For Buster Williams’ 81st birthday, a 202 Jazz Times feature and a liner note from 2004

The great bassist Charles “Buster” Williams turns 81 today. For the occasion, I’ve uploaded a feature piece that I wrote about him in 2021 and a liner note for the 2004 album Griot Liberté.

************

Buster Williams: Ready for His Close-Up, Jazz Times, 2021

“My music always expresses the way I see things from day to day—how my perceptions change, what’s meaningful or less meaningful,” bassist Buster Williams told me in 2004, when I wrote the liner notes for Griot Liberté (HighNote). That album, his last as a leader until 2018’s Audacity (Smoke Sessions), featured his working group of the time (Stefon Harris, vibes; George Colligan, piano; Lenny White, drums), navigating six Williams originals with aphoristic titles like “The Wind of an Immortal Soul” and “The Triumphant Dance of the Butterfly.”

“The griot is a storyteller who liberates the soul and the spirit,” Williams elaborated. “To be liberated is to be able to go to sleep instantly at night because your day has been fulfilled with victory. The real victory is how we defeat our own devils—our limitations. That’s liberty. That’s freedom. And what am I? I’m the storyteller.”

Williams animates that credo throughout the 90 minutes of Bass to Infinity, Adam Kahan’s nuanced, intimate documentary portrait of an artist for whom the nostrum “played with everyone” is an apropos descriptor. (The film was commercially released in March; go to busterwilliamsmovie.com for more details.) A practiced raconteur, Williams spins a cohort of compelling tales, delivering oft-told episodes with authority and deliberation, as though telling them for the first time. Those qualities also suffuse his orotund, mellow instrumental voice, which we hear in several passages of unaccompanied invention; in duo encounters (and conversations) with old friends Benny Golson, Larry Willis, Rufus Reid, and Carmen Lundy; and in an impromptu trio vignette with White and Kenny Barron, Williams’ partner in Sphere from 1982 until well into the ’90s and in Ron Carter’s two-bass quartet from 1977-80.

Herbie Hancock—in whose pathbreaking Mwandishi band Williams played between 1970 and 1973 after they’d established a rapport during a five-week run with Miles Davis in the spring of 1967—recounts the occasion when Williams introduced him to Nichiren Buddhism. The camera homes in as Williams strokes tuned bells and chants namu myoho renge kyo during devotionals at his personal shrine. We eavesdrop as Williams, his wife, and four sisters converse around the kitchen table about their upbringing and family history.

Montaged into the narrative are personal photographs and archival footage of Williams playing behind Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan, and Nancy Wilson, his primary employers between 1962 and 1968. And three well-wrought animation sequences offer visual context for Williams’ amusing recollections of his tenure with saxophone titans Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, who hired him soon after he graduated from Camden (N.J.) High School in the summer of 1960 and retained his services for the next year-and-change.

The film’s back story dates to early 2015. During a between-set break at Smoke Jazz Club on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Kahan—who had recently wrapped The Case of the Three Sided Dream, a powerful bio-doc on Rahsaan Roland Kirk—approached Williams with a proposal that he participate in a documentary portraying the face of the bass through depictions of several master practitioners.

Williams declined. “I gave [Kahan] an alternate proposition,” he recalls via Zoom from the music room in his New Jersey home. “I said, ‘If you want to do a documentary on me, I’d be happy to do it.’ Now, all kinds of people come up to you on intermission and say all kinds of things. I had no idea whether it would pan out, but I had nothing to lose—if he wants to do this … okay, fine. Adam was a little surprised. But he agreed. He needed to find more information about me; meanwhile, I Googled him and found his film on Rahsaan, which I liked. Then he phoned and said he’d like to do the film. That was a good start.”

Initially, Williams thought that Kahan’s use of animation in Three Sided Dream “diminished its seriousness and quality.” Kahan asked him not to pre-judge. “That story about Ammons and Stitt was so important, and I didn’t know how else I was going to show it,” Kahan says. Accessing the flexible aesthetics that have served him so well throughout his 60-year career as a first-call sideman and bandleader, Williams came around. “When I saw [the final cut of Bass to Infinity], the animation is what I liked best,” he says. “At the premiere, I told the animator [Matt Smithson] that he caught the real essence of my experience out there on the road, for the first time.”

The first animation episode in Bass to Infinity concerns a Friday evening in the summer of 1960 when Charles Anthony Williams, Sr., a respected Philadelphia-area bassist who held multiple day jobs to support his five children, got a call from fellow Camdenite Nelson Boyd, the dedicatee of Miles Davis’ “Half Nelson,” whose c.v. included consequential work with Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron, and Dizzy Gillespie. Boyd needed a weekend sub to play bass with Ammons and Stitt in Philly at the Showboat, a basement club on the corner of Broad and Lombard. Mr. Williams had a conflicting gig. He recommended his son. Boyd asked, “Is he ready?” “Damn right.” He called Buster at his girlfriend’s house, awaiting her preparations for their date: “Come home and put your suit on—you’ve got a gig.” He hung up. Williams obeyed.

“I love how they told that story,” Williams says. “I’m sliding down a pole, jumping into my gig suit and tie and white shirt. I had one navy-blue gabardine suit. After wearing it for a while at different gigs, it turned purple where the bass rubbed against it. I had a slim-jim black tie. It had become so saturated with sweat that you didn’t dare try to untie it, so I loosened it enough to get the knot over my head.

“I was like, ‘Pinch me, am I dreaming?’ Then I drove to Philly for the gig, got set up, and waited in the hotel lobby for my heroes to appear and for the gig to start.”

Without benefit of soundcheck or rehearsal, Williams traversed the trial by fire with flying colors, holding his own through, among other numbers, a breakneck “Strike Up the Band,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Autumn Leaves,” and a blues in D-flat. He’s clear that his preparedness stemmed directly from his father’s intense ministrations. “Sometimes he took gigs as a drummer, and when I was 15, he started bringing me as the bass player,” Williams says. “I got a lot of training that way. He was very strict; sometimes I’d be working something out between tunes, and he’d hit my strings and say, ‘No practicing on the bandstand.’ He set up one of his basses for me, which I think had cost him a bit more than $200. Every time I had a gig—which paid $5, $10, maybe $15—I had to give him $2, until I’d paid him off.”

At 16, Williams—a Paul Chambers acolyte who’d imbibed, through his father, bass lineage from the 1930s onward—started practicing regularly with pianist Sam Dockery, a name familiar to hard-bop partisans for his several years with the Jackie McLean/Bill Hardman/Johnny Griffin editions of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. “I’d go across town on the bus with my bass to play with Sam all day long at his house,” Williams remembers. “Every morning he’d get up and put on a white shirt, tie, and suit. I can’t tell you how much I learned about harmony from playing with Sam.” Some nights, Dockery drove to Philadelphia to play in Jimmy Heath’s quartet, then propelled by drummer Lex Humphries. “I wanted to be on that scene,” Williams says. “That to me was the description of ‘making it.’”

Williams got word that Heath’s bassist, also from Camden, had jumped ship. He strategized. His father had been running a Monday-night jam session at a nearby club; Williams invited local-hero alto saxophonist Sam Reed to play. “I knew Sam was my stepping stone for getting into the jazz community in Philadelphia,” he states. “I was never one to go out and hang and talk a bunch of ‘splib-blop.’ I wanted to keep my mouth shut and let my music speak for me.” Reed promptly called Williams for a Wednesday-night ballroom gig opening for Heath. “On the bandstand I noticed that the curtain was open and Jimmy was peeking out, looking at me,” Williams says. “Two days later he called me to join his band at the Sahara Club. We worked there three, four nights a week. Jimmy’s influence on me was unlimited.”

“Buster was playing his ass off,” says Kenny Barron, a contemporaneous teen phenom then making his name around Philly. “He plays primarily in the bottom, which gives me something to hold onto as a pianist, and his sound is very deep. Also, he was reliable, which was very important. To me, he and Arthur Harper were the two best players in Philadelphia at the time.”

“During those days, you could tell the bass players who came out of Philly by their feel, which we used to call ‘the hump,’” Williams notes. His entrance into the Philadelphia scene coincided with the departure to New York City of such slightly older eminences as Jymie Merritt, Reggie Workman, and Jimmy Garrison, all deep swingers who would expand their scope to suit the “freedom principle” as the 1960s progressed.

Williams mirrored that progression. He conscientiously played in the traditional style for Betty Carter (who expressed intense displeasure when he gave notice), Vaughan (who, on a 1963 sojourn to Europe, bought him the Boosey & Hawkes bass that he still uses), and Wilson (who moved him to Los Angeles between 1965 and 1968). His commitment to Wilson, strengthened by the fact that she was a steady employer, led him to turn down a job offer from Miles Davis after a five-week West Coast run (Ron Carter was exploring opportunities in the New York studios) during which he displayed his skills at “playing free within the form.” After returning to New York, he eschewed gigs with Art Blakey and Herbie Mann to join Hancock’s nascent Mwandishi band, where, over the course of three years, “I could really express my melodic self because of all the colors and textures from Herbie.

“Joining Miles was entering a ready-made family that created a niche that spread through the whole genre,” Williams adds, noting that encounters with outcat Philadelphia drummer Edgar Bateman prepared him for interacting with Tony Williams. “Now I’m stepping in for one of the family members, and they’re not making any concessions because I’m new or haven’t had a rehearsal. That spoke to their confidence in me. They knew that Miles hired me and he knew what he was doing. Plus, we’d met in 1963 at the festival in Juan-les-Pins, when Sarah and Miles were both playing the week and we stayed at the same hotel.

“It enhanced my viewpoint and perception, and it was in keeping with what I wanted to do. I’d never felt such freedom before—such freedom to be free. Miles was kind to me. He bolstered my confidence. Every intermission he’d take me aside and we’d talk. I think on the third night I got up the nerve to ask him, ‘Miles, am I really doing what you want me to do?’ I wanted to know if I could make some detours or veer off a bit or, because of what everybody else is doing, do I need to stay and toe the line? Miles got this glitter in his eye. He smiled. He said: ‘Buster, when they play fast, then you play slow. And when they play slow, you play fast.’ That said loads to me.”

“I remember the first time I heard Buster play that gigantic Hawkes bass unamplified,” fellow Philly bassist Christian McBride recalls. “It almost broke down the walls in the place. On the one hand, when you plug that bass in and the natural sound of that instrument gets changed, a part of you wonders, ‘Why would you want to change that gorgeous sound?’ But he worked hard to develop a recognizable, personal, effective sound through his amplifier, through his pickup, through his strings.”

“Usually when you hear Buster on a record, you know it’s him,” says George Colligan, who—along with Eric Reed and Patrice Rushen—has been Williams’ pianist of choice for the past two decades. “His sound touches on the amplified context of the ’70s and ’80s, with a distinct sustain, but he also leans to a classic bass sound. His rhythmic approach is unique, with an organic quarter-note feel that’s filled with humanity. Of course, his soloing is singular, and he’s very advanced harmonically, so when he accompanies you won’t hear just roots and chord tones. His lines are like a solo, but it enhances the music. It makes it go in different directions.”

“As the music got more experimental in the ’60s and throughout the ’70s, Buster was right there with that abstraction, but he also kept his ground with grits-and-gravy swinging,” McBride adds. “If Buster did nothing else in his career, you could just use his work in Mwandishi—the band swung, was funky, was acoustic, was electric, was spiritual, was socially conscious—to show what an advanced yet rooted musician he was.”

All the aforementioned flavors infuse Williams’ first recordings as a bandleader. On Pinnacle (1975), Crystal Reflections (1976), and Heartbeat (1978), he documents 10 original pieces (augmenting the five he’d recorded during his West Coast stay on three albums by the Jazz Crusaders). Each date bears out McBride’s observation that Williams gleaned “a classic, timeless sense of melody” from his years backing up star singers. McBride continues: “Melody can often be overlooked in the jazz world, but Buster never did, either in his playing or in his composing.”

On the first two dates—whose collective personnel includes Roy Ayers, Woody Shaw, Sonny Fortune, Earl Turbinton, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Jimmy Rowles, Kenny Barron, Ben Riley, and Billy Hart—the ambience code-switches from trippy backbeats to fierce swinging to Great American Songbook reflection. On Heartbeat Williams leads Barron and Riley for two trio cuts; Gayle and Pat Dixon enhance two other pieces with (respectively) violin and cello, springboarding on the leader’s association with Ron Carter’s quartet.

“Ron would tell me that we try to create problems for ourselves in the midst of a performance, and solve the problem at the same time,” Williams says of that five-year, three-album association. “If you don’t create problems, you don’t have one to solve, and if you don’t solve problems you aren’t learning something new.”

Williams’ bandmates on Audacity testify that he practices this dictum on the bandstand. “Buster’s book is difficult to play,” Lenny White says. “His tunes don’t have standard movement because of the notes he hears, but they’re beautiful. His music isn’t just regular straight-ahead 4/4 jazz. We’ve created a mutual trust over the years, and to trust someone else is the highest dynamic you can have. I’m willing to take a chance and he’s willing to follow—and vice versa.”

“His tunes are harmonically challenging; you have to study the band if you want to get on his gig,” Colligan cosigns. “But like a lot of the older cats, he’d rather you figure out how to do it from listening to them and letting the music grow organically—to communicate non-verbally with like-minded people.”

On Audacity, Williams expressed that trust by including a tune from each band member (White, Colligan, and saxophonist Steve Wilson), in addition to four previously unrecorded originals from his 60-composition corpus. “I like things that are scripted and things that are not scripted,” he says. “A lot depends on who you’re playing with and how long you’ve been playing together. For example, what we did with Mwandishi, you can’t get up on the bandstand and do that with just anybody. It becomes what it is without you even knowing it. When I can get my band working again after this pandemic, it’s going to be something even more exciting.”

While waiting for the world to reopen, Williams is “making a living on Zoom four or five hours a day, sometimes even more,” giving classes at the New School and Manhattan School of Music, and to various private students. Between sessions, he practices. “I struggle with being deliberate and focused enough not to miss those opportunities,” he says on our Zoom call, before pointing to a piano to his left. “I jump on my bass and play some, then work on a piece on the piano, then come back to the computer and enter it into Sibelius to hear what it sounds like and make sure I’m writing down everything I’ve done, or else I’ll forget it.”

At 78, Williams’ quotidian discipline, his ethos of a self-imposed “sense of responsibility that I must fulfill,” perhaps accounts for—as McBride describes it—“the sheer physicality” of his bass playing. “Only a few people have the fountain of youth thing happening,” McBride says. “Ron Carter still sounds the way he sounded 40 years ago. Buster is like that. He hasn’t lost a thing. Nobody sounds like him or feels like him or writes like him. He’s a special musician, all across the board.”

Colligan and White both believe that Williams has received insufficient recognition for his talents. To these ears, Williams implies that he agrees when he explains why he told Kahan that he’d participate in the documentary only if he were the sole subject.

“I was ready to be approached,” he says. “I was ready to be documented. I was ready to be the focus of attention. I felt that it was due. It wasn’t something that I would necessarily express, because I don’t have that kind of hubris. But when he expressed this interest, it just snapped: ‘Okay, this is the time.’ What I was feeling inside was being matched.

“I can’t say that I feel undervalued as much as I feel it’s all a matter of time. I hear people talk about ‘unsung heroes’ or ‘being underrated.’ I don’t think I’m underrated. Whatever rating I get, I deserve. Those who like what I do, I strive to be worthy of it. Those who would like me to do better … well, I’ve got no problem with that too, because that’s my own personal quest. I know I’m valuable. And I know I have something to say, and I am always striving to perfect what I say. But I think that whatever one is due will be done.”

[–30–]

*********

Buster Williams, “Griot Liberté” (Liner Notes):

“I don’t like a CD or album that contains all good songs or performances, but with no connection between them,” says bassist Buster Williams.

Based on those criteria, Williams ought to favor his most recent album, Griot Liberté, for a compelling back story links the eight originals and a standard that comprise it. Although the term was on Williams’ mind as far back as 2000, when he was in the process of conceiving the music for Houdini [Sirocco], a trio album with pianist Geri Allen and drummer Lenny White, the music didn’t come to fruition at the time.

“My music, whether I like it or not, always expresses what’s going on in my life—the way I see things from day to day, how my perceptions change, what’s meaningful and less meaningful,” Williams says. “Last December, my wife went into the hospital, and her illness allowed me to see the meaning of things. When she came out of intensive care, one of the first things she said is that she saw the Phoenix rise from the ashes. It was like she had been reborn.  She told everyone how her campaign has been to reinvent herself, and she felt like a caterpillar that had turned into a butterfly. All of this fit with the concept I was feeling with ‘griot liberté.’

“The griot is this storyteller that liberates the soul and the spirit. To be liberated is to express yourself as you see it, to have no qualms, to be able to lay your head down on your pillow at night and go to sleep instantly because your day has been fulfilled with victory. The real victory we seek is how to defeat our own devils—our own limitations. That’s what my wife presented to me, and ‘griot liberté’ came alive.  Liberty. Freedom. And what am I?  Yeah, I’m the storyteller! When she came home, I said, ‘She’s okay; I can focus on this music,’ and it started to come out.”

At 61, Williams has told vivid stories in notes and tones for more than four decades. A professional since 1959, when he worked around Philadelphia in a Jimmy Heath-led quartet with drum legend Specs Wright and pianist Sam Dockery, he went on the road with Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt at 18, and never looked back. “I was always the youngest guy in the band,” he jokes. “It’s only now that I’m the old guy.” He sidemanned with a who’s-who of modern jazz—Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Dakota Staton, Betty Carter, the Jazz Crusaders, Miles Davis, Herbie Mann, Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Ron Carter, Kenny Barron, and Cedar Walton, to name a few—and co-founded the collective quartet Sphere. He’s also led a dozen or so dates of his own.

“Those jobs all are my invaluable treasures,” he says. “They shaped me, set me up for what I’m trying to do now. It would be hard to say which was my most important or most prized gig, because each person gave me something new and different.”

Through such experiences, Williams internalized the overarching importance of ensemble imperatives and a tabula rasa approach to nightly performance

“I want the band to have a great collective sound,” he remarks. “I’m not looking to stand out.  I’m looking for interaction, to have each person throw something into the pot and make something that could not otherwise exist. I’m always looking for things to sound different and take on the nuances of the new moment.  I don’t want new personnel to be influenced by what was done before. What happened yesterday, I don’t even want to hear that again. When I played with Miles, the most amazing thing to me was that, night after night, we had to find something totally different to play on the same songs.  I never had a rehearsal with Miles.  The same thing with Herbie Hancock. Today is a new day, and you’ve experienced new things today, so why should the music be the same as last night?

“As a bass player, I have a responsibility for holding things together rhythmically and harmonically. My vantage point is unlike anyone else. So when I decided to be a bandleader, it wasn’t difficult in terms of concept and vision. Betty Carter really encouraged me. She told me, ‘You want to lead a band?  Just make sure it swings.’ I never forgot that. But the difficulty—even as successful as I was as a sideman—was in establishing myself with clubowners or entrepreneurs. There’s always that question, ‘Well, who’s in the front line?’ One reason why Ron Carter created a band in which he played piccolo bass was so he could be the front line.  In that regard, I feel more of a blend with vibes than I do with saxophone or trumpet. The vibes are lush and romantic and sensitive. I want to express a certain softness in my music, and vibes allow me to do that.”

Williams’s past vibraphone partners include Roy Ayres, Bobby Hutcherson and Steve Nelson.  Griot Liberté is Williams’ third recording with 32-year-old mallet master Stefon Harris, whom he hired for a job at Manhattan’s Sweet Basil in 1996 on the recommendation of trombonist Steve Turre. “Stefon is like a sponge that is ready, willing and able to absorb information, and he knows how to distil it and turn it into his own invention,” Williams says. “He’s still finding his way.  But he’s matured beautifully, and he never goes for flash in sacrifice of substance. The openness he brings to the bandstand is remarkable.”

Ubiquitous on the New York scene since he relocated from Washington, D.C., in 1995, pianist George Colligan makes his recorded debut with Williams. He receives similar praise from the maestro. “George played with me in a trio when he was living in Washington. Like Stefon, he’s wide-open and has brilliant ears. The way I want to play, you’ve got to have ears. If you’re not listening, you won’t know where you are.”

Williams’ drummer of choice since 1996 is Lenny White, a generational peer. They lock in with such smooth synchronicity that a listener could overlook how much content they play. “Lenny makes everything effortless,” Williams enthuses. “For one thing, he gets such a pristine ride cymbal beat.  If Lenny never played anything else and just played the ride cymbal, I’d be satisfied. You’d be surprised how many drummers don’t really give the ride cymbal its importance—especially some of the new drummers today. See, one of the reasons I have a band is so that I can play the way I want. What I do from the first note is my concept of what I think a band should be. It’s not something I’ve necessarily spent a lot of time thinking about. I know what I’m looking for, but at the same time, nothing is preconceived. Lenny allows me to really be myself.”

On “Nomads,” which opens the recital, White propels affirmative solos by Harris and Colligan with his own version of the loose 6/8 feel against the four that Elvin Jones made famous when he and Williams were still apprenticing. Think of the lyric Williams wrote when he composed it in the early ‘90s: “In the dark of night, traveling o’er the desert sands, on their way to some distant land, never knowing where they’re going, looking for a home, all their fortune lost, tattered clothes and broken hearts, still they live to rebuild their dream, hoping that the gods lead them to their home. Passion burning bright, never giving in to pain, nothing left but their struggles gained. Soon the dawn will come, a new land they’ll call their own…”

“Related to One” is a challenging 12-bar blues in two keys, with “an 8-bar section before the blues begins that’s based on the relative minor to the major key that the blues will be in.” Williams has built walking basslines on thousands of blues forms over the years, and spurs his partners to blow concise, down-home solos; he wraps with a few authoritative solo choruses that channel his “Blues Up and Down” days with Stitt and Ammons.

Over White’s rolling beat, Harris swings the melody on the opening section of  “The Triumphant Dance Of The Butterfly,” before stating a lyric ballad section. “I wrote the ballad section first,” Williams says. “When I wrote the melody, I heard a lyric that went, ‘Why should I try to convince you, when I know that you don’t really care?’ It became a joke between us! When my wife came out of the hospital, I worked on the song again, and this other stuff came out. It sounded to me like the triumphant dance of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly.” Keep that image before you as you listen to Williams’ resonant, well-wrought solo and beautiful bassline, springboarding Harris and Colligan into concise, to-the-point testimonials.

The overtones Harris elicits when stating the theme of “The Wind Of An Immortal Soul”—based on a sequence of chords that share a bass pedal—evokes the aura of Bobby Hutcherson. “Each chord is structured differently, so that each bar creates a different harmony, a different sound, a different emotion, a different description,” says Williams. “In Greek mythology, immortal souls took on the wind as their body. The wind travels anywhere.  It has no barriers. It can take the shape of anything it wants.” Before stating his own unfettered declamation, Williams follows that principle in supporting Colligan and Harris through cogent, ascendant solos.

Williams plays a ravishing solo on “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” a song he grew intimate with during his tenure with Betty Carter. “I reharmonized it, which fit the concept,” he says. “Every day I’d see my wife in the hospital, and then have to say goodbye.”

“Joined At The Hip” is a straightahead form with a Bobby Hutcherson feel on which Harris imprints his own stamp. The changes, Williams notes, are very difficult. “It wasn’t contrived, it just came out that way,” he says. “The title is self-explanatory. When you’re joined at the hip, that’s it forever.  Can’t do anything about that.”

Williams’ majestic solo piccolo bass variation on “Concerto de Aranjuez” is dedicated to the late Pascual Olivera, a good friend. “Pascual was a great flamenco dancer,” Williams eulogizes. “He had fourth stage cancer, had 14 chemo treatments, and totally destroyed all the cancer. But a year later, it came back. When he overcame the cancer, he and his wife Angela went on tour and did their victory dance to ‘Concerto de Aranjuez.’”

Griot Liberté concludes with “The Ninth Wave.” “There’s a 9-10-foot painting by a Russian painter in the Fuji Art Museum in Japan of three or four sailors floating on the mast portion of a ship that has been destroyed by the ocean’s waves,” Williams says. “They’re facing this gigantic wave, and the sun is behind it. If they can overcome this wave, they can be victorious. So this last piece is very serene and calming.  It describes to me the feeling of ease and calmness after going through the ninth wave, when all your senses are vibrating at the highest level. You’ve survived, you’ve accomplished what you went after, and you’re seeing something that’s even more vivid than what you had envisioned, it’s like a prayer of thanks.”

It’s a fitting end to an album on which the creative juices were flowing. “For me it’s an ongoing challenge to work outside the box and avoid the barriers that the studio presents,” Williams says. “I don’t know if I could maintain the creative level if it were not for the stress.” Told it sounds stress-free and spontaneous, he responds with an old-school dictum of comportment in the performing arts. “My father told me a long time ago, ‘Never let them see you sweat.’ That’s professionalism.”

A day late for Renee Rosnes’ birthday, a Jazz Times feature from 2021and a publicity bio for her 2001 album “Life on Earth”

If you heed the opinion of her peers and colleagues, Renee Rosnes is a jazz equivalent to a “five-tool” baseball player, that rare athlete who possesses the physical attributes and psychological fortitude to excel in all phases of the game over a sustained duration. In lieu of hitting for average and power, throwing, fielding and running, Vancouver-born Rosnes, 59, has made her mark as an instrumentalist, improviser, composer, arranger, and bandleader, accumulating a c.v. as distinguished as any pianist of her generation since she moved to New York in 1986.

            During her first 15 years in New York, Rosnes established impeccable bona fides as both side musician and leader. She sound- and beat-sculpted on various keyboards with Wayne Shorter and MBASE influencers Greg Osby and Gary Thomas. She functioned as an authoritative hardcore jazz practitioner on long-haul side-musician relationships with grandmasters Joe Henderson, J.J. Johnson, James Moody, Bobby Hutcherson, and Lewis Nash, as well as the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Stars. She stamped her elegant, orchestrative conception of the piano trio function on three sparkling standards albums targeted to the Japanese market with the Drummonds, a for-the-studio outfit titled for the surnames of Rosnes’ then-husband Billy Drummond and bass maestro Ray Drummond.

            Rosnes was also composing and arranging for her own bands. She documented her output on eight albums, each with its own distinctive character, for Blue Note’s Canadian cousin, beginning with an eponymous 1988 date to which Shorter, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock and Branford Marsalis contributed.

            On Rosnes’ 20^th and latest date, Kinds of Love (Smoke Sessions), conceived and composed at the height of the Covid-19 lockdown, her apex-of-the-pyramid personnel – Chris Potter, saxophones and winds; Christian McBride, bass; Carl Allen, drums; Rogério Baccato, percussion – jump in the deep end of the pool on nine bespoke originals. It’s Rosnes’ third outing for the label, following 2018’s Beloved Of The Sky (Potter, vibraphonist Steve Nelson, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Lenny White) and 2016’s Written On The Rocks (Nelson, Washington, saxophonist Steve Wilson and drummer Bill Stewart), which feature another 16 Rosnes compositions, mostly of recent vintage.

            “Smoke Sessions has given me the liberty to present myself in the fullest way possible artistically,” Rosnes said by phone from the New Jersey home she cohabits with husband Bill Charlap. “The pandemic gave me an unusual amount of time to work and kept me creatively motivated. I’m normally so busy getting on airplanes that I often lamented not having solitude to work, and then this gift presented itself. I felt fulfilled working day to day, week to week, imagining this new album, inspired by the musicians who would be recording with me. I trusted that the music would soar, and the musicians I’d assembled would impart more depth and nuance than I even imagined. The key is to always allow people to be themselves.”

            “I take sources of inspiration from all parts of my life,” Rosnes continued. She keeps a notebook with ideas, spawned when she comes across something intriguing – a 20^th century work by Lutoslawski or an 18^th century sarabande from one of Bach’s English Suites; a Lester Young phrase from a 1957 solo on “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”; a fragment from a composition by Chick Corea or Thelonious Monk; birdsong; the image of a landscape, synesthetically refracted into the language of notes and tones. “I analyze why it appealed to me, then explore whether I can utilize any part of it, whether it’s a harmonic progression or a rhythmic concept. There’s no end of raw material to work with.”

            “I was knocked out by her writing, which was always strong,” said Potter, who first recorded with Rosnes on Ancestors (1995) with Nicholas Payton, Peter Washington and Al Foster. “But these new tunes felt like another level; the way she extends her language, the framework she invents – it keeps blossoming and blossoming. It’s the specificity of the voicings, how she incorporates improvisation into the composition. You expect things like this in a classical piece, where everything is written out, but you don’t always encounter it in jazz. Yet, it still feels natural; when you’re blowing, you feel you can play and be yourself.”

             McBride first recorded with Rosnes on As We Are Now – a 1997 quartet with Potter and Jack DeJohnette – a few years after touring with her in J.J. Johnson’s group. “I always look forward to playing Renee’s music because it’s highly advanced, with unusual intervallic leaps and harmonic progressions – and it’s also memorable and singable,” he said. “Her melodies are super-strong – there are many smart, highly intellectual composers whose work is fun to analyze, but you don’t necessarily walk away humming it. I think she’s been extremely successful at channeling the storytelling Wayne Shorter does in his long-form writing into a more traditional acoustic jazz texture. It’s an escapade.”

            “Renee is a natural composer, who instinctually knows so much technically about the building blocks of music that she can lead with the heart and end up with something that is 100 percent structurally sound,” Charlap said. That assessment fits Rosnes’ contributions to Ice On The Hudson (SMK), a cabaret-jazz project on which her elegant, focused responses to David Hajdu’s well-turned lyrics complement the voices of Rene Marie, Janis Siegel, Karen Oberlin and Darius de Haas. “When we were hatching ideas for songs, Renee was completely open-minded, as long as the idea is grounded in authentic human feeling,” Hajdu testified in an email. “We’ve written about missing a loved one so much that you’re willing to die to be reuinited; about diners and pie; about the Gabriola Passage, a natural formation in Northwestern Canada that Renee finds profoundly inspiring. No theme is too daunting, too emotionally complicated, too serious, or too silly for her. None of the songs sounds like any of the others, and yet they are all distinctly the work of the same musical intelligence.”

            “Open minded” also describes Rosnes’ contributions to the eponymous 2020 Blue Note release by Artemis, the all-female collective that she founded in 2016 and serves as music director – the sprawling, Nino Rota-ish theme of “Big Top,” the minimalist, Alec Wilderish framing of Cecile McLorin Salvant’s voice on “If It’s Magic” and “Cry, Buttercup, Cry,” and the funky camelwalk lope that propels her arrangement of Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder.” In a sense, her involvement with Artemis parallels her earlier work with SFJazz Collective, to which Rosnes contributed 11 compositions and arrangements from its inception in 2004 until 2009. That experience, Rosnes said, showed her “it was possible to have a band of leaders where egos don’t get in the way, to create great music with strong personalities who encompass many viewpoints.”

            Allison Miller, Artemis’ drummer, noted Rosnes’ receptivity “to the various sub-genres each musician brought to the band,” how “she produced the record in a way that made all these different-sounding compositions fit together as a single body of work.” “Like all my favorite musicians, Renee is ever-evolving,” Miller said. “She has a beautiful combination of organization and creativity, which I think woman bandleaders especially need to have. She has this beautiful ability to herd us all together – which isn’t easy, because we each have big opinions and want to give everyone else advice. But at this point in her career, she very humbly and kindly demands respect. She’s definitely a mentor to me. I hold her on a pedestal.”

[BREAK]

Although Rosnes now devotes the preponderance of her career mosaic to bandleading and collaborative projects, she continues to spend consequential side musician time with Ron Carter, her steady employer since 2011, when, at Kenny Barron’s recommendation, he brought her for his quartet.                                                                           

            “It’s been extraordinary to create music with Ron on his terms night after night, at that high level of consistency,” said Rosnes, who does precisely that on Live in Stockholm, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 (In and Out). “I love his spontaneous arrangements, the curveballs he throws at me when he’s experimenting or exploring with the harmony or the rhythm. There’s a lot of trust between us, which contributes to the feeling of liberty and freedom within the music.”                

            With deliberate precision, Carter enumerated the sources of his trust. “I need a piano player who reads the music I write,” he began. The job description continued: “the ability to transcribe songs if I need them right away”; “when I say a little faster or a little slower, they don’t say ‘why?’ or, if I ask them, they say ‘That’s too fast or too slow’ or ‘Can I suggest something?’”; “trusts my downbeat”; “trusts my notes as good notes to play in a chord – it’s their job to try to find how they can make that fit into their scheme”; “has a real sensitivity about the piano volume and knows how to use the pedals”; “is a half hour early for all the gigs”; “wants to be in the band.”

            He paused, then, with formality, referenced Rosnes’ given forename. “Irene fits all those boxes I just checked off. When we see each other after a long layoff, we hug because we miss each other’s importance to the music of our life.”

            Both Carter’s encomium and Barron’s initial cosignature highlight Rosnes’ stature as a “keeper of the flame,” grounded in the aesthetic imperatives that prevailed among the masters of the art of swing with whom she played and to whom she listened closely after arriving in New York. She frequently attended sets at Bradley’s, the piano saloon, by rotation regulars like Barron and Cedar Walton, both frequent Carter collaborators during the 80s and 90s, as well as Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Walter Davis, John Hicks, and Richie Beirach (to name a short list).

            “It was such an education, to hear this level of mastery any given night of the week, and it had a major impact on the development of my playing,” Rosnes said. “Obviously that particular scene is not possible anymore — at least with that many artists and with that frequency; young musicians aren’t able to have that experience because it simply doesn’t exist.”

            “Renee knows how to put a certain English on the ball,” Potter said, describing how Rosnes incorporates those experiences in her pianism. “It’s not just the notes, it’s the velocity and the phrasing; it’s the real language, not a sequenced version of that language. There’s all this pianistic subtlety that maybe came down through folks like Wynton Kelly, to whom she’s obviously paid very close attention. She combines that with classical training, so she knows how to make the piano ring, make certain notes jump out – make it swing. It’s jazz piano.”

            “I want to avoid husbandly hyperbole,” Charlap qualified, before analyzing Rosnes’ artistry in his eloquent argot. “She’s a magnificent accompanist and listener, so seamless and correct within a rhythm section, weaving a carpet for the soloists and the rest of the band,” he said. “In her quiet nature, sometimes she’ll play a solo with so much fire and so vital that it sometimes feels like a tidal wave emotionally. She’s a great virtuoso pianist, a major soloist with an incredibly beautiful design to her melodic line, unique to her. But she’s got this other thing, which is some sort of gift from above – or from somewhere. Renee can hear anything. If you drop a needle on a record, and it’s Stravinsky or Art Tatum or just about anything, she knows every single note instantaneously. But that doesn’t teach you taste. One can play something that is technically correct and yet not really part of the language. It doesn’t have to be something that’s been done. But it must build on something that has existed. And she has virtuoso taste.”

            “When I came to New York, Mulgrew Miller for me was the reigning champ of New York – the next step after Kenny Barron,” McBride said of the playing field he stepped into in 1989. “I think that way of Renee. She can play with anyone in any style, any situation, make it work on that music’s terms, and still maintain her individuality. That, to me, is a true genius.”

[BREAK]

Until she assembled Artemis in March 2016, Rosnes, in both side musician and leader roles, almost always was the only woman on the bandstand. “I learned a long time ago that music transcends gender,” she said. Perhaps as a survival mechanism, she’s trained herself to shrug off “the many slights that women instrumentalists often face” in all aspects of their career. But she mentioned a particularly troubling encounter last summer when she arrived at a New York club, left unidentified, to perform the fourth night of a week-long run.

            ”As I approached the entrance, I was stopped by the doorman, who obviously didn’t recognize me,” Rosnes said. “That’s not entirely unusual, and doesn’t bother me. He said, ‘Excuse me, but do you have a ticket?’ I replied, ‘No, because I’m playing in the band.’ He took a step back, eyed me, and sarcastically said, ‘Oh…really?’ After a few seconds went by, he said, ‘What do you play? Cards? Roulette?’ I just stood there and looked at him in disbelief. I knew I had options, but I was not interested in getting riled up before a gig. At that moment, the manager just inside the door noticed something was amiss, poked his head out, and admonished the doorman for not letting me through. I made a conscious decision not to allow that experience take me out of my zone nor affect my performance that night — but it sure feels disappointing when those things happen.”

            “When I was traveling with Renee, she always radiated that she felt comfortable with who she is,” Potter says. “That got expressed both musically and also the way that she dealt with promoters and everything else. I’m sure lots of stuff got thrown at her that doesn’t happen to the men. But she always seemed very sure of herself. The same as all musicians, she was always looking to make her music at the highest level it could possibly be. I don’t remember any situations where I felt she was being disrespected, and I can’t actually imagine her putting up with it, even though she’s very nice and Canadian and everything like that. But it might be she was so good at it that I didn’t even see the struggles she faced.”

            Without diving too deeply into the thickets of dime-store psychology, one could speculate that Rosnes’ firm belief in the innate musical gifts she displayed from early childhood have allowed her, as the mantra goes, to always know her worth, immunizing her spirit against the viruses of misogyny, harassment, and institutional sexism, and allowing her to bring a clear-headed can-do attitude to any musical situation she’s encountered.  “I didn’t have any one-on-one mentors, male or female, who took me under their wing after I came to New York,” she says. “My mentors became the people I worked with, merely by the fact that they hired me and I got to make music with them and learn from them every night.”

            “Renee is definitely a mentor to me,” said Miller. Indeed, it’s increasingly evident to Rosnes that she is – has been for some time – a mentor figure to several generations of younger female musicians, as she and her Artemis bandmates were told at several concert engagements not long before our conversation.

            “People tell us we’ve had a great impact, or we see on social media that we’ve moved or encouraged someone, that it’s helping in their journey or to make decisions about what’s possible,” Rosnes said. “I hadn’t given it much thought, but now I see it means something greater than I’d imagined.

            “As each year goes by, I see more young female musicians who play at a high level on all the instruments. You can tell how dedicated they are and how well they play; you just know they’ll be making a name for themselves – and rightly so.”

********************

Bio for Renee Rosnes, Life On Earth:

 

On Life On Earth — her eighth Blue Note recording and fifth under the auspices of EMI-Canada — the pianist Renee Rosnes presents her most conceptually ambitious recital to date. It works on several levels. For one thing, Rosnes surefootedly guides a collection of astonishing rhythmic talent — Zakir Hussein from India, Mor Thiam from Senegal, Duduka Da Fonseca from Brazil, trap drummers Jeff Watts and Billy Drummond from the U.S. — with some of the leading instrumentalists in contemporary improvising — saxophonists Chris Potter and Walt Weiskopf; trombonist-shell master Steve Turre; and bassists John Patitucci and Christian McBride. She deploys them in various configurations on a program that draws upon a palette of rhythms, melodies and textures that reference India, Senegal, Indonesia, Brazil, Inuit, European Classical music and hardcore jazz.

 

“I’m drawn to musicians I know can go various ways conceptually, who have the talent and depth to interpret what I’ve written and bring their personal experiences to it,” says Rosnes, 39. “That’s what happened on this date. I didn’t have to explain a lot; we played and it fell into place.” She notes that each musician on Life On Earth has a history of saying something consequential outside of their most customary context or setting. “That’s becoming more and more the case,” she adds, “as today’s musicians travel so much and as the Information Age brings the world together.”

 

What sets Life on Earth apart from the pack is how deeply Rosnes has drawn from her inner well of experience in composing, orchestrating and conceptualizing the diverse information into music. The genres never feel juxtaposed; she gets to essences, transmuting each approach integrally into her personal narrative. 

 

“Since I recorded Art and Soul in 1999, I’ve developed as a musician,” Rosnes says. “I’ve listened to a lot of different things, and I’m always writing. I set out to make an album exploring different instruments and timbres than I was used to playing with. These pieces truly grew out of my love for various things, be it a musician or a beat or something I grew up with, and each has a story. Hopefully a musical thread of my personality and the rhythm section’s carries through, and it becomes an organic experience.”

 

No piece emanates from a deeper source than the stunning “Empress India,” which takes its title from a favorite blend of tea.  It’s based on the complex, fluent rhythmic patterns of tabla master Zakir Hussain, whose work with Shakti Rosnes knew well, and whom she first witnessed at a classical performance with the Indian Masters Of Percussion. Born in Saskatchewan and raised in Vancouver, Rosnes discovered her birth mother, Mohandir, in the spring of 1994, not long before her adoptive mother, Audrey, succumbed to cancer.

 

“Since I met my family, I’ve listened to more Indian music than I had in previous years,” Rosnes says. “I love harmony and I enjoy writing music with a lot of harmonic content, while most Indian music is based on one mode and one tonic.  To my knowledge, few recordings feature tabla with piano. I came up with this line and envisioned how we might marry the two sounds.”

 

Rosnes stays drumcentric on “Senegal Son,” an irresistible melody with origins in a solo that Senegalese percussionist Mor Thiam played in Excursions, a band led by bassist Ray Drummond in which both play. She orchestrates it for marimba (Steve Nelson), alto flute (Shelley Brown), and rhythm section (Patitucci and Watts).

 

“I mentioned the beat I’d heard, Mor clapped it, and I heard this melody over it,” Rosnes says. “With this groove I felt that a lot of harmony was unnecessary. It’s a moot point. It’s all about the heart of the music.”

 

Speaking of heart, Rosnes, Patitucci and Billy Drummond converse on the lovely melody of “Ballad of The Sad Young Men” in a way that makes you feel you’re hearing a great singer convey the poignant lyric. Roberta Flack’s beautiful version on her debut album, “First Take,” inspired Renee to play the tune.

 

With “Icelight” and “Gabriola Passage,” Rosnes harks to the Pacific Northwest, where she came of age. “Icelight” has a Latin feel, but Rosnes wrote it in tribute to the newly established northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, where the landscape is dominated by tundra, rock snow and ice, and which is inhabited mainly by the Inuit people.  It features the capacious, hard-edged sound of tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, a long-time Rosnes collaborator; Inuit throat singer Kevin Tarrant offers his musical commentary on the final vamp.

 

“I went to school with a lot of Native Indian kids and heard Native Indian music growing up,” says Rosnes, who collects indigenous Haida art from the Inuit. “Until I left Western Canada, I didn’t realize how much of an impact the Native American culture had on me.”

 

Spurred by Weiskopf’s soprano saxophone and drummer Duduka Da Fonseca’s Brazil-inflected beats, “Gabriola Passage” was untitled when Rosnes performed it the July 2000 Ottawa Jazz Festival. In a letter, a listener wrote Rosnes that the piece evoked thoughts of sailing through ocean waves in a steady breeze, not unlike the experience of sailing east from Gabriola Island to Valdez Island to the Georgia Strait off of Vancouver. 

 

“I spent a lot of time there growing up, and I love that part of the world,” Rosnes says. “It’s in my blood, the smell of the ocean and the virgin forest. I’d been to exactly the place this man was talking about, and the image connected with me.”

 

As a Vancouver youngster, Rosnes played classical music on piano and violin, and she references those experiences on “The Quiet Earth,” conjuring the image “of a peaceful and blue planet spinning quietly on its axis, viewed from far away somewhere up in the stars.” It begins with a stirring string soli, morphs to a soulful Rosnes statement and climaxes with a majestic Patitucci declamation, pizzicato.

 

“I’m very interested in the ranges and possibilities of string instruments, and I enjoy writing for strings, though I haven’t done it much,” says Rosnes. “I went to university in the Classical performance program.  But at some point I felt so much more challenged by the art of improvisation, and I decided to go that route.”

 

During those Vancouver years Rosnes’ friend Red Schwager, a guitarist now with George Shearing, played her the recording of the ketjak Balinese Monkey Chant that she samples at the outset of “Hanuman,” the Monkey God. Rosnes transcribed it into a wobbly unison line for trombonists Steve Turre and Conrad Herwig and bass trombonist Doug Purviance, then launches into a surging melody in the spirit of Joe Henderson’s “Caribbean Fire Dance.” Duduka Da Fonseca represents the monkey on cuica and Chris Potter unleashes a ferocious tenor solo that evokes the sound of Henderson while never xeroxing his licks. Rosnes comments: “There’s a real force and real power to the piece, which reflects the image of Hanuman, who is adventurous, strong, cunning, and courageous — and he’s a musician!”

 

“In some way this is my personal tribute to Joe,” says Rosnes, who played with Henderson from 1987 to 1998, shortly before the recently deceased tenor master suffered the stroke that marked the end of his performing career. “Joe performed at a consistently high level night after night, in a lot of different contexts, and those occasions where everything came together were among the best that I’ll probably ever experience.”

 

The trio gives an intimate reading of Rosnes’ arrangement of “Nana,” a suite of six Andalusian folk songs that the Spanish classical composer Miguel de Falla arranged for voice and piano. Rosnes makes the piano evoke the life force of a singer, and Patitucci makes the strings resonate with emotion on his arco solo.

 

The leader calls upon the harmonies and textures of Steve Turre’s painstakingly accumulated and personally sculpted collection of musical seashells to evoke “The Call of Triton,” the trumpeter of the deep in Greek mythology who blew loudly on his seashell to raise great storms and blew gently to calm the waves. Rosnes toured with Turre at the cusp of the ’90s and plays with him in the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, so she knows his range; she frames him with a funky beat and the intriguing timbral blend of bass clarinet and flute.

 

Rosnes learned indelible lessons in musical storytelling on numerous sidemusician gigs with such masters as Henderson (1987-1998), James Moody (1987-present), J.J. Johnson (1993-1998), and Bobby Hutcherson (1995-present). But no experience expanded her sense of orchestral possibility more than a year (1988) spent playing synthesizer with Wayne Shorter.

 

“Playing Wayne’s music opened up my mind to so much harmonic freedom,” she says. “Anything could happen at any time on the same piece from night to night. He didn’t give a lot of verbal direction to the bandmembers; conceptual ideas were stated through the horns, and as a learning, growing musician, you took your cue musically from what was going on.”

 

Rosnes doesn’t claim to be a student of mythology, but on Life On Earth she makes the universal archetypes vivid and palpable through music. “I’m Canadian,” she says. “But I approach this as a member of the human race.”

For vibraphonist Joe Locke’s birthday, the transcript of a WKCR Musician Show from 1998 and a Downbeat Blindfold Test from 2015

In honor of the master vibraphonist Joe Locke’s birthday, here’s a new post with the transcript of a WKCR Musician’s Show that we did in 1998 and the final, edited version of our 2015 Downbeat Blindfold Test.

************

Joe Locke Musician Show (10-21-98):

[MUSIC: Locke, “Slander,” “Saturn’s Children”]

TP: What was the impetus for you to play the vibraphone? It’s not that common an instrument, not the easiest thing to lug around.

LOCKE: I’d like to think I had a more romantic story about how I started to play the vibes. But the truth of the matter is, my mother wanted me to play the glockenspiel in the marching band. This is the sad truth. She saw an ad for a set of vibes in the paper for 200 bucks, and I can still remember her saying to me, “Joe, the vibraphone, that’s something like a glockenspiel, isn’t it? Let’s go have a look at it.” That’s how it happened. If she had her way, if there was an ad for a glockenspiel, I probably wouldn’t even be sitting here talking to you now. I’d be playing in a marching band somewhere in Iowa. I’m not sure.

TP: But you’re not from Iowa. You’re from upstate New York.

LOCKE: But I think of marching bands and Iowa being synonymous for some strange reason.

TP: What sort of scene was there once you got the ABC’s of the instrument down?

LOCKE: Actually, there was a thriving jazz scene in Rochester, New York, where I grew up.

TP: Probably in some part due to the presence of Eastman School of Music.

LOCKE: Probably. There was a healthy scene there, but there was a real healthy scene on the street in Rochester at the time. Steve Davis, the bassist who had been with Coltrane’s group, was someone I used to play with all the time, from the time I was about 15 on, and also Vinnie Ruggiero, who was a fantastic drummer who unfortunately passed away. Vinnie played with Bud Powell, and subbed for Elvin in Trane’s band one time in the Vanguard when he was about 18 or 19, he played with Slide Hampton’s Octet. He was a big influence on me. Also people like Joe Romano, a saxophonist who played tenor and alto. He made some records. He made a record with the Jazz Brothers, with Chuck Mangione on Riverside in the early ’60s, and he’s still a fantastic player. Sal Nistico used to come through town. So it was a real thriving scene at that time. So by the time I was 15 years old, there was a real scene happening. So it was a good place to grow up.

TP: Is that how you first got interested in listening to jazz? Or was it through studying vibraphone and discovering great jazz players? What was that path? Was that in your house?

LOCKE: I played drums in a Rock band. I remember that being a thing. I was listening to David Bowie and whatever. I think of David Bowie, because I think of a record, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

TP: Were you involved in like the Glam-Rock kind of thing?

LOCKE: No, it was more like Procul Harem and bands like that. But I was maybe 12 and I was playing drums in a Rock band. The first album I heard was Mike Mainieri’s Journey Through An Electronic Tube. I don’t think I ever told Mike this story, but that was the first… I was at a friend of my sister’s house, and we were hanging out, and she played me a song from Mike’s record, Journey Through An Electronic Tube, and I really loved it, and she said, “Oh, you like that? Do you want to see something?” She took me up in the attic, and her father had a set of vibes up there. That was going way back to when I was maybe 8 years old, but it stayed with me. I got the vibes at 13, and started slowly listening…just like most people my age, started getting from Rock, kind of got into Weather Report and Return to Forever, and then after listening to Weather Report, picked up some Wayne Shorter records and some Blakey records with Wayne on them, and it just went from there.

TP: So it was a backward process from Rock, Fusion, into Jazz, as it were. And how did that develop? Did you go to some music school?

LOCKE: Yeah, I was going to the Hofstein School of Music, and I was studying Theory and Drumset. I started to play the vibes, I was pretty much self-taught, and when I was 15 I got a job with an organ trio. So I was kind of going to high school in the daytime and at night I was working with a bunch of grownups.

TP: What sort of organ trio? Greasy, Soul-Jazz type of thing?

LOCKE: We were playing standards, and I remember doing some covers of the Crusaders… There was a version of “Eleanor Rigby” I think that maybe the Crusaders had done, or stuff off… Kool & the Gang had a record called “Kool Jazz.” There was an interesting thing happening there. Ronnie Laws and stuff was happening, but we were playing Eddie Harris tunes like “Compared To What,” but I was also getting my feet wet learning standards, and we’d be doing tunes of the standard songbook.

TP: This was around Rochester?

LOCKE: Yeah, this was in Rochester. It was great. I was in heaven. It was a funny thing playing with these musicians and really learning a lot. I got a gig with Spider Martin, who was a tenor player. I went on the road with Spider when I was 17, after playing gigs professionally for a couple of years, and recorded a couple of records; people were on the records like Billy Hart, Jimmy Owens, Pepper Adams, Steve Davis. I came back from being in Spider’s band for a while, and someone called “Rhythm” changes on the stand, and I didn’t know what they were. I was developing, but there were (as there are now) huge holes in my education.

TP: So you’re developing as an ear player but then theory caught up to your ear knowledge.

LOCKE: Yes. Then after playing with Spider… He was concerned with things like… He taught me a lot about music, but I also learned a lot… I learned more perhaps about dealing in the adult world and the ins and outs of being on the road and stuff like that. When I got back to Rochester, there were some real serious cats dealing with the music, like, of different Miles bands, and playing “Rhythm” changes through the keys and stuff like that. That’s when I really started to say, “Wow, I’ve got a lot homework to do.” That was at about the age of 18.

TP: Was the homework something you just went in the shed by yourself and did? Did you go to school?

LOCKE: I studied a little bit. Actually, when I was a kid, I studied a little bit with Phil Markowitz, who is a pianist on the scene, who works with Dave Liebman and still works with Bob Mintzer’s band and is a good friend of mine. I studied privately a little bit with Bill Dobbins, who is a fantastic musician and educator. But my education was I think primarily pretty much going in the shed and lock the door. That guy Vinnie Ruggiero who I spoke about, who I can’t stress enough the importance of him in my life, he… I used to take the Andrew White solos, the Coltrane transcriptions, and try to learn them, and then Vinnie, who was a drummer, but knew the music inside and outside, would come to my house and say, “No, you’re phrasing that wrong,” “No, this is how it’s supposed to go,” “no, there’s a wrong note in there and you have to fix that up.” I was working on stuff like “Ah Leu Cha” and “Two Bass Hit” and “Dr. Jackyll” and stuff like that.

TP: So you weren’t taking it easy on yourself.

LOCKE: I was real fortunate to have some people around me who really knew this music.

TP: And pushed you, too.

LOCKE: And pushed me. I just did a record date recently with Vinnie’s son, Charles Ruggiero, who was living here for a while. He’s back up in Rochester for a while; I hope he comes back here. It was amazing to see him playing and sounding fantastic and sounding a little like his Dad and the mannerisms he had that were like his father, that made me really see how the music continues from generation, from father to son and from teacher to student. That’s a great thing to be a part of now.

TP: In the process of gathering musical knowledge, were you also being influenced by vibraphonists or assimilating other people’s vocabulary, or did that come incidentally to your gathering knowledge about music?

LOCKE: It’s a funny thing. I think when I really started to get seriously into acoustic, straight-ahead music, what we consider to be the body of work called jazz, I was influenced much more by saxophonists and trumpet players. Not even piano players. That came much later. But I was really influenced by Hank Mobley. He’s the first person I’d say I was influenced by.

TP: How did that translate to the vibraphone?

LOCKE: It translated to me because his solo were so swinging and so melodic, and easy to…not easy to hear, but I was able to hear what he was doing. And when I tried to cop what he played off the records, I was able to get to it, and even though sometimes it was really hard for me to get to, I was able to slowly digest where Hank was coming from moreso than I would… I could hear what he was doing, people like Hank and Jackie McLean to a certain extent. Those are people I really dug.

TP: Regardless of that set of influences, coming up is a set of vibraphonists, and we’re going to start off with Milt Jackson.

LOCKE: It’s a thrill for me to be here, because it’s a great chance for me to think about who influenced me. One person I’m very indebted to as a vibist is Milt Jackson. I was speaking with Monty Alexander one time, and told him I’d heard him and Bags once at a club out by the airport in Miami, and it was fantastic — “I just love what you do with him.” Monty said, “Milt doesn’t play the Blues; he is the Blues.” That’s the most aptly, succinctly put description of Milt Jackson, is that everything he plays has this incredible natural feel. He’s just incredible. And to hear him now, he’s playing better than ever. I think this cut is Monty with Bags.

[MUSIC: Bags, “Here’s That Rainy Day” (1969); Bobby Hutcherson, “Little B’s Poem” (1975); Dave Pike, “Cheryl” (1961)]

LOCKE: It’s so great to come up here and play three of my favorite cats on the radio for all the people listening. These happen to be three of my favorite cuts of all these wonderful vibes players. There are points in Milt’s solo on “Here’s That Rainy Day” that have a quality… Not to get overly intellectual about it, because I’m not able to anyway! But there are points in that solo where every time I hear them there is a crescendo reached, like an emotional kind of climax reached that hits me the same way every time I hear it; the release in the end of the second half of the tune, there’s one point in his solo that hits me the same way every time. It’s what I look for in music, and he really hits it in that solo, and it hits me the same way every time I hear it. Bags is unbelievable still to this day. When all is said and done, he’s one of those artists that another one of him will never happen. Vibes players will come and go and be great, but there will never be another Milt Jackson. It’s an amazing thing to be an artist of that caliber.

TP: The same thing could be said for improvisers like Bobby Hutcherson and Dave Pike.

LOCKE: It’s really funny. We’re talking about the instrument I play, but if these guys didn’t play vibes… What I’m hearing that I love in all three of these guys is themselves coming through their chosen instrument. It happens to be the vibes.

Dave is someone whose rightful place in history hasn’t been set yet.  I think he’s a very important vibist, and he’s someone who took the language of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and translated it to the vibraphone, which is an instrument that’s really hard to do that with — to make the metal sound like it’s not metal, and make it sound flowing.  It’s Time For Dave Pike was his first album, he was 23, and his playing was so swinging, so in the moment.  It sounds like he’s playing lines like what Bud would play or what the best saxophone players of the day would play.  I just love to hear it; it’s the stuff that excites me about the instrument.  The vibes per se don’t excite me, but that language excites me, and when I hear someone playing that language successfully on the vibes — and I don’t think there are that many people who have done it successfully.

TP: The language of Bebop.

LOCKE: I guess I would have to say the language of Bebop. But even if it isn’t Bebop, it’s expressing yourself over a set sequence of changes and then telling a story over them. That’s what gets it to me.

TP: I guess that’s what all improvisers, especially in Jazz, are aspiring to.

LOCKE: It doesn’t have to be Bebop to turn me on, but these guys really do it.

TP: Well, Bobby Hutcherson is someone who extended the language not only of the instrument, but musically in a total sense as well.

LOCKE: Of all three of these guys, Bobby is the one that really does it for me. Milt I almost put in his own place, because Milt is so important. Bobby is the one resonates in me the most, I guess because of some of the language he was playing. I think in the way that Milt really took the language of Bebop, the language of Charlie Parker and put it on the vibes, Bobby took the language of Trane and the innovations that were being made in the ’60s by some of his contemporaries, and translated it onto the vibraphone.

TP: he’s someone who seems to be able to blend the percussive, drum-like approach to the vibes with a real flow as well. He sounds like almost a drum choir sometimes, overlaying rhythms and the way he seamlessly weaves them together.

LOCKE: Yeah, it’s amazing. You’re exactly right. Bobby can play really-really pretty, heartbreakingly pretty, and then he can get into a thing where he’s playing really percussively and exploring like the rhythmic aspects and the percussive, drum-like aspects of the instrument. But his harmony is deep. So when I think about Bobby, I don’t even think of the drum aspect as much as I do the depth of the harmony. Some of his contemporaries, like Freddie Hubbard, who were really like hanging out with Trane and learning the stuff he was doing, like superimposing harmonies on top of harmonies, Hutch was putting that onto the vibes and experimenting with different modes and scales and Eastern stuff. You can hear in “Little B’s Poem,” which is mid-’70s, that slowly he’d been building the language where now, in the mid-’70s, there is a superimposition of harmony where you’re trying to get from Point A to Point B, but now Point B isn’t a bar away or even a couple of bars away; Point B might be half a tune away or maybe 8 bars away, and he’s going to make his own path to that next place in the harmony of the tune, and he does it in a really exciting way where he’s finding new ways to get from Point A to Point B. I just hear so much… There’s so much that excites me about him. How he transcends the bar line, how he makes the vibraphone… He does these things where he staggers his phases, where he’ll be playing a sequence or pattern that if you were to sing it slowly would sound like [SINGS ASCENDING REFRAIN], but he plays them against the time in a very quick way, and it creates a feeling almost of flowing water. Yet, in that, the harmony is intact. It’s very deep. I know sometimes I’ll play some of Bobby’s stuff, and the saxophone player will go, “What’s that, man?” I’ll say, “That’s Bobby Hutcherson’s stuff.” I hear saxophone players play stuff sometimes that I know is coming from Bobby. And it’s those staggered sequences when you’re getting to the next point in the tune in a sequential way, but that he really had and has a genius for finding his own root. Every time I hear him, he excites me. It’s just hearing the mind of someone brilliant at work, and yet someone who’s having a lot of fun, too.

TP: And you mentioned that he studied with Dave Pike coming up as a kid in Los Angeles.

LOCKE: I talked to Dave about that and I talked to Bobby about that. He took some lessons with Dave when Dave was in Los Angeles and Bobby was just starting out. So it’s kind of interesting to see the continuum happening. Dave is still playing great, and Bobby of course is still playing incredibly. I’m just happy that all these guys are still kicking it and still playing at the top of his game.

[MUSIC: Joe Locke, “Song For Cables”]

TP: A lot of musicians now in their thirties and forties are starting to approach the popular music of the ’70s and ’80s that was in the air when they were coming up in a serious jazz way, and trying to play it with the same level of sophistication and with that standards were approached by their idols as well. Let’s discuss the full range of music you were listening to and playing. We had you in Rochester playing in organ trios and serious hard-core jazz. Let’s get you to New York.

LOCKE: Backing up on the music of the ’70s and the stuff that we were influenced by, a perfect example is this. Last week I was in the studio with Diane Reeves, and I did an arrangement on a song by Joni Mitchell called “River” from the album Blue. I had actually done it from my own head. I’d wanted to do an arrangement of the song. I’d heard a way of doing it in my head, and I went into the studio and demoed it — with sort of a West African flavor to it, with background harmonies and hand percussion and a marimba and vibes. I sent it to Diane, and she called me, and then I got a call from George Duke, and they said they wanted to do it on the upcoming album with Diane. It was a total honor for me, number one, because Diane is my favorite singer of the younger generation of people who are dealing with the music now, and I’m a huge fan of hers. I believed in this arrangement of Joni’s tune I had done, and to do it with Diane and George Duke as producer was a real honor for me. Also, we respected that music, and to do it justice…I think we can do it justice. There’s a lot of depth in some of the writing that was happening then from people like Joni, and to do it with Diane, someone who respects that music, was really something. We did it with Mulgrew Miller on piano, Reginald Veal and Brian Blade and Romero Lubambo. There was a feeling that this music is music that is worth of being done now. To sort of play with people of that caliber and to feel the meat being brought out of the tune.

The point I want to make is that there’s a lot of music that means stuff to us, people of my generation, that people are going to be hearing more of as time goes by. I’m recording songs that were done by non-jazz artists of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and we do it because we love the music, and for no other reasons — artistic reasons, not commercial.

TP: Let’s address the progression, the chronology of events that brought you to New York. Did you just decide to take the plunge?

LOCKE: I just decided to move here, yeah. I just jumped in with no money, and had a couple of friends here. The interesting thing is, when you come here, your vision of what… My vision of what I expected the experience to be…it was different. The people who gave me my first breaks were musicians who I wouldn’t have expected. Some of the first things I did in town were with Byard Lancaster and J.R. Mitchell and Yusef Yancey and guys who were considered outside players, which I didn’t have any experience with, and it was an ear-stretching experience for me. It’s interesting, you don’t know what your story is until it’s already told. So that was a fascinating thing for me, to play with some people whose frame of reference is completely different than mine. I got a chance to play early on with Bob Moses, who had me playing with his nonet, and that was an amazing experience to play some music on a high level and get my butt kicked. I played on the street with George Braith and C. Sharpe and Tommy Turrentine. We played out on the street for ten hours every day, and I’m still really thankful to George Braith for the whuppin’ he gave me on a steady basis. It was an amazing experience to go out there, set up at 8 o’clock in the morning and play all day long. You’d be playing “Cherokee” for an hour. That was New York to me. It was an amazing experience. Those were some of the things that were really important to me.

TP: The comment you made, “you don’t know your story til it’s told,” is peculiarly applicable to improvisers in jazz, because you have to be prepared to intersect with almost any other personality. That’s one of the fascinating things about it. As you developed your own concept, talk about some of the affiliations you made. The first recordings I remember are around ten years ago on Steeplechase.

LOCKE: Well, the first recording I made was when I was 23. It was an album called Live In Front of the Silver Screen with Phil Markowitz, my former mentor, Eddie Gomez on bass, and Keith Copeland. Then I didn’t record for quite a while. Then I did a thing on Cadence Records in 1986 with Jerry Bergonzi, Adam Nussbaum, Andy Laverne and Fred Stone on bass. But I didn’t start recording on a regular basis until Steeplechase. At that point I’d been recording with Eddie Henderson, then the label asked me to make my own record. I went in the studio with Kenny Werner, Larry Schneider on saxophone, Ron McClure and Ronnie Burrage — and I was a nervous wreck, man. It was a test of having to make music under the microscope, and I remember how I felt then as opposed to how I feel now working in the studio. The studio, gratefully, has become more of a home for me.

TP: I guess doing a bunch of records for a label like Steeplechase, where you can get a bunch of top-shelf New York musicians without a lot of pressure because it’s all being done in eight hours or less… It maybe doesn’t seem so great when you’re doing it, but at the end, you know a lot more about what you want to express in the studio.

LOCKE: I’ve always said that those of us who make records for labels where you have to get it done direct-to-two-track immediately, and have it done in 5-6-7 hours… You have to be able to play to do that, where there’s no fixing — fixing it in the mix, as they say. You have to deal, and you have to deal with the consequences. You have to stand by what you recorded. I listen to some of those earlier records, and I cringe, but it was the truth for the time. It was a true document for what was happening then. I was really fortunate to be with musicians like Kenny Werner, Ron McClure, people who really helped lift me and carry me along. It’s like they’d lift me and carry along; it’s like they’d take me and lift me up and set me down on the grass at the end of the song. I was in fast company with those guys, but they were very supportive and loving.

TP: Back to other music and Joe’s comments. We had a caller who was anxious to know Joe’s feeling about Lem Winchester, who was also a Sheriff and died under odd circumstances relating to his job.

LOCKE: He was a cop in Wilmington, Delaware. He actually died from a gun accident that was self-inflicted, a very sad story. He was a wonderful player, and I appreciated the caller, because he felt it was important to acknowledge this master. I was first made aware of Lem Winchester through a trio album with Shirley Scott, and I believe it’s the only album trio of vibe, organ and drums, if I’m not mistaken. The instrumentation hasn’t been documented very much. I heard someone who was really swinging. As I said about Bags and Dave Pike, this is someone who’s really playing music on the vibraphone. He’s not attacking it in some sort of vaudevillian way, but someone who’s making very thoughtful, swinging music on an instrument that happens to be the vibraphone. Just an amazing player who we lost way too soon.

[MUSIC: Lem Winchester, “Skylark”; Roy Ayers/Jack Wilson, “Shosh”]

LOCKE: It makes me laugh to hear Roy. He’s swinging so hard. That’s as good as it gets, man. And people who know Roy, as I did, from Ubiquity and the Acid Jazz stuff he’s doing now, and the crossover stuff with him singing, which is all very cool, I like that aspect of Roy also… But to hear him deep in the pocket, playing straight-ahead blues, he’s killing it, man! It cracks me up to hear it. I just want to laugh, because it’s so deeply swinging. Roy’s another one of a handful of people who really got it. It’s just amazing. If you’re out there, Roy, you’re beautiful, man. And he’s still playing his tail off. I love that track, because he’s playing all that language. He’s like a saxophonist playing vibes. He’s great. And the thing about Roy, that he came from this place where he was really deep in the tradition of this music, and you can hear Bird and Bags and all the influences, and he went on to do something different.

Another vibe player who did that who I owe a tremendous debt to, as to any vibe players who are really conscious about what we’re doing… Well, I shouldn’t say that; we all have our influences. But to me, he’s an important influence — Mike Mainieri. I listen to some of Mike’s older stuff… I have an album called Blues From the Other Side which I think he did in 1962 when he might have still been a teenager, 19 or 20, after leaving Buddy Rich’s band. So he had already done all that stuff. He’s swinging so hard coming out of a Bags kind of thing, a Milt Jackson kind of thing, and he’s someone who can deal with all that language and frame of reference. Mike went on to really open some doors, not just for the vibraphone, but for music. This is a guy who could have stayed in the pocket of being a straight-ahead player. He was hearing something different, saw what was happening with the scene… It’s a question you’d have to ask Mike. But he found another way through. Some stuff was happening with Rock music at the time. As I understand it a rehearsal band called White Elephant started, which was like a studio band of all the studio guys who would get together and play after their studio work, and some really interesting music came out of that. Then Mike had a band called L’Image with Tony Levin and I want to say Warren Bernhardt and Steve Gadd, with composition and stuff that was happening in American Pop and Rock music, and playing some very interesting stuff…

TP: He’s one of the first to start creating a sound out of electronic augmentations on the vibes also.

LOCKE: The thing about Mike, if I’m not mistaken… I use a system when I play electric called the K&K Midi-System, and I think Mike Mainieri is in large part responsible for that technology even being in existence. So really an amazing thinker, a conceptualist, someone who gets an idea and just sees it through to its end, to its fruition.

[MUSIC: Mainieri, “Los Dos Lorettas”; Burton/Corea, “Native Dancer”]

TP: We had a caller who wanted very much to know your feelings about Gary Burton’s musicianship, his very distinctive place as an improviser and creator in the music.

LOCKE: I think Gary Burton is one of a kind. In his own way, he’s like Milt, in that when Gary moves on from this sphere no one is going to come along again who approaches the instrument like he does. I mean, it’s freakish how comfortable he is with four mallets playing music on the vibraphone. Gary devised a technique of playing the vibraphone that suited what he needed to express, and he did it in a way that… I think the outcrop of it was that he really messed with a lot of vibe players who came after him, in a different way but similarly that Trane messed up a lot of saxophone players who came after him. I’ll explain that. He devised a technique that for him was like breathing or drinking a glass of water. It was second nature. He worked hard on it, but it’s something that he does naturally. As we speak, there are vibraphonists at home and in conservatory practice rooms, practicing 12 hours a day, trying to do what Gary Burton does. I know for a fact that Gary Burton hasn’t practiced for 20 years. He doesn’t pick up the mallets unless he has something…unless he’s playing. I don’t think he’d mind me saying that. I think it’s common knowledge. It’s unbelievable what he does and how musical he is. And something I respect even more, that I’ve come to appreciate more as I’ve gotten older, is that Gary went his own way. If you listen to him with Stan Getz or with George Shearing in his early years, when he was a teenager, he’s got all the Bebop vocabulary, he’s got all that stuff at his fingers. And he chose to play a different way, because he was hearing something inside that he wanted to express.

TP: To get a tiny bit technical, how would you describe that way that he chose?

LOCKE: Improvisationally, Gary’s playing became less chromatic and more diatonic. He was dealing with modes and scales, and the languages was I think coming from a more European and, at the same time, a more Americana kind of place, but it wasn’t coming from… The place he decided to go to was less of a chromatic Bebop approach. But when you hear him play Bebop or standard tunes, it’s unbelievable. I’ve been working with Eddie Daniels lately, and my first gig with Eddie Daniels’ band was kind of subbing for Gary on the music of Benny Goodman — Benny Rides Again. We did the Ravinia Festival this past summer. I got the music from Eddie, and had to shed this Benny Goodman music, and I got the CD of Burton with Eddie Daniels playing the Benny Goodman music. I know what it’s like to play that music, and it represents some challenges. Lots of fast lines in thirds with the clarinet, and lots of diminished things. Burton plays the stuffing out of that music, and he’s swinging — like unbelievably swinging. So I just can’t say enough about him as a player.

The thing is, there seem to be camps now, people who are into straight-ahead music and people who are into ECM recordings. To me, it’s all music, and if it’s on a high level there shouldn’t be… I don’t have a problem stylistically.

TP: He’s certainly been exploring a lot of areas on his recordings for Stretch. He’s reexplored Astor Piazzola’s music with veterans of Piazzola’s band, then there’s a date of all standards, then duos with Chick Corea…

LOCKE: When I started to play the vibes I was really into Gary Burton. Actually Good Vibes was an album that was one of my first…

TP: Is there a machismo aspect to playing four-mallets for you, that four-mallets is something you have to master?

LOCKE: I went back and forth, from two to four, back to two. I did a duo record with Kenny Barron, and I went back to two mallets. Now I play with four mallets again. Mainly when I’m soloing, I’m holding four, but I’m playing with the two inside ones, and I have the outside ones in case I want to punch up some chords. I can work up some four-mallet stuff, but Burton has taken it to a level that’s incredible. And you know what? He’s got it! He’s amazing. He’s just excellent. He’s doing some amazing things still, and he sound better than ever — just like Mike Mainieri does. These guys who are older than I am, yet when you hear them play they have an exuberance and a youthful vitality that I can only hope I have when I’m their age.

[MUSIC: Locke/Billy Childs, “Blue”]

TP: In this hour we’ll get away from the vibes and hear personal favorites of Joe. Jackie McLean.

LOCKE: This is actually Let Freedom Ring, Jackie’s record, which turned me around and made me want to pursue this music. It really got me into the Blue Note catalogue. When I heard this recording, I felt a change. I felt I’d pursue this music even further. The ballad “I’ll Keep Loving You” is very important to me. I got a chance to meet Jackie when I was a teenager, and it was a big thrill for me. This is the record that sent me on my way. At the time I was listening to more electric stuff and kind of getting in. But this record is really important to me. This is the first album I thought of playing.

[MUSIC: J. McLean, “I’ll Keep Loving You”; Wayne Shorter, “Yes Or No”; John Coltrane, “Crescent”]

LOCKE: Once again, when I thought of coming here, Juju is a record I immediately pulled out along with Let Freedom Ring, because it was an album early on, when I first started to get into acoustic jazz, that really affected me. I played it over and over again. I probably had the copy of the LP three times. And “Crescent,” because that band was so important. I transcribed a lot of Trane’s solos early, and I got a lot of the saxophone language — which actually translates to my instrument, the vibes, quite well. Like, a lot of the stuff he was playing on tenor on that solo I can’t begin to fathom, but the stuff I could actually lays real well on the vibes.

TP: You said you emulated a lot of saxophonists and horn players, but not all of it, I assume, lays equally well on your instrument.

LOCKE: No, it doesn’t. But a lot of stuff, lines that I borrow from Crescent lay easily, meaning you can execute them by playing simple alternate stickings — left-right, left-right, left-right, without having to do a lot of doublings and crossing your arms in front of the other ones and getting into a lot of gymnastics.

TP: Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote the TV show.

LOCKE: Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it surprised me that a lot of that saxophone language could be played on the vibes, because I hadn’t heard it done a lot. Then at that point, too, after checking out Trane on Crescent and realizing I could play some of that stuff, I started to check out Steve Grossman, who was coming out of Trane, and his stuff could be executed on the vibes — and that was real exciting to me. It’s funny to look back on this period my of life and education that I was really-really into saxophone players. It makes me kind of take pause.

[MUSIC: Locke/Handy/Roney/G. Allen, “Wise One”]

TP: Our last set will include recordings by two contemporaries who aren’t as widely known as they should be in the jazz world at large. Walt Weiskopf’s Song For My Mother from 1995, and Darrell Grant from a 1993 recording called Black Art, both on Criss-Cross.

LOCKE: I chose these as recordings from a pair of my contemporaries who I think have an original voice and who I have a lot of respect for. I think Walt is an amazing musician who plays himself on his horn. What they have in common is that they both express themselves so well through their music, and both are wonderful composers. There are lots more of my peers I would like to play. This show actually could have been all my peers and people I respect and admire and have learned so much from.

[MUSIC: Weiskopf, “Three-Armed Man “; Darrell Grant, “Tillman Tones”]

TP: Your first two Milestone dates were concept type records.

LOCKE: I’m really happy about Slander, which is the coming full circle with this band. It has some covers of other people’s music, but it focused primarily on my writing, which wasn’t exhibited in the last two. I’m happy to have that aspect of my voice heard on this CD.

______________________

Joe Locke Blindfold Test (First Edit):

Equally comfortable navigating Cecil Taylor’s complexities, Eddie Palmieri’s grooving Afro-Caribbean flavors, vertiginous chamber jazz with Geoff Keezer and Tim Garland and hardcore swinging blues and bebop, Joe Locke, 56—whose expansive 2015 release, Love Is A Pendulum, is his 34^th album as a leader or co-leader—is a generational avatar of vibraphone expression. This was his first DownBeat Blindfold Test.

Bobby Hutcherson

“I Am In Love” (Mirage, Landmark, 1991) (Hutcherson, vibraphone; Tommy Flanagan, piano; Peter Washington, bass; Billy Drummond, drums)

Someone influenced by Bobby Hutcherson. Oh, it is Bobby! He’s playing very signature lines. It sounds like it’s in a recording studio, but he’s so in the moment he’s playing like it’s a gig. This is the album Bobby made with Tommy Flanagan, Billy Drummond…and the bass player sounds great…it’s Peter Washington. I love this period, which started in the ’70s, when Bobby got into playing structures that ascended and descended, parallel shapes that he’d climb up and down. He developed his own language, and it’s coming through loud and clear. Many of us have aspired to and been inspired and influenced by this combination of incredible harmonic depth and poetic playing. I didn’t feel the vibes sound was recorded well—4½ stars.

Chris Dingman

“Same Coin” (Waking Dreams, Between Worlds, 2011) (Dingman, vibraphone; Fabian Almazan, piano and Fender Rhodes, Joe Sanders, bass; Justin Brown, drums; Erica Von Kleist, flute; Mark Small, bass clarinet)

The pianist reminds me of Ed Simon, though it’s not. My first thought is Stefon Harris, who plays with a great sense of melody, like he’s singing through the instrument. This player has that lovely quality, too, and a nice sound. I like the matching of flute, bass clarinet and vibes with the piano as a carpet underneath it—a lovely conception. The piano solo is beautiful. The vibes solo is terrific—an original voice and much sincerity. 4½ stars.

Stefon Harris

“Thanks For the Beautiful Land On The Delta” (African Tarantella: Dances With Duke, Blue Note, 2006) (Stefon Harris, vibraphone;  Steve Turre, trombone; Anne Drummond, flute; Greg Tardy, clarinet; Xavier Davis, piano; Junah Chung, viola, Louise Dubin, cello; Derrick Hodge, bass; Terreon Gully, drums)

Stefon. African Tarantella? That melodic, singing expression I talked about with Dingman comes through loud and clear here. Not sure if there’s a bass trombone, but the low end is palpable; the piece is emotionally resonant. Beautiful orchestration and arranging. There’s a big, wide-open half-time feel—the drummer knows how to sustain that good feeling and not get in the way while keeping things interesting. I don’t know if Terreon Gully had come on the scene then, or if it’s Eric Harland. 5 stars. It’s exciting to hear a vibes player who transcends the instrument, and makes music on those 37 cold bars. Stefon’s playing has poetry and fire, intellectual rigor, and the blues are intact.

Dave Samuels

“Resemblance” (Tjader-ized, Verve, 1998) (Samuels, vibraphone; Eddie Palmieri, piano; Joe Santiago, bass; Bobbie Allende, Marc Quiñones, percussion)

Cal Tjader? It sounds like something I recorded with Eddie Palmieri when we re-did the El Sonido Nuevo album on KUVO in Denver. The vibes have crisp, precise, beautiful articulation like Gary Burton. A very strong linear improviser. Ah! Dave Samuels. That sounds like Eddie on piano. They’re playing beautifully together. 4½ stars.

Warren Wolf

“Annoyance” (Wolfgang, Mack Avenue, 2013) (Wolf, vibraphone; Benny Green, piano; Christian McBride, bass; Lewis Nash, drums)

[after 4 bars] Warren Wolf. Warren’s phrasing is beautiful. The combination of almost childlike consonance, and then little dissonances thrown in as though something is encroaching, is an interesting compositional device. Besides being a wonderful melodic improviser, Warren has the blues in his playing. His dazzling chops and speed impress people, but what hits me most is his soulful delivery. Warren makes it sound easy, but if that were easy to do on the vibes, more people would do it! 5 stars.

Dave Holland

“Amator Silenti” (Critical Mass, Dare2, 2006) (Holland, bass; Steve Nelson, vibraphone and marimba; Chris Potter, tenor saxophone; Robin Eubanks, trombone; Nate Smith, drums)

I’ll guess Dave Holland—and Steve Nelson—because of the instrumentation. It’s a heartfelt, romantic track, showing a side of the quintet that I miss in some other writing for it. It goes from that very consonant, open, beautiful sound into the freeway, from the most inside to the most outside within a few minutes! Steve is the composer? When he writes, it’s a good one. You can tell they’ve made a lot of music together by the way they’re dialoguing, speaking with one voice. I like the colors created by different instrumental combinations. Stunning. 5 stars.

Jason Adasiewicz’s Sun Rooms

“Bees” (Spacer, Delmark, 2011) (Adasiewicz, vibraphone; Nate McBride, bass; Mike Reed, drums)

After 16 bars, Jason Adasiewicz. An album called Sun Rooms. I don’t consider this avant-garde, but it represents an aesthetic that’s thriving in Chicago. I’m not moved by him as a linear improviser, but I love what he does sonically. On this track, for example, he speeds up and slows down the motor for an aesthetic effect, which Matt Moran of the Claudia Quintet does. He’s exploring textures in a cool way; it’s valid to use all the possibilities at your disposal on an instrument whose possibilities are inherently—or ostensibly—very limited. I wouldn’t go back to it to get my head right on any given day, but I appreciate it. That I could identify it as Jason means he has a voice. 3 stars.

Dave Pike

“Forward” (It’s Time For Dave Pike, Riverside, 1961/2001) (Pike, vibraphone;  Barry Harris, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Billy Higgins, drums)

Dave Pike. The Bud Powell of the vibes. It’s Time For Dave Pike? So it’s Barry Harris. One of the greatest bebop vibes records ever. I’m surprised I didn’t know it at first, but this track didn’t ring a bell. It doesn’t get any better. Dave Pike is a great, eloquent bebop improviser, on the level of Sonny Stitt, but doing it on the vibraphone—and he sounds very different than Bags. 5 stars.

For Terence Blanchard’s 63rd Birthday, articles and interviews from 1995 through 2020

This post collects most of my encounters with Terence Blanchard, who recently added to his formidable c.v. the Artistic Director position at SFJazz. The announcement came a few months after the Metropolitan Opera staged his opera, Fire Shut Up In My Bones, following its 2021 staging of Champion. In the meantime, Blanchard has continued to add to his film scoring credits, recently played a weekend retrospective of his jazz activity at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and spent a good chunk of summer 2023 on tour with Herbie Hancock. You can read all about the maestro’s current activities elsewhere, but this omnibus post — with the transcript of a 1995 WKCR Musician Show, a 1997 DB Blindfold Test, a 2001 DB cover story (and interviews for the  piece with Clark Terry and Branford Marsalis), a 2015 piece for Jazziz and a 2020 piece for Jazziz — is interesting to scan. (I seem not to have a digital file of a 2009 Jazziz piece that touched on Blanchard’s excellent album Choices.)

**********

Terence Blanchard Interview for Jazziz– 2020:

When I last spoke with Terence Blanchard, in 2015, I asked him to discuss the synergy between the detailed, painstaking process of composing movie soundtracks and the no-holds-barred approach to improvising he’s projected during a 38-year career as one of the world’s most esteemed jazz trumpeters and bandleaders.

            “My jazz background allows me to think quickly on my feet in the film world,” Blanchard responded. “A given story contains various emotional components, and you see the limitless nature of music, how one idea, one through-line, can be expressed in so many ways. Some people think it’s limiting to stay within the context of the story, but it’s actually very liberating,”

            Testifying to Blanchard’s ability to contextualize narrative with notes and tones is an end-of-2020 c.v. containing 100-plus film, television and theater scores. Many were commissioned by Spike Lee, beginning with Jungle Fever in 1991, and including such high-profile works as Malcolm X, Four Little Girls, Bamboozled, Inside Job, Chi-Raq, and BlacKkKlansman, for which Blanchard earned a 2019 Oscar nomination.

            Most recently, Lee recruited Blanchard for Da 5 Bloods, a daring, sardonic Vietnam epic that proceeds to Blanchard’s vivid symphonic canvas. Shortly after its June Netflix release, HBO aired the audaciously noirish 8-episode Perry Mason, set in Jim Crow Los Angeles at the height of the Great Depression in 1932. Blanchard conjured a novelistic score to propel and signify on the twists and turns of a multi-layered narrative that features the title character as a PTSD-afflicted World War I survivor, reimagines his colleague Della Street as queer, and morphs his chief investigator Paul Drake into a Black man.

            Add to Blanchard’s 2020 credits two directorial debuts: Bruised, by Halle Berry, who plays the lead as a traumatized boxer; and A Night In Miami, by 2019 Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Regina King, a well-acted ensemble piece portraying the course of a 1964 encounter between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in Malcolm’s motel room after Ali – then Cassius Clay – won the heavyweight championship of the world.

            “I love the grandness, the emotional quality of Terence’s scores,” says Kasi Lemmons,  who commissioned her fourth on the 2019 release Harriet, in which, under Lemmons’ direction, Anglo-Nigerian actress Cynthia Arivo inhabits Harriet Tubman’s persona. Lemmons concurrently wrote the libretto for Blanchard’s second opera, The Fire That Burns Within, initially staged by the St. Louis Opera in 2018, which is scheduled to open the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-22 season.

            “Terence elevates whatever you’re trying to work on,” Lemmons says. “I told him that this was my version of a superhero movie, and that the soul and driving momentum of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinner Man’ felt very appropriate. I talked to him about ancestors. He understood it, like he always does. He nailed it.”           

            Perry Mason’s Executive Producer and primary director, Tim Van Patten — who served that same function for four seasons of Boardwalk Empire after directing 20 episodes of The Sopranos — was similarly enthusiastic about Blanchard’s intuitive mojo. “Terence was completely dialed-in to the tone of this show — the narratives and identified themes,” Van Patten, says. “I’d give him a few notes and say, ‘Go for it.’ I felt no ego at all. He created a forensic arc, where you could track the characters through his music within the eight hours. He did what we call end title scores that commented emotionally on each individual episode and gave a nod to the next episode. That’s complicated stuff, and it’s a lot of writing. I’ve never come across that before. It blew my mind. I was in the hands of a master.”

 

**********************

TERENCE BLANCHARD: Tim told me, “We have to think of it like a long film with eight chapters.” The music had to take you on that journey as the episodes evolved. I didn’t want to do period music, which I thought would be too on the nose. Instead, I used elements from the early 1930s and tried to make them more contemporary. They found great locations, created a great look, the acting was amazing — everything was on point. All the emotional content was right on the screen. My job was to enhance it; there was no need to push any buttons or go deeper into anything.

JAZZIZ:  Perry Mason isn’t a “Black” show, quote-unquote. It’s not associated with a Black director or an African-American theme.

TB:  People probably think a Black composer may not be right for that project. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s such a daring approach to a remake of Perry Mason — it was logical to try something daring for the music in post-production.

How long did it take to write the score?

TB:  I started before Covid. It affected how we could record. For one thing, I probably would have had a big band, but instead I used five saxophones, string quartet, piano, bass, drums and myself. Normally we’d have a bunch of musicians play together in the room, the engineer mixes it and then sends it off. Instead, everybody did everything individually. We’d send their parts to an editor, who put them in ProTools and made sure everything lined up. Then we’d send that to a mixer. It was pretty arduous.

In distinction to your other recent soundtracks, you play a fair amount of trumpet.

TB:  Yes, on every episode I’m playing someplace. That wasn’t at all what I set out to do. But Covid limited the number of musicians I could use at a session, and I couldn’t be in the room with someone else if a lead instrument was needed – so I felt it was up to me to be lead voice.

A very different ambiance than One Night in Miami.

TB:  Initially I gave Regina King some Latin-based and blues-based demos. But she kept coming back to bluesy, jazz-based solo piano with a gospel influence. I immediately thought Benny Green would be perfect, and sent him thematic ideas. Once Regina started to hear where I was going, we got into more detail about what the piano should do improvisationally during specific scenes. There is the main theme. There is the Malcolm X theme that starts off when he’s praying, where I introduce the duduk. The main theme winds up being a more playful thing for Cassius Clay. With Jim Brown, it’s introspective; with Sam Cooke it’s fun-loving. There are a couple of other transitional groove-based things. I also generated some atmospheric stuff, and there’s a song in the front that I wrote with Tank and the Bangas and Keb Mo, the great blues guitarist, that Jim Brown listens to while he’s driving through Georgia. But the main focus of the score is piano.   

            I love that the film portrays these four African-American men expressing various modes of thinking that we experience in our community that are all very valid. In my mind, the score is another character — a character of unity, like the conscience of the characters. It’s right there with all the action, but it isn’t underscoring everything. It’s not trying to make huge statements. It’s another tone.

            It’s a different sonic approach from Bruised, where I use a lot of atmospheric tones, but most of the score is centered around cello, played by Malcolm Parsons, who is part of the Turtle Island String Quartet. I recently recorded an album of Wayne Shorter’s music with them and the E-Collective — we’re still trying to figure out how to release it. Since we couldn’t be in a studio, I sent things to Malcolm, he’d record and send them back. I’d mix them into my session  with everything else I had going on — rhythmic, sonic, harmonic — and send to Halle for critiques. It’s a brooding score, because Halle’s character is struggling through some dark elements to find herself on the other side of what she’s going through in her life. It’s very powerful.

For Da 5 Bloods you used a 90-piece orchestra, as you’d done some years before on Spike Lee’s Miracle of Saint Anna. Talk about your process.

TB:   It was like working on anything Spike sends my way. First I step back a second, because I’m captivated by what I’m watching. With 90 pieces, you have room to shape colors and tones that can constantly evolve and grow, and then diminish, and then grow again. At the beginning of the session, with 90 people sitting in front of you, there’s always this nerve-wracking moment, hoping that all the music is right. But then you get the incredible experience of feeling the power of 90 people play something you’ve written. By the way, young African-American musicians came from all over to be part of that session — some from Canada, some from New York, some from Mexico.

            Spike uses source music to cover the period and location, so I never have to worry about that, even though I may use some of those elements in the score. Here, the songs from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On made total sense. I was thinking: How do I make this a grand story? How do I rise to the occasion? That opening sequence, where the helicopter is shot down, has so much information, it took me five days to score it — three days to plot it out on piano, the next few days to orchestrate it. That set the tone for the rest of the film. My job is to connect the audience to the characters themselves. For example, for the theme with Clarke Peters (Otis) and the woman he had the child with, Tiên, I bring in the duduk. The music shows Otis’ softer side — and actually a bit of his comedic side — when he sees the young girl and starts to drink the wine. Even though Tiên hasn’t said anything, we know what’s going on as soon as the girl walks into the frame.

How did Kasi Lemmons present Harriet to you?

TB: That she saw Harriet Tubman as a superhero, that it wasn’t a slave film — only in the first five minutes does Harriet deal with slavery in the form we normally see. The rest is about Harriet’s journey, how she became this incredibly strong woman on a mission to save all these souls. The first scene where she crosses the river is the one that informed me what the film should be.

            Everyone on Harriet felt we had to do 110%. During the shooting, whenever someone got weak or tired, we’d think: Harriet Tubman was a diminutive woman but her energy and spirit was boundless. We kept that in front of us as motivation. No one talked about anything extraneous. It was: “What are we going to do for Harriet?” People probably will refer to this film for many years. It may be used in classrooms to teach about Harriet Tubman. When you think about it on that scale, you can freak out a bit. The last time that happened to me was when I did Malcolm X for Spike. Everybody was a little nervous. Wynn Thomas [cinematographer] told me: “Look, we all want to do 150%, but if we want to do that, the best thing is to do our jobs.” That calmed me down. I thought about it during Harriet:  “Ok, let me do what I have been doing and focus on helping tell the story.”

Kasi Lemmons also wrote the libretto for your second opera, Fire Shut Up In My Bones, adapted from Charles Blow’s memoir.

Kasi told me she loved opera when I first worked with her on Eve’s Bayou; we talked about this opera when we spoke about Harriet. I’ve always loved her writing, and I knew she’d write something fantastic. Opera Theater of St. Louis brought Charles, Kasi and myself to St. Louis for a meeting. Kasi followed Charles everywhere, like a super-sleuth investigator, asking questions. So I knew she’d come up with ideas. When she started creating the imagery with Jim Robinson, the director, it set me thinking what I might do for the different characters. Now that it’s going to the Metropolitan Opera, we’ll meet again to make changes and develop some of the characters.

I’ve seen clips on Youtube that show a demotic, vernacular libretto. Does the score mirror that?

TB:   No, I wouldn’t say that. My composition teacher, Roger Dickerson, told me years ago that my respective experiences as a jazz musician and a film composer will probably come together in a way that I couldn’t yet envision. He said: “You should think about how to notate some of those things you do in jazz for the orchestra.”

            That’s what I thought about when it came time to write Fire Shut Up In My Bones. I tried to draw upon all my experiences as a musician — from jazz, from orchestras, from teaching — to hopefully create something a little different in the opera world. I thought about Benny Golson. I thought about all the great jazz artists who have come before me. I thought about some of the great classical voices I’ve heard. And I tried to write something that would have the flow of a jazz composition and the strong melodic content of great Classical American music. Puccini’s La Boheme is one of my favorite operas, and one thing that blows my mind every time I listen to it (which happens in old American musicals, too) is how the melody develops like the words do. How they’re so intertwined. I didn’t want my opera to sound like I was jerking off just to try to make a musical point. I wanted to marry the development of the melodic line to the emotional development of the words being sung. That’s more important to me than anything.

Is your process for opera and film similar or different?

TB: With opera, I might sit at the piano for a day, trying to find a rhythm that makes sense for a couple of lines. On films I have less time to flesh those things out. I’m sitting at my keyboard, surrounded by all my other colors and instruments.

Most of your development as a composer was not the product of formal study at an institution of higher learning. You were a working musician when you attended Rutgers.

TB: During high school, I studied with Dr. Bert Braud at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and then privately with Roger Dickerson. Both are brilliant and taught me all my techniques without opening a book. They gave me the rules and wrote out the lessons in a notebook. Roger was so adept at knowing what I needed to hear, what I needed to work on.

            When we did my first opera, Champion in Washington D.C., I flew out Roger and his wife. The second night, we went to dinner with friends; one of them asked him really intricate questions. Roger started out saying, “You know, four-bar phrases are the death knell of creativity.” I went, “Damn, I thought that was my idea.” Every time he said something I’d think, “Wow, I thought that was mine, too.” So I started to realize how much this guy influenced my life. He helped shape my thinking in all areas. Later, I read Paul Hindemith’s The Craft of Musical Composition, and found that everything Roger taught me was in that book! Roger said: “You were a kid, just 16 years old. So I figured out ways to give you the same information.”

In past conversations, you’ve described learning to play jazz by listening to one thing in granular detail, rather than studying a lot of different things. Was this your process in becoming a film composer?

TB:  The exact same thing. Denzel Washington took me to the premiere of Glory. Then I got the soundtrack, listened to it over and over, and started to break it down into core elements. Once I got one thing, I’d move on to another. Then I became a big fan of Thomas Newman’s score to Shawshank Redemption, and did the same thing. I listened over and over to the cue from the scene where James Whitmore hung himself. It’s simplistic, but very beautiful.

            I’m that nerd, man. My kids and my wife laugh at me. Even when I’m not working, if I’m not practicing or watching sports, I’m online reading about gear, or reading about processes, or reading about something – trying to learn and get better. I don’t have a team of people like some  others do. It’s just me. So I need to constantly fine-tune. Years ago, I saw a Magic Johnson interview where he said that, every off-season, he tried to add something to his game. I try to do that as a musician. After I finish Bruised, I’m going to get back into practicing. Because of Covid, I don’t have any performances. So I’ll have time to sit down and focus on some things. I’m excited.

You played piano before you were serious about the trumpet. Any remarks on your piano background and the impact of your father’s musical taste and character and personality on the way you function?

TB:   I started playing piano when I was 5 years old, because my grandmother had a piano at the house and I’d always try to find some sounds in it. Then they started me on lessons. In my house, we heard operatic music and classical music. So my early musical upbringing was based on a classical sensibility. The jazz that I heard was Oscar Peterson and Andre Previn on the Tonight Show or some televised production.

            My father was an insurance salesman. He was great with numbers, and would play little math games with me. He loved music, and he was a workaholic. That’s probably why I’m the way I am now. If my father wasn’t working on balancing the books from his insurance accounts, he was sitting at the piano, going through music he had to sing that weekend in church or at a performance. He was a one-finger piano player. He’d sing his part, then play the tenor part against what he’d sung, then play the alto and soprano parts. Essentially, he knew everybody’s part. I thought he was nuts. But later I realized that he had a serious passion for music. Sometimes he’d put on an opera: “Hey, hey, boy, come here; sit down, listen… Now listen to those strings. You see how the oboe comes in right there?” It’s almost like he was planting the seed within me to do opera now, without my even realizing it.

I recall a remark you made that your father and Roger Dickerson and Ellis Marsalis and Alvin Batiste gave you models for successful African-American men in that particular moment.

TB:   Nobody had money. Nobody was living a lavish lifestyle. But that didn’t diminish their passion or love for what they were into. They were men of integrity who worked their hardest to be the best they could at whatever they were doing. When I was young, that’s just who they were to me. I didn’t know any better. When I was around Ellis or Roger, it was the same energy as being around my dad, or my Uncle Rick, who sang with my dad, or a guy at my church, Osceola Blanchet, who taught operatic music to my dad and all these other Black men in New Orleans. Or being around Kidd Jordan, who was totally different than those dudes, but just as passionate for what he did as they were for what they did. They all appreciated each other. I feel blessed that those images in early life helped shape who I am.

Given the scope of your recent activity, do you feel very conscious about your status as one of a fairly small number of Black film composers?

TB:   I don’t want to ever be the guy who dropped the ball. Benny Golson, Oliver Nelson, all those dudes broke their backs for me to have this opportunity — even though they did it for me inadvertently. That’s the fear when I’m standing in front of a 90-piece orchestra. I’m not going to be the guy who’s unorganized, who seems like he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

            I used to joke with Marcus Miller that we couldn’t be in the same room at the same time, because if the building blows up there’s two-thirds of the Black film composers gone. It’s an awful joke to tell, but it reflects the reality. And now, it’s not just about African-Americans, but also women — more people getting opportunities to score. They’re bringing different sensibilities, which is cool. I used to ask Miles Goodman about helping me learn more about film scoring, and he said: “No, I’m not going to work with you. Your weaknesses are your strengths. You’re going to bring something different to the world of film. If I teach you, you may wind up doing some similar things as I do. I don’t want that. Your uniqueness is what the film world needs.”

 

Terence Blanchard, “Blanchard’s Groove” – Jazziz 2015:

The origin story of Breathless, Terence Blanchard’s spring Blue Note release with his new group, E-Collective, dates to 2006, when Blanchard recorded the soundtrack he’d composed for Inside Man, the Spike Lee caper film in which Denzel Washington plays a hard-boiled old-school detective. He hired drummer Oscar Seaton for the session, and dug Seaton’s mighty grooves. Seaton enjoyed the process, too, and they agreed to collaborate in the future. Around this time, Blanchard, who lives in New Orleans, where he was born and raised, had a similar conversation with bassist Donald Ramsey, an old Crescent City acquaintance.

            Nothing happened right away. Blanchard attended to his duties as Artistic Director of the Thelonious Monk Institute and, after 2011, the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami. He composed more soundtracks, two Broadway shows, an opera, and music for several albums by the working quintet — in this period, either Bryce Winston or Walter Smith on tenor saxophone, Fabian Almazan on piano and keyboards, Derrick Hodge or Joshua Crumbly on bass and Kendrick Scott or Justin Brown on drums — that had been his default basis of operations since the early 1990s. Then, last spring, Blanchard decided to commit. He asked Almazan to join a plugged-in band with Seaton, Ramsey and guitarist Charles Altura, whom he’d heard on a YouTube clip with Ambrose Akinmusire, once Blanchard’s student at the Monk Institute.

            During the summer, Blanchard, 54, wrote a batch of danceable tunes built on funk, Afro-pop and hip-hop beats, with succinct melodies and enough harmonic information to facilitate improvisational flexibility. In October he brought E-Collective to New Orleans for two days of rehearsal, and embarked on a three-and-a-half-week European tour for beta-testing and refinement. In December, he reconvened the musicians in New Orleans for the recording.

            In February, Blanchard brought a modified version of E-Collective — Burniss Earl Traviss played bass; Kimberley Thompson played drums — to Russia’s Triumph of Jazz Festival for three weekend concerts at separate venues in St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the final, Sunday event, at Moscow’s International House of Music, they played five instrumentals from Breathless,  among them “See Me As I Am,” a funky-yet-plaintive 9-note theme with a stomping, work song feel; “Confident Selflessness,” which refracted Afro-fusion a la[i] Joe Zawinul; and “Soldiers,” a brisk blues over a skittery New Orleans groove. It was a compelling tour de force — freewheeling, experimental, kinetic — marked by balls-out, thematically cogent solos from the front-liners.

            The leader directed the flow with body language and transitional passages on laptop synth, and said his piece on a string of inflamed declamations that exploited his full-bodied command of the trumpet’s higher register and an ability to calibrate cries, shrieks and whoops precisely, sometimes unplugged, sometimes with real-time, foot-pedal-triggered processing. He danced his way through the rhythmic web in the manner of ’70s-era Miles Davis, bobbing and weaving, leaning back and bending forward, prancing left and right, forward and back.

            On Breathless, Blanchard contextualizes the instrumentals with a palpable narrative arc, mirroring such recent opuses as 2007’s A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem For Katrina) and 2009’s Choices. As on Choices, he conveys his core message via a soliloquy by Cornell West, in this case a meditation on Dr. Martin Luther King’s “prescient and prophetic” warnings on the enduring costs to America of economic inequality, racism and militarism. “You break the barrier at the highest level, break through the ceiling, even with a black man and a black woman and two impressive black children in the White House,” West intones. “But too many folks are in the basement — because they’ve never been concerned about the poor … nobody on his economic team.”

            Unlike its recent predecessors, Breathless features a vocalist, the New Orleans singer P.J. Morton, who opens the proceedings with an incantatory reading of Gene McDaniels’ cynical, demotic Vietnam-era lament “Compared to What,” his sweet, church-inflected tenor setting up a fierce Blanchard solo. Morton quiet-storms Hank Williams’ melancholy, posthumously issued ballad “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But Time.” His rendering of Blanchard’s despairing lyric on “Shutting Down” oozes plaintiveness, echoed by the composer’s long, piercing wails on trumpet.

[BREAK]

Blanchard’s bandmates, each young enough to be his child, returned to the United States on Monday morning, but he remained behind for a Tuesday concert with the Moscow State Jazz Orchestra at Spaso House, the official residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Russia. He took time off from fine-tuning the rough mix of Breathless to meet me for lunch in the restaurant of the opulent hotel next door to the concert hall.

            “At the rehearsals, I told the band I wanted groove-based music, to appeal to young people and get them more interested in playing instrumental music on a high level,” Blanchard said. “But I vacillated about how far to go creatively. Should it be more like Weather Report or more R&B-based? Then I decided not even to go down that road, but let it unfold as the guys played together — let it be what it’s supposed to be.”

            Blanchard was asked about the match-up of his no-holds-barred attitude to improvising and the detailed, painstaking process of composing movie soundtracks. The Internet Movie Database lists 58, including 13 for Spike Lee, among them Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, Four Little Girls and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. “Some people think it’s limiting to stay within the context of the story, but it’s actually very liberating,” he said. “The story contains various emotional components, and you see the limitless nature of music, how one idea, one through-line, can be expressed in so many ways. We try to tell a story throughout the entire show, not just on a particular piece. My background as a composer shows me how to develop my ideas, while keeping the content within that context.  I remember watching Betty Carter, who went seamlessly from tune to tune, not even giving you a chance to blink. It involved you in her world.”

            Through film, Blanchard added, “I’ve realized you’re trying to tap into a bigger purpose than the notes or the rhythm or the harmony.” He referenced aphorisms to this effect from Art Blakey, who employed him in the Jazz Messengers between 1982 and 1986 (“We’re all trying to find our grits”), and Cornel West (“We’re always trying to find our own truths”),  and also paraphrased John Coltrane (“You’ve got to learn how to become in tune to the universe when you play”). A tour with Herbie Hancock about a decade ago introduced Blanchard to Buddhist practice; he meditates and chants to still his mind.

            “You need to remove that chatter in the brain,” he said. “‘Am I good enough to do this? Should I be here doing this? Man, look at all the records I’ve listened to.’ When you start to play, you might have an idea — a shape — of what the solo should be. You’ve got to throw that away, or someone else will play something unrelated to what’s in your mind, and you’ll be fucked. I always tell myself to try to find my voice. Think in terms of a soulful calling — trying to express an honest emotion. Let it roll. Sometimes it’s through melody. I try to make sure the melodies are free and not bound by what’s happening harmonically. Sometimes I get caught up in what the guys are playing, and I stop just to let it hang.

            “The cry you hear is from trying to be heard, to get my point across. When are people truly going to learn that we’re all the same? You would think in our country, where we want to talk about American exceptionalism and being the best at everything, we would be the best at race relations — and we’re not.”

            Blanchard attributed his embrace of a no-safety-net attitude to private lessons with composer Roger Dickerson circa 1977-78, when he transferred from a prestigious Catholic high school to spend mornings in a public high school and afternoons at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. His classmates included Wynton and Branford Marsalis, who would facilitate his recruitment to the Jazz Messengers, and Donald Harrison, his front-line partner in the Messengers, with whom he would form the influential Harrison-Blanchard Quintet in 1984.

            “Roger told me to learn to listen to the music tell you what it’s supposed to be,” Blanchard said. “When you compose, these little ideas are screaming at you; your ego is telling you it needs to be something else, that it’s not related to what you’re writing.” To reinforce this truism, Dickerson taught a concept called “If I could tell you, I would,” which he had distilled, Blanchard found out a decade later, from Arnold Schoenberg’s The Craft of Musical Composition.

            “I teach it wherever I go,” he continued. “I have the students manipulate those words into as many sentences as they can, to show how many permutations one can create in what appears to be a limited set of circumstances. Then I take any musical theme they have, and run it up every degree of the scale or whatever key it’s in. All the intervallic relationships change, but the melodic shape stays the same. That proves that the shape, not the intervals, is the musical idea; they can create an entire composition using only their original ideas.”

            Moving in the fast company provided by the Marsalis brothers and Harrison also facilitated Blanchard’s development and spurred his work ethic. “I first met them after fifth grade, and when I saw them again, those dudes were playing their behinds off,” he stated. “I knew I had a lot of work to do, but I had a passion for it. My dad had put in a fake bar with lights that turned when you turned on the record player in it, and weekends, instead of going out, I’d sit home and play my Miles Davis records. I’d listen to one track over and over, first listening to the trumpet, then the saxophone, then the bass — trying to figure out what is jazz. But all of us were driven. Wynton and I made a pact that if we ever caught each other doing some bullshit, we needed to call each other on it.”

            Blanchard also cited the active influence of a cohort of African-American male role models, not least his father, Joseph Oliver, who sold insurance and sang opera locally. “Dad would practice his pieces at the piano, and when he finished, he’d balance his books on an adding machine on a cardboard table,” Blanchard said. “At NOCCA, Ellis Marsalis constantly talked about practicing and how much he had to work. He and Kidd Jordan and Alvin Batiste and Roger were my benchmark for being a successful African-American man in this country. They weren’t making money or getting stardom. They were serious about their craft because they loved it. That’s my orientation. I work hard at this stuff for no other reason than the mere fact that I love it.”

[BREAK]

“I’m looking for musicians who are inquisitive,” Blanchard said. That aspiration was evident throughout Sunday’s concert in Moscow, not least on Almazan’s “Everglades,” which emerged from Blanchard’s dreamy synth line that steered the composer into a Chopin-esque ballad upon which he created stark, forceful variations from which Blanchard piggybacked into a fiery, processed solo that incorporated mysterious overtones and echoes into the flow.

            “Sometimes in jazz, you learn a certain style and improvise within that style,” Blanchard said. “Well, Wayne Shorter said jazz means ‘I dare you.’ I want people who are willing to try anything, and then help me to learn from those things as they are learning.”

            If the band’s unconstrained approach to the raw materials reflected Blanchard’s leadership style, so did the inclusion of Almazan’s contribution, the latest in a string of pieces Blanchard has incorporated from younger personnel — Edward Simon, Eric Harland, Lionel Loueke, Aaron Parks, Derrick Hodge, Bryce Winston, Walter Smith III and Almazan — on the leading edge of 21st-century jazz expression.

            “I’d never really played in 5/4 and 7/4, and those guys did it well, so I felt like the one who was behind the 8-ball,” he said of the salutary effects of eliciting original music from younger partners, as Art Blakey did when he and Donald Harrison played together in the Messengers. “To develop a high level of expression, they have to write and have a place to perform it and work it out. Where better than in a band with people you play with regularly, whose rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities you trust? Hearing your compositions up against something else can be a wakeup call, but that only happens with guys who really are trying to find themselves.”

            In a sense, Blanchard said, he experiences this dynamic in meeting the varied challenges presented by film scoring. “I always say that my jazz background allows me to think quickly on my feet in the film world,” he said. He described his process on Inside Job, which includes old-school funk, atonal string music and remixes of the Sufi-based pop song “Chaiyya Chaiyya,” which Spike Lee appropriated from the Bollywood romantic thriller Dil Se.

            “Spike found the Indian song, and told me he’d use it for the opening and closing, which made it an element. For one area at the end, he wanted a string quartet. ‘Oh-kay! A string quartet it is.’ He decided to use a love theme I’d written as the main theme. I had to figure out how to make this very intimate sound that I initially heard into something more menacing. The Roger Dickerson experience was extremely helpful. It allowed me to see all those musical ideas in various forms.”

            Blanchard’s experience with Dickerson and his other New Orleans mentors is a key reason why he returned to the Crescent City from Brooklyn midway through the ’90s, as was his desire to be near his children after a divorce. “I learned a lot in New York, but every time I went home I’d remember why I was doing this,” he said. “Being in New Orleans kept my feet to the ground, reminding me every day of the guys I heard growing up whose dedication came from sheer passion.

            “Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie aren’t around to tell people any more. It’s up to us. We have to start saying, ‘Listen, this is how I did this, and this is how you can do this.’”

SIDEBAR

Title: Punchy Music

Terence Blanchard has recently been making his mark as a composer in Broadway theater, with credits that include the Chris Rock vehicle The Motherf**ker With A Hat and a revival of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. But no recent achievement gives him greater joy than his first opera, Champion: An Opera In Jazz, commissioned by the St. Louis Opera Theater, which staged six sold-out shows in June 2013.

Champion is a two-act, 10-scene account of the life and times of welterweight boxing champion Emile Griffith. (The libretto is by Tony-Award winning playwright Michael Cristofer, with whom Blanchard worked on the films Gia and Original Sin.) Griffith, who died in 2013, is best remembered for the denouement of his third title match with the Cuban boxer Benny “the Kid” Paret, who Griffith knocked out to win the championship in 1961, lost to in a split decision later that year, and defeated again in 1962, attacking his opponent — who had outed and mocked Griffith’s closeted homosexuality during the weigh-in — with such ferocity that Paret died as a consequence.

            Blanchard is no stranger to contact sports, having played Pop Warner football well enough in late-adolescence to be placed on an all-city team (“I was strong for my age”), before his father forbade further activity. “My dad sang opera, and it was very important for me to get through this,” he said. “When they brought me onstage to take a bow after the premier, Arthur Woodley, who plays the older Emile, grabbed me and said, ‘Your dad would be proud.’ I was like a little baby.”

            For Blanchard — who trains with former world heavyweight champion Michael Bentt, who he met during the early ’00s while working on Dark Blue, with director Ron Silver — boxing is analogous to jazz. “After you learn the fundamentals and proper technique, it all goes out the window when the bell rings,” he said. “It’s a chess match — out-thinking your opponent, being a couple of moves ahead. Michael never felt one of his greatest knockout punches; he was in a zone, and it seemed effortless. I feel that way sometimes on the bandstand, that I’m witnessing myself as the audience is.”

            He stated that high-level boxers feel the same passion for their sport as his own peer group feels for music. “I was in the gym with Virgil Jones, who trains [WBA super-middleweight champion] Andre Ward. I was hitting the heavy bag, and some trainers saw me. They didn’t know who I was. They said, ‘Man, you got a nice power shot.’ They don’t care. I’m not competing! It’s the same thing with musicians. If you go out and hear a kid who can play, you go, ‘Man, that guy’s got a good sound.’”

 

Terence Blanchard (Downbeat Readers Poll cover story – 2001):

 

By his estimation, Terence Blanchard has spent 12 to 14 months out of the last 18 on the road, primarily with his band, so his itinerary on this Friday doesn’t vary so greatly different from his quotidian routine.  The previous evening Blanchard interrupted his work on the score for “Original Sin,” a feature film starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas scheduled for early 2001 release, to board a late-night flight to New York; after a few hours sleep, he met a crew from “CBS Sunday Morning” to shoot street footage and interviews for a forthcoming segment.  Now he’s sitting in a stuffy van that is crawling crosstown through afternoon Manhattan traffic en route to the waterfront Long Island home of Clark Terry to shoot the photographs of the issue you have in hand.  Along for the ride are Robin Burgess, who is Blanchard’s manager and his wife, photographer David Bartolemi, who is doubling as chauffeur, Bartolemi’s 20-year-old assistant, a publicist and a journalist.  As we nibble takeout Pad Thai and Dim Sim, the discussion ranges from the “game face” that Sonny Rollins suddenly took on directly before the curtain rose on a Rollins-Blanchard Carnegie Hall concert several years before, segueing to complaints about journalists who pose sneak-attack questions, morphing to disquisitions on athletes who are and are not role models — as we approach Terry’s home, it concludes with a heartfelt critique on the manner in which jazz business inhibits the creative endeavors of musicians.

 

Blanchard’s performance fees are not insubstantial, but, with 29 films under his belt, he doesn’t tour out of financial necessity.  “There’s been a lot of question about my sincerity as a jazz musician,” he had noted the previous Monday in a phone conversation from his office in the New Orleans Garden District.  “For me, that’s a ludicrous question.  I could easily make more money just writing films, but I’m still out on the road.  I love playing music, I love playing jazz, and it will never be my choice to give that up.” 

 

This year’s release, “Wandering Moon,” reinforces that assertion.  It’s a de facto suite of Blanchard compositions that touch metaphorically on the alienation from family and roots that road life necessitates while emphatically celebrating the imperatives that keep him traveling.  “It culminates some ideas I set in motion a while ago,” the 38-year-old trumpeter says.  “During my shows, I’d play some of my tunes and then things by Duke Ellington or Wayne Shorter or some standards, and started to hear the deficiencies in my own writing style.  It was a wakeup call.  I realized that I needed to internalize other people’s music by playing it on the road for a while.”  Blanchard documented that search with “The Billie Holiday Songbook” (1994); the Grammy-nominated “The Heart Speaks” (1996), an interpretative collaboration with Brazilian composer-singer Ivan Lins on which Blanchard’s consonant, vocalized sound and romantic sensibility were fully on display; and the well-received “Jazz On Film” (1999), on which, with help from an A-list ensemble, he rescored and rearranged eight film music classics plus his theme for Spike Lee’s “Clockers.”

 

“It seemed to be the right time to get back to original music,” Blanchard remarks of “Wandering Moon”; as the “Downbeat” electorate noted, the album is a triumph.  Blanchard’s resourceful young working band (Brice Winston, tenor sax; Aaron Fletcher, alto sax; Ed Simon, piano; Eric Harland, drums), seasoned by authoritative veterans Branford Marsalis on tenor and Dave Holland on bass, interprets with a no-holds barred improvisational attitude the leader’s rhythmically intricate extended form compositions, replete with memorable melodies that define harmonic progression.  They take their cue from Blanchard, who seems able to execute any idea that enters his mind.  His instrumental voice denotes a man comfortable in his own skin, capable of articulating a vocabulary that encompasses a wide range of human experience.  Some have described the voice as dark; it could as easily be termed urbane, cerebral, erotic, lyric, immutably inflected with a blues sensibility.

 

“My favorite instrument in the world is the human voice, but I can’t sing,” Blanchard laughs.  “I read a quote by Maurice Andre where he talked about having the experience of not feeling the horn in his hands, like he was just singing through the instrument.  I’ve never gotten there, but my quest has been to get to the point where the instrument no longer exists…in a sense.  You try to get a vocal quality through the horn, the quality you hear when you listen to Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong.”

 

A decade ago, around the time when he was writing the music for Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” Blanchard took a hiatus from a successful career — he could look back on a four-year stint with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and co-leadership of the influential Harrison-Blanchard Quintet — to change his embouchure.  “I wasn’t developing technically,” he says.  “Emotionally and musically, I was growing.  I kept hearing ideas in my head that I wanted to play but couldn’t execute, and that was very frustrating.  My bottom lip was rolled over my teeth and I was cutting my lip.  Art Blakey’s whole thing was, ‘Don’t lie to yourself; just tell yourself the truth.’  When you lie to yourself, you’re covering up inadequacies, and you can’t grow that way.  Once I figured out what the problem was, I had the opportunity to fix it.  Then it was a matter of being diligent, staying on course, taking my time and being disciplined.  When I made the change, it immediately allowed me to open up my sound.  Technically I got to the point where I could play over the horn from low to high with a certain amount of ease.  That allowed me the freedom to explore more musical ideas.  Before I would put the time in but I wouldn’t gain the results I wanted.  Now there’s no excuse.  If there’s something I want to do, then I have to put in the time to develop the ability to do it.”

 

Putting in the time was never an issue for Blanchard, who learned about the aesthetic rewards of hard work from his father, Oliver Joseph Blanchard, to whom he dedicated “Joe and O,” a lovingly disputatious call-and-response tune on “Wandering Moon.”  Pere Blanchard, who died in 1998, was an opera lover who sang professionally in the 1930’s and ’40s, and continued to sing in the church choir and other groups long after he began to sell insurance in New Orleans for a small black-owned company.  “My father was a one-fingered piano player,” Blanchard recalls, “and whenever he had a performance, he would be at the piano all day.  He was a baritone.  He would play his part and learn it, then he would play the tenor part and sing his part against it.  I’d go out and play football for hours, and he’d still be at the piano when I came back.

 

“He loved the earlier jazz, people like Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. He wasn’t interested in bebop and what happened after that.  He said, ‘Man, those guys play too many notes.  Listen to Pops.  You can hear melody there.’  I come from Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, and we would have musical discussions all the time.  He allowed me to have my opinion, and he wanted me to convince him that he was wrong!   Then, I started playing with Art Blakey, who was the last guy I expected to talk about Louis Armstrong, and Art would say, ‘Yeah, Miles and Clifford were cool, but Pops had a sound.’  That made me go back and research that music again.”

 

“Terence was always diligent,” says Branford Marsalis, who preceded Blanchard in the Jazz Messengers, and has been his friend since they — along with Wynton Marsalis and Donald Harrison — attended the New Orleans Center of Creative Arts in the 1970’s.  “He went to a predominantly black Catholic school called St. Augustine, which has a great marching band, but had a terrible music program.  They consistently had the best talent that the city had to offer, and did nothing with it.  At some point in his sophomore year Terence realized that the school wasn’t going to fulfill his needs.  So he quit, and went to a public school that would allow him to go to NOCCA.  In hindsight, that was a helluva thing for him to do.  He’s always been the kind of person to be honest enough to figure out the surroundings, and then be proactive about it.

 

“I think that Terence’s decision to change his embouchure changed him as a person and changed his musicianship.  There was a mild competition between he and Wynton, which is only natural — they play the same instrument and both want to excel.  Terence was willing to undergo two years of absolute misery for long-term gain.  For a professional working musician to decide to take a hit like that shows an enormous level of personal honesty that is rare even amongst musicians who make our living by trying to be relatively honest.”

 

After NOCCA, Blanchard decided to study at Rutgers, an hour’s drive from New York; there he studied with trumpet guru William Fielder and band instructor Paul Jeffreys, who placed the young trumpeter in Lionel Hampton’s band, in which he played for a year-and-half on weekends.  In February 1982, on Wynton Marsalis’ recommendation, Blanchard and Harrison auditioned for and got the gig with the Jazz Messengers

 

“I grew so much just in the first month,” Blanchard states.  “Wynton had told Art that I could write.  So the first thing Art said was, ‘I know you’ve got a box of tunes; pull them all out — we’re going to play them all!’  When you see someone like that apply their musical knowledge to newer compositions, the practicality of the process makes you want to reinvestigate all of your records.  Art made me understand that as long as I set my goals and worked towards them, I could do anything I wanted.  I got a chance to play with some great musicians who were my peers on a consistent basis; we grew and learned and made mistakes together, which was a great learning experience.  I got a chance to see guys get better, which motivated me.  Even though my embouchure was incorrect, my sound started to get stronger.  Plus we were playing with Art!  You’re in the Messengers, and you realize that this guy had listened to Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw…the list is endless.  Now he’s listening to me.”

 

Earlier, as the van was inching towards Clark Terry’s house, Blanchard looked back on his first encounter with the most recent member of the Downbeat Hall of Fame.  “When I was 17, Clark came to New Orleans to give a master class, and later I went to his show at the club in the Hyatt Regency Hotel,” Blanchard recalled.  “He remembered me from the school, called me up to play a tune with him, and I played his horn.  He was the first guy I saw play who really made me understand what I needed to work on in terms of technique and control.  I used to listen to records by Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard and even by Clark, and imagined people gyrating all over the stage to get those phrases out of the instrument.  The man barely moved, but he was so expressive and made it look so incredibly easy that I wanted to run home and pick up my horn and start practicing.  Then I really found out how difficult it was!”

 

After the outdoor portion of the hour-plus shoot — the old master and his heir posed on a backyard bench 20 feet from the Long Island Sound shoreline, engaging in focused conversation and extemporaneously playing “the Flintstones Theme” and “What A Wonderful World” for the “CBS Sunday Morning” crew — I grab a few minutes with Terry by the piano in his award-festooned living room.

 

“After you’ve been around as long as I have you can tell what a subject is or is not going to be,” Terry comments.  “I saw right away that Terence had something extra-special, because of his personality and his seeming ability to detect a situation that was musical.  Terence never broke tones.  It was always straight, melodic tones.  And even at the age when I first met him, he seemed to have a great knack for mellifluousness.  You could tell from the start he was already on the right track, and he kept developing.  Every time I have an opportunity to play with him, I’m amazed at how beautiful and fluid and professional he has become through the years.”

 

As Bartolemi and the TV crew pack up, Terry and Blanchard sit at the kitchen counter, near a basket with a world-class selection of hot sauces, exchanging hilarious ribald parables between mouthfuls of sandwich and sips of Dry Seck.  Then it’s time to pile back in the van to get Blanchard and Burgess to LaGuardia Airport for their 8 o’clock return flight to New Orleans; by 9 the next morning Blanchard expects to resume work on “Original Sin.”

 

“I would say that the vibration I get from Terence is that he is a trumpeter of genuineness,” Terry concludes.  “You can tell who are the name brands and who are the off-brands and substitutions.  He always would be recognized as a name brand, not an also-ran.  He’s a leader.  He has his own sound.  I can recognize him right away.  Now, you can have your sound and it can be a horrible sound.  But he has his own sound which is a marvelous sound.  He studied and worked hard.  If you work diligently enough and go through the right channels, all the beautiful things within you are capable of coming out.  Terence was smart enough or clever or gifted enough to choose the right channels, and you can’t hold talent down when it’s given the right nourishment.”

 

Interviews with Clark Terry and Branford Marsalis for Downbeat Cover Story on Terence Blanchard:

 

TP: Do you remember when you first met Terence?

 

TERRY:  He was in high school, and I don’t remember the exact date, I don’t even remember the school, but I remember this very interesting young man when I first met him.  You can tell after you’ve been around as long as I have, when you see a subject, what the subject is going to be or what the subject is not going to be.  And you could tell right away that he had something very extra-special, and he was going to be somebody that the world was going to know about.

 

TP: Was it his personality?

 

TERRY:  His personality and his seeming ability to detect the situation he was in right at the time.  He knew when he was in a situation that was musical and he knew when he was in a situation… For instance, if you’re being interviewed by people, some interviewers ask you dumb questions, and you can sense that; and some ask you questions that let you know right away that they know what they’re talking about and they’re there for a reason.  He could sense that.  He could sense real people from not too real people.

 

TP: He was telling me in the van coming up that you were playing at a club in New Orleans, and you invited him up on the stand to play a blues.  Which a lot of trumpeters have told me, that you’ve been extremely gracious towards them in sharing information.  And I know how many people you’ve seen or heard over the years.  Can you pinpoint any essential characteristic about his sound that you remember that strikes you or imprints itself when you think about Terence?

 

TERRY:  I come from St. Louis, and St. Louis was always known as a trumpeter’s town.  There was always something about the sound of most of the people who came from St. Louis that has a continuity and thoroughness to it — a purity.  If I can give you a slight example [PLAYS A PAIR OF TWO-NOTE EXAMPLES]…and broke the tones.  Well, Terence never broke tones.  It was always straight, melodic tones.  And he seemed, even at the age when I first met him to have a great knack for mellifluousness, which was a great thing for a young student to come by.  And he was always such a nice, sweet, gentle person, you couldn’t help but like him, and by just liking him and being able to talk to him more, he could find a lot of things he wanted to know and you could find out a lot of things you wanted to know about him.

 

TP: But having met him, you kept an eye on him ever since.

 

TERRY:  Oh, all the time, yes.

 

TP: How would you describe his evolution from then to now?  Obviously he’s more proficient on the instrument and more complete in what he wants to say.  But do you see it as a continuous personality…

 

TERRY:  Absolutely.  You called it right away.  You could tell from the start he was already on the right track, and he just kept developing.  He still is continuing to develop.  Every time I have an opportunity to play with him, I’m amazed at how beautiful and how fluid and how actually professional he has become through the years.  At the beginning, kids naturally lack a bit of professionalism because they haven’t been at it long enough, but as time goes on… And then, coupled with that, his writing is unbelievable.  I was just amazed.  I’ve run into a lot of good players who I’ve liked.  For instance, Quincy Jones.  I played Quincy’s first arrangement for him, and I knew that he had… He was the same type of person Blanchard was.

 

TP: Really.

 

TERRY:  Yeah.  Because when I first met him I was in Washington with Basie’s band, and he came up and said, “Mr. Terry, I’m a trumpet player and I want to play trumpet and I’d like to study with you.”  I was working until 2 o’clock in the morning and he went to school at 6 o’clock in the morning.  I said, “How are we going to do that?  You’re in school all day.”  He said, “Well, could I come in the morning an hour before school?”  I said, “Okay.”  So he came and he studied and you could tell that he was very gifted and very talented.  And then after a long wait, he said, “I can write, too.  Can you try one of my arrangements.”  So we tried it.  But it was horrible when we first played it.  I took it to Basie’s band and we played it and the cats laughed at it.  But I didn’t dare discourage him because I could tell the sincerity in this person just from looking at him.  When he came back he said, “How did you like my arrangement?”  I said, “Well, Q, you made a few mistakes, and you’re on the right track, and I can guarantee that you’re going to do it.”  I shudder to think if I’d have said, “Man, forget it.”

 

TP: Well, he’s the type of person who still might have…

 

TERRY:  He would have gone on anyhow.

 

TP: And you went to Europe with him in that band that disbanded, so that’s how much you thought of Quincy Jones.

 

TERRY:  Yes, the band for Free and Easy.

 

TP: What’s it like to play with Terence?  Out there, it sounded like you were on the same wavelength.

 

TERRY:  We are on the same wavelength.  He’s gifted and very easily involved in whatever the situation it is, whatever type of music you’re playing or whatever tune it is you’re playing.  We played two tunes there, and he said it had been years since he played them or he had never played…

 

[ETC.]

 

TP: Trumpet players, especially the younger generation, there are a lot of branches on the trumpet tree, a lot of stylistic influences, and people form allegiances to one sound they take off from or another.  If you hear Terence in reference to the older trumpeters, what vibration does he remind you of?

 

TERRY:  I would say that the vibrations I would get from him from the trumpeter of genuineness.  You can tell by name brands and off-brands and some substitutions.  He always would be recognized as one of a name brand, always of the name brand.  You would never suspect him to be a person who was an also-ran.  He’s a leader, has his own sound.  I can recognize him right away.  Now, you can have your sound and it can be a horrible sound.  But he has his own sound which is a marvelous sound.

 

TP: And you were also speaking with him about the Monk Institute, and students needing guidance so that they can all the vocabulary and then bring their feelings into it and say their own thing.  Following Terence, at what point would you say that transition started to happen for him in the way you remember his progression?

 

TERRY:  Well, it’s difficult to pinpoint that because I wasn’t around him every day and every year.  Sometimes, there were years between when I would hear him.  For instance, I was shocked when I heard the first soundtrack he made for Spike Lee on the movie.  I said, “This cat can’t do that.  He hasn’t been around long enough!”   But he had been around long enough.  He’s been studying, he’s been intense, and he’s been really involved all these years, and he had the ability and talent to do it.  He studied at it and worked hard at it.  He’s the type of person… If you work diligently enough (which is what we try to get out students to do), all the beautiful things within you are capable of coming out.  But you have to work at it in the right direction, and you’re going to have to have the right channels to go through.  For instance, if you go to the left instead of going to the right, chances are you wouldn’t develop the things that are there for you.  By going this way, they came out of you.  Had you gone the other way, you might not have been so successful.  So he was smart enough or clever or gifted enough to choose the right channels, and you can’t hold talent down when it’s given the right nourishment.

 

TP: You said St. Louis trumpeters are known for producing a very consonant, mellifluous sound.  How do you identify the characteristics of trumpet players from New Orleans?

 

TERRY:  New Orleans also is a very individual type of approach to sound, all the way back to Buddy Bolden.  They had marvelous trumpet players as far back as you can remember.  The father of Gerald Wilson’s first wife was a trumpet player, and he used to talk about how Bunk Johnson and people like that used to play.  All of them had a certain sort of way associated with New Orleans.  It might have been the gumbo.  Who knows? 

 

TP: Is there an impressionistic name you can give that sound?

 

TERRY:  Well, I don’t know how I would narrowly pinpoint that, because it would be taking a heck of a chance.  It encompasses so many things.  It’s like the cuisine of New Orleans.  There’s jambalaya, there’s etouffé, there’s red beans and rice.  So you might say soulful.

 

TP: You’re a pioneering educator, and he’s picking it up…

 

TERRY:  I can tell you on that point, those of us who have been involved in jazz education for a number of years are all very proud and happy to see a person of the caliber that Terence is getting involved to pursue the perpetuation of our craft, of jazz.  Because he is a marvelous person, his head is on in the right place, he’s not twisted, he’s not egotistical, he’s open-hearted, he’s warm, he knows how to communicate with youth, he knows how to get the best out of youth, and I think he’s going to do a great job in jazz education for years on, as he always has done, and he’s going to get better and better and better.

 

[PAUSE]

 

“Batch 37 Hot Sauce, 6.75 ounces.”  “There is a point where pleasure and pain intersect, a doorway to a new dimension of sensual euphoria, where fire both burns and soothes, where heat engulfs every neuron within you.  Once the line is crossed, once the bottle is opened, once it touches your lips, there is no going back.  Pain is good.”MARSALIS:  I’m hung over, hungry and grumpy.  Perfect state of mind.

 

TP: Now, this was not a record you had anything to do with producing.  You just played on it.

 

MARSALIS:  Terence’s record?  Yes.  I just played on it.

 

TP: You’ve known Terence for a good chunk of your life.  Here’s an easy question for a guy with a hangover.  How do you see his sound evolving since he came on the scene, since he emerged and entered the fray.  His sound and compositional from Point A to where he is now.

 

MARSALIS:  I think that Terence’s whole shit changed when he made this decision to change his embouchure.  There was like a mild competition between he and Wynton, which is only natural — they play the same instrument, and they both want to excel.  And Terence pretty much came to the conclusion that it would be impossible for him to change his trumpet playing unless he changed his embouchure.  Which meant that he was willing to undergo two years of absolute fucking misery for long-term gain.  I think that changed his outlook on a lot of shit.  I think it changed him as a person and it changed his musicianship.  It changed everything.

 

TP: Do you think it changed the way he hears things in writing as well?

 

MARSALIS:  Not in the way he hears things.  I think that growth changes the way you hear things in your writing.  And for a professional working musician to decide to take a hit like that shows an enormous level of growth and an enormous level of personal honesty that even amongst musicians who make our living by trying to be relatively honest is rare to me.

 

TP: Do you think that’s something that’s always characterized Terence’s personality in one or another?

 

MARSALIS:  Well, he’s always been a quiet person.  I was lucky enough to be his friend.  Because it’s not like you get to know him.  Like, some people, they throw up a wall of silence or mysteriousness, and some people throw up a wall of overwhelming friendliness — like they’re going, “Hey, great ta-see-ya, how are you?” when it’s really like “fuck you; you don’t get to know me, this is what you get to see.”  But Terence has always been real quiet and observant.  He observes.  It’s not like he puts you through a test.  But he waits a while until he lets people get to know who he is.  But since I’ve known him since high school, I’ve just always known him.

 

TP: What sort of trumpet player was he when he was 14-15-16?

 

MARSALIS:  Terence was great.  We used to hang out all the time.  We were always fucking around and being stupid.  That’s what I remember.  I lacked the sophistication at 14 to really be able to ascertain who was good and who was bad.  He was diligent.  I mean, he went to a school called St. Augustine, which is a predominantly Black Catholic School, and they have a great marching band.  To the unskillful and the uninitiated, they have an excellent music program.  Since most regular people deal in Pop terms anyway, the marching band is the only kind of music that they can grasp or comprehend, and they always had an excellent marching band.  Well, while having an excellent marching band, they had a terrible music program, and more often than not, most of the students didn’t find out that they were woefully underprepared in music until they got to college and were hopelessly overmatched, and some of them even quit, which was a drag, because they consistently, because they were a black school, had the best talent that the city had to offer, and did nothing with it.  Terence went to that school, and it was some time in his sophomore year when he realized that school wasn’t going to fulfill his needs — it just wasn’t going to make it for him.  So he quit, and he went to a public school that would allow him to go to New Orleans Center of Creative Arts.  I mean, he’s always been the kind of person to be honest enough to see… He’s able to figure out the surroundings, and then he’s proactive about it.  Once again, in hindsight, that was a hell of a thing for him to do.  I wasn’t thinking about it the way I thought about the embouchure change, because I was much younger.

 

TP: He said his father would always make him convince him, and he would do it, so he’d always have to be very honest with himself in those type of discussions.  What do you think it says about the jazz audience, or at least the ones who are fanatical enough to participate in the Downbeat Readers Poll, that Terence has made this sweep this year, has made that impression upon them, considering that he embodies a somewhat different approach to music than what’s been acknowledged in recent years.  Any ideas on that?

 

MARSALIS:  Well, it takes time.  It’s one of the things I think that’s difficult when you place Pop values on something that is larger than such.  For instance, they hire somebody to review a record, and they give you so much time to listen to the record and decide whether you like it or not.  Well, it’s entirely conceivable that you won’t really get the gist of the record for six weeks.  So the proper amount of time that it takes to digest really difficult music is never given before you have to make a determination.  Well, I think the same can be said about a musician’s body of work.  There are a couple of us… Like, my brother Jason, who I look to for musical advice, was always in love with the Harrison-Blanchard Quintet, and I was, too.  I think that’s one of the best bands I ever heard.  They wrote great songs.  The songs had a real modern bent to them.  The biggest drawback to Jazz of anything to me is that when the shit is really good, it’s a little, and sometimes a lot ahead of where the people are, or even where the musicians are at the time.  And people always have this overwhelming desire to latch onto shit that they’re already familiar with.  They want to hear shit that they know.  So in a time when Neoclassicism was in the air and everybody was playing music that sounded like it was in the ’50s, they were playing some real heady shit, man.  It was some forward-thinking, modern shit.  And I appreciate anything modern.  But people never got that band, never understood that band, and they never understood Wynton’s band.  What they understood is we were young and we wore suits.  Any sort of realistic assessment of the music at that time was left to us.  I always thought that it was a bad idea.  Because when Terence and Donald were approached to be on Columbia, and asked me what I thought, I said that it was a horrible idea.  I knew that Wynton was the star of the moment, and I understood that a record company that makes its living with Pop music would not be able to adequately ingest that many jazz musicians.  They could only focus on one…or two, but probably just one.  And they signed, and I think one of the things that happened to them is they fell through the cracks and got victimized by a lot of the attention that they paid to Wynton’s records.  Not that it’s Wynton’s fault.  That’s just the way it is; a lot of other people fell through the cracks as well.  But I thought it was a shame, because that was an amazing group of musicians and they had some really dynamic shit to say.

 

TP: Talk about the dynamics of Terence as a composer, what makes him a distinctive voice.

 

MARSALIS:  He’s diligent.  He’s always searching for the truth and he always wants to make himself better.  The Classical music and the orchestration and the music that he’s listened to for specific things has definitely changed the way that he plays.  And it’s changed it for the better.  He’s writing good stuff, man.

 

TP: Have you paid attention to his film work?

 

MARSALIS:  Oh yeah.  He’s one of the top soundtrack writers in the business.  I rank him right up there under Howard Shore.  But Hollywood is one of the few places left where one can, almost in the old sense of the word, still be victimized by the color of their skin.  The biggest problem with any business is that the business is only as good as the people who run it, and the average median thinking is what we can expect in any situation.  For instance, there’s Terence Blanchard and Stanley Clarke, and those are the only Negro writers. So whenever you have a movie that is done by a Black director or a movie with a predominantly Black cast, which makes it a “Black” film, and the film budget ranges in the $8 to $10 million, “Oh, call Stanley Clarke or Terence Blanchard.”  It’s not like they will sit down and watch a movie and say… The biggest problem with writing for film is that the people who make the decisions on what the music should be are usually the director and the producer, and they are rarely qualified to speak about anything from a musical point of view.  So their appreciation of an artist is limited to how well the movie did that they wrote the soundtrack for, or whether they wrote one or two things that the person found personally moving.  But it’s not like most directors can say, “I want this guy because his music is great; I have explored his body of work,” and blah-blah-blah.  So you’re dealing with people who have a very limited sense of understanding of music, so they come to it with a very limited sense of understanding.  They want a name.  They say they want to hear your reel.  Well, what they really want to do is see your reel.  They want to see what you’ve done.  And if you can find a way to do 5 or 6 or 7 movies, then you get another one based on that.

 

TP: It takes on a life of its own.

 

MARSALIS:  It becomes more like a regular business person’s resume.

 

TP: That said, what is it Terence does that makes him so effective as a film score writer?

 

MARSALIS:  He understands classical techniques very well.  He understands how to write for strings.  He understands how to write melodies that are mysterious and strong.  Writing melodies always has been a strong point of his.  In the Hollywood business, they’ve made a shift from melody writing, which you hear in those movies of the ’30’s, ’40s and ’50s, to background writing, where sometimes the idea of good music will be having a chord that goes on for five minutes.  So it’s just a matter of knowing when it’s a good time to do that or when you can sneak in a melody or two.  In Eye’s Bayou he threw in New Orleans rhythms a couple of times, and that gives him an added advantage that a lot of these other guys don’t have.  He threw in a couple of these New Orleans beats when they were walking.  He’s a bad motherfucker, man.

 

TP: He’s very slick and he doesn’t show it off at all.

 

MARSALIS:  Yeah, but he’s slick with content.  He’s not just slick.  A lot of guys have good technique, and they’ll write the same score all the time.  They’ll rip themselves off continuously.  There are a couple of Hollywood composers who are notorious for that.  One guy in particular who is very successful now has written the same score for the last ten years.  It’s amazing that no one seems to mind and no one catches it, but then I understand that we’re dealing with people who have very minimal taste.

 

TP: Well, they keep making the same fucking movie over and over.

 

MARSALIS:  Well, they do make the same movie over and over.  That’s for sure.  It goes back to what I was saying earlier.  People like the shit they’ve already seen.  They don’t want to be introduced to new idea or new techniques.  It frightens them.

 

TP: How do you see Terence’s film score work inflecting what he does as a jazz composer and an improviser?

 

MARSALIS:  I can’t say specifically, because they are so different.  But you can’t spend your time involved in a situation like that and not have it affect you.  It has to have an impact.  It just does.  Listening to Classical music the way I’ve started listening to it has changed the way I play jazz.  I can’t specifically tell you how and why…

 

TP: Does it have to do with detailing…

 

MARSALIS:  No, I don’t think it does, because jazz requires a tremendous amount of detail.  There’s just a difference in the sound and how… I know for a fact, for instance, that the way I play ballads now is directly a result of listening to music where there wasn’t a strict rhythmic pattern banged out all the time.

 

TP: So you feel more comfortable playing rubato at this point.

 

MARSALIS:  Yeah, for the entire song.  And understanding songs that start off soft and become bigger and bigger; they almost become orchestral in scope now.  Terence is working on some musical ideas now, which I think haven’t yet met fruition.  The idea of having songs based on themes, and all the solos and everything relate to those themes, and the themes are interwoven, and can easily come in and out of the songs…

 

TP: So more extended composition.

 

MARSALIS:  Exactly.

 

TP: Which could be a result of all the craft and apprenticeship filtering in to what he…

 

MARSALIS:  It would seem apparent to me that that’s what’s going on.  That’s what I would think.  Terence might disagree.

 

 

Terence Blanchard Blindfold Test – 1998:

 

While working six nights at Manhattan’s Iridium behind Jazz On Film, a new release on Sony-Classical featuring his rearrangements of film music classics for jazz sextet and string orchestra, Terence Blanchard is spending days (and an occasional overnight) writing the score for Having Our Say, a forthcoming film about the centagenarian Delaney Sisters starring Ruby Dee and Diahann Carroll.  When that’s done, he’ll go in the studio with vocalist Joe Jackson next week.  Somehow, the ever-gracious trumpeter-composer found 90 minutes to listen to 13 tunes (all-trumpet) in his hotel room, from which the following was culled.

 

“When you watch Ruby Dee,” Blanchard commented toward the end, “you forget you’re watching a movie, and get into her character.  That’s what happens to me when I listen to Bird or Coltrane or Monk or Miles or Dizzy, and it’s what I aspire to in my music.  It’s time for musicians in my generation to throw away the shackles of the past, to investigate some other areas.  Not much true exploration is occurring.  I think cats like Steve Coleman and Branford are working in interesting directions.  It’s hard to do.  Our challenge as musicians is to be honest with ourselves and reevaluate what we’re doing and where we’re going.”

 

1.  Dizzy Gillespie, “Africana,” from Gillespiana, Verve, 1961/1993), Gillespie, trumpet; Lalo Schiffrin, arranger.

 

It’s Dizzy, obviously, but I don’t know the tune or the arranger.  5 stars for Dizzy and the arrangement. [LATER] Lalo incorporates some elements that are distinctly like jazz big band and some are that are very orchestral; he only brings the trumpet in for certain big moments.  Dizzy sounds great.  He played with such command of his instrument.  It’s a good pick, because he’s playing unlike Dizzy, if you know what I mean, but you can tell it’s him by his sound and phrasing.  It sounds like they recorded everybody live in one room, and then you hear Dizzy playing over the band.  The sound is huge.

_________________________________________________________________

2.  Bill Dixon, “Summer Song/Three/Aurorea/Dusk,” (from In Italy, Vol. 1, Soul Note, 1980), Dixon, trumpet.

 

Is it Don Cherry?  Then I don’t know who this is. [LATER} He played something in the lower register which made me think of Don, but he has a bigger sound.  His facility made me think of Booker Little, but I don’t remember Booker making this kind of record.  I thought it was good, creative and interesting, but I must admit that it isn’t my cup of tea.  It’s hard for me to rate it.  You hear right off is that he really believes in this, and I can’t fault anyone for that.   I’m interested in the intent behind the music.  I believe there’s a lot of room for everybody to express themselves in various variations or iterations of this thing we call jazz.  

_________________________________________________________________

3.  Ornette Coleman-Don Cherry, “Sound Manual”(#8) (from In All 

Languages, Harmolodic, 1987).  Ornette Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Billy Higgins, drums

 

I want to have that!  As soon as you drop the needle it’s like, “Oh, okay.”  I always loved that band.  5 stars.  That was recorded in ’87?  Get out of here!  It’s obvious how they influenced Miles’ band.  Don had a way of reinventing lyrical lines; they aren’t in any specific meter, they’re freed up in time and space, and they flow.  Those guys were ____ renegades.  Just think about the time they were doing this stuff, the crowd of people they were surrounded by; they had to be brave to come out and do this.  I’ve never thought of them as free musicians, and I don’t know why people do.  They did what everybody wants to do in jazz.  Once you learn the language and understand how this music functions and operates, then you devise a platform on which everything you do is based on musically.  _________________________________________________________________

4.  Art Farmer, “Raincheck,” (from Listen To Art Farmer & The Orchestra, Mercury, 1962/1997). Art Farmer, flugelhorn; Oliver Nelson, arrangement.

 

It’s a wild recording; I don’t know the trumpeter or arranger.  Art Farmer and Oliver Nelson?  The arrangement threw me off; the harmonies and orchestrations, with the woodwinds and electric guitar, sounded a little bit like some West Coast stuff.  Art sounded great.  He hit all those notes right on the head, played them in tune and phrased them beautifully.  5 for the performance, 4 for the arrangement.

_________________________________________________________________

5.  Freddie Hubbard, “Thermo”, (from Above And Beyond, Metropolitan, 1982/1999)

 

That was “Thermo.”  I remember busting my lips trying to play it.  Freddie Hubbard is one of the all-time greats in this music, not just a trumpet player but a great composer as well.  I did a gig with Freddie and Woody Shaw when I was really young.  It was wild, because nothing I played belonged to me — it belonged to one of them.  Every time I played something, “Whoa, can’t do that.” [LAUGHS] I always admired his facility, the weight of his sound and phrasing — right in the middle of the beat.  5 for the performance and 5 for the composition.  

_________________________________________________________________

6. Wynton Marsalis, “Spring Yaounde,” (from City Griot, Columbia, 1991).  Wynton Marsalis, trumpet.

 

Obviously Wynton.  It’s nice.  Wynton has definitely developed his own sound.  He’s had that for a long time.  Anything he plays you’ve got to give him a 5.  He’s a serious technician, with a unique way of twisting lines and rhythms.  The composition I don’t feel as strong about; I’ll give it a 4.   To me subtext has always been his thing; you’ve always got to check out what’s going on underneath the melody.  I’ve known him since elementary school, and he and Branford and Kent Jordan all influenced me to practice and want to be better.  I’ll always appreciate knowing them for that reason alone, aside from just enjoying their music.

_________________________________________________________________

7. Brian Lynch, “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Your Face,” Spheres of Influence, Sharp-9, 1997). Brian Lynch, trumpet.

 

I don’t know who it is. [LATER] I knew it would come to me after a while!  I’ll give the performance a 5.  Brian has always been a good player; he’s been around and knows what he’s doing.  The arrangement was interesting, particularly the introduction, which I didn’t expect to go where it did; I’ll give it a 4.  Brian’s style is musically direct.  Art Blakey always used to tell us, “never speak down to anybody or speak over them; speak right to them,” and all the guys who played with Art had that right-to-the-point approach.

 

This was wild!  When you hear all of this, you realize the vast number of distinctive styles in this music of people playing the same instrument.  That’s always that fascinated me about playing jazz as opposed to playing Pop or Classical music.  There’s a readily discernible difference in all these guys, and we’re all playing the same instrument and the same three valves.

 

[-30-]

 

Terence Blanchard Musician Show (6-21-95):

 

[MUSIC: Blanchard: “Divine Order,” “Going to Mecca,” “Malcolm’s Theme,” “Poems,” “Don’t Explain.”

 

 

TP: I’d like to talk about your relation to different trumpet stylists when you were coming up as a trumpeter, and I gather Clifford Brown was someone you heard rather early on.

 

BLANCHARD:  Yes.  Clifford Brown and Miles Davis were the first people that I really paid attention to.  Clifford was the first.  I think the thing that caught me about Clifford was just his mastery of the instrument.  Prior to that I had heard trumpet players who could play high, I had heard trumpet players who could do little tricks.  But Clifford’s lyrical and rhythmical knowledge of music that he displayed on the instrument was very fascinating to me.  I remember listening to “Sweet Clifford” for the first time, and was totally amazed at his technique.  Miles Davis was totally at the opposite end of the spectrum for me.  The first time that I heard him play I was just taken by his purity, and his thoughts, his musical thoughts.

 

TP: What were the circumstances under which you heard them play?  At home?  In school?

 

BLANCHARD:  At first it was in school.  I went to the New Orleans Center of the Creative Arts, and Ellis Marsalis put on some of these records for me.  Prior to that I wanted to be a Jazz musician, but at this time there wasn’t any Tower Records, and the stores’ stock of Jazz product was very limited.  Most of the stuff that you could get at that time, you had to order.  So we weren’t really knowledgeable about a lot of things, and that’s where Ellis played a big role.

 

TP: What was your experience in Jazz before being exposed to Ellis Marsalis and that quite remarkable little class he had at that time?

 

BLANCHARD:  [LAUGHS] I knew about Louis Armstrong and I knew about some of the earlier musicians, like Earl “Fatha” Hines, because my father used to talk about Earl Fatha Hines and Pops all the time.  Of course, the popular people, the famous people like Dizzy Gillespie who you used to see on television all the time, and people like Oscar Peterson and Sarah Vaughan.  But as far as the modern era of Jazz, I wasn’t really up on that, people like John Coltrane, Clifford and Ornette Coleman.

 

TP: Had you been playing trumpet from an early age?

 

BLANCHARD:  I started playing trumpet in my fourth grade in elementary school, but I didn’t really take a lesson until my junior year in high school.  So I had the trumpet for a long time.

 

TP: Were you involved in second line type things in New Orleans?

 

BLANCHARD:  Not as much as I would like to have.  At that time, “when I became serious,” I started devoting all of my time to staying at home and studying and listening to music and practicing — because I had a lot of stuff to do.  I didn’t have a chance to play in some of the New Orleans style bands.  I did get a chance to play with some of the Jazz bands.  I played more of the modern stuff.  Dick Stabile(?) had a big band at the Fairmont Hotel, and I used  to sub for Emory Thompson all the time there.  There were a couple of other gigs that we used to have.  I used to sit with people at a club called Tyler’s in New Orleans (it’s closed now), and Snug Harbor, which used to be called the Farber(?) at that time.

 

TP: Talk about Ellis Marsalis’ mode of teaching.  Apart from the innate talent of the students, how did everyone come out of there so prepared?

 

BLANCHARD:  I think it was an effort of all of the faculty.  Ellis taught Jazz Improvisation and sight singing.   But we had a number of different opportunities.  We studied theory and analysis, we had different project classes where people would work on special things, depending upon what it was that you wanted to do later on in life.  We also had to be in the chorus, and we learned about breathing and phrasing and stuff like that.  So it was a number of different things.  We also had a performance class, where you were graded not only on your performance, but your critique of other performances.

 

TP: Terence Blanchard commented on Clifford Brown combination of virtuosity and tremendous lyricism, and it was never better illustrated on the Clifford Brown with Strings record, from which we’ll play “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man Of Mine.”

 

[MUSIC:  Clifford Brown, “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man Of Mine,” “Sweet Clifford”; Miles Davis, “Old Folks”]

 

TP: If you’d been in here with Terence Blanchard, who programmed that material, you’d have seen him singing the solos pretty much note for note, all of them, plus the tenor solos, doing the drum arrangements, and basically reminiscing about absorbing this music when he was a teenager in New Orleans and later.  Would you repeat what you were saying about Miles Davis right before we went on mike?

 

BLANCHARD:  What I loved about this band is that there were no wasted notes, not by anybody in the band, whether they were accompanying a soloist or whether they were out front. Everything seemed to be just right on.  It takes special musicians to be able to do that, because sometimes musicians wanted to be out front, their ego gets the best of them.  But these guys really seemed to play in tune with the music.  I love that band.

 

TP: There’s a quality of spontaneous composition and refinement of the arrangement going on all the time, it seems, with Miles Davis’ band.

 

BLANCHARD:  Yeah.  And see, the thing about it is there’s a large amount of control that the band has as a group.  Because anybody can step out and just play some stuff that’s melodically hip or rhythmically hip.  But it takes a lot of control to restrain yourself and be able to play what’s perfect for the moment, which may be different from what you intended to play when you walked into the studio or walked into the club that night.

 

TP: Or maybe right the instant before you started playing the solo.

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh, definitely.

 

TP: You made another comment about Miles which has been commonly made, which is that on the first note, he can play the one note, and you know it’s him.

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, that’s the thing I love about this music.  From the guys that I really admire and love and really appreciate from the very first note, you can tell it’s their music.  That’s the great thing about being with Jackie McLean for a week at the Blue Note.  You open the door in the dressing room… Jackie wasn’t even playing; I think somebody else was playing.  But you can hear the compositions and you say, “That’s Jackie McLean’s music.”  That’s a fascinating thing for me, because we still use all those same 12 tones.  People say you have to find something new, but I think you just have to be yourself, and I think that’s what those musicians were doing.

 

TP: Why is it so hard to play with the type of economy that Miles Davis played with?

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, I think it takes special musicians to be able to do that.  Because sometimes musicians can be a little selfish.  Let’s face it.  Sometimes our egos can get the best of us.

 

TP: Well, you’ve spent a lot of time perfecting your instrument, and you want to show your stuff off!

 

BLANCHARD:  [LAUGHS] Right.  You want to display your wares, so to speak.  I think what made that band so great was the fact that they could put all that stuff aside, and understand that playing as a unit… You say more by playing for the moment, and not trying to reach that peak or not trying to display that technical prowess on every song.

 

TP: Yet, getting back to technique, let’s say a few words about what specifically you would think technically about Miles Davis’ playing and Clifford Brown.  You had the chance to play next to Sonny Rollins a few years ago at Carnegie Hall and had the chance to play some of the things he’d played with Clifford Brown, like “Pent-Up House” and maybe “Kiss and Run” as well.

 

BLANCHARD:  The thing that I find interesting is that… Of course, everybody always talks about Clifford Brown’s dexterity over his instrument, which is very obvious.  He had a tremendous amount of control over his instrument, not only technically, but also with his sound.  But I think Miles gets slighted a bit when it comes to that.  First of all, he had a beautiful tone, and it takes a lot of control to be able to play with a beautiful tone like that.  And he had a great attack, which also takes a lot of technique and control.  He was no slouch!  I mean, “My Funny Valentine” live, he’s nailing some of those G’s and A’s [LAUGHS] up there pretty consistently on that session.

 

So I think both those guys were technically proficient in their own right, but had different styles.  That’s the beauty of the music, is that this music allows people to really express themselves in the way they see fit.

 

TP: Well, the next trumpeter up is Clark Terry, known for his impeccable technique and tremendous imagination in small groups, big bands, studios, reading, trumpet, flugelhorn, mute, everything for almost 50 years, and also as a teacher.  Your impressions of Clark Terry, first hearing him, etc.

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, Clark Terry was the first guy that I saw play live who really made me understand what it was I needed to work on in terms of my technique and control.  I used to listen to the Clifford Brown records, like I said, and I listened to Freddie Hubbard records and even Clark Terry’s stuff, and just imagined people all over the stage gyrating to get those phrases out of the instrument.  The first time I heard him play was at a hotel in New Orleans.  The man barely moved.  But he was so expressive through his instrument.  It really amazed me.  He made it look so incredibly easy that I wanted to run home and just pick up my horn and start practicing.  And then I really found out how difficult it was!  I mean, I’d always had a lot of respect for Clark Terry, but my love and passion for his genius just really grew from that point on.

 

[MUSIC:  C. Terry w/ Ellington, “Perdido” (1952); Freddie Hubbard, “Birdlike” (1961)]

 

TP: We listened to a tune that’s been a challenge to just about every trumpet player that’s come up in the last 25 years and more, Freddie Hubbard’s “Birdlike” from 1961.  I think Terence described that as a 21-chorus solo, though you might have been off by one or two.  And what a great solo by Clark Terry on “Perdido”.

 

BLANCHARD:  It was great.  I remember the first time I heard that.  I was in college, at Rutgers, and somebody was playing it over the loudspeaker system in the hall.  It drew me into the hall.  I ran into the hall, trying to figure out who the hell was that playing the trumpet.  It was an amazing thing. 

 

TP: He just goes right into the solo, and he keeps building.  Every time you think he’s upped the ante to the max, he comes up with something else.

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, the thing that amazed me about it was the fact that it was “hip.”  It was beyond the Swing Era to me.

 

TP: He quotes “Parisian Thoroughfare” at the end of the solo.

 

BLANCHARD:  He played a lot of ideas which were very contemporary for the period.

 

TP: Well, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie spoke of Clark Terry as a musician who was totally conversant with everything that was happening during the innovations of the mid-’40s.  Talk about Freddie Hubbard’s impact on the world of trumpet. 

 

BLANCHARD:  Freddie Hubbard scared me to death.  I saw him play live one time in New Orleans, and I was just totally amazed at everything that he did, harmonically and rhythmically.  He was definitely one of my heros.  I got a chance to meet him that night, too.  Actually he called me up to play; I was about 18 years old.  It was a great honor meeting him.  Plus I grew up listening to all the stuff he did with Art Blakey, and then the stuff he did on his own, Red Clay and some of the Pop stuff, Funk stuff.

 

TP: What happened when he called you up to sit in?

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh, he was totally cool.  What happened was, I was at a jazz band competition earlier that day, and the judges heard me play, and they took me to the club actually, and they knew Freddie and introduced me to him.  They told him about me, and he said he wanted to hear me play.  So he called me up and he gave me his trumpet, and he played the flugelhorn, and we played a blues.

 

TP: Put on the teacher’s hat again and talk about what Freddie Hubbard’s done and where he stands amidst the various trumpet styles of the period.

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, for me, Freddie has changed the style of the trumpet from the Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, and even Miles Davis period.  He came into the music with a freshness that was very different, and you could tell that he was very influenced by the saxophonists of his period.

 

TP: How does being influenced by saxophone players manifest itself in a trumpet style?

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, he played some things that weren’t really associated with the trumpet.  Some of those arpeggiated things he played, some of the more technical things he would do and some of the extended harmonic things he would do, and the rhythmical things all interspersed between those, weren’t really associated with the instrument.  It was associated more with the saxophone players of the period, like Trane, Sonny Rollins, people like that.

 

People don’t talk about this a lot with Freddie.  But Freddie and Woody Shaw, to me, had a very unique rhythmical concept to the things they played, and it had a very large impact on me.  That’s the thing I always noticed about him.  Sometimes Freddie’s phrases can turn on a dime, so to speak. Especially the way he played later on.  I heard him play at the Blue Note one night, and he amazed me, because as soon as you think he’s going to resolve a phrase one way, he turns and goes another direction.  Not only does it go in another direction in terms of ascending-descending, but also harmonically.  It was just an amazing thing to listen to, because he does that on tunes that are harmonically complex.  So it was more of a testimony to his genius.

 

I think people need to be more aware of that side of him.  I think sometimes Freddie gets labelled as a guy who is just technically proficient on his instrument, but I think he’s definitely created and developed his own style that’s influenced a lot of us.  When I listen to the record we just played… I’ll give you an example.  Once I played with Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw at Russian River Festival, and it was the most frustrating and the most enjoyable concert in my life.  It was enjoyable to be on the bandstand with them.  It was frustrating because everything that I played belonged to one of them.  Everything!  It was just amazing, because I didn’t realize it up until that point.  They’d play something, and I thought, “Wow, oh, that’s right; I got that from that record.”  Then Woody would play something and I’d say, “Oh, right, okay.”

 

TP: Back to square two anyway.

 

BLANCHARD:  I said, “Yeah, now it’s time for to start dealing with something else.”

 

TP: Well, I guess a lot of trumpet players had that reaction to Louis Armstrong when they heard his innovations in the ’20s and ’30s — “Where do we go from here?”

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh, definitely.

 

TP: Being from New Orleans, I’d think you’d have been aware of Pops from Square One.

 

BLANCHARD:  Not directly.  I was aware of Louis Armstrong, I was aware of who he was, but I really hadn’t listened a lot to his music.  I’d heard people in New Orleans playing in that style all while I was growing up.  But it wasn’t until I joined Art Blakey’s band, and I started listening to Art talk about Louis Armstrong…

 

TP: What did he say about him?

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, he just talked about him being a genius.  He talked about his prowess on his instrument, and how he had a really big sound, how he could really sing.  Art Blakey always talked about that.  He said Pops could really sing through his instrument.  I had to go back and reexamine Pops, because I kept looking at him from a social standpoint and not being comfortable with what I thought he represented socially.  But then I had to go back and reevaluate the period from which it was created and what he did for music, and how he really changed the course of music.  He’s still, to me, probably one of the greatest Jazz musicians who ever walked this planet, for a number of reasons.  First of all, not only was he able to really master his instrument, but he also had the ability to combine a lot of aspects that musicians have trouble dealing with today.  He was an entertainer, and he also was a genius musically.  The music stands on its own.  He didn’t water down his music for commercialism.  He had a way of incorporating all those elements together, which I think made him one of the greatest of all time.

 

[MUSIC: Pops, “Muskrat Ramble,” “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” (1956)]

 

TP: Terence, your music publishing company is Joseph Oliver  Music, and I’d thought it referred to King Oliver, but you told me different.

 

BLANCHARD:  No, really it’s about my father.  My father, as I knew him growing up, his name was Oliver Joseph Blanchard, but when I became a teenager we found his birth certificate, and his birth certificate had it labeled as Joseph Oliver Blanchard.  That’s where the title comes from.

 

TP: Growing up in New Orleans, you mentioned hearing a lot of older musicians playing in that style.  Was that a major part of your musical development?

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh, yes.

 

TP: Talk about that a bit, and let’s talk about the culture of New Orleans and the continuity of this style of music.

 

BLANCHARD:  One of the things I loved about growing up in New Orleans was that everybody had some kind of appreciation for Jazz, whether they were really into the music or not.  Because you heard it all the time.  That was the big thing, to hear the trumpet call before the Second Line.  Everybody knew what was about to occur.  Or to see one of the Jazz funerals, when the band would split and let the body pass by, and then they would get into their thing of celebrating the passage from one life to another.  Or just hearing bands on Bourbon Street and the French Quarter.  When I was in high school, I always caught the bus or the streetcar to Canal Street, and then I would have to switch to a bus.  But sometimes I would walk up Bourbon Street, because they had 24-hour music, and I would hear a lot of guys, like Teddy Riley, who’s a great trumpet player, Emory Thompson is another one, Wallace Davenport.  I would hear these guys playing in the style of the music, and it really affected me, moreso when I started playing with Art and later on than it did at that particular time — because I started to reflect on my upbringing.  Because I used to sit in with those guys in the French Quarter all the time, and I learned a lot.

 

TP: How would the older musicians in New Orleans treat an eager young musician?  Were they salty?  Were they helpful and friendly?

 

BLANCHARD:  For me they were very, very helpful.  They would always encourage me.  I never really had a problem with anybody.  They always told me things.  They always pulled me aside and said, “Look, you need to deal with this” or “you need to check this out” or “I know you guys don’t want to hear this, but go listen to this style of music.”  That was always helpful for me.  Or they would do it on the bandstand.  Sometimes Emory would play me some tunes, and I didn’t know what the hell they were or what key they were, but it really helped me to develop my ears.  And just watching those guys, how they… I saw Emory one night, and he didn’t have a plunger mute, but he used a paper cup, and just to watch his technique with the cup, watching him make the horn speak, it was very unusual for me.  And I have a great appreciation for all of those guys, for the things that they contributed.

 

TP: Two aspects of New Orleans style playing that continue to have an impact on the music are the polyphonic ensemble playing we heard on the Pops tracks and the special rhythmic feeling of New Orleans.  Can you talk about those aspects of music-making?

 

BLANCHARD:  That’s one of the things I love about Pops.  When you listen to those guys play those ensembles it’s like a revival almost!  It’s a special thing.  It really gets you going.  The music is very passionate and very powerful.  But rhythmically that music has always had an identity all its own.  It has a heavy root on the fourth beat.  Everything seems to revolve on the fourth beat.  If you’re counting in 4/4, it’s 1-2-3-4… Whether they play it or not, you can hear where everything revolves around it.  Which makes it interesting, because everybody kind of knows what’s about to occur, and either you can go with it or you don’t have to.  The thing that makes it interesting is the arrangements sometimes.  You can hear it on “Muskrat Ramble.”  They would set up like they were about to play something on the top, and then they didn’t — which really adds an element of surprise.  I’ve traveled all over the world, and in other styles of music I can always hear the influence of New Orleans traditional music and other musics, which I think is great.

 

TP: A lot of the older musicians you heard on Bourbon Street probably had other interests apart from that music.  That was a functional thing, a way of making your living in New Orleans.  But I’d think a number of them must have been aware of the advances in the music from the 1940’s and ’50s.

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh yeah, they were very aware of that.  Those guys knew about everybody.  That’s the thing that was great for me, because I didn’t get a chance to talk to Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie at that point in my life.  I had those guys, and they were very helpful.  Willie Singleton was the kind of guy who wasn’t really a soloist, but he was a great trumpet player, and he would talk to me all the time about stuff.  It was interesting being around him, because I could hear him, like, read some Clifford Brown solos, and his sound and technique was just amazing.  He would talk to me about how Clifford phrased certain things and how he developed things, and he would actually play them for me.  Emory Thompson was the same way.  He talked to me about Clifford and Miles and the things that he observed.  He’d seen those guys play live, and he had talked to them about certain things.  Plus he was a great player in his own right, so he had a lot of knowledge about the instrument.

 

[MUSIC: Diz-Bird, “Bloomdido” (1950); Diz-Stitt-Getz, “Wee” (1956)]

 

TP: Terence, put on your analyst hat and talk about Dizzy Gillespie.

 

BLANCHARD:  With Dizzy it was a gradual thing.  I knew about Dizzy early on in my career, because like I said, you’d see him on television and hear him play.  When I started listening to his recordings with Bird, it blew me away.  He had the same impact on me that Clifford had, in terms of just marveling at what he could do with the instrument, the way he could phrase and just capture your attention.  The things that he played rhythmically with the trumpet were very unique.  I asked him about it, and he’d always make a joke, “Well, I was just trying to keep up with Bird.”  I said, “Well, you were doing more than just keeping up!”  When you listen to the melody of “Bloomdido,” it’s an amazing thing.  Those solos, and just the melodies themselves are a real lesson in bebop; just learning how to play the melodies correctly and how to phrase them correctly.

 

TP: Getting deep inside them is a lesson in and of itself.

 

BLANCHARD:  Definitely.  When you look at the tune “Confirmation,” it’s definitely a lesson in the Blues and how to deal with alternate changes on the Blues — because that’s basically what it is, with a bridge.  The thing that’s great about the Bebop era for me is that those guys played, for lack of a better term, a lot of notes, but all those notes still had meaning.  They weren’t notes for the sake of crowding a specific space with music.  When you listen to tunes like “Bloomdido,” all the things that Bird and Dizzy did, all of the notes had a purpose, and a lot of the stuff was very melodic.  That’s the thing that I think is really the genius behind that, that throughout all of it there’s still melody.

 

TP: We’ll move now to Thelonious Monk, one of the unique melodists in all of music.  Both he and Dizzy were very close to your former employer, Art Blakey.  There’s a story that in the Billy Eckstine band, when Art Blakey came in, Dizzy Gillespie danced out the rhythms for Buhaina, and Buhaina took off from there more or less.  Did Art ever talk about that.

 

BLANCHARD:  He never talked about that specifically, but he did talk about that band a great deal, and he did talk about Dizzy and Bird being in that band, and he talked about how much he learned from those guys.  He felt like he didn’t really have a lot together when he got in that situation, and those guys took him by the hand and nurtured him and helped him to really develop his craft.

 

TP: We’ll hear one of Terence’s favorite’s on Monk Plays Ellington, “I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart.”

 

BLANCHARD:  One of the things about this album that I really love is the fact, first of all, that Monk would take the time to do this project and express his appreciation for a person he obviously learned a great deal from.  The other thing is he did it in such a fashion that he’s still Monk.  He’s not trying to play like Duke Ellington.  He’s being Thelonious Monk playing the music of Duke Ellington.  When you listen to all of this stuff, that combination adds a uniqueness to the entire project that I think is quite wonderful — and very beautiful.

 

[MUSIC: Monk, “I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart” & “Caravan” Ellington, “Anatomy Of A Murder: Main Title”]

 

TP: At the end of “I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart” Terence said, “That’s bad!  We have to play another.”  You had the solos memorized, the bass solo, all the chords down.  The things you find out doing a Musician Show!

 

The Ellington soundtrack had a big influence on you, Terence, when you began your own scoring endeavors with Spike Lee for X and before that for Mo’ Better Blues.

 

BLANCHARD:  Not so much for Mo’ Better Blues, because I just wrote one piece of music for that.  [END OF SIDE, MISSED A BIT] …Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” so I could get a handle on both idioms.  The sad thing was that I didn’t really get a chance to use much of what I learned from either.  The first thing I learned from doing film is that the story really will tell you what type of music it needs.  But hopefully, I’ll get a chance to really stretch out, so to speak, in the future.

 

TP: You said as a youngster the reason you were able to sing the bass solo, the piano solo and the drum part simultaneously is because you were listening real hard to these records, trying to figure out what Jazz is.  I said, “Well, maybe that’s why it was natural for you to become a composer.”

 

BLANCHARD:  I never thought of that, but it’s probably true.  I remember when I started listening to Clifford and Miles, it just seemed that everybody around me at that time had more of a grasp on what Jazz was and they knew more about the music and really had a love for it.  I felt like I had to play catchup.  So I would go home and I would listen to these records all the time, and I would play them and I’d listen to just the saxophone, then I’d go back and listen to the same song and listen to the trumpet, trying to figure out, “Wait a minute; there must be some formula to this.”  The thing that was good about it was I’d started to understand how the instruments function in small groups, especially listening to Miles Davis’ band with Herbie, Ron, Tony and with George Coleman and Wayne Shorter.  That band really helped me develop my interest in composition.

 

TP: Talk about your early efforts.  Did that begin more or less with the Messengers, or the Harrison-Blanchard group shortly after?

 

BLANCHARD:  No, it started in high school.  I started writing some things in high school.  It was funny.  I remember the first time I learned about a minor chord with  major seventh.  I wrote a song very similar to “Chelsea Bridge,” which is kind of funny because I thought I came away with something unique, then I heard the record and I said, “Wow, that’s my song; wait a minute, it’s not mine…” [LAUGHS] But I started writing things at an early age.  One of them we recorded with Art Blakey.  It was a tune called, “Oh, By The Way,” which I think I had written as a junior in high school.

 

TP: We’ll hear some soundtrack music,.  We couldn’t find the CD of Shawshank Redemption, of which you think very highly , but we do have the soundtrack to Glory, composed and conducted by James Horner and performed by the Boys Choir of Harlem.  A few words about both soundtracks.

 

BLANCHARD:  They’re both very unique, obviously.  Shawshank I really love because I think Thomas Noonan is a very talented composer.  He has a wide range of emotional tone colors at his disposal with an orchestra, and I find that to be very amazing.  The score James Horner did for Glory was very unique to me, because given the subject matter I would probably have thought of a different style of music to go with the film.  But I really loved the music that he chose to go with the film, and I learned a lot from this score as well.

 

[MUSIC: Glory, “The Whipping,” “Charging Fort Wagner”; Coltrane, “Resolution”]

 

TP: Terence Blanchard was saying that as many times as he’s listened to this record, he’s never blase.  Terence was playing the drum part, the bass, singing the melody, and said this is how he gets every time he listens to Love Supreme.

 

BLANCHARD:  Yes, it has that power.  It draws you right to the music.  It’s very powerful.  The thing I always express to young musicians about it, one of the things that’s amazing to me about it is that people listen to John Coltrane’s music, and especially drummer will listen to Elvin Jones, and I think they miss the point to a degree. When you listen to Elvin Jones, he’s playing with a lot of intensity and the music is very emotional, but he’s not playing loud and he’s not bashing on the drums.  He’s playing with a lot of control.  But it’s the content.  That’s what draws the intensity out of the music.

 

TP: What do you think are the sources of Coltrane’s music from which he derived the intensity that really permeates all of his playing?

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, I think he started to come in touch with something within himself.  That’s the only way I can explain it.  You hear stories about how he became spiritually aware of a lot of things in his life, and I think that’s the thing that really comes out in all of his music, is that searching for the truth in life.  This album, and that particular cut, used to keep me up at nights when I was with Art Blakey.  We would finish a show and I’d be dead tired, and I’d go back to my room and say, “Man, I’m just going to go to bed,” and I’d mess around and put this on.  Next thing you know, I would listen to it literally until my batteries would wear down, because his music has such a power.  You hear exactly what he’s talking about when he says, “A Love Supreme.”  You just feel it immediately in his music.

 

TP: From that, we’ll go to Ornette Coleman from 1959.  Again, your first hearing Ornette Coleman, the impact it had on you, and the dynamics of the music.

 

BLANCHARD:  You know, I kind of fell into Ornette, because I was heavily into Miles Davis.  I was really listening to some of the later stuff Miles did, with albums like Nefertiti and The Sorcerer and that stuff.  The more I listened to that stuff and the direction they were going into, when I heard Ornette it kind of fell in place for me, because I could kind of hear where Miles was borrowing.

 

TP: Be more explicit about that.

 

BLANCHARD:  When you listen to some of the stuff with Miles, when Miles would play his solos, sometimes the piano would lay out and Miles would try to play very free.  They would manipulate the time, they would play beyond the standard swing patterns, or sometimes they would play different kinds of rhythmical patterns, and just trying to really free up the music harmonically and rhythmically.  When I started listening to Ornette I heard that right away; especially in some of the stuff he did with Don Cherry, I heard the correlation.  Actually it happened one night in New Orleans late one night, when I was in high school.  I was driving someplace and I turned on a radio station, and they played some Ornette Coleman, and I mistook the first couple of bars of the trumpet solo for Miles Davis.  I started listening closely, then I said, “Okay, this is somebody different,” who I wasn’t really aware of.”

 

TP: Two aspects of Ornette’s quartet music is the polyphony in the front line between Ornette and Don Cherry, sort of co-composing as they’re playing, interweaving in and out of each other, and also Edward Blackwell’s ability to play extremely clear drum patterns that buttress the music, that are almost African in a certain way but come directly from the drum culture of New Orleans.

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, there’s an interesting dynamic going on with that band.  Sometimes, when you listen to Ornette and Don Cherry just play the melodies, and the way that Ed Blackwell would play in between the melodies… There’s a certain language that they established with that band that was very unique unto that band that definitely influenced a lot of other people. Because some of that stuff was free.  And it’s interesting to me, because I consider Ornette’s music to be very free in one sense, and very beautiful and very traditional in another sense.

 

TP: Want to elaborate on that?

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, you definitely hear the traditions of the music.  You definitely hear the traditions of Swing and Blues in Ornette’s music.  But you also hear where he was dealing with some new things and expounding on those, and breaking out of certain traditions, and cutting new ground.

 

TP: Talk about structure in your music.  Do you set up everybody’s parts in your music?  Talk about your compositional process?

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, sometimes for the Jazz band I may come in with set ideas.  But what I’m learning to do now with the band that I have is not to do that as much.  Because I really respect the musicians in the band, and I give them a chance to bring something to the compositions.  For instance, on the title cut of the new album, Romantic Defiance, I wanted Troy Davis to do something very specific.  I wanted more of like a military kind of drum dirge, something built around that.  So I would tell him that, and I wouldn’t give him a specific pattern or anything, but that would be the instruction or pattern I’d give him, and he’d take it from there,  But generally, on most of the stuff, these guys bring a lot to the music.

 

[MUSIC: Ornette, “Peace” (1959); Joe Henderson, “Lazy Afternoon” (1968)]

 

TP: A few words about Joe Henderson.  That again raises the issue of people on other instruments influencing your style, be it instrumentally, compositionally, and so forth?

 

BLANCHARD:  Well, the thing I love about Jazz is that the instrument is one thing, but what you say with it is the thing that matters.  I get inspiration from all these guys.  It doesn’t matter what instrument they play. If they have something to say and something to offer that really touches me, I’ll listen and try to learn from as many people as possible.

 

TP: Some of the people whose music we did not get a chance to play this evening were Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner, and you’d also chosen Dexter Gordon’s version of “Body and Soul,” and Ben Webster and Harry Sweets Edison.  I know Sweets has been important to you.

 

BLANCHARD:  Definitely.  I’m really sorry we didn’t get a chance to listen to that, because he’s definitely one of the pioneers in the music.

 

TP: Finally, we’ll hear music from Romantic Defiance, the latest CD on Columbia.  You’ve recently changed format, and gone from a two-horn front line to performing as trumpet with rhythm section, which is a somewhat more challenging but I guess gives you more room to stretch out.

 

BLANCHARD:  It started when we did the Billie Holiday record.  When we went on tour with that we just had the quartet plus Jeannie Bryson doing the vocals.  I learned a lot from that situation, and I felt it was going to give me a chance to strengthen my chops and learn more about my instrument — and that’s exactly what it’s done.  So playing quartet has been challenging, but it’s also been a lot of fun for me.

 

For the 91st birth anniversary of David “Fathead” Newman, a 1996 WKCR Musician Show, a 1998 interview for Downbeat together with Hank Crawford, and a liner note from 2000

In honor of the 91st birth anniversary of David “Fathead” Newman (1933-2009), a master practitioner of the saxophone family and the flute, whose sound helped stamp Ray Charles’ various units during the ’60s and ’70s and whose own leader career is documented on three dozen or so recordings, here’s a three-part post. Itbegins with my liner notes for the 2000 High Note release Keep The Spirits Singing.  There follows the transcript of the proceedings of WKCR Musician’s Show that I conducted with maestro Newman on February 27, 1996, 28 years ago, to publicize Newman’s engagement that week at the Greenwich Village club, Sweet Basil. There follows an extensive interview that I conducted with him and his Ray Charles orchestra partner Hank Crawford in 1998 for a Downbeat cover story, my first ever for the magazine. Lots of interesting stories here about Dallas/Fort Worth and Memphis in the ’40s and ’50s, about encounters with Ray Charles, Buster Smith, Ornette Coleman, et.al.

***********

David Newman (Notes for Keep The Spirits Singing):

In the exciting times directly following World War II, when David Newman was a young man in Dallas, Texas, interstates, jet planes, mall culture and television did not exist.  People from different regions did things their own way.  For black tenor saxophone players from the wide open spaces, that meant cultivating the larger than life sound of the kind projected by luminaries like Herschel Evans, Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Tate, Arnett Cobb and John Hardee on the popular recordings by big bands and jump bands of the day.  As much Newman and his peer group — Ornette Coleman, King Curtis, Booker Ervin, Dewey Redman — absorbed the startling modernist postulations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie during those years, they never strayed far from the elemental principle that the horn is an analog for the human voice.  The sound was of the essence.

Then, musicians learned by jumping into the fray.  Initially an alto saxophonist, Newman attended high school with future luminaries like Cedar Walton and James Clay and jammed on up-to-the-minute bebop with a teenage Ornette Coleman.  He played in bands led by a pair of little-recorded legends, the alto saxophonist Buster Smith, who was Charlie Parker’s earliest and primary influence from Kansas City days, and the tenor saxophonist Red Connor, who Coleman cites as a primary mentor.  We’ll digress with Newman’s comments on both.

“Red Connor was a very fine musician with a sound somewhere in between Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, or Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon, with a little Don Byas or Chu Berry in there,” he recalls.  “Booker Ervin listened quite a bit to him, as you can hear in Booker’s playing.  I don’t know of any other players that had Red’s particular style and his sound; he was very much his own person and  didn’t particularly pattern himself on any of the forerunner tenor players.  Red knew all the Bebop tunes, he was playing Bebop always, and I got a thorough training by playing with the Red Connor band when I was in high school.

“At that time Buster Smith had moved back to Dallas, and he had one of the best big bands in the city.  One night I sneaked into a club to hear his band play, and he gave me a chance to sit in, which was a very big thing for me; soon I started to play with him.  Buster had an advanced approach, different from most musicians of his era.  He had a huge sound on the alto, and his execution was superb; he could get over the instrument really fast — he knew it backwards.  His phrasing and harmonic concept were modern, ahead of its time.  He was a self-taught musician with perfect pitch, and he could sit and write arrangements while we were riding up and down the highways — he wouldn’t have to be anywhere near a piano.  He would write out full arrangements, and on a jump blues that he wanted to extend he would set up different riffs for the saxophones, then someone in the brass section would set the riffs for the trumpets and trombones.  They called Buster ‘Prof,’ short for Professor, because he had this air about him, as this very well-educated professor.

“Buster put together small combos for the road or to back up people like T-Bone Walker and others who came through Dallas.  Around 1951-52, Buster organized a group with Leroy Cooper and myself to do a tour with Ray Charles, who was singing and playing the alto.  We played mostly the southern states out to California.  I had met Ray a little earlier, when I was playing with Lloyd Glenn, a piano player with a hit record called ‘Chickaboo,’ and Ray was with Lowell Fulsom, who featured him playing piano and singing.  We were traveling on the road at black theaters and dance halls with a package that also included Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker.  Sometimes Ray sounded similar to Charles Brown, sometimes he sounded like King Cole, even sometimes like T-Bone Walker, but you could hear his thing starting to come out.  I think Ray’s recording of ‘I Got A Woman,’ when he started to inject a Gospel feel, is where the real Ray Charles started to emerge.”

Newman blossomed as a star sideman with Charles’ brilliant small band from 1954 to 1964, but he’s never felt aesthetically encumbered by his past.  “Ray gave us a lesson in music appreciation,” Newman told “Downbeat” a few years back.  “Before I encountered Ray, my only real love was jazz and bebop.  With Ray I learned how to respect and admire and love all other forms of music.  This music is an incredible gift.  I want to expand my mind and expand the music as it comes through me, put my stamp on it, my feeling, and see what comes out.  I want to explore other areas, bridge the generations.  You can’t close yourself off as music moves on.”

Now 67, Newman sustains that attitude of freshness and exploration throughout Keep The Spirit Singing.  Performing on flute and tenor and alto saxophones, he sculpts his sound with refined nuance through a broad matrix of emotion and rhythm-timbre, enhanced by an ensemble of creative veteran improvisers who know the Old Master well enough not to have to waste time getting acquainted in the studio.

Pianist John Hicks spent his formative years in St. Louis and Atlanta, and knows intimately the language of blues and church forms; his distinctive voicings and ebullient beat fit Newman like a custom-made suit.  “I’ve known John a long time, and he’s been one of my favorite pianists for many years,” Newman says.  “He knows where I’m going, and we blend as a very good combination.”

On three selections Newman pairs off with trombonist Steve Turre, a fellow Charles alumnus who coaxed the master into playing four tunes on his recently issued In The Spur of The Moment [Telarc].  “I like the blend of the tenor saxophone and trombone,” Newman says.  “Ray’s standard instrumentation was two trumpets and three reeds, but in the ’50s when we played the Apollo and the Howard Theater, he would use the trombone.  I wanted Steve because he gets that wide-open, full sound.”

Newman first met Turre and bassist Steve Novosel when both were working with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, another devotee of extracting a full sonic palette from an array of horns.  “I first met Rahsaan in Chicago, when I was playing with Ray,” Newman digresses.  “Rahsaan was just getting his start, and had come over to Atlantic Records.  He would hang out at the Sutherland Hotel, where we stayed quite often in Chicago.”

Returning to the subject at hand, he continues: “Steve Novosel is a solid, great player.  I depend on him a lot for his ability to carry the melody.”

Like Novosel, trapsetter Winard Harper works frequently with Newman.  The relationship began when Harper hired Newman for a record date a few years back; the in-demand 38-year drummer plays with idiomatic precision and imaginative flair throughout. Joining him for several tunes is percussion wizard Steve Kroon, who dots the i’s and crosses the t’s with customary panache.

Guitarist O’Donnell Levy composed and arranged the Caribbean-flavored title track and the samba-esque “Asia Beat,” which frame the session, while Turre offers the pungent “Mellow-D For Mr. C.”  “I like the way the changes move in the tune,” Newman says of the latter, which refers to Ray Charles.  Does the Caribbean beat relate to the 12/8 feel Newman played over 45 years ago?  “Yes, it does.  It’s a very natural feeling.  A lot of people today seem to like that feel, and I am one of those people.”

Newman’s “Cousin Esau” showcases his vocalized flute sound.  “I adapted some of the things that Eddie Harris and Les McCann used to do with this particular beat,” Newman says.  “No one has a name for it, but I call it the Listen-Here beat.  Most drummers that I ask know what I mean.  It’s a four-beat rim-shot figure played on the snare drum; most people can groove to it.  I thought of the flute when writing this tune.  Through the years I’ve tried to get an identifiable flute sound, and somehow it’s starting to come together.  It’s a very earthy, open sound.  When I was a kid I used to blow across a Dr. Pepper or R.C. Cola soda bottle to get a sound; after I started playing the flute, I found it was a good way to get a good open sound.”

Newman wrote “Karen, My Love” for his wife; his bravura performance comes right out of the Gene Ammons tradition of heart-on-the-sleeve balladry using only the choicest notes.  “John Hicks helped me flesh this out,” Newman reveals.  “I knew exactly what I wanted, but John could put meaning to what I had in mind.”

Newman reprises “Willow Weep For Me,” which he recorded years ago for Atlantic, taking it here with a 3/4 feel.  It’s a showcase for his bright, declamatory alto saxophone style, and shows that his early experience with Buster Smith “has stuck with me all through the years.”

John Hicks composed “Life,” one of his many lovely waltzes, with Newman’s flute in mind.  “It has a natural feel,” Newman says.  “John wanted me to play it as I felt it fit me.”

Newman is no stranger to the Latin sound that inflects much of the proceedings.  “I guested many times with Machito’s band, and later on with other Latin groups, and that gave me the feel of the Latin beat as well as some things coming out of Cuba,” he notes.  “The jazz feel with the African-Latin influence and the European influence is part of what jazz is all about, especially these days — it’s all come together.”

Pushing the envelope remains the animating imperative for Newman, a musician who can retrospect on a career that spans a half-century — 45 years in the spotlight.

“You don’t want to get yourself into a dated position,” says the man whose sound defines soul tenor for several generations.  “I like to incorporate the modern approach I hear from the younger players in playing the changes, and I still include some of the things that I played and learned from the veteran musicians when I was young.  You take what you have and ride with it, put it all together, and keep moving with the feeling, keep going forward.”

******************

David Newman (WKCR) – (2-27-96):

[MUSIC: “Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool”]

TP: We don’t have that much time, and there are a number of things I’d like to ask you.  So if you don’t have any objections, a few questions about your background in the Dallas area in the 1940’s and the early 1950’s.  Is that okay?

DN: Yes, it’s okay.  Just fire away.

TP: I’d like to know a little bit about your music education.  You’ve been known during your years in music for playing at least three horns, tenor, alto and flute, and improvising on them, and that’s been a hallmark throughout your career.  When did you first began playing an instrument?  What was your musical background like in your family?  Give us a little biography of your early years.

DN: Actually, there are no other musicians in my family that I know of; you know, previous musicians.  When I started playing, my first instrument was the alto.

TP: How old were you?

DN: I must have been 12 or 13 when I got my first instrument, the alto.  My Mom wanted me to take piano lessons, and I was opposed to taking piano lessons, so I told her I would like to have an instrument, a saxophone, and she said, “What kind?” and I didn’t really know.  I wound up getting an alto.  It was purely by speculation, but later it turned out that I don’t think I could have made a better choice.  It was my favorite instrument.

TP: Why was that?  What distinguishes the alto for you amongst the other members of the saxophone family?

DN: Well, for me it was the voice…it was close to like… I had been doing a little singing in the a cappella choir in the glee club there, and I was singing alto parts, and so I figured that would be a good start for me just to start playing the alto.  However, later on, I picked up the baritone, too, and I played the baritone for quite some time.  As a matter of fact, I started out with Ray Charles playing the baritone saxophone, and then later I switched to tenor saxophone.

TP: People who play the alto say that it’s maybe the hardest instrument to get a real sound out of?  Do you find that true, or do all the saxophones have different challenges?

DN: Well, I think each one presents a different challenge.  But it seems like the soprano was the most difficult saxophone for me to get a true tone out of.  For some reason, you have to have really good, tight chops to get a true sound from the soprano.  But the alto wasn’t that… I think maybe the clarinet was the most difficult instrument to play from the woodwind family, but I didn’t start out playing clarinet like most sax-o-phonists.  Most of them start out playing the clarinet.

TP: What was your path?  Presumably you took to music with some facility and got immersed in it while you were in high school, because I know that shortly after you were working, making money at gigs and so forth.

DN: Oh, yeah.

TP: Who was your high school teacher?  Was he the main one?

DN: Yes.  Well, his name was J.K. Miller.

TP: At what high school?

DN: That was Lincoln High School in Dallas.  He was the one who gave me the nickname “Fathead” in music class one day, in the band-room.  He gave me this name because I was fluffing passages, I wasn’t reading the music, and he clapped me on the head and called me “fathead” in class, and that stuck.  That was the same school… Like, Cedar Walton and I are from the same town, and…

TP: You’re about the same age, too.

DN: I was about a year ahead of Cedar.  I’m a year older than Cedar, I think.

TP: Please continue.  What sort of music were you playing in your high school band?  Basic stocks?  Was he playing contemporary arrangements?

DN: They were basically stock arrangements, and we had a few arrangements that Mr. Miller had introduced us to.  Because he had played professionally in the big band era.  He had played with bands like Tiny Bradshaw and Hot Lips Page, so he had a few charts like from those big bands.  But most of the charts that we were playing in the Jazz Band was primarily stock arrangements.  Then in the marching band, naturally we were playing all the John Philip Sousa marches and different other marches.

TP: How about in terms of listening to records?  What was impressing you at that time, in 1946, ’47, ’48?

DN: Well, I started out…I was listening to… From my home, my parents, my mother and father, they had these 12-inch records that if you dropped them they would break (33-1/3 I think they were).  The big band era, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, all of the big bands, that was the music that was around my house.  After I started playing the instrument, I was introduced to Bebop, which my friends introduced me to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie records.  And from that point on, I wanted to be a Bebop musician.

TP: What records do you remember listening to?

DN: Well, I think the very first Bebop record that I listened to was a tune called “Koko”, which was “Cherokee”, with Bird playing “Cherokee.”

TP: So rather than frightening you away, it made you want to do it all the more.

DN: Oh, it scared me to death, though.  It was awesome, the way… I had never heard anything quite like that before, I don’t think.

TP: What were your first forays into playing music for money, albeit probably very little at the beginning?

DN: Well, it was during the late Forties when I was still in high school.  I was offered gigs, like, playing with local musicians around there.  There was a musician named Doug Fernell(?) that I played with…

TP: And the Sanctified Shouters, something like that?

DN: Right, heh-heh, his Satisfied Five.  Then later I was introduced to Buster Smith.  Most of my formal training was through Buster.  He was really my mentor.  He was a very fine teacher and a very fine musician.

TP: Giving you a very direct link to Charlie Parker, albeit in a different way.

DN: Very direct, that’s true.

TP: I’d like you to go into some detail about Buster Smith as a person, as much as you would like to describe.  How did you come to meet him, first of all?

DN: Well, I came to meet Buster because during the time when I was still in high school, Buster had moved back to Dallas and he had a big band, and it was probably one of the best big bands there in Dallas.  Buster actually wrote this tune, “One O’Clock Jump.”  It was his composition, and he had an arrangement on “One O’Clock Jump” that was really something.  Buster had moved back from Kansas City.  Before then, he’d lived in Kansas City.  Kansas City was really the hub.  All of the big bands were coming out of Kansas City;  for some reason it was like the hub, and all of the bands would come to Kansas City.  And I met Buster Smith, and I started playing his music…

TP: Through the high school orchestra?  Had he heard you play?  How did he hear about you?

DN: Yes, he had heard me through the high school orchestra.  One night I sneaked out into a club to hear his band play, and I was given a chance to sit in and play, which was a very big thing for me.

TP: You mentioned him as being your mentor.  How would he impart information?  What sort of things do you remember him telling you or showing you that really stuck?

DN: Well, basic things like sound, getting a nice, big, round sound.  And his approach to the instrument.  He had a very unique approach to the instrument.  It was different especially from most players of his era, musicians of his time.  His execution was very good.  He could really get over the instrument.  Charlie Parker listened to Buster when Charlie Parker was playing with Jay McShann, and Buster had been with the Bennie Moten Big Band and the Blue Devils band around Kansas City.  His whole approach to the music was very different…

TP: How was it different?  In what way?

DN: Well, it was different in that most of the musicians of his time… He was a little more advanced in that he was actually playing Bebop… His style of playing wasn’t like, say, the other musicians around his time.  He was very much ahead of himself in his playing, Buster was.

TP: You mean in terms of his rhythmic phrasing…

DN: Yes.

TP: …or in terms of his harmonic concept?

DN: Exactly.

TP: Both of them.

DN: Right.

TP: Looking back at it now from your perspective forty years later, how would you describe the arrangements that he brought into that band?

DN: Well, his arrangements were very modern.  Like, the phrasing was very modern, and it was very much ahead of its time.  It wasn’t the same as the other bands, like the Blue Devils and the Bennie Moten bands.  Buster’s arrangements were a little more advanced as far as the phrasing and harmonics.  He was like a self-taught musician.  I don’t know exactly who taught Buster to arrange.

TP: I think he took it off of records in the 1920’s.  I think I recollect reading that he had sat down with Fletcher Henderson arrangements and taken them apart…

DN: Yeah.  And I presume he taught himself to read and write, because I don’t think he had any formal training.  But I knew he had perfect pitch, and he could sit and write arrangements while we were riding up and down the highways, and he wouldn’t have to be anywhere near a piano or anything — he’d be just sitting and writing, writing different parts.  He was a very talented musician, very talented.

TP: Did he ever give you any comments on what he thought about what Charlie Parker was doing in the late 1940’s or early ’50s?

DN: Well, he would tell us that Bird used to come around and listen to him when Bird was playing with McShann.  He said that he would see Bird come around to and to listen to him and to check out his style of playing.  That’s what Bird was listening to, because most of the other musicians weren’t getting over the instrument…they didn’t execute like Buster did.

TP: That band had a number of young musicians who went on to rather prominent musicians, those early Buster Smith bands.  I believe one of them Ray Charles entered for a while before he went off on his own and had his first efforts?  Am I right about that?

DN: No, I don’t…

TP: Ray Charles wasn’t part of one of his bands?

DN: No, I don’t think Ray was any part of Buster’s thing.  Ray came from a different part of the country.  Ray was from North Carolina, and then he went to school in Florida.  When I first met Ray, Ray was playing, like, with the Lowell Fulsom band.  He was being featured as a vocalist and playing with the Lowell Fulsom Band, and I had been… We had a package, which was Lowell Fulsom, T-Bone Walker, Lloyd Glenn and Big Joe Turner, and I was playing with Lloyd Glenn.  That’s when I first met Ray, in 1951.

TP: I transcribed an interview that Buster Smith did where he mentioned that, but maybe I was misreading it.  Anyway, talk a bit about the progress working with Buster Smith into joining the Ray Charles band.  Presumably, you were working with all sorts of bands around the Dallas area and then in the Southwest area as well.

DN: I did, until after I first met Ray when he was with Lowell Fulsom, and Ray said that he was going to form his own band soon.  We had become good friends, and I told him that I would love to play with him whenever he did start his band.  And Ray eventually formed his band in ’54, and he was out in California, and Ray gave me a call.  I joined his band out in California, and I started out in the band, as I said before, playing the baritone, because there was another tenor player by the name of Donald Wilkerson who was playing tenor.  After Donald left the band, then I asked Ray could I have the tenor chair, to play the tenor, and he said, “Yeah, if you can get yourself a tenor saxophone?”  I went and bought a tenor saxophone and I started playing the tenor.  That was about ’56.

TP: Were you playing alto all along?

DN: Oh yeah, I was still playing the alto.  But I had the baritone, and that’s what I started out in his band, playing the baritone.

TP: It seems like for you and a lot of musicians who were born around the time you were, playing in these Blues bands, Rhythm-and-Blues bands, it’s almost like you had to have two identities going, playing the function, for the audiences you were playing for, and yet keeping the more creative side possibly going on simultaneously.  How much room was there in the Blues bands and in Ray Charles’ band to stretch out and do something that you may or may not have been more interested in?

DN: Well, I think that probably the best thing that you could do, you could stretch out every now and then.  You could sneak in a Bebop phrase here and there while you were playing the Blues.  But the thing of it was, most of the time you couldn’t make any money playing Bebop, so in order to earn money by playing, most of the guys would play in Blues bands, to play the Blues.  It was very important to learn to play the Blues, too, because it’s a very integral part of being a Jazz musician.  I think every Jazz musician should be able to play the Blues.

TP: I’d like to ask you about a couple of other people who were around the Dallas-Fort Worth area at that time.  One who is mentioned often by people as being a fabulous player, who never recorded at all, as far as I know, was Red Conner.  Did you know him?

DN: Yes, of course.  When I met Red Conner, Red Conner was living in Fort Worth, and I was playing alto in Red’s band.  This is when I met Ornette Coleman.  Ornette was playing the tenor saxophone at the time, and he was still in high school over in Fort Worth and I was in high school in Dallas, and we would meet and play up in the parks over in Fort Worth.  We would meet out in the parks and have jam sessions and play out in the park.

TP: Would you play Out in the park?

DN: Well, we were playing Out in the park also, yes.  Out in the park.  Because naturally, we were playing all the Bebop arrangements, and then going a step farther, especially Ornette.  Ornette was always a little advanced.  Like, if we played one of the Bird tunes, he would play Bird’s solo note-for-note on the tenor, and then after that it would be Ornette.  He would play strictly Ornette after that.

TP: So what you’re saying is that Ornette Coleman as a teenager had thoroughly assimilated the language of Bebop.

DN: Yes.  Yes, he did.  And he went one step further, because he had ideas about… Like, from the very beginning, when I first heard him, he had ideas about what he wanted to do and the different sounds that he wanted to get from the instrument.  And later, when he switched to playing the… When he left home, and I heard him playing alto after he’d moved out to California, well, it wasn’t anything new to me, because I expected that he would be going in that direction.

TP: Which direction are you talking about?  I’d like to hear it in your words?

DN: What, the Harmolodics and…

TP: What did it sound like to you?

DN: Well, it’s not too easy for me to describe his music.  But it is music.  He has his own system, his own style, and the phrasing, and his own concept of what the music is all about.  Coltrane listened to Ornette.  A lot of musicians have been and still are intrigued with Ornette’s style of playing.  I don’t know too much about Harmolodics, so I really couldn’t go too deep into it to explain to you about it, because I never did… It was hard enough for me to get to the basics of what was really happening at the time.  It was difficult enough for me to get that, let alone try to grasp what he was into.  Later on, a lot of musicians would term it as Avant Garde music and being out, you know…

TP: Tell me more about Red Conner.  What was his sound like?

DN: Red Conner was a very fine musician.  He had a big, open sound on the saxophone.  I would say that Red’s sound was somewhere in between Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons.  But Red had his very own unique sound of playing.  He didn’t really sound like anyone else.  But he knew all of the Bebop tunes.  During those days, whenever a new record would come out, we were all aware of… It wasn’t like it is so much nowadays, where so many records come out and so many different compositions come out that they’re pretty hard to keep up with.  During that particular time, Red knew all of the Bebop tunes, and I got a thorough training by playing with the Red Conner band.  There was a trumpet player named Bobby Simmons who was from Fort Worth also.  Between the two of them, it was really learning time.  You could really learn a lot from them.

TP: You would play those tunes in performances, or you’d play them in rehearsing and woodshedding?

DN: We would play them woodshedding and in performances.

TP: Did he change the essence at all to suit the audience, or was there a receptive audience?

DN: No, he wouldn’t change.  He would play them just as they are and swing them.  But we did have compositions that we would do that would suit the audience, compositions like Duke Ellington’s “A Train,” and he would play “Body and Soul” something similar to the way Coleman Hawkins would play it.

TP: Was he into Chu Berry also?

DN: Into that sound.  Maybe into that sound.  He would get a little like Chu Berry’s sound there.

TP: On the Ellington record, to get back to the present, because I’ve been keeping you in your past a little long for a contemporary interview:  The new record by David Newman is Mister Gentle and Mister Cool.  It’s a tribute to Duke Ellington on Kokopelli.  And a lot of the tunes on here refer to Ben Webster in some way.  Were you listening to the Ellington band, the big bands, and the saxophonists who established their style before Charlie Parker?

DN: Oh, yes.  I started to really listen to the musicians before Bird’s time.  I listened to Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry, Don Byas, to their particular styles.  Then later on, I would listen to musicians like James Moody, Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, and you name it!

TP: I guess when you sort of got out of being local and going on the road, which was 1954…

DN: Yes.

TP: You must have had opportunities to hear everybody sit in… I mean, it must have been a great environment for just being exposed to a lot of different styles of music.

DN: Oh, it was.  It was.  And in Ray’s band, in the Ray Charles band, all the musicians were like really Jazz musicians, and they had gone to college, and were really good, fine Jazz musicians and really good players.  They all came really from the Bebop era.  Ray had a unique style of writing for five horns.  He would use two trumpets and three reeds, and with the two trumpets and the three reeds he was able to get a really big, broad sound, a really big band sound.  Ray wrote some phenomenal arrangements for the group there.  He was into really doing some very fine arranging for the five horns.

TP: Amongst your peers in that band were Hank Crawford, Marcus Belgrave…

DN: Marcus Belgrave, Blue Mitchell, Johnny Coles, musicians like that would come through.  There were a lot of fine musicians who came through Ray’s band.

TP: Now, in talking about Charlie Parker, Red Conner, Ornette Coleman, yourself, you keep talking about adjusting to the nuances of sound, and the various sounds that the saxophone can offer.  I know that you have to feed your parking meter and leave momentarily, so I think I’ll ask David Newman, as a final questions, your ruminations on Sound.  Whatever way you would want to address that.  Sound and the saxophone.

DN: Well, the sound I think is very important, Ted.  I think most young musicians, or musicians period should try really to get really a good, pure, open, wide, big sound, because if you don’t get a good sound from the instrument…  In my opinion, you don’t have too much going for you if you don’t have… I mean, sound to me is the very essence of the instrument, and it comes first.  I think one should have control and have a sound as one of the first things you do when you approach the instrument, and then later, getting over the instruments and being able to executive also comes in hand.  But to me, sound is the very essence of the instrument.

TP: David Newman has been putting a personal sound and style on all of his instruments for many years, and… How many are you playing this week at Sweet Basil?

DN: I’ll be playing the alto, the tenor, and the flute.  I don’t play the soprano that much these days, but I still play the alto, the tenor and the flute.

About having an identifiable sound, I think that’s important, because… For the younger artists of today, the musicians when they come around when they’re playing, having an identifiable sound is very important.  Well, it means a lot to me, and I’m pretty sure it would mean a lot to any other musician to be able, when one hears a certain thing played on the air or on a CD, to be able to say, “Oh, that’s…”  To have the blindfold test, to be able to say, “Well, that’s this person.”   That’s David Murray, that’s James Carter, that’s David Newman, that’s Joshua Redman or whoever.  Having an identifiable sound I think is very important.

[ETC.]

[MUSIC: “Don’t Get Around Much Any More”]

****************

Hank Crawford-David Newman (Ted Panken) – (3-3-98):

TP:  The first question I’ll address to you both is when you were first aware of the other?  Hank Crawford, did you first meet David Newman when you came into the Ray Charles band?

HC:  Yes, I first met him when I went in Ray’s band. But I was aware of his playing from some records I had heard, solo things he had done with Ray Charles. But the first time we met I’d just joined the band actually.

TP:  I’d like to talk to you, Hank, about your path into the Ray Charles band, and I guess we should start from your early years as a musician. When did you start playing music?

HC:  I started playing at the age of 9. I started on piano. Piano was my first instrument. I studied three years of private lessons; I guess that must have been at about the age of 6 when I started taking music lessons, and from there I went to the saxophone.

TP:  Why did you go to the saxophone from the piano?

HC:  My father was in the Service, and when he came back, he’d bought a saxophone with him, which was a C-melody — actually it was a C-melody saxophone. I think he was sort of a frustrated saxophone player himself, but he never did go into it. But he brought the horn, and I was studying piano and still in elementary school. So I still had, I guess, 6th, 7th and 8th grade to go. And once I entered high school in 9th Grade, naturally I wanted to be in the high school band, and piano was a bit much to march with. So I just went to the closet and picked out the horn. I’m self-taught saxophone. I just got a book actually in Ninth Grade and taught myself after I learned the fingering, because I already had a slight knowledge of music from taking piano lessons.

TP:  You could read probably, and knew some chords.

HC:  Right. And I started playing saxophone in Ninth grade. Then after I taught myself the fingering and stuff, I just kept playing. Later I had lessons on the saxophone, too, but that was in college. That’s when I entered college.

TP:  What sort of music program did you have in high school?

HC:  Well, it was basically the marching band, a concert band, and a dance band which we called the Rhythm Bombers. It was a 16-piece high school band. Our band director in high school was a trumpet player by the name of Matthew Garrett, who is Dee Dee Bridgewater’s father. Actually, Dee Dee’s given name is Denise Garrett. Her father was Matthew Garrett, and he was my high school band director. We used to play a lot of Woody Herman charts and Count Basie charts, just big band stuff.

TP:  Did he have you working outside the high school, like Walter Dyett did in Chicago, got his guys in the union?

HC:  Oh yeah. We played a lot of Monday night things, usually on campus. And then we played some things off-campus, which was in local clubs. But even in high school, we were playing major functions.

TP:  Had you always been listening to records and other saxophonists?

HC:  Yes.

TP:  And when did the alto become the horn of choice, or the horn that suited your ear. From the influences that you describe on your bios, you mention Bird, Louis Jordan, Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, later Cannonball, they’re all alto players. So I assume that was the primary voice that you heard.

HC:  During that period I heard a lot of saxophone players, from Bird to Bostic, Tab Smith, and on up through to Ammons, Sonny Stitt, you know… So really, I can’t say just one more than the other inspired me the most. Because I love to hear musicians play, all saxophone players. I got a bit from each one. But I always liked the sound of the alto, although I did play a little tenor or baritone. But I could express myself more on alto. That seemed to be my voice.

TP:  You also mentioned your church experience as being very important for you.

HC:  Oh yes.

TP:  And it seems to me that the alto saxophone is the sound that’s more commonly inspirational in the church.

HC:  Oh yes. I think the alto is very voice-like. I approach the horn vocally, as if I was going to sing. I guess that comes across because of my early beginnings or early roots in the church. That’s where I started when I was playing piano. I used to play for the junior choirs, the senior choirs, prayer meetings. My whole family was really involved in church a lot. If they didn’t play, they were singing. So all my life I was involved in spiritual music.

TP:  What was the name of the church you belonged to in Memphis?

HC:  Originally, Springdale. Springdale Baptist Church.

TP:  That’s where you had your piano lessons, or played piano.

HC:  Yes, right there.

TP:  Well, we’ll stop with Hank in high school playing with the 16-piece band in high school with Matthew Garrett as the band director, and go through the same process with David Newman. Your path on the saxophone. When you started playing, what the circumstances were, etcetera.

DN:  You mean right from the very beginning.

TP:  When did you first put a horn in your mouth.

DN:  Well, it was the mid-Forties when I first picked up the alto. Like Hank, I started out with the piano. I had a few piano lessons at first, but I didn’t stay with the piano as long as he did. I only had a few lessons, and then right away my friends started calling me a little sissy, so I wanted to pick up a more masculine instrument. So I asked my Mom to get a horn, and I didn’t know exactly what kind of horn. But then I heard Louis Jordan play the alto saxophone, and it just blew me away, and right away I chose the alto — that’s what my Mom bought me. I was still in elementary school, and started taking private lessons from my music instructor, J.K. Miller, who was the band director at Lincoln High School. He taught Cedar Walton and James Clay, alike from Dallas. We called him Uncle Dud. When I started high school I went directly into the band. Uncle Dud was the one that gave me the name “Fathead.”  He wanted me to read the music instead of memorizing music like what I was doing, and he called me a fathead in class, and that’s been my nickname until this day.

TP:  Unapropos.

DN:  [LAUGHS] Unapropos, but nonetheless that’s the way it was, and it’s a trademark by now. I don’t get offended by the name at all, because it goes so far back, and it’s just a nickname anyway.

TP:  What sort of music program did he have. Hank Crawford’s describing playing contemporary Basie and Woody Herman charts, a 16-piece band. Did you have something similar to that in high school?

DN:  We had something similar to that for the jazz band, some Basie charts, some arrangements by Buster Smith, who was a local alto saxophone player and arranger and composer from Dallas, and also some stock arrangements, which were published orchestrations. I was playing alto for many years, and after about my second year in high school, a friend of mine introduced me to Bird. He brought along a Charlie Parker record, a 78 on Savoy Records, and Bird was playing “Koko,” which was “Cherokee.”  I had never heard anything like that before in my life. I was thinking that there was no other player that could play any faster or better than Earl Bostic. Earl Bostic was the man at that time. And when I heard Charlie Parker it just blew my mind away.

From that point on, I fell into the Bebop bag, and I started listening to all the Bebop tunes as they came out. And during that particular time, it was very easy to keep up with all the new tunes that came out, because there weren’t that many. So I would listen to J.J., Diz, Bird, Fats Navarro, Dexter, all the players.

TP:  What a lot of people describe is that when these records would come out, their whole little clique of musicians would get together, memorize the solos, and then…

DN:  Exactly.

TP:  Was that your experience, too, Hank?

HC:  yes.

TP:  Do you remember your first Bird record?

HC:  Maybe not by name, but I can say this. Like David was saying, at that particular time it was the Bebop era that we both came through, you know, and some of the same people he named I really admire. I love Bostic for power. He was a power player. But we all came through all phases of music, from the Blues, Gospel and Jazz… Actually, I was speaking about the spiritual side of music, but we were also playing Bebop. That was the era that we really come through. We always tried to play Bird’s solos, and did play them, note for note!

TP:  So you memorized your Bird solos also.

HC:  Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

TP:  I’m going to ask you each about your contemporaries, because you each came up with a small group of distinguished cohorts. In David’s case, you came up with James Clay, Cedar Walton and Ornette Coleman. You’ve mentioned a good story about Ornette, playing in the park.

DN:  There was a park in Fort Worth (I forget the name) where we would all gather around the gazebo and play there. I was playing with an older musician there named Red Connor, a very good saxophone player. He never was that well-known because I don’t think he left Texas that much, but at the time he was the leading saxophonist in that area. His sound was more or less between Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon, and even maybe Don Byas. He was a Bebop player, and he knew all the Bebop tunes. I was playing in Red’s band, and Ornette would come and play. I was playing the alto and Ornette was playing the tenor saxophone when I first met him. We would play all of Bird’s tunes, and we both knew his solos, as well as Sonny Criss and the other alto players. We’d learn these solos note for note, then after we finished playing whatever Bird had played, then it came time to do the individual thing, and this is when Ornette would go Ornette. Then we could hear come in after he would run out of Bird’s solos, then he would go to Ornette! [LAUGHS]

TP:  Ornette as we know him today.

DN:  Ornette as we know him. It was Ornette. He wasn’t calling it harmolodics at the time, but that’s the direction that he would go into. He would not conform to the chord structure. He would just go completely different, because he had his own conception. His concept was entirely different. We knew he was on his way to being something different. We didn’t know what it was, but we knew it was a different thing happening with Ornette.

TP:  Hank Crawford, I can think of two pretty fair saxophonists in your age group, George Coleman and Frank Strozier. Were you all acquainted?

HC:  Yes, we were all in high school together. In fact, George and I were in the same class. Frank was a few years behind us, but we were all in the same band. Speaking of local saxophone players, at that time the guy who impressed me the most was a tenor player named Ben Branch, who sounded a lot like Gene Ammons — and I always liked Ammons’ playing. There was a guy who played alto in Memphis who I got my name from, an older man named Hank O’Day — really Hank, not Henry. He was playing in a big band that was led by Al Jackson, who was the father of the drummer Al Jackson from the Stax scene.  There was George, and then a few years behind us was Charles Lloyd. There was another guy who played saxophone who sounded very much like Bird… At that time, George Coleman was the king. He was playing all of the Bird stuff.

During that era, we were studying a lot of Bebop. That’s why we went from house to house, to learn all these bad tunes. But basically, our primary function when we would go out to play was the Blues. We’d practice the Bebop all day at each other’s house, but when we had to go out and play, we’d play a lot of Blues, Memphis being the home of the Blues, they say. I walked bars and laid on my back on the floor with people dropping coins in the bell.

I remember listening to Johnny Hodges, and I remember Tab Smith played on “Because of You” that floored me. I like melodies. I really like ballads, and I think I’m most expressive on ballads. I guess that comes from being around vocal music a lot.

TP:  You mentioned that starting in the church as well. You mentioned that in your trademark horn arrangements, the horns are the backup singers, you’re the lead singer with the alto.

HC:  Yes. I found that to be true when I joined Ray Charles’ band. I started trying to write a little bit when I was in high school, and in Memphis, almost every band that you played with was at least eight pieces, from 8 to 16 pieces, five horns at least. Big bands was a favorite of mine, too; I loved big bands. I even had the opportunity to meet some of the great big band leaders later on in my career.

TP:  Lunceford was from Memphis from originally.

HC:  Yes, and Gerald Wilson. And later, when I went to school at Tennessee State in Nashville, I had a chance to meet Ellington and Dizzy. They would come and play the homecoming campus gig every year. There would always be a big name. I had an opportunity to meet Charlie Parker three months before he passed in Nashville. I was a senior at Tennessee State, and Bird came through on a show with Stan Kenton, June Christy, Nat Cole. There was a tenor player in Nashville named Thurman Green. [LAUGHS]

TP:  You’re laughing.

HC:  Well, he was funny. He was funny just as a human being and then he was funny as a player. We used to laugh at his playing. He just played funny, man. He knew Charlie Parker personally. And Bird came through at that particular time with that show we were talking about, and he came down to a little place that I was playing called the El Morocco. I was playing an off-campus gig, and Bird came down there, just hanging out. He didn’t play anything; came with Thurman, his friend. He sat there, and for about two hours, man, after we finished, I had a chance to sit next to him and talk. I don’t know what we were talking about. Just fun things. This was like in December, and he passed in March. That’s about three months.

TP:  It sounds to me that the thing you both share is you had thorough high school educations. You got a thorough musical preparation in a lot of ways in high school, and then you were playing functionally on these type of gigs and getting professional experience from a fairly young age. How old were you when you did your first professional gig, whatever amount of money it was?

HC:  Actually in high school we were getting paid. Because at that time, at 14 and 15, we were going out playing the dances. The senior players, they were out, too. But at that time, Memphis was full of great musicians, man. Phineas Newborn was there. He was playing at that age, man, and he was just out of sight. So we played all of the R&B gigs and all of the jazz gigs and so forth.

TP:  There wasn’t a differentiation between Jazz and other forms of music. It was all one big pot, kind of?

HC:  Right. Well, playing Bebop, that was our classroom. That was the study period, you know. But Blues just came as a natural if you were from that part of the country.

TP:  I take it that Dallas, Texas wasn’t so dissimilar in terms of the requirements for playing in public, am I right?

DN:  My experience in that area was we’d play Bebop in jam sessions, and maybe there was one club or two where we would play together for the door, which wouldn’t be very much money, like the Log Cabin in South Dallas. But you couldn’t earn a living playing Bebop because the people, especially in the Dallas area, they weren’t that interested in Bebop.

TP:  What would happen if you might throw that into your playing?  Would they be very verbal and vociferous and clear in their displeasure?

DN:  Well, the younger people would dance to anything that we played. They were receptive. But the older generations, from the thirties on, they didn’t take too much to Bebop. They would listen for the beat and that sound which they were accustomed to. If it wasn’t Swing from the Big Band area, then it had to be something like Blues or Rhythm-and-Blues, something from a beat there, and the Blues, bluesy tunes. So you had to play the Blues. In order to make any kind of money playing music around the Dallas area and Texas, you had to play the Blues. T-Bone Walker was from Dallas, and I would play gigs and go on gigs. Whenever T-Bone would come through town, I would go on gigs, because Buster Smith usually put bands together to back up T-Bone. Lowell Fulsom lived in Fort Worth, and I’d work with him.

TP:  Would you go out with them or just play gigs?

DN:  I would go out. My first outing from Dallas was with a piano player named Lloyd Glenn, who had a hit record out called “Chickaboo.”  They would have packages on the shows. It would be Lloyd Glenn’s band, Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulsom, and I was playing with Lloyd Glenn. That was my first outing other than going out backing up T-Bone Walker playing in Buster’s band. But my first outing on the road professionally was with Lloyd Glenn.

TP:  Tell me a little bit about Buster Smith, the master of riff arranging. How did you come to meet him?

DN:  Well, Buster was well-known. Buster had left Dallas, and he was living in Kansas City. He’d played in the Blue Devils, which was from Oklahoma City, and then with Bennie Moten, and then Basie, and then came back to Texas for various reasons in the ’40s. He was very good arranger and he had control of the alto saxophone. His execution was very good. He was very fast. This is how Bird came to listen. When Bird was very young and later when he was playing with Jay McShann, he’d come over to hear Buster play, because Buster was really getting over the instrument. Buster was a main influence on Charlie Parker more than most people realize.

TP:  What were your personal experiences with Buster Smith?

DN:  I played many engagements with Buster. He was a very gifted musician. I think he was a self-taught musician. He had perfect pitch. We’d ride up and down the road, and Buster would just sit in the car with his cigar in his mouth. He wasn’t a drinker; he just had a cigar. As a matter of fact, they used to call Buster “Prof,” short for Professor, because he had this air about him, as this very well-educated professor. But he taught himself music, really, and he had this wonderful gift. He could arrange and write without being around any kind of instrument at all from having perfect pitch. I learned so much from Buster.

TP:  I don’t know if you recall this from our last encounter, but I showed you a transcript of an interview Buster Smith did for the Oral History Project at the Institute of Jazz Studies, and he said that he had a sextet with you and Leroy Cooper, and that Ray Charles used that band in the very early Fifties, and that was your first encounter with him.

DN:  That’s true. Leroy Cooper and I were both from Dallas, and Leroy had been to the Army and was back. When I came to Lincoln High School, Leroy had graduated and was going to a college called Sam Houston, and from there he went to the Army. Buster had a small combo together. He usually kept a big band, but for putting together bands for the road or when people like Ray Charles would come through, Buster would put together these little small groups, and that’s how Leroy Cooper and I came to playing together. Leroy and I also played together behind a guitarist called Zuzu Bollin, who had a record out called “Why Don’t You Eat Where You Slept Last Night” that Leroy and I played on. Yeah, we played on this record, “Why Don’t You Eat Where You Slept Last Night.”  Then after that, Leroy left and went out with Ernie Fields’ Big Band, and when he came back… See, Leroy was playing alto. He was originally an alto player. But when he went out with Ernie Fields, Ernie Fields needed a baritone player, and Leroy started playing baritone. When he came back from Ernie Fields’ band, he was playing the baritone. When he was playing alto, he just literally ripped the keys off the alto because he was so fast.

TP:  But do you recall the specifics of the linkup between Buster Smith and Ray Charles?

DN:  Well, Buster was probably recommended to Ray. Because Ray needed a band to back him up when he came through, and Buster was the man around Dallas. I don’t know what the connection was, who brought them together, but Buster was probably recommended.

TP:  What was Ray Charles’ style like at that time insofar as you mentioned.

DN:  He sang like Nat Cole, T-Bone Walker, Charles Brown. He hadn’t found his own identity yet; he was still searching. He could sound like probably anyone, but his favorite people were people like Nat Cole, Charles Brown, T-Bone Walker.

TP:  I’ll ask Hank Crawford now to talk about your college experiences and your beginnings as a professional musician, which were in college, but entering the fray from that.

HC:  Well, as I think about it, there was a route of, say, Memphis, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, that most road bands were covering at that time. They all came through Memphis, and they used to play at places like the Palace Theater, amateur shows (we called them midnight rambles). There was the Hippodrome, and there was Club Handy which was at that time in Mitchell’s Hotel. They would all come through Memphis. We didn’t have to really go too far to see these people. That was one of the good things about that era. We got a chance to see a lot of the people that we later got to know. A lot of singers would come through town, like Percy Mayfield, but instrumentalists, too. We got a chance to see these people. Sometimes they’d come through maybe with not the full band and pick up locals, and we would always be the ones that would play for these certain entertainers, whether it be… Really, man, it was an era of everything going on. You had tap dancers, comics, shake dancers — shows. We played shows.

TP:  And you’d play the whole show.

HC:  the whole show.

TP:  You’d be playing for the shake dancer, for the tap dancer, for the singer, for the comedians act.

HC:  Yeah, for all of it, before the Apollo even entered my mind, you know. That all was happening. It’s a long story; I could think of a million things. But that was part of it in Memphis, among a whole lot of other things. When I left Memphis…

TP:  When did you first go out on the road?  Do you recollect?

HC:  Really, really go out on the road?

TP:  Was that at that time, or after?

HC:  Most of that time I was basically in Memphis. When I went to Tennessee State, I formed a little group called the Jazz Gents, and we would play locally, and as far as we would get would be Louisville, Kentucky, at the Top Hat, and then we’d get up to Buffalo at the Pine Grill. This was all while I was still in school, so we’d go out during the summer months and play for the summer, that southern route, New Orleans, St. Louis and stuff like that. I was basically a student most of the time, but I had a chance to meet all of these people, because they would come in the locale that we were all based, really.

I had some great teachers at Tennessee State. W.O. Smith was one of my instructors; he’s a bass player who was on the original recording of Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul.”  Frank T. Greer was my band director, when Florida A&M and Tennessee State started doing the “hundred steps, 8 to 5…”

TP:  Oh, that’s when they started that?

HC:  Yes. When that started, FAMU and Tennessee State, you’d just be running down the field almost. Anciel Francisco was my reed teacher. I didn’t start studying saxophones and clarinets and reeds until I got in college.

I played around Nashville, and I met a lot of people. I met Roland Kirk in Nashville, and Leon Thomas, and man, you could go on and on.

But really, I guess my big real-real going out on the road was when Brother Ray came.

TP:  Let’s talk about how that happened, for about only the three hundredth time you’ve told the story.

HC:  Well, I was still in school, and like I say, I’d heard Ray — “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” and “Drowning In My Own Tears”   were some of the first things I heard. I remember I heard something about David. One of the first things I heard him play was the solo he did on “Ain’t That Love.”  It knocked me out, man. Actually, I had a couple of buddies who had already joined Ray’s band. There was a trumpet player, John Hunt, and a drummer, Milt Turner, both from Nashville. Anyway, Ray came through Nashville. I think Leroy Cooper, “the Hog,” he had taken a leave of absence, and he was out for a minute, and they suggested to Ray that I would be the person to play that part. I never played baritone in my life. Never. You know, just around the band-rooms fooling around with the instrument.

DN:  I took the same route. I came in the band playing baritone.

TP:  Well, I think music before it was anything else was functional for you. This was how you were earning your livings basically from the age of 14-15-16 years old.

HC:  Yeah, from day one. I never did anything else.

DN:  We were both reed players, so we played the reeds.

HC:  I happened to be the Student Director on campus. I had a big band at Tennessee State; I was fronting the campus band, a 16-piece band — I was writing then. I was impressed by the sound of Ray’s small band. Actually, in Memphis, we always had eight pieces, and always had that kind of Gospel type of sound. So I kind of knew the feeling. But getting into Ray’s band, it just made it much more better, because I fell into the same kind of groove that I had been raised up with.

So anyway, I went down, didn’t even audition. I don’t think we had a rehearsal that day, because it was just quick notice. I went to the campus band-room, I talked Mr. Greer out of the baritone, told him what it was for, so he agreed, and I took it down to the Club Baron where they were playing. I sat in and played the gig that night, and that was the end of that. Three months later, I got a call from R.C. — or his manager, Jeff Brown at the time — and he asked me if I wanted the job.

I never thought I’d stay as long as I did. I was glad, because I felt the music, and worked a lot, and saw the world. Ray was getting into his thing. He was really beginning to blossom at that time. The period that I’m talking about, when I joined the band…

TP:  Do you mean blossom musically or blossom in terms of the breadth of his audience?

HC:  The fans. He was really going… I got in the band at a great period, man. I really came in the band at a great period.

TP:  Let’s hold that, and I’ll talk to David about his route to Ray Charles so you can catch up to each other on the time line.

DN:  Well, I met Ray in ’51, when he was featured with Lowell Fulsom, singing and playing. He had recorded a few singles, and he said that he was going to get his own band. We became friends right away, and I asked him, when he formed his own band to let me know, and that I would love to come play with him. And sure enough, he called me when he formed his band in ’54. We’d played together in ’52 when he was touring around, and we played with Buster, backing him. But when he formed his band in ’54, he called me, and I stayed with the band until 1964.

TP:  How did the band evolve from ’54 until Hank joined?

DN:  Well, the band just blossomed right away. I started out playing baritone, and Donald Wilkerson was on the tenor. There was a trumpet player from Houston by the name of Joseph Bridgewater, and he knew John Hunt, and Ray needed a second trumpet, so Joseph Bridgewater called John Hunt into the band, and John Hunt in turn called Milt Turner from the band, who was from Nashville. That was the Nashville connection. Then we came through Nashville and there were already musicians in the band who knew Hank, so that was the connection.

But I stayed with Ray from ’54 to ’64, then by ’66 I came to New York and first played some gigs with Kenny Dorham and then later played a few gigs with Lee Morgan and did a couple of recordings with him.

TP:  Now, you switched to tenor while you were in the band, and it seemed like that was a great meeting of the minds and ears when you started playing tenor with Ray Charles.

DN:  Donald Wilkerson left the band for a minute. Now, the tenor player was getting all the solos. During all my time playing baritone I think I got one solo, and that was a tune called “Greenback Dollar Bill.”  I took a solo on that, because that was my one and only solo. I wanted to stretch out, so I asked Ray could I take the tenor chair. He didn’t have any particular tenor player in mind, so he said yeah, if I could get a tenor saxophone. So I went out and got myself a tenor saxophone, and from that time on I started playing the tenor. I had never played tenor before. I had played baritone and alto, but not tenor.

TP:  How was the switch for you?  Natural, I would assume.

DN:  Oh, it was natural. I was just eager to make the switch anyway, and I was eager to play. I knew the book pretty well anyway; it was just a matter of switching from an E-flat to a B-flat instrument.

TP:  How do you see the differences between the two?  Are they different voices for you the way you play now.

DN:  I have a different approach on each instrument. Whatever instrument I pick up, I tend to have a different approach. It’s a different flow; I just feel them differently. I can’t say exactly what it is. I just know that I have a different voice on each one.

TP:  Now, you came in as the baritone player. Was Ray Charles playing alto and piano in the years before Hank joined?

DN:  When we’d begin, the first half-hour or so before Ray would come in to do his singing and performing on piano, we would play these five-horn jazz arrangements Ray had written, and Ray would play the alto part.

TP:  Then Hank eventually took the alto chair. Clarify that for me.

HC:  See, I went in the band in ’58, and I played baritone 1958 to 1960, for two years. I didn’t think I was going to be playing baritone that long, but for some reason Leroy didn’t come right back — it was a period of two years.

TP:  Did you get a solo?

HC:  Yeah. In fact, I was playing baritone on Ray Charles At Newport, but I was called Bennie, my real name. A lot of people ask me, “Now, who is Bennie Crawford?  Whatever happened to him?”  I say, “Well, he’s still around.”  Anyway, I played for two years on baritone. And like Newman was saying, I was shocked. One night, however it happened, here comes Ray Charles with his alto saxophone… See, that was one of the good things about that band, too. It was educational, because everything we did was on paper. We did a few head things, but even they sounded like arrangements. We were just that kind of band. In 1960 Ray graduated from the small band. He had big band eyes. I think that’s when he did “Let The Good Times Roll” and that big thing, which is on The Genius, one of my favorites.

DN:  Excuse me, but Hank played baritone when Ray Charles presented me to Atlantic and we did Ray Charles Presents. He had solos on that and he did some of the arranging.

TP:  I was about to ask Hank about your arranging activities with the Ray Charles and the dynamics of it, the type of feeling you were trying to convey and what he was asking you to do.

HC:  When I joined the band with Ray, that was an avenue for me to do a lot of things. Like I said, I had been writing for small bands a little bit in Memphis. To be honest about it, Ray and I kind of clicked right away. We became section buddies and we always communicated, and I think he might have had something with me, because I even got the job as music director when Ray got the big band. I was directing the small band. Even in the small band, when I was playing baritone, when Ray was not on the bandstand, that’s the first time that we introduced the electric piano. There’s only two people I know who were playing electric piano at that time, and that was Joe Zawinul with Cannonball and Ray Charles. Ray liked the sound. I remember he bought a blond Wurlitzer. I got a chance to kind of use my piano chops, because Ray wasn’t on the bandstand, so we only had bass and drums.

TP:  You play piano on a couple of the albums that are on the CD.

HC:  Whatever I could do on it, you know. [LAUGHS] When through whatever channels things went through, I was asked if I wanted to take the job as music director, naturally I agreed, because I just dug the whole scene. And I kept that post for three years. That’s when I got a chance to do a lot of writing. I did most of the writing in the small band.

But back to your point. As the thing grew, Ray started playing alto and he started writing more charts for the small band, which featured him a lot on alto. And he was quite a fine alto player.

TP:  Who were some of the influences for you and Ray Charles as arrangers?

HC:  Well, I liked Quincy, Ernie Wilkins, Frank Foster…

TP:  So the Basie-Dizzy Gillespie type charts of the mid-Fifties when you were in school.

HC:  Yeah, and the Ellington things.

TP:  Had you taken those apart and analyzed them and studied them in a really exhaustive way, or were you just taking a little bit from here and a little bit from there and applying it as appropriate?

HC:  I would take a little bit from each arranger. But basically, I was sort of being myself. I think even after listening to all the saxophone players that we talked about, I found my own voice. Even when I play now, I try to play like Hank, but you will find yourself playing a bit of this guy and a bit of that. I’ve always been a melodic player, I’ve played in all sets, but like I said, I found my voice. And being in Ray’s band is such a long story, but it was quite an experience. I went to alto when the big band was organized.

TP:  You were playing together how many nights a year during that time? 250? 300?

HC:  Oh, man, we were busy. We played the theater circuit, dance halls, clubs, whatever. It was something else.

TP:  That gives the band the type of tightness that you can’t get in any other way, doesn’t it.

HC:  And the thing, too, about it, there were some great musicians in the band. There was Fathead, Cooper, Marcus Belgrave, John Hunt, and there later came to be Bruno Carr and Philip Guilbeau — and all of these guys were dynamite players. So it was a learning experience. We all had knowledge of music, and we could play together well. Whether we were playing outside or inside, whatever we played, the musicianship was so good that it happened automatically. So everybody felt comfortable even in that setting, whatever we played.

Before Ray, I guess the band that really knocked me as a small unit was James Moody’s Octet. Even before I went into RC’s band, Moody did some of the first small band records that I heard, and I loved the sound of Moody with an octet. I’ve always loved the sound of a band.

TP:  That’s the sound you put on the recent record, Tight, five horns and rhythm.

HC:  I’ve always used horns on my records, except for a few I’ve used just a quartet. I like the sound, and when I joined RC I studied his formula for it, how he’d take tenor, alto and baritone and two trumpets to come out sounding like a big band. I found out there wasn’t that much really involved. It’s basically I, III, V, VII and IX. I don’t think we ever played anything in that small band that had anything above a IX chord in it.

TP:  David, I think Hank’s looking at you to answer a question.

DN:  What’s that?

HC:  I was just talking about the simplicity of the music we played, and how it wasn’t complex, but it came off as the sound of a big band. I was just saying I don’t think we ever played anything chord-wise in terms of the structure of a horn that was over I-III-V-VII-IX. We didn’t get into the flatted chords and extensions. Everything was basic.

DN:  With the five-horn arrangements and two trumpets, it really gave the sound effect of a big band, because of the brassy sound. Ray preferred two trumpets to trombone. His voicing for the five horns was very unique.

HC:  It’s like a vocal group. You have soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass. Those are your five major voices. Anything over that, you’re doubling. When you get into IX or XI, you’re only doubling the third or whatever you played before. When you take a VII-chord, man, and it’s voiced right, five horns can sound like ten. It’s when it’s distorted that makes it sound less.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

TP:  Hank, the first time you met David?

HC:  Actually, it was in Nashville when I joined the band for that one night. The band bus pulled up in front of Brown’s Hotel. At that time it was called a Wiener. Red-and-white, long airport style. I was standing outside, and they pulled up, and I remember David getting out with this grin on his face. I’d heard him, as I said. He kind of bowed and nodded at me, and I nodded back. I’m meeting David, you know. It was just that simple. That was the first time I actually saw him.

TP:  David, let’s talk about some of the productions on the record, inasmuch as you remember, starting with the first one, Ray Charles Presents David Newman. First, how much input did you have into the material on these records. Do you feel that these are a good expression of who you were in that period.

DN:  Well, yes. My only tune  on here was a tune called “Fathead,” and that was my contribution to the arrangements. Hank Crawford knew Paul Mitchell from Atlanta, and he introduced me to the tune “Hard Times,”  which he arranged. Hank also arranged “Bill For Bennie,” and “Sweet Eyes” and “Weird Beard.”  Ray’s arranged “Mean To Me” and “Willow Weep For Me.”

TP:  Did this record evolve organically out of things you were doing in the band, plus your own interests?  Also, how were the records set up in terms of choosing material, personnel and so forth?

DN:  I had no idea that I was going to become an Atlantic recording artist. Ray had just said that he was going to feature me. I really didn’t know that he would be presenting me as such, and that I was going to become an Atlantic artist myself. Because Ray was recording for Atlantic. I just thought we were really doing an instrumental, and Ray was just going to feature me. But what he did is, he set it up. It was called Ray Charles Presents Fathead. It was like setting me up. And hence, from that recording on, I became an Atlantic artist, and I signed a contract then.

We did some of these tunes when we were on the road playing. Like I say, Hank had introduced “Hard Times” to me. I thought it was a helluva tune when he first played it, and I immediately asked him where he’d gotten it. Then when Ray said this was going to be my introduction and he was going to present me on this recording, we started to think about tunes that we could play. So Ray did the arranging on “Mean To Me,” he spent a lot of time on that, and then “Willow Weep For Me.”  Then Hank arranged most of the other compositions that we played, like  “Tin Tin Deo” and “Hard Times“…

TP:  What do you remember about Straight Ahead, with the slick New York rhythm section?

DN:  Oh, Straight Ahead was a wonderful date, because I particularly wanted to record with Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers, I knew Charlie Persip, and I asked him how he felt about playing with Wynton and Paul, and he said that he would love it because he’d never recorded with them before. It turned out to be a wonderful date for me. It was the first time I’d recorded on the flute.

TP:  Does this reflect what you were able to do on the set with Ray Charles before he would come out?  You’d be playing Jazz for two-three-four tunes, and then the show would start?

DN:  On Fathead, not Straight Ahead. Straight Ahead was later on, a separate thing. Because I had been spending time living in New York when I did Straight Ahead. In fact, I wasn’t even in Ray’s band at all when I recorded Straight Ahead. That was done around ’65 or ’66. [THIS IS INCORRECT]  I was still playing with Ray when I did Fathead Comes On. That was the second recording.

TP:  I know you probably want to get out of the Atlantics and talk about recent things you’ve done. You did two very strong records with Herbie Mann, a former Atlantic recording artist, and his now-defunct Kokopelli label, both with strings, a smaller group on Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool, and then more lush arrangements on Under A Woodstock Moon.

DN:  Bob Friedman did the arranging on Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool , which was a tribute to Duke, with all Duke Ellington tunes. Bob had played baritone for a brief spell with the Duke Ellington band and was familiar with the Ellington compositions. I think the original concept about doing a tribute to Duke came from Herbie Mann.

TP:  Was it all material that was meaningful to you as a young musician?

DN:  Some of it was, and then some of the tunes, like “Azure” and “Almost Cried,” even at the time I started to work on the project. My parents had all of the records by the swing bands of the Big Band era like Ellington and Armstrong. Johnny Hodges was one of my favorite alto players, and I’d listen to him play “Jeep’s Blues,” a tune that I always loved, “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.”  I had heard “Prelude To A Kiss,” but I’d never played it before.

The second recording, which was Under A Woodstock Moon, was my outing as a producer. I always wanted to do strings, and I’d had strings on an album entitled Bigger and Better for Atlantic, with Bill Fischer arranging in the late Sixties. Kokopelli couldn’t afford to do a whole string section, so we did a string ensemble thing with a string quartet, which was as much as they would allow me to do. Bob Friedman did the arrangements. I had just moved to Woodstock, and this was a tribute to Mother Nature. One of my compositions was “Under A Woodstock Moon” and another called “Amandla.”

TP:  It’s a very mellow, melodic record, with a lot of variety of color and texture.

DN:  The other tunes were a tribute to Nature, like “Up Jumped Spring,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most,” “Autumn In New York,” and “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square.”  I have another composition on there called “Amandla,” which is an African name for freedom.

TP:  Let me ask you one or two things that the editor wants me to ask you. What do you think was the impact of the Ray Charles Band you were in on contemporary music, in terms of the way the grooves and the feeling has permeated it?

DN:  I don’t know about the impact. I would say that there is definitely an influence on the music from the Ray Charles feel and what was happening musically with Ray. Ray Charles certainly influenced my playing and Hank’s playing jazz-wise and in terms of music as a whole. Ray gave us a lesson in music appreciation. Before my encounter with Ray, I really didn’t have any kind of concept about music appreciation. I only liked to play jazz and bebop. That was my only real love. But after meeting Ray and playing with Ray, I learned how to appreciate all other forms of music also, like the Blues, Spirituals, Gospel, and even Country-and-Western.

TP:  To play the whole range of music with conviction and soul.

DN:  Right. And to have the respect and to really admire and to love the music. So it was a lesson in music appreciation that I think we got from Ray. I don’t know about the impact, but there was definitely an impact.

TP:  That’s a beautiful answer. You’ve really stretched out a lot on your recent recordings, taken chances, worked with progressive musicians. Is that your true heart in the music?

DN:  Well, yes. Because this music is a gift, it’s an incredible gift. What happens is the music doesn’t really come from me or from us; this music comes through us. So I want to explore what I can do in all the different areas of music. I don’t necessarily want to stick to a certain form insofar as the music goes. I want to expand my mind and expand the music as it comes through me and as I feel it. I really like to bridge the generations, so to speak, when it comes to the music that I’m playing, because this music is moving as the time moves on, but we still have these feelings about music. So I want to explore and to play in other areas, even see how my music fits into the Rap situation — I mean, poetically. I don’t really see anything wrong with Rap. It’s just the content in Rap that’s a little offensive sometimes. But the Rap music itself is really an extension of the music, coming from Louis Armstrong.

TP:  Do they use samples of your solos ever that you know about?

DN:  Not that I’ve heard. Nothing that I’ve heard so far. But I’ve become interested in this, just listening. I was listening to Quincy Jones speak the other day about the music. Jesse Jackson asked him why would he be interested in Rap, and Quincy said the same thing, that the music comes not from him, but through him. That’s the same way I feel about this music. It comes through me, and what you do is, you put your particular touch onto the music and what you feel. You put your stamp on it, your feeling, let the music come through you and see what comes out. You can’t close yourself off from the different forms of music as music moves on.

TP:  You also have access to so many sounds and colors from being a multi-instrumentalist. How do you keep your chops up on all the instruments?

DN:  Well, I manage to keep my chops up, especially since I have moved to Woodstock now. I get a chance to work on the different instruments. I still have a soprano, I have an alto and a tenor and my flute. I get quite a few calls to do studio work to record with various musicians, and I manage to stay halfway busy to keep myself going. Of course, I know that to keep my chops up and play, I have got to pick the instruments up and play them.

TP:  People say it’s a struggle to keep one instrument up, and you’re keeping up four!  You’re doing pretty good.

DN:  Well, it’s a labor of love, that’s what it is. I love the music. I think I’ll always… It’s not about practicing, but I just pick up the instruments and play.

[PAUSE]

TP:  Equipment from David Newman.

DN:  I have a Selmer alto. My mouthpiece is a hard rubber Otto Link. I used to play the Meyer mouthpiece, but now I have Otto Link hard rubber.

TP:  Why?

DN:  I like the Otto Link hard rubber mouthpiece. I don’t play the metal mouthpiece any more, because I have dentures now, and I’m a little more flexible on the hard rubber. I like the Otto Link because I like the sound, especially the old Otto Links. I use that on my alto and my tenor. I have a Selmer soprano also, and I used a Meyer mouthpiece on the soprano. I have a Selmer Mark-VI tenor that was made in the ’60s. It was made in about ’60 or ’61, a very good time for Selmer tenors. Any of the Selmer saxophones made in less than 100,000 would be really good quality material that they were putting into the instruments. They still make very good instruments, but the newer instruments these days… That’s the reason why so many musicians try to get a Mark VI. The Mark VI was really one of the classic saxophones.

I have a Germeinhardt flute.

TP:  Anything you want to say about why you use these instruments, or have you said your fill?

DN:  Well, my first flute was…when I first became interested in the flute… We were traveling in Ray’s band, and we came through Orlando, Florida, and we had a few off-days. I passed by this pawn shop, and in this pawn shop they had two wooden ebony Haynes flutes, very good and expensive flutes. Some guy there who had played with the symphony had these instruments, and the pawnshop owner let me have it for little or nothing. He had a C-flute and an alto flute, and I think I gave the guy $25 for the C-flute, which had an E-flat trill on it. I should have bought the alto flute also. I brought this flute back, and the guys in the band asked me, “Do you know what you got there?”  I said, “It’s a flute.”  They said, “Man, you’ve got a Haynes wooden flute, and this is a very expensive instrument.”  And I started teaching myself to play the flute, and listened to other flute players, particularly James Moody and Frank Wess, and I eventually started trying to get a sound on the flute. Rahsaan Roland Kirk and I, we both maybe started on the flute around the same time. I was a couple of years older than him, so I might have started earlier. Eventually, the flute was stolen from me, I lost it, and then I started playing other C-flutes, of course. But my first flute was a Haynes flute, and the flute I have now is a Gemeinhardt.

[PAUSE]

TP:  David has left, and Hank and I are here together. A few words about the recordings on Memphis, Ray and A Touch Of Moody. What do you remember about More Soul, the first one you did?

HC:  Actually, that was my first recording as a leader. I wrote some of the arrangements in Nashville, maybe a couple in Memphis, and the rest I wrote while I was in Ray’s small band. But we played these arrangements in Ray’s small band. We used to go 45 minutes or an hour before he would come on to sing — the band had it. When we recorded that, we were playing at the Apollo Theater, doing a show, and we finished the late show. We were doing five or six shows a day. We finished at about midnight, and we went directly to Atlantic Recording Studio. We got there I guess by 12:30, and we started recording at 1, and we didn’t stop until we’d completed it, which was 7 or 8 o’clock the following morning. Most of the musicians and the music we were playing in the small band of Ray Charles.

That’s when I got the opportunity to start writing, because after I had been in there for a while, R.C. found out I that I was doing some arranging and liked to write, so he just kind of hinted, said, “You know, if you want to do some writing…” Plus I found it a good place to be, because I was very interested and very much into writing and arranging, and being in that band, since he liked to write and I had written for bands that size… See, I was familiar with the size of that band. I just didn’t have the venues or the musicians to play the music. I was still young and hadn’t been that far. So that gave me an opportunity to write, when he found out I was writing a little bit.

TP:  The writing started in high school for you.

HC:  Yeah, I’ve been writing since then.

TP:  There are two Moody tunes, “The Story” and “Boo’s Tune.”

HC:  I did the arrangement on everything except “The Story,”  which Ray Charles did. I told Ray I was doing the date and asked him if he would do a tune for me, and he did “The Story.”

TP:  So Moody’s band was very influential in a lot of ways that aren’t well known.

HC:  I loved him as a player and I liked the sound of the band. I think Johnny Acea was writing for that band at the time. I always loved the octet sound. Moody’s was one of the first bands I heard that small that really knocked me out. Of course, before that I was listening to Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five, which is just like five pieces. But Moody’s band was like an octet, and I loved the sound of the band.

TP:  I have to tell you, when I listen to you I feel like I’m listening to the reincarnation of Earl Bostic, in a certain way, just in the way you approach a melody and the sound.

HC:  Well, Earl was a power player. In fact, I play strong myself. I’m naturally a power player. That was the thing that I like about Earl, plus he was playing a lot of ballads and standard tunes. At that time, you know, I was hearing a lot of Bostic, so he was just automatically one of my first influences.

TP:  And I’m sure it affected people when you played like that, just because of the way the sound is.

HC:  Yes.

TP:  Anyway, the second record, From The Heart, sounds more like what I’d expect to hear from you later, more range, lush textures and so forth.

HC:  Well, From the Heart was completely mine. Nobody did any arrangements on that. At this time I had really found my way of writing. I was kind of comfortable with what I was doing on From The Heart. It was basically the same band, because I was still with Ray. But I was getting the opportunity to play these tunes before he would come out. Once I got the job as music director, he pretty much just gave it up, and gave it to me. So I used that, man, and I did a lot of writing, and the music got exposed because we were going everywhere, playing concerts. It just gave me a chance to expand on what I wanted to do earlier anyway, being in that group.

TP:  Then there’s a strings album on this.

HC:  Ah, yes. I asked to be recorded with strings, and I was surprised when I got a yes on it from Neshui Ertegun at Atlantic Records. He agreed, to my surprise, and asked me who did I want to do the arrangements, and I said Marty Paich. I had heard Marty Paich’s small band arrangements when he was writing for Shorty Rogers and Stan Kenton, the West Coast scene, and I liked the way he voiced the strings. I found out the secret; he used french horns with strings to get that real melancholy sound. So Neshui agreed, and we went to California to record the record. I selected all the tunes except one, which really turned out to be sort of a signature tune for me, which was “Whispering Grass.”  Marty Paich suggested that.

TP:  You have quite a memory.

HC:  Oh yeah, I try to remember these things. I mean, it stayed with me, man, because it was such an experience. I heard Marty do a string session with Gloria Lynne, “I Wish You Love” and all those things, and I thought it was beautiful work. To be honest about it, when Ray wanted to do his first thing with strings, around the time of The Genius, by me being close to him, I suggested Marty Paich to him, and he used it.

I was with Ray Charles 24-7, because I was the music director. He would call me to come over to his house, and I would sit there all day and sometimes all night while he would dictate and I would notate. So I was always busy.

TP:  So you have as much of an insight as anyone into the inner workings of his creative mind.

HC:  Oh yeah. Well, after a while, he noticed how I was writing. He’s an individualist, you know; he’s the only one. Like, there are certain saxophone players, certain musicians there’s only one. Like, I haven’t found anybody that has my sound yet, and I don’t think David… We all have our distinctive sounds.

TP:  That was the ethos of the time. Everybody had to have their sound when you were coming up.

HC:  That’s the secret of survival in this business, is identity. You can play all of the notes, and there are a lot of musicians out there now, man, that can play — I mean, young and old. But nobody knows who they are. And people buy identity. You put on Miles Davis now, and automatically somebody goes, “That’s Miles.”  Then you put on Dizzy, and they know him. But once they don’t know who you are, you don’t really sell. Like, Louis Armstrong; they know Pops. That’s what people buy. When they go into a record shop, they say, “I want this guy.”  They’re not going there to listen to fifty other guys just to buy a record. They know basically who they want when they go in. So that’s what to me sells, is identity.

[PAUSE]

TP:  David just came in to mention to make sure I mention that he and Ron Carter were the two senior cast members on the 2 CDs for Kansas City.

[PAUSE]

TP:  Your comments on identity were a tangent from talking about Ray Charles. You said you were with him 24-7, and the type of insights that gave you into the way his mind works. Some general comments on his approach to music and the impact he had on you.

HC:  Well, see, it was so real for me to be there, because being around him and his background… There’s only like a four year difference in age between us. So we are all from the same era, and we basically had the same experience with music, which was Gospel and the Blues and Jazz. We’re all from that era. So I heard the same things that he heard, and whoever was around at that time. It just so happened that when I joined Ray, that was a period when things were happening within that unit that eventually went to the Moon. Anyway, that’s what made it so easy for me to understand. Because when he would dictate to me, writing his own charts… See, he wrote his own charts; he just didn’t put them on paper. I was the one who was doing all the notating. So when he found out that I had a background in arranging and composing and voicing chords and stuff like that, after a while, he would come in and make his initial statement about what he wanted, and he would write it, and then he would say, “You got it.”  So really I studied him. It was another teacher, but it was not that much difference in how we felt about the feeling of music, because we all had the same type of background.

TP:  You were almost his alter-ego.

HC:  Yeah. So I really understood where he was coming from. I studied that, and I found out that, hey, I have some of the same kind of thoughts about this music, which made it easier for he and I to relate.

TP:  Is it harder for you to find people who have that sort of unspoken communication and empathy in the projects you do now?

HC:  Yeah, because you don’t have the association with musicians like you had at that time. I mean, it was a community. The Jazz community was great. We were friends, man. We hung out together and studied together, broke a lot of bread together. We had venues to play. There aren’t any venues now like there used to be, and the community is divided. We don’t see each other as we once did.

TP:  You don’t cross paths in the same way.

HC:  Man, right here in New York City we used to walk down Broadway and go to 52nd Street or 50th Street, and stand right there on the corner — every day, 24 hours a day — and you would meet friends. And we didn’t only play together. We discussed music. That whole era was a learning period from everybody. But now, man you almost walk out like… You can’t find anybody. Everybody’s moved out or they just don’t come out any more. You know what I’m saying?  There’s just not the community like it used to be. There’s no association, just, “Hey, how you doing, I’ll see you next time.”

TP:  But how does that affect your performing or recording projects, or the way you deal with bands right now. I guess you have to dot a lot more i’s and cross a lot more t’s.

HC:  I’m not one of the type of players that’s concerned a lot about changing with what’s in. No, I found my sound, and I think I’m going to stick to my guns. I think that’s what destroys a lot of players. Instead of being themselves, they try to be like others. And in this business, there’s only one of one. Like, there’s only one Bird, there’s only one Coltrane, and there’s only one whoever. But what happens with a lot of musicians, I think, they’ll be inspired by somebody when they are learning, and they grew up trying to play like that person.

TP:  A lot of the young players. Because they don’t have so many places to play. They’re in school, and that’s the way they’re educated.

HC:  That’s it, man. Like I said earlier, I’ve played in all settings, Jazz, Blues and everything. I’ve had an association with all kinds of music, man, and with some great people. I think I have established myself and my sound and what kind of player I am really, although I might play Jazz, I might play this, I might play that. Like I said, I approach the horn as a vocalist. I try to sing through the instrument, and play melodies, not a lot of technical things. I think if I would lose that identity that I’ve established myself and that people know me by, and go into something just for the sake of saying, “Well, I can do this just as well as that person,” I think I’d lose my identity. I could probably get away with trying to play some Coltrane for maybe a couple of tunes, and then your fans or your audience is going to say, “Hey, you’re trying to play like so-and-so; get back to yourself.”

TP:  That raises a question. What you play on the surface is very simple, basic.

HC:  Yes.

TP:  Is it deceptively simple?  How complex is it really to do what you do?

HC:  For some people it’s hard. For me, playing simple is almost a natural.

TP:  Because you’re a very sophisticated, educated musician.

HC:  I’m sort of a romantic when it comes to it. The technical things… I’ve studied, man, and I can get off into some pretty hard Bebop. But that’s not just me naturally. I just play what I feel naturally. And I’ve been into some great sets with some great players, you know, but it ends up that I’m better being myself.

TP:  George Coleman played all the notes.

HC:  Yes, in all the keys!  We studied that, too. I tried that. I said, “Well, you know, I can do a little bit of this, but that’s just not where I’m from; that’s just not me.”  So I chose to do what I do best. Because if you’re going to survive in this business, man, you’ve got to have your own identity. Nobody’s going to come to listen to one of my concerts or gigs to hear me sound like somebody else. That’s the biggest mistake I can do, for somebody to come and pay $20 or $25 and come in the door, and here I am on the bandstand trying to be somebody else.

TP:  Your name is your sound.

HC:  Right. And once you lose that, I think you’ve destroyed everything. You can turn on the radio, man, and you can hear this trumpet player or this saxophone player, and man, they’re playing! But there’s something that don’t register with you if he doesn’t have a certain sound or play a certain style of phrasing. If you can’t recognize that in a player, then you’re just listening to somebody and all you can say about it is, “Ooh, who is that?  He sure plays good!”

TP:  Are there any good young players, saxophone or any instrument, who you think have a sound?

HC:  Well, there’s a tenor player who’s young compared to a lot of people… I think Joshua Redman has his own sound.

TP:  That’s probably why he’s so popular.

HC:  That’s part of it. There are a few others; I can’t think of them now. But there are so many youngsters, man, that I hear and they sound good, they’re playing!  But that’s what’s missing. And I’ll even go so far as to say this. As far as the man walking on the street, who knows nothing about music, but knows it when he hears it, and he knows whether the player is playing or jiving, or he knows when you’re playing wrong and when you’re playing right. All these people on the street, man, they know when you’re playing wrong and when you’re playing right.

There are so many players like… I just want to use a major influence on young musicians, and I mean nothing by this because I have a lot of respect for him. That’s Wynton Marsalis. What I’m going to say that is when I was talking about identity…

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

TP:  Now you know it’s him when you hear him play.

HC:  The man has all the facilities in the world. I mean, he’s a good trumpet player, he’s a good educator, he’s a good everything — I have to give it to him. But the average layman, I’ll bet you, man, 75 out of 100 would identify a Freddie Hubbard or a Dizzy or a Miles faster than they would identify Wynton — as far as identity. I mean, if you don’t really know, if you’re not a musician… And not only Wynton, but anybody. If you don’t really know him and know the techniques of playing because you are a musician or a good listener, you would not be able to identify this bad cat, whoever it is.  It’s just like Count Basie. One note. You know the tag he plays, BOP-BOP-BOP?  I can go the piano and do it (it’s only three fingers) you could do it, I could teach my kids, anybody. BOP-BOP-BOP, it’s all in one place. But nobody sounds like when Basie hits it. Same notes. But when Basie strikes it, there is something else that comes out of the note. You know what I mean?  And Oscar Peterson or somebody like that can go right behind and play the same thing, and you know how great Oscar is, but Basie has a stamp. When he hits it, you automatically know it.

TP:  Do drummers today get the tempos they were in the Fifties and Sixties?

HC:  I like drummers. A drummer is very important to me. Because everything I play is basically to the root. I don’t go outside too much. A lot of musicians find that hard to do. The simplest things can be the hardest sometimes.

TP:  The more you know, the harder it is not to go into everything that you know.

HC:  Right, man. The drummer is very important. You’ve got to learn how to be able to do what’s necessary for you to do in playing in a band. In the drummer’s case, it might be necessary for him to just keep time. It’s not necessary for him to play a solo. Or anybody in there, but especially drummers. Some guys felt like that was not enough just to keep time and complement the man out front, the front line. It was a drag to a lot of people just to keep time until you get that give-the-drummer-some, that one solo a night. Otherwise, he’s playing time. And a lot of guys don’t like to do that because they like to do other things, but it’s not necessary for you to do nothing but keep time here — and that’s hard.

TP:  And tune to the drum to the sound of the band…

HC:  Right, and do that every night!  Every note. It’s got to be this way every time you play it. Certain music. Certain music you just don’t explore on, man.

TP:  I need your equipment.

HC:  I’m just playing the Selmer Super-Action 80. That’s what I’m playing now. The mouthpiece is Barrett. It’s really like a stock mouthpiece. I never played anything other than stocks.

TP:  What is it about the Selmer alto?

HC:  It’s like the Rolls Royce of saxophones. You ain’t got a Selmer… It’s just like having a Cadillac or a Rolls Royce. It’s the king. It’s a good horn, and most professionals play it. There’s a lot of other horns, Bushes, Conns, all of them, but the Selmer is it for me. The body, it’s got good weight, feels good, and it responds. To me, it’s just the best horn.

[PAUSE]

TP:  Hank has some thoughts on Fathead.

HC:  Well, we go back to almost the beginning of my professional career, and we’ve been more than just musicians, section buddies. We have a little friendship. I respect him as a man, and we kind of have that respect as men — and I respect his playing. I broke a lot of bread with David. The thing I like about him is whatever he plays, for me, I can understand it, I can feel it, how he expresses himself. He’s just the kind of player that I like, and there are many others, but David is one that I had the experience of being around a lot, so I know him from A to Z!  He’s a very soulful man, and he can play in almost every setting. I think that’s what we all learned coming up through that period. He’s just one of my favorites… He’s on most of my recordings. Every time I use a small band, I always use David. He has a beautiful sound, a warm sound, and he always finds the blue notes. He’s a stylist, and I think that’s true of most of the musicians from our era. We’re stylists. We all style whatever we play; we put our tag on it. That’s just the way it is. And I like all music, man. I’m not trying to put down anybody. I have respect for anybody who gets involved in the business because it’s so competitive. But when I hear a guy that can cross all bridges, and comfortable playing in each setting, that’s what I admire — and don’t feel guilty playing it.

I don’t feel guilty playing “Steel Guitar Rag” if I’m called to play it. You know what I mean?  I heard that when I was coming up as a kid, man, at 6 o’clock in the morning. Down South, that’s the first thing you’d hear on your radio, is Country & Western and Gospel music. That’s what you wake up on, C&W and Gospel!  I spent many days listening to Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow and all of those people. And we all liked it!  Even Jazz musicians, they can’t say they didn’t grow up listening to these people. So I played it as a youngster, and I don’t feel offended by it. I just do my best in it. So it’s music to me. I don’t mind being square because I play this tune. In fact, it’s a blessing to be able to play in all the styles. That’s when your phone keeps ringing!

TP:  Well, it’s like what David said about Ray Charles. He said it was like music appreciation. He learned to play with soul, from the heart in every different situation.

HC:  Look at Cannonball, man. His biggest hits were Soul music, “Mercy, Mercy” and stuff. And Cannon was one of the greatest saxophone players in the world to me.

[-30-]

******************

For the eminent bassist-educator Rodney Whitaker’s 56th birthday, three liner notes between 1999 and 2018

Rodney Whitaker, mastermind of the wonderful jazz program at Michigan State University for the last two decades, has been an important presence in jazz since 1988, when he joined the Donald Harrison-Terence Blanchard Quintet, followed by tours of duty with Roy Hargrove’s early bands and then in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (as it then was called). I’ve had the opportunity to write the program notes for three of Whitaker’s CDs, and I’ve posted them below, in chronological sequence.

**************

Rodney Whitaker Quintet (The Brooklyn Session: Ballads & Blues):

On the straightforwardly titled Ballads and Blues, Rodney Whitaker and an elite young quintet address a set underpinned by the sensibility people used to call Mainstream.  “Before I made this date,” says Whitaker, 31, who holds the bass chair in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, “I was listening to Ben Webster’s ‘Soulville’ [1959] and Coleman Hawkins’ ‘Today and Now’ [1962] every morning while driving from Detroit to Michigan State University, where I teach.  The tunes weren’t particularly fast, but the music cleared my mind, transported me to another place.  It inspired me to do something in that vein.  I realized that everything doesn’t have to be threatening or complex; some things just can help people relax.”

Don’t confuse the choice of material with a musty attitude or archival approach; the musicians follow the time-tested jazz aesthetic of piggybacking the tradition, finding contemporary iterations of timeless forms.  “I wanted people who are very creative but can achieve a classic sound,” Whitaker explains.  “Ron Blake developed musically in Chicago, playing under Von Freeman, so he has that Chicago tenor concept, though he can also play more modern.  We met in Roy Hargrove’s band, and we’re like family.  I’ve known Eric Reed since his early days with Wynton Marsalis; he’s well-rounded and can play any style you want.  I met Stefon Harris on the J@LC ‘All Jazz Is Modern’ tour.  We spent a lot of time on the bus listening to music, discussing principles and ideas, encouraging each other to read certain books.  I have a strong affinity to his creativity.  I met Carl Allen when I played with the Harrison-Blanchard Quintet; we play well together, and over the last ten years we’ve worked in numerous circumstances.

“I grew up listening to this music.  My parents listened to Sam Cooke and Motown music, and my father liked the Blues — T-Bone Walker and B.B. King and Muddy Waters.  I wanted to be a musician since my mother can remember; went to bed at night with the radio on, woke up with it on.  I started playing violin when I was about 7.  I went to camps, had good teachers, was in Honors Orchestra and so on, and had I stuck with it I probably would have become a classical violinist.  But I switched to bass in junior high school, and one day when I was 13, a neighbor who was a big jazz fan saw me carrying the bass and let me borrow some recordings — that was it for me.

“In high school, I had a teacher named Herbie Williams, who taught me jazz harmony and so on.  My friend Cassius Richmond, who plays with James Carter, brought me into a teenage group called Bird/Trane/Sco-Now which was led by Donald Washington, who had been my string instructor in sixth and seventh grade, and Mr. Williams urged me to join it.  The group was based on Charles Mingus’ philosophy that jazz is the art of the moment.  We played Bird’s music, Bebop, we played John Coltrane’s later music, and experimented with music by Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.  The AACM guys from Chicago were some of our heroes, but Donald Washington also stressed the tradition.  It created a different sort of musician, I think, versed in the tradition but not afraid of allowing it to grow; you see how the music is all connected.  He encouraged us to compose.  At certain moments he’d point at you and you’d have to create something right off the top of your head.  I like the music to go in and out, because that’s what I did my whole life, as did the guys I grew up with.”

Whitaker left Detroit in 1988 with Harrison-Blanchard, then replaced Christian McBride with Roy Hargrove’s Quintet in 1991.  “That was the gig where I really got myself together,” he enthuses.  “We toured so much, we played constantly, and the band had so much press as the new young guys on the scene that we had to deliver.  Playing with a young drummer the caliber of Greg Hutchinson helped me, because we developed side by side.  Roy could listen to a recording by anyone from Ornette Coleman to Miles just once, call the tune on the gig that night, and play it — I trained my ear to do that.”

After leaving Hargrove in 1995, Whitaker freelanced with Elvin Jones, Kenny Garrett and Diana Krall, practiced extensively, explored compositional ideas and concepts, and recorded his first two CDs [“Children Of the Light” and “Hidden Kingdom” (DIW)], both comprised primarily of original music.  In 1996, Wynton Marsalis hired him to play with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

“When I met Wynton,” Whitaker remembers, “I was playing in the Detroit Civic Symphony Orchestra, and he was there to play the Hummel Trumpet Concerto with the Detroit Symphony.  I still have the paper that he autographed for me, inscribed ‘Listen to Jimmy Blanton’ — which I did.  Wynton always represented Tradition for me; he inspired a lot of guys my age and even younger.  When we were growing up, we dreamed of being studio musicians.  With the exception of the masters, no one was making money playing jazz.  He made us believe that we actually could play jazz and make an impact, and that’s what we wanted to do.

“Coming up, it didn’t matter to me what style people were playing as long as it wasn’t commercial.  I checked out everyone from Wynton and Branford to Steve Coleman and Greg Osby.  Dave Holland’s group with Steve Coleman and Kevin and Robin Eubanks had a big impact after I heard them in the late ‘80s.  The compositions were unconventional, but they grooved and swung at the same time in their own way.  Plus Dave Holland has such command of the instrument.  Of course, we all grew up with the masters to look up to, but he’s doing this right in your sightline.

“I took lessons for two weeks from George Duvivier at a jazz camp when I was 15.  He was a great man, very humorous, very honest.  I was very cocky, and he really calmed me down.  He forced me to learn two- and three-octave scales on the instrument — that pretty much did it!  He helped me learn how to bow in tune with a good sound.  We didn’t work on jazz things, just basic technique, at which he was very skilled — it didn’t even look like his left hand was moving.  I learned that people hire bass players because they can swing, not because they can play a lot of notes.  Playing a lot of notes is like icing on the cake, but the cake can be good without the icing.”

You hear Whitaker’s plush arco sound on “Alone With Just My Dreams,” a Duvivier original which previously appeared only on a 1948 Joe Wilder recording.  Don Sickler provided the score for this and three compositions by Paul Chambers, the Detroit bass legend who grafted the vocabulary of Charlie Parker to his solo conception of the instrument.

“Paul Chambers is one of my musical fathers,” Whitaker states definitively.  “Detroiters are very proud of Detroit folk, and whenever I carried a bass, people who aren’t musicians would say, ‘You ever heard of Paul Chambers?’  The other name everyone mentioned was Ron Carter, who’s also from Detroit.”

“Ease It” is a 12-bar blues from Go (VJ), a Chambers session with Cannonball Adderley.  “It’s the first song that I ever learned the melody off the recording,” Whitaker says, “and it’s always represented everything Paul Chambers was about.  He played such a fluid solo, walking the bass with incredibly swinging notes throughout.

“I don’t think I know any professional bassist who doesn’t know ‘Whims of Chambers’ — if they don’t, they should,” he continues.  Whereas on the 1956 original Kenny Burrell doubled the melody line with Chambers before the bassist’s opening solo, here tenorist Ron Blake and Whitaker play the melody in unison on the first 12, vibraphonist Stefon Harris chimes in for the next 12, then pianist Eric Reed leads off the solo sequence.

“The Hand Of Love,” from a 1957 Chambers Blue Note, Whitaker notes, “inspired me in the same way.  People are less familiar with that side of his writing.  Most of his pieces were bebop-sounding, but this is a pretty, melodic tune written on a 32-bar American song form.

Carly Simon’s “The Way They Always Said It Should Be,” taken arco, is the album’s “new standard.”  “From when I was 8 to about 15 I listened to a station that played ‘60s-‘70s pop tunes, and I sat up every night waiting for this,” he recalls.  “In fact, the man at the station got tired of me because I would call and request the song!   I didn’t know what it was about, but something about it haunted me.  My wife and I heard it again three years ago, while we were vacationing in the South with our kids.  At this point in my life I could understand the lyrics — about marriage and wanting your relationship not to falter.  My wife found the CD at a 24-hour grocery store, brought it back at midnight or 1 a.m., and said, ‘here, learn this tune’ — I think I learned it right then.”

Family is explicitly acknowledged on “For Rockelle” (recorded on Roy Hargrove’s Of Kindred Souls), for which Whitaker conjured the melody when his daughter, now 12, was an infant.  “Wise Young Man” is Eric Reed’s customized ballad tribute to Whitaker, who played on the pianist’s pair of early ‘90s recordings for Mojazz.

J@LCO trombonist Wycliffe Gordon joins the mix on “Centerpiece,” an iconic blues fingerpopper since composer Harry Edison recorded it with Dizzy Gillespie in 1955, and on Charlie Parker’s “Big Foot,” both orchestra staples.  “Jazz at Lincoln Center is almost like going to graduate school,” Whitaker marvels.  “I get to play Duke Ellington’s music.  I get access to scores.  I get access to recordings that are obscure and difficult to find.  It forces me to do research.  I always tell younger musicians that in order to be a jazz musician, you need to be an historian — read the books, study the musicians and learn the stories.  It’s like ethnomusicology.

“This experience has enabled me to work with people like Jimmy Heath, Jon Faddis, and Slide Hampton.  They actually paid me to share the bass chair for a week with Percy Heath!  It was amazing to listen to him walk those lines and swing the way he does.  Probably he and Milt Hinton were the most encouraging of all the bass players I’ve met.  They see this desire in you to play — which is what they want — and encourage you.  I toured with Yusef Lateef a couple of years ago, playing music with an Arabic-Middle Eastern tinge; every now and then a certain rhythm or motif would give you an ancient feeling, something you never felt before.  In Jazz at Lincoln Center, the sound, say, of Duke Ellington’s chord voicings, the sound and style of the song sort of forces you to play in the style of a particular person.  It’s almost like an actor going into character.  You can’t help it.  It’s stronger than your willpower.  It comes over you, and you feel like, ‘I’m Milt Hinton’ or ‘I’m Percy Heath’ or ‘I’m Paul Chambers.’  It is like acting.  It’s drama.  You have to get into those characters to bring the life out of that music.

“But you have to force yourself not to do that.  Duke wouldn’t want you to play in the style of him.  ‘A Train’ sounds totally in 1948 than in 1960.  We played the Blanton-Webster Years with John Lewis, and one thing Mr. Lewis would say was, ‘Well, quote the solo, but then do your own thing.’  I think if you don’t do that, you’re not playing jazz.  What killed European classical music from really being creative was the fact that people did not want to allow the tradition to grow.  Any music has to be allowed to live.”

Jazz will, so long as Rodney Whitaker and his cohorts on Brooklyn Session: Ballads and Blues have anything to say about it.

****************

Rodney Whitaker (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Notes):

Recorded three weeks before the end of the millennium, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is Rodney Whitaker’s paean to coming of age, marking, as he puts it, “my transition from being a young lion to a grown man.”  Now 32, the Detroit native known for his big sound and fat beat surrounds himself with a group of bandmates from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, where he’s held the bass chair since 1996.  It’s a band of young veterans, creative spirits with classic sounds who carry personal voices nurtured through the J@LC experience of immersion in the lifeblood of jazz vocabulary from Jelly Roll Morton to John Coltrane.  They play with the intuitive cohesion that only musicians who work and travel together 8-9 months a year can attain, and they articulate Whitaker’s music — redolent with insinuating melodies and intriguing harmonic formulations — with mature perspective and ebullient optimism tinged with bittersweet recognition of the unexpected curveballs life can hurl.

That’s the aura of the recently composed set-opener “Happier Times,”a 20-bar AAB form tune featuring the pure soprano saxophone sound of multi-reed wizard Victor Goines and the ringing chromaticism of pianist Farid Barron.  “The tune has a very simple, sort of childlike melody,” Whitaker notes.  “The idea behind it is that at the close of 1999, I had encountered at least ten couples I knew who had gotten divorced — people who were very close, the ideal couples.  I was depressed, so I sat down and wrote a tune remembering the happier times and hoping for happier times to come.  The tune has what I call a Rodney Whitaker form.  Since I was in Roy Hargrove’s band at the beginning of the ‘90s, I’ve had a way of writing where I state the theme three times, and only after developing it like that, go into the release.  I think if you hear something at least three times, it stays in your head.”

Whitaker conjures a memorable melody on the haunting “Visions of the Past,” featuring Wynton Marsalis’ vocalized trumpet sound at its most romantic over a medium-slow tempo controlled with exquisite tension by trapsetter Herlin Riley.  “My wife likes Eric Satie’s music,” Whitaker remarks, “and I wrote this three years ago as a short piano piece in Satie’s style.  In an earlier recording it had a different character, but Wynton makes everything he plays sound like the blues.  That blues flavor is different than what I was thinking of, but I accept it because it’s honest — that’s his thing.”

LCJO alto saxophonist Wes Anderson adds his distinctive sopranino saxophone to the mix on Herlin Riley’s festive “Taylor Made,” which begins in a 6/4 groove and transitions into 5 at the end of the form.  It evokes the sound of New Orleans drum master James Black, a master at swinging in odd tempos who had a huge influence on Riley’s playing.  “They call Herlin the Groove Master, and this tune is just a groove,” Whitaker explains.  “I always tell Herlin that his way of playing is tailor-made to fit mine.  It transcends style or anything technical; we both come to groove and play every night, and we’ve played well together from the first day.”

Idiomatic performance of Duke Ellington’s repertoire is a staple of LCJO programs, and Whitaker has immersed himself in the maestro’s music in recent years.  The arrangement of “Mood Indigo” evolved during a three-week Fall 1999 tour focusing on Ellington’s small group music with a handpicked ten-piece band that included state-of-the-art singer Dianne Reeves, whose poignant reading here stands with any in the lexicon.  “I guess I’ve absorbed the Ellington sound, been affected by the bass tradition of Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Blanton and Jimmy Woode, and the music they’ve created,” Whitaker observes.  “At the same time, playing Ellington is really about education, trying to understand what they did with the music and letting some of it influence me, but also being mindful that I have to try to do something different.”

On the haunting “Ladies Vanity,” which first appeared on a 1956 date led by Oscar Pettiford, a Whitaker hero, Victor Goines uncannily nails the weary been-there/done-that sound of the composer, the legendary tenor saxophonist Eli “Lucky” Thompson, who spent his formative years in Detroit.  “I like to pay homage to my hometown,” Whitaker states, “because you have to start with where you’re from.  I listened to this tune hundreds of times.  Victor transcribed this song for the record, and captured every nuance.”

Whitaker returns to themes of family on the celebratory “Woman Child,” written during a 1993 tour of France with Roy Hargrove on the occasion of the birth of drummer Greg Hutchinson’s daughter.  Like many of Whitaker’s pieces, the 34-bar AABA theme with 8-bar A-sections and a 10-bar B-section falls slightly between the cracks of standard form.  “I think I hear like that,” Whitaker reveals.  “Most of my tunes are not worked out; they come from melodies I’ve heard in my head.”  Following sprightly turns by Goines and Barron, Whitaker with thick cut spins a crisply executed, melodically inventive statement..

Whitaker’s chops get a workout on his opening solo on Goines’ “You and Me,” a 16-bar form repeated twice, featuring the reedman’s full-toned bass clarinet.  “With the exception of Eric Dolphy, we’d never heard a melody featuring bass clarinet and bass,” Whitaker says.  “Victor created a beautiful melody based on some things he heard me working on technically.  I like to have all the musicians contribute to my records.  There’s no way I can have all the ideas.  If they feel I respect them enough to want their music or concepts, it always makes for a better record.”

It’s no accident that Whitaker’s Ellingtonian “Darrianne Niles” sounds like it might be the theme song for a ‘40s film noir by, say, Otto Preminger or Jacques Tourneur.  “I wrote it at a time when I was reading novels by Raymond Chandler and in that style about romance and mystery, and I tried to capture the essence of romantic mystique,” Whitaker confesses.  “It’s about my manager; she dresses and carries herself like a character out of a Bogart movie.”  It’s a four-horn orchestration, with each voice stating the melody during the theme, structured as an AABA form with 5 bars in the A section and 16 in the extended B section.  Marsalis’ gold-toned locution goes a long way towards establishing a sepia aura of contrast and shadow.

Alto saxophonist Andrew Speight, head of the Jazz Studies program at Michigan State University, where Whitaker has taught, wrote and orchestrated “Hurricane Andrew,” a brisk, exciting Mingusian burnout blues with a connotation not unlike John Coltrane’s “Take The Coltrane” on which all hands demonstrate their command of the idiom.

Whitaker displays his plush sound and romanticism on “Unconditional Love,” a bass feature on a 10-bar theme with two 3/4 bars displaced in the middle of the form.  “During the time I wrote this, I was listening to people like Scott LaFaro and Chuck Israels, trying to get to the gentle side of playing the bass,” Whitaker comments. “My intention in music is to try to embody the whole tradition of jazz.  My earliest sounds were groove-oriented music, from listening to Sam Cooke or T-Bone Walker in my house.  Naturally, I was attracted to Paul Chambers or Sam Jones, people who had a strong groove, and I didn’t grow up interested in this style.  But as I started to mature as a musician and as a man, I started to understand how valid every aspect of jazz is; I wanted to add some of these textures and colors to my playing, and I had to go to the people who do that best.  Scott LaFaro was a genius who revolutionized the way we think about the bass.  He expanded the register of the instrument, and he wasn’t just a timekeeper, but was able to play other rhythms.  People like Charles Mingus did that, too.  But Scott LaFaro was the first player bold enough to just play melody in the accompaniment role, instead of just four-on-the-floor quarter notes.”

A reprise of “Happier Times” and a blowout version of Motor City icon Joe Henderson’s “Tetragon” (a session warmup too good to discard) conclude “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”   Affirmative and egalitarian, the album reaffirms Whitaker’s ever-growing reputation as a bandleader-composer of high aspiration and substance and an instrumentalist who resides in the elite echelons.

Has the J@LC experience enhanced the growing process?  “We pretty much cover all the different genres you can think of in jazz, from Gerry Mulligan to Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus, back to Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton,” Whitaker reflects.  “It makes me more aware of the depth of these people.  Growing up as a jazz player, you’re more attracted to certain styles.  Here you’re forced to play something you may not be attracted to, and make it sound good.  You start to learn how great Jelly Roll Morton was, how he composed the blues with a more complex intricate form than anything you hear at this time.  You start to understand that the music’s intellectual ideas didn’t start in 1965, but in 1925!  You learn that all this music, from Jelly Roll Morton to Ornette Coleman, is timeless.”

That’s not just idle chat; Whitaker can legitimately claim the full jazz timeline, from Wellman Braud to Malachi Favors, as his comfort zone.  “Although I don’t have my own band yet, I have a strong sense of what music should sound like,” Whitaker concludes.  “I think that’s the most important thing.  I guess anything you put out, if it’s honest, is a documentation of where you are musically.  In order for me to go to the next level of what I hear in music, I invariably have to start my own band, and I have to allow my sound concept to evolve within the sound of the musicians in the band, as every great bandleader has done, from Miles Davis to Duke Ellington.  This record to me is a new beginning; I ushered out the Millennium in terms of what I’ve studied and learned to this point, and now it’s time for the next step.”

**************

Rodney Whitaker, Liner Notes for All Too Soon:

For the second installment of an ambitious five-CD project undertaken to observe his fiftieth birthday in 2018, Rodney Whitaker convenes a world-class sextet and singer Rockelle Fortin to pay swinging homage to the oeuvre of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. It’s a subject that the University Distinguished Professor of Jazz Bass and Director of Jazz Studies at Michigan State University came to know intimately when he played bass for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra — as it then was called  — between 1994 and 2002.

“Although people are fascinated by Ellington’s music and talk about it a lot, I feel most people don‘t know that much about it,” Whitaker says. “During my eight years with LCJO, I played every major work by Ellington, studied all the scores, and read every book about him I could find.” In the process, Whitaker channeled the sound of the pathbreaking 1940s Ellington bassists Jimmy Blanton and Oscar Pettiford on piano-bass duos like “Pitter Panther Patter” and orchestral bass concertos like “Jack The Bear.”

“I had my mind blown by Duke’s and Strayhorn’s brilliance by playing works like ‘The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse’ or ‘Such Sweet Thunder’ or ‘The Far East Suite,” he continues. “Before Lincoln Center, my scope was what I liked, what I’d been exposed to, and early on I was resistant, because I wanted to maintain my hardbop identity. But my experience gave me a thorough view of jazz. I looked at it as graduate school, getting my PhD in performance. I picked Wynton Marsalis’ brain — we had conversations and debates where sometimes my opinions were polar opposite to his on, let’s say, whether Ellington or Strayhorn had written parts of a particular tune. To be able to do that, I had to learn more about music.

“The sound of their chord voicings, the style of the song forces you to play in the style of a particular person, almost like an actor going into character, to bring out the life from that music. But you have to force yourself not to do that.  Duke wouldn’t want you to play in his style — his ‘A Train’ sounds totally different in 1948 than in 1960. Once we played a ‘Blanton-Webster Years’ concert with John Lewis, who told us: ‘Quote the solo, but then do your own thing.’ If you don’t do that, you’re not playing jazz. Any music has to be allowed to live.”

Whitaker’s m.o. for applying that stated aesthetic principle to the task at hand was to model the session on Billie Holiday’s freewheeling mid-1950s small group dates for Verve with iconic Ellington tenor saxophonist Webster, trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, pianist Jimmy Rowles, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassists Red Mitchell or Joe Mondragon, and drummers Alvin Stoller or Larry Bunker. “I was thinking about having a vocalist, but also making the recording more like a cutting session, where a lot of the music is not arranged,” says Whitaker. He adds that, as a precocious Detroit teenager, he thought swing music was “corny.”

“When I was younger, I didn’t like Ray Brown or Oscar Peterson or any of what I called ‘happy jazz,’” Whitaker recalls. “The Detroit musicians in my generation all came up playing free jazz, hardbop and bebop. But when I was 16, I got an album called Soulmates by Joe Zawinul and Ben Webster. I bought it because I was listening to Weather Report a lot; I wasn’t even hip to what Joe had done with Cannonball Adderley’s sextet until I was 18. Anyway, I fell in love with Ben Webster’s sound, and checking him out sent me to Ellington and Sweets and all the others.”

Swing is the only apt descriptor for the way Detroit-born drummer Karriem Riggins propels the first ten numbers. Now 43, Riggins played on Whitaker’s first two albums, Hidden Kingdom and Children of the Light, from 1994 and 1996, respectively. At the time, Riggins — who possesses a high Q-score in hip-hop circles as a producer and beatmaker — was lighting sparks with Roy Hargrove’s state-of-the-art quintet, prior to consequential tenures with Ray Brown and Mulgrew Miller.

“I mentored Karriem as a teenager,” Whitaker says. “He’s a curious soul, and has the ability to retain a lot of information. Before he got in Ray’s band, I remember watching him learn the music, and he ingested Ray’s entire career. I wanted a drummer I really knew, because if the bass and drums are together, we’re a band.”

Less widely known is Ann Arbor-based pianist Rick Roe, who retained Whitaker’s and Riggins’ services for his 1996 trio recording, Changeover, and recorded a “cult classic” called Monk’s Modern Music with Whitaker and drummer Greg Hutchinson, who played together with Roy Hargrove from 1991 to 1994. “Rick and I always played well together,” Whitaker says. “He’s one of the best compers in jazz.”

“He’s my first-call tenor saxophonist,” Whitaker says of Diego Rivera, the Associate Director of MSU’s jazz studies program. “He comes out of the Johnny Griffin hardbop school; he plays the way I like a tenor player to play.”

Also on board from the MSU faculty is trombonist Michael Dease, 36, a one-time student of Whitaker’s LCJO colleague Wycliffe Gordon who has established an international reputation by dint of ten leader recordings that showcase his efflorescent instrumental and compositional skills and endless will to swing.

The group’s elder is virtuoso trumpeter Brian Lynch, who functioned as a co-equal sideman with Phil Woods and Eddie Palmieri after serving consequential 1980s apprenticeships with Horace Silver and Art Blakey. Among his 20+ albums as a leader are the 2006 Grammy-winning Simpatico, and, more recently, the 2017 Grammy-nominated Madera Latino: A Latin Jazz Interpretation on the Music of Woody Shaw.

The proceedings open with “Cottontail,” a 1940 Ellington recording that pivots around a force-of-nature Webster solo. After Riggins uncorks a drum fanfare, Lynch, Dease and Rivera exchange five idea-rich rounds of choruses before an ebullient polyphonic section, and a crackling Riggins solo.

The tempo ratchets down  to medium swing on the title track, a romantic blue ballad from 1940 on which Webster uncorked an iconic solo that still stands as a masterpiece of boudoir tenor saxophone. Rockelle Fortin, who is Whitaker’s oldest daughter, soulfully renders Carl Sigman’s lyric, signified upon by Dease’s voice-like trombone.

Whitaker refracts the essence of Oscar Pettiford on his melodic introduction to Strayhorn’s “Take The A Train,” which Ellington debuted in 1941. Rivera, Dease and Lynch provide obbligatos as Fortin sings the lyric, and solo in that order — followed by Roe — over Riggins’ big beat, which foreshadows a concluding drum solo over which the ensemble riffs.

Another resonant Whitaker solo opens “Just Squeeze Me,” which, in its initial incarnation, on a 1941 Rex Stewart-led date of Ellingtonians, featured an impassioned Webster solo and was titled “Subtle Slough.” Whitaker discovered the tune on a 1955 Prestige recording by the Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. In his opening two-and-a-half minute solo, Whitaker shows us what Chambers might have done had he soloed on the source track; Lynch’s muted solo refracts the spirit of Miles into his own argot; after Roe says his piece, Whitaker engages Riggins and Lynch in triological conversation.

This arrangement of “Mood Indigo” emerged from his nightly duo feature with Dianne Reeves on a 1999 tour with a Nicholas Payton led tentet that included Joe Lovano and members of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Whitaker and Reeves recorded it together on Whitaker’s 2000 album Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Sirocco). Whitaker describes Fortin’s performance as a tribute to Reeves, a consequential mentor; she does the great diva justice. Riggins’ variegated straight-eighth beats spur Rivera’s keening soprano sax solo and a pithy Whitaker declamation.

The ensemble introduction to “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” follows Thelonious Monk’s changes on his 1956 all-Ellington recital with Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke. Lynch, Whitaker, Dease, and Rivera (tenor) uphold Ellington’s anthemic dictum.

Riggins projects a 21st century foxtrot feel on “Harlem Air Shaft,” from a June 1940 date that featured solos by Cootie Williams on trumpet and Barney Bigard on clarinet. “The original recording is referred to as a 3-minute masterpiece, because every element that exists in jazz happens in Ellington’s arrangement,” Professor Whitaker says. After fresh, swinging solos by Rivera, Roe, Dease and Lynch, and exchanges between bass and drums, Rivera’s variations end the tune.

“Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me” began life as “Concerto For Cootie,” a 1940 Ellington masterpiece. A few years later, after World War Two began, Don George wrote lyrics, transforming it into a feature for the blind baritone singer Al Hibbler. After Dease’s alligatory introduction, Fortin sings with relaxed phrasing and poignant tone, paving the way for Dease’s timbrally extravagant statement.

Composed by Ellington’s great Puerto Rican valve trombonist Juan Tizol, the oft-recorded “Perdido” was first documented at a December 1941 transcription session and a January 1942 RCA date by the Ellington orchestra. Both featured solos by Ray Nance and Webster, whose tonal identity Rivera signifies upon as the ensemble states the theme. Riggins lays down a medium-up magic carpet upon which Dease, Rivera, Lynch and Roe soar on their solo turns. Note the breathe-as-one, conceived-in-the-studio, three-horn soli from 3:23 to 4:40, setting up another strong Whitaker solo, and then exchanges between the horns and Riggins.

Ellington introduced his exotic tone poem, “Azure,”in 1937. He recontextualized it on various occasions, including a 1965 encounter with Ella Fitzgerald that Fortin references on her lovely interpretation. “We put the arrangement together in a few minutes, from specific chord changes that Rick Roe suggested,” Whitaker says. “Rockelle pushed us towards’s Ella’s thing when we played it.” Solos are by Rivera, Dease and Lynch.

For the final two selections, as if to signify on the perpetual forward gaze that defined Ellington’s attitude to his oeuvre at every stage of his career, Whitaker includes drummer Kayvon Gordon, a young Detroiter who played with his working quintet before moving to New York in the fall of 2018. On “Come Sunday,” from Ellington’s iconic 1943 “Black, Brown and Beige” suite. Gordon’s percolating backbeat variations complement Fortin’s spiritual reading of the lyrics, testifying solos by Rivera and Roe, and an elegant bass chorus. “We updated some of the harmonies, and it has a more contemporary gospel and feel than what Ellington did with it back in the day,” Whitaker remarks.

It’s the quintet again on a creative treatment of Tizol’s oft-covered “Caravan,” which debuted in 1936. Whitaker states the bassline of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Tin Tin Deo” over the melody and Fortin channels Ella Fitzgerald in interpreting Irving Mills’ lyrics.

Here, as on each track of this inspired tribute to the Maestro, Whitaker upholds the standards set by his “happy jazz” role models, leaving this listener wanting more. “I could release another volume,” Whitaker says. “There are 12 tunes — including some more obscure ones — that we didn’t use.” I can’t wait to hear them.

For pianist Luis Perdomo’s 53rd birthday, a Downbeat article from 2007 and a liner note from 2016

For the fabulous pianist Luis Perdomo’s birthday, here’s a Downbeat article from 2007 framed around the release of his second leader recording, titled Awareness, and a liner note for his fourth Criss Cross release, from 2016, titled Spirits and Warriors. (This album, as well as The ‘Infancia’ Project and Links, which are referenced in the liner notes, can be heard in their entirety on Youtube, as of this writing.)

***************

Luis Perdomo Downbeat Article (2007):

One night backstage at the Jazz Gallery a few years back, a colleague of Luis Perdomo speculated that, contrary to his stated birth date of 1971, the Caracas-born pianist, a ubiquitous presence on New York bandstands since 1999, was in his fifties. The comment was in jest, but it spoke to the old soul clarity, grit and maturity of Perdomo’s idiomatic contributions to Latin jazz dates with Marlon Simon, Ralph Irizarry’s Timbalaya, and Ray Barretto, and his fresh formulations, still ongoing, with such informed pan-genre hybridizers as Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany Terry, Miguel Zenon, Brian Lynch, and Ravi Coltrane.

With the 2006 release of Awareness, his second leader recording for Coltrane’s RKM label, Perdomo makes a strong case for himself as a leader of originality and conceptual breadth. Each of the eleven tracks is a Perdomo composition, and he organizes them into a suite with a narrative arc that unfolds from beginning to end. Six tunes are trios with bassist Hans Glawischnig, a stalwart on many important Jazz Latin art music scenes over the past eight years, and drummer Eric McPherson, a New York native with an encyclopedic beat vocabulary. On the other five, Perdomo sets up a double trio with old master outcat bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Nasheet Waits, McPherson’s chum since grammar school. Using the percussion coloristically, he phrases freely across the open-metered, surging pulse, while paying keen attention to harmonic development and pianistic touch.

“I’ve always been in love with the idea of two or three basses,” said Perdomo, citing Cecil Taylor’s 1967 opus, Conquistador, on which Grimes performed, as an early model. As a teenager Perdomo  also heard Grimes with far-outcat Frank Wright on an ESP trio album. The source for both records was his teacher, an Austrian emigre pianist named Jerry Weil, a bandmate of Perdomo’s uncle, a salsero. “He taught me jazz and salsa, Bach and Chopin,” Perdomo recalled. “Every lesson he’d give me music—to begin with, Keith Jarrett’s Memories of Tomorrow and Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower as well as Solar.” He cites a panoramic range of other formative influences, among them Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue with Andrew Hill, Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, Monk, Tatum, Weather Report, Eddie Palmieri, Martial Solal, George Gruntz, and Alexander von Schlippenbach, timba from Cuba, ‘80s sounds from Brazil, and traditional Venezuelan music.

“The first record I bought was John Coltrane’s Om, when I was 16,” Perdomo said. “I’d get up in the morning and put it on—or Spiritual Unity or Faces and Reflections by George Duke with Ndugu Chancler—and when the teachers were talking about a math problem or something in class, I could go to a certain part of my brain and listen to it.”

Already in demand as a keyboardist with local dance bands, Perdomo at 16 first played jazz professionally on trio gigs at Caracas hotels, and got his on-the-job seasoning on a Monday-through-Saturday, 9-to-4 residence at a popular local jazz club from 1989 until 1993. Then Perdomo moved to New York.

“A Cuban trumpet player I knew would visit his uncle in New York to buy records and listen to music, and he invited me,” Perdomo said. “Every record I had said ‘Recorded in New York.’ My Dad was a big Bud Powell fan, and when I’d hear Oblivion, I’d see the New York skyline.” On Perdomo’s second trip, a friend mentioned that Manhattan School of Music was holding auditions. A year later, a 95% scholarship in hand, he sold his equipment, gathered his savings, and spent the next five years as a full-time student.

“I’d been listening to a lot of avant-garde music, but I didn’t understand Charlie Parker,” he related. “When I got to New York, something clicked, and I started working backwards. I was aware of all the new music that was being done around the city, but I was listening to Bird, Bud Powell and Fats Navarro. Now I’m totally into James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. In fact, I’d like to do a piano record playing the music of Fats Waller, Ernesto Lecuona and Scott Joplin.”

If his salsaphile family had their way, Perdomo reported, that next project would instead be more explicitly Latin. “I want to be true to myself and play what I hear,” he explained. “From growing up in that background and playing salsa, I hear all the percussion—the congas, bongos and timbales. I also love straight-ahead. All this music touches me, and  if I like it, I’ll learn it real fast, and do it.”

He recalled an encomium from Branford Marsalis during the session that generated Miguel Zenon’s first Marsalis Music record, Ceremonial, on which Perdomo excels. “Branford  said, ‘You guys are part of a movement; you’re changing the way Latin music is heard.’ But I don’t see myself as an innovator. I just see myself as well-equipped to do all these things.

“I’m glad to be living during this time. A lot of people say it would have been great to live during the ‘60s when so many different movements were happening, but a lot is happening right now, too.”

************

Luis Perdomo, Spirits and Warriors, Liner Notes:

Last fall, when Criss Cross proprietor Gerry Teekens offered pianist Luis Perdomo his fourth Criss Cross leader date, the 45-year-old, Caracas-born pianist—who had recently recorded a solo piano album for another label—accepted immediately.

“I wasn’t planning on doing this record,” says Perdomo, a New Yorker since 1993, and a first-caller of long standing. “But there are so many great people in New York I’ve never played with before, or have played with but not enough, and I’ve taken these opportunities from Gerry as occasions to do something with them. For me, putting together these bands is like cooking—get the right ingredients, take a lot of time to prepare and you know it’s going to be great.”

For this musical repast, Perdomo assembled an A-list quintet of individualistic tonal personalities. Not least among them is tenor saxophonist Mark Shim, who returns from Perdomo’s 2012 opus, The ‘Infancia’ Project (Criss-1348), on which Perdomo addressed four originals and five pieces, primarily drawn from the lexicon of hardcore modern jazz but also including a Hector Lavoe bolero, with master clave-to-swing bilingualists Andy Gonzalez on bass, and Ignacio Berroa on drums.

“Mark is an under-recognized musician,” Perdomo says. “I particularly love his robust tone, and his rhythmic concepts are unique. I always like to play with people who are rhythmically inclined. By the time I was 12, I was playing in salsa bands in Venezuela, so I come from a tradition that incorporates a lot of percussion and beats. I always talk about rhythm when I teach and give master classes. To me, rhythm is the most important element in Western music. Most of the bands I really enjoy playing with, and that I have spent a long time playing with, tend to go in the rhythmic direction.”

In this regard, Perdomo cites long haul tenures with the Miguel Zenón Quartet (the alto saxophone master appears on Perdomo’s third Criss Cross date, Links [Criss-1357]), in which he has played for 16 years, and the Ravi Coltrane Quartet, in which he held the piano chair from 2001 to  2011, as well as groups like Ralph Irizarry’s Timbalaye, and various units led by Yosvany Terry and Dafnis Prieto. More recently, Perdomo notes, he’s focused increasingly on his own solo piano project and his trio, The Controlling Ear Unit, with bassist Mimi Jones and drummer Rudy Royston.

Spirits and Warriors marks Perdomo’s first encounter with trumpeter Alex Sipiagin, leader of 11 Criss Cross dates and sideman on nine others, including four by the cooperative quintet Opus 5. “Gerry asked if I wanted to do a quintet with trumpet, and I asked about Alex,” he recalls. “He made a huge impression on me the first time I heard him, and many times since. I always wanted to play with him.”

A regular in various Tom Harrell units for the past decade, and with Jacky Terrasson’s trio from 1994 to 2002,  bassist Ugonna Okegwo played on Perdomo’s first leader recording, Focus Point, in 2003. “Ugonna is very rhythmic and I love his tone,” Perdomo says. “When it’s time to walk the bass and swing like crazy, he’s the guy to do it, but he’s  also played very openly in groups like Sam Newsome’s Global Unity. Ugonna won’t overwhelm you with technical stuff. He plays just the right amount of notes to make everything sound good, and at the same time puts his imprint on the music.”

If septugenarian drum titan Billy Hart is the oldest protagonist on Spirits and Warriors, he may also be the youngest in spirit.  Still maintaining an intense touring schedule, Hart—most frequently heard these days at the helm of his quartet with Mark Turner and Ethan Iverson, and propelling generational contemporaries like Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson and George Cables in the Cookers—makes his first Criss Cross appearance since 1987, when he joined Ralph Moore on 623 C Street.

“Billy’s playing is like a tree,” Perdomo says. “It’s firmly rooted in the tradition, but he can go in different directions. His groove and rhythmic feeling are strong, like a tree’s trunk, but sometimes the tree has no leaves, sometimes they change colors, sometimes there are creatures living in it and around it, sometimes there are none. These are the images that appear to me when I think of Billy—or Jack DeJohnette, Ralph Peterson and Eric McPherson, who I’ve played with. They are constantly listening.”

He adds: “I also like being like that. That’s why I like to play with flexible musicians, with a foot in tradition and a foot in the modern. At any moment I can go either way, and I like musicians who can back me up. Music is just music. It should make you happy. For some reason, boundaries don’t exist in my head.”

Having resolved the issue of personnel, Perdomo focused on the music they would play. The centerpiece is the six-piece suite for which the album is titled. “I was thinking of a lot of people, some really good friends, some not so close, who either died too young—who are the spirits—or have come through an illness—the warriors—and are still with us,” he says.

The late and much missed bassist Dwayne Burno, who played on Links, is the subject of the suite-opening “Face Up,” a stalwart swinger so titled to signify Burno’s penchant addressing his instrument with his head at an upward tilt. “I imagined the type of changes Dwayne liked to play on, and the kind of song that he played masterfully,” Perdomo says. He opens the solo rounds, followed by Sipiagin and Shim.

“Sensei” evokes the aura of Woody Shaw’s and Bobby Hutcherson’s musical production at the cusp of the 1970s, a feeling reinforced by Sipiagin’s mercurial, virtuosic solo and Perdomo’s lilting, percolating declamation. The title references Perdomo’s uncle, Eliazar Yanez, a drummer and master taiko player who introduced his nephew to pianist Gerry Weil, an Austrian emigre who had moved to Caracas, under whose ministrations Perdomo would subsequently absorb recordings spanning “avant-garde and straightahead jazz, salsa, Bach and Chopin.” “My uncle was very fit, but he passed away in his fifties from an aneurysm,” Perdomo recalls. “This piece, like the other spirit pieces, is less like a mourning than a celebration of his life and his being around in my time.”

Hart’s ebullient intro launches “Aura,” a crisp finger-snapper with an ebullient feel not unlike Bobby Watson’s Horizon circa 1990. Perdomo’s intention was to represent the inspiring attitude of a friend and musical colleague who resolutely refused to complain about or be held back by serious medical issues while on tour several years ago. A gnarly horn unison shout chorus leads to solos by Shim, Sipiagin, Perdomo and Hart.

Clarion piano chords open “Ralph,” a turbulent, anthemic number dedicated to the aforementioned Ralph Peterson and Ralph Irizarry. Propelled by Hart’s staunch, multi-directional beats, Sipiagin and Shim exchange and intertwine their lines; Perdomo evokes Andrew Hill, as he finds ways to phrase his harmonic path with stacked counter-rhythms, before a penultimate vamp that allows Hart to say his piece.

Shim’s keening EWI solo illuminates the bittersweetness of “Her Eyes,” conceived in memory of the “expressive, big eyes” of pianist Shimrit Shoshan and saxophonist Rebecca Buxton, who both died much too young. Perdomo and Sipiagin admirably sustain the emotional mood.

The ballad “Year One” is dedicated to the Italian-born, Venezuela-based pop singer Yordano, who employed Perdomo when he was 18, and who, at the time Spirits and Warriors was recorded, was one year past a bone marrow transplant for lymphoma. “He doesn’t really like jazz, but he likes ballads—Chet Baker,” Perdomo says. “I imagined he likes the softer songs that Chet Baker played.” Sipiagin’s golden, blue-tinged tone and Shim’s testifying tenor infuse the flow.

After the suite concludes, Perdomo presents two rarely-covered jazz songs and an iconic standard. He designates Clifford Jordan’s classic “Glass Bead Games” (from the 1972 album of that name), as a quartet feature for Shim, who displays enviable textural control on a tour de force declamation. Solos by Perdomo and Okegwo follow.

There follows a trio treatment of Hermeto Pascoal’s “Little Church (Igrejinha)” debuted in a more sonically extravagant context on Miles Davis’ 1970 album Live Evil (the composer whistled, Miles played trumpet with effects, Herbie Hancock played organ, and Dave Holland played bass). Perdomo presents it as a trio feature, on which he and Okegwo, pushed gently by Hart’s just-right brushstrokes, sculpt cogent melodic variations from the gorgeous chords.

Sipiagin alchemizes his trumpet into a voice on the melody statement for the album-closing “Portrait of Jenny,” a blue ballad previously covered by such masters as Nat Cole, J.J. Johnson, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, George Benson, Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Blue Mitchell, Donald Byrd and Joe Lovano. Hart switches between brushes and sticks, providing an airy cushion for extended solos by Perdomo, Sipiagin and Okegwo.

“It’s a tune that you can treat traditionally but also go in different directions,” Perdomo says, stating the attitude that permeates this latest documentation, on which the clarity, grit and maturity that make him such a valuable contributor to contemporary jazz piano expression is palpable throughout.

“I see myself as well-equipped to do a lot of things,” Perdomo told me a few years ago. “A lot of people say it would have been great to have lived during the ’60s when so many different movements were happening, but a lot is happening now, too. I’m glad to be living during this time.”

For the eminent composer and pianist Anthony Davis’ 73rd birthday, the transcript of a WKCR Musician Show from Aug. 11,1993

In honor of composer-pianist Anthony Davis’ 73rd birthday, I’m posting the transcript of a WKCR Musician Show that he did with me in 1993, in which he presented music that influenced him in formative years and also his original music, including a number of selections from the original production of his opera X Manhattan’s City Opera (as you may know, the Metropolitan Opera presented a new production this year), which maestro Davis commented on. We’d previously done a Sunday Jazz profiles show in 1989, where Mr. Davis discussed his body of recorded work up to that point in detail, but I haven’t had a chance to transcribe it.

*******************

Anthony Davis, Musician Show (WKCR-Aug. 11, 1993):

[MUSIC: Anthony Davis, “Little Richard’s New Wave” – for Melissa Finley dance piece]

TP:   We have a wide array of music programmed – Ellington, Mingus, Monk, Cecil Taylor, a variety of operas, as well as your own music. The impact of Duke Ellington is quite evident in your small group and piano work. Have you been involved in Ellington’s from early on?

AD:   I think it started when I was a freshman at Yale. Actually, it first started with my meeting Leo Smith. Leo is a real Ellington junkie, became really interested and fascinated with Ellington’s music. I was totally a bebopper.

TP:   How do you mean?

AD:   When I was 18, I was completely…like most of the pianists today…I was a follower of Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, and I was really interested in Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. So I was always playing with changes and writing tunes with changes, etc. Leo sort of introduced me to a lot of earlier music as well as more current music — hearing more of Cecil Taylor, etc. Then also, at Yale, I was fortunate to be there at a time when Willie Ruff, who is still there, had what’s called the Conservatory Without Walls. They started this off with a concert with Ellington. Ellington came to Yale and did a series of concerts. Also…

TP:   Was one of them recorded as The Yale Concert?

AD:   I think so, yes. What was really interesting, they had an Ellington Fellowship program, so they brought Mingus and many other artists associated with Ellington came up to Yale and performed. Mingus’ concert was famous, because there was a bomb threat in the middle of it so we had to abandon the building, but Mingus still played through the whole thing!

I met Ellington at a party after one of the concert. I was I guess about 19, and I was across the room from him. He looked at me. Of course, in those days I had this huge Afro, which I lost only recently. But I had this huge, wild Afro in those days, and he looked across the room and he pointed at me and he said, “You must be a musician.”

TP:   To which you said?

AD:   “Yeah.” I wasn’t really sure that was my life’s calling at that point. But after Ellington came over and hugged me and said, “You must be a musician,” I figured, “I guess I’d better be.”

TP:   He anointed you.

AD:   That’s right.

TP:   Please forgive the silliness of the question. But for you as a musician at that place and time,  and wherever you were at aesthetically, what was the appeal of Ellington’s music, and what did you learn from it, if I can put it like that?

AD:   Well, I think it’s profound in the sense that what you learn from Ellington is the idea of structure, the idea of creating forms that embrace both improvisation and interpretation by the improviser, as well as compositional form. Every composition of his has a unique structure, and that’s what was so fascinating to me. As opposed to when I looked like bebop music and its sort of formalized structure of 32 bars or 16 bars or 12 bar forms, where Ellington was always unusual and did so much with even expanding upon those structures. So I began to look at… I was fascinated with his suites  and more of his extended compositions, and it influenced me a lot. I remember starting to write suites when I was in college. I wrote a series of suites. One was called “The Left Hand Of Darkness Suite.” Then I wrote another one called “Madagascar Suite,” because I found out some of my relatives were from Madagascar, so I did a suite of music from that. I began to create compositions that had that… In fact, a lot of the musicians at the time used to joke with me and call me “Mister Medley,” because I was always making all my tunes into extended pieces, linking them together and tying them together.

But that was a lot of the Ellington influence – the idea of creating longer forms, longer structures, and also the idea of looking at influences outside of music itself. The idea of drawing upon…whether it be a book or a story or something you see, etc.

TP:   Ellington was extremely visual and always seemed to have a story to tell for almost anything he’d write.

AD:   Oh, of course. If anyone knows anything about Ellington, he was a painter, and all these different colors of blue that he… I don’t know how many titles of his pieces are different shades of blue. But the idea of his fascination with color and light. And you can see that in his music, too.

So that was a profound influence on me. And the idea of Ellington being really a role model, a model of someone who achieved a perfect balance of composition and improvisation… He became an important musical model for me.

TP:   In a sense, he’s the source of the three other musicians we’ll prominently feature. Mingus, Monk, and Cecil Taylor all draw heavily on aspects of Ellington in their work.

AD:   That’s definitely true. Mingus played in Ellington’s orchestra for a short time. But I think you can hear in Mingus’ music the influence of Ellington and Strayhorn, too, in terms of his harmonic idiom. I also have to say that Art Tatum was a profound influence, too, in terms of developing his harmonic idiom. Of course, with Mingus again, the fascination with the extended forms, the idea of expanding song form and making it into larger compositions, larger structures. I always loved Mingus’ music. It was another profound influence for me.

TP:   Before we begin with the programming, it must be mentioned that although Anthony Davis doesn’t perform so often in the New York area, this month you’ll be involved in a number of performances, both your own and as a sideman with long-time music colleague Ray Anderson in a few weeks at the Yardbird Suite. You performed last Thursday outdoors at Lincoln Center with a small version of Episteme, with Warren Smith, Mark Feldman and Mark Dresser. But this Sunday, at the Brooklyn Museum, in the Inspiration Series, you’ll be presenting a suite of works, both Monk repertory and material inspired by Thelonious Monk.

AD:   Yes, I’ll be doing a solo piano recital and I’ll be doing some Monk compositions and arrangements of Monk compositions I’ve done, and I’ll be doing some of my own music as well. So I am looking forward to that. I guess my first influence in “jazz” was Thelonious Monk. Hearing him I guess in 1965 first inspired me to become an improviser to begin with. Before I heard his music I was strictly a classical pianist. Hearing Monk, I became more interested in improvisation and composition.

TP:    We’ll elaborate more when we get to the Monk segment. But let’s begin the Ellington segment with “The Clothed Woman” from 1947.

AD:   It’s one of my favorite Ellington compositions. It’s not known as much as some of the others. As a pianist, I was very impressed with how modern Ellington’s playing is here. You can hear the expanded harmonic vocabulary he had — even though within a blues structure, and then there’s a stride section in the middle. Within that, he was a visionary, far ahead of his time in what he was attempting in terms of harmony. So I was always very influenced by that, and you can hear I think some of where Cecil comes out of — and other musicians, too.

I first heard “The Clothed Woman” live, when he performed at Yale. He did a duo piano version with Willie “The Lion” Smith. I think the stride theme was inspired by Willie The Lion. If you hear the style of it, it’s really inspired by Willie the Lion’s playing.

[MUSIC: Ellington, “The Clothed Woman”-1947; Ellington, “Koko”-1940; Monk, “Brilliant Corners”-1956; Monk, “Crepuscule With Nellie”; Monk Big Band, “Little Rootie Tootie”]

[END OF SIDE 1]

AD:   …trombone. So you really get a clearer idea of the stride influence on Monk’s playing, how his left hand worked, using the open fist, and then the kind of motion that he always has in his left hand, the harmonic motion that is in Monk’s music. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to take another Monk solo and orchestrate.

TP:   A for-instance? I’m putting you on the spot.

AD:   Putting me on the spot. Well, “Crepuscule With Nellie” would be really interesting to orchestrate. It might have been interesting to do a ballad, since orchestrated solos had always been up tunes – it might have been really interesting to do one of his ballads. It might have been really hard to play, because a lot of it is very free in terms of the rhythmic…

TP: And he played it differently every time. You were thinking of a different version of “Crepuscule”…

AD:   The versions are always different.

TP:   He played it a lot, as a solo piece, in the middle of sets…

AD: Yes, he could embellish it the way that he wanted. That’s some of the freedom in doing a solo thing. But I think it would be great to… There are different ways of orchestrating something like that. It would be a real challenge.

“Brilliant Corners” is an incredible composition. Again, the structure of it is interesting, and the way he uses the double time…the bridge is in double time. With Sonny Rollins, Ernie Henry and Max Roach, it’s one of the classic recordings.

TP:   The solos have a sense of inevitability to them, but completely personal to the improvisers.

AD:   That’s the thing. The best improvisers playing Monk are people who have their own strong voice, like Coltrane or Johnny Griffin or Sonny Rollins, and later Charlie Rouse, too, who is so linked to Monk – his ideas were so melded to Monk’s. To me, it’s just a brilliant performance by everyone on that. That’s one of the records I grew up with, too. I was doing a Monk concert several years ago at one of the tribute concerts they did up here at Columbia, and we were rehearsing with Steve Lacy and Charlie Rouse, Richard Davis was on bass, Blackwell was playing and Ben Riley was playing – they were alternating. We were just sitting down, what Monk tunes we knew, etc. It was fascinating for me, because of course Charlie and Steve Lacy know very close to exactly all the things Monk was doing, and I had a looser interpretation – I’d listened to Monk and a lot of it I learned from records. I was doing “Pannonica.” I’d listened to the record, and I remember Oscar Pettiford’s bassline. I said, “Well, Oscar played this bassline here” and they said, “Well, he played the wrong changes.” [LAUGHS] That was very funny for me, being a younger musician at the time, and having learned a lot from the records.

TP:   Some musicians today say that in playing Monk you almost have to do it right down to the fingering, that Monk’s music is so complete, it’s a world unto itself.

AD:   It definitely is.

TP:   Is Monk a life-long project? How far away from his style can you in interpreting Monk?

AD:    I think that’s a challenge. You could… There are plenty of people now who are trying to play the music pretty close to exactly what Monk did. I think one of the challenges is to invest your own personality into it, and to take it and explore playing Monk in your own way. An example is Monk playing Ellington, or hearing him play Fats Waller or something like that. It’s exciting for me to approach what I sort of investigate with my own ideas, too.

TP:   Can you speak a bit to the connection between Monk and Ellington, particularly in terms of piano style? Even Ellington commented on it at a certain point.

AD: Well, they’re part of a tradition. I’m not sure Monk was directly influenced by Ellington as much as they shared common influences. If you look at Monk’s thing directly, it’s more like Fats Waller, Count Basie, that side of it. Also because there were composers, and there aren’t too many great composers in this music – but they are two of the great composers. I think the way they approached the instrument was really compositional, with the idea of clarity of idea. So you hear a lot of common ground there, I think. Both of them had a sense of also the resonance of the instrument, in the left hand what kind of open voicings can be used, whether it be a fifth in the left hand, etc. — and how to really make a piano sound in terms of the harmonics of the instrument. I think that comes a lot from Ellington’s playing in the big band, as Basie did, too. I think Monk took that another step into the small group. So you can hear, I think, a lot of Ellington’s approach to the instrument, as well as other pianists like Basie.

TP:   Now we’ll hear a set that features Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor doing variations on Billy Strayhorn’s “Take The A Train.” One is Mingus’ famous arrangement from Pre-Bird, in 1960, where he interpolates “Exactly Like You.” Then Cecil Taylor’s version from 1958.

[MUSIC: Mingus, “Take The A Train/Exactly Like You”-1960; Cecil Taylor, “Excursions On a Wobbly Rail”-1958; Mingus, “Open Letter To The Duke”}

TP:   Do you know the story behind “Open Letter To the Duke”?

AD:   I don’t know the story behind it. I like the musical structure of it, and also the fact… Actually I hadn’t heard that extended version before. I was always used to just the tenor solo and then into the head. It’s interesting, because it’s sort of through-composed; it goes from one style to another, and then it goes into the classic Mingus-Ellingtonian ballad style, ballad thing, which is really gorgeous – I always loved it. I love the way the piece sort of evolves, almost like a free association in terms of the form of the piece, rather than being to the standard ABA forms or AABA forms, etc. So I was always interested in it…one of Mingus’ pieces. You can see his indebtedness to Ellington, of course, and Strayhorn.

Mingus was a profound influence on my music, too. When I was in college, I had a band with George Lewis, among others. Gerry Hemingway was the drummer, and Wes Brown was the bass player, a guy named Hal Lewis was the alto saxophone player. We played our own music except for Mingus compositions. I transcribed a lot of Mingus pieces at the time. So we were playing “Peggy’s Blue Skylight.” I did “Meditations On Integration.” “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, then Blue Silk.”

TP:   The extended pieces.

AD:   Oh yeah. Well, they fascinated me. “Orange Was the Color” has such an interesting structure, like… It’s the weirdest way to write a 32-bar tune that anyone has come up with — 11-, 11- and 10-bar phrases. I find that a fascinating piece. A lot of his compositions of the period are sort of extended song forms. Even a piece like “Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love” I used to do.

TP:   That was recorded in 1974 or 1975, so it was composed right around the time.

AD:    I used to go to Manhattan to hear the group with Don Pullen and George Adams. Jack Walrath I guess was playing trumpet. I was always very impressed with that group. I always liked Don’s playing a lot.

TP: Let’s discuss Cecil Taylor’s performance on the harmonic extensions of “Take The A Train.”

AD:   That was a great group with Earl Griffiths on vibraphone. It’s interesting, because when I formed my own quartet with Jay Hoggard and Blackwell and Mark Helias, that was one of our models for inspiration. Everyone, of course, compared it to the MJQ, with another great composer, John Lewis, the musical director. That was an influence as well, but we were also very interested in other combinations. Bobby Hutcherson and McCoy Tyner did a quartet record. Also, the Cecil Taylor-Earl Griffiths combination.

I was fascinated, because as a pianist, I remember when I formed the group I had been tired of playing with horn players, frankly, the whole role of the function of instruments in that situation, with the piano in an accompanying role and the bass and the drums all fulfilling a particular function within that setting. I found playing with a vibraphone very liberating.  When I began to write music for that group, all the roles could be shared in different ways. A piece of mine like “Song For The Old World” and some other pieces we did were…a lot of the principle of it was all the instruments sharing different roles of what the group would be. Who’s sustaining the rhythm, and who was the melodic interest. It might be the bassist as the solo and we were playing rhythms and stuff. Blackwell, of course, was a big inspiration. He was a fantastic, great musician, and really open to playing with younger players.

TP:   It must have been amazing to have a chance to play with him regularly at that formative period.

AD:   It was very exciting to me, because he was my connection to Ornette Coleman’s music, and he’d played with Coltrane as well, and he brought so much. A lot of my music was created with him in mind. In “Song For the Old World,” for example, the parade rhythms he uses from New Orleans and stuff… We spent a lot of time together listening to…and developing my own ideas as a musician. Working with him and Mark Helias, we developed a real rapport as a trio. Then with Jay, of course, it went to another level.

TP:  Mark Helias remained in synch with him until Blackwell’s death. They linked up so well together.

AD:   Playing in that group was the beginning of it, I guess. We did some wonderful music.

TP:   In terms of your own piano playing, did Cecil Taylor have an impact?

AD:   Oh, definitely. I guess I was very interested in the virtuosity of Cecil, and also the fact that he really thinks of the instrument as an orchestra. That fascinated me. Using both hands. So many of the bebop-inspired pianists were… I was playing once in a club in New Haven, and Leo Smith came to hear me. I was then about 20 years old. He said, “Whatever happened to your left hand.” Basically I was playing bebop; I was playing all this stuff. I said, “I can play with my left hand; there’s no reason I can’t improvise with both hands.” So I began to really get interested in that. And listening a lot to stride pianists as well, from James P. Johnson and Willie the Lion and early Duke and Fats Waller. As a kid, I listened a lot to Art Tatum and Erroll Garner. But I became really interested in the idea of really playing with both hands, and the idea of liberating myself from what had been where the bass is playing and takes the lower register, and then the piano sort of providing chords in the left hand and playing in the right. Cecil was very liberating for me in that. So when I first came to New York, I began to play in a lot of groups as a sideman without bass, because I began to get the reputation for playing with my left hand. I played with Leroy Jenkins and other ensembles with, like, violin, piano and drums. So my first time playing in Europe was playing music like that.

I was very interested in that whole approach, and the physicality of it. I think Cecil is a real innovator. I hope that sometime they do a Lincoln Center concert of Cecil Taylor’s music, too. Somehow there are a lot of holes in what they present up there in terms of looking at our history, and someone like Cecil I think is very important to look at, too.

TP:   Staying on this theme, the Lincoln Center program is focused on creating a repertory out of the work of the artists you’ve mentioned, and they’re giving importance to idiomatic interpretation. But what you’re talking about sounds more like the notion of an idiomatic extension.

AD:   I think one of the interesting things about this music is, it’s not dead, it’s not something that’s in a museum. It’s something that continues to develop and continues to change. It’s very interesting to me to hear the music evolve. It’s not enough to just do a Monk… It’s beautiful that it happens. To me, Monk’s music and Ellington’s music are a pinnacle of music, in the development of 20th century music. I think it’s important to represent that and to play those things. But I think it’s also important to realize that there’s still an ongoing revolution in music.

TP:   Revolution or evolution?

AD:   I think revolution, too. Some people talk about evolving. But the way music changes is never gentle or sweet or nice. There’s always animosity and friction and everything else. So I think “revolution” is more…

TP:   So to borrow the term, music is in a state of “permanent revolution.”

AD:   Right. Perpetual revolution.

TP:   One thing to be said for what they do… You had a chance to see Monk and you had a chance to touch Ellington. But today’s musicians don’t have that chance. I think it’s important to have a chance to…

AD:   Oh, of course. I think that’s beautiful, that’s great. But I don’t want them to deny the idea that people can do something else with that…

TP:   Or that someone who doesn’t do that is not per se “legitimate” within that context, which I think is an attitude that…

AD:   Or to assume that people who decide not to do that haven’t checked that out already. A lot of us went through a whole period… I went through a period about the same age, when I was in my twenties, when that’s all I was interested in doing – playing in the style-of. Playing Bud Powell compositions and Richie Powell compositions and Thelonious Monk compositions, etc. But I realized that part of my purpose in being here was to develop my own music and develop my own direction, not just to be a laboratory for the past but also to try to produce something new. I don’t mean to sound immodest or anything. But I think the idea of his music is to…and what you get from Charlie Parker and what you get from Thelonious Monk is the courage to experiment and to explore new areas.

TP:   Now it’s time to hear some of Anthony Davis’ own music. Was The Life and Times Of Malcolm X your first opera?

AD:   Yes, it was. X was the first.

TP:   Had you written much for voice before, or was this new to you when you were doing it?

AD:   I’d written a couple of songs. That’s about it. I’d written a piece called “Beginning of Light of Time Passing.” Part of that I’d written. I’d also done an earlier song that I never play any more. But X was really my first chance to explore it. But I’d been thinking about the form of opera for a long time. I first thought about that in college. Basically, when I started at Yale, I was a philosophy major. My interest in opera came from reading Nietzsche, really. I read his essays on “Birth of Tragedy” and his essays on Wagner, and I was fascinated by it. I said, “What is this form, opera?” I’d never seen an opera. I only heard elements of it, and I was I think initially repulsed by the whole form. But it encouraged me to explore it.

Also, I took from “Birth of Tragedy” the idea of the combination of what he looked at as the Apollonian and Dionysian outlook on art as something that I could apply very easily to American music, particularly to Afro-American music, and to looking at… I felt that Nietzsche’s answer for this ideal music that combines these forms was actually Jazz or African-American music, and then I began to think of the idea of creating music theater that embodied…that allowed freedom for the improviser within a structure that…sort of the Apollonian idea of structure and form. So I was fascinated by the idea of opera before I ever heard an opera. So I thought of myself as preparing myself to write this opera, even back in college, and that’s when I started writing suites and listening to Ellington a lot and studying that musically. Also, in school I studied Wagner and Strauss and the whole operatic tradition — mostly the Germanic tradition, actually, through taking a Wagner class.

TP:   The fact of X’s existence got lost in the shuffle a bit last bit in the wake of all the hoopla about the movie. The production was 1986 or 1987?

AD:   The New York City Opera produced it in 1986, and it was done in American Theater Music Festival in 1985.

TP:   And it’s in the repertory.

AD:   Right. It’s going to be done again in Los Angeles, hopefully, in 1995, and maybe in Michigan before that. So I’m very excited about that. Now the recording is out, too. It’s interesting, because we preceded the movie about 6 or 7 years. I remember seeing Spike Lee in the audience opening night of X at City Opera, too.

TP: I don’t recollect him mentioning that.

AD:   No, he hasn’t mentioned that!

TP:   But his movie stands by itself, I think.

AD:    Oh, of course it does.

TP:   We’ll hear a selection that you say reflects the influence of Mingus on your music. But perhaps we’ll hear a number of selections right now of X and some other music you’ve spoken about. Coming up is “Ella’s Aria.”

AD:   “Ella’s Aria” – Ella is Malcolm Little’s half-sister. This is when Malcolm was taken from Michigan to Boston. It starts out with a kind of ostinato that begins “Come with me, child,” then it goes into “My side of town they call the hill,” which is the more overtly Mingus-inspired part. I can talk a little bit about that.

But the opening section is in 13/8. That’s my other obsession, is in rhythm. I’m very interested in exploring… I like repeating patterns and rhythms, and especially odd meters and odd rhythms. A lot of that came when I studied South Indian music at Wesleyan University, and I was very influenced by the whole theory of rhythm.

TP:   You’ve done whole compositional series that are based on rhythmic cells, so to speak.

AD:   Right. This one is very simple. It’s actually based on an earlier composition I’d done in 1974, which is from… A lot of times in my music I steal from myself. In this case, I had a piece called “The Left Hand of Darkness Suite,” which was based on an Ursula K. Leguin novel. This section of the ostinato comes from…and some of the music that’s underneath “Ella’s Aria” is from what I call “The Left Hand of Darkness Theme,” and this is that vamp. But I adapted it and it became part of the opera. Then it evolves into this kind of F-minor section, which is definitely… I mean, it’s one of Mingus’ favorite keys, too. The whole F-minor/D-flat major thing is to… There are millions of Mingus tunes like that.

TP:   As I recollect, the staging of the opera was very fluid with action transitions moving seamlessly from one part of the stage to another. Were you writing with the staging in mind?

AD:   I think the fluidity was what I had in mind. I think the staging sort of followed that. That was the only way to do it, really. But I thought of it in that way. But also musically, because it was very important to me. I was trying to make a musical statement first. A lot of times people are confused and talk about the political statements that are in X. But I think my first purpose was to make a musical statement. I think the musical statement is actually more threatening to people than my musical statement. I think what the idea was, was the idea that I could create a fluid piece of music that goes in and out of…let’s say the African-American tradition, from blues structures, etc., to Mingus-style ballad sections, etc. – but all within my own musical language. And then, go in and out to other kinds of structures and forms in the same way that a Wagner opera evolves. And using the same kind of structure in terms of motives and repeating and recurring textures. And really adapting the idea of Wagner but making into a strictly American idiom. I think it’s a revolutionary thing, because what it does, it implies also that…it puts into doubt what the tradition of opera is. What I was trying to create is a tradition of opera that is uniquely American, and particularly African-American. That’s more threatening, because it’s really a concept of music, not just a political concept of dealing with subject matter that deals with an African-American experience.

[MUSIC: “Ella’s Aria”; “The Pool Hall”]

TP:   We have to end on the segue, but we tried to be as accurate as possible for the “Pool Hall” scenes, sung by Thomas Young, who also played Elijah Muhammad in the opera. “Ella’s Aria” was sung by Hilda Harris. From X: the Life and Times of Malcolm X, An Opera In Three Acts, music by Anthony Davis and an incredible, poetic libretto by Thulani Davis.

AD:   That’s for sure.

TP:   Were you working in tandem with her? Was the music first? The libretto first?

AD: Mostly the libretto was first. Some of the music, as I said, I had some structures that I was referring to in the piece. First of all, the Overture is based on my piano piece, “Middle Passage.” So a lot of the material that unifies the structure of the whole opera is drawn from the solo piano piece. Then, as well, in the work the Mecca music, for example, was an adaptation from a work called “A Walk Through The Shadow” that I had done. Actually a lot of that was written first musically, and then set to words — but then we went back and forth. But mostly we worked with libretto first. I found that the easiest thing to do and most liberating because she could really create a complete idea with the words. Also, we’d worked so much together at the Public Theater doing poetry and music together. So I was very used to her language and the rhythm of her language was easy for me to deal with in terms of setting music. We worked with my brother Christopher, who did the story treatment. First of all, we laid out a structure, an idea of a structure, and then I had some ideas about thematically what areas I wanted to get to – certain kinds of arrival points in the opera. Then I wanted to explore…then I began to set some of the words to music.

This whole section you just heard was really the jazz section of the opera, which was from Boston. It shows Malcolm’s transformation from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red – to becoming the hustler. Thomas Young plays the role of Street, sort of an amalgam of different characters, who initiates Malcolm into the hustler’s life. So basically the whole thing is, starting with Ella, sort of middle-class statements about what Malcolm should be and what Black people are in Boston, etc. “My side of town we call the hill.” It could be the South Side or Harlem, wherever a Black community is. Then Street’s character challenging those ideas, saying, “Well, come on; you’re just working for the white man; you’re just doing this.” Then Malcolm slowly being won over.

TP:   The question, of course, is why she brings Malcolm to the pool hall.

AD: That’s another issue. Ella doesn’t even appear in the movie, for good reason probably. But…

TP:   But in the opera she brings him to the pool hall, and then Street sidles by and starts to take him under his wing.

AD:   Right. A whole other story. We all have dramatic license on these things. Malcolm himself took dramatic license in the autobiography.

What’s interesting for me is this idea of transformation of Malcolm. This is really the first transformation in the opera. We basically structured the opera in relation to these transformations. That was exciting for me, and it was exciting to do musically, because taking it from the ostinato, from “Ella’s Aria” to this F-minor section that’s sort of loosely based on the changes of “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” which is very funny. People don’t think, “You don’t know what love is until you’ve heard the meaning of the blues. So I had all these little byplays and jokes musically that I like to explore. Then going from that into when Street’s music comes in, really using blues structure. I guess my models were Cab Calloway, also looking at the zoot suit part (“you need a zoot suit, conk and cap”) of course was Fats Waller, the original rapper, if know “Your Feets’ Too Big” and those Waller-Andy Razaf things. So I was very interested in that.

Also in showing the music’s relation to history — the fact that the music reflects the historical development and creating a social ambiance, creating a sense of time and place.

TP:   This is very difficult music, and the singers make it seem effortless. Did you know who the singers would be when you were writing the music, or did they have to audition on the music and show their proclivity for it?

AD:   In Ella’s case, I had music for Ella…

TP:   For Hilda Harris?

AD:   Not necessarily. I knew about Hilda. Hilda was actually one of the first people I tried to get to do it, but she wasn’t available. I had a wonderful person, Mariana Simpson, for the opera production. In the case of Street’s music, it’s a very interesting story. Originally, Street was going to be a bass, and Avery Brook was the original Street when we did it in the workshop in the Philadelphia. But Avery was so magnetic as Street, he just blew Malcolm off the stage! So we decided that Avery should be Malcolm. So when we did a later workshop and then we did it in Philadelphia, at the American Music Theater Festival, Avery Brooks played Malcolm X.

In the meantime, I was auditioning for the role of Elijah Muhammad, and Thomas Young came by to sing, and he sang Gounod’s “Faust” or something. I said, “Wow, this guy is an amazing tenor; why isn’t he at the Met? What’s happening?” Which, there are obvious reasons, racism probably at the top of the list. But I was really impressed with him. Then he said to me, “I’m singing tonight in a club in your building.” In Manhattan Plaza, there used to be a club downstairs, the West Bank. So I said, “I’ll come to hear you.” I couldn’t believe this guy is going to sing a jazz gig. I invited people to come. The director came, and Cindy Aronson, and my brother, and some other people. He did this set of Ellington and Strayhorn, and I couldn’t believe it. He’s one of the greatest jazz singers I’ve ever heard. Period. Up there with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, you name it. Scat singing, everything – it was incredible. I said, “He has to be Street, too; we have to work it out so he’s Street, too.”

It worked out dramatically, because the idea of double-casting, of having that role of Street and Elijah Muhammad being the same person, making this connection between the antagonists in the opera, is consistent. Because one of the problems structurally in the opera is that Elijah Muhammad doesn’t show up until the second act. Now that avoided that problem, because all of a sudden we had the same person appearing as sort of this other father figure, the false father — the earlier false father and then the later false father. So it was an interesting structural decision to make. So he’s responsible for one transformation and then Elijah for the second.

So it worked out very well in terms of that – and Thomas was a brilliant actor, so he could pull that off. Also singing…it was a tour de force for him to be in the first half of the opera a great jazz singer and then in the second half to do his opera, the operatic, higher tessatura of opera singing. Even though in the jazz part, he did interpolate a high-D… I think people should know that he actually sings…that’s a glissando to a high-D, which is unheard-of in classical repertoire, let alone anything. He’s an amazing performer.

So I had to transpose Street. Originally Street’s music was in F-minor. I had to transpose it to C-minor. I said, “What key would you want to do it in?” I heard his voice and I said, “C-minor is a good key.” So I have this modulation that happens, and it goes into the other key. It worked out very well. But I decided to recast it in that key for him. So in that way, the music is really written for him. Then also the scat section; he put the scat section in there as well.

But he’s a phenomenal singer, and I’ve written other roles for him since.

TP:   Anthony has also written the operas Under The Double Moon and Tanya subsequent to X…

On the album of X you use a core of musicians you’ve worked with for many years under the title Episteme.

AD:   That’s from Greek. It means “knowledge” in Greek. It basically comes from Plato’s Republic. Being an old philosophy major, I was very interested in the idea of levels of knowledge, and episteme is one level of cognition. I used that as a title, because basically I was interested in having an ensemble that was for my experimental work, that could be any size from… I guess it refers to the Episteme concert, which was 3 pianos. So it’s gone from that to 10 pieces to an opera to…

TP:   What seems to have developed is a rotating pool of musicians who are familiar with your ideas and music, and so, given the exigencies of the life of a performer, there’s an ample pool to call.

AD:   Well, yes. And there are a lot of the musicians I’ve worked with over the years, like J.D. Parran, for example, and Pheeroan akLaff (the drummer), Mark Helias and Mark Dresser (bass players), Abdul Wadud. And then, there are some newer people like Art Baron, who is a fantastic trombone player who brought the whole experience of being in Ellington’s orchestra to it.

TP:   Herb Robertson is on trumpet, and also Warren Smith on drums and percussion. We’ll now hear another section of the opera, which is the end of the first act?

AD:   Yes, this concludes the first act. It’s “Malcolm’s Aria.” This is after he’s been arrested. He sings it in prison. He’s being interrogated by a policeman. If someone had seen the production, remember, he has his hands tied behind his back with a light focused on him. It begins with an improvisation with J.D. Parran and Gerry Hemingway playing vibraphone with a sort of pedal point improvisation that segues into Malcolm’s aria.

Malcolm is sung by Eugene Perry, a fabulous singer. In a way, I have the same relationship with singers that I have now with musicians – with Thomas, Eugene, Cindy Aronson, Hilda Harris I’ve worked with in a number of settings. It goes from opera to opera. Not just one opera, but it might be 3 different operas at different times. So in a way, I’m now working with them, writiing and conceiving my music for them vocally the way I would conceive something for J.D. Parran or something for Art Baron or something for Mark Feldman or John Purcell. What’s exciting to me, it’s the same process I would imagine Ellington went through where you have Johnny Hodges and you have Cootie Williams or you have Lawrence Brown, that you can create music that showcases their abilities. I do try to do that for the voice within my music as well as for the instruments.

[MUSIC: “Malcolm’s Aria”]

TP:   That was sung by Eugene Perry, the baritone who plays Malcolm X in the cast recording. Was he in the stage production as well?

AD:    He was the understudy actually at City Opera. He didn’t get to go on stage. In the new production they’re going to do in Los Angeles, he’s going to be the Malcolm. I’m very excited. He’s a fantastic singer. I worked with him as well in Under The Double Moon. He was Tarj, and then I created the role for him. We’ve worked a lot doing concerts, etc. He’s a great person and a really fine singer.

TP:   Coming up is a segment from Under The Double Moon. It’s the culmination of a long-standing compositional development, because you’ve been recording the music that comprises since the 1970s.

AD: Right. A lot of that music was based on my Wayang series of compositions, which were inspired by Balinese and Javanese music, particularly the gamelan music. I was interested in the idea of creating an opera or some kind of music theater work based on those compositions, and also with a science fiction theme. So I was interested in using science fiction with music, and the potential of that. I wanted to do something in my second opera completely different from X, because X was sort of this epic historical drama, more contemporary. I decided for my second opera to do something much more about fantasy and set in the distant future, in which the polemics of race are not so important, in a sense, but it’s still evident – it’s a multi-racial cast. In this opera, there are twins who have psychic powers. One is played by Ai-Lan Zhu, who is a wonderful soprano from Nanching, China, who played one of the twins. Eugene Perry played the other twin– he was Tarj. They’re being lured by a character named The Inspector who has come to their planet, which is called Undine, to recruit teenagers who have psychic powers, who can read minds, etc. They recruit them for a school that’s run by the Empress, who rules the 7 planets. But we don’t know quite for what purpose he wants the twins. Also, we discover that the twins find out where they have come from, who their real father, who turns out to be a transformed human who lives underwater, called the Gaxulta.

So basically, this enabled me to create my whole musical landscape of my own invention, and that was exciting. In a way, it allowed me to make my own rules. The music can make its own rules, and that’s very exciting.

In this scene, you’ll hear when the inspector finally convinces the twins to join him. It sort of starts out as kind of pseudo circus music I use that recurs in it. A lot of it is this kind of carny atmosphere, because the twins worked a carnival, and it’s now festival time in Undine, and at Festival time anyone is allowed to have sex with anyone else, so it’s sort of open-ended in that way. So the inspector is really intrigued by the festival. But he’s more interested in getting the twins on his side. This is Scene 2 of Act 2. Thomas Young is the Inspector, Ai-Lan Zhu is Xola, and Eugene Perry is Tarj. The libretto is by Deborah Atherton.

[MUSIC: from Under The Double Moon] – BEGINNING OF SIDE 4

AD:   …called “Middle Passage.” I’d done an earlier piano work, a solo piano piece that I wrote for Ursula Oppens, which was called “Middle Passage.” In this, I took the closing line from the poem, which is “voyage through death to life upon these shores.” So that’s the full title of the piece. Basically, it’s a setting of Robert Hayden’s poem for voices. What I’ve attempted to do was layer a lot of things, using, as I do a lot with repeating structures… As the poem is laid out visually on the page, you can see that he has italicized portions of the text, and sometimes I use that as repeating lines. Sometimes it’s the name of slave ships – Desire, Adventure, Tartar-N are all names of slave ships; the ironical names that slave ships have. Then the Middle Passage story culminates with the Amistad. The poem has a section about the whole Amistad incident. Of course, I’m planning to write my next opera, a big opera called Amistad, about the Amistad rebellion.

So this is a setting of the Robert Hayden poem and was done by the Chanticleer Men’s Choir.

[MUSIC: “Voyage Through Death To Life Upon These Shoes”– Nov.1991]

TP:   We’ll conclude with the first 7 minutes of a 14-minute suite for Monk that you recorded in 1978. That was a very fertile time for you. This is on Red Records. You were then recording for India Navigation, and I think for Sackville Records as well.

AD:   I made three recordings that summer. All these recordings were done I think within a month of each other. So I made three records. This is actually the first record I ever made. It was a solo piano record on Red. I was on the road with Leroy Jenkins at the time. We were doing a concert in Italy, and we had a day off in Milan, and they asked me to do this record. I was actually sleeping in the studio between takes, but I managed to make this record. During that time, I also did Song For the Old World for India Navigation, with Blackwell and Jay Hoggard and Mark Helias, and then I did Of Blues and Dreams with Leroy Jenkins, Abdul Wadud and Pheeroan. These were my first recordings. What happens in that case, you always have a backlog of material. I had material for days to record.

TP:   From what you’ve said, you were writing 7-8 years by this point

AD:   yes. The first group was Advent. It was named not for the Christian holiday but for the speakers.

[MUSIC: Anthony Davis, “Crepuscule: Suite for Monk”]

For Pianist Kirk Lightsey’s 87th Birthday, A Liner Note for the Criss Cross Record “Lightsey to Gladden” and an interview about Bradley’s from 2006

For pianist Kirk Lightsey’s 87th birthday, I’m posting a liner note that in 2006 for a recording session that he made with his old friend Marcus Belgrave for Criss Cross in 1991, and an interview that he did with me for a long piece that I wrote for Downbeat about the piano room Bradley’s, where he frequently performed during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Liner Notes for Lightsey to Gladden (Criss Cross – 1991)

Few New York jazz pianists were as busy as Kirk Lightsey from 1979, when he moved east from Los Angeles after joining Dexter Gordon for what would be a five-year run, through 1993, when he relocated to Paris, where he continues to reside and flourish. In addition to sidemanning outside of Gordon’s orbit—dates with Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, David Newman, Jim Pepper, James Moody, Ricky Ford, and Clifford Jordan from those years are highlights of Lightsey’s discography—he primarily made his living in the trenches as a solo and duo pianist. He was a fixture on New York’s piano saloon scene, performing regularly at such boites as the Knickerbocker, Zinno, and Bradley’s—according to a sessionography compiled by Bradley’s proprietor Wendy Cunningham, he worked more than 40 one-week engagements between the first week of January, 1980 (a duo with Rufus Reid), and Christmas week of 1993 (a trio with trumpeter Tom Harrell and bassist Dennis Irwin) at the latter venue. Two years prior, he played there for a week in trio with guitarist Kevin Eubanks and bassist Rufus Reid, his partners on the 1990 Criss-Cross date From Kirk to Nat, and another week with bassist Cecil McBee and trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, the latter his partner on the 1986 Criss-Cross date Kirk and Marcus and the until-now unreleased follow-up Lightsey to Gladden, from 1991.

“During this time, Marcus and I were working together a lot,” Lightsey recalled over phone from Languedoc, in the south of France. “He was one of my favorite trumpet players anywhere, because of his fluid technique, his phrasing was also fluid in the way he handled the changes and the mood of the pieces, and all of that. During our week at Bradley’s, Wynton Marsalis came in with Stanley Crouch just about every night, and joined us.”

Lightsey and Belgrave met in the early ‘60s when Belgrave, originally from Chester, Pennsylvania, came off the road with Ray Charles and moved to Detroit for work in the Motown studios, where Lightsey, himself a son of the Motor City, had found steady employment after returning home from several years playing piano in an Army band at Fort Knox. That followed a tour with the pre-Motown Four Tops—several members were Lightsey’s former high school classmates.

“I’d been attending Wayne State University on a clarinet scholarship, which I had as long as I played clarinet in the band or orchestra—or both—and I got tired of that,” Lightsey says. “Yusef Lateef was there, and so was Joe Henderson. We went on the road to Las Vegas for three months in 1958 with [drummer] oy Brooks and Clarence Shell, a bass player who was playing with the Windsor Symphony. At the time, the Four Tops were singing like the Four Freshman. Motown forced them to become the Four Tops that you know.

“At the time, there were clubs all over Detroit, and everybody had a band and was working. We had a band with Beans Bowles, who was in Motown, who was a baritone player with Maurice King’s band in the Flame Show Bar, which was the top show club in town. I was working down the street at the Frolic Show Bar with Joe, Clarence, and Albert Aarons, who played later fourth trumpet with Count Basie. Earlier in the ‘50s, on Tuesdays, which was everybody’s off-night, I had a chance to mix with older players like Elvin Jones, Paul Chambers, and Yusef at the World Stage, where Kenny Burrell and Barry Harris were in charge of the music. Later on, we got a chance to replace the players in Yusef’s band and other bands in town. We’d go to Barry’s house every day until his wife would throw us out—that was with Charles McPherson, Lonnie Hillyer, Ira Jackson…oh, lots of players. I had a classical background, and I was less interested in playing the staccato bebop style, like the Bud Powell approach. I prefer a more legato style. I think orchestrally as much as posible in approaching the piano—fluid piano lines, as much as I can make them! I was thinking more along the lines of Tommy Flanagan—and later, Hank Jones.

“Marcus was the greatest player around. He’s a great reader—maybe because he’s short, he could put the music on the floor and read it standing up! We were the band in residence, and we made several recordings in Motown’s jazz department—Pepper Adams, George Bohannon. We played for all the hits that came out at the beginning of Motown. The sound of Motown was James Jamerson, and when the drummer, Pistol Allen, couldn’t come up with the beat that they wanted to go with James Jamerson’s thing, they would call in Little Stevie Wonder, who might have been 13, to play the drums. When Little Stevie would come in, they’d always get it right away.

“Marcus stayed in Detroit after I left town, but I was coming back and forth to Detroit a lot, and every time I came back he’d be the first guy I’d want to play with—so we sustained our musical friendship. I would try to get Marcus to move to New York, but he never would. He’s Detroit. But we did start doing tours in Europe. That’s when Gerry Teekens heard us as a group, and decided that he wanted Marcus and I to do a project. It turned out to be two projects, since we couldn’t finish all the material.”

Belgrave plays with such consistent harmonic invention, rhythmic ingenuity, and vocalized soul that it seems unnecessary to comment on any single solo he takes on the program—although please note his keening duo with Lightsey on David Durrah’s “Moon”. His front line partner is Craig Handy on tenor saxophone and flute. Then 27, the baby of the group, Handy belies his tender years with a burly sound, superb ensemble playing, and solos that weave into the flow of the group—to name one, note his introductory tenor bray on Lightsey’s set-opening blues, “Donkey Dance”, foreshadowing a surging declamation; to name another, the thoughtful deliberate buildup to his rousing statement on Wayne Shorter’s “Pinocchio.” Not particularly known for playing flute, Handy also uncorks authoritative solos on that instrument on the swingers “Working Together” and “Everyday Politics” (the former containing a connotation of “Beautiful Friendship,” the latter reminiscent of Dizzy Gillespie’s late ‘40s ditties), as well as on the ballad “Midnight Sun” in duo with the leader.

Bassist David Williams, best known as Cedar Walton’s bassist of choice since the early ‘80s, is the foundation of it all, while Eddie Gladden (1937-2003), Lightsey’s partner with Gordon, and the record’s dedicatee, propels the proceedings with an explosive, oceanic beat on the drums and cymbals.

“We played for five years together, all over the world,” Lightsey recalls of the Newark-born drummer, with whom he shares a 1937 birth year. “He had my favorite swing cymbal beat of all. It was amazing to play with him. He was so forceful. In fact, the music was so forceful that I had problems with tendinitis and that kind of stuff along the way, but I managed to play through all of that. At the time, there were still Blakey and Elvin and all sorts of other people, but Eddie was my favorite drummer to play with.”

“I first met Eddie in L.A., where I moved at the end of the ‘60s, when I worked with O.C. (“God Doesn’t Like Little Green Apples”) Smith. He was at the Concert of the Sea there with Dexter. I first met Dexter in Stockholm in the early ‘70s, when I was there doing a  TV special with O.C. Smith, We were taken to the club, which was called Ernest, where Dexter was playing with the local guys, and he didn’t like the piano player that night. They had told him we were coming, and when we walked in, they just rushed me up to the stand. From then on, Dexter knew me. At the time I met him and Eddie in L.A., Rufus Reid—who was an old friend from when Rufus was living in Chicago—was thinking about me to replace George Cables, who was leaving the group. I couldn’t do it right away, because I’d promised to do a month with O.C. Smith on a little tour that ended in New York. That’s when I walked into the Village Vanguard, after appearing with O.C. Smith at the Playboy Club, and they led me up to the stage again. That began my playing with Dexter in the band.

“Eddie had Dexter figured out. Dexter had several ways of building tension, even on his being late to the gig. Then, when he’d start to play, we would have to stay on top, and he would start his solos almost falling backwards on the time, on the meter, and we would have to keep on it until he caught up. When he would just catch up and play it right on the beat, he would get a standing ovation. Eddie Gladden figured out how to just NAIL him when he’d jump on it. We could hold him on the road, and be there with him when we took off and take him with us. That’s when Dexter said, ‘I think I’m getting too old for this shit,’ because he couldn’t fool us any more.”

In 1993, Lightsey himself decided he’d had enough of New York City, and decamped to Paris with his wife Natalie, herself a native Parisienne. “”New York is a wonderful city for jazz musicians, but it’s a tough city, too,” he told a reporter several years ago. “The greatest achievement of my career was living there for 30 years. It’s a city where you can play all the time, and where you actually have to play all the time, because if you don’t play regularly, you drop out of the race.”

No longer needing to race, Lightsey remains a first-call pianist for hardcore jazzfolk across the European continent (he worked frequently with the late Johnny Griffin in recent years, as well as expat tenorist Ricky Ford, and also Nathan Davis in the collective group, the Roots)—he can afford to be selective about the engagements he accepts with his trio, in which he works with such talent as bassists Gil Naturel and Reggie Johnson and drummers Doug Sides and Don Moye. He’s made some recordings since 1991, but not many, and none that capture the New York attitude that he so abundantly displays on every track of this date, which, had it been released contemporaneously, would be among the highlights of his discography. Criss-Cross proprietor Gerry Teekens is to be commended for finally making it available.

*********************

Kirk Lightsey on Bradley’s (Part 2 – June 5, 2006):

TP:   The first time you went to Bradley’s, you were in town at I think you said at the Playboy Club with O.C. Smith, and wound up there. What was your impression?

KIRK:   My impression was one of a big family, and… Well, I met Bradley Cunningham, and I understood why the family was so close, because he was that kind of guy. Plus, he played the piano. I mean, he knew more verses than most pianists, except Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones and Jimmy Rowles. So we’d have a round-robin quite often.

TP:   the first night you were there, you said, you played late and he took to you.

KIRK:   Yes. He liked what I was doing, and I hung out. But during that same time I hooked up with Dexter Gordon, and Bradley had booked me just out of the blue…

TP:   After hearing you that night.

KIRK:   Right. He booked me for… Maybe somebody had cancelled or something, but he gave me a gig right away, but I had to cancel the gig because I went with Dexter Gordon. He talked about that forever.

TP:   He told you that you owed him one.

KIRK:   Oh, you bet. Yes, he did.

TP:   Describe Bradley’s personality.

KIRK:   He was a great guy. He loved having fun, and he just loved music. He was a soft kind of guy. All of his friends were really true friends. They were there every night, all the time, until, as they called her, “the widow” took over.

TP:   Do you recall who was playing the night you went there the first time?

KIRK:   I don’t. It could have been… Mmm! No, I don’t. I have no idea.

TP:   When did you first actually work at Bradley’s?

KIRK:   After that? Rufus Reid and I went in there when we were off with Dexter, and then I started going in with Red Mitchell, and one of the learning experiences was going in with Homes.

TP:   You mentioned Santi, Cecil McBee, Bulldog…

KIRK:   This was way before that.

TP:   Oh, Sam Jones.

KIRK:   Yes. He took being there as very artistic, and he took the artistic license of being a bit late, playing exactly what he wanted to play… Well, that’s what it became anyway. And he took playing there with that point of view. I liked it. I liked playing there with Sam Jones. That was the only time I played with him.

TP:   Did Bradley have any input into the type of repertoire? Was there a sort of lingua franca repertoire there, as it were?

KIRK:   Well, you could play what you wanted to play, but if you were playing anything wrong, so to speak, or not in – heh-heh – a good way, you would hear about it from all the people, especially from Bradley and from all of his buddies, because they knew what it was. They became my live audience, all of Bradley’s buddies. They were there this week at the Jazz Standard, a lot of the people from Bradley’s. It was like an old Bradley’s week. Four days there. Really great. To show you how the family was so tight at Bradley’s, the first night I was at the Standard, all the waitresses who had worked at Bradley’s joined forces and came in to see me the same night. That was great.

TP:   In our earlier conversation, you were talking about having an audience of pianists and your peer group, and the people who played there would also come to hang out. Talk about who those people were, and how their presence influenced how you would approach a gig at Bradley’s.

KIRK:   Well, to hear Hank Jones or Tommy Flanagan, or Jimmy Rowles or Fred Hersch or Roger Kellaway, and to go there when Red Mitchell, who was doing two months at Bradley’s with a different pianist every week or every few days, it was always delightful and exciting. You  never knew what to expect when Red was there, although he liked to use a lot of the same pianists — Kenny Barron, me, Kellaway, a lot of people. But it was always a real charge to know that you were being accepted by all the New York players, the people who might have been ahead of you in the pecking order of pianists in New York. There was definitely that. But when they would all show up to hear you, that was great!

TP:   That was a good feeling. That wasn’t an intimidating feeling.

KIRK:   No, indeed not. Well, it might have been at some point. But if you played there one night, you’d get past that.

TP:   Let’s talk about the crowd. You said that the audience would let you know just by the volume of the conversation, and if you quieted them down, you knew you had succeeded.

KIRK:   Oh, yes, indeed. Everybody had their own way of doing this. At Bradley’s, because the listeners were such high level listeners, being that they knew the music, they knew the history, they knew the musicians, they knew everything… I mean, for the most part. And the people who came there, they either discovered under magical conditions the music, or they were there because they were a part of the family.

TP:   You were saying you’d have a big audience… Can you change on how the audience would change as the night went on.

KIRK:   At the beginning of the night, there were shirts and ties and coming from work and having dinner, and very spiffy kind of people. But as the second set progressed, there would be less of them and more of our family, kind of people that you saw all the time. Robert John was there all of the time. He was there sketching or painting, he wrote poems… He wrote music, too. I still have a piece of music of his. These people would be the people that I would direct my people to, because they were there all the time. If you got them, then you got everybody.

TP:   So it wasn’t necessarily all musicians, but there was a certain group of artists and writers who had settled primarily in Greenwich Village who would gravitate to Bradley’s.

KIRK:   It was a home for all those people, and definitely for all the musicians who were playing.

TP:   Talk about the late set.

KIRK:   Oh, boy. The late set is when everybody left all the other places. They would leave the Vanguard, they would leave the Blue Note, and wherever it was from all over town, and gather at Bradley’s. For one thing, the musicians, if you’d been out of town, you’d go there just to check in, to tell everybody that you’re there. Because somebody might just be looking for you for a record date. This was the meeting place, the happening place. It kept you working, because you saw the people who were looking for you or who were glad to see you… “Oh, man, I got a date. Wow, it’s so good to see you. Can you make the date tomorrow at 3 o’clock.” Or a rehearsal or whatever. But that was the point of tomorrow’s focus.

TP:   The office.

KIRK:   Yes, indeed.

TP:   You had some anecdotes. One had Chet Baker walking in with a paper bag.

KIRK:   Oh, yeah. He had his horn in a paper bag. It wasn’t a jam night. It was kind of quiet, but there was a lot of people, half-full or something, seats around, and Chet just came and sat in the seat across from the piano. A lot of people didn’t know who he was. He pulled out of this paper  bag his trumpet, and proceeded to join us with whatever we were playing. Of course, Chet and I went back a long way to the old recordings on Prestige. So he sat down and we continued to finish the set that I had begun, and the people were just mesmerized by Chet Baker just joining us and the purity of his sound. People were just in tears, it was so beautiful. Then when we finished, he put his horn back in the paper bag, under his arm, and left.

TP:   That sort of sitting in was not an uncommon thing at Bradley’s.

KIRK:   Well, it was one of my favorite things to do, so as to, at some point in the night, turn it into a party, where I would call up other players to play, people whom I knew were in the audience. Some pianists. Sometimes I would be so tired by the fourth set, I would need help, so I’d call up John Hicks or I’d call up anybody I saw there, and they would help me finish the night. At some points, it was very necessary.

TP:   You had a story about Tommy Flanagan and your version of A Child Is Born.

KIRK:   Oh, boy! Well, for me, A Child Is Born just keeps going up, it keeps progressing, until you get to the turnaround at the very end. Well, that to me just stops forward motion of the song. So I’m sure Thad had a reason for doing that, but I had my reason for taking out 2 bars. Tommy Flanagan was in, listening, with his wife and a whole group of pianists and musicians in there, and everybody was enjoying it. But when Tommy came in, I was playing A Child Is Born and leaving out the turnaround. He looked at me, and he focused, and he listened, and when we finally finished the set he rushed over to me, and said, “Son…” I called him “Father,” so he called me “son.” He said, “Son, you owe me 2 bars.” I don’t think he ever collected the 2 bars.

TP:   You also had some George Coleman stories.

KIRK:   Oh, Coalman would come in. Especially when we were playing Never Let Me Go, he would pull out his horn and come up and start playing, and it would be just magical. These kind of things happened in Bradley’s. There were times with Marcus Belgrave, who I didn’t realize at the time was so close to Wynton Marsalis… He was like his godfather in playing the trumpet or something. I was playing with Marcus and Cecil McBee, and Wynton came in with Stanley Crouch every night when we were there, and joined us…or stood with his trumpet in his hand listening to Marcus. Well, those were very touching moments in Bradley’s.

TP:   One thing I asked you was how playing in Bradley’s affected your pianism. You spoke of getting used to not playing with the drums, the rhythmic component.

KIRK:   Certain people I played with never had trouble with that. It wasn’t a new thing for us. Like, with Rufus and Cecil… Although hearing the way different pianists approached the duo setting, it was a learning thing to listen to other people approach the way they dealt with a whole night in duo playing Bradley’s. It was a development, though, because as the crowd changed… Early in the night also, when the suits and ties would be in there, you’d have to play straight-up kind of material, things that a lot of people knew. But as the night went on, the material would be further out, extended, and on the last set, you could pull out all the stops and be right on time.

TP:   Had you done much duo playing before?

KIRK:   Actually, I had. In Detroit, I had done solo playing and all kinds of playing, and Detroit was quite a high-level place to play the piano, as per all the stellar pianists who came out of Detroit. Tommy or Hank Jones said it was the water from the Detroit River!  Oh, my. Hugh Lawson, even Geri Allen, so many… But playing for a week, sometimes two weeks… We would play at Bradley’s for a whole two weeks, and this would be the perfect place to develop your material, to live the music that you’re playing, and for the people to realize that you’re really working on your craft, you’re really doing it.

TP:   After Bradley died and Wendy Cunningham took over the place, the culture of Bradley’s changed somewhat, and you had a number of things to say about that. You were talking about you and some other veterans advising her, and you talked about the influx of younger musicians who came in.

KIRK:   That came a little later. Well, Roy Hargrove kind of started a whole flow of younger musicians coming into town, and when people came into town, of course, they had to come to Bradley’s, because this was the last watering hole, and it was a great one.  You could buy a house in Bradley’s. You could sell your car. You could buy anything at Bradley’s! This made it such a magical meeting place.

Bradley’s tight friends (I mean, he had a house full of them, all of his old buddies), they seemed not to like the widow. That’s what they called her. So when Bradley died and they saw that she was going to run the place, they didn’t help her. They just stopped coming. The musicians, we owed it to Bradley to help her try to run this place properly, because it was our home! This wasn’t just a bar down the street. This was the world-famous home of all the great musicians. So we helped her as much as we could.

TP:   What kinds of things did you tell her to do and what did she wind up doing?

KIRK:   We told her about people who were available, or who could be with other people. Policies that she had, or started, that we didn’t see the sense in. We’d help her choose some policies, and… Well, some things… Well, she learned good, and she had her own idea about things, and she was the owner of the place, so what could we do? But she was amenable. She was, as far as I’m concerned, a great friend.

TP:   She wound up booking trios, quartets, she brought in drummers…

KIRK:   This was after the policy changed in the club.

TP:   I think that’s the time Wynton was in, too, with you, Marcus & McBee… It was 1989.

KIRK:   I’ve forgotten when Bradley died.

TP:   I think ‘86 or ‘87. You said that Roy might have sat in with you on his second night in New York.

KIRK:   That’s what it sounded like. Wendy came one night and asked me if I would let him sit in, and we just proceeded to have a ball. There he was. So from that night, he kept coming all the time. So he would play mostly the last sets, or end up finishing the night with us, which would be great.

TP:   He developed a lot, because he would get his ass kicked and come back for more. I remember him sitting in with Walter Davis and George Coleman, and the next set he’d come back. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

KIRK:   He’s quite a talent.

TP:   You made a comment about why Bradley’s became less attractive to you as time went on. You said the younger musicians had a sense of entitlement maybe, or things like that.

KIRK:   Yes, they had discovered our old home, and they wanted to… Well, they were more prevalent. They were working there. We started at a certain point that when some people would be there, we would hang out somewhere else. It shifted… The age level, the magic, the intensity somehow shifted. Well, it changed.

TP:   Things do. You did the song Everything Must Change. Was there a Bradley’s style, a broad overarching style? Was it just the quality of the musicians, or the quality of piano playing? Was there a certain approach to music-making that resonated with the room?

KIRK:   It was a sound that had been set by Jimmy Rowles and Tommy and Hank Jones and all the stellar pianists who played in there. John Hicks. All of them. When you played at Bradley’s, you had to come up to a certain brilliance, or they’d just make so much noise you couldn’t be heard. But when you were on, they were on — or they were off, talking. They were on your every note, every sound, every emotion.

TP:   But it wasn’t so much a style of playing as an attitude to what you’re doing…

KIRK:   Well, the attitude of being responsible for the musical enjoyment of all your peers. It was a level that you approached, or tried to every night. Sometimes you didn’t make it. But when you didn’t make it, they were all right with you; they would be there the next night to see what you were going to do that night.

TP:   Because who knew who would be there, or what you would find…

KIRK:   Yes, indeed.

TP:   Is there an ultimate Bradley’s pianist for you?

KIRK:   Oh, Hank Jones for me. He was the ultimate. Tommy was next for me. I saw Willis last night. He was ultimate for me because of the quality that he’d reach when he’d play there. A funny story about Larry, he was trying to make both gigs in the same week — at Bradley’s, then he would run over to Zinno’s… We laughed about that last night at John’s memorial. But that’s just like Larry Willis.

For Master Saxophonist John Handy’s 91st Birthday, a Testimony About His Experiences with Charles Mingus From 2022

Born in Dallas in 1933, saxophonist John Handy – best known as an alto saxophonist, but proficient on the entire woodwind family – moved to the Bay Area at 15 and has lived there ever since, with the exception of a 1958-1962 stay in New York City. Handy’s New York sojourn included a five-month run with Charles Mingus that generated three well-known recordings – Mingus Portraits, Blues and Roots, and Mingus Ah Um – on which his Charlie Parker-inflected alto voice was prominent, most notably on Mingus’ iconic “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” The only surviving Mingus alumnus from that period, Handy has spent the last 60 years as a popular bandleader, recording artist and educator.

 

 

I met Charles in 1957 when he did two weeks out here in San Francisco. I’m pretty sure it was at the Black Hawk. I believe Freddie Redd played piano, Bunky Green was playing alto, and the older Willie Jones, who was left-handed, was playing drums. There was no trumpet player. I spoke quite a bit with Bunky. Willie Jones, the left-handed drummer, was in the band, too. I went to the last set on the last night of their engagement. Mingus asked me to sit in and then asked me to join his group, I borrowed a baritone saxophone from a college classmate, Virgil Gonsalves, as I’d played baritone but not for a while. Mingus asked me to join his group, but I didn’t want to leave – I was married, and we had a new son. By the next year, my wife and I had saved money for the trip to New York. We stayed at the Flanders Hotel, where a lot of people stayed – it extended between 6th and 7th Avenues between 47th and 48th Streets. [135 W. 47th through to 136 W. 48th Street]. Did you know where Manny’s Music was? It was on 48th, and when you came out of the hotel, you made a right and they were only a door or so away. So that’s that’s the time element. Blue Mitchell was in the hotel. That trio with Gene Harris, the Three Sounds – Bill Dowdy, Gene Harris and Gene Simpkins. Jack McDuff.

 

I started going to jam sessions, especially in Brooklyn (I don’t remember where), and started exchanging phone numbers with people. I ran into Idrees Sulieman, the trumpet player, who started telling people about me, and got me a few gigs. He introduced me to Randy Weston. I did at least two casuals with him; I’m sure no more than two.

 

Then somehow, we got broke sooner than we had planned to in New York, and I decided I’d better go gig-hunting. I dressed up, which we always did in those days, put on a tie and all, and went to the Five Spot, where I knew there was a jam session. Frank Foster and Thad Jones were featured. They were doing a record with Basie that went over late, so I played two or three tunes with the rhythm section – Phineas Newborn (whom I’d met in San Francisco), George Joyner (who later became Jamil Nasser), and Roy Haynes. I sat down when Thad and Frank showed up. I met Frank when he was stationed out here in the military, the year I got out of McClymonds High School, which I attended with Bill Russell and Frank Robinson and all those folks. Bill Russell never played first-string at McClymonds. I met him about two weeks after I’d arrived in Oakland from Dallas. I was playing ball by myself in the gym, and after a while I heard another basketball. I saw this tall, thin kid. We decided to play each other one-on-one, and I beat him the first game. We played 15 games, and I never touched the ball again.

 

Later, I was standing at the bar, which faced the bandstand. After they’d played a couple of pieces, Mingus – who’d walked in – said from the bar, “Hey, why don’t you all let this guy play?” Frankly, they were a little embarrassed, Frank said. “Well, he can play if he wants.” They let me name the tune, “There Will Never Be Another You.” I did something on the saxophone that most people still don’t know how to do. Mingus started singing “Bird’s back! Bird’s back!” He was a big man and he put on such a show. He ran to the those saloon doors, and almost hit the door – I thought he was going to break it. Then he went outside. It was like it was too much for him to take. So he came back in and he was still singing – we were still on the stand. Sonny Rollins was in the phone booth which on the right when you came in. He said, “Sonny – Bird’s back!” Sonny said, “Yeah, yeah, Charlie.” I was embarrassed, still on the bandstand. Between tunes, he said, “Hey, baby, are you working anywhere?” I shook my head, no. He said, “Well, you open with me next week.” He had a four-week engagement, within that week, opposite Sonny’s trio. We brought in the new year.

 

During that month with Mingus and this quintet, opposite Sonny, Charles would play too long. He wouldn’t get off the bandstand. It embarrassed me and most of us. A couple of times, Sonny wouldn’t show up. One time, John Coltrane, who I’d met when he came out here with Johnny Hodges, before I got out of high school, came into the Five Spot. They pushed him to go get his horn out of the car – it was snowing, bad weather. John came back in and played “Back Home In Indiana,” which was ok. Then he played one of Monk’s tunes, “Well, You Needn’t.” The planet stopped moving. It was Christmas time and lots of people were drinking and having a good time. They stopped. They couldn’t believe what he was doing. Then at one point, Mingus pushed me to play my tenor, which I’d played tenor for three years after starting as an alto player. I played “Body and Soul.” Charles and Dannie Richmond and Booker Ervin talked about that solo.

 

After we left the bandstand one night in January, Mingus said, “Get your instruments; we’re going around the corner.” We put on our coats, walked a few blocks, went up some stairs that you could break your neck, and entered the Nonegon Art Gallery, which was packed. That’s where we recorded the United Artists album, which included stuff we’d been playing at the Five Spot that he’d written for John Cassavetes movie, Shadows. He featured me, especially on the ballads. Most everything he hummed or played on the piano. I remember saying, “Mingus, why don’t you just give us…” I was right out of college and my reading was fine, and I had a good ear. I could remember stuff. But I asked him for something to take home and work on, and it bugged him. The place was packed. We were about to leave the bandstand, and Charlie had both hands on top of the bass. He looked threatening. I knew he had sucker-punched Jackie McLean in the mouth and bent his front teeth, like a gopher. Jackie told me that at a rehearsal at Mingus’ house. I couldn’t believe he was playing with him. Jackie was from Harlem, and he was not a coward. He told me that three people wrestled him down to keep him from going after Charles with a knife. I was the featherweight champion of Dallas at 14. I knew how to fight. I got real close to him and said, “Charles, I think I know what you’re thinking, but I want you to know I can hit much faster with this saxophone than you can with that bass. If you ever touch me…”  In essence, I was saying: “Whenever I see you, whether it’s In a concert, if you’re playing, if you’re working, hotel, no matter where the thing Is on. If you come out of your house, I’ll be there waiting,” He said, “Heh-heh, you’re crazy” and he walked off the bandstand. We never got into anything after that. 

 

Eventually we did the Blues and Roots album. We started as supposedly a big band date, and each time we rehearsed, we had different personnel and less people. The music changed every time we had a rehearsal. I didn’t like it at all. The more I played with him, the more frustrating it was. He wanted his melodies. He never gave anyone but the piano player any chords. It was embarrassing at times when musicians came in, guys that we knew who could play, and many times you could see the looks on their faces. They thought we didn’t know what we were doing. And many times we didn’t know. We were playing what we could hear. He would write things on piano for trombone or saxophone which are next to impossible to play. Some people thought it was funny because they didn’t have to do it. 

 

A few months before the Mingus Ah Um album we were at the Half Note. The bar was situated where, when you were on the bandstand, near the piano, you could talk to the people at the bar. In between some things that we were playing, one of the Canterino brothers told Charles that Lester Young had just died. He started playing a minor blues, slow like a ballad. When we were doing the date, he called that blues, but he didn’t give us the changes. That became “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” one of his most famous, most recorded pieces. I thought was nice, but it could have been embarrassing if people had really listened closely to the chords, because at times I had no idea where they were going. I didn’t see the chords until Sue Mingus started organizing Mingus’ music.

 

I can’t remember where the last gig I played with him was, but I do remember that Mingus had written a piece that I thought sounded like something from Gershwin. When he introduced it, he said, really deadpan: “the name of this piece, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘Gershwin.’ If Gershwin can steal from us, we can steal from him.” It really broke me up. I could hardly play it. He could be funny.

 

Eric Dolphy pretty much took my place with Mingus. Before him was Leo Wright, the alto player from out here. I met Eric I want to say a year before I went to New York. I was in New York when Eric came to New York with Chico Hamilton. Mingus could get Eric to do anything, stuff that I would never do.

 

Sometimes he wrote beautiful music. Some of his composing was important because he extended the repertoire of jazz. He helped to extend the technique of the bass. Because of Charles – and before him, Jimmy Blanton, whom he knew – bass players started playing like virtuosos. However, I do think that personality is important. He got away with things that he would not have gotten away with had he played in other communities. People let him get away with it because he was big, he was strong, and he knew how to hurt you. The worst thing a musician could do Is hit another one. The last thing you should ever should ever do is to impair somebody’s ability to play, to perform. You wouldn’t choke a singer. To hit Jimmy Knepper and Jackie McLean in the mouth! There were times he was sweet – like a little kid sweet. Most of the time he was like a bear that had been awakened – and he didn’t want to be awakened.