hear what I was doing.  It wasn’t a problem at all.  The thing was that he had already been committed to Wayne Shorter.  So the deal was that when Wayne left Art Blakey, I was supposed to go with Art Blakey,  and it was supposed to be a trade like that.  But I didn’t want to go with Art Blakey.  I went with Andrew Hill instead.  So we went on tour with Andrew Hill, and that’s the way it went down.  It wasn’t anything about me being much more advanced than Miles.  Miles was just as advanced.  In certain ways he wanted to produce his free stuff, which is what he did in Bitches Brew and everything.  All these things are pretty much free over the static rhythm, like I mentioned before.  So he wanted to make sure that I projected the music to the public, and reach a wider audience.

TP:    By the late Sixties you’d become an established figure in New York.  When did you begin to set up the workshop situations that led to something like Crystals, which is your first recording of big band music.

SR:    As soon as I came to New York.  That’s what I came to New York for, to set up the band.  I had a place, a rehearsal space downtown.  A lot of musicians.  I think I remember having the Brecker brothers in the band…

TP:    Did you go to Bond Street right away?

SR:    No, that was much later.  I moved uptown.  I had two six-room apartments on 124th Street.  I had the whole top floor, 12 rooms, so I could do a lot of things up there.  I did something for the Canadian Broadcasting System with Cecil McBee and a lot of other musicians up in my studio.  But I was rehearsing at the Marion McCloud School up there, long before… The initial reason why I got the loft downtown was because I didn’t have any place to rehearse, and I had music I wanted to rehearse, and at the school there was no beer, no drinks, no cigarettes, no nothing, so it was a very tight situation for us to rehearse in — but it was available.

But then I started looking around downtown, and then eventually I found Bond Street.  There was a very beautiful woman, Virginia Admiral, the mother of Robert De Niro, and she was very pleased that we made the whole building internationally famous.  Bond Street, incidentally, was a very happening place, by the way.  There was this woman up above us with her lady mate that was the first one who started the books on sexual harassment in the office.  I saw her on TV once.  I said, “Wow, look at her.  She’s got rouge and lipstick on; she’s trying to look like a woman.”  Then up on the next floor there was Mapplethorpe!  Robert Mapplethorpe was up on the fourth floor.

TP:    Well, I’d say we had many strands of American culture at 24 Bond Street!

SR:    24 Bond Street, that’s right.  Mapplethorpe was there.  He was a good friend of mine.  He used to come down.  He loved the music.  I mean, he did some photos of me with my clothes on. [LAUGHS] They’re around!

TP:    The next music will represent Sam Rivers in the ’70s.  We’ve already decided we have to do a Sunday profile on the  next trip to New York.  Coming up is Crystals.

SR:    This is the only big band arrangement I have.  I have 200 compositions and arrangements for big band at this point, and I haven’t been able to record any of them.  I’m still trying to get discovered out here.  I was looking at something on my way up there which says, “Sam Rivers: Often Overlooked.”  That was the first thing it said on this history, “Sam Rivers: Often Overlooked.”  Why?  Why would I be often overlooked?  I don’t understand that.  I’m sure that my place in the history of music is not really where it should be.  But I am not bitter about it, because I really don’t care.  I am going to put my stuff together, and I’m going to have it for posterity.

[MUSIC: Sam Rivers, "Tranquility" (1969); SR w/G. Lewis, "Circles" (1978)]

TP:    In our final hour, as we celebrate Sam Rivers’ 74th birthday on WKCR, we’ll hear some recent recordings.  You’ve recorded prolifically in recent years on other people’s recordings and collaborative situation.  Let’s hear the various recordings and cover the circumstances of each.  The first track is from the 1996 CD, Configuration, on NATO, a French label, with Sam Rivers on reeds; Noel Akchote, guitars; Tony Hymus on piano (who is a composer on much of this); Paul Rogers, bass; Jacques Thollot on drums.

SR:    It’s more or less an international album.  Tony Hymus is from London.  Akchote is French, and he’s also teaching in Switzerland.  The bass player is also from London.  The drummer, Thollot, is French.  This fellow decided to put this together.  But he was mainly interested in doing commemorative kind of music for Cassavetes’ movies.  This is just a preliminary thing that happened during the extra.  Also Tony Hymus is doing a concerto for me which will be performed with the London Symphony in January.  It’s all written, and I’m going over to do that.  The piece needs someone who can improvise and sound… [LAUGHS] This was part of a project the French government is doing.  He put the musicians together, I knew them all, and he asked me how it was.  Everyone on the album is a bandleader, so it’s an all-star group, and each one had to contribute some music.  So I contributed three or four compositions on it.

[MUSIC: Rivers, "Moonbeams" (1996); Rivers (solo), "Profile" (1995); Rivers-Workman, "Solace" (1995)]

TP:    I haven’t known you to do too much solo performance over the years.  I’m sure you have, but it’s not been that documented much.  Is this your first solo recording?

SR:    It is.  It’s the first one I’ve done.

TP:    I guess it’s taking that blank page concept of free improvising to its ultimate extent in a certain way.

SR:    I suppose so.  I was very comfortable in doing it, because I’ve done it in the past, but I have never recorded it.  I have done quite a few solo concerts, but they’ve never been recorded professionally like this one was done.

TP:    How does it differ for you from, say, the duo or trio format of free improvising?

SR:    I’m not really sure it’s much different.  I get added stimulus from the musicians who are playing with me, but that would be the only thing — more stimulus and more creativity.

TP:    How important is that dialogue with an ensemble for you in your improvising?  Or, for that matter, in your composing?  You said you pay heed to who the performers are sometimes when you compose.

SR:    Yes, that’s right.

TP:    Talk about the input of the other improvisers within your concept.

SR:    Improvising is sort of a real democracy kind of situation where everyone is performing in their own particular style or idiom of performing.  But since it’s musically, in a sense, correct, then it forms a unit.  But it’s a unit where everyone is doing their own thing, but it combines to become one unit, one whole like that.  I think life is pretty much like that. [LAUGHS] Even the nucleus revolving around a certain entity through the universe.  I suppose it would be random, in a sense, but physicists have put random into the equations.  So everyone is doing a particular thing, but it comes out to be a complete unit, one particular whole.  But it has to be individuals doing it.  It doesn’t have to be individuals, but it’s a much more powerful, creative situation when everyone is more or less producing their own individual concept.  Which is why producers love to have all-stars, because each person is going to be playing his own particular thing, but then it will combine to become one unit.  They usually try for that.  Sometimes it doesn’t work.  Sometimes there’s a clash.  But usually the musicians will work together.  That’s why producers like all-stars, so they can get the unit happening but everyone will have their own individual voice.  So I’m fortunate to have musicians like that in my group now.

TP:    A little bit less than a year ago, in November, you went in the studio with Julian Priester and a musician who deals with electronic sounds, Tucker Martin(?), and there’s a new record out on Postcards entitled Light and Shadow.  A few words about how that date came about, and your interaction and relationship with Julian Priester.

SR:    My relationship with Julian Priester goes back many, many, many years.  We did some things in the past, and then I played with him sometimes in Herbie’s band when Julian was there and Eddie Henderson and Billy Hart.  So I’ve known Julian over the years.  And we taught together in Seattle.  Ralph Simon is the producer of Postcards, he’s producing most of the music there, and he’s a very talented producer and saxophonist himself.

TP:    I take it this was an improvised, collaborative date. Is that how it was set up?

SR:    Yes, it was improvised.

TP:    Did you do a couple of rehearsals going over stuff and then went into the studio?

SR:    Yes, we did.

[MUSIC: Rivers-Priester-T. Martin, "Heads of the People" (1996); Rivers-Schlippenbach, Backgrounds For Improvisers, "Terrain" (1995)]

TP:    Bea Rivers, do you remember when Sam composed your tune, “Beatrice”?

BEA RIVERS:  Yes, I do.  It was one evening when Tony Williams came by to spend the evening, which he did…

SR:    Ron Carter, too, wasn’t he there?

BEA RIVERS:  Yeah, Ron Carter was there as well.  But Tony Williams would come every day and play with Sam.  One day he came in, and Sam said, “Tony, listen to this.”  Tony listened to it and he said, “Wow, what is the name of that?”  He said, “I think I’ll name it ‘Beatrice.’”  So that’s how it came about.

TP:    That was composed for the date, Fuchsia Swing Song.  It wasn’t one of your older tunes?

SR:    I had already composed it.  I hadn’t planned to put it on the album.  I had different music for the album, but it was a little too advanced for Alfred.  He said he was going to cancel the date, so I went back and got other music.  Fuchsia Swing Song was music I had done four or five years earlier.  I really hadn’t planned on recording that music.  I thought it was much too old to record.

TP:    Was that the music you had recorded in that quartet with Hal Galper, Henry Grimes and Tony Williams?

SR:    Yes, that music.

TP:    So the music performed on Fuchsia Swing Song was all music from 1959 and 1960.

SR:    Yeah, Fuchsia Swing Song was old music.  I had other music, but Alfred… As a matter of fact, all the music that Tony did with Lifetime, he had big problems with Alfred Lion because Alfred didn’t want to do it.  He really couldn’t hear it.  It seems like the music that musicians have the hardest problem getting recorded is the music that withstands the ravages of time.  It’s the ones that last the longest.  You know what I mean?  So you have the hardest problem talking to the producers, and it ends up that this  music twenty years later is still fresh-sounding.  You still have to convince the producers, because they would prefer something that they heard yesterday…

BEA RIVERS:  Over and over again.

SR:    Over and over again.  Some of the recordings that the young musicians are doing, have they considered of what value that’s going to be in another twenty years?  Of no value at all.  It’s throwaway music.  Most of the people that are recording now, it’s throwaway.  I’d rather hear Charlie Parker than hear any of them.

BEA RIVERS:  That’s right.  They’re recording what the masters have already done.

SR:    That’s not good, because they don’t have anything… In the future, how good is this?  The music that’s being done right now by the young old-timers, how good is that going to be in another twenty years?

TP:    Well, only time will tell, I guess.

SR:    [LAUGHS] I guess only time will tell, but I’m really not happy with that.

TP:    We could have a long conversation about that, but if we did, we wouldn’t get to hear the next two tunes.  So maybe we’ll hear it on the Sunday we’ll devote to your music sometime in the future.

[MUSIC:  Rivers-Matthews-Cole, "Point" (1996); Rivers-A. Anderson-Altschul, "Molde" (1973)]
[-30-]

* * *

Sam Rivers (DB Interview, 11-29-99):

TP:    Is there anything inaccurate or that you’d like to add to what you spoke about in the earlier interview?

RIVERS:  I just saw one thing that was misspelled — El Reno, Oklahoma.

TP:    Give me some sense of how the big bands impressed you, and who were the composers and arrangers and instrumentalists you admired in that very formative period in Chicago.

RIVERS:  Well, I was pretty young then, and I was listening more or less for educational purposes, to be used in the future.  My mother and father both understood the music, although they didn’t really care for it that much; they were more into spirituals and classical.  Then I had the records, too, to listen to later on so I could pretty much visually identify who was performing on the records.  So that did help in a sense.  But as far as influences in big band or jazz orchestra, it’s hard for me to say.  16 musicians as a group was more on my mind than anything else.

TP:    You mean the sound of the big band rather than the…

RIVERS:  Yes, the sound of the big band.  More than any particular composer or anything.  I was impressed with the instrumentation and what was to be done with it from the beginning, rather than listening to any particular style or something like that.

TP:    You were very young also in Chicago.  I forgot that you left when you were 11.

RIVERS:  Yes.  Then the bands were still coming through.  My mother was still teaching in North Little Rock, at Shorter College, and there were orchestras that came through there, too. I remember a lot of the groups at that time, just World War 2, that were travelling all over the country.  The same groups came down south.  Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Count Basie…

TP:    So you heard all these bands before you went in the armed services.

RIVERS:  Yes.

TP:    Would you say that somewhat defined the sound in your mind’s ear?

RIVERS:  I more or less turned out being an instrumentalist.  I would say I was interested in how the instruments, the musicians performed as individuals in the whole thing.  I had never taken any other view of it.  I know later on that Duke wrote specifically for each person in the band; not really wrote, but he gave the members of the band sketches — because Duke didn’t do very much writing as a whole for orchestra groups; it was more improvised than written down.  Count Basie’s music was all written, but not by Count Basie.  A bunch of people did Earl Hines’ music, so they more or less were hired to write arrangements and compositions for the groups.  Sy Oliver for Jimmy Lunceford, then he started writing for Tommy Dorsey.

TP:    When did saxophone start becoming a preoccupation for you?

RIVERS:  When I went to college at Jarvis Christian College in Texas, and I was in the band there.  I was playing trombone, but they didn’t have a saxophone player, and so I said, “Well, I can play it.”  It was kind of a random act, in a sense, because I started playing saxophone regularly and I really liked it.  I had always played soprano saxophone when I was in high school.  As a matter of fact, all the instruments — trumpets, all the saxophones and baritone and trombone.

TP:    So you’ve been playing wind instruments all your life.

RIVERS:  Right, since I started in high school all the way through.  I was in this high school where you had a room full of instruments, and any instrument you wanted to play, you could pick it out (it was a Catholic school), and the priest would get it repaired, so then you’d play then instrument.  Now you have to buy your instruments.  No one had to buy an instrument then.  If their parents didn’t want to buy them, and you wanted to be a musician, the instruments were donated.  The bands were put together like that.  So I had gone through all the instruments,  since I could take any one I wanted as long as I took care of it.  So I learned all the wind instruments pretty much before I got out of high school.  Then when I got in college, I was playing trombone, because that’s what I had then — I don’t know why.  I changed to saxophone then because they needed a saxophone player.

TP:    Then you started to specialize.

RIVERS:  I specialized on saxophone.

TP:    Did you play a lot outside of the school at that time?

RIVERS:  Yes, I played lots of dances outside the school.  It was a very small town, so any town gatherings…I mean, the band played for it under the direction of ..(?)..

TP:    But your playing was always under the direction of the school band.

RIVERS:  Yes.

TP:    Because I talked to Teddy Edwards, who grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and he talked about going out with various local ensembles when he was 12-13-14, doing a lot of functional playing, and I wondered if that was part of your experience.

RIVERS:  No, not for jazz.  I was out performing when I was 4 years old, but it was spirituals, singing.  But not jazz.  I was born into musicians.  My mother and father and grandfather were all musicians.  I was already a musician long before I decided on jazz.

TP:    So you were singing from the age of 4.

RIVERS:  Right.  We were part of the choirs that my mother directed.

TP:    Is that one reason why you think the way you play saxophone is vocalized?

RIVERS:  I’m sure that process is sort of filtered into it, but I don’t consciously think about it.

TP:    Steve Coleman was saying that you always sing the melodies to everyone, sing everybody’s part to them.

RIVERS:  Yes, I do.  I think that’s the tradition.  It’s really the tradition.  The notes really don’t mean anything if you haven’t seen them before.  The notes only mean something after they have been interpreted.  If you look at some music, you only know how it goes because you heard something similar to that that you’re reading on the paper.  For instance, can you imagine taking a Charlie Parker solo and give it to a classical musician who sight reads who had never heard Charlie Parker?  It would sound completely alien to them.  He might not even be able to recognize it.  Music has always been like this.  In Boston when I was going to the rehearsals I did right around the corner from Symphony Hall, I’d go in, sit and watch Koussevitzky conduct.  I was friends with the people at the back door, backstage, so I could go in and listen to the symphonies.  Every place I’ve listened to musicians, they’ve always hummed the part that they wanted to go.  I always thought of it as you hum… First you write it out, and if you know they haven’t heard it before, so then trying to play it… They can figure it out for themselves, but I don’t want to put them through that!

TP:    You started writing charts when you were in Boston?

RIVERS:  Yes, I started writing when I was in Boston, and in fact that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t leave Boston.  I was pretty much one of the ghost-writers for a lot of jingles, and then I had this job with this publishing company that would send me lyrics, and we would put the music to them.  It was a pretty easy life like that.  I can still do that.  You send me some lyrics if you want… Nobody sends them any more, because I guess they don’t do this any more.  They don’t need music for lyrics any more; they just need the machines, the beat machines.  So that sort of phased out.  You just need a rapper and a [SINGS BEAT] and you’re off, and that finishes it for the music.  I haven’t heard any music that… But that’s what I did.  Send me the lyrics and I put the music to it.  It takes about an hour or so.

TP:    But as far as your original music and the way your concept of organizing music was formed, did that also start to take root in Boston?

RIVERS:  Yes.  I started long before I came to New York.  As a matter of fact, I was writing original music all through the ’50s.

TP:    Talk about the situation in which you did that.

RIVERS:  It was just I had a piano… It’s hard to say.  I bought a bunch of music paper and just started writing.

TP:    Was it for a band?

RIVERS:  Yes, it was for a band.  Because I was part of the Herb Pomeroy’s big band, which was comprised of the teachers who were teaching at Berklee, and I was part… I didn’t do any teaching.  I wanted to do more composing than teaching; I’ve done some teaching, but it’s very demanding.  If you want to be a composer, teaching is far too demanding, and all my respect for the teachers, because it’s a very unheralded business which is very unappreciated.

TP:    Do you remember what year you first affiliated with Herb Pomeroy?

RIVERS:  The relationship goes back to the late ’40s.  He was pretty much instrumental in the creation of Berklee School of Music.  Without Herb Pomeroy I doubt seriously if there would be a Berklee School of Music today.  He pretty much put it together himself, and he deserves all the credit for that, aside from his writing.  He’s an excellent composer and a true organizer.  Arif Mardin was doing some writing, there was Chris Swanson and some other great composers.  I had just started.  The music that we were doing was very shocking music.  Jaki Byard was one of the main writers at that time.  He was one of my idols as far as composing, because he did write in the kind of style I identified with, a style that took all the musicians into consideration.  It was a very technical style, too.  It was a very unique style.  I still think of Jaki as a unique, excellent composer, and it’s still unheralded.

TP:    In the interview we did before, we talk about you getting to Boston right after the war.  Did you go there right after the Navy?

RIVERS:  I went straight to school, to Boston Conservatory of Music.

TP:    So that was ’46.

RIVERS:  Yes.

TP:    You also mentioned you were in a house with a bunch of musicians.  Sounds like the first of many situations you set up where you made your living space a sort of center for musical creation and thought.

RIVERS:  Well, we were all students there at that time.  Jaki Byard was living there, and I was living there, and some other musicians… [Quincy Jones was around, though he wasn't living there.  Charlie Mariano was living in Boston at home.]  Nat Pierce was there, and Alan Dawson was also living there.  The Perry Brothers and some other musicians were living in the house, but we were all going to school, my brother was living there, Gigi Gryce was also there… There are quite a few musicians I’m leaving out.

TP:    Then you played intermission at this place Ort’s Grille which had a floor show, then you’d play the intermission?

RIVERS:  Right.  On the floor show the musicians… They had Charlie Mariano and Nat Pierce; they were all working there, too.  Jaki Byard was playing.  We all worked there.  It was a restaurant, and pretty much it was a place where you could come and eat.  If you wanted to play a set… That’s what I did.  You’d want to have dinner and come down and play, instead of going to the movies.

TP:    Would you go hear Charlie Parker when he’d come through Boston?

RIVERS:  Yes, Charlie Parker and also Lee Konitz.  We were impressed by Charlie Parker and also Lee Konitz with Tristano.  I did anyway.  I thought his approach was very unique.  Yes, and Charlie Parker.  Dizzy Gillespie of course did far more advanced things than Bird.  Bird was pretty much playing the Blues, and Dizzy would have all these different kind of notes.  I recognized Dizzy was very advanced when I first heard him on record in 1945.  I was getting ready to get discharged from Navy when I heard these big disks.  It was just a thing with Billy Eckstine, Billy Eckstine’s “Blowing The Blues Away” with people like Dexter Gordon and Gene Ammons, and it was nice, a battle of tenors, and then at the end he came in, and I said I’d never heard anything like this before.  It really knocked me out.  I still remember it.  As a matter of fact, we used to do that with the band we had in Boston in the early days.  That’s something I never have talked about.  It was Jimmy Martin’s band in Boston, which was… We had a big band in Boston, and soon I was part of that band.  I was also going to school…

TP:    Who was Jimmy Martin.

RIVERS:  Jimmy Martin was a pianist and a singer, and he organized a band of all of the so-called Boston Beboppers, as we were called.  Jaki Byard was doing the writing for us, and Hampton Reese, who did a lot of music for B.B. King and other… He was an excellent composer.  This was all in the late ’40s.  So we did concerts around, not that many, but we did a few… Joe Gordon was in the band, and Gladstone Scott… I’m trying to think of other musicians who were involved…
TP:    Was Jimmy Woode involved?

RIVERS:  Jimmy Woode was there, but he was more involved in the cocktail lounge.  He had a beautiful woman singing and doing that kind of thing.

TP:    So Boston had a very active scene.

RIVERS:  Yes, it was very busy.  There was a place called Wally’s Grill, then over on Tremont Street, on the other side of town, there were two or three clubs.

TP:    And everybody would be coming through.

RIVERS:  Yes, they were coming through.  There were jam sessions at the union.  We’d put on jam sessions when musicians would come through.  Zoot Sims and the guys would come up to the union, and we’d jam up there.

TP:    Who performed your first charts for big band?  Was it in the Herb Pomeroy band?

RIVERS:  No, my music was not ready at that time.  I was putting it together.  I gave them one composition, but it wasn’t quite finished.  The music we were playing with Herb Pomeroy was very startling music for the time.  The arrangements we were playing were very… Since I had heard everything out there on records, and I knew what was going on, I thought this band was probably the most exhilarating band on the scene at that time.  And the music is still available; that’s all I can say.

I can say that my music on this record is the most exhilarating music of the time, and in a sense it’s startling to a lot of other people.  All the music that’s around, I make sure to listen to everything, and I don’t hear… I’m just doing the music, and I have all these compositions, over 200, and I’ve just managed to get, what is it, 12 on… I’m rehearsing every week, and still putting together my…

TP:    Let me make a statement about you in the ’50s, you tell me if I’m right or wrong, and then we can move forward.  You’re in Boston from about ’46 to about ’64.

RIVERS:  Yes.

TP:    In Boston you are doing this commercial music work with the lyrics and the jingles, you are studying music intensively at a variety of institutions…

RIVERS:  I did the jingles afterwards, after I got out of school.  It’s hard to say when, somewhere in the ’50s…

TP:    Around ’54-’55?

RIVERS:  Around there.  But I stayed in Boston rather than leave.  The rest of the guys left.  Jaki Byard left, Gigi Gryce left; they all left and went to New York, but I stayed because I had work there.

TP:    And while you’re in school and doing the jingle work, you’re also a professional improviser.  So you’re working with Herb Pomeroy’s band, you work at Ort’s Grille, you go on the road with blues bands…

RIVERS:  Right.  I had weekends at a place in Harvard Square every Friday and Saturday with Tony Williams and some other musicians.

TP:    You mentioned that your inklings for freedom in music began to take shape in the band with Tony.

RIVERS:  I suppose so, but it was classical musicians, an avant-garde kind of group where we would play…

TP:    Was Hal Galper in that group?

RIVERS:  No, that was a little later, with another group with Gene D’Astasio on trombone(?), and Tony was in it…  But there was no piano in that group.

A lot of these things were going on at the same time.  It’s not like these things were happening every night.  In a month’s time a lot of these things would be happening, but it wasn’t something that was every day, so we had time to get organized and do things like that.  Hal Galper was on a job in a coffeeshop outside of Harvard Square, which I can’t remember the name of.

TP:    What I’m trying to get to is when the Sam Rivers sound that we know through the recordings from the ’60s to now began to coalesce.  You said that Fuchsia Swing Song has compositions you’d been doing with that band with Hal Galper and Tony Williams.

RIVERS:  Yes, that’s right.  I guess that band was late ’50s.  But I’d been doing music pretty much all through the ’50s.  I started writing for big band seriously in ’57 and ’58.  I have compositions from that period.

TP:    Were they being performed at that time?

RIVERS:  No.  But I was writing them.  I have some compositions from that period that I haven’t begun yet.

TP:    So your opus begins in 1957.

RIVERS:  I would say that.  Maybe ’55 even.  But in ’57 I’m serious.  I’m sure of that.  Without exaggeration, I started in ’57.  I decided to write a whole book for 7 horns — 2 trumpets, trombone and 3 saxophones.  I wrote the whole book, 30 pieces, but I never got a chance to play any of it.  I still have it.  It took a couple of years.

TP:    Now, the number of voices obviously has evolved.  On this record it’s 13 horns.

RIVERS:  I was always considering 13 horns because 13 horns is the standard size of the jazz orchestra, which became fully formed in 1923.  So I have always put this as like 13 horns with rhythm.  Not so much any style; I was always sort of creating my own style.  I listened to everyone else with appreciation, and also to make sure I don’t imitate them.  I have a two-fold reason to listen to everyone, because I want to make sure that if I hear something it sounds like I’m going to do, then it’s easy to rephrase it, then it comes out… Because the music is all about rephrasing, how you phrase the music.  I listen to a lot of concert music, symphony music so to speak, and I hear… It’s more the phrasing than the notes that makes the music.  With different phrasing it would be bebop rather that symphony music.  It’s the phrasing that makes it sound like it does because of the way it’s presented.

TP:    When did you start writing music for 13 horns?

RIVERS:  In 1958.

TP:    Did you have an ensemble in ’58 to play it, though.

RIVERS:  No.

TP:    So it sounds to me like that ensemble starts forming after you get to New York.

RIVERS:  No-no, I had some rehearsals in Boston.  I put some rehearsals together.  But the problem was that there weren’t any musicians available.  Everybody who could do the music was also busy, teaching and other things, so I couldn’t put things together.  I was performing with Herb Pomeroy, and I did bring some music into them.  After I heard my first arrangement, when Herb played it, it was okay, it pretty much held its own compared to the great music Herb’s band had… The repertoire Herb has is still a fantastic repertoire, and I think it should be heard more.  But the main reason I went to New York was because I had the music and I wanted to start a group.

TP:    Talk about you started getting that group together.  You had a place on 124th Street, you had two 6-room apartments, you did a lot of activity, then started gravitating downtown for rehearsal space is how I think you put it.

RIVERS:  That’s it.

TP:    When did you move into 24 Bond Street?

RIVERS:  Somewhere around 1968.

TP:    Is that when you started organizing the musicians for the big band?

RIVERS:  No, before that.  As soon as I got to New York I started.  In fact, it was organized before I left Boston.  I was pretty much a transient anyway.  Everyone thought I lived in New York for all these years anyhow, because I always had a service in New York, so very few… If you wanted me, I could come up.  New York to Boston was a 3-4 hour ride, so it wasn’t a problem to get back and forth.  But I set up rehearsals even before I moved.  There were some friends on the Lower East Side who had lofts, and I rehearsed there.  One of the musicians was Gene Perla, the bassist.  So I had set up rehearsals even before I set up rehearsals.

TP:    So Gene Perla was part of the first group of people who were playing your music in New York.

RIVERS:  Yes, and he got a lot of the guys.

TP:    What I want to talk about is Crystals and the circumstances around it.

RIVERS:  Ed Michel was the producer, I’d done some other things with him, and I told him I had this music for big band, so he said okay and we did it.

TP:    At that time you’d been workshopping the music for four-five years at Rivbea, and 8-9 years total, and you’d established a circle of musicians around New York who could play your music and were familiar with the requirements.

RIVERS:  That’s sort of it, but I guess… I had time to really put some thought in my music, because I wasn’t running around worrying about how to get something to eat.  So it was different.  I had time in Boston to put my music together and put some thought to it and fix it up, and some of it was quite complicated.  And when I did get to New York, the musicians were young and they weren’t quite ready for it, and for them it was like going to school.  The traditional musicians were pretty much busy, so I got a lot of young musicians around New York and worked with them.  They weren’t part of the tradition.  So it was trying to bring them up… It was a kind of musical education for them, or something like that.  They’ll probably say the same thing, that the music was pretty advanced for them at that time.  I understood that, too.  I wasn’t a tyrant about it.  I’ve always been laid back because I didn’t want to make anyone nervous when they’re trying to make music.

TP:    Steve said you’re extremely concerned about not hurting people’s feelings.

RIVERS:  Right.  But the musicians when they first came in… Like, Steve was able to read, but some of the other younger musicians weren’t really able to read it.  And some of the guys that were able to read didn’t get the concept for a while.  It’s a different kind of concept on some things, where you’re going to be playing free for 8 bars and then come back in which is alienating to the way a lot of musicians play, even traditional musicians.  The musicians that were the free musicians couldn’t really read the music, so I had to get musicians who were tradition and could play free.  Because getting free musicians to play traditional is out of the questions.  Traditional musicians can play free, but free musicians can’t play traditional.  I like to get traditional musicians, because traditional musicians can definitely go out.  That’s why I concentrated more or less on a certain kind of musician, who can play the blues but also keep evolving.

TP:    Was there a feedback loop type of thing for you where you’d be inspired by particular voices into new compositions when you’d hear your pieces played back, and get ideas from the way they sounded?

RIVERS:  Well, yeah, but I did that at rehearsal! [LAUGHS] I’m always astounded at some of the sounds that come from these… I go back to the scores repeatedly to look to see what it really was on the paper.  Which is possible on some of the things like that.  It’s a source of inspiration to me every time I hear the music.  And I’m fortunate enough that the musicians feel the music, and so there it is.  That’s it.  Even here with these musicians down here it’s the same.  Of course, they’ve been together down here for ten years.

TP:    First let’s talk about this record.  It seems you got a very good mix of musicians who are exactly what you’re talking about.

RIVERS:  Because they’ve all been with me, played with me before.  Most of these musicians I knew from the period when I had Rivbea.

TP:    It’s an interesting mix of players with a more open form orientation who developed their aesthetic in the ’70s, like Chico Freeman, Bluiett, Joseph Bowie, or Ray Anderson, and then people like Steve and Greg and Gary Thomas.  It makes the dynamics of the solos, the arc of each piece really fascinating.

RIVERS:  Yes, I agree.  It’s something that I really can’t explain.  Like I say, I know that these musicians all read well and they all can play changes, and so they’re all coming from a different musical perspective which is what I really like.  If you noticed, every musician there has his own individual approach to the music.  That’s important to me, because I didn’t want anyone that sounded like anyone else.  There’s a lot of people out there that sound like someone else, so I made sure these guys all had their special voice.  That’s the reason why they’re there.

TP:    A few people have talked about how distinctive your rhythmic concept is.  Dave Holland described as overlapping cycles of rhythms.  Can you describe it in a way that would make it clear to somebody like me?

RIVERS:  Years ago, when I was at the conservatory, I was looking at some Stravinsky, and it had all these different time signatures for every bar and everything like this.  I said, “Wait a minute.  Now why….” I wanted to see why.  So I just took some of the music and put it in 4/4 to see how it would look in 4/4.  In other words, what I’m saying is that all these different rhythms… I use all kinds of rhythms, but they’re superimposed over a basic 4/4.  It’s 1…2…3…4, then the others are going 1-2-3-1-2-3, and something else might be going 1-2-3-4-5… It’s different layers of rhythm.  The melodies, which… I write contrapuntally, which means that there’s two and three and four melodies going on at the same time, and they make their harmonies up, but they are really melodies going on.  The harmonies happen, but every voice is playing their own particular thematic material.  But they are also playing a different time signature than the basic one.  The bass is really playing like the roots, and he pretty much is the only stabilizing force that you should hear.  Without the bass there it would be completely an avant-garde, almost classical sound which it is anyway — but without the bass it would be hard to call it jazz.  So it’s like I said superimposed layers of different rhythms which are written as melodies in some things.

That’s one kind.  Then I write traditional.  Right now I’m writing a suite for my daughters and my granddaughters and my great granddaughters (there’s about 10 of them) – I’m just finishing the fourth song now.  This is all with melody.  I’m writing these melodic things from the piano, which is the approach I use when I’m writing something melodic.  When I’m writing for my orchestra I don’t use the piano, because the piano is exceedingly limiting.  You play something and you hear it, and it’s limiting because then you have to depend on those sounds.  Now, if you don’t use a piano, and use your intellect, just think… I don’t use the piano at all unless I’m writing very traditional.

TP:    Do you write on the saxophone?

RIVERS:  I don’t write it… No. [END OF SIDE A] …I don’t have any rules.  It’s sort of like higher mathematics.  I don’t have any rules.  I sit down and I start writing.  I’m not interested in any kind of rule.  I’m not interested in whether this sounds right or not.  I’m not interested in any of that.  I put these things together, and then I go out and listen to it, and I amaze myself.  Because I don’t know what I’ve done!  I don’t try to know what I’ve done! [LAUGHS] I know how to do things, and then I know how to do things which I wouldn’t understand.  Am I complicating it?

TP:    No, I think you’re making it very clear.  You’re embracing the unknown.

RIVERS:  Yes, that’s right.  If I don’t know how to do it, I’m going to still do it.  Then, of course, I know there’s another way I know how to do it!  Then another time I’m going to try to do things I DON’T know how to do.  In a sense, whatever I do is right.  I am the creator.  I don’t understand why musicians sometimes feel inhibited.  No, I am not inhibited at all in music.  Whatever I do is right.  I have no… I can go anywhere with these 12 tones that I want to; whatever I do is correct.  I just put these things together, I dream all these different kinds of sounds together, I put them together, and I take it in to my orchestra and they play it — and I am astounded.

TP:    Osby’s comment was that you broke just about every rule you can imagine, so much that you could have a book of Sam Rivers rules that could constitute a whole new school of thought.

RIVERS:  [LAUGHS] Like I say, you learn the rules, so you should be aware of the rules.  I’m a STRICT traditionalist in that sense.  But when you go further and then start searching… After you go past… Like the record I did of standards, which is just… I’ve gone by the rules all the way, and so now there are no rules.  It’s like higher mathematics.  There are no rules when you get to a certain level.  There’s no such thing.  You set your own limits.  So how do I make it accessible to the audience?  I have to put the rhythm there.  Because we are in a kind of backbeat rhythm era, and everything is like a rhythm thing… No matter what you do about the rhythm…

TP:    You did that with “Sizzle.”

RIVERS:  It’s also in “Inspiration.”  Everything is danceable. Most of it, not all of it.  But most of them are danceable.  And also with the next one coming out, “Culmination,” which will be out in a few weeks.

TP:    Let me take this to your time with Dizzy now.  How long did you know him?

RIVERS:  I knew Dizzy for years and years.  He came to Boston quite a few times.  The first time he came, he came to the Hi-Hat with a quintet, and I was sitting downstairs listening, and then the tenor player came in and it sounded just like Dexter Gordon.  I said, “Wow!  I didn’t know Dexter was with Dizzy.”  So I ran upstairs, and it was John Coltrane!  So that was the first I ever heard Dizzy.  Then after that, all over the world we used to run into each other.  Then I had Ed Cherry…we were getting ready to do some concerts, doing some work at Sweet Basil with the big band.  So Ed Cherry said, “I can’t make it because I’m going with Diz; we’re going to do a tour.  Dizzy’s forming a new quintet.”  I said,  “Maybe I’ll give him a call.”  He said, “Yeah, you could give him a call.”  So Christmas Day I called up Diz… I know it was Christmas Day, but I’m not sure which year it was now.  I was living in New Jersey then, not too far from him.  I said, “Merry Christmas, Diz.  If you ever need a tenor player, give me a call.”  He said, “Yeah, okay, what’s your number?”  I couldn’t believe it.  So he took my number, then sure enough a week later he called me from Canada.  We formed a group with Ed Cherry, Ignacio Berroa and John Lee.  That group was together for four or five years.

TP:    Did being with Dizzy Gillespie have any effect on you that was palpable that you can talk about?

RIVERS:  The way he presented the music was very enlightening to me, to keep it light until you started playing, and then it got heavy.  That’s great because he… The way he presented the music was good.  As a matter of fact, it was the only time in my life that I really worked that much.  I was always on the road.  For the four years it was continuous traveling.  It’s hard to say whether that’s… You don’t really get anything done.  When I look back over it, as far as composing, it wasn’t a very prolific period, because I was traveling too much.  I did write anyway on the road, of course, but… I always used to wonder why a lot of the jazz greats didn’t write more music, and the fact of it is that it’s very difficult to write when you’re travelling all the time.  Duke Ellington was the only one who was able to do it, but then most of his came down to the improvisations of the musicians in the group rather than his composing skills.  Very few musicians, if any, have come up with a whole lot of writing when traveling like 50 weeks out of the year.

TP:    Did being around Dizzy have any impact on your subsequent writing?

RIVERS:  Well, I was around Dizzy’s big band, and my style already was pretty full, and Dizzy didn’t pay… Like Mike Longo said, Dizzy didn’t pay for compositions, and I wasn’t going to offer anything to anyone else’s band if I wasn’t going to get paid for it.  Lalo Schifrin came in; I don’t know whether he paid Lalo Schifrin or not.  But I wasn’t about…

TP:    But I mean being around him didn’t have any particular impact on the way you thought about writing for orchestra or your own compositions.

RIVERS:  No, not really.  Dizzy had one composition we did a lot when touring with Dizzy’s big band, and it was the only one he wrote, which was really great — “Lover Come Back To Me.”  It was a really beautiful arrangement.  I think of that one all the time.  Then he wrote “Night In Tunisia,” which is another one.  There aren’t that many.  But then J.J. Johnson did an arrangement for symphony orchestra on “Night In Tunisia” which is really beautiful.  I played that with Dizzy in concerts.  With Dizzy we played the same tunes every night.  So for me, it was just creating different ideas every night on the same basic changes, which was not a problem, because that’s the way I started in music!  The situation was a little different, because Dizzy and all those guys were really great musicians.  But when I was younger, playing in some of these places the musicians weren’t that good, so I just would take the time to practice, and just do different things.  So I was back to pretty much that stage, where I’m playing with good musicians and I’m playing the same material every night, so I really have to… It’s just a challenge.  Not really a challenge, because I was used to it so much.  The idea of being able to improvise every night was not a big deal for me, because I remember earlier… If you look at the liner notes, if you remember earlier in my career, this trumpet player… Charlie Parker came to St. Louis with Jay McShann, and nobody knew who he was.  So the word around with the musicians was, “Hey, man, there’s a guy in Jay McShann’s band that never plays the same solo twice.”  So obviously, at that time musicians pretty much memorized their solos, and they played the same solo on everything.  On “Flying Home” with Illinois Jacquet; that’s a good example of what was happening in those days.  A solo like that, you memorized your solo.

TP:    I did a liner note for Billy Taylor, who played with Coleman Hawkins for a few years, and he said that he said he memorized the famous solo on “Body and Soul,” but Coleman Hawkins didn’t — he played it differently every night.

RIVERS:  Yes.  He was one of the few musicians… Him and Lester Young… They were the special musicians, the creators.  That was one of their things.  But Charlie Parker was the first one who really stood out as far as doing that.

TP:    That obviously animates you.  In saying you write from your intellect, is that and the free improvising that you do sort of  a seamless entity for you?  Do you access a different part of your consciousness when you’re free improvising?   Because you’ve been doing a lot of that in recent years as well.

RIVERS:  I think that my main contribution to jazz, in which I have least 10 CDs or records out… I am the creator of a particular free form in jazz.  I say this with all modesty, in a sense.  But I have to explain it.  When Ornette Coleman came out, he played thematic material, and then he improvised on the thematic material.  Cecil Taylor, avant-garde, he played themes and then he improvised on the themes.  When Dave Holland and myself went out, we had no thematic material, we didn’t do anything — it was spontaneous creativity right there.  It was all improvisation, in the sense that it came on the spot and every night was different.  I have many CDs out like this.  I don’t feel that I get credit for my contributions.  I would like someone to tell me who was the one who started it if I didn’t.

TP:    But you’ve been documented on that recently after several years hiatus as far as documentation.  Like, the FMP solo CD and the FMP duo with Alex von Schlippenbach which I haven’t got my hands on…

RIVERS:  That’s all improvised.

TP:    And some French musicians.

RIVERS:  No, but that was written music.  I’m just talking the improvised…I mean, the creative music that had nothing to do with… I mean, the thematic material was all created on the spot.  The spontaneous creativity is what I’m talking about.

TP:    Does the frame of mind in which are you are improvising with the frame of mind when you are writing?

RIVERS:  Yes.  If I am doing… Of course, they are different mindsets.  If I am playing the blues, I play the blues.  If I am playing something standard, then I play the standard.  And if I am going to do something that I want to be completely original, then I try to go in without it.  I just leave it wide-open and just start writing.  In fact, as I mentioned, I’m not trying to think of anything; it forms itself.

TP:    It’s all so internalized in you that it forms itself.

RIVERS:  It forms itself.  Some of these ideas I didn’t get from music.  Some of these ideas I got from writers, from people who write.  It’s time to start writing.  You don’t find it odd, do you, to just sit down and start writing?  Every time I start writing… I write something every day.  I do the same thing.  It’s not about sitting down and “What should I write?”

TP:    I always use thematic material.  I write about Sam Rivers, and the conversation becomes like writing for me…

RIVERS:  I get up in the morning and just start writing.  That’s what I do.  I’m not thinking about anything.  Then when I get formulated… I’m thinking about writing some music, of course… When I sit down at the typewriter, I try to use the typewriter as an instrument in the same way.  How many people do that.  I think of my typewriter as another instrument.  I’ve been typing since I was 10 years old, too.

TP:    Talk about how you settled in Orlando and formed this band.

RIVERS:  Well, I was traveling all over the world, and the few places I did miss before I started traveling with Diz, I got them when I was with Diz!  Especially in the United States.  Because the music is popular in Europe and Japan and Australia, so I traveled over there quite a bit.  But here in the United States it’s sort of meager.  But with Dizzy, Dizzy was very popular in the United States, and also in Europe and the world.  So traveling around in Europe and the States, all the different states… I had a chance to see which one was… Because I wanted to get out of New York.  The main reason I wanted to get out of New York is because I was getting tired of the cold.  That was the main reason, nothing else.  Everything was all right.  I could still take care of what I was doing, although it was more things to consume time there than here — thank goodness for that, in a way.  But I was traveling all around, to California, and I looked for a place out there, looked in Arizona and New Mexico, all the places that are nice and warm. [LAUGHS] The reason I settled here, I came here, and I was speaking to some of the musicians here, and I said, oh, it’s nice down here.  So I was thinking about it.  Then we came down here for a vacation.  We were looking for a place so we came down here, met the musicians down there saw, well, there are all these musicians at Disney, and there’s schools down here, and there’s a lot of movie studio work here…

TP:    So you have competent musicians.

RIVERS:  A lot of competent musicians.  And working at Disney is not really the most inspiring thing.

TP:    So they’re hungry for inspiration.

RIVERS:  So it’s kind of captive thing.  They can’t leave because the money is so great, so it’s… But I’m not hooked up in that scene because I don’t want to get trapped in it.  I mean, it’s a very good living.  But I do okay anyway.  I’m here by a lake, watching the people do their diving and fishing… That’s the reason why I’m here.  But the musicians said, “We’ll be there.”  I just put a sign up that said, “Sam Rivers is forming an orchestra, and be at the union, at (?),” and I went there, and there the band was.  Everyone was there before I even got there.  That was going on 9 years ago.  I moved there in 1991, and I started the band exactly the same… I came here because of that.  Because they said the musicians here… It’s the same reason I moved to New York.

TP:    you had a pool of musicians.

RIVERS:  That’s right.

TP:    And have you been writing more than you ever have since you’ve been in Orlando?

RIVERS:  I write more than I ever have because it’s a very talented pool of musicians here.  I take in a composition, and we only need one rehearsal.  So I have to continuously… Like, when I first went to New York, we had to spend three hours on one tune.  That doesn’t happen here.  We spend like 15 minutes on one composition, and whatever length… We might do it two times, and it runs a half-hour, like that.  So it’s a different set here.  I want to keep writing new material.  But then if I go sometimes without, I can always go back to something we did like three years ago that we haven’t done for a while!  I’m in that kind of situation.

TP:    So basically you’re in a wonderful position.  You have a working unit 8 years let’s say 40-45 weeks a year…

RIVERS:  Yes, and we perform, too.  I just finished a concert at Rollins College, where I performed new music for 16 musicians and new compositions for 30 musicians, and it was very successful.  We’re doing a monthly thing.  Next month, Marshall Allen will be down here with the Sun Ra Orchestra.  We are trying to create a scene down here which is very favorable for musicians.

TP:    What is the place that you play regularly?

RIVERS:  Right now I’m playing regularly at the Sapphire Club.  That’s probably the club that features all the new groups that are coming through.  Orlando is producing a lot of the young groups that are coming up, N-Seek(?) and all those people.  It has the technical facilities here to do it quite efficiently.  I have masters of a lot of the music I’ve done here, so I’m in a position to sell them or possibly produce them myself.  But they’re all ready.  There are very good studios down here.

TP:    About how much have you recorded already by yourself?  30-40 tunes?

RIVERS:  I guess.  But I’ve recorded every rehearsal for the past two years on CD, and it’s very good quality, which I can also… See, I have the scores for these things.  I’m going to publish the music and the scores for some…actually for schools, so they can see how the composition is done.  It appeals to the audiences because I’m doing this nice dance beat to it, so I’m trying to play really, really exciting, advanced music with a nice primitive beat.  Combine the intellect with the soul.  It works very good, because I have a very large audience down here, and all over the state — at Gainesville, which is the other college town, the University of Florida.  We’re trying to get some music to come this way.

TP:    I think I’m going to wrap this with one question.  You’ve played the blues a lot, T-Bone Walker and so on.  First I’d like you to tell me about those years, but in a more general way, tell me about how playing the blues and the blues aesthetic impacts your overall aesthetic.

RIVERS:  Well, it’s part of it, like the spirituals are.  It’s something that you really feel.  It’s pretty much at this point running through the cliches, in a sense.  It’s hard to say how I feel about it now.  But I still feel the same way about Gospel music when I hear it.  I’m affected more by Gospel music than I am by the Blues at this point.  When I hear these good Gospel choirs down here, that’s something.  That’s feeling!

TP:    Is it nice to be back in the South for you?

RIVERS:  It certainly is for that reason.  [AFTER BLOWING UP AT ME] I got the best music out there.  I know that this CD is the best… I’ve listened to everything.  Last year the record of the year was really unbelievably embarrassing.  It was Herbie Hancock playing Gershwin.  And the year before that it was this female out there with this really trite Gil Evans stuff.  It’s embarrassing.  What the fuck is going on!?  How does this happen when everybody knows it’s bullshit?
TP:    When I talked with Anthony Cole he said that you were going in different directions with the trio.  We didn’t talk much about the trio.  I read what you wrote about it on the album I have.  Can you talk about it’s evolving, how it’s developing?  He particularly talked about it entailing a new direction for you.

RIVERS:  Well, it is a new direction in the sense that I was fortunate to have three musicians who are multi-instrumentalists.  But that was pretty much falling in the way that I’ve done things over the years.  If a musician played one instrument, he was a virtuoso on one instrument, but he was efficient, fairly fluid on other instruments that wasn’t his main instrument, but he was also able to play parts… I thought what a waste of talent to have the possibility for these other instruments, and not use them to add color, plus give it an extra added stimulus from the different sounds that would be emoted from the different textures that the instruments produce themselves.  So I’ve always pretty much done that, but I’ve never had the good fortune of having good musicians like Anthony Cole specifically and Doug Matthews broadly, because where do you find musicians… What Anthony Cole plays is just as good on piano as he is on drums, and he’s an excellent tenor saxophone player, which he learned on his own…

TP:    He said your comment to him was “find your own scales.”

RIVERS:  I really didn’t need to give him any lessons, because his knowledge was enough.  Which is the way I learned pretty much how to play the changes and everything, was learned from knowledge of the piano.  He was one up on most musicians, because he was a pianist, too.  Pianists have less problems learning an instrument that someone who’s learning an instrument without going through the piano.

TP:    He particularly seems to have inspired you a lot.

RIVERS:  He does.  It’s hard to explain it.  But it’s the way I just emphasized.  His piano is as professional… And I am a professional pianist, so we can do two-piano duets.  We can do things like that.  Then he can also do like reed things, soprano and tenor, and since Doug Mathews plays bass clarinet we have the reed thing going.  But we can do so many things… Like, improvising on changes together, and so many different kinds of things like that in the trio format, or playing free.

TP:    So he gives you a full template of improvisation from traditional to free, almost mirroring what you can do.

RIVERS:  That’s right.  So we can do the same things together.  His knowledge of harmony and changes are just as good as mine, so we don’t have any problems.  I probably have more advanced ideas because of my writing and things like this, but he’s coming on fast, so the ideas that he… Yes, we complement each other.

TP:    And you’ve been playing together pretty much since ’91-’92?
RIVERS:  Yes.

TP:    And as a trio since then?

RIVERS:  Yes.

TP:    So Doug Matthews came into the picture at that time as well.

RIVERS:  Doug Matthews came into the picture about ’93, I think.  We were playing with another musician down here who was very good, who doubled on bass, electric bass and tuba, named Charles Silver.  With him we could use a the combination with tuba.

TP:    How frequently in ’99 has the big band played in Orlando?  Once a week?  Every other week?

RIVERS:  No, it’s been probably once a month.  But we do concerts in other cities.  We do concerts in St. Petersburg and Tampa and Jacksonville and Melbourne.  I could do more if I really wanted to, but then it would be hard on the guys because everyone got their day job!

TP:    Do you rehearse without fail once a week?

RIVERS:  Definitely.  We rehearse whether we play or not every Wednesday evening at the union in Orlando.  It’s open to the public; sometimes people come.  I can rehearse my 30 musicians whenever I… I have 30 musicians total.  I just did a concert with them last week at Rollins College.  We have an open invitation to perform all my new works at the Rollins College at this point.  I do one a month.

TP:    So the 13-horn music is expandable up to 30 pieces or more?

RIVERS:  Well, I have music for 30 musicians, but I also have music for 11 saxophones, 11 reed instruments, then I have for my regular 16 musicians.  It’s different combinations, some with 25 musicians and some music written for 30 musicians.

TP:    So you have musicians to play all the different permutations.  Like, the Winds of Manhattan record was 11 saxophones.

RIVERS:  That was 11 saxophones.  So I have 11 saxophones available.  I’m getting ready to do a concert with 11 saxophones, new music always, because I don’t really perform any old music… Well, it wouldn’t be new to me, but I mean…

TP:    Right to everybody else.

RIVERS:  Yeah.  It hasn’t been performed.  It’s been on the shelf.

TP:    Talk a bit about the way the band in New York sounds different playing your music than the band in Orlando which plays your music all the time, and internalizes it and has that comfort zone, just in a qualitative way.

RIVERS:  Quality…see, that’s it, the quality of the musicians… See, in this day and age the quality of the musicians all over the world … I would be able to find musicians with a certain kind of feeling for the music because the records have been out.  We’re not isolated any more!  I mean, the idea that one set of musicians can do it when another… They all listen to the same music!  So there are talented musicians who don’t go to New York.  New York is full of guys with big egos. [LAUGHS] That’s the way it is there.  It’s not because they’re more talented than anyone else.  It’s just that.  Not to take away from them, because I’m one of the guys that was in New York, and I went there because I knew I was great…

TP:    You had an ego.

RIVERS:  Every musician goes up there because they think they’re the greatest, and that’s it.  Not so much that they’re great, but that they had a contribution to make, and the only way you’re really going to make it is to go to New York.  You go to New York if you have a contribution to make, and everyone understands that.  Because the setup, all the organizational things are there, the press and all this.  You’re there, so you know what I mean.  But they don’t have anything to do with producing records, you see, and you don’t have anything to do with the business.  You see, they comment on the business.  It’s a different thing.  Like what you’re doing now.  You’re commenting on it.  You don’t really have anything to do with the business.  You don’t really have anything to do with the business.  I mean, the business has to be taken care of.  You’re pretty much relating what is going on, or what is getting ready to happen or what has happened.  But you don’t have any real process in doing it.  I’m the one who…we’re the ones who… We are the creators, and without the creators there really isn’t anything to comment on.  So we understand that, too.  So hence our ego.  Okay? [LAUGHS]

But anyway, I was just looking on the Net here at the Amazon.com, and this record is recommended as one of the top 11 CDs of recordings in jazz in 1999.  Number 2 actually.

BEA:  You’re the only one with five stars.

RIVERS:  I’m the only one with five stars.  Roscoe Mitchell has 4½ stars.  He’s #1 and I’m #2.  I’m happy about that.  I’m still here.  And it’s not a comeback.  It’s just been a steady, ongoing thing.  I’ve never left.  I’ve been here all this time.

TP:    With the New York musicians, you had a band of people who all have very individual styles.  That was a real collection of musical personalities on that record…

RIVERS:  Right, all recognized.

TP:    All stylists and people who have established real individual voices over time, younger and older.

RIVERS:  Right.

TP:    In Orlando do the musicians have that same quality?  I’m not looking to bash anyone.  Since I haven’t heard the Orlando band, I can’t tell whether it sounds different or similar, what the nature of the difference is if it’s different.

RIVERS:  Mmm…I would say that the experience of the New York musicians… I’m trying to write so that…I’m trying to write, like, I mean…like, I mean…like… I’m thinking like…I mean, like… Why would I…I mean… Would you ask Beethoven a question like that?

TP:    No.

RIVERS:  “Which symphony in the world, Mr. Beethoven, would you like to play your music?”  Here we go.  Of course, the one that was playing it would be his favorite!

TP:    Well, Beethoven wrote for certain musicians, though.  Most of the Classical musicians had musicians who inspired them, plus their own improvisations themselves.

RIVERS:  Beethoven started writing because other musicians were writing his improvisations and putting them down like their own.  I mean, a lot of musicians who have done that, some of the respected in the world.  Stephen Foster for one.  He just wrote down what he heard.  There are a lot of other musicians who do that, too, but that’s not creativity.

TP:    Which is what you do?

RIVERS:  I don’t do that.  All my ideas come from myself.  I’m saying there are other musicians who have achieved notoriety or celebrity who didn’t, who only wrote down the ideas of other people, wrote down the stuff.  That’s the main reason why Beethoven started writing down his music.  I learned this early, that the reason why Beethoven stopped improvising is because the musicians were coming into his concerts and listening to him improvise and would go back and write the music down and say they wrote it.

TP:    Stealing.

RIVERS:  No.  They said they wrote it.  He didn’t write it down.  So if you don’t write it down, how can you say it’s plagiarism.  So he had to start writing his music in order to say it was his.  So I’m doing the same thing, writing it down.  But out of all the thousands of orchestras in the world, do you think he’d have a specific orchestra that he’d think would like to play his music?  How many symphony orchestras in the United States alone?  How many jazz orchestras in the United States alone?  How many jazz orchestras in the world?

TP:    I take your point.  Of course, at the time Beethoven was writing, he couldn’t foresee what the situation would be now.  He could only focus on what was around him then.

RIVERS:  Yes.  And he had the musicians.  They were all paid by the state, by the church, so they lived a very comfortable living.  They were all taken care of by the King, who pretty much dictated the music they were allowed to write, too.  Well, maybe not Beethoven, but Bach I’m thinking of.  I’m skipping around.

TP:    I do take your point, Mr. Rivers.  I ask the question because in the pool of musicians in New York there are so many distinctive improvisers and distinctive styles, and you’ve played with so many musicians who are world-class improvisers, master improvisers…

RIVERS:  They’ve all made their own contributions.

TP:    What I’m trying to get to, and maybe am not asking…

RIVERS:  Do the sound stronger with the music?  The solos are obviously far more creative, of course… Well, I can’t even say that.  Ted, we live in an age where there are so many musicians… Like I keep saying, there are thousands… It’s hard to say.

TP:    Are you saying that the level of musicianship in the world has transcended location in a certain sense, and it’s much different than when you were younger?

RIVERS:  I’m trying to say that.  Because the records are all over the world.  Everyone hears the music.  Even back to Beethoven’s time, outside his circle he wasn’t even known.  So it’s a different thing.  All over the world, everybody in the world, every place I go, they know the music. [LAUGHS] So to say that these musicians play this music better than those musicians over there and both musicians have heard this music, and one musician decides not to go to New York and another one decides to go… I mean, we have all these different kinds of nuances there, so it’s hard for me to…

Ted, you put me in a difficult spot here trying to tell you… I really can’t answer the question.  Not in this day and age, I can’t answer it.  If you’d asked me this question in the ’40s or the ’50s, then I would say, “Listen, the musicians…I can tell…”  In the middle ’50s, when I listened to a record, I could tell whether he was black or white, I could tell how old he was, I could tell what part of the country he was from — just by listening to his record.  You can’t do that any more.

TP:    You could do that in the ’40s and ’50s.

RIVERS:  In the ’40s and ’50s you could do that.  You could tell where he was born just listening to him.  Where he was born, what state he was from, what type of music he was (?), where he lived, where he was playing, how old he was and whether he was black or white. [LAUGHS] You can’t do that any more.  Except you can tell black or white still.  But other than that, there’s very little difference.  But there’s a difference between a black saxophonist and a white saxophonist.  I don’t know what it is, but I can tell.  So it’s something that’s still there.  I don’t know what that is.  But that’s as far as it goes now.  I can tell ethnic.  I can tell a Spanish musician, I can tell a white musician, and I can tell a black musician.  That part of it is still there.  Other than that, I can’t tell what part of the country he’s from.  I can’t tell whether he’s American or German, if he’s a White musician.

TP:    Let me change the questioning a bit.  I want to ask you about a couple of individuals and to say whatever you want to about them.  In the liner notes to Culmination you wrote something about Charlie Parker that was so fascinating I keep going back to it, what he told you about notes and phrases.  I’d like you to talk about the impact of Charlie Parker on your conception of music.

RIVERS:  It’s something that really comes later on, if it’s ever achieved by some musicians… I don’t think piano players have a problem with that.

TP:    With what?

RIVERS:  That every note is important, no matter how fast you play.  Now, saxophonists and trumpet players, some of them don’t look at it that way.  They look at some notes as just passing tones to something else, a part of a phrase.  the note itself is not really important, but it’s part of a phrase itself.  Charlie Parker did not look at it that way.  He looked at every note, no matter if it was a slur; every note in that slur had been worked out and practiced and rehearsed to make sure, when he decided to use it, if it ever came into his head, he could do it.  That’s what he said, that every note is important.  Then I spoke to another musician who was just as famous as Charlie Parker who said, “Sam, you don’t have to play every change; there are phrases that fit over changes.”  So one musician was talking about phrases that fit over the changes rather than playing the changes itself, and another musician was saying playing the notes, each note is important, and the form a phrase.  Do you get the difference?

TP:    Which musician told you the latter.

RIVERS:  I don’t want to call his name. [LAUGHS]

TP:    Is he alive still?

RIVERS:  No.
TP:    You can call his name.

RIVERS:  That’s okay.  I don’t want to say.  I just mean there was a duality in the thoughts of how… Here I’m listening to both these opposites who thought to achieve the same purpose.  So it’s completely opposed, diametrically opposed what these people are talking about, but it works.  And they both and ultimately come to the same conclusion.

TP:    You commented to me that Dizzy Gillespie was a more advanced musician than Charlie Parker.

RIVERS:  The notes he used as part of the chord… It wasn’t a II-V… Charlie Parker was more a blues kind of…he was pentatonic.  Everything was pretty much coming directly from the blues.  Dizzy was coming from the Blues, too, but it was in a different way of finding the odd notes in the chord that wee part of the chord structure of the blues rather than the Blues itself.  So that’s where it was the difference.  I mean, Charlie Parker was playing the blues itself and Diz was pretty much playing the Blues but more or less advanced, substitute chords and everything on top of the basic chords.  So that was the difference.  He was layering other things where Bird was staying with the basic.

TP:    Next person.  Jaki Byard.  You said you met him when you got to Boston.

RIVERS:  1945.

TP:    You knew him from then, and lived with him.

RIVERS:  Yes, we had a whole house at 13 Rutland Square.

TP:    Which you described in our radio interview.  Is that where Bird came when you met him?

RIVERS:  Bird came by there, and then Bird came by most of the time when he was Boston.  Then after I got married, he came by where I lived when I was there teaching in Boston.

TP:    How long have you and Bea been married?

RIVERS:  52 years. [1947]

TP:    Did Jaki Byard have a big impact on you and you on he?  Did you mutually influence each other?

RIVERS:  I’m not sure if I had a big impact on him, but he had a big impact on me because he was much further advanced in the music than I was.  Because when I came… I’d been stationed in California, and nothing was happening in California at that time.  We were completely cut off.  It’s not like today where it’s instant news.  I didn’t even know who Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were, and I just happened to listen to something that was there.  So I didn’t know on the West Coast if… It was not like today where it’s instant news all over the world.  But Jaki Byard was up there, and he had a chance to listen to Bud Powell and all them during his days when he was in the Service.  I’m not sure if he was in the Army or the Navy, but I think he was in the Army.  But the musicians had a fairly boring life in the Service, out there on the base, because there wasn’t anything for them to do but get up in the morning and play for the flag coming up and play for parades and play in the officers quarters in the evening.  Their life was fairly dull.  They were just spending most of the time practicing like that, because they didn’t have to march or anything.  So all they did was practice.  So most musicians who were in the Service, when they came out they were really ready, because they hadn’t done anything but practice!  So Jaki Byard was one of those.  I consider him one of the more exceptional musicians I’ve met in my life anyway, and listening to his arrangements… Like myself, he’s a vastly underrated musician.  Maybe whoever has all of his arrangements… He was a prolific composer, too, and maybe someday they’ll find someone who will give him his musical due as they’re doing to the great Duke Ellington record today.

TP:    Today I was listening to Lazuli, which you did for Timeless ten years, and there was a piece on it called “Devotion” which was a paraphrase of “Body and Soul.”  I guess you did that right in the middle of your years with Dizzy.

RIVERS:  No, it was before Dizzy.

TP:    It was ’89.  You were with Dizzy after ’89.

RIVERS:  Oh, it was ’89.  Then it was right after Dizzy.

TP:    You mentioned in our radio interview that you, like just about any other person your age who played saxophone, memorized “Body and Soul.”  But then you also said that Lester Young was really the man for you.  Can you talk about your early saxophone influences and the nature of those influences?

RIVERS:  What stands out is Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul,” and every tenor player had most of that memorized.  I memorized it then.  See, I already knew it on piano, so I memorized it… In those days Jamey Aebersold wasn’t around, so you had to do all this stuff yourself.  Which is okay.  So I analyzed it to see what he was doing with his changes and all that, and then I learned ..(?).. But it was more like taking his music and analyzing it to see what he was doing.  Then there was Chu Berry’s “Stardust,” which was very nice, too, and I analyzed that one.  Then Lester Young, “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” things by Lester with Nat King Cole which were really beautiful… Nat King Cole wasn’t much of a singer, but he was one of the greatest pianists of all time.

TP:    Did you just say he wasn’t much of a singer?
RIVERS:  No.

TP:    I won’t quote you on that.

RIVERS:  [LAUGHS] You can if you want to.  He was a crooner.

TP:    My wife loves Nat King Cole.

RIVERS:  Where was I?

TP:    We were talking about your early saxophone influences.

RIVERS:  I heard the guy with Lucky Millinder’s band.  Jimmy Forrest and Lockjaw I think were in Andy Kirk’s band; I think I saw them.  I saw Jimmie Lunceford’s band with Joe Thomas, I think it was.  They were okay.  But it was only Lester and them.  But in those days there weren’t many records, so you had to figure things out for yourself.  That’s why there were so many different sounding saxophone players back in those days.  Everybody had their own style because there wasn’t anybody really to follow.  Every band that came in town had these different tenor saxophone players.  Some of them were good, and others came in and you’d never remember them — like Honeydripper.  All these good saxophone players and you don’t even know their names any more.  So the few that stick out were the ones who went to New York! [LAUGHS]

TP:    Some in Chicago, I guess.

RIVERS:  Yes, Chicago and in Kansas City.  But if you wanted to record, you had to go to New York and go to Minton’s and places like that.  That’s the way you’d really get discovered.  You could be traveling around the United States with a band on a train…

TP:    Did you go back and forth between Boston and New York after you go out of the Service, or did that happen later?

RIVERS:  No, that happened later.  I didn’t really go to New York.  I went to New York now and then, but I wasn’t really that interested in New York at that time.

TP:    And I think you said you moved to Arkansas in ’34.

RIVERS:  Mmm-hmm.

TP:    Did you go back to Chicago during the summers, or did you pretty much stay in Arkansas?

RIVERS:  I pretty much stayed in Arkansas until I went off to college at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins, Texas, which I graduated at 15 and went down there.
TP:    So you graduated at ’38.  So anyone you would have heard in Chicago was 1934 and before.

RIVERS:  Well, the musicians I knew about at that time were Roy Eldridge and Billy Eckstine, Andy Kirk… Well, no, Earl Hines was the one, and Duke Ellington.  Cleanhead Vinson had a band, and some of the other guys in Duke’s band.  So I remember all these guys who had bands came through San Francisco when I was stationed out there.

TP:    And you went in the Service in ’42?

RIVERS:  Yes, ’42.

TP:    Was that directly after college?

RIVERS:  I was getting ready to get drafted.  As soon as I graduated I was going to get drafted and go into the Army.  So I didn’t want to go into Army.

TP:    You mentioned playing with Jimmy Witherspoon on the West Coast.  Was that one of your first blues gigs as a saxophonist?

RIVERS:  Well, it was my first gig out there.  I was the only one who could play because I wasn’t in the band.  If I’d been in the band, I wouldn’t be able to do that, because the musicians who played in the band had to play at the officers quarters.  I had a job in the office with the headquarters, so I just typed… I could type, so I did that.  I didn’t want to go into the band anyway.  I had a 9-to-5 job.  I got my own jeep so I could go back and forth to where I was living.  I was supposed to be living off the base, and I’d get the extra subsistence pay.  So I had a chance to play out there and make money like that, working on …(?)… But it was always in my Navy uniform; I didn’t take it off.  When I was playing in the bands I had on my Navy uniform, which was okay.

TP:    Were you stationed on the West Coast for your whole time in the Navy?

RIVERS:  yes.

TP:    So you were based around San Francisco, and you were playing out there during that time.

RIVERS:  Yes, I was playing all the time.  I was in the Navy,

TP:    Who else did you play with besides Jimmy Witherspoon on the West Coast?

RIVERS:  He was the only one.  I’d do jam sessions.  I can’t remember anyone else.  There were jam sessions all the time, but I don’t remember… Richmond was another place; it was a really jumping city, but it was dirt roads and everything — it wasn’t really a city.

TP:    When you look back at Studio Rivbea, what do you make of what you wrought?  You had such an enormous influence on a generation of musicians in New York.  Looking back on it, what are your thoughts.

RIVERS:  Well, I was interested in just having a place where musicians could perform without the stresses you have to go through to perform your own music and without having the man tell you to chill it.  That’s pretty much what it was all about.  That was it.  We couldn’t do it anywhere else.  It’s like that now again in New York, where you don’t hear any music any more, other maybe than John Zorn and maybe the Knitting Factory.  But that’s probably the way it’s always been.  All the time I talk to people about this, how in this music the important people are not popular, and the popular musicians are not important.  So we have a situation going here that doesn’t really seem right.  I hardly (?) a situation like that, where you look at a record label and you know just by the label that the music that’s on it is going to be like traditional and not very creative and in some senses mediocre — I mean, just by looking at the label.  I’m not on an American label.  I’m on a French label.  You have to know that being on an American label is a very suspicious place to be.  It automatically means that nothing is really happening, because you are not allowed to do anything on an American big label.

That’s pretty much it.  Or, no one has asked the big labels to look if there’s somebody out here who’s really doing something creative, and the audiences might go for listening to it.  I’m looking on the Net here, and my record is one of the best-sellers of Jazz here.  I thank the audiences.  Because the critics at Downbeat… You have to tell them I’m still out here, and maybe some day… In the Critics Downbeat Poll, I’ve not even been mentioned!  I feel I must have insulted somebody who worked where who is in a position of power.  I really feel that.  I’ve gone 50 years without even being mentioned as a saxophone player, without even being mentioned in any of the Critics Polls. Guys come up to me, and they can’t even understand it…

[-30-]

* * *

Sam Rivers Colleagues (Comments):

Greg Osby

TP:    How did you respond to the music you played that week at Sweet Basil that subsequently became a record.  Perhaps you could break down for me structurally how you interpret him and what’s unique about the music.

OSBY:  Well, the rehearsals and the week at Sweet Basil, I was a bit skeptical as to how the record was going to turn out.  First of all, Sam’s music had never been captured accurately for me.  It was always slipshod and haphazardly produced.  Just upon personal inspection or dissection or whatever, I knew that Sam had a lot more to offer, and there was a lot more to it than just eclectic avant-garde icon or whatever.

TP:    Did you ever hear Crystals, by the way?

OSBY:  Yeah!  I have an old, tattered vinyl… Because there was no dynamics being exercised, it was like a blast-fest, so much so that the whole saxophone section had to have toilet paper and all kind of stuff shoved in our ears because nobody was really addressing it.  So I was questioning Sam’s choice of sidepersons and did he get the right people that would accurately and vividly interpret what he was doing.  Because the music was killing!  I mean, some of the most highly developed and some of the most advanced music that you can ever imagine, for big band, for small band, for any composer.  He had so many things happening at once, and his progressions and stuff were so non-standard.  I mean, he broke just about every rule that you can imagine, so much so that he could have a whole book of Sam Rivers rules that could constitute a whole new school of thought.

TP:    What would be some of the principles of that school of thought?

OSBY:  See, Sam uses clusters, contrapuntalism and movement as elements of…not just for transitory elements or for colorization elements, but these are like valid sections of music.  I mean, the whole section might be moving, and it’s like a vortex, as opposed to something that’s really calm, and then it goes into something that’s very involved just for the sake of getting to the next piece of music or getting into the next section of the music.  I mean, the whole piece of music might be just one thing.  And it’s something that’s a definite Sam-ism.  I mean, Sam is from that school of…I mean, the same school like Andrew and Cecil, that’s readily identifiable, with utilization of characteristics and things like… That’s more important to me than being famous or being popular or whatever.  This is a cat that is THE cat, and he is A cat.  He is somebody that when you speak of him, you’re speaking about a whole method.  You’re speaking about a whole school of thought.  You’re not talking about somebody who is just merely accomplished or virtuosic or has a couple of achievements or whatever.  This is a cat who has a whole well-rounded concept.  Although I’m not going to be so bold as to say that I know what it is or… A lot of people, their ego won’t allow them to say, “Well, I know what that is” or “this is that.”  I can’t be that definite.

TP:    But you have a sense of it.  You have an interpretation.  You have a point of view.

OSBY:  Yeah.  Because I hear it.  Upon mixing the record, you can isolate certain sectors of music.  You can isolate the brass, you can isolate the trombones, you can isolate the rhythm section or the saxophones or the trumpets or whatever.  I was listening to this stuff, and I was like, wow, man, the saxophones are doing something completely and totally and entirely different than every other section.  There’s about four or five things happening at once as a section.  Then within that section the individuals will be doing different things.  So it’s like a whole band where you break down the integers, and all the digits are doing different things.

TP:    And yet it locks together.
OSBY:  It locks together.

TP:    Which is kind of that African concept of stacking and hatcheting.

OSBY:  Right.  Because in typical big band writing, you have sections parodying other sections.  If you play a second alto saxophone, well, then you can be guaranteed that either the second trumpet player or the second trombone, they’re probably playing the same line or the same voice.  It’s really just doubling sections.  But Sam, he just annihilated that theory.  It’s almost like what Mingus was doing.  He would have every cat in the band doing something different.  But this was a lot more cacophonic.  Because it was like a big band!  But the fact that a lot of people weren’t dealing with it dynamically and playing real loud all the time, you missed a lot of it.  So the record really reflects that, because you can hear the subtlety and you can hear the movement and stuff, as opposed to live in Sweet Basil with all that brick and wood, and it was just loud.  It was just a blast-fest to me, and I was kind of discouraged, but the record…

TP:    And without going into a lot of detail on your feeling of which personnel would work and which wouldn’t, I’d assume you’d think the personnel that would work would be more you and Steve and Gary Thomas and the people associated with you, and maybe less so the people who came up under Sam’s generation.

OSBY:  Right.

TP:    It seems to me, listening to it, that there’s a nice dynamic between the very expressionist qualities that the project onto it vis-a-vis the approach of you and Steve.  It worked well.

OSBY:  Well, it is, absolutely.  You have to have balance.  And our personal preferences aside… I would love to hear Sam’s music interpreted by people who can read really well and who are great soloists and all this kind of stuff.  But then these people have something missing, because they never played with the Brass Fantasy or the Art Ensemble or with David Murray’s various groups or with Threadgill and all that kind of stuff.  So they don’t know how to use the instrument.  They know how to play the instrument, but they don’t know how to use the instrument if you know what I mean.  Therefore, we had people who had that experience, and so they balance out the virtuoso-technician-cerebral types.  That’s why it worked for me.

TP:    Talk about Sam Rivers’ place in history.

OSBY:  Sam probably will go down as one of the esoteric giants.  Kind of like Andrew.  Andrew will never be a poll-winner.  He’ll never grace the cover of Downbeat or anything like that.  And Andrew is one of those cats who is regarded in the community as one of THE cats.  It’s hard for me to interpret.  I know you know, but it’s hard to put that in words for a laypersons.  You say “one of the cats.”  “Oh, he’s not one of the cats.  One of the CATS is somebody like Trane or Bird or somebody…”

TP:    Well, I think what we mean by “one of the cats” is these are people whose lives intersect with the lifeblood of the music, and historically so, which is the case with Sam, through his Boston experience, and even before that in the Navy and on the West Coast, and Andrew being a working musician in Chicago.

OSBY:  Yeah, but see, you have the cats who are widely regarded, Bird and Trane and Diz and Miles and those kind of cats.  Then you have people who within the community, the sub-structure, they say, “Well, these are the CATS that spawned the other cats.” It’s like Sun Ra and John Gilmore and Earl Bostic; these cats begat the cats like Trane.  But you never hear people talk about those other cats.  Like, Andrew Hill begat people like Geri Allen and Jason Moran and James Hurt and people like that.  So we know who the cats are, but when we hear the talk in interviews and so on, all we hear are people like Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, because those are the popular cats.  Now, they’re the cats, too, and they begat a whole bunch of clones and a whole bunch of disciples and students.  But for people like me, Andrew and Sam and Duke Ellington and Sun Ra, those are like REAL cats…

TP:    Well, they don’t beget clones.

OSBY:  No.  But Lennie Tristano and, you know, these underground cats.  Monk is a cat only because of the popularity of his songs and stuff like that.  See, he’s very esoteric, too.  A lot of people aren’t really tapping into the reality of what his stuff was.  They’re just dealing with the obvious elements.

TP:    Talk about Sam as a saxophone player.

OSBY:  Sam as a saxophone player is incredible.  I don’t really know who he’s coming out of.  And that for me is enough for me to like him. [LAUGHS] That’s all I need.  I don’t know who his influences are.  I have to sit down and interview him personally to find out.  But it’s very unorthodox.  Sometimes it sounds like he’s totally self-taught, and he’s playing the alternative fingerings… He’s doing other things sonically, like choking up on the mouthpiece and doing a lot of throaty things…

TP:    He said when he was a kid (remember, he was born in 1923), he memorized every Lester Young solo and Hawkins and all this, and then he sort of erased the blackboard.  But that’s his root in a very first-hand way, like Von.

OSBY:  Now that you say that, I can hear the Lester Young.  I can hear the Prez in his playing.  Less elements of Coleman Hawkins, but I can definitely hear the Lester Young.  But he totally fragmented that, so I don’t know… It’s really hard to define.

But his music, man… he’s really into some other highbrow musical systems.  He uses Schillinger or Hindemith… He’s into some 20th composition.  He’s definitely into that, because just the symmetry in some of the lines and some of the music that he does is definitely not coming from a jazz base.  It’s coming from somewhere.  I don’t even want to say it’s European or whatever.  I don’t know what it is…

TP:    I think “highbrow” is a good way.  Talk in some general way about the layering of highbrow musical ideas and concepts on top of the vernacular.

OSBY:  The problem is, when a lot of people hear that kind of stuff, they dismiss it at being third-stream or classically derived or whatever.  They say it doesn’t swing, or the intervals are too wide or too disjunct or too jagged or whatever, and it doesn’t sound consonant, it’s just dissonance for dissonance’s sake — and it doesn’t meet its mark.  But that’s the kind of stuff that appeals to me even more, because I can hear the jazz bases, I can hear the swing influences and stuff, because I dig deeper.  I dare to be patient enough to check that out.  But people who only give it a fleeting listen and say, “Well, this cat is obviously influenced by some Europeans…”  So what?  So was just about every other major icon in the music.  But you just hear a lot more of the blues elements in what they do as well.  I hear the blues in Sam’s music.

TP:    Well, he played with T-Bone Walker for a long time!

OSBY:  Yeah.  A lot of people don’t hear that.  They just hear the wildness and the rawness.  I think “raw” is the key word here.  I mean, it’s so raw and it sounds so unrefined…

TP:    And yet it is.

OSBY:  And yet it is.  But a lot of people just hear that it’s like a man on a mission who hasn’t realized his vision.  But I beg to differ.  It’s the same response as people who hear Von Freeman, or even some early Wayne Shorter.  They just think the cat is wild and everything.  Or Coltrane, all the criticism that he got, all the adverse criticism Duke Ellington got… They just don’t hear it.

TP:    And it kind of defines in an aspirational sense what jazz can be.  Kind of putting your personal vision… In other words, all the hard work and preparation you refer to in terms of your own productions, and the passion with which you can articulate that and continue to grow with it.

OSBY:  Absolutely.  It’s not a thumbing of the noses.  It’s not like, “Take that; I can do what I want, and this is my music.”  It’s really people conceptualizing and trying to present the music as they see it, using a logic that’s not popular, or that’s not only not popular, but probably even something new.  These cats get in the lab and they work out theories and stuff.  Sam said he has trunks and trunks and reams and reams of unreleased and unpublished music, and he’s trying to codify it and get it all out now.  That’s why the record is so long.  That’s why we did all those recordings and did all those songs.  It was like enough for a double CD.

Steve Coleman

TP:    Let’s first talk about your earlier contact with the music of Sam Rivers and the things that struck such a chord in you.  Was it when you first got to New York and played with him, or before that?

COLEMAN:  Yeah, when I played with him.  I started making rehearsals at Studio Rivbea.  I’d heard Sam’s name before, but I didn’t know much about his music.  Well, when I got to New York I didn’t know much about anybody’s music.  It wasn’t just Sam.  A lot of guys who were still living, I didn’t know a lot of people’s music.  I mean, I knew some of the people whose names were, well, big names… I knew Sonny Rollins.  I even knew people like Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard.  But Sam, even now isn’t as popular as those guy, so I didn’t know his music.  But I’d heard the name “Sam Rivers,” I’d heard the name “Cecil Taylor” or whatever, but anybody who I didn’t get to hear live who came through Chicago… The only place people came through was the Jazz Showcase, and they almost always hired traditional people.  Even some of the guys in Chicago, like the AACM guys who left, I heard most of them in New York.  I played with Muhal at a jam session in Chicago before I came, and I played with George Lewis at a jam session and stuff like that.  But that’s not the same as hearing his music.  It was one of those Von Freeman type things or something like that.

So I really heard Sam when I got to New York and I started trying to play with everybody I could play with.  I think it was Chico Freeman who told me about the rehearsal.  He asked me could I read or whatever, and I said yes, and he told me then to come down there.  I knew Chico because I knew Von.  So I went down there and just started sitting in on rehearsals and stuff like that.  That’s how I met Sam, that’s how I met Dave Holland, that’s how I met a lot of those guys.  I got to New York on May 20, 1978, and it was a few months after that.

TP:    Talk about the ongoing relationship.

COLEMAN:  When I first heard the music it was shocking to me because I had never heard any music like that.  But I was shocked in New York many times during that period!  The first band I heard was Air, and that was shocking; I remember hearing them at Beefsteak Charlie’s.  The second group I heard was Arthur Blythe with the cello and tuba at Sweet Basil, which was shocking.  So I was constantly being shocked in that time period.

So Sam Rivers’ thing was just another shocking experience.  I had played a lot of big band music, but never anything like his music.  It was so original, almost everything about it — rhythmically, harmonically, melodically.  It’s not that he told you what to do, but he hired certain types of people and they were doing certain types of things, so there was a certain kind of looseness that was in the music.  Sometimes it got too loose for me actually.

TP:    Was it loose because of the predispositions of the players or was it loose because of the music?

COLEMAN:  Well, it was loose because of the players, and also because of the way Sam was — because Sam is loose.  But Sam is loose but in a kind of… You know, he was loose in the way that Bird was loose.  I mean, he’s loose, but he knows what he’s doing, and there’s a precision there inside the looseness.  But some of the players were just loose.  My interpretation of the loft scene is it was very loose anyway.  It’s kind of coming off a lot of developments from the ’60s, and players just take it in different directions.  Some players really know what they’re doing and really are working on their music, and others are just sort of in there.  So it’s a mixture of that.  But then again, when you go to the period before, that was happening, too.  But generally speaking, I found that true of that particular scene.  It was very experimental music, and so a lot of times the guys… Sam even put it to me this way at one time.  A lot of times guys just got who they could get, because they didn’t always have a choice of everybody who was on the scene.  Not everybody was into that kind of music or whatever.  So if you wanted to fill out a big band or a group or whatever, a lot of times you would just take who you could get, and it wasn’t always the best cats for the particular situation.  Sam said, “Well, you do the best you can; I’ve been out here a long time.”

TP:    Well, he’d always set up situations, so it wasn’t something new for him.

COLEMAN:  Exactly.  He’s doing the same thing probably in Florida.

TP:    Break it down for me a bit how you see the different components of the music.  What is it that’s so original?

COLEMAN:  It’s hard to describe.  It’s hard to say it’s one thing, because it’s not, and it almost never is.  But rhythmically it’s very different.  Now, I don’t mean necessarily the rhythm section, but the way the melodies laid rhythmically, the rhythms that the melodies were written in.  Because Sam had this very kind of contrapuntal concept, or many lines layered against each other kind of writing.  He does things like turning around the beat and different things like that, which means there’s an odd number of beats in a phrase as opposed to an even number of beats.  Sam would have things turning around, then they would turn back around on themselves and then come back… Some players would call that odd times, but he never wrote out anything in any kind of odd time signature.

TP:    They just fell that way.

COLEMAN:  Well, it was that way.  But you can write anything any way you want to write it.  No matter how out I want to get, I can still write it out in 4/4 if I want to.  He was a master at doing that.  In other words, he deliberately wrote it a certain way so that people could read it.  He told me that, too.  And I noticed this.  I noticed that even though his things were written in 4/4, that wasn’t the way they were.  The same thing with listening to Art Tatum or Charlie Parker or whatever.  There are some things they play which are not in 4/4, but because they’re in that context, people assume that’s what it is.  I don’t know if there’s an easy way of explaining this, but it was an odd number of beats in a lot of the phrases.  [SINGS CHORUS] That’s a 7-beat phrase that keeps turning back on itself.  So every second time it comes around, it’s an even number of beats — 14 beats.  But still, the phrase itself is in 7.  When you’re playing the phrase you can feel that you’re repeating the phrase every 7 beats.  So he had a lot of things like that, which most people don’t have in that music.  It’s a simple thing, but when you have a lot of that happening on top of each other, and you have one phrase doing that in 7 and another one doing it in 5 and another doing it in 4 and another one doing it somewhere else, it has a certain character.  It’s one of the things that I actually copped from him.  It’s one of several things that I’ve borrowed, stolen, whatever you want to call it.

TP:    Any others you’d care to put on the record?

COLEMAN:  Well, there is some intervallic stuff also, intervallic meaning… In every style you can see certain intervals that are predominant and others that are not so predominant.  I mean, there’s only 12 intervals really, but certain people tend to do certain kinds of things.  And Sam’s melodies have certain types of intervals that recur in everything.  This just got in my brain after a while, so it had a heavy influence on my music.  I mean, it’s not just what Sam did, because it’s a combination of a lot of different players.  But some of what Sam did definitely got into my music.  And all these things were coming from his writing more than anything else, because that stuff was just sitting there enough that you could kind of soak it in very quickly, especially if you’re playing the music.  So it’s not so much coming from his playing; it’s coming from what he was writing.  But his writing and playing are essentially the same brain.

TP:    You’re on Colors, the Black Saint record from ’83.  How long did you play with the big band in that first go-round?  Is that around when it fell apart in New York?

COLEMAN:  I did a lot of recording with him I guess up to the time I started steadily playing with Dave Holland — there was a little overlap.  But I would say all between ’79 and ’83 I did a lot of gigs with him, most of which weren’t recorded, of course.  I remember doing gigs at the Public Theater, tons of stuff at Rivbea, gigs all over the place.

TP:    Was he writing original music for that band the whole time?

COLEMAN:  Always.  Yeah, he has tons and tons of music.  The music we’re playing now, none of it is the music we were playing back then.  I don’t remember hardly anything being repeated.  The music we played with Colors was completely different than the music we played in the big band, which was completely different than what we just did…

TP:    And completely different that what was in Crystals.

COLEMAN:  Well, to my mind.  There may have been some things he reworked, like “Beatrice.”  But for the most part, that’s what I’m talking about.  I don’t remember “Whirlwind.”  When we played it just now, I was like, “I don’t remember this.”  Now, he may have played it with somebody else, but I didn’t play it with him.

TP:    How do you see the music on these records as evolving from when you first hooked up with him 15-20 years ago?

COLEMAN:  I hear the biggest difference as the people playing on it rather than so much the music itself.

TP:    In the level of competence?

COLEMAN:  No, I can’t say that, because there were people in the past, like George Lewis and people like that, who were really competent.  Where one person may be less competent in one area, another person may come in.  Well, George is one of those people who really had it together; he reads real well and has a fast mind.  To me, George Lewis and Sam, they represent people who have chosen what they want to do.  They’re not doing what they do because they can’t do something else, if you know what I’m saying.

But I wouldn’t say necessarily it’s a level of competence.  There is a general air today that’s very different than when I first came to New York.  With the guys younger than me, there’s a certain kind of… It’s hard to say.  It could be interpreted as precision, then again it could be interpreted as sterile.  It depends on who you’re talking about and how you’re looking at it.  But in general it’s cleaner.  But that could be not good also.  It depends on how it’s done.  I mean, Bird was very clean, but in a different way.

TP:    Well, you’re very clean.

COLEMAN:  Yeah.  Well, I try to be clean in the way that…

TP:    So is Greg.  You’re precise.  You know what you’re playing, and you’re technique is together, and you’re thorough musicians.

COLEMAN:  Well, I’m very concerned with it being precise, but not mechanical.  I mean, to me Bud Powell was very precise.  At the same time, there’s this sort of spontaneity, almost like a professional raggediness that you hear in his playing, but if you try to practice it you see it’s on a very high level of precision.  But it still has that sound that we used to call in Chicago “the professional beginner” sound.  To me, some players have a high degree of that, and to me that’s the hardest thing to get.  I think Sam has that in his music.  When I was mixing the music, and I was checking out the voicings he was using on “Beatrice” and so on in detail, I mean, there’s some incredible writing happening there that you don’t hear until you really dig down and go into the deeper levels of it.  I mean, I don’t expect the regular person in the audience to hear it.  However, when that detail is there, it adds to the emotional impact of the music, in my opinion.  It adds to the impact and depth of the music, not musical depth, but emotional depth…spiritual depth, for lack of a better word.  With Coltrane’s music you get the same kind of thing, with people who have really dug, and there’s layers and layers of thinking and work and interpretation there.  It hits you a certain way, rather than when somebody is taking it casually, or when somebody has done it on a casual level.

TP:    Talk about him as an instrumentalist, specifically as a saxophonist, and the qualities that really mark his improvising style and his saxophonism.

COLEMAN:  I guess the best word is serpentine.  The first thing that strikes you about somebody is the way they do something.  Not necessarily the notes and things like that, but the way.  And the way is in the sound, the phrasing, the rhythm; those are the things that immediately strike you.  It’s very slippery.  It comes out of what I think of as a certain school of saxophone playing.  It’s not really a school in that they imitate each other or they all went to school or anything…

TP:    It’s an aesthetic.

COLEMAN:  Exactly.  When you go to the older players, there’s always… Certain players that have a lot of depth in their playing, like Coleman Hawkins, you always see a different direction that their influences went — a different way.  For a player like Coleman Hawkins, different schools came out of different sides of his playing.  You see that with players like Charlie Parker, or Coltrane, or Louis Armstrong.  So there’s a certain kind of playing that I can trace back to Coleman Hawkins that I call the “snake school,” which is my best term.  It’s represented by players like Lucky Thompson, Benny Golson, Lockjaw Davis, to give you a few examples.  Even when you get into the more adventurous music, you still have those tendencies.

To me, Sam is in that particular school.  I don’t know any other word to say it.  Because there’s really no term for this; I’m sort of making stuff up.  But he’s in that snake school, kind of in the way… This is my interpretation; it might not be his at all.  To me, Von Freeman is in that school — or he definitely can be.  It has to do with a lot of slipperiness, it has to do with a lot of shifts and directions that they make in their lines and when they’re playing, and the intervals and the rhythm… It’s mainly the rhythm and the phrasing.  Then Sam makes it even more apparent with his phrasing because he has this garbled kind of phrasing, just the way he attacks the notes and does a lot of smears and things like that.  That makes it more pronounced, in my opinion, especially the way he smears the notes.  You can hear this on almost any of his recordings.  If I’m driving along in the car, and Sam comes along on the radio, then you can instantly hear that it’s him.  It’s like right away, just from the sound and phrasing, you can instantly hear it’s him.  For me, the first thing I get is that slippery thing.  It’s sort of like he looks, kind of long and rangy and everything.  And he moves like this, too.  To me, this goes beyond music.  When he’s like directing the band and doing his little dance, for me that’s like a snake dance.  It has that same kind of thing.  And if you ever check out the way he sings the music before the band plays, he sings the shit exactly like it should go.  He’s like “Okay, here we go; one-two, [SINGS].”  He has a certain way that he sings it that really gives you, more than words, how he wants this thing to go — or how he hears it in his head; he’s all animated about it, and that gives you a lot of information.  Everything, the way he’s singing, the way he moves and so on, and then he plays like that.  That gives you an idea, okay, this is how he hears this, this is how he wants it to go.”  There’s nothing he could say to you that would…

TP:    Like the way Monk was physically.

COLEMAN:  Exactly.  There’s a lot of people like that.  And there’s nothing that he could say that would give you more information than watching him move, listening to him sing, just watching the way he is.  He’s just an embodiment of the whole thing.  That’s the best way I can put it.  That goes for his playing his writing, the way he moves, the way he talks.

TP:    Talk about how this project came to be.  Had you been in touch with Sam a lot in the intervening years?

COLEMAN:  Not a whole lot since he moved down to Florida.  But it was always in my mind from the time we did Colors which for me was a disappointment in the production.  I thought it was a great tour, I learned a lot on the tour and I thought we did some great music, but then the tour got capped off by what in my mind was a really sad recording, or representation of it.  After the record came out I was saying I don’t think there’s any good representation of Sam’s music out here.  As you know, a lot of guys who are not real popular are left recording for these real small labels, and many times they have to do the whole record in 5-6 hours, and the mix is thrown together, the record is thrown out there, and there’s nothing happening.  So I thought it would be sad if this great cat left, and there’s like no real representation of his music.  Now, he’s made a lot of small group recordings, and there’s a lot of examples of him doing improvisations with people like Dave Holland and others, but to me the thing that was missing was his writing.  He’s written thousands of things, and the representation is small.  So that was one of the things I proposed along with recording Von Freeman, which I haven’t gotten to do yet.  I always liked Von and I always liked Sam, and I always told myself if it was ever within my power, I would try to see that some of the better quality stuff got recorded from them.  I wanted to record Von with a bigger group also. [ETC.] I knew Sam could do it by himself because he writes everything, so I didn’t have anything at all to do with the music.  I just told Sam, “Well, I want to do something with you; I want to produce, have it be on a good sound quality level, but beyond that, you got it.”  I brought in a couple of people, but mainly I brought in people where he couldn’t find cats or where there were holes.  I didn’t pick the whole band.

TP:    The band is an interesting mix of younger cats who are more, as you say, precise but with an edge, and then people who are contemporaries from the loft period.

COLEMAN:  The bottom line is, it worked out like it worked out.  I wasn’t dissatisfied with the way it worked out.  Had we had more time, probably we could have done better, but I could say that about anything.  I thought it worked out great overall, the whole thing.  I really learned a lot from the experience.  But certain guys who have been playing a certain way a long time, you’re not going to change that overnight.

TP:    I thought there was a great dynamic.

COLEMAN:  I thought there was, too.  The rubbing of these different things produced different effects.  It would have been boring if it was all guys like me or all guys like Ray Anderson or whatever.  The fact that it was different people rubbing elbows made for an interesting mix.  And it’s because of Sam that that mix was there.  It’s not the kind of mix that you could concoct.  If we had concocted it, it would be probably less interesting.  Everybody has strengths.  A lot of the players who were hanging out on the loft scene have a lot of energy, and there’s a lot of raw power there…

TP:    A lot of expression in the horns.

COLEMAN:  Exactly.  So that adds a great deal to the thing.  You find that in a lot of the older music, too, in Duke Ellington’s band and so on.  To me, a lot of the younger guys don’t have that, unless it’s manufactured.  There are players who don’t like that, who say, “Well, that’s bull” or whatever.  But for me, all of that is valid — that energy.  I learned that when I played with Cecil Taylor’s big band, for example. I played with this band, and there was a lot of raw energy there, and if that energy is channeled right it can be killer.  It can get out of hand, but anything can get out of hand!

So I thought it was a really good thing.  I felt my job was to help Sam make this the best we could make, given what we’ve got, given our situation, given the budget, given how much time.   And it helped that we had a gig at Sweet Basil before, which was like rehearsal in a lot of ways, and it also helped that they had a bigger budget than normal, because little problems that came up that took time to work out, and the fact that we had a bigger budget meant we could do that, whereas if we were recording for a real small label that wouldn’t have happened.  What happens with a small situation is that when problems come up, you can’t work them out.  So the chips fall where they may.

TP:    Sam talks about how these pieces are meant to be 50 minutes.  Of course, on a record you can’t do that.

COLEMAN:  Your chops say you can’t do that.

TP:    Do you feel it’s an overly idealistic aspiration on his part?

COLEMAN:  Well, yeah.  It’s kind of like the Braxton music on different planets.  It falls within that area.  It’s an ideal.  To me, ideals are great.  They’re fantastic.  If that’s the ideal you hold in your head, if that’s what you aspire to, that’s great.  But it probably will never be that.  I mean, guys’ lips will fall off if you play 5 compositions of 50 minutes each. People just won’t make it.  However, it’s a great idea, and I see what he’s talking about.  Yeah, it could be like that.  But I also think that would be very boring.

TP:    I guess that’s part of the African thing you’re talking about, is the endless music.

COLEMAN:  Yeah.  I understood what Sam is saying there, but I don’t think that’s ever been realized or will be realized, because it’s just a situation.  Also, there’s a stamina issue.

TP:    Would you elaborate more on your comments in the liner notes about the closeness of the music to the West African concept.

COLEMAN:  Well, one thing is what you mentioned about the different levels of the musician and all that kind of thing.  You find that a lot in African music, where people are participating on the level they can participate on.  You find it a lot in community music.  There’s not the idea of everybody being a virtuoso.  Only some people are virtuosos.  Other people are doing other things, performing other functions.  When I see, for example, Duke Ellington’s band or Count Basie’s band, that’s what I see.  You don’t see a thing where everybody is a virtuoso kind of thing.

The one thing I wouldn’t have done, Sam has this super-democratic thing where everybody’s soloing, everybody gets the same amount of space and all that kind of stuff.  I wouldn’t have done it like that.  I would have let the stronger soloists solo for the most part, or get the lion’s share of the space, in order to bring the strongest characteristics out of the music.  I wouldn’t have let everybody solo and everybody get equal space and everybody have 2 seconds, which is what it comes out to be when you’re trying to get all that music done and get all that stuff in on record.  You have these really short improvisations…I mean, that are not collective.  There’s a lot of improvisation, but a lot of stuff that’s collective, which is like composition.  Everything gets mixed together, and you’re not hearing the individual voices so much.  There were people in the band who are strong soloists in all the different sections, and I would have brought them out more.  In my opinion, it would have raised the level of the music.  But Sam had a different idea.  Sam is a very compassionate guy.  He didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.  So he’d have guys solo who really shouldn’t be soloing.  That wasn’t their function.  I would have had a bit more role-playing, I guess I’m saying.  In that sense, I’m following the African thing.  I’m not going to have a kid do a master drummer’s part.  The master drummer does the master drummer part.  That doesn’t mean the other guys are less important, because that support part is very important.  A guy like Michael Jordan, he needs his support, role players — he can’t do it by himself.   That’s very important.  But in this day of stars and egos and so on, we don’t think like that – in the West.  We think the star is the most important guy.  Well, that’s not true.  It’s the whole team that’s important, and that’s part of what’s wrong with this culture.

TP:    Greg addressed a quality in the orchestrating where, say, the saxophone lines are doing something totally different than every other section, there are four or five things happening at once within the section, so it’s a whole band where you break down the integers, they’re all doing different things but it locks together.  Then my comment was that it’s not unlike the African concept of stacking rhythms, hatcheting…

COLEMAN:  Right.  But it wasn’t usually in sections like that.  In other words, Sam writes a cross-section.  In other words, a tenor and an alto might be playing with a trumpet and trombone.  Then another two trumpets might be playing with the baritone and another alto.

TP:    He described it as doubling sections.

COLEMAN:  He’s writing things where he’s making unusual groups of people.  It might even be the bass and one horn or something like that.  There’s unusual groups of people doing things, then he’ll play that off against the sound of sections, like the brass section or the trumpet section or whatever.  So sometimes he will have traditional sections playing.  Other times he’ll break those sections up, and it will be like me and the lead trumpet player and one of the lower brass or something like that, and it will be a section.  So you have to keep your ears open, because you never really know until you know the music where you’re going to be paired off and who you’re going to end up playing with, and all that kind of thing.  As a result, you have to be strong and play on your own.

TP:    That’s how the pieces become different with every performance, then, in a structural sense, that you don’t know who you’re going to be paired off with?

COLEMAN:  Well, no.  Within the same piece you’re paired off with the same double. The improvisation is what makes it different.  But from piece to piece, until you know that particular piece, it’s different.  And he has so much music that you can’t remember everything.  So from piece to piece it’s always different.  Most people when they write big band music, they’re writing saxophone section stuff out — this real Nestico type of writing where all the saxophones are playing together, all the trumpets are playing together, all the trombones are playing together.  Sam has some of that, too, but more often than not he’ll break the sections up and have different instruments playing with each other, and that gives a different sound.  It’s a really different sound when you have a saxophone, a trumpet and a trombone as a section, or a saxophone, euphonium and trumpet, or whatever.  That’s a really different sound than three saxophones playing.

TP:    One last general question.  Talk a bit about Sam Rivers’ place in the history of the music.

COLEMAN:  In my opinion, there’s two histories of the music.  There’s the history of what gets written down in the books and what’s known and all that kind of stuff, which unfortunately is what most people are going to know.  Then there’s the actual effect that you’ve had on the music and its participants, and which continues through other people you’ve touched.  In that sense, for me, Sam’s influence on the music is huge, because he’s touched people some of whom are themselves going to make a lot of marks.  I mean, there are a lot of unknown people who have this kind of effect, but Sam is more than unknown, so naturally he’s going to be better known, because he’s been on the scene a long time, he’s lived a long time, he’s played with a lot of people over the years.  So from way back in the ’50s all the way up to now he’s affected a lot of people’s lives, from Tony Williams all the way through to what’s happening today.  As a result, through his own work and through the work of these other people, he’s had a big effect.  To me, your effect on the music is cumulative.  It doesn’t just stop with some records you put out that somebody may think is important or whatever.  It’s mostly the interactions you have as you live every day, and the effect you’ve had on certain people.  I know he’s had a huge effect on my life.  I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if it wasn’t for Sam and people like him.  And if there’s anybody out there who claims that I have a big effect on them, well, again, that’s coming from Sam…

TP:    It’s the line of descent.

COLEMAN:  Yeah.  And it plays out all the way to the public.  It’s not just something that stops with the musicians, because what we do collectively is this music.  Even if somebody like Terence Blanchard had not listened to Sam at all and he had no effect on him, and he has a big effect on me, then when I play with Terence Blanchard the effect is still there, regardless of that.  So it carries on and on and on through unusual ways.  I think he’s a very original voice, and very original voices always have a huge effect, in my opinion, even when they’re not well known.  They always have a huge effect because they’re bringing something different to the mix, to the dance.  Put it that way.  If you’re just bringing the same thing to the dance that everybody else is bringing, well, then, it’s already in the dance — it’s no big deal.  But if you’re bringing something different, everybody is like, “Oh, what, wait a minute, what’s this cat doing?”  So that’s adding something to the overall mix.  He has a much bigger effect than somebody who is just bringing the same drink to the party and then throwing it in the punch when there’s already that in there  than somebody who brings a different ingredient.  He has a much bigger effect because that ingredient wasn’t there before.  That’s the way I look at people like Sam Rivers.

TP:    Please talk about him personally, your relation to him…

COLEMAN:  When I first came to New York, he and Bea kind of took me under their wing a bit.  Not completely; I didn’t move in with them or anything like that.  But they definitely took me under their wing, and I would go over and hang out even when there was no music stuff happening.  See, I was fairly poor and didn’t have a lot happening in terms of where I was living and all that kind of stuff.  So I would just hang out a lot at Rivbea, and a lot of times I’d be hanging out with Sam or Bea or Monique.  Sam encouraged me a lot.  He would talk to me.  It wasn’t like a father-son relationship in the traditional sense, but it’s more like that than anything else, I guess.  I definitely felt they were taking me under their wing and encouraging me.  Bea told me early on… She would talk to me and tell me things that Sam wouldn’t necessarily tell me, like, “Sam thinks you have a lot of talent and you’re going to do a lot, so you just have to hang…”  She would tell me a lot of things that I guess Sam would say but wouldn’t say in front of me.  Sam isn’t a cat who throws around a lot of compliments.  That mainly came from Bea.  But you could tell that she was getting a lot of information from Sam, because some of the things she would say weren’t things you’d think she’d know just on her own.  She would just say a lot of things.  I remember when he first heard Gary Thomas, Bea said a lot of the same things about Gary which I thought really came from Sam. But Sam wasn’t the kind of guy who would say that.  He would just get down to the business of doing the music.  But I felt they took me in, in their own kind of weird way — because they’re kind of a weird lot.

TP:    They dance to the beat of their own drummer, as the saying goes.

COLEMAN:  Yes, and I’m like that, too, and I dug that, and I could relate to it.  So they just encouraged me.  When Sam did talk to me, he really encouraged me to try to stay creative and try to build my own sound.  He always said that for him, that’s what the whole thing was about, was really getting out what’s unique inside of you and getting your own sound.  I got the feeling that if he didn’t do that, he didn’t want to do anything.  I felt that way, too, so I was attracted to that part of what he was talking about.  “The really important thing is you’ve got to have your own voice, you’ve got to have your own thing to say.”  I remember a lot of guys in Chicago saying that same kind of thing.  For me, that was the big message and the important thing I get from his example.  He’s one of those cats like Cecil Taylor and Ornette who just stuck it out over the long run.  If they stumbled, they got back up and just kept going.  That’s like a really big inspiration for me, because I’d see if they can do this in what were harder times than today, then what’s my problem?

Dave Holland

TP:    First, tell me how you first touched based with Sam Rivers and came into his orbit.

HOLLAND:  I met Sam in New York in the late ’60s shortly after I’d moved there.  I remember seeing him around town at various locations.  He’d started rehearsing with Cecil Taylor, who had a place sort of downtown around 18th Street and 6th Avenue, which is in the area I was living, so I used to see Sam quite often — he’d be on his way to rehearsal.  The next time we kind of hung out a little bit was touring in the fall of ’69 when I was with Miles and he was with Cecil’s band, and we were doing some double-bill concerts in Europe.  That was sort of the extent of it until late ’71 or early ’72.  I was living in New York, and I’d just come back from the West Coast after working with Circle.  The band broke up, and I worked with Stan Getz for about a year-and-a-half, and during the time I was with Stan I met up with Sam.  How that happened, just to cut a long story short, was Barry Altschul, who was the drummer in Circle, had started going to Sam’s loft at Studio Rivbea and rehearsing with him in the afternoon, and when I got back into town, Barry suggested I come by and do some playing with him.  That’s how it started, and from then on I started working with Sam, and we played in trio and big bands in quartet and quintet format.

TP:    So you basically were involved in all his different projects.

HOLLAND:  Yes.  I’d say it was from early ’72 until early ’81.

TP:    You’re on Sizzle as well as the other…

HOLLAND:  I am, yes.

TP:    Did playing in those different situations with him involve different demands on you…

HOLLAND:  In terms of the orchestration of the groups, one interesting group that we played in was with Joe Daley on tuba, which certainly presented some new challenges for both of us in terms of how we would work together, both of us playing bass instruments.  That was a particularly interesting and challenging situation for us to work on.  But musically, the majority of performances that I did with Sam were improvised music.  We used no written music.  The only written music that we used was with the big band, and all the other performances, even the quartet-quintet performances… Abdul Wadud did some gigs with us with cello-tuba-bass-saxophone-drums.  All this music was improvised.

TP:    You started basically with a tabula rasa, a blank piece of paper, as you put it to me on the radio.

HOLLAND:  That was it.  We’d just start wherever we wanted to.  The great thing for me was that every night we could really go in whatever direction we felt like going, and it gave us a chance to explore a lot of interesting places.

TP:    Did you hear any of the new record, or any of the music?

HOLLAND:  I haven’t heard the record, and I was out of town when they did the week at Sweet Basil.

TP:    Tell me about playing the big band music.  Did it sound like anything you had been involved with before?  How would you describe the dynamics of it, the demands of playing it?

HOLLAND:  It was certainly unique, original music that Sam was writing for the big band then.  It was quite complex at times.  It involved a lot of overlapping rhythmic cycles, and everybody had to very much be aware of how their part works with everybody else’s, of course, and how they interlocked.  The music seems to span…pretty much like Sam’s playing, it spanned the whole tradition of the music.  You could hear bits of Duke Ellington in there just…in terms of references, I mean.  I’m not suggesting it was at all similar, but only that it drew on a sort of broad range of the tradition of big band writing, and it had conventional harmonic elements and more atonal elements going on.  It was a very broad mixture of things.

TP:    It seems to me that he really relies on the groove function of the bass, that the drums are more coloristic in his concept.  True?

HOLLAND:  I don’t know.  I think that very much depends on the players involved.

TP:    He’s player-oriented.

HOLLAND:  Yes.  Sam very much tried to involve the individual styles of the players into the music and integrate them.  The music would take different shapes depending on who was playing it, of course.  But I don’t know if I could say the function of the drum would be… One good example was Charlie Persip came in one time to play with the band, and that was a very interesting time when he played, because he brought his wonderful experience of playing big band music to that music, and I thought it was a great combination.

TP:    Tell me about the Studio Rivbea scene.  The big band workshopped there.  Was it on a once-a-week basis or something?

HOLLAND:  There was a rehearsal more or less once a week, and we’d run through the charts.  The rehearsals were quite loose.  I was frustrated sometimes because I would like to have had more time to develop each piece.  Sam would run through the piece and work on some sections and then move on to the next one, and I was still interested in developing the piece we just finished with.  The rehearsals moved along quite rapidly.  We didn’t spend a lot of time on each piece.

TP:    Could you give a sense of the ambiance of that time, of the ’70s, the music that was happening in lofts, the spirit of the time, the various overlapping circles in New York City, and where Sam fit into that.

HOLLAND:  I think there was a feeling amongst the community that there was a need for some alternative performance spaces, and there were some places opening up.  Ornette Coleman had a place in Soho where he started doing performances.  That was the first thing I remember in that way.  Various other people decided to do that.  Sam opened up his loft, which is actually where he and his family were living, and it became a whole family affair.  It was wonderful.  He, his wife Bea, the daughters and his son all pitched in and helped run the place, helped to make it a very personal kind of thing, a very personal environment for the music to happen in.  It literally put on these wonderful series of concerts which gave musicians a chance to really develop and focus in on their ideas musically and without any commercial constraints.  So it was sort of the breeding ground for a lot of very interesting musical ideas that were being developed during that time, and that weren’t being heard in New York.  Of course, this kind of activity brought together people, and of course opportunities then came up for those groups to work in Europe and elsewhere.  So it was a very important time of people coming together and organizing their music.

TP:    And Rivbea was a key center within that.

HOLLAND:  It was a key center.  The lofts often tended to gravitate around certain groups of musicians or certain approaches to music, let’s say.  There was a loft called Environ…

TP:    John Fischer’s place.

HOLLAND:  Exactly.  And they tended to have one policy… Well, there were overlapping things.  But each loft would have its own set of groups or people that it presented.  There was a very wide range of different things going on.  It was not only a place to perform, of course, but a place to rehearse and a place to congregate for the community of musicians, to come together and discuss what’s going on and to share ideas and so on.  These kinds of places that come along every now and then provide a very important function to the musical community.

TP:    Is there something about Sam Rivers’ personality that makes him… He’s someone who seems to organize a scene around him wherever he is.  He said he did this in Harlem when he first came to New York, and in Boston as well.  What are the dynamics of his personality that make him so charismatic and attractive to other musicians?

HOLLAND:  Well, Sam is a very dedicated musician, to his music, and he’s also dedicated to realizing it and bringing it to fruition in performances and so on.  He was probably one of the ones who was very independent-minded as a musician.  He didn’t wait for people to say, “Would you like to do this?”  He would take the initiative.  So this was why I think that Sam would often have a scene around him, because he was someone who would take the initiative, would have the vision and the drive to put things together.  Also, he is a great composer.  Although his small groups that I was involved in during the ’70s were all open form performances, without any written music, his written music is very distinctive and very personal, and shows a very individual approach to writing and to thinking about music.

TP:    If you were to describe him as a saxophonist to someone who was unfamiliar with him, how would you do it?

HOLLAND:  Sam is a very inclusive player.  He uses all his musical experience when he plays.  That’s something he taught me when I was playing with him, was the idea of just bringing it all into the music, all your experiences into the music.  So when you listen to Sam’s playing and listen to his written music, you hear that range of experience he’s had, from Blues through more traditional forms and up to the present with his own original music.  I think one of the things that’s very interesting in his playing and very individualistic is his approach to rhythm.  He had an influence, I know, on quite a few musicians who worked with him during the ’70s in terms of how he used rhythm in his written for the big band, his overlapping cycles, and the way he utilized rhythmic fields and so on in his music.

TP:    How would you assess his place in the history of the music, particularly in his time?

HOLLAND:  Sam is a player that spanned a number of developments in the music in his career and in his life, and he’s somebody who was able to keep some continuity going through those different stages and have the later things that he’s done still echo the experiences that his earlier music had.  A lot of players, particularly during the ’60s and ’70s who were playing this open form music didn’t bring that kind of experience to the playing, to the music that Sam had, and Sam brought this great foundation within the tradition of the music, but then found a way to express it in this contemporary open-form way.

Chico Freeman

TP:     When did you first hook up with Sam?

CHICO FREEMAN:  I guess it was 1976, when I came here from Chicago.

TP:    Did you know him before?

FREEMAN:  No, I didn’t know him before.  I met him here.

TP:    How did you link up?

FREEMAN:  I guess when I came around, you start come around, hanging, trying to get known and meet people, and I think I met him… I went to Rivbea because someone told me… Well, I’d heard about it before.  When I went over there I met him and Bea.  He had a big band going, and he hired me.  First he heard me (I think I sat in somewhere or something), and then he hired me.

TP:    You’d been involved in the AACM Big Band for a number of years.  Did his big band sound really distinctive?  Original music?  Was it very striking to you?

FREEMAN:  Definitely original music.  His whole style is original.  It was quite different from the AACM Big Band or Muhal’s big band.

TP:    Talk about his style, and what’s original about it.

FREEMAN:  Well, his way of writing.  He has a style he’s developed that’s linear… I mean, he juxtaposes lots of different lines together and things like that, so he’s got a linear juxtaposing approach to lines that he has.  I think it comes from the saxophone.  But he plays good piano, too.  He has I guess like polychords for the harmonies that he does, and then he sort of adapts that to the way he writes lines and things, then he juxtaposes the lines and the harmonies together in the same way.  I remember Don Pullen was in the band when I was there, too.

TP:    Dave Holland was talking about his concept of cyclic overlapping rhythms.

FREEMAN:  That’s it exactly.  I called it juxtaposition.  But cyclic overlapping or juxtaposition.

TP:    How was it different from your experience in Muhal’s band.  Talk about how he ran the band, about his personality as a bandleader, and also, extrapolating from that, about the ambiance of Rivbea and its position in the New York scene at that time as you experienced it.

FREEMAN:  He was different than Muhal in that Muhal was more… Muhal as a composer approached it more from a piano perspective, I think, and Muhal also ran the band very… It was a great band, to tell you the truth.  I really loved working in Muhal’s band.  The Duke Ellington approach was involved, even though it was newer things we were doing.  Sam’s approach was a little more loose in the sense that… In that way they maybe were similar.  There’s a lot of freedom of expression, a lot of solos and things like that.  Sam’s music being so different… And the reading was a challenge.  Reading his music is not easy.

TP:    Why.

FREEMAN:  It’s difficult. [LAUGHS]
TP:    Just because it’s so dense.

FREEMAN:  Yeah, it’s dense, and a lot of things going on, and sometimes the saxophones are playing with the trombones, and then the next you know they’re playing with the trumpet.  There’s a lot of things happening.

TP:    So you can get a sort of vertigo being in a section, like orienting yourself to where you are.

FREEMAN:  Yeah, you have to find that out.  You’d spend five rehearsals just finding out who’s playing what you’re playing, or rhythmically.

TP:    And Sam said the parts sometimes involved you playing 8 bars written and then 8 bars free, and going back and forth…

FREEMAN:  Yes, that, and there were all kinds of things he was doing.  The interesting thing about Rivbea and the ambiance is that Rivbea was kind of self-contained.  It was a rehearsal space, it was a performance space, and it was also a kind of conceptual musical…like a school.  It wasn’t a school in the typical traditional sense of a school, but it had that kind of a… Let me change, and call it a workshop.  It was a workshop kind of situation.  So at the same time Sam was running this big band, he also had his trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul during this period.  I used to get a chance to listen to them a lot.  But Sam also made it a place where not only was it for him to showcase his bands, but it was a place where other bands and other musicians had an opportunity… Sam is the reason I pretty much started my European career as a leader.

TP:    How so?

FREEMAN:  Well, Sam had this big concept… He would take the Rivbea Orchestra, which at that time was Barry Altschul, Dave Holland, myself and some other people I can’t… Byard Lancaster, different people who were playing; I can’t remember everybody.  But he had the orchestra, and we went out to do the Northsea Jazz Festival, and there he had a whole night, not just one concert.  That night there was a concert by the orchestra, then we broke down into smaller groups.  I had a small group which was with Dave and Barry, myself, and a vibes player, and I did a concert.  In this case, I was playing my own original music.  Sam allowed that, which was very interesting.  There were a few different groups that the band broke down into.  In a way, that was like my first festival to play as a leader, even though I was in the Rivbea Orchestra.  From that, my response at Northsea, which was really very positive, Sam introduced me to his agent, and his agent began to work with me, and that’s how my career started.  So that was due to him and Bea.  So I have a lot to thank him for.

TP:    Was the music that the Rivbea Orchestra was playing similar to what the orchestra at Sweet Basil played last year and that’s on the record?

FREEMAN:  Some of it was similar.  Not all of it.

TP:    How has it evolved over the years?

FREEMAN:  Well, Sam is an amazing guy.  He has a mind like a steel trap.  He remembers things.  He’s amazing.  Sam used to be in a group called Roots, which at that time was Arthur Blythe, Nathan Davis, Sam, myself, Don Pullen, I think Santi and Idris Muhammad.  I remember once, something happened to the music; it got lost, or some arrangements on a couple of charts got misplaced somehow.  And Sam remembered the whole arrangement, and he wrote the arrangement out, all the parts.  He remembered everything.  He wrote everybody’s part out.  Shocked me.  I mean, I was amazed.

And Sam knows 270 million songs. A lot of people listen to his music, but they don’t realize the standards… He knows every standard…I shouldn’t say every standard that was written… But once we had a test on the bus, man, and everybody tried their best to find a song Sam didn’t know, and no one was successful.

TP:    If you were to try to describe the way he plays saxophone to somebody and what’s distinctive about his style, how would you do that?

FREEMAN:  Well, that’s difficult. [LAUGHS] His style.  How do you describe his style.

TP:    Steve Coleman used the word “serpentine,” and compared it to the way he moves and talks and gestures.  Osby said he reminded him of your Dad.  I don’t know if he means that because they’re about the same age, or because they have similar references and came up under each other.  He’s very vocalized.  He plays like someone who played a lot of blues, which he did.

FREEMAN:  Yeah, I would agree with that.  Serpentine sounds like a good word, too.  His lines are elusive.  They angle.  He’s angular in his lines and stuff like that.  I don’t know if he reminds me of my father.  They have completely different style.  I think they’re both great musicians.  I would compare them in the sense that each has their own distinctive style.  My Dad definitely has a sound, and so does Sam.  It’s a different sound.

TP:    If you were pick a word or image to describe his sound, how would you do it?

FREEMAN:  I’ve never done that actually.  Nothing comes to mind right now, one word that would do it.  The colors that he has are… What distinguishes him more to me, and what I hear are his phrases and the way he begins and ends a phrase.  He sort of sings at the end of a phrase.  He plays a line, and when he rests that last note sings.  He sort of sings it.

TP:    He’s been singing since 4 years old in gospel choirs.  What was your general impression of the week at Sweet Basil and the way the record came out?

FREEMAN:  I thought the record came out really well.  The week at Sweet Basil was good.  I mean, we had great musicians in the band.  The saxophone section particularly was… And the trumpet section was great, too, I must say.  Then of course, having Joe Bowie and Ray Anderson, I like both; those are two of my favorite trombone players.  I really enjoyed the band, and especially the musicians who were there.  And the music was definitely a challenge, and as a result it was good to be there among that caliber of musicians and playing that, and also to take Sam’s music.  You see, with all of that cyclical juxtapositioning and those angular rhythms and things, it was interesting to bring dynamics and all of those other things to that, and make that music live.  It was a challenge.  So I found it to be very interesting.  Yet at the same time, I said it sounds quite complicated, but at the same those complications are built on a basis of simplicity.
TP:    Very advanced structures over a primitive beat.  He always puts the dance beats on it.

FREEMAN:  Yes, it was simple bass.  The bass was simple.  Harmonically it was not… For the solos, the chords were pretty simple and basic, and also the beats and rhythms, but the structures of… The melodic structures were quite complicated, rhythmically and… Again, it’s where he placed things, and he inverts things, and starts things from the middle and from the inside-out and from the outside-in, backwards-to-front and front-to-back, and all in different kinds… Cyclical and juxtapositioning by offsetting them here and there.

TP:    As he put it, it’s like higher mathematics to him; he can’t make a mistake.

FREEMAN:  I’m telling you, it’s his own system.  He’s worked it out.  He’s the master of his own thing.

TP:    Anything you’d like to address that I didn’t cover?

FREEMAN:  Nothing I can think of, except to say he’s responsible for a lot of musicians, helping a lot of musicians and being there for a lot of guys.  He’s always embraced rather than rejected, and I think that a lot of us owe him a debt.  He’s been around for a long time, and he’s definitely one of the innovators and major exponents of this music.

Bob Stewart

TP:    When did you first become aware of Sam Rivers and involved in his music?

BOB STEWART:  That was actually when I moved to New York, around 1966-67.  There was a couple of year period there when he rehearsed uptown at 134th Street, at Bethune Elementary School.  He used to do every Thursday or something like that for a couple of hours.  Carlos Ward on alto saxophone and Charles Stephens on trombone, Joe Gardner, Hamiet Bluiett, all these people were in the band when we would rehearse up there — way before Studio Rivbea.

TP:    What was that music like?

STEWART:  Stylistically, in terms of how he was writing, it was some of the most difficult tuba parts I’d ever seen to that date.  Because he was writing for the tuba, just like he was writing… A lot of composers at that point wrote the tuba part like they were writing a baritone saxophone part.  They just had me paralleling the baritone, which was pretty boring most of the time.  And he was writing for the tuba just like it was another horn.  He wrote in a linear fashion, so that everybody had their own lines, which is what created the harmony more than as… I think he wasn’t thinking so much contrapuntally as he was in lines, so that formed the harmony of the piece.  So the tuba parts were really intricate and difficult rhythmically and interval jumps and leaps that would be in the part…

TP:    Did you have rhythmic responsibilities that other horns didn’t have within that?

STEWART:  No.

TP:    So as a tubist in Sam Rivers’ Big Band you’re playing long lines, and you’re just one of the horns.

STEWART:  Right.  That’s one of the reasons why a number of years later, ’81 and  ’82, I did two what I called Tuba Spectaculars at St. Peter’s Church, covering all phases of the tuba.  In ’81 Major Holley did a presentation, Ray Draper did a presentation, Howard Johnson did one, I did a duo with Arthur Blythe, a whole series of things like that.  The next year I did a presentation of the tuba through the composers Sam Rivers and Gil Evans, and it showed how they both were writing for the tuba, although very differently.  Both composers inspired me to play my horn in a very different fashion, because the stuff they wrote was very difficult to play but each one very differently difficult.

TP:    Is it difficult just because it stretches the limitations of normal technique on the tuba?

STEWART:  No, it’s within the technique of any instrument, although it’s not something that a tuba player gets to see every time, because not everybody is as creative as they are.  Alto players I’m sure see this kind of all stuff the time at that point, but it wasn’t something that a tuba player wouldn’t see all the time.

TP:    Were you ever involved in his free improv situations?  He did a lot of that with Joe Daley in the ’70s.

STEWART:  No, I never did any of that stuff with Dave Holland and Bobby Battle and Barry Altschul and Warren Smith… It was an interesting presentation during that period with tuba and the bass.  But it was right after I’d done all these rehearsals.  Then he went down to Rivbea, which is when he formed that group.  I didn’t rehearse too much with Sam once he formed Studio Rivbea.

TP:    Because you didn’t play with him downtown, you played with him uptown.

STEWART:  I played with him uptown before he went downtown, all the stuff that was formulated going downtown.  It was almost like Minton’s before it went downtown.

TP:    So that was a real serious workshop atmosphere right after he moved here.

STEWART:  Absolutely, because we weren’t getting paid for that, and he didn’t have a whole lot of gigs, so we were just going up there and rehearsing with Sam.  Like I say, it was as enlightening to me as it was to Sam, in terms of he could hear his arrangements.

TP:    That’s what he said, he had all these arrangements and nobody available in Boston to play them.

STEWART:  Exactly.  So when he brought that out, I said, “Whoa…” I still have some of that stuff at home, as a matter of fact.  I xeroxed it all.  It was so difficult it was like working on an etude book or something.  Sam’s etude book.  It was a great thing for my eyes during that time, and it expanded my technique.  This is one of the reasons, like I say, why I did those concerts.  Because Gil Evans didn’t write in such a technically difficult way, but in terms of what he’d ask you to do… He had some things that were very-very high.  He wanted the texture of a tuba to play up high on its instrument, like high around middle-C, D, F, above that, while trumpet and other instruments were playing toward the bottom of their instrument and playing right next to where I was playing, or even play in unison with me.  But there was a tension, because the sound of my instrument up high and theirs from down low…my instrument created the tension.  That’s another thing I learned from Gil, how he would do that with instruments, how he would do that with the tuba, putting it up high while bringing… At the time, Lew Soloff was playing trumpet.  Having Lew playing like in thirds with me, except I would be above him.  So it created this really interesting tension in the band while not necessarily being loud.

TP:    A number of musicians who play with him say there’s a sort of vertigo effect in orienting yourself in the music at any given time because of the overlapping rhythmic cycle concept that he uses.

STEWART:  You had to depend on people differently.  In a regular big band, you can count on somebody going BIH-DE-DAP–UNNH.  You can kind of pop off of a whole section dropping at a downbeat or a …and-a-4, or whatever it happens to be, so you can kind of know where you are.  But in Sam’s music you had to listen differently.  It wasn’t like the kind of cliche places where you can depend on what your part went like.  You had to listen very differently in terms of where the accents were.  It’s rhythmically unique.

TP:    He doesn’t sound like anybody else.

STEWART:  He doesn’t sound like anybody else at all.  Nobody else.  I mean, the closest thing that even feels like that is the way that David Murray writes, but not really.  Just in terms of the ensemble, there’s a…I don’t want to use the word “confusion”… You can’t relate it to all the regular stuff that you do in a big band, and therefore finding out where you are or who you play your part with.  Because quite often it’s very difficult to figure out who you’re playing your part with, so you have to get your cues a different kind of way.

TP:    Let me move to last year and your impressions of the week at Sweet Basil, and relate the music you were playing to what your experience had been 32 years before, and how you like the record.

STEWART:  I love the record.  I was honored to be a part of that project, because it was nice watching this music evolve to now from ’66 or ’77.  Particularly if you think of the whole evolution, if you have a definition of jazz, part of that definition is how musicians evolved and how the technique evolves.  The technique becomes more evolved, and musicians become much more agile on the instruments.  And to watch that very same thing happen in my lifetime is very interesting how a lot of these instruments and musicians hadn’t been used to looking at parts like that coming out of regular big bands.  We never really played his music well then.  But 30 years later, when a few of the same people were in the band… Hamiett Bluiett and I were the only two original members.

TP:    Then there were a bunch of people who played with him at Rivbea, and then some young guys with a different aesthetic.  An interesting mix of musicians.

STEWART:  So it was interesting.  There were three layers of musicians in that group.  Really four, because his rhythm section from Florida is brand new.  And it’s interesting hearing that music really played well, finally after all these years, and people coming back to the music as well as coming to the music fresh, and people that have been in the music for maybe the last ten years rather than 30… Hearing that music having all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed.  It was absolutely marvelous listening to it and being a part of it.  We did a thing at La Villette in France, and it was a packed concert, and people just were going wild.

TP:    There’s a primal thing.  The energy is just amazing.

STEWART:  Absolutely.

TP:    If you were going to describe it to someone who hadn’t heard it, what would you say to them?  In its advanced, current iteration.

STEWART:  It’s hard to describe.  You could tell them it’s a big band, but it’s like no big band they’ve ever heard.  You tell them it’s big band arrangements, but it’s not like any stereotype of any kind.  Either stereotype or non-stereotype.  If you think about the creative big band things that Gil Evans did for Miles, or the creative big band things that were being done by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis… Still it’s creative, but it’s creative differently.

TP:    Does it sound connected to the tradition to you?

STEWART:  Absolutely.  It’s in the tradition similar to the tradition label that was put on Duke Ellington’s music when they called it “jungle music.”  It’s similar to that tradition, in that, while being contemporary, he’s reached back some kind of way and brought up spirits from old, that… I feel like I’m playing in some kind of African big band.  Just the rhythmic qualities of it and the way the lines are moving very independently of each other, which you hear a lot in African music.  It reaches back to particularly a rhythmic sense…
TP:    The way he put it was it’s very advanced harmonies over primitive… He always puts the dance element into it, and he used the word “primitive” not in a pejorative sense, but more primal, old…

STEWART:  I think that’s what I just said!  It’s a very contemporary music, but still it calls up spirits from way back.

TP:    One more question.  Your impressions of Sam as a saxophone player, and the salient qualities of what he does.

STEWART:  I’ll just give you my experience.  Having known Sam and heard a certain way he plays from the early days, I was thinking of him as an avant-garde saxophone player.  I knew he had chops and I knew he knew what he was doing, but I never really heard him play that other way.  About 12 years ago I was in Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band, and I was so surprised to see he had hired Sam Rivers to be either first or second tenor player.  Right after that Dizzy hired him for his quintet, and Dizzy was straight-ahead compared to what Sam was doing.  I was surprised.  Then when I heard him play in that style, I was absolutely floored at the depth of this man’s knowledge.

TP:    He has a very vocalized sound, doesn’t he.  Steve Coleman used the word “serpentine.”

STEWART:  Oh yeah?  That’s the way he writes, too.  He writes very similar to the way he plays.  I mean, if you don’t hear him sing those parts… That’s one of the things he was doing over in Paris when we did that concert.  He started singing the beginning of the tunes, just to put the feeling into the band.  Before we even got a chance to play, the audience erupted.  He would do it with such energy. [SINGS]

Anthony Cole

TP:    I want to focus this conversation on the Orlando scene.  Give me some sense of Sam’s impact on Orlando and maybe the impact of Orlando on him as well.  Tell me something about the venue that the big band plays in.  I also want to talk to you about your personal interaction with him and role in the big band, more or less.

ANTHONY COLE:  It’s pretty easy for here.  I moved here from L.A. in ’91.

TP:    So you moved to Orlando the same year Sam did.

COLE:  Yes, exactly.  When I moved here I pretty much had retired from playing the drums.  I was playing piano in a jazz quartet and I was going to spend more time on the piano, more or less, than the drums.  My mother, Linda Cole, who is a fine vocalist around here, pretty big around here, was going to jazz jam sessions that they were having at what  was known as the Beecham Jazz and Blues Club at the time.  It’s now known as Sapphire Supper Club — same club.  Every Tuesday night there was a jazz jam going on, and she was pretty much begging me to come over here and go to one with her.  And I didn’t… I had a plan in mind when I moved here from L.A., and I pretty much didn’t want to get into the rigmarole and the hustle-and-bustle and all that, but I went with her, sat in and played some drums.  Sam Rivers had just moved to town, and he happened to be there, and saw me play.  He sat in and did a tune.  We didn’t play together, but after that time he was trying to track me down.  Long story short, we hooked up.

As far as the scene here at the time, there wasn’t much of a scene, other than like anywhere else where you have some local bands and a couple of places where those bands plays, there wasn’t really much of what we know to make a scene.

TP:    You do have the studio musicians.  Like a pool of hungry musicians, as he put it.

COLE:  Right.  Well, all the musicians are out at Disney, playing out at Disney.  You come here and get a job out at Disney and it’s making you good money, so you sacrifice a lot of whatever…

TP:    Creativity.

COLE:  Exactly.  To do that.  Well, I had the opportunity to do that and iced it, because I had got here once a lot of cats were already doing that, and I had got to see the results of that, and knowing that I would lose a lot of my freedom I decided to stay broke.  But anyway, the impact that Sam has had on this area is… Well, he’s pretty much brought to the forefront the reality of jazz, avant-garde jazz, free jazz — however people want to classify the music, because it’s just music, if you know what I mean.  In reverse, the impact it’s had on Sam is the response from the younger generation that he’s gotten from his music, not as much the older generation, or your older jazz crowd.  It’s been the younger crowd that he’s moved here, because his music is closer to the lifeline of what’s going on now.  It doesn’t bore you, it doesn’t just swing along, it actually moves.  I think everyone has been surprised.  I think Sam has been surprised with the response in this area, and of course everyone has been surprised with having a living jazz legend living in this area.

TP:    So in Orlando it’s a situation where Sam Rivers, who is an icon of avant garde jazz, although he’s also, as he likes to make sure you’re aware, a strong traditional musician…

COLE:  Totally.
TP:    …has a large audience, and has touched a chord amongst young people in Orlando.

COLE:  Moreso.  Moreso than the older generation.

TP:    You gave me some sense of why you think that is.  Could we hone that down a bit, get into some specifics, the inner dynamics of the music that make it so appealing.

COLE:  Well, the fact that, like I said, it’s life music.  It moves!

TP:    You mean it has a beat, it’s danceable…

COLE:  It’s danceable if you want to dance.  It’s listenable if you want to listen.  If you want to close your eyes and slip off into a cosmos somewhere, it lets you do that.  It’s life music.  I mean, we have to specify it as certain things because of specific instrumentation or whatever we know as categories or descriptions.  But the music lends itself to whatever you need it to be!  That’s more so like straight-ahead jazz… Swing music is for swing people who dress up and swing-dance, and it’s got that thing.  Contemporary jazz is for those people who love to listen to that boring kind of music.  The thing with Sam’s music, as it’s always been, is that it moves, it’s got life, it goes in and out.

TP:    Were you familiar with Sam’s work in the ’60s and ’70s at the time you met him?

COLE:  A little bit.  Not extensively.

TP:    Are you now?

COLE:  Yeah, a lot more.

TP:    I’m just thinking of the role of his drummers in the ’70s.  He worked with Barry Altschul, who coined the term “freebop” to describe what he did, and it sort of hit me when you were describing the rhythmic component.

COLE:  Exactly.  And that moreso with the dance music.  Sometimes there’s more of a backbeat, like a lot of other trios Sam had.  He’ll tell you himself there’s once again a new direction with the trio he’s gone in.

TP:    You are someone who has an equal comfort zone playing the piano and plaing the drums?

COLE:  I’ve been playing drums since I was 3 years old, and there’s always been a piano around.  My mother plays piano, my uncle Carl played piano, there’s a piano in my grandmother’s house.  Piano is just a natural.  It’s a toy that’s always been there.  It’s nothing that I ever really sat down and went, “Okay, I’m going to do my scales.”  I grew up in an entertaining family.  I come from the Cole Family.  It’s like the Jacksons or the Osmonds.  You know what I mean?  I didn’t have much of going outside and jump-roping or big-wheeling and throwing balls and shit.  I was in the house rehearsing for Christmas shows and Easter shows.  I’ve always been on stage.  So there are things that come naturally to me because it’s just always been there.  If you grow up around nothing but mechanics, you’re going to know a little something about a car.  So it’s just that… We all sing.  I come from a family of singers.  So that’s the primary instrument, is the voice.  I started playing drums when I was 3…
TP:    You sing also.

COLE:  Mmm-hmm.

TP:    Is that part of your career in Orlando as well?

COLE:  yes.

TP:    So you’re not just making your career playing creative music with Sam.  You’re doing a range of activities.

COLE:  Yeah.  My life has been my career.  Whatever, if it involves something musical, then I’m there.  That’s what the career is.  For me, a career has never been anything intended or like aspired or anything.  I’ve never known anything else.

TP:    How specific is Sam in directing you in your function as a drummer with the big band?

COLE:  He just hands me the music.

TP:    Then you interpret totally.

COLE:  Mmm-hmm.  Totally.

TP:    Does he have specific parts for the drums, or does he sing it to you…

COLE:  A lot of times I get the same charts the bass player has, or I’ll get just a map-down of stuff so I know who’s blowing, who’s soloing.  It differs.  But a lot of times I pretty much just get an outline of what’s going on.  With the big band for me a lot of times it’s just all ears.  I mean, there’s things on paper that I definitely follow, where it’s to be followed, but most of the time… When Sam hired me to play in the big band, the only thing he said is, “You don’t have to play any different than you do in the trio.”  So that’s pretty much the door that he gave me.  That’s what he wanted.  But at the same time, there’s a different thing that happens to me when 15 horns are playing.  It’s like driving down your street or driving down a big boulevard, same car, same driver, you’re just in a different place.

TP:    Would you describe a bit how playing with Sam this last decade has affected your sensibility and aesthetic as a musician?

COLE:  Well, it’s confirmed a lot.  Sometimes there’s things you think out of tradition and custom, there are things you think aren’t kosher or acceptable, some things you should keep to yourself or whatever.  And Sam has really pointed out the fact musically moreso that everything is correct.  Nothing is wrong.  Music is music.  It’s all beautiful.  When Sam hired me, he hired me for the musician that I am.  He never once has said, “Well, it should go like this” or “this is what… When I started playing saxophone…well, when I got a saxophone or started messing around with it is when I first went out on the road with Sam, which is in ’92.  I asked him if he’d give me lessons.  He said, “No.”  He said, “Just make up your own scales.”  That’s all he said to me.  So his instruction is moreso, “Do your thing.”  Of course, you’re always going to have influence.  Of course, there’s always things to grab from, but there’s always a specific individual behind the instrument, and that’s really… He’ll tell you in a minute, he’s gone out of his way, especially at the time when Coltrane was happening and there were other saxophonists around…he went out of his way to not sound like someone else.

TP:    He says he listens to everything so he can not sound like them.

COLE:  Right.  Sometimes it’s a conscious effort.

TP:    Talk about the experience of the week at Sweet Basil that germinated these two records, and the experience of the recording.  It’s a very different group of musicians what I’m sure you’re in touch with in Orlando.

COLE:  Well, for me the whole time while that was going on, I was just pretty much thrilled at working with all these musicians who I’ve heard on record and seen on album covers and TV so forth all this time, and actually being in the driver’s seat for these cats.  The music, I eat and sleep it, so the music… For me it was like a haze.  I mean, I met everybody!  And anybody who I didn’t get a chance to meet, they were at the club.

TP:    Everybody got to meet you.

COLE:  Well, yeah, in that case.  But Anthony Cole is a new name.  Chico Freeman is not a new name.  Greg Osby is not a new name.  So for me it was a different pair of shades than for everybody else.  Everybody else, it’s “Holy shit, who’s this drummer you’ve got?” blah-blah-blah, and I’m going, “Oh my God, finally it’s beautiful to meet you.”  And THEN we all played music.  It was kind of like that.  It kind of went in that direction.

TP:    you were there because you belonged there.

COLE:  Yeah.  But a lot of times I don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes with a lot of things.  I’ve got so many irons in the fire now that I just take each moment full on as it is.  Kind of like switching channels.

TP:    Is this the only situation for you in which you’re playing drums in a band?

COLE:  No.

TP:    So there are other bands with which you play drums, other bands with which you play piano, other bands with which you play saxophone, and they are different functionally than Sam’s band.

COLE:  yes.

TP:    Sam talks about wanting traditional musicians because they can play free in a minute but free musicians can’t play traditional.  You’re a traditional musician within that formulation.

COLE:  In that formulation, yes, because I’ve learned the basics.  I can sit down and play “As Time Goes By,” your basic II-V-I chords, those things I learned while I was living out in L.A.  At that time, Free was the last thing you could get me either to listen to or play, because I was learning the inside structure of things.  Now, for me… It’s different for other guys.  But for me, once I got to that point where I knew how to do all that, now, where else do we go from here?  It took working with Sam to feel comfortable or okay a lot of times in the beginning about going out or playing free.  As a drummer, I’ve always been a firehouse; that’s never been a problem.  But on other instruments… It wasn’t even until I started playing saxophone that I understood that instrument being able to take everybody else somewhere else.  Because I’m a drummer, a drummer can make or break a situation, blah-blah-blah, but a lot of times a drummer can’t lead something into free.  A lot of drummers don’t know how to lead into free.  It’s always the time thing.  And when I started working with Sam… Because I’ve worked with a lot of horn players.  When I started working with Sam, he was the first horn player I worked with who would start screaming through the horn in the middle of something.  And that for the first time encouraged a whole different reaction from the drums than I had ever experienced before.  So in that case, that’s one thing he did as far as the influence of the free drumming.  Because like I said, normally you’re used to leading people somewhere.  Sam will take you where he wants you to go.

TP:    In that connection, talk about the way the band on the record interpreted the music vis-a-vis the Orlando musicians who presumably play the music every week.  Some of these guys haven’t played the music for 30 years, some of them not for 25 years, some had never played it.  Talk about the way the Orlando band sounds different.

COLE:  Well, it’s obvious.  With Sam’s music… It’s like if you’re playing something every week for the past 5-6-7 years consistently, not only are you going to have an idea of what something should sound like… A lot of these guys in New York were around when Sam’s thing was going on a long time ago, but from that time up to the record, a lot of other stuff had gone… A lot of people aren’t in contact, whatever; hadn’t played the music.  So the guys up there pretty much know Sam from that time and are familiar with him then, but not necessarily familiar with the way he’s interpreting his music with another band.

TP:    How would you say his interpretation has changed from then to now?

COLE:  I really don’t know, because I don’t know that much about the Then.  I know a lot more about the Now.  If you listen to other big band albums that Sam…

TP:    Well, Crystals is the most notable.

COLE:  Exactly.  And from Crystals to now you can just hear a difference.  I can’t speak for other people.  The only way I know… For me, the experience was cats in New York who know Sam but haven’t played the music for a long time, and cats down here who play the music all the time who haven’t hung out with Sam as much as the other guys in New York did at one time… The CD down here by the big band down here is coming out pretty soon, and you’ll be able to hear the extreme difference immediately between cats who are paying Sam’s music every week and guys who are all-stars.  Now, there’s no bash there.  An all-star is an all-star.  But the guys down here play Sam’s music all the time.

TP:    Right.  So they’ve internalized everything.  It’s second nature.

COLE:  Exactly.  They’re a lot closer to the music.

TP:    Could you tell me a bit more about the Sapphire.  What does it look like.  Break down who you think the audience is.

COLE:  Well, it’s a big supper club.  They have all kinds of music there.  I mean, it’s a supper club.  They have big concert venues there, but it’s a big supper club.  It’s got a dance floor, a big bar, a big-ceilinged place.  It’s the old Blue Note that was here; the same spot that was Valentine’s, the Blue Note, Beecham’s Jazz and Blues Club — it’s the same location.

TP:    What other acts play there?  National acts?

COLE:  Certainly.  National acts from all ranges.

TP:    Who’s been there this last month?

COLE:  I don’t go there unless I’m playing.  I’m right down the street, and play there all the time.  But they have everybody. It’s not like one specific kind of music.

TP:    It’s like a showcase type of place.

COLE:  Yeah, but it’s also like a big concert hall and BIG acts.

TP:    How many people does it hold?

COLE:  Oh, it can hold maybe up to 700-750 people, tight.

TP:    Good sound system?

COLE:  Yeah… A reasonable facsimile for probable cause!

TP:    But the audience that comes on Monday nights is specifically Sam’s audience that he’s built up since ’91.

COLE:  No.  Whoever comes on Monday night is there to see whoever’s playing on Monday night.  It differs.  Sam isn’t there every Monday.  They have different acts every night.  Sometimes they have all ages shows.  Or Punk Rock shows and there’s nothing but kids there.  So it’s a potpourri.

* * *

John Abercrombie Blindfold Test (Raw Copy):

1.    James Blood Ulmer, “Sphinx” (from MUSIC SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS, DIW/Koch, 1995/1997) (James Blood Ulmer, g.; Calvin Jones, b.; Rashied Ali, d.) – (5 stars)

I love the feel of this piece.  It reminds me a little bit of something from sort of semi Sonny Sharrock, but not really.  It could be one of these Albert Ayler tunes or something like that, something in that vein.  It sounds like somebody who’s playing with their thumb a little bit, but it’s not Wes!  It doesn’t really sound like him, I didn’t know he played anything this out, but it could be… Could it be Kevin Eubanks?  It sounds too harmonically oriented to be Sonny Sharrock, but that was still my first take on it.  It still could even be somebody like that, but… James Blood?  Wow!  This is great.  I don’t know that tune.  I have to get this.  I’ve heard some other stuff by Blood and I liked it.  I have some of this stuff where he was singing that I enjoyed, but I’ll have to get this.  This definitely sounds very hip to me.  Very open.  And it’s kind of funny; that’s why I thought it was Sonny Sharrock, because of some of the similarities.  He sounds to me more harmonic.  I hear more harmonic information in his playing.  It’s cool.  And I think he does sort of play with his thumb a little bit, because it’s got a little bit of that feel.  It’s plucky.  He chokes the notes a little bit, so it… I’ll give this 5 stars.  I still like it. [AFTER] Now that you tell me it was Rashied Ali, it makes total sense, because I played with him once, and he has a great way of playing a sort of open music.  you really feel like they’re playing on a form or something.  It really has a great swing, a pulse to it.  It’s not just free.  I think that’s what makes it work.  That’s what makes everything sound so great.

2.    Gerardo Nunez, “Calima” (from CALIMA, Alula, 1998) (Nunez, guitar; Danilo Perez, piano; John Patitucci, b; Arto Tuncboyaci, d) – (4 stars)

An acoustic guitar.  Two players or it’s overdubbed.  I hear other parts.  That first part with just the guitar overdubs was just impeccable technique, whoever it is.  I mean, it’s almost perfect technically.  But I can’t tell from that who it is.  I might know, not by the content of what he’s playing, but just somebody playing the guitar that well.  This sounds like a Spanish Classical piece.  I’ll make a stab.  It’s not that guy Fareed Haque, is it?  Fareed is so technically proficient, that that’s what this kind of reminded me of.  The little bit I’ve heard him play Classical stuff, he has that kind of flawless technique.  I like it.  The beginning was beautiful, and this has a nice rhythm feel.  The approach of the guitar player… It sounds like everything’s almost kind of written, or it’s things you would include in a Classical or a Flamenco technique.  But it’s not a famous Flamenco player, I don’t think.  Now you’ve piqued my interest.  It’s not Paco, is it?  I’ve heard Paco do things that are kind of like this, with hand drums and of course that kind of technique is akin to a Flamenco player.  So it’s definitely somebody Spanish.  I can’t guess.  It’s very nice, but I can’t figure out who it is.  I’ll give it 4 stars for the really great feel.  Flawless guitar technique.  Wow.

3.    Jim Hall-Dave Holland, “End The Beguine” (from JIM HALL & BASSES, Telarc, 2001) (Hall, g; Holland, b) – (3-1/2 stars)

The bass player almost sounds like it could be Dave Holland, playing one of his little… But it’s probably not.  The only reason I mentioned Dave Holland (and I don’t think it’s Dave) is because I’ve played little pieces with Dave where it has this kind of feel.  Dave writes some of these little Indianesque-sounding, Arabian… The bass player does sound like he has some of Dave’s rhythmic concept, but I don’t know who… [Why don't you think it's Dave?] I don’t know.  I have to listen more.  I have to hear him solo to really know.  [Can you glean anything from the guitar player?] I’m not gleaning well right now.  It’s someone who’s Dave-like, but I don’t think it’s Dave.  The sound is not quite what I’m used to hearing; Dave has a bigger sound.  But then, he could be recorded differently.  And Dave usually sounds a little punchier.  And also Dave has certain rhythmic phrases that he does, because I’ve played with him so much, and I didn’t hear any of those.  But it does have an aura of that. It’s Dave?  Wow.  The guitar sounds like a 12-string.  I thought maybe it was Gismonti playing the 12-string, but I don’t think he and Dave ever played together. But the opening thing didn’t sound anything like something Gismonti would play.  That sounded more jazzy.  This is definitely somebody who’s a jazz player of sorts.  I know it’s not Ralph Towner, because it’s not good enough to be Ralph Towner playing 12-string. [LAUGHS] It’s good, but it’s not like what Ralph would play.  I don’t know if he started out on this instrument.  Did he change… No, there it is.  It’s all the same instrument.  I’m not going to get it. Can you give me a hint? [You're going to feel bad if you don't know who it is.] Oh, I think I know who it is now.  See, that’s all you had to say.  It’s Jim.  This sounds so different than what I’m used to hearing Jim play.  Harmonically and rhythmically, some of the chords… Now it does make sense that it’s Jim to me.  But at first it didn’t.  Maybe I still have Blood’s music in my head.  Because the opening, the first reading of the opening sounded a little Delta-like.  I got Dave, though.  I was pretty sure.  This is that album where Jim plays all the different duets.  I haven’t heard it.  Not that I have to, but I’ve never heard Jim play a 12-string guitar.  It’s not the instrument he normally would play.  It’s not the most interesting thing I’ve heard Jim do, but it’s still good, and I needed a hint from you to actually figure out who it was, although I was pretty good about Dave.  3-1/2 stars.  I think if I had heard him play on an electric guitar, with his more rounded tone and the tone I’m used to, playing a similar thing, I would have probably nailed it.  But like you said, it was hearing him play that instrument.

4.    Arsenio Rodriguez, “Rhapsodia del Maravilloso” (from Sabu, PALO CONGO, Blue Note, 1957/1999) (Rodriguez, guitar; “Sabu” L. Martinez, Raul Travieso, Israel Travieso, Ray Romero, congas; Ernesto Baro, bass) – (5 stars)

That’s a different instrument, too.  That’s either a 12-string or a tres.  A tres.  I got it.  That’s not Arsenio Rodriguez, is it?  I love this stuff.  The main reason I know about him, when I used to work years ago in a band called Dreams, was a trombone player who passed away named Barry Rogers, and Barry’s second instrument was the tres.  He used to play trombone and tres with a lot of the Latin bands, and he played me some Arsenio Rodriguez and said this was the cat.  This is more in the context of a rhythm section, but the bass player is very strongly prominent here, too.  This sounds not unlike the duet with Jim Hall and Dave Holland, in a strange way, because the tres is a double-stringed kind of instrument, if I’m not mistaken.  This gets 5 stars.  I’m not surprised I got it. But once I figured out what the instrument was… I know Wes didn’t record on tres!  I can make jokes.  But I know that other people didn’t, so it has to be either the heavyweight guy or somebody I didn’t know.  Beautiful music.

5.    Nels Cline-Gregg Bendian, “Mars” (from INTERSTELLAR SPACE, Atavistic, 1999) (Cline, el.g; Bendian, drums) – (3 stars)

Definitely sounds like a real free electric guitar player, but somebody with a lot of chops.  I don’t recognize… Wow.  Twisted.  I like it.  I can’t tell from the content of what he’s playing who it is. [Do you have any idea of what it is they're playing?] I may know it.  I’ll listen a little bit more.  That part sounds like a tune!  There are a lot of guys I haven’t heard maybe that much.  Could it be Vernon Reid?  I don’t know.  It’s too jazzy to be Vernon.  Vernon would be more like Hendrix and Rock.  This has that tone, but it’s obviously somebody who’s played… [It's a West Coast player.] Now I know who it is.  Nels Cline.  Nels is the only guy I know on the West Coast guitar-wise who would play something that might sound like this.  It sounds great.  For my ears there could be a little more dynamics, but I’m not playing it.  It maintains a real high density level at all times.  Which I enjoy playing more than I enjoy listening to, I think.  But I like it.  It’s definitely got some harmonic knowledge and some lines that he’s using… I’ll give it 3 stars. [This is "Mars" from INTERSTELLAR SPACE] Oh, I would never get that!

6.    David Fiuczynski, “Down Under” (from CHARTBUSTERS, Hip-Bop, 1995) (Fiuczynski, guitar; Dr. Lonnie Smith, organ; Lenny White, drums) – (4 stars)

Nice guitar tone.  I like the tone.  It’s over-driven, but in a nice sort of sweet way.  I like that. That part sounded like something Scofield would play.  Amazing technique.  All these lines here are pure Scofield.  Pretty pure.  But the other stuff isn’t.  He’s a funny composite of things, real blues-drenched, a great tone, some real heavy… Those lines didn’t sound… Super slinky technique.  Amazing.  Some of it sounds pretty original.  He definitely sounds like a pastiche of a lot of different players, but amazing control.  This sounds like Larry Young almost.  Dr. Lonnie.  I could tell by these sort of broken arpeggiated things he does that kind of go across the keys.  That’s beautiful.  Now I can guess on the guitar player, and it may be a wrong guess.  Is it Paul Bollenbeck?  I’ve heard Paul play things that are technically like speed of light.  This guy’s got speed-of-light technique.  Definitely 4 stars. [AFTER] Fiuczynski!  He sounds amazing.  He really does.  It’s amazing technique.  Great lines.  Some of them directly culled from the Scofield vocabulary.  Sounds great.  Like I say, he’s a pastiche of many things.  But he sure has picked some good things to put in his trick bag.

7.    Russell Malone, “Heartstrings” (from HEARTSTRINGS, Verve, 2001) (Russell Malone, g.; Kenny Barron, p.; Christian McBride, b; Jeff Watts, d.; strings; arr. Johnny Mandel) – (4-1/2 stars)

Another great guitar sound.  I like this sound.  This sounds a little more familiar to me.  I think I know who this is.  Is it Russell Malone?  I heard this actually driving in a car one time, and I was so taken with the pretty sound he got… It really is a lovely sound.  I distinctly remember it.  When I first heard it, I wasn’t sure who it was, so it was like in a blindfold test.  I was driving my car waiting for the announcer, and I was kind of going through my mind, and Russell’s name was one of the names that popped into my head.  I don’t know his playing that well.  I’ve only heard him on a couple of things, but this is the best thing I’ve heard him do with his tone.  His solo is very bluesy, more than I’m used to hearing him play.  Maybe he’s more of a bluesy player than I realize.  I haven’t checked him out that much.  Isn’t he from Georgia?  I thought the solo was really good.  The time when I did hear this record in my car, this is exactly the tune I heard, and I was struck not only by the sound, but by some really interesting parts in the solo that I wasn’t expecting.  Because the solo has kind of a very laid-back, bluesy feel, and all of a sudden there’s these oddball notes and a couple of funny phrases.  So I thought it was a very good solo, well-constructed and a beautiful tone.  I’ll give it 4-1/2.

8.    Simon Shaheen, “Blue Flame” (from BLUE FLAME, 2001, Ark-21) (Simon Shaheen, oud; Bassam Saba, nay & fl.; Billy Drewes, ss; Adam Rodgers, ag; Francois Moutin, b; Lorenzo Martinez, bongos; Steve Sheehan, caxixi, brushes, cymbals, diembe, durbakka; Jamie Haddad, hadjira drum, cymbals, hadgini) – (5 stars)

It’s an oud.  There’s a couple of oud players I’ve heard, and one is the guy who records… I’ve heard a few.  I brought back some music from Istanbul.  But I can never pronounce this guy’s name.  Isn’t this Rabih… No?  Then maybe I don’t know who this person is.  There’s a couple of guys I used to listen to.  There’s a guy who records for ECM, Anwar, but he wouldn’t play this kind of stuff. This is more rhythmic; he’s more floaty, from what I’ve heard.  Then there’s the guy that used to make the records for Enja years ago, Rabih ..(?).. This is what it reminds me of.  I like the solo a lot, maybe more than the composition.  I like the feel of the composition, but I like the sound of the solo.  I like this part.  It’s really open. It’s almost like a jazz player playing oud.  But it’s not.  It’s an oud player playing oud.  It’s got a looseness to it, though.  Makes me want to play with a pick again, hearing some of these fast lines.  The solo was absolutely beautiful with the rhythm section.  It’s so loose.  It sounds like they’re playing in 5/4.  It takes me a while to figure out sometimes what the odd time signature is, but I’m pretty sure it was 5, which is a very hard time signature to play in — at least for me.  But it was so loose and so effortless.  And the sound of the oud, it’s like one of my favorite instruments.  It almost sounds like somebody took a classical guitar and tuned it down real low so the strings are really elastic.  It’s really one of the warmest instruments.  But this guy, I’m sorry I didn’t know him.  Now I’ll have to go and listen more to him.  5 stars.  It’s totally happening.  I wish I knew him.  Now I will know.

9.    Joe Morris, “Manipulatives” (from UNDERTHRU, Omnitone, 1999) (Morris, guitar; Mat Maneri, violin; Chris Lightcap, b.; Gerald Cleaver, d) – (3 stars)

This almost reminds me of something I did years ago with Barre Phillips and John Surman and Stu Martin.  I played on a couple of tunes on Barre’s record.  The rhythm section sounded like this, kind of in time but really kind of wacky.  This is kind of how I played back then!  It’s interesting, but I wish it was a little more cohesive somehow.  The rhythm section seems to be almost overpowering the soloist a bit.  It also could be the mix.  If you heard these guys play live, maybe it would be the opposite, or maybe it’s perfectly balanced, but it sounds a little more… The thing about this kind of playing to me is… Which is what I liked more about, say, the Blood Ulmer thing.  Even though that was rambling and a little wacky, it’s clear somehow.  It has a real cohesiveness.  This doesn’t have that.  This feels scattered, kind of.  It’s not my most favorite stuff.  It’s probably me!  I have no idea who he is.  I could make an educated guess. Joe Morris.  Wow!  I’m a good educated guesser.  I like this, but for me it lacks the cohesiveness of the Blood Ulmer thing or maybe even the Nels Cline thing you played me.  It’s in that same genre.  Well, my band can no doubt at times sound like this!  It sounds more balanced during the violin solo in terms of the actual sonic density of it.  This is another kind of music that maybe I like to play a little more than actually sit down and listen to it.  But because I play this way, I can appreciate it.  It’s fun to play this way and they sound good.  My educated guess for the violin player is Maneri.  But I don’t know him.  He sounds good.  Now the music is starting to gel for me.  Even though it’s more dense, it sounds better now.  3 stars. I like what they’re trying to do, but it doesn’t sound as cohesive as some of the other stuff to me.

10.    Kurt Rosenwinkel, “A Life Unfolds” (from THE NEXT STEP, Verve, 2000) (Rosenwinkel, guitar; Mark Turner, ts; Ben Street, bass; Jeff Ballard, drums) – (5 stars)

I’ve got to know this.  It’s probably a 7-string guitar.  Very nice.  Again, sometimes I go for the tone first.  Even if I’m not trying to figure out who it, almost all the players… Actually, everybody you played me today has a good tone, in their own way.  They’re all different, too.  Every one of them had a completely different approach to the tone of the guitar.  This sounds so familiar to me.  It’s a very nice composition.  It’s beautiful.  I think I know who this is.  I think it’s Kurt Rosenwinkel.  I know this.  This is from his second CD.  This is gorgeous.  I remember when bought this CD, and I liked the whole CD, but I remember when I got to this tune, I played it three or four times.  I had to hear it that many times.  This guy has got something that’s different.  I don’t know what the tuning is.  He’s definitely got the guitar retuned on the bottom on some lower strings.  You can hear them… A very clear but warm tone.  Again, I’m attracted to the tone, but he also is a very fluid, melodic player — lyrical, let’s say.  He also sings when he plays.  When I’ve heard him, he sings these little falsetto things.  Sometimes he’ll actually sing the lines, and he’s not just playing some blues ideas.  He’s playing some complicated lines and he sings with it.  So the response to that is he actually hears what he plays!  It’s amazing.  This is a great composition.  5 stars all the way.  Playing, composition…this is great.

11.    St. Germain, “Montego Bay Spleen” (from TOURIST, Blue Note, 2000) (Ernest Ranglin, g.; Ludovic Navarre, conductor; Alexandre Destrez, keyboards; Idresse Diop, talking drum; Carneiro, percussion) – (3 stars)

Nice groove, nice atmosphere.  It’s hard for me to tell who the guitar player is.  The actual guitar playing sounds a little more mainstream than I thought it would sound hearing the rhythm.  I thought the guitar player might play further out, but this is more in playing.  Very sparse.  He’s not playing a lot.  Sure it’s not one of my records?  No… What the hell was that?  That sounded like an edit.  I couldn’t tell; it was so strange. It’s strange, because most of what he’s playing is kind of straight, and then when he played these quirky lines, it didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of what he was playing.  This is a hard one to even make an educated guess at.  The tone is like a jazz guitar tone, a sort of brighter sound.  It’s not my favorite; I like a darker sound.  Well, that’s HIS sound.  I shouldn’t comment. But it sounds like a big guitar with sort of a bright sound, like a big jazz box — or at least a medium-size jazz box.  This one completely stumps me. 3 stars. Ernest Ranglin!  Sorry.  There’s no way I could get it.  I know the name.  Is he from Jamaica?

12.    Sylvain Luc & Bireli Lagrene, “Stompin’ At The Savoy” (from DUET, Dreyfuss, 1999) (Sylvain Luc, Bireli Lagrene, guitars) – (4 stars)

Acoustic guitar duo.  Wow, he’s so astute!  I like the way they’re breaking it up. The one guy is playing almost like a percussion instrument, tapping.  The guy playing the solo sounds very blues-like.  Good blues player.  Mmm!  I like this guitar player a lot.  Whoo!  I want to steal some of his lines.  Impeccable kind of technique, but very bluesy at the same time.  I mean, he’s not like somebody who I’d all of a sudden go, “Oh, that’s Wes or Kenny or Sco or Bill Frisell or Grant Green.”  A lot of this kind of playing… I think it’s great.  I totally admire it, and think it’s fantastic.  But it doesn’t have as much of an instantly identifiable thing.  It’s like amazingly great guitar playing.  Is this the second guy playing now?  I can’t tell.  I think maybe it’s the second guy.  It almost sounds like something I’ve heard before, but I can’t put my finger on it.  I mean, it’s “Stompin’ At The Savoy.”  I know the tune, but I don’t know the… Some of the other things you played me, I might know the player but not the tune.  Here I know the tune but not the players.  Is it Bireli Lagrene?  Yeah, and there’s another guy on this.  I’ve heard this before.  I think this is the other guy playing, but I can’t remember who it is.  Sylvain Luc.  Okay.  I may even have this.  It’s amazing playing. I’ll give it 4 stars because it maybe didn’t sound as original as some of the other things, but man, I wish I had those chops.

13.    Derek Bailey-John Butcher, “High Vortex” (from VORTICES AND ANGELS, Emanem, 1992/2001) (Bailey, guitar; Butcher, ss) – (4 stars)

Sounds like my train is here!  I’d better run and get to the platform.  It’s the 5:07; it’s in early.  I’m trying to figure out if the instrument on the right is actually a guitar, whether it’s processed, or if the bass is being bowed… Derek Bailey?  It’s a horn.  Is it a horn?  I can’t tell. Soprano saxophone?  Then maybe it’s somebody like Evan Parker.  No?  Somebody whose name I probably know, but wouldn’t be able to… [He's English] I figured he’d be a gentleman.  I’m sure when I hear his name, I’ll know it.  I may even have played with the guy, because I’ve played with some English musicians.  This is the kind of thing that unless you really listen to this music a lot, it would be hard to tell.  But it’s instantly identifiable as Derek Bailey…because he’s instantly identifiable! [LAUGHS] It’s the least guitar-like in terms of what most of the world thinks of as guitar playing, but I knew who it was pretty quickly, whereas some of the other things I wouldn’t know, especially when it’s amazing feats of technique.  I’m impressed with that.  But I know who he is when I hear him.  So that’s kind of an interesting take on it all — style or being able to recognize somebody, even if it’s just abstract, in comparison to what you played before. I’m really nice today.  I’ll give it 4 stars.  I like it.  He sustains a mood that’s kind of interesting. It’s like free playing that’s sort of… You can go on for a long time, because the density is not so dense as a couple of the other things you played for me, that are hard to listen to.  It’s very quiet, it’s almost chamber-like, so you can listen to it and get inside it.

14.    Mark Elf, “Cheek To Cheek” (from DREAM STEPPIN’, Jen-Bay, 2002) (Elf, guitar; Neal Miner, b; Lewis Nash, d.) – (3 stars)

“Cheek to Cheek.”  Again, I know the tune.  We’ll see if I know the player.  But this sounds like somebody, just from the outset, who’s a real traditionalist.  Nice-a feel, like Lawrence Welk used to say.  They’ve got a good feeling.  This could be a lot of different people.  Again, it’s not one of the major guys that I grew up listening to.  It’s not Tal or Jimmy Raney, but it has that kind of sound.  It sounds like a more modern recording.  Nice.  It’s someone who kind of bridges.. They’re a bebopper, but they’ve also got a swing kind of feel to it.  Is it somebody like Howard Alden?  It’s great playing.  I just don’t know… It could be several different people.  That’s why I mentioned Howard.  But yeah, this is maybe a little more bebop than Howard, a little more Howard.  This has a little bit of that swing feel.  He loves the eighth note, and he manages to play just about every one.  There’s a little space.  It’s not somebody like Cal Collins, is it?  There’s a lot of these guys whose playing I’m sort of familiar with, but I don’t really know them that well. [He's not a Concord artist] Then I wouldn’t know him.  If it’s not ECM or Concord, I’m screwed.  It’s none of the guys I really know.  And I don’t think it’s someone like Bucky Pizzarelli, because he doesn’t play this many lines.  It’s not someone I know.  It’s not Jack Wilkins.  That’s a modern voicing.  Wow!  It’s got me stumped.  I don’t recognize the bass player and drummer particularly.  Everybody is good, but nothing is grabbing me.  It’s funny, he sort of ends with something a little more modern, a little harmonically different.  The other playing was pretty inside, in a way.  It’s very good, but it didn’t strike a bell with me.  3 stars.