Mulgrew Miller, R.I.P. (1955-2013) — A Downbeat Article and Several Interviews

I am deeply saddened at the death of Mulgrew Miller, who succumbed yesterday to his second severe stroke in several years. He cannot be replaced, but his impact will linger. It’s hard to think of a pianist of his generation more deeply respected by his peers. He found ways to refract various strands of post World War Two vocabulary — Oscar Peterson and Bud Powell, Monk and McCoy, Chick Corea and Woody Shaw  — into a singular soulful, swinging conception.  I heard him live dozens of times, whether in duos and trios at Bradley’s or Zinno’s, or with his magnificent, underrated, and influential group Wingspan at the Vanguard and other venues, with his working trios, and on dozens of sideman dates with the likes of Joe Lovano, Von Freeman, and a host of others. I can’t claim to have known Mulgrew well, but nonetheless had many opportunities to speak with him, casually between sets at a gig, and more formally at several sitdowns on WKCR and, once over dinner for an article — I didn’t have quite as much space as I hoped to get — that appeared in DownBeat in 2005. I am appending the article, the transcript of that conversation,of a conversation a month before that on WKCR, and an amalgam transcript of separate WKCR encounters in 1988 and 1994, one of them a Musician’s Show. We did a very far-ranging WKCR interview in 2007, as yet un-transcribed.

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Mulgrew Miller: No Apologies:

Down Beat

Ironies abound in the world of Mulgrew Miller.

On the one hand, the 49-year-old pianist is, as Eric Reed points out, “the most imitated pianist of the last 25 years.” On the other, he finds it difficult to translate his exalted status into full-blown acceptance from the jazz business.

“It’s a funny thing about my career,” Miller says. “Promoters won’t hire my band, but they’ll book me as a sideman and make that the selling point of the gig. That boggles my mind.”

“Mulgrew is underrated,” says Kenny Garrett, who roomed with Miller in the early ‘80s when both played with Woody Shaw. “He’s influenced a lot of people. I’ll hear someone and go, ‘Man, is that Mulgrew or someone who’s playing like him?’ When they started talking about the ‘young lions,’ he got misplaced, and didn’t get his just due.”

Miller would seem to possess unsurpassed bona fides for leadership. As the 2004 trio release Live At Yoshi’s [MaxJazz] makes evident, no pianist of Miller’s generation brings such a wide stylistic palette to the table. A resolute modernist with an old-school attitude, he’s assimilated the pentagonal contemporary canon of Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett, as well as Shaw’s harmonic innovations, and created a fluid personal argot. His concept draws on such piano-as-orchestra signposts as Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal and Erroll Garner, the “blowing piano” of Bud Powell, the disjunctive syncopations and voicings of Thelonious Monk, and the melodic ingenuity of gurus like Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan and Cedar Walton. With technique to burn, he finds ways to conjure beauty from pentatonics and odd intervals, infusing his lines with church and blues strains and propelling them with a joyous, incessant beat.

“I played with some of the greatest swinging people who ever played jazz, and I want to get the quality of feeling I heard with them,” Miller says. “For me it’s a sublime way to play music, and the most creative way to express myself. You can be both as intellectual and as soulful as you want, and the swing beat is powerful but subtle. I think you have to devote yourself to it exclusively to do it at that level.”

Consequential apprenticeships with the Mercer Ellington Orchestra, Betty Carter, Johnny Griffin and Shaw launched Miller’s career. A 1983-86 stint with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers put his name on the map, and he cemented his reputation during a long association with Tony Williams’ great cusp of the ‘90s band, a sink-or-swim environment in which Miller thrived, playing, as pianist Anthony Wonsey recalls, “with fire but also the maturity of not rushing.” By the mid-‘80s he was a fixture on New York’s saloon scene. Later, he sidemanned extensively with Bobby Hutcherson, Benny Golson, James Moody, and Joe Lovano, and from 1987 to 1996 he recorded nine well-received trio and ensemble albums for Landmark and RCA-Novus.

Not long after his fortieth birthday, Miller resolved to eschew club dates and one-offs, and to focus on his own original music. There followed a six-year recording hiatus, as companies snapped up Generation-X’ers with tenuous ties to the legacy of hardcore jazz.

“I won’t call any names,” Miller says. “But a lot of people do what a friend of mine calls ‘interview music.’ You do something that’s obviously different, and you get the interviews and a certain amount of attention. I maintain that jazz is part progressive art and part folk art, and I’ve observed it to be heavily critiqued by people who attribute progressivity to music that lacks a folk element. When Charlie Parker developed his great conception, the folk element was the same as Lester Young and the blues shouters before him. Even when Ornette Coleman and Coltrane played their conceptions, the folk element was intact. But now, people almost get applauded if they don’t include that in their expression. If I reflected a heavy involvement in Schoenberg or some other ultra-modern composers, then I would be viewed differently than I am. Guys who do what I am doing are viewed as passé.

“A lot of today’s musicians learn the rudiments of playing straight-ahead, think they’ve got it covered, become bored, and decide ‘let me try something else.’ They develop a vision of expanding through different areas—reggae here, hip-hop there, blues here, soul there, classical music over here—and being able to function at a certain level within all those styles. Rather than try to do a lot of things pretty good, I have a vision more of spiraling down to a core understanding of the essence of what music is.”

This being said, Miller—who once wrote a lovely tune called “Farewell To Dogma”—continues to adhere to the principle that “there is no one way to play jazz piano and no one way that jazz supposed to sound.” He is not to be confused with the jazz police. His drummer, Kareem Riggins, has a second career as a hip-hop producer, and has at his fingertips a lexicon of up-to-the-second beats. When the urge strikes, bassist Derrick Hodge might deviate from a walking bass line to slap the bass Larry Graham style. It’s an approach familiar to Miller, who grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi, playing the music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Al Green in various Upper Delta cover bands.

“It still hits me where I live,” he says. “It’s black music. That’s my roots. When I go home, they all know me as the church organist from years ago, so it’s nothing for me walk up to the organ and fit right in. I once discussed my early involvement in music with Abdullah Ibrahim, and he described what I went through as a community-based experience. Before I became or wanted to become a jazz player, I played in church, in school plays, for dances and for cocktail parties. I was already improvising, and always on some level it was emotional or soul or whatever you want to call it. I was finding out how to connect with people through music.

“By now, I have played jazz twice as long as I played popular music, and although that style of playing is part of my basic musical being, I don’t particularly feel that I need to express myself through it. To me, it’s all blues. The folk element of the music doesn’t really change. The blues in 1995 and in 1925 is the same thing. The technology is different. But the chords are the same, the phrasing is the same, the language is the same—exact same. I grew up on that. It’s a folk music. Folk music is not concerned with evolving.”

For all his devotion to roots, Miller is adamant that expansion and evolution are key imperatives that drive his tonal personality. “I left my hometown to grow, and early on I intended to embrace as many styles and conceptions as I could,” he states. “When I came to New York, I had my favorites, but there was a less celebrated, also brilliant tier of pianists who played the duo rooms, and I tried to hear all of those guys and learn from them. The sound of my bands changes as the musicians expand in their own right. I’m very open, and all things are open to interpretation. I trust my musicians—their musicianship and insights and judgments and taste—and they tend to bring things off in whatever direction they want to go. In the best groups I played with, spontaneity certainly was a strong element.”

Quiet and laid-back, determined to follow his muse, Miller may never attain mass consumption. But he remains sanguine.

“I have moments, but I don’t allow myself to stay discouraged for long,” he concludes. “I worked hard to maintain a certain mental and emotional equilibrium. It’s mostly due to my faith in the Creator. I don’t put all my eggs in that basket of being a rich and famous jazz guy. That allows me a certain amount of freedom, because I don’t have to play music for money. I play music because I love it. I play the kind of music I love with people I want to play with. I have a long career behind me. I don’t have to apologize to anybody for any decisions I make.”
[-30-]

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Mulgrew Miller (11-22-04) – (Villa Mosconi):

TP:   I’m going to ask you a broad question. It might be embarrassing or hard to answer. For a lot of pianists, a lot of people your age and younger, and some who are older than you, too, you’re regarded as the heir to the throne. You know this. Tommy Flanagan was quoted a few times. A lot of pianists in their mid-40s think of you as the guy who brings the tradition into the present in a way that they admire. I don’t mean this as a way for you to brag on yourself. But what is the position that you think you occupy within the piano lineage at this point?  What is it you think you represent? What is it you think you’ve been able to accomplish?

MILLER: Whoo! Well, first of all, I consider myself an eternal student of the music. Perhaps I have been able to bring a fairly wide palette of ideas and a range of stylistic things that I have amalgamated into a sound. That sound that I have probably lends itself to a lot of different ways of playing. Because one can be a student of sort of a narrow range of styles. For instance, one can be a student of maybe the ‘60s piano players, and be good at that; or one can be a student of that as well as some of the earlier styles; and so on. My initial influences were people like Oscar Peterson and Ahmad Jamal and Phineas Newborn and Art Tatum and those kind of people, and sometimes you don’t find that in a guy my age and younger. A lot of times, their biggest influences are maybe Oscar, but usually it’s… [CAESAR SALAD ARRIVES] Usually, a guy might start off liking one of Miles’ many piano players, which I do love, too.

TP:   In the Musician Shows that we did, Wynton Kelly was in there, Bill Evans was in there…

MILLER: Yes.  But my foundation in jazz comes from an earlier basis, the old Art Tatum thing and Erroll Garner and Oscar.

TP:   Did you get to that early?

MILLER: In my mid-teens. When I started playing jazz, those were the players that I heard first. A little while later, I heard McCoy Tyner and Herbie and Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett.

TP:   There are quite a few players who have become adept at playing a fairly broad timeline, but you seem to have been there a little earlier than some of them. But maybe it’s just because you’re older.

MILLER: Yeah! [LAUGHS]

TP:   Perhaps you came first in that generation by dint of playing with Mercer Ellington and Woody Shaw and Art Blakey. But sensibility-wise, is that something you’re predisposed to? Are you very open-minded? Did you come from an open-minded background? Because it’s not like you’re from one of the big cities. You’re from a fairly small town in Mississippi. You played in the church, you played rhythm-and-blues. I’m sure there was some talent, but maybe a parochial world-view or maybe not—I don’t know. But tell me something about what you see giving you the curiosity and wherewithal to explore all this.

MILLER: Expansion and evolution is part of my motto. The reason I left my hometown was to expand and grow, and if I was going to do that, I had the notion early on to embrace all these different things, especially in terms of piano styles and ranges of conception and so on. If I heard a great piano player, I liked him. When I came to New York, I made it a point to hear every good pianist who was playing, not just my favorites, so that I could learn something from everybody who was playing.

TP:   Give me a few examples.

MILLER: My favorites would be Cedar Walton or McCoy Tyner or Herbie Hancock, Ahmad Jamal—or among my favorites. But of course, in New York playing the duo rooms there was another less celebrated tier of pianists you heard, but brilliant all the same. I tried to hear all of those guys and learn from them.

TP:   Let’s talk about the Memphis approach to piano playing. You and James and Donald Brown coming up behind Mabern and Phineas Newborn…there’s a distinctive approach. It seems like gravitating to New York was a natural. You all fit into what the New York thing was or was becoming. Can you talk about some of the stylistic things you brought to the table when you arrived?

MILLER: I’m glad you brought that up, because I have never ascribed to a Memphis school of piano. Even though there are similarities in our styles, but most of the people who influenced either one of the pianists that you are naming from Memphis, are not from Memphis. If you talk to the late James Williams and Donald Brown and myself, you’d find that, yes, we were all inspired and influenced by Phineas Newborn and Harold Mabern and Charles Thomas. That’s the soil in which we were rooted. But you would also find that we’re all influenced by Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner and Hank Jones and OP and all these people who were not from Memphis, and in various ways and various degrees. So I don’t ascribe to a city as a way of identifying a certain sound.

TP:   Is it more some of the influences that were available Memphis, or a way of filtering that information? Or does it have to do with all of you playing R&B and church music?

MILLER: Well, yeah. But what I’m saying is that a person living in Texas, having the experience, if he didn’t announce where he was from, you might not know if he was from Memphis or not.

TP:   I’ll take your point.

MILLER: Or Alabama, let’s say, Do you think a guy from Birmingham…

TP:   Are you thinking specific?

MILLER: No, I’m not.

TP:   Because in the Jazz Messengers, for ten years, it was James, Donald and you coming out of that nexus. So it’s not as though I’m trying to put capital letters…

MILLER: One of the things I think we have in common is that we all studied a certain breed of piano players, which critics call the mainstream. We’re all students of that breed of piano player. But we’re not the only ones. And my point is, I don’t think we all sound alike.

TP:   That wasn’t my implication at all.

MLLER: Right.  So a guy from Hot Springs, Arkansas, might sound more like me than a guy from Memphis.

TP:   But I suppose I’m trying to trace the continuity from when you started forming your ideas about how music should take shape up to this point. And music being such a social art and having such an oral component… I’m just thinking that this was the early ‘70s, the type of jazz you play wasn’t particularly popular or in the air, you were playing a lot of different music, and you each have a personal way of bringing the lineage into the future.

MILLER: I was discussing my early involvement in music with Abdullah Ibrahim one time, and he had an excellent term for describing that experience. He called it a community-based experience. Which I had early on. One of the interesting things about jazz is that players come from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences. But before I became a jazz player or wanted to become a jazz player, I had varying experiences playing in the community. I played in church. I played in school plays. I played proms. I played for dances in an R&B band. I played for cocktail parties. So there’s what I’d like to call a social connection there that I think maybe was nurtured early on in my playing, a kind of connection to people. The point I’m trying to make is that before I became a jazz player, I was already improvising, and I was always on some level emotional or soul or whatever you want to call it. I was already in the process of finding out how to connect with people through music.

TP:   Is that still how you see what you do?

MILLER: Yes.

TP:   It’s still consistent.

MILLER: It maybe isn’t as consistent as I’d like it to be. But you hear different players, and some people communicate… It’s something about what they do that reaches people on a certain level more than some other players. I’m not sure where I fit into that whole thing. But I began trying to make that connection real early in my development.

TP:   What’s more important on some level, communication or the aesthetic?

MILLER: As I think I understood you, for me, one is not different from the other. Communicating in the moment is what… I’m a very moment kind of guy. I’m not an over-organized musical mind by any means. My intention, my agenda when I sit down at the piano is to connect with people. I think that comes first.

TP:   You’re talking about coming up in this community-based experience. The scene has changed so much.

MILLER: It has.

TP:   And the social nature of music-making has changed a great deal. I was just noticing in the recording session, these guys who are half our age, how they’re behaving and what they’re thinking about. The drummer, who is extremely talented, is relaxing between takes by scratching on Doug E. Fresh. The trumpet player’s twin is doing a video verité of the whole thing. Everyone is, on one level, extremely sophisticated about technology and art and ideas, and on the other hand, there’s a sort of naiveté that’s kind of charming as well. Not that I went to so many sessions 20 years ago, but that scene would seem unimaginable twenty years ago. You relate and employ in your band very young musicians, people who will commit to you.

MILLER: Well, they are products of their own time, as I am a product of my own time. However, as you stated, the scene is different now. I think one of the things is that musicians don’t find the scene now as enticing as it was when I came on the scene.  There aren’t as many bands, there’s not as many clubs to play in across the country.  Sometimes they look in other directions for a way to express themselves and for other career options. Let’s face it.  The scene as it is now is not terribly encouraging to a young artist, and they come on the scene and see another little fellow in another arena making hundreds of thousands of dollars just rapping, rhyming. They’ve grown up with that. So in their minds, this beats sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring.

TP:   Well, Kareem Riggins, your present drummer, is a successful hip-hop producer. So you’re experiencing all that first-hand.

MILLER: Yes. And my bassist is involved in pop music as well.

TP:   When you were coming up… I know Donald Brown was a house musician at Stax/Volt. Did you ever do anything like that?

MILLER: At Stax?  No. I came in a little town where there was nothing like Stax…
TP:   I meant once you got to Memphis.

MILLER: No.  That scene was just about on its last legs.

TP:   But do you think that then… It seems the young players today maybe compartmentalize a little more. It’s like hip-hop is hip-hop… It’s like Lampkin was saying to Duck when Duck was doing that rap, and saying, “No one my age raps,” and he said, “Jazz musicians!” So here’s a young guy who obviously has a lot of respect for what being a jazz drummer means, but he also has respect for what the other thing is. He’s not trying to conflate one with the other. I think at that time, a lot of jazz musicians were trying to mix the two, sometimes with success and sometimes not so successfully.

MILLER: True. For one thing, jazz musicians playing in R&B bands go way back!  Benny Golson and Coltrane played in R&B as it was known then. Which at the time, though… what we called R&B then sounded a lot more like jazz than it does now.

TP:   Tadd Dameron was arranging for one of those bands.

MILLER: Yeah!  And through the decades, people like Idris Muhammad, who was playing with Sam Cooke and so forth…

TP:   He invented the Meters beat. Not to mention Blackwell.

MILLER: Yeah, exactly. So all these people… McCoy played with Ike and Tina Turner at one point! So this thing about straddling the fence, so to speak, is really old. As I said, I grew up playing the music of James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Al Green and all that kind of stuff.

TP:   Does that music still mean a lot to you?

MILLER: I still enjoy it. Because it’s soul music. It’s black music. And that’s my roots. It still hits me where I live.

TP:   But there some musicians among your contemporaries who present that music and arrange it and work with it on records. You haven’t done that so much on your records. There may be implications of that vibe on one tune or another. But it isn’t an explicit reference in what you do. Is that deliberate?

MILLER: Well, you see, by now, I have played jazz twice as long as I played pop music. By now. Although that is a part of my basic musical being, I don’t feel particularly that I need to express myself through that style of playing. However, I am not against paying homage to my roots, as it were. It’s nothing for me to go into a Baptist church… Like, when I go home, it’s nothing for me to go to church and walk right up to the organ and fit right in. I do it. I did it this August.

TP:   Do you do it in Pennsylvania?

MILLER: No. I don’t have time to be involved in a church.  But if I go home and visit a church in my community, they all know me there as the church organist from years ago. So they all assume that that’s what I’ve come to do.

TP:   There are different ways that artists construct their persona as they grow and develop. Some people want to be completely autobiographical and encompass everything. For instance, such as Cassandra Wilson did in the last few years. You played with her on one of the best straight-ahead singing records of the period. But now she’s bringing in everything. But it doesn’t seem that to do this gnaws at your insides.

MILLER: No, it does not. Well, my experience is that I played with some of the greatest swinging people that played jazz—Art Blakey and Tony Williams and Johnny Griffin and Woody Shaw. I’ve been so captivated by that whole experience that I want to deepen that. Not necessarily to isolate myself from everything else. But that’s my focus because I see how that is so special. The way THEY did it was so special! Not everybody who’s playing swing music (let’s call it that for now…swing-based music) swings with that same quality. In today’s world, it’s possible to be expansive, to do a little bit of this and a little of that. But somehow, when I hear some of those groups, I don’t hear the quality of the feeling of swing that I heard when I played with those guys. So my focus… Rather than to dilute that by trying to do a whole lot of things pretty good, I want to do that really well.

TP:   Let’s talk about what it is that makes that approach to music so special. There are a number of people, your peers included, who love bebop and swing music, and it’s about the only thing they love. Or at least, publicly that’s what they say…

MILLER: Well, it’s not the only thing I love.  But what makes it so special for me is that, of all the different areas of music that I might delve into, that is, I’ve found, the most creative way of expressing myself. You can express power and beauty all at the same time, and yet express intellect. And the swing beat is powerful but yet subtle. So I am just enthralled with all of that. When I played with guys like Art Blakey and Tony Williams, and when I heard Elvin Jones, and when I play with Ron Carter, and all of the great swingers that I’ve played with, I see how that music affects people. For me, it’s a sublime way of playing music. So I think you have to be devoted to that in a singular way almost to do it at that level.

TP:   When did you begin to be that devoted to it?

MILLER: When I heard Oscar Peterson. I knew that I wanted to play this music with that kind of quality of feeling, and with that kind of integrity.

TP:   Let’s talk about why this music, against all odds, and with this culture the way it is, still survives. There may not be a big market, but there sure as heck are a lot of young musicians who can play.  And most of them are willing to learn. Obviously, there’s jazz education. But if it were just jazz education, then the music would be an artifact.  And it’s not. Perhaps you can address through some of the young musicians who play with you.

MILLER: I think young musicians are hearing and feeling the same thing I felt when I first heard the music. When they first hear this music, they see an opportunity to express themselves at a level that they had not been able to do previously in whatever other musical pursuits they were pursuing. I think this music that we call jazz is the only form of music that offers that opportunity, to have an integration of sophisticated harmony and sophisticated melody and sophisticated rhythm all at the same level, and be creative and improvise within that. I mean, you have sophistication in classical music in terms of harmony and melody, but the creative level is not there. I’ve played all of these musics on some level—R&B, and I’ve studied classical. But Jazz is the most enthralling music because you can express all of that. You can be as intellectual as you want to and yet be as soulful as you want to at the same time.  So to me, that’s what captivates the young musician.

TP:   For instance, John Lampkin knows all the hip-hop and drum-bass stuff. His beats are up to the second. I’m sure Karriem is the same way.

MILLER: Yes, he is.

TP:   Though with you he plays the function.  But are you paying attention to all these things? Are you incorporating what’s happened since Art Blakey and Tony Williams died, and the music of your sidemen into your own conception?

MILLER: Only what they bring themselves. At this stage of the game, I’m not trying to delve into that area with them. But they bring their own sensibilities from that. And things might happen on the bandstand that might not have happened with an older group of musicians. And I mean, just slightly older. For instance, Derrick might slap the bass a la Larry Graham.

TP:   Whereas Peter Washington wouldn’t.

MILLER: Yeah. Peter Washington wouldn’t do that.

TP:   Lewis Nash probably wouldn’t be playing those beats that Lampkin…

MILLER: Yes.  However… [LAUGHS] That wouldn’t be called for with me. But something like that might happen.

TP:   So you think all this is healthy. People incorporating this inclusive… For instance, Donald seems to want to do rap as well as rappers, and do smooth jazz as well as anyone doing smooth jazz. That’s sort of his stated purpose, and he doesn’t do a bad job, and doing these things doesn’t dilute what he’s able to do. I don’t know what the total effect is, but…

MILLER: I don’t see it as unhealthy. Let me put it that way. However, I don’t see how being good at rapping will help your understanding of what melody is, or deepen your knowledge of what harmony is. Most jazz musicians today have a pretty good knowledge of melody and harmony.  But even with the vast knowledge that’s out there, many of us are not even close to the core of what that is all about.

TP:   Who is?

MILLER: Who is? Well, I can tell you who was.

TP:   We also have to be careful not to search for the unreachable Holy Grail. Those cats may not have thought they had it either.

MILLER: Well, for instance, Bobby Hutcherson is a person who is creative on a deep level, and his involvement with harmony and melody and rhythm is very deep.

TP:   Mr. Nelson seems like he contemporary embodiment of that.

MILLER: Without a doubt. Kenny Garrett is a person who is involved with music on a very deep level. There are others. But I find that a lot of musicians have learned the rudiments of playing straight-ahead and become bored with it. [LAUGHS] But they think that they’ve got that covered, so “let me try something else.”

TP:   Why do you think they get bored with it?

MILLER: Well, in a lot of cases it’s because they haven’t had a chance to explore that with one of the great ones. Because if you’ve just come through four years at Berklee School of Music, or you’ve copied X amount of saxophone solos, and haven’t had a chance to do the thing I’m talking about, to see how that works in communicating and connecting with people, then you might be able to think that you’ve attained a certain amount of mastery, but in fact, all you might have is rudiments.  And a lot of that will not be effective if you get on the bandstand with Art Blakey or Elvin Jones or Roy Haynes or Ron Carter or Sonny Rollins or Johnny Griffin.

TP:   What’s it been like playing with Ron Carter lately? You’ve been doing the trio thing for a year or so now.  Is it your first sustained playing with him?

MILLER: Yes. Let me tell you this. When I was listening to Four and More and all those records in college, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would have two different relationships with people on that record—Tony and Ron. For me to have an ongoing relationship with Ron just blows my mind.

Ron is such a deep bass player. He’s unique in a lot of ways, but particularly he’s unique in the sense that he’s found a way to… Well, let’s say that he epitomizes the long, sustained note and the bouncing beat. Sometimes it’s hard to find those two together. A lot of times you find guys with the long sustained note, but no beat. Sometimes you find a guy with a big beat and he gets a thump out of the instrument. But Ron epitomizes that thing about the sustained note and the bouncing beat.  His walking conception is second to none. It’s very advanced, Ron’s walking conception.

TP:   It seems to me he’s the master of a certain type of counterpoint that’s singular to jazz, both rhythmic and melodic, with a call-and-response feel. Is the record The Golden Striker emblematic of how the trio sounds?

MILLER: Pretty much. We’ve stretched out a bit more since we did that record. Ron is a big fan of the MJQ with John Lewis, and this trio reflects his conception. That’s the kind of effect he wants to get over.

TP:   Are there any other situations in which you’re playing with someone’s band as steadily as that?

MILLER: No. My priority now is my band.

TP:   So with Ron, it’s because there’s still something you can learn and garner.

MILLER: Well, yes. Ron is one of the few people that I would do sideman work with now.  But even in that case, it takes a back seat to my own stuff as a leader.

TP:   He understands that, no doubt. He’s an eminently practical man. So you’re not talking about recording sessions or coming in for hire.

MILLER: No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about appearing on club dates.

TP:   I have seen you as a sideman on some club dates. What are the criteria? Does it have to be musically satisfying? Someone you have a long-standing relationship with?

MILLER: Basically, it has to in some way serve my career (let’s be honest about it), and it has to be musically edifying. It has to be challenging. It just has to be on a certain level. Playing with Ron and Bobby Hutcherson. Those are two people that I’ve singled out who I’d play club dates with as a sideman. That being said, over the years I’ve worked a lot with Benny Golson, James Moody, and Joe Lovano.  But I’ve scaled back from just doing sideman appearances. This thing with Ron is kind of an ongoing project. It’s not just dropping in on a club to be a sideman. It’s a conception and an idea… And where else would I play with a bass player like Ron Carter?

TP:   And the piano plays a very prominent role…

[PAUSE]
TP:   Is it important for you to have a trio as such… It might tempt you to do your next record with Ron Carter and Lewis Nash, let’s say. But I get the feeling you’d think twice about it because you see the trio as an extension of your vision more than just what you play.

MILLER: Exactly. That’s very well said. And with an organized, more or less, trio…

TP:   Well, the thing is, it doesn’t seem that organized. You don’t seem to approach it that way.

MILLER: Well, it’s not, in that sense. But it is in the sense that there’s a continuation of musical thought from gig to gig, and if you have a set group of musicians, it evolves over time. That’s the main reason why one would do that.

TP:   Is there also a sense of following through on your own experience of having played with elders and passing down information? Do you feel some broader sense of responsibility beyond your career?

MILLER: I do.

[END OF SIDE A]

TP:   Kenny does it, Terence does it. Wynton does it even.

MILLER: Some musicians have a vision of themselves as expanding through different areas of music—reggae here, hip-hop there, blues here and soul there, and classical music over here—and being able to function at a certain level within all those styles. I have a vision more of spiralling down to a core, to a core understanding of the essence of what music is. What playing melody really is beyond the language that we have come to know as the vocabulary…

TP:   You’re trying to get to something that’ s beyond vocabulary?

MILLER: Yes.  For instance, a young musician might have transcribed many solos and be armed with an expansive amount of vocabulary, but may still not understand what creative melodic expression is. Not to mention harmonic expression. Or a drummer might study the styles of several different drummers, but still not have insight. To me, knowledge and insight are two different things. Knowledge has to do with intellectual facts about something. Insight has more to do with a sort of understanding of what the essence of something is, beyond what the facts might be.

TP:   You made a comment on the radio in 1994 that people make a mistake about McCoy Tyner. They talk about him as a phase of music or a style of music that is something to get beyond, and you said they’re missing a fundamental point, that he and Coltrane created a sound, that the sound had profound implications and was almost a metaphor for something beyond itself, and that it fundamentally changed the sound of jazz. Which also implies the notion of the music as something broader than itself, as actual narrative, having a similar force. Is that something that you are striving to communicate on some level?

MILLER: Yes.  Embracing all that spirituality, so to speak, in the music. I don’t think that’s a sound that’s going to go away. What they did was embrace more universal aspects of the music than had been discovered in the West at that time. They broadened their scope, so to speak. It was a new thing, but those things that we’re discovering about music… These were old things from the older part of the world. So it enlightened Western music, especially in terms of jazz, about what that was. So I think that they were musical prophets in that sense.

TP:   Do you ever get discouraged? Do you get the feeling that you’re fighting an uphill battle and you’re holding onto this noble aesthetic that the world no longer is prepared to support? How do you sustain your fortitude in the midst of all this stuff. I’m your age. I get tired. Obviously, you can make a good living at this, but also it’s obviously not all you would like it to be.

MILLER: Absolutely. I don’t allow myself to get discouraged. I have moments, but I don’t allow myself to get discouraged for long.  This culture and this society doesn’t do a lot for the morale of jazz musicians. It’s a wonder that all of us are not seeing psychiatrists! As Dizzy Gillespie once said, this culture and this country doesn’t deserve jazz. It has disowned it. I mean, largely. Especially when you consider that every year you have a show called the American Music Awards, and the word “jazz” is not even mentioned. How could that be?  So one would tend to get discouraged…

TP:   How do you do it? Is it religious faith?

MILLER: Well, it’s faith. Yes. It’s faith in the music. It’s faith based on experience, though. It’s faith based on the fact that I knew that guys before me went through the same thing.  In the ‘70s, I heard that Art Blakey was pared down to three people and a singer! Yet in the face of all of that, he just kept on going.

TP:   Well, what else was he going to do?

MILLER: The thing is, we all feel like that. What else am I going to do? I could do other things. But I feel like what else am I going to do? I play this music because I feel I have to play it. It’s like a calling to me.

TP:   Do you think that’s true for most people who play it?

MILLER: I can’t speak to that. But I’m sure it’s true for many of them. I don’t feel it’s true for all the people who are playing music.  A lot of  people (I’m not calling any particular names) are responding to the pressure that’s created by the industry to do something different. Because they see that they get writeups when they do something that’s really obviously different. A friend of mine calls it “interview music.” You play a certain way and you get the interviews and a certain amount of attention for playing that way. Now, what we have to do is address why is that. From what I’ve observed, it’s that the music is heavily critiqued at this point in time (maybe it always was, but I do notice that it is now) by people who have a heavy Eurocentric perspective on the music. They view the music as something that’s totally progressive. I think that the music is a progressive art form. But it’s also a folk art form.

TP:   It’s still a folk art form.

MILLER: It’s still a folk art form.

TP:   You’re going against the grain in saying that. What do you mean?

MILLER: I’m talking about the folk roots of this music, which we know is the blues.

TP:   The church, too?

MILLER: Perhaps. To me, it’s all blues. Whenever writers and critics hear people… I don’t know what it is, especially African-American players. When they hear them refer to that, it becomes blase in their ears.

TP:   Or corny. One or the other. Like some atavistic…

MILLER: Right.  But here’s my point. The folk element of the music is something that doesn’t really change. If you hear the blues in 1995 and you hear the blues in 1925, it’s the same thing. The technology is different. One is electric guitar and one is folk. The chords are the same, the phrasing is the same, the language is the same—exact same. I grew up on that.  The guitar that Robert Johnson was playing was the same kind of guitar that Little Milton plays. Basically. So that basic sound is there. It’s a folk music. Folk music is not concerned with evolving.

TP:   But jazz is an art music.

MILLER: Partially.  Well, yes.

TP:   It is concerned with evolving.  Ellington was concerned. Bud Powell, Charlie Parker… The genius of it is… Ellington came from a very different background. But Charlie Parker took these rather humble materials and was able to create a universe out of them. Ellington was able to take these vernaculars contemporary to him and create what you call this universe of sound and color.

MILLER: Yes.  But let’s revisit the word “art.” There are people who would debate that almost any kind of expression is art.  So blues is art. Any kind of musical form is art.

TP:   We’re speaking of the progressive conception.

MILLER: That’s something different.

TP:   People will say, “Coltrane and Charlie Parker weren’t trying to play the music ten years before…”

MILLER: Yes, that’s true. I’m happy to address that. Because in their progression of the music… When Charlie Parker came up with this great conception, the conception was different, but the folk element was the same as Lester Young and the blues shouters before him. Even when Ornette Coleman and Coltrane played their conceptions, the folk element was still intact, especially in the case of Coltrane.  But now we have a situation where the establishment doesn’t care if that element is there or not. If it’s not there, that’s fine. If a guy can walk on stage and not pay homage to that or have that as part of his expression, then they almost get applauded for it. Let me tell you, if you’ve ever seen B.B. King on a jazz festival, then you’ll know that the blues connects with people more than any other… That in this music is what connects to people. I can tell you from experience, you can bring your conception to the stage and play a thousand notes a minute, but after about 45 seconds of that, people don’t want to hear it any more if it’s not connecting with them on that other level that I’m speaking of.

TP:   On some level, it’s almost as though the folk expression these days for young kids isn’t hip-hop, but popular music. Because when you were growing up, B.B. King and Little Milton was probably a lot of what you heard on the radio. Nobody’s hearing that on over-the-air radio now. Or, on a more sophisticated level, some of the brother and sister musicians from Latin America who are bringing in folkloric music and vernacular music of their cultures and integrating it on some level. Now, a guy like Ed Simon can say something on the blues as well as his own, and others do it less successfully. But it seems not to be phony, but something that’s real and also progressive. There are all these hybrids going on in jazz. But you’re not dealing with any hybrids, though you probably could.

MILLER: Well, it depends on how you look at it. Jazz was a fusion music from the beginning. Fusion of European elements… So in a sense, I am! [LAUGHS] But I still maintain that this music is part progressive art and part folk art, and there are forces out there now that don’t really care about the folk art. What they attribute progressivity to is something that lacks that folk element.  And I say that that view is essentially a Eurocentric view, and most of the writers and critics, whether they be African-American or non-African-American, have a certain amount of that view. Most, not all.

TP:   I don’t think it’s as much Eurocentricity as Corporatecentricity. I know a lot of African-Americans who could give a goddamn about the folk element… It’s the fact that a large audience isn’t coming in, or if it’s six figures or not… But I do understand what you mean.

MILLER: If I can get up on the piano and reflect a heavy involvement in Schoenberg or one of those ultra-modern composers, then I would be viewed differently than I am now. Guys who do what I am doing are viewed as passé.

TP:   How does that make you feel?

MILLER: Terrible!  Because I know the depth of the musicians that do what I do. I’m not even talking about me. I’m talking about guys like Steve Nelson or Peter Washington or Billy Pierce. I know how, when those guys get together and play together… See, this is an interesting thing, how the PEOPLE enjoy them. The people can have a great time listening to those people play, and the writers will say, “Well, nothing new happened; it was just passé.”

TP:   The Europeans wouldn’t book certain bands unless you could be on it, I think.

MILLER: He did some gigs. See, this is a whole nother thing. It’s a kind of funny thing about my career. They won’t book me as a leader, but they’ll book me as a sideman and make that a selling point of the gig.

TP:   You’re an iconic guy for that kind of sound.

MILLER: Yeah. If you want the gig, bring Mulgrew in. But I won’t hire Mulgrew’s band. That just boggles my mind. I have seen times when a guy with absolutely no name… He’s a good player, but a guy with no name could get a gig based on the strength of my name being on the bill at a particular club. But yet, it took me years to get in that club.

TP:   So on the one hand, it’s “wow!” and on the other…

MILLER: But you asked how I maintain.

TP:   It’s like Thelonious Monk said, “I’m famous! Ain’t that a bitch!”

MILLER: [LAUGHS] I have worked hard to maintain a certain sort of mental and emotional equilibrium. It’s mostly due to my faith in the Creator. It’s more that than anything else. I don’t put all of my eggs in that basket of being a rich and famous jazz guy.  So that allows me a certain amount of freedom, because I don’t have to play music for money. I play music because I love it, and I play the kind of music I love. At this stage of the game, I can play who I want to play with and I have a long career behind me. I don’t have to apologize to anybody for any decisions I make.

TP:   You can sleep at night.

MILLER: Yes.

[-30-]
* * *

Mulgrew Miller (WKCR, 10-28-04):

TP:   We were speaking about some of your early bands, and a musician from the next generation called and said, “Make sure you talk about the Buhaina days.” Now, we’ve spoken about those days before, but there are people out there, like Derrick Hodge, who probably wasn’t even born when you were out with Woody Shaw…

MULGREW: He was just being born.

TP:   So maybe it’s not such a bad idea to go back and give folks a sense of what times were like at the time you came up. You came out of Greenwood, Mississippi. You once told me that you heard Oscar Peterson on The Joey Bishop Show when you were a kid, and it inspired you, gave you an aspiration that piano could be a mode of expression and not just something you were learning how to do.

MULGREW: Very much so.

TP:   It got you into jazz. You moved to Memphis for college, to Memphis State University, where you met people like James Williams and Donald Brown and Bill Easley. Then you get out of there and embark on your professional career. What were the steps between Memphis State and your going out into the great wide world.

MULGREW:   Mercer Ellington came through Memphis shortly after the death of Duke Ellington, and picked up the multi-reed player, Bill Easley, and Bill left Memphis on the road with Mercer. A few months after that, Mercer needed a sub on the weekend for the then-pianist Lloyd Mayers, and Bill Easley recommended me to Mercer. I went out with the orchestra for a weekend, and later on for another weekend, and a year-and-a-half later I actually joined them. I was on the road with the Ellington orchestra for about three years. During that time, I was making connections in New York. I met Cedar Walton and other musicians…

TP:   Did you move to New York when you joined Mercer Ellington?

MULGREW: Kind of. We were on the road so much, we actually lived on the Greyhound bus. But when we were in town for a few weeks off or days off, we would be at the Edison Hotel on 47th Street, which is where all the big bands stayed going back through the decades.  Basie, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, and all the bands stayed at the Edison. So that was my New York address during the time I was in the Ellington Orchestra. When we were there, I’d go hang out in the Village and hear all my favorite bands and piano players. I guess word was starting to spread that there was this young pianist from the country who was playing with the Ellington Band who wanted to come to New York.

TP:   Memphis is the country?

MULGREW: Well, Greenwood, Mississippi is the country!  Eventually, Betty Carter called me, because my name came up with her from several different sources, including James Williams, who was then with Art Blakey, and then Cedar Walton and a few others. She asked to come in to do an audition, which I did, and she hired me.

TP:   Over that three-year period, 1976 to the beginning of ‘80, something is happening to your playing, from leaving Memphis and getting into the mix, both playing the Ellington book, but also soaking up the New York piano, which was at a certain peak at the time with Bradley’s and the other piano bars… What do you think were the most important lessons you learned during this time?

MULGREW:   Well, it was like a double-gauged evolution. First of all, there’s the personal evolution. I was becoming an adult while I was on the band… I think I turned 21 during the time I was on the band. So I was learning a lot about life, being around so many of the elder gentlemen in the band. I have to tell you that being on the road with 18 different personalities is quite a learning experience.

TP:   And Ellington was famous for having eccentrics in the band. I don’t know if that carried over into the Mercer Ellington edition…

MULGREW: Well, there were a few! Some would come and some would leave. But most of them were very interesting personalities.  We spent a lot of time on the bus and a lot of time in the same area of space, so to speak. So you really had to learn how to get along with people. I like to say that I became a man on that bus. There was also the opportunity to learn to play the music of Ellington and to sit in the piano chair, and hear all of those extended works and soak in all of that sound. So it was constantly opening my mind up to a whole world of sound…

TP:   Parenthetically, let me take you on a bit of a tangent. Ellington himself had one of the most distinctive sounds and presences on piano of anyone who ever played it, and a lot of what he did in real time would influence the direction of the band. So there are a lot of dynamics to that piano chair. Now, I know you’re very into Monk. Did you ever try to emulate Ellington? Did his approach soak in for you?

MULGREW: Not really, especially during that time. Obviously, there were certain signature things that you had to do, like the introduction to Satin Doll and Take The A Train and Things Ain’t What they Used To Be. You had to learn all those classic intros. I did take note of how Ellington played with the band as an accompanist, but I didn’t really try to emulate his style a lot at that time. I was listening a lot to Bud Powell and McCoy Tyner and many of the modern…

TP:   Soaking up the modern vocabulary.

MULGREW:   Pretty much. Because my agenda was eventually to get to New York and play with all the small groups. So I was listening to all the small group players.

TP:   Then Betty Carter called.

MULGREW: Then Betty Carter called. We were on our way to Japan, and I told her, “Well, you have to wait two weeks until I come back from Japan.” Then she did, and John Hicks was getting ready to leave the piano chair in Betty’s band. She called me, and I went to an audition. At the time, she had Curtis Lundy on bass and Kenny Washington on drums. She used to call Kenny Washington “the kid,” because he was very young at the time. I made the audition, and I stayed with Betty about eight months.

TP:   That would be a different type of seasoning.

MULGREW: Yes. Because now I’m in a trio, and I have to realize my capacity in a trio format. I had to really develop as an orchestrator and a soloist. So compared to the big band, there’s more focus on the piano chair.

TP:   In that group, you’re rather exposed.

MULGREW:   Yes, and Betty puts the heat on.

TP:   There were a lot of hits in that band. Very precise.

MULGREW: Yes, everything was very arranged and crisp. So it was a great experience, even though it’s one that I never fathomed I would get to. I knew who Betty Carter was, but I wasn’t that familiar with her work. So I had to do a crash course.

TP:   After eight months, what did you think?

MULGREW: I’ll tell you what. During my time with her, I came to realize how great she was and who she was, and the music and so on. But my whole big thing was to come to New York and play with Woody Shaw. I had heard Woody’s records—as well as everybody else’s—before I left Memphis, then I met Woody Shaw at a summer jazz camp, one of those Aebersol jazz camps for students. Woody was there with Joe Henderson, and man, they lit the camp on fire. He had just emerged out of one of his heavy woodshedding periods, a lot of practices, and so he was just on fire. He and Joe Henderson played and they lit the camp up. I have never forgotten that feeling, that fire and creativity they had when they played on the faculty concerts.

They had a piano class, and Woody came and sat in on one of the classes. Whoever the teacher was at the time had each pianist play a chorus of blues, and I played my chorus or two, and then he went on to the next student. At the end of the class, I went up to Woody Shaw just to introduce myself, and he says, “Hey, man, I’m going to see you in New York in two years.”

TP:   Sounds like a big moment.

MULGREW:   Yes.  And wouldn’t you know that it was about two years to that week, or to the day almost, after I had joined Mercer Ellington, that I went down to the Vanguard to hear Woody Shaw’s band, and on the intermission I went back to the kitchen, which at the Vanguard is also the dressing room and the hangout and the office and so forth. I went to say hello. Now, mind you, at this point, Woody was legally blind, suffering from retinitis pigmentosa. I said, “Hey, Woody, how you doin’?” Or maybe I said, “Hello, Mr. Shaw.” Whatever it was. At the time I guess he was seeing well enough to see who I was. He says, “I remember you. You’re that piano player with the funny name. I told you I’d see you in two years in New York, didn’t I.” And it was two years almost to the week from when he’d said that earlier.

I continued to follow his groups. Whenever he played in town, I would go to see Woody’s group, or Dexter’s group, or Johnny Griffin’s group, Cedar Walton’s group with Billy Higgins and Sam Jones. These were all my favorite groups to hear. Woody kind of kept track of me through Betty Carter’s group and so on. When Larry Willis left the band, Woody called me, after I’d been with Betty Carter for about eight months.

TP:   For a lot of musicians of your generation, his harmonic ideas, his ways of moving from point A to point B were significant and consequential. A lot of people see his music as one of the last big vocabulary jumps. Can you articulate what he did that had such an impact on musicians?

MULGREW: Woody had a conception that he had gleaned from listening to a lot of John Coltrane, and playing with McCoy Tyner and playing with Eric Dolphy and playing with Larry Young. All of these people were on the cutting edge of jazz development at the time, and Woody came right in the wake of that. So he had evolved a conception of using a vocabulary that was a departure, in many respects, from the many trumpet players before him, who used a more diatonic approach in improvising in the vocabulary they used. A lot of bebop oriented lines which go straight up and down the scale, and so forth. But Woody developed this concept of playing the pentatonics and other intervallic ideas, very similar to what McCoy was doing and many of the modern players were evolving. So in that respect, he was really the cutting-edge trumpet player.

TP: He certainly figured out how to transmute those ideas into memorable melodies. That’s what gave him such cache. Everything was so flowing and consonant.

MULGREW: Absolutely. Well, what we remember about a lot of those players from that time, including John Coltrane, is the beauty that they were able to bring out through the experimenting with all of those things. As you said, all of the great melody and all of the beauty in the harmony… The great thing about Woody Shaw is he could play all of that stuff, and it would be beautiful. It wasn’t just intervals. It wasn’t just pentatonics. All those things were lyrically and melodically beautiful—and harmonically beautiful. There are times when I hear his signature sound in the playing of the trumpet players or in the writing of other writers.

TP:   Is his sound imprinted in you, would you say? I’m not talking about a copycat way, but there are moments when it resonates in your own compositions.

MULGREW: I’d like to think so. I’d have to be a blockhead to be with him for three years and now absorb some of that stuff.

TP:   You go into the Messengers in ‘83.

MULGREW: Yes.  In most of those bands I spent three years. Just happened to be that way.

TP: Our caller wanted you to talk about those days, so here’s your chance. Just to put it in context for your bass player, who was only 2 or 3 at the time: When James Williams and Bobby Watson joined Art Blakey, there began an upswing after several years of treading water. Then in 1980, when Wynton and Branford and Wallace Roney come to town, and later Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison, his becomes the band the hot young players were landing in. And the piano chair took a Memphis signature, from James to Donald Brown to you. So it was a very fresh period for Art Blakey, and his band became a workshop, in which ideas were batted around and coalesced.

MULGREW: It was really kind of a renaissance period on the scene.  Of course, Art Blakey’s band had been an institution for decades. Art Blakey’s band was a career-maker. If you played in the band, chances are you had a great chance at establishing yourself as a name in the business. Or moreso than with other bands. You really had high visibility, and you really got recognition if you played with Art Blakey. So I always say that, well, that period and that experience put me on the map as a name.

TP:   I’d imagine one thing it gave you was a taste for declarative drummers.

MULGREW:   You got that right. That experience defined, pretty much, for me what I wanted to hear in other drummers. I thought I knew up until that point, but I really got to know and experience and feel what a swinging drummer feels like.

TP:   Did it change your approach to piano?

MULGREW: I think it was an overall projection thing. Art played so powerfully rhythmically and sonically. He had such a big sound and the beat was so wide. If it affected my playing in any way, it was probably in terms of how I felt and heard the beat. Because Art had such a wide, strong beat. But it also affected me in terms of my projection on the instrument. The piano doesn’t naturally have that kind of clarity that the trumpet or saxophone has.  There’s something about the trumpet that says, “Hey, listen to me.” There’s something about the vocal quality of the saxophone that says, “Hey, check me out.” But the piano has a tendency to be kind of understated and dynamically less obvious than some of the other instruments. So to play with a drummer like Blakey, you really had to learn how to project a certain kind of dynamic beyond the lights of the bandstand, as Art used to call it. He said, “You’ve got to make it go beyond the lights of the bandstand.”

Let me also state Art Blakey showed us how to be bandleaders. As Benny Golson said, he was very didactic in his own way. Art wasn’t one to always tell you “Do this” or “Don’t do that.” You just observed him, and he led you by the sheer force of his personality—and his musical personality. He shaped your musical experience just by sitting behind the drums and swinging so hard. He allowed us to compose and arrange.  The whole experience was basically about the presentation of music, how to present music, and not get on the bandstand and not sound like you’re in a jam session. It was an organized presentation. So you learned a lot about professionalism, and how to call a set, how to arrange the repertoire from one song to the next, and varied the song… All those kinds of things are important. So we learned a lot just observing him observing us.

TP:   Then you and Wallace Roney and Bill Pierce, and Charnett Moffett was one of the bassists with Tony Williams… It was an extraordinary band. I don’t think the contributions of that band are sufficiently recognized right now.

MULGREW:   Tony Williams, in my eyes, was the same breed of musician as Woody Shaw, in that their involvement with music was so intense and so serious and so deep. Tony, in my estimation, was a true genius of the drums—of jazz music. I’m not saying this because he’s no longer with us; I used to say this when he was here. As an instrumentalist and musician, I always put him on the same pedestal with Charlie Parker and Art Tatum and John Coltrane. If Tony hadn’t played another beat after he was 19 or 20 years old, he would have changed history.  Maybe even if he was 18 or 17.

TP:   But he played a lot of beats afterward.

MULGREW:   Yes, thank God! But he came to the scene with a ripe imagination and a fertile mind for the music. I think when Tony came on the scene at 17, he was already a visionary, and that vision was firmly in place about how he wanted to play music and how he thought music was supposed to go.

TP:   Projecting with him must have been a challenge as well. He was playing LOUD during those years.

MULGREW: Well, I think loud was a natural component of what he was doing. He wasn’t only loud. He was powerful dynamically. Tony’s playing had that real urge in it.  But quiet as it’s kept, Art Blakey was a pretty loud drummer. He wasn’t quite as loud as Tony, but Art was a very powerful and dynamically and sonically loud drummer. Tony Williams was even more so, and maybe for a lot of reasons, having gone through the whole rock-and-roll experience… Tony played some big, heavy drums, big drums, big cymbals, big sticks. I think Tony’s vision of music was that it should sound really BIG. I think he genuinely felt that way about the music. I don’t think he was just playing loud because he couldn’t play soft.

TP:   You did a trio record towards the end of his life that amply demonstrates what he could do with dynamics when the occasion called.

MULGREW: That proved to be his last recording.  But I played a few trio gigs with Tony, and on most of those trio gigs he played as loud as he played at other times.

TP:   Back to you: All of this 16 years or so of playing in these high-level situations, during which time you were starting to emerge as a trio pianist and with Wingspan on records that come out in ‘87-‘88-‘89… Having self-assurance and a sense of who you are as a musician is a must. You can’t really coexist with them on the bandstand without that.
MULGREW:   Exactly. I spent all those years developing self-assurance and confidence. When I came to New York, the last thing on my mind was having a record date of my own.  Having my own record, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just thinking can I get a chance to play with this person or that person, and grow and develop.  I think it’s a little different now. A lot of the youngsters want a record date when they get off the plane.

TP:   Well, that attitude began in the late ‘80s during the Art Blakey renaissance when the “Young Lions” came up. Looking back, what do you think of the way the music evolved during that period? The overall sound. Did it change?

MULGREW: I think a certain area of the music changed. The younger players sort of had a sound and the older players had a sound. But because there wasn’t enough attention devoted to the older players, the younger sounds and developments and bands and music were perpetuated. I think the music suffered in a lot of ways because of that. Even though you had some really outstanding musicians then who were young and developing, many of them—or many of us—were exposed prematurely and with fragmented development and so on, and the major record companies weren’t pushing the veteran musicians enough. While the teenage piano players were getting record contracts and television appearance, Cedar Walton went around without a record contract. And how you gonna do that?! How you gonna do that to the music? In spite of that, Cedar Walton, for example, is one of the finest pianists playing today, and has been for the last 40-50 years. So I think that the Establishment, the jazz industry did a lot of disservice to the music by hyping so many musicians and ignoring the veterans, and so on.

James was a very dear, close friend for 31 years. We met at Memphis State, and he was one of my prime mentors. I loved him so and respected him so much, as everybody did. And he touched so many people.

TP:   Wingspan goes back close to twenty years. Wasn’t the first Wingspan album [Landmark] in 1987?

MULGREW: 1987.

TP:   At the time, you’d just joined Tony Williams after several years with Woody Shaw and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, which would be two good apprenticeships, if you want to call them that, for setting up a group with horns and expressing your own compositional vision. Would that be accurate?

MULGREW:   It would be indeed. I’d like to add that before the Art Blakey and Woody Shaw experiences, I was with the Duke Ellington Orchestra and with Betty Carter.

TP:   You’ve continued to put in dues over the years because of the way the marketplace has treated the lifeblood music. You mentioned you did a Japanese tour and a West Coast tour with the group. The personnel’s been fairly stable over the last few years, no?

MULGREW: Well, it’s changed somewhat. The only original member is Steve Nelson. Steve Wilson has been with us for ten years or so, and Kareem Riggins has been with us off and on for about ten years. Our new bassist, Derrick Hodge, also plays in the trio; he’s been with us about 2½ years now. And we added trumpet a year ago with Duane Eubanks,

TP:   Does this configuration inspire much writing?

MULGREW: I haven’t done much fresh, brand-new writing. But this project in 2002, all the writing was new.

TP:   That’s pretty new.

MULGREW:   It’s new to me!

TP:   I guess it must take a while to wrap your mind around a tune and have it evolve. But there also will be tunes you’ve been doing since the late ‘80s. Some of your things are close to modern standards.

MULGREW: We’re also doing some songs I wrote from a recording I did for RCA called Hand In Hand in the late ‘90s. Plus, we do standards and cover tunes by such composers as Hank Mobley and so on.

TP:   Now, with all respect to your writing, when people think of Mulgrew Miller, they think of your piano playing. And most pianists, when they’re presenting their music, will do so in the trio format. What are the satisfactions of a larger ensemble?

MULGREW: You get to take advantage of the different voices and colors, and get a larger palette of colors and sounds to deal with in playing the compositions. We have vibes and trumpet and alto saxophone. Steve Wilson plays also soprano saxophone and flute—his flute playing is a well-kept secret, but Steve is a marvelous flute player. We have the option of all these sounds, and it adds another dimension to the trio.

TP:   Do you see it as the trio-plus?

MULGREW:   I don’t really think of that, although personnel-wise, it really is that. For instance, in some cases, the repertoires are different. We play songs in the larger group that we don’t play in the trio, and vice-versa. So I don’t necessarily think of it as a trio plus horns either.

TP:   You went for six years without being signed to a label, once RCA released, but you’ve found a home for now with MaxJazz.

MULGREW: They’re wonderful. Richard McDonnell and his sons are musicians, and they understand the art and they understand the artist vision. I’m really privileged to be able to work with such understanding businessmen who run this company, and we get a lot of support from them.

TP:   Your most recent date, Live At Yoshi’s, is a trio record. How does a live performance differ from the studio? How will the experience of seeing Wingspan in person differ from a studio recording?

MULGREW: Well, the repertoire is pretty set. The thing about Wingspan is that the group is constantly evolving as the musicians evolve. The way we’re playing now sounds a lot different than how we played four-five years ago. It’s a matter of individuals in the bands expanding in their own right. For instance, I’ve seen a lot of growth in our drummer. Just in the last year, he’s playing at a whole different level than he was a year ago. Our bassist, Derrick Hodge, brings a lot to the table. By the rhythm section being different and evolving, that affects and stimulates what happens on the front line.

TP:   How proactive are you as to tempos and beats? Are you open to feedback?

MULGREW:   I’m very open. We might talk about a basic feel to a tune, a basic idea or something, but all things are open to interpretation. These are all remarkable musicians, and I trust them very much, and I trust their musicianship and insights and judgments and taste, and they tend to bring things off in whatever direction they want to go. If Kareem wants to take a Latin tune in a swing direction or in a 3/4 direction, then we go there.

TP:    Were these liberties granted to you at an equivalent stage of your career?

MULGREW: More or less.  I’ve always been open to the idea of flexibility and spontaneity. In the best groups I played with, that was certainly a strong element in various ways. Spontaneity is important.

* * *

Mulgrew Miller Musician Show, WKCR, 5-4-88 (Ted Panken):

[Art Tatum: “Caravan,” “Sophisticated Lady” (1954?)]

TP:    I’ll turn the reins over to Mulgrew and let him say a few words about Art Tatum.

MM:    Oh!  What can I say?  Well, as we hear, it’s pure genius.  It’s divinity on the keyboard. [LAUGHS]

TP:    At what point in your musical life did you hear Art Tatum?

MM:    Well, it was pretty early actually.  I had been a great Oscar Peterson fan in my early teens, and just through research… You know, I like to find out where the guys come from or who they’re influenced by.  And when I learned that Oscar was influenced by Art Tatum, I thought I’d better go back and check this guy out.  And lo and behold, I heard something that was unbelievable.

TP:    Messed you up, huh?

MM:    Yeah.  I think Art is definitely the greatest of all time.

TP:    You came up in the state of Mississippi.  Tell us about your early years in the music, your early training and so forth.

MM:    Well, I started playing the piano, like a lot of kids do, very naturally.  You know, you go to the piano and you pick out these little tunes that you’ve heard around… My father eventually got a teacher for me, and I studied through high school, and then I attended Memphis State University.  In Mississippi I played rhythm-and-blues as a teenager, and I played in church, Gospel, you know, spiritual music.  I played a lot of cocktail parties.  I had a little teenage trio, and we tried to emulate Oscar Peterson and Ramsey Lewis, heh-heh..

TP:    You were born in 1955.  That would make this 1970, 1971 when you were making your first strides…

MM:    Yes, about ’71, ’72.

TP:    This is all a matter of record, but we might as well get it down.  Who were some of the people that you listened to?  These are some people whose music we’ll be hearing during this course of this evening.

MM:    Actually, while I was playing R&B, my really first piano influence was Ramsey Lewis.  My older brother was into Jazz, and he kept telling me about this guy named Oscar Peterson.  And I said, “Hmm-hmm-hmm, Oscar Peterson could never play…”

TP:    Like Ramsey Lewis.

MM:    You know, nobody can touch that.  So I finally heard that Oscar was going to appear on the Joey Bishop Show one night, and I said, “Well, let me sit and take a listen to this cat, and see what’s happening.”  And I was turned around forever, for good!   And the record that I think  we’re going to play next is very dear to me, because it was the first Jazz record that I had.  This was the record that I started listening to, and it featured Oscar in his classic trio situation playing tunes like “Girl Talk” and…

TP:    “Moon River.”

MM:    “Moon River,” yes.

TP:    “I’m In The Mood For Love” and so forth.

MM:    “On A Clear Day.”  He did some excellent block chord work.  And it’s just so tasty, everything on the record is just exquisite.  Well, this was the record that I was trying to emulate when I was 14 or 15.  I had no idea of what was going on!

TP:    But this sort of opened the door a little bit.

MM:    Right.

[MUSIC: Oscar Peterson, “Girl Talk” (1970), Phineas Newborn/Jones/Hayes, “Way Out West” (1961)]

TP:    Phineas Newborn was in Memphis at the time when Mulgrew was attending Memphis State in the music education program.  Tell me about the program, the areas that you were covering as a student.

MM:    Well, as a student, I was a Music Education major.  I only attended for two years.  But the Jazz program at Memphis State was probably one of the best in that part of the South at that time.  Unfortunately, they didn’t really have a program where you could focus on small group playing and improvising.  It was basically a typical college big-band situation.  And they had four bands at different levels, and so forth and so on.  So that was the extent of the Jazz program at Memphis State.

TP:    Did you enter competitions?

MM:    Yes, we did.

TP:    What kind of material did you play?

MM:    Oh, we played a variety of composers and arrangers, some of the things from the Kenton band, and some of my favorite charts that we did were Thad Jones’ material, and there would be arrangements from the students within the band, and so forth and so on.

TP:    Is Memphis State where you had your first efforts at arranging and writing?

MM:    Well, you might say my first efforts.  It was not much more than an effort at that time.  I really was more into composing than arranging.  But I guess you might say that my first compositions I wrote at Memphis State.

TP:    [ETC.] Mulgrew will be appearing with the American Jazz Orchestra as part of a Jimmie Lunceford tribute — arrangements and recreations of the music of Jimmie Lunceford.  You’ve been rehearsing that music this week.  What’s it like?

MM:    Well, it’s a very educational.  I had had some big band experience playing with the Ellington band on the road for three years, so in a way it was sort of comfortable to me.  It’s a situation where I have to exhibit my discipline, and lay back, and play the things that the music requires.  John Lewis, of course, is directing the orchestra, and there are some very talented musicians in the orchestra as soloists — we’re really trying to recreate the style of the music.

TP:    [ETC.: APPEARANCE BY WINGSPAN] We’ll next hear some music by Bud Powell.

MM:    Bud Powell also was an artist who I discovered around the time I was in Memphis.  I had known all along of his importance in the music, and his innovations, and his contributions.  I first heard a record called The Amazing Bud Powell.  I really listened carefully, and tried to understand what his contribution was.  Of course, he was  to influence a whole generation of piano players to play the same type of lines that Charlie Parker was playing, harmonically and rhythmically and melodically.

[MUSIC: Bud Powell, “Celia,” “Cherokee” (1949)]

TP:    Mulgrew, someone asked me to ask you how you came up with the name Wingspan for your group.

MM:    Actually, Wingspan is sort of a dedication to the legacy of Charlie Parker — Bird, you know.  The tune “Wingspan” on the record is a composition sort of written i that sort of Bebop mode — with a few curves here and there!  But it’s basically a Bebop oriented tune.  Once again, the title derives from thinking about the legacy of Charlie Parker.

TP:    When we last spoke with Mulgrew about his earlier years, we were around 1973, Mulgrew has left Memphis State.  Pick it up.

MM:    Well, after leaving Memphis State I had heard about a piano teacher in Boston who was sort of well-known among certain circles.  She had taught years ago at Boston University, I believe.  She was the mother of the great baritone saxophonist, Serge Chaloff, who was one of the original Four Brothers with Woody Herman’s band.  She was known as Madame Chaloff.  I wanted to study with her, because I heard that she really had this great concept for piano technique, and a lot of guys that had studied with her were the guys that I admired — Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, quite a few guys, Hal Galper had studied with her, and a lot of lesser-known pianists.  She was sort of like this mystical piano guru hiding out in Boston.  So I went to have a few lessons with her, and I’d like to think that I really benefitted from studying with this lady.

TP:    What were some of her unique approaches?

MM:    Well, her concept was sort of mystical and metaphysical, in a way.  It involved things like breathing, a lot of things in principle that are similar to Yoga.  It involves breathing and likeness of the arm and muscle-power…I mean, finger-power rather than arm power, you know.  It was a whole philosophy behind the concept that sort of reminded me of some sort of Eastern philosophy or something.

TP:    Again, in Boston were you able to supplement your studies with gigs?

MM:    Yeah.  Well, actually I was doing more working than I was studying!  There in Boston I met some very fine musicians — Ricky Ford, Billy Pierce, Chris Albert, and some of the guys that are still around Boston.  Some of them have since come to New York, like Boots Maleson, who plays bass in the Ron Carter Quartet.  And I played with all of these guys around Boston, and this was back in 1975.

TP:    Was it was around that time that you joined Mercer Ellington, or was there a hiatus?

MM:    There’s about a year between that and the time I joined Mercer Ellington.

TP:    That’s when Ricky Ford joined Mercer.

MM:    Ricky joined Mercer about that time.  Now, I was in  Boston during the winter, and you know, coming from the South, I had never been that cold in my life! [LAUGHS] So it got a bit cold for me.  I couldn’t stand it.  Snow, covered cars for a month at a time.  So I had a friend that I had gone to high school with who was living in L.A., and he kept saying, “Come out to L.A., man.  You could make it out here.”  And I had always heard that L.A. was like paradise, you know, since I was a kid.  So I went to L.A., and I stayed out there for a year.

That was a very interesting period in my life.  I met a wonderful tenor saxophone player.  He’s really a marvelous, magnificent player.  His name is Rudolph Johnson, and he’s not a well-known saxophonist, but he is one of the best-known saxophone players I’ve heard.

TP:    Is he originally from Kansas City?

MM:    No, he’s from Columbus, Ohio.  But he’s been with Ray Charles for the last eight or nine years.  But this guy is one of the most incredible tenor saxophonists I’ve heard.

TP:    Did he record for Black Jazz?

MM:    Yes, he did.

TP:    Okay, I know which Rudolph Johnson you’re talking about.  What else was happening in L.A.?

MM:    I was working, I was doing all sorts of things in L.A. — musical things!  I was working at some of the smaller jazz clubs down on the beach, and I was also playing in a church at that time, which I had been doing since I was a kid.  So I sort of played in church from the time I was 8 years old until literally up until the time I joined Mercer Ellington.

TP:    Some thoughts on the relationship of the church music to the secular music.

MM:    Well, yeah, especially in the direction of Jazz and Blues.  Certain areas of Gospel music and inspirational music, the tonality and the colors are very closely related with the feeling of the Blues.  Actually, that’s what it is, the dominant seventh sounds and that sort of thing, and the rhythms.

TP:    How did you come to hook up Mercer Ellington, then?

MM:    Well, that’s sort of a long story, but I’ll try to make it short.  I first studied with Mercer Ellington in my sophomore year at Memphis State.  He had been touring some part of the South.  Lloyd Mayers had been the piano player since Duke’s death, and I think Lloyd had to miss a weekend or something.  A friend of mine who was working with the band named Bill Easley, who plays clarinet and saxophone, recommended me to Mercer to work one weekend as a substitute for Lloyd Mayers.  I just did that weekend, and it was almost a year when I ran into Mercer in Los Angeles.  I learned that he had been looking for me.  He didn’t know where to find me because i had moved to L.A.  I think it was coming up to New Year’s Day, 1977, and he needed me to play a New Year’s Eve gig.  He said, “What are you doing for the next three weeks?”  I said, “Well, nothing.  I can make the gigs.”  So he took me for three weeks, and actually, what was supposed to be three weeks turned out to be three years.

TP:    Did you come in cold, or were you pretty familiar with the Ellington repertoire?

MM:    Well, I was familiar with some of the most popular of Ellington’s music.  But there was a great volume of stuff that I’d never heard.  But I was familiar with Duke’s personality, because I had seen him on TV and I’d heard a lot of his music as a kid.  So I didn’t feel like I was totally cold, but I was very green.

TP:    That’s a heavy chair to fill.

MM:    Well, I never related to that idea of filling Duke’s chair or his shoes, because my position in the band was that of a sideman.  Mercer was the leader.  So sort of all the pressure was on him.

TP:    What were your features with the band?

MM:    I had one feature I would play.  That was a song I think Duke sort of spontaneously composed called “Reflections In D,” which is a beautiful piece for piano.  It had an orchestrated background.  So I did that, and sometimes Mercer would feature me on solo piano playing “Lush Life.”

[MUSIC: Wingspan, “Dreams of Brazil,” “Wingspan”]

TP:    Your stint with Mercer Ellington spread your name around to the wider Jazz audience, I would think.

MM:    Actually, as far as spreading my name around, my name didn’t really get around that much, especially in the circle of musicians, because Mercer didn’t travel that circuit that much.  I mean, Mercer kind of… We played a lot of college dates, a lot of country club dances.  So as far as getting my name around among the circle of musicians and critics and so forth and so on, I guess it was a very limited amount of exposure.

But, far more important than that is the fact that I got a chance to hear the very colorful music of Duke Ellington every night, still being played by a lot of the people that played with him, and it really opened my ears up to the world of musical color.  And since that time, I’ve been really affected by that.

TP:    Did it spur you to go back into the recorded work of Duke Ellington?

MM:    Yeah, a bit.  Yeah.  Actually, yeah.

TP:    After leaving Mercer, your next major gig was with Betty Carter…

MM:    Actually, before we address Betty, I probably should add that a lot of people are familiar with Duke’s famous pop tunes, “Satin Doll” and “Sophisticated Lady” and so forth and so on.  But not a lot of people are familiar with his more extended works, his suites, the “Liberian Suite” and the “Afro-Eurasian Suite.”  I mean, that is some of the greatest music that’s ever been composed in this century.  And I thought that is deserving of mention on this show.

TP:    His work was so comprehensive, it seems impossible that one man put it down.  I guess that can happen if you have your band as your instrument for forty-five years.

MM:    That’s right.  But I think he was exceptionally prolific.

Anyway, as we were saying, I left Mercer in January of 1980 after receiving a call from Betty Carter, and I was on the road with Betty for about eight months.

TP:    Did you replace John Hicks?

MM:    I replaced John Hicks, that’s right.

TP:    Now, being with Betty Carter places a whole different set of demands on the piano player.  You’re almost the second voice in the band, in a lot of ways.

MM:    Yeah, in a lot of ways.  But still, there was a common thread there underlying the experience, because I was still an accompanist, and that was my basic role — being an accompanist.  I really learned to be sympathetic to that role and to whoever was up front, the soloist or the leading voice or whatever.

TP:    Was this the time when you settled in the New York area?

MM:    Yes.  As a matter of fact, upon being employed by Betty, I found residency in the New York area — in Brooklyn, as a matter of fact.

TP:    [ETC. on MUSIC]  Your feelings about McCoy Tyner’s music.

MM:    Actually, I have to say that there are a lot of piano players that had a great effect on me.  As with most musicians, there are people who affect them more than others.  In my case, I think my first great inspiration was Oscar Peterson, and after that time I was really affected by a lot of people, some of the people we’ve played.  But when I heard McCoy Tyner play live at the time he had the band with Azar Lawrence and Junie Booth, I felt that my soul was being ravished. [LAUGHS] It really took hold of me.  I went back to Memphis State, and I was determined that I was going to practice as hard as ever, because I was really set on fire by what I had heard from McCoy Tyner at this period.

[MUSIC: McCoy Tyner, “Theme for Ernie” (1962); Freddie Hubbard/Wayne/McCoy/Elvin, “Birdlike” (1961)]

TP:    That was killing, wasn’t it.

MM:    Yes, indeed!  That was one of the most famous Freddie Hubbard solos, I believe.

TP:    You seem to have memorized everybody’s solo on “Birdlike,” gauging from your response while it was on.

MM:    [LAUGHS] Oh yeah.  Well, that was a record I really listened to a lot.  McCoy’s playing on that is just immaculate, and Freddie’s playing and Wayne’s playing — just the whole group.  That is really a 10,000-star record.

TP:    You wanted to say some things about the pianist’s relation to the horns.

MM:    Well, part of the conception of playing Jazz and improvising is playing lines.  This particular innovation was carried forward moreso probably by horn players than piano players — maybe.  Of course, in Modern Jazz, most of us have been influenced by the innovations of Charlie Parker and through Bud Powell, and a lot of the horn players that came afterwards, like Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown and Miles Davis, and of course, John Coltrane, and so forth and so on.

TP:    We’ll now hear Thelonious Monk’s “Work,” which Monk recorded in 1954 with Mulgrew’s former employer, Art Blakey, and the title track of your second release for Landmark.

MM:    My first exposure to Monk I think was the “At the Five Spot”…

TP:    With Johnny Griffin, another former employer.

MM:    Right.  I remember one of the first so-called Hard-Bop songs I learned was “Blue Monk” and “Straight No Chaser.”  I remember driving to high school, when I would drive to school in the morning, and a friend of mine and I would sing the melodies to these songs.  But I readily related to Thelonious Monk’s music, because in a way, it was so simple.  You know, in its complexity it was so simple.

TP:    Monk really developed his conception performing up and down the Eastern Seaboard with various church bands in the 1930’s.

MM:    Yes, and that’s easy to hear.  When I listen to his composition, “Crepuscule With Nellie,” that sounds a hymn to me.

[MUSIC: Monk/Heath/Blakey, “Work” (1954); Monk/Roach, “Bemsha Swing” (1953)]

TP:    We’ll continue with a selection featuring another of Mulgrew’s favorite pianists, Wynton Kelly.

MM:    Wynton Kelly was a supreme accompanist and a very wonderful soloist.  One of the great things about Wynton was his pulse and his time, and the way he made you feel when he played.  He had what we call a lope.  He played with a kind of a lope that was really deep in the time, and it kind of made you pat your foot or your feet or snap your finger.  That’s one of the great traits in his playing that a lot of piano players have tried to pick up on.  Just the way he phrased and the way he placed his notes.

TP:    And he was a master of almost any type of music he had to play, whether Bop or Soul type pieces, ballads…

MM:    Oh, definitely, right.  I think Wynton Kelly was almost everybody’s favorite sideman.

TP:    He also played a great deal in the churches in Brooklyn during his too-short life.

MM:    Well, he certainly had that feeling, you know. [LAUGHS]

[Miles/Stitt/Kelly/Chambers/Cobb, “Walkin'” (1960); Bill Evans/Israels/Bunker, “Round Midnight” (1965)]

MM:    We all know the contributions of Bill Evans, with its harmonic colors and the spring-like, airy lines that he played, and his renditions of the songs.  I think he made a timely contribution to the art of playing Jazz piano.  I’ve certainly learned a lot from listening to Bill Evans.

TP:    As has many a pianist.

MM:    Yes, as many a pianist and horn players.

TP:    The next set will focus on Ahmad Jamal, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.  There’s another Miles Davis connection.  Miles got a lot of ideas from listening to Ahmad Jamal in the Fifties in Chicago, and of course, Herbie Hancock and Chick both worked with Miles.

MM:    That’s true.  Miles had so many wonderful piano players.

TP:    Ahmad Jamal was one of your earliest and primary influences.

MM:    Ahmad Jamal is a very unique player.  He’s sort of in a class by himself, because he was of no particular school, but yet all of the areas and eras of the music are represented in his playing, all of the Modern approaches and…you know, the whole history of the piano is there.  Yet, he’s so individual and his style and his approach and his conception is so unique.   He is so deserving of the highest merit in the tradition and history of jazz pianists.

TP:    And his music has been evolving as well for really some thirty-five years, in a continuous evolution.  He’s never stood on his laurels.

MM:    That’s right.  He keeps encompassing all of the innovations that come along.  That’s why he’s such a remarkable artist.

[MUSIC: Ahmad Jamal, “Dolphin Dance (1970); Herbie Hancock, “One Finger Snap” (1964)]

MM:    Herbie, you know, what can I say?  Herbie is like the supreme conceptualist.  He is the ideal for me, without ever wanting to become a Herbie “clone.”   Herbie is such an expansive pianist, musician, his compositions, and he has incorporated so many conceptions and devices into his playing.  To me, Herbie’s playing at best is what Jazz is all about.

TP:    Herbie performed on “One Finger Snap” with your current employer, Tony Williams, on the drums.

MM:    Yes, let’s mention Tony, because Tony is one of the most incredible musicians that I have ever had the experience of witnessing on any instrument.

TP:    For the last five or six years you’ve been working with Art Blakey and Tony Williams night after night after night.

MM:    It’s an incredible experience.  I think I’ve become addicted to those loud drummers.  These are some of the greatest drummers of all time.  Back in the summer, I had the experience of playing with three of the greatest drummers alive in one night!  I played with Tony Williams at the Blue Note Festival, then I went down to Sweet Basil and I sat in with Art, and then as I was sitting in with Art, Elvin Jones sat in on the same  set.  It was just incredible.

TP:    [ETC.]  Any concluding comments?

MM:    Unfortunately, we didn’t have four or five hours to play some of the artists who have affected me since I’ve been in New York.  I’ve learned so much from a lot of the players in New York that we haven’t had a chance to talk about, players like Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan and Cedar Walton, one of my very-very favorites, who I think is one of the most underrated piano players in the world, Kirk Lightsey, Kenny Barron and Harold Mabern — the list goes on.  Of the younger players, there’s Kenny Kirkland and Renee Rosnes and Benny Green, and there are a lot more that are coming up behind us.  So it’s really a healthy environment.

TP:    [ETC.]

[MUSIC: Chick Corea, “Tones For Joan’s Bones” (1966)]

[-30-]

 

Mulgrew Miller (Musician Show, 6-29-94):

[MUSIC: Tatum, “Elegy,” P. Newborn, “Lush Life” (1961), Bud Powell, “Parisian Thoroughfare” (1953)]

TP:    In selecting the music, Mulgrew was very definite about particular musicians and tracks.  “Lush Life” was by Phineas Newborn, who bestrides the talented group of pianists who emerged from Memphis.  Was your first exposure to him when you attended school there?

MM:    Yes.  I had heard of Phineas Newborn prior to my arrival in Memphis, but I didn’t know much about him.  And I met him in a club one night, and subsequent to that I heard him playing live, and I was blown away — needless to say.

TP:    In what kind of venue?

MM:    Oh, it was very small, what we would call down there a hole-in-the-wall joint.  A small club with an upright piano where it seemed like half the keys didn’t work, and he played them like it was a Steinway grand.

TP:    Who did you meet when you got to Memphis?

MM:    Well, the first pianist I met in Memphis actually was Donald Brown.  We were both students at Memphis State at the time.  A few days later I met James Williams, and we became very good friends, and James became a very important mentor to me.  Actually James was a mentor to both Donald Brown and myself at the time.  There was a very fantastic pianist who has made some impact in New York in the last year or so named Charles Thomas.  And Phineas, or “Fine-as” Newborn was there also.

TP:    Which is it anyway?

MM:    I don’t know.

TP:    How should I say it?

MM:    I would say that it’s officially Phineas.  But everybody down in Memphis called him Fine-as.  Some even called him Pheenus.

TP:    Pheenus.

MM:    Yeah.

TP:    I remember the first time I had to pronounce his name on the radio, I had four phone calls, literally, telling me one was right, and they were divided between the two pronunciations.

What was the extent of your background in the literature of the music when you arrived in Memphis?

MM:    Well, I came to Memphis State right out of high school.  Up until that time, I had really been into the more traditional stylists, like Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, and to a great extent Ahmad Jamal and Art Tatum.  Those were my favorite players at the time.  When I got to Memphis, there was a great student environment, a lot of students learning about the music.  At that time, I was able to absorb the more modern players (that’s a comparative, relative term), people like Bud Powell and McCoy Tyner.  Although I had heard some records by Bud Powell records McCoy Tyner records, and records by all of the contemporary players back down home, I didn’t really get into listening to them until I got into Memphis State.  I would say I think of some of them more as conceptual players than actual stylists.  In other words, you can sit and analyze what they do, and find certain formulas for things, and create your own language from that.

TP:    I’m sure that being able to play in such a stimulating setting helped begin to hone the process of forming a vocabulary.

MM:    Yeah.  Because when I met James, I didn’t know very much theoretically or analytically about what I was doing.  I was just sort of going for a sound.  And there are a lot of limitations to that approach.  James had been a student at Memphis State  for several years, and he was actually in his last semester there, and I was in my first semester.  So James knew all the stuff that I was trying to learn, like chord voicings and certain scales, certain records to listen to, who to listen to, what songs you need to learn, and he was very generous about directing me along those lines.

TP:    You came up in Greenville, Mississippi.

MM:    Greenwood.

TP:    Excuse me.  How much was Jazz listened to in the community when you were coming up?  Were you an exception as a youngster playing Jazz on piano, or…?

MM:    Oh, definitely, yeah.  Well, actually there was an older guy who still lives there, who played a style that was kind of out of Erroll Garner, Nat Cole, Teddy Wilson.  He had been a mentor.  You know, I kind of looked up to him and tried to copy, emulate the way he played.  But he wouldn’t explain things academically.  You just had to sit and listen and wonder, “Wow, what was that?”  Or he’d show you a lick or something like that.  But to learn to look at the music analytically so that you could put it together yourself, I didn’t get to that until I got to Memphis.

So to answer your question:  Yes, in my generation, in high school, I was practically alone in learning to play Jazz.

TP:    Were you dealing with other types of music, that your peers were into, which I’m assuming was rhythm-and-blues and Blues…

MM:    Yes.

TP:    And of course, church music.

MM:    Yes.  Well, that was really what I was doing.  I was playing on the weekends, playing in the rhythm-and-blues bands, and on Sundays, sometimes two or three hours from the gig, I was in Sunday School class!

TP:    So the secular and the sacred were right on top of each other.

MM:    Oh, yes.  Yes, indeed.

TP:    What were some of the models for the music you were doing with the rhythm-and-blues bands?  What sort of bands were you listening to?

MM:    We were doing kind of a wide range of things, from the really bluesy things like Little Milton, Albert King, B.B. King to the more popular hits of the day.  James Brown was big at the time, and Aretha Franklin, and Al Green, and Marvin Gaye — all of those kind of things.  Around 1966, when I was sixth grade, I started trying to emulate Ramsey Lewis, because he got two or three hits at the time, real big hits.  He was probably my very first idol.

TP:    You wanted to be in with the In Crowd.

MM:    Yeah.  But actually this was a little after that.  This was the “Wade In The Water” period.

TP:    Our discussion of Phineas Newborn brought us back to Mulgrew’s younger days in Greenwood, Mississippi.   After Phineas Newborn’s arrangement of “Lush Life,” we heard Art Tatum’s arrangement of Massenet’s “Elegy.”  You mentioned hearing Tatum in high school, I guess, and then probably delving into him in more depth subsequently.  We also heard Bud Powell performing his original composition “Parisian Thoroughfare” in 1951.  What were your first impressions of Bud Powell?

MM:    Actually, I’m afraid the first record that I heard by Bud Powell didn’t really impress me at all, because it was a recording that was made in Europe, and I don’t think it was from his most fruitful period.  He was playing some ballads, and they were very slow and very stark-sounding voicings that were… I was used to the big, fat, pretty voicings of Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum and so forth, and a certain kind of mood that would be set in a ballad, and most of these things that I was hearing from Bud Powell at first were very slow, very stark-sounding ballads.  So I’m afraid I wasn’t very impressed at first.

But I think the first record by Bud that impressed me was The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1, I think, the one with Fats Navarro and Sonny Rollins.  Because I have always been impressed by long lines, long right-hand single-note lines; that always got me.  And I was really impressed when I heard Bud’s conception of that.

TP:    Mulgrew’s next selection (Charlie Parker and Strings, “Just Friends”) leads me ask whether primarily pianists, or also other instrumentalists have affected your conception of how to play the piano?

MM:    Well, I would say primarily pianists, but certainly not only.  I have learned a lot from listening to John Coltrane, from Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins…

TP:    Is it about attack?  About different types of…

MM:    Generally about the language.  Just learning language from them.

[MUSIC: Bird and Strings, “Just Friends” (1950), Miles Davis/Mobley/Kelly/PC/Cobb, “Bye-Bye Blackbird” (1961)]

TP:    …”Bye-Bye Blackbird” featured the subtle swing and strong solo by Wynton Kelly, about whom I know Mulgrew has some words.

MM:    Oh yeah.  Well, it’s interesting to me that you referring to it as “subtle swing.”  I think of it as very pronounced swing!

TP:    Very pronounced, but I guess I was referring to the little modulation he did at the beginning of his solo.  I should have been more precise.

MM:    Oh, yes.  Well, he had that kind of finger-popping, foot-tapping way with the way he played time.  It’s very, very unique.  I’ve heard many players, younger players trying to emulate that, including yours truly.  It’s interesting to see how that happens in a person’s playing.

TP:    Well, maybe I should have used the word “sophisticated.”  Because it is everything you say, and yet, it’s always done in such an elegant way somehow.  I mean, these are subjective words for dealing with music.

MM:    Yeah, and words are always inadequate to describe something that’s so natural and so beautiful.  But Wynton is still, I think, a very strong influence in the Jazz piano world.  First of all, Wynton was a great accompanist.  I think anybody who wants to be a contemporary accompanist would have to check Wynton out, because as Miles Davis said, he knew how to feed the fire.  And that’s important, how to contribute to the time mechanism of the group, how to help the rhythm section and get deeply into that pocket.  And that feeling we were just talking about, I think most of us would want that if we could have it! [LAUGHS]  But you can’t teach that kind of thing, you can’t analyze it so that somebody else could really get to it.  That’s one of those mysteries that happens in this music, when a person’s personality, his own ways and idiosyncracies (or however you want to refer to it, call it whatever you want to call it), when that takes a big part and comes to play into the music.

TP:    I guess Wynton Kelly was the product of a number of influences, from Brooklyn and a West Indian background, and Classical music and church and all of that went into that incredible style, the singular distillation of which we heard on “Bye Bye Blackbird.”  In terms of Charlie Parker’s music, have you as a pianist dealt first-hand with Charlie Parker in formulating your aesthetic?

MM:    Well, probably not first-hand.  I mean, I guess first-hand I would have to be here to play with him.  But I understand what you mean.

Yeah. there was a phase in my development where I really listened to a lot of Charlie Parker and a lot of Bud Powell.  And I still listen to them.  But I always thought that Charlie Parker had the ultimate phrasing.  If I were to pick someone to model how I would like to phrase my lines on the piano, it would be Charlie Parker.

TP:    Well, enough said.

MM:    [LAUGHS]

TP:    [ETC.]  Next up is Lee Morgan’s “The Delightful Deggie” from Delightful-Lee on Blue Note.

MM:    Well, this is one of my very favorite albums.  I think if I could probably take 10 or 20 records on the road or to  the moon with me, this would be one of them.  It’s great because it features both Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson, and it shows the contrasts and similarities in their participation in the Jazz scene at that time — and it’s a very interesting study in contrasts.  It also features McCoy Tyner, who I have always thought of as a very, very gifted melody-maker as a soloist and improviser.

[MUSIC: L. Morgan, “The Delightful Deggie” (1966); McCoy Tyner, “Surrey With tHe Fringe On Top’ (1968)]

TP:    “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” is a trio performance within a quartet concert at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1968.  As liner-note-writer Ed Williams who said, the trio hijacked “The Surrey With The Fringe On Top” and took it into some different territory!

MM:    Oh my! [LAUGHS]

TP:    [ETC.] You were mentioning McCoy Tyner’s melodicism before the set, and I guess nobody needs to be told about how that piece swung.

MM:    Absolutely not.  But yeah, I think that McCoy has had, and still has a very unique gift of melody.  Because I realized what the challenge would be of getting into an area of pentatonics and fourths and other kinds of unconventional intervals for the time, and to sort of get melody out of it takes a rare gift.  McCoy has that gift, and you can hear it in his very earliest recordings.  He has a very, very great gift of melody.

What I’d like to say here is that I think writers and critics have probably not understood the great significance, the cultural significance of McCoy’s influence in American music — Trane, along with McCoy, or vice-versa.  But I often see reviews where they will critique a younger player, such as myself or some of the younger players, and sort of write off, “Oh, he’s another McCoy Tyner influenced piano player.”  But I think that influence is not going anywhere very soon.  I think it has great cultural significance.

TP:    Elaborate.

MM:    Well, there’s a sound there.  There’s a sound in McCoy’s playing, in the music that Trane brought forth, brought into fruition, that very much influenced American society and American culture.  So I think McCoy’s playing will affect American music for a long time.  Not only Jazz, but I hear it, you know, in keyboard players in particular in all sorts of genres of music.  I think some of the writers and critics sort of treat McCoy’s style as if it’s, you know, another passing phase — “Well, it’s time to get on to something else,” and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.  But I see McCoy as sort of a prophet of musical truth, and that’s going to be around a long time.

TP:    Of course, McCoy Tyner recently has recorded some amazing solo releases for Blue Note that show his expansive grasp of the whole piano continuum, and always with his own distinctive sound.  It’s always there.

MM:    Right.

TP:    You mentioned before that Oscar Peterson was one of your primary early influences coming up in high school.  I think he’s also been misunderstood by the critical community, and I think Phineas Newborn ran into that problem with people who were writing about the music.

MM:    Well, I guess it’s sort of the nature of the beast when you have this whole thing that we call art criticism.  You know, you have to say something!  And it’s always a matter of opinion.  There are no absolute truths in those criticisms.  It’s always opinion.  I think many, many great musicians, especially John Coltrane, suffered from the lashings of the critics.

Oscar Peterson, there’s no doubt about it, is one of the great pianists of all time.  But Oscar is primarily a stylist.  I don’t see Oscar as a conceptualist as I do, say, Bud Powell or McCoy Tyner or Herbie Hancock.  He brought forth a style that was pleasing, and it’s the cause of his popularity maintaining itself through the decades.

TP:    Well, he’s one of the virtuosos of his time…

MM:    Absolutely.  Undeniably! [LAUGHS]

TP:    …and a pinnacle that almost any jazz pianist has to deal with.  You were very specific about wanting this particular trio side from the mid-1960’s with Sam Jones and Bobby Durham as opposed to one of the sides with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen.

MM:    Well, I think when people think of the “classic” Oscar Peterson Trio, they think of the Ray Brown-Ed Thigpen trio.  And I think that’s probably true.  But without trying to compare anybody with Ray Brown or anybody with Ed Thigpen, I think as a unit this particular trio with Sam Jones and Bobby Durham (and at one phase of it was Louis Hayes) brought out another side of Oscar, a kind of less cocktailish side, if you will… I’m taking a bold step in saying that, because I never thought of Oscar Peterson as being a Cocktail Piano Player.  But those are relative terms.  You know, I’ve heard people refer to Ahmad Jamal or Red Garland even as sort of a Cocktail style.

TP:    Some cocktails have more of an impact than others.

MM:    Yes.  As a matter of fact, I’ve heard some so-called cocktail piano players that I’d rather hear than some Jazz players!  But that’s all relative.

But anyway, this particular trio brought a little edge to Oscar’s sound, I think, and to his playing, if you will.  This particular record was my first record.  Oscar was the first real Jazz piano player that I heard that really just knocked me out, that made me… When I heard Oscar Peterson, I knew I wanted to be a Jazz player.  And this was the first record that I had.

TP:    It’s a moment you remember vividly, I take it.

MM:    Very vividly.

TP:    How old were you?  Where were you?

MM:    I was about 14 years old, sitting up one night watching The Joey Bishop Show.  And they announced that Oscar Peterson was coming on.  And I had been hearing about Oscar Peterson through my older brother, who was always trying to point me in that direction — because I wanted to play like Ramsay Lewis and whatever.  But when I heard Oscar Peterson, I just flipped.  Because I could relate to it on a number of levels.  Here is Black music being played at a very high level of sophistication.  That sort of motivated me.  I could study Classical Music and all of that, but I was never motivated to do that.  But when I saw Oscar Peterson, I was motivated to master the piano.

[MUSIC: OP Trio (Jones/Durham), “Girl Talk” (1972); A. Jamal, “Poinciana” (1971)]

MM:    As one can tell from that performance, the one great thing about Ahmad Jamal is, for me, he affirms once more that there’s no one way to play Jazz.  There’s no one way to play Jazz piano.  There’s no one way that Jazz is supposed to sound.  I was very captivated about the way he went about that performance with reckless abandon.  There’s something about that approach that’s really captivating for me, very interesting.  He did some very daring and unusual things in that performance.  Ahmad has always been one of my very favorite pianists, one of my initial inspirations.

TP:    Well, Herbie Hancock, who we’ll hear next, undoubtedly heard a lot of Ahmad Jamal when he was coming up in Chicago…

MM:    I’m sure of it.

TP:    …and Miles Davis, of course, used Ahmad’s orchestrational approach to the trio as the model for the dynamics of his rhythm section.

MM:    Yes.

TP:    And I’m sure Herbie Hancock applied these lessons to very good use during his time with Miles. [ETC.] Next is “Head Start,” from a recording by the Bobby Hutcherson Quartet featuring Herbie Hancock in February 1966, one of several collaborations between the two, although not all were issued contemporaneously.

MM:    Well, I’d like to say, everybody knows how great Herbie  Hancock is, and there’s no doubt about it — I mean, Herbie is so amazing.  You hear that because so many young pianists today are emulating Herbie, and he’s had a mammoth amount of influence on the piano scene for the last thirty years.

TP:    If you had to crystallize it, what would you say it is about his sound and his conception?

MM:    The great thing about Herbie is that it’s no one thing, it’s a lot of things.  There’s the touch, there’s the sophistication, the taste, the intuitiveness, and the versatility.  So it’s all of those things that make Herbie so great.  He’s just such a phenomenal musician.  Probably if “genius” applies to anyone these days, it’s him!

I’d also like to say that Bobby Hutcherson, who is playing on this next recording, is one of my very favorite musicians alive.  He’s just such a great improviser.  I’ve personally been influenced by the way Bobby plays.

TP:    How does that translate?

MM:    Well, Bobby has a very advanced harmonic approach in the way that he plays his lines.  He plays his lines between the cracks, I think.  I mean, Herbie has that same quality, and that’s why they were such a great match for this record.  I played with Bobby back when I was with Woody Shaw in the early Eighties; Bobby was a great friend of Woody’s, and they played a lot of music together.  Bobby did some recordings and concerts and tours with us, and I was just knocked out by him, not only as a musician, but as a person also.  So he’s one of my very favorite improvisers.

TP:    I guess you must have had an extended taste of Woody Shaw’s unique harmonic sensibility.

MM:    Oh, yeah.  Well, another one of those great affirmations that there’s no one way to play Jazz.  Woody was always searching, you know, for that certain sound that would open up vast new musical horizons and territories.

[MUSIC: Hutcherson/Hancock, “Head Start” (1966); Bu/Golson, “Along Came Betty” (1958)]

TP:    [ETC.] Both Benny Golson and Art Blakey have played an important role in Mulgrew’s life. You were a Jazz Messenger for several years in the mid-1980’s, and you’re on several of Benny Golson’s recent recordings.

MM:    Right.  I have actually worked quite a bit with Benny over the last five or six years or so.  Benny is one of the greatest saxophone players alive.  I think he’s very much underrated today.  I think it’s kind of sad that we don’t take those giants and embrace them and treat them the way they should be treated.  Benny plays a whole lot of saxophone these days.  His style has changed somewhat from the days we just heard.  He still has some remnants of that sound, but also conceptually, he’s taken on some of the Coltranish mannerisms in his playing.  And you know, quiet as it’s kept, it might have been that they influenced each other.  They were friends, very close friends…

TP:    Jimmy Heath was a third leg of that relationship, too.

MM:    That’s right, that Philadelphia kind of connection there.  Benny has always had that almost kind of sheet-of-sound concept, as you can hear in this solo, running up and down the saxophone.  He was doing that way back then, playing the chords and things like that.

TP:    Without knowing it for sure, it would seem to me that Benny Golson has folloswed that Coleman Hawkins-Hershel Evans-Don Byas-Lucky Thompson line of saxophone playing, and Trane maybe got more into the post-Lester Young end of that spectrum…

MM:    Yeah, Dexter Gordon and that kind of thing… Yeah, absolutely.  There are points of departure, but there are also points where they have things in common.  You can hear, especially when Trane first started to get into running the scales up and down the saxophone… There’s a lot of similarities in the approach to that anyway.  The stylistic sound of the horn is different.  But probably they influenced each other.

TP:    When Benny Golson joined the Jazz Messengers, as he tells the story, Art Blakey was looking for a way to establish a definable group identity.  Not that it was floundering, but when Benny Golson came in he seems to have codified what became the Messenger sound, and begun the continuity of Jazz Messenger units that lasted over the next thirty years.

MM:    What I’ve noticed from playing with many bands, it’s usually two major factors that sort define the sound of the band.  Not necessarily in this order, composition is one of the main factors that defines the sound of a band, and number two is the drummer.  The drummer has a great influence on the sound, how the band plays, how it swings, he influences the freedom and the type of vocabulary that a soloist can use.  Coltrane might have been quite different in his development if he had had some other drummer than Elvin Jones.

TP:    Well, referring to our next set, speaking of drummers, and speaking of Art Blakey, he and Thelonious Monk were just about best friends, birthday-mates, and so forth.  Of Clark Terry there’s not much we can say except that there is no greater trumpet player.  And there’s a session Mulgrew was very specific about including called In Orbit, from 1958, Clark Terry with Thelonious Monk as a sideman, Philly Joe Jones on drums and Sam Jones on bass.  You’ve recorded a number of Monk’s compositions.

MM:    Yes.  I first heard Thelonious Monk’s records when I was in high school, and it was probably some of the first real Bebop (as it were) records that I heard.  I found it so easy to relate to Monk, as opposed to how I first heard Bud, for some reason.  Monk I could easily relate to.  It was that childlike kind of simplicity in his playing.

TP:    Did you first hear his solos or his group things?  A lot of people seem to have first heard his solos.

MM:    Well, I first heard the group things, the Five Spot records with Johnny Griffin and all of that.  And I first heard tunes like “Straight, No Chaser,” you know, the melody and the rhythms — the syncopation in the melody really intrigued me.  I was talking to Bill Easley last night, and he was telling a story about how he first heard me, first met me in Memphis, when I walked into a jam session and played “Blue Monk” just like I’d heard it on the record, or as close as I could get it.  It was probably one of the first Bebop tunes I knew, if you want to call it Bebop.

TP:    James Williams tells that same story.

MM:    Oh, does he?  [LAUGHS]

TP:    The same session.  He thought, “Wow, there’s a sensibility at work here.”  Let’s listen to the only Monk composition on In Orbit, “Let’s Cool One.”

[MUSIC: CT/Monk, “Let’s Cool One” (1958); Keith Jarrett, “Rainbow” (Bye-A-Blue)]

I was just saying to Mulgrew Miller that every pianist who comes up to do a Musician Show has their one favorite Keith Jarrett solo, to which Mulgrew said, “And this is mine.”

MM:    Yes.  Well, I think Keith Jarrett is a melody-maker of the highest order.  Not only is he a great melodist, he’s also a very lyrical player, and there’s so much poetry in his lines and his improvising.  “Rainbow” is just one of the finest recorded examples of that, for my ears anyway.  I just love that piano solo.

TP:    This will take us into the world of Duke Ellington, and the “Liberian Suite, Dance #1.”  Mulgrew, I guess the gig that got you out into the broader world of touring, professional big bands and Ellingtonia was two or three years with the Mercer Ellington Orchestra, from about 1977, was it?

MM:    Right.  Three years.

TP:    I guess that experience would give you a full, idiomatic range of piano techniques and melodies and the great Ellington book, not to mention the opportunity to play in an accomplished big band.

MM:    Well, that was a great experience on a number of levels, not only musically, but personally, too.  I always like to say that I grew up in that band.  I turned 21, I think, the year before I joined the band.  It was quite an experience on a personal level, because I had to learn to live with 18 other people on a bus, [LAUGHS], and get along with them, all types of personalities, and so forth and so on.

But on a musical level, it was a great experience because I learned in that band that music is about sound and color and feelings.  It’s not about exercises and formulas all the time, you know.  Duke Ellington was a sculptor of sound, a painter of sound, if you will.  And that has left a lasting impression upon me.

TP:    Were you able to check out the scores, for instance, in the band?

MM:    There were piano scores.  But a lot of the extended works we were doing were transcriptions, and basically my experience was hearing the performances live.

TP:    As the pianist in the Mercer Ellington Band, you’re of course inheriting the mantle, so to speak, of one of the most individual-sounding pianists that ever played the instrument.  Were you at any point trying to actually get the type of sonorities and dynamics, or was it a question of playing live?

MM:    No.  Of course, there was a certain role as accompanist to the band and a certain thing about… I mean, I had to deal with the style to a certain degree.  There are certain intros, like the classic intro to “Satin Doll” or to “A-Train” that I had to do.  But basically, I mean, my whole musical makeup is totally different from Duke Ellington’s, you know, and I wasn’t expected to come there and sit in the band and be Duke Ellington.

TP:    And thank God for that.

MM:    Yes, and thank God for that.  I would never have been able to fulfill that kind of demand.

TP:    So of course, the band then took on a very different personality than the Duke Ellington band.

MM:    Yeah, because there were a lot of younger guys in the band as well, and the younger guys are influenced by a lot of different things than, say, Cootie Williams and some of the older guys who were the Ellington luminaries.  So yeah, you’re right.  It took on a different feeling and a different sound, with a different personality.

TP:    And yet, an invaluable experience.

MM:    Definitely.  Most definitely.

[MUSIC: Ellington,”Liberian Suite, Dance #1″ (1947); Milt Jackson/Cedar/Higgins, “Bullet Bag” (1993]l

MM:    Well, what can I say about Milt Jackson?  He’s probably one of the greatest musicians of all time.  I only played with Milt Jackson for the first time about a year ago.  When I first came to New York, I had a list of guys that I really wanted to play with, and he was on that list.  Up until last year, last June I believe it was, I had played with just about everybody I wanted to really play with really badly.  When I played with him, I told him, “I can go and quit” or lay down and die in peace or whatever!  But it really sort of put the lid on all of my greatest desires as far as playing with people.

TP:    What impresses me most in listening to him is that he seems like an endless fount of melodic invention.  I can recollect a concert a few years ago, just kind of a pickup band.  He played 14 or 15 pieces.  And he started hitting his stride maybe around the fifth piece, and everyone that followed he did something to out-do what he’d done on the previous piece, when it didn’t seem he could possibly come up with anything new to say.

MM:    Yeah, he’s amazing.  Milt Jackson is amazing.  And how he can weave everything around the Blues, no matter what kind of song it is… I heard him play what we would call a modal tune, I think “So What” or “Impressions,” one of those tunes that he plays sometimes, and how much blues he can play in that is amazing!

TP:    Cedar Walton and Billy Higgins is a rhythm team that goes back thirty years.

MM:    Well, when I first came to New York, Cedar and Sam Jones and Billy used to play together.  And I think to this day it’s probably the finest rhythm section that I’ve heard in New York.  That was just a team that was unbelievable.  Cedar is another one of those great, great melody-makers.  I love Cedar’s playing because he’s so great with melody and orchestration.  He’s such a great trio player because he’s a great orchestrator.

TP:    A role he filled with the Jazz Messengers, one of your predecessors.

MM:    Certainly.  And I’ll say this about Billy Higgins.  A few years ago I got to play with Billy Higgins for the first time on a record with Bobby Hutcherson, and I mean, I was high for a month!

In closing I’d like to talk about Art Blakey.  I would like to talk about Art because we miss him, and I miss him, and it was great experience — and the scene misses Art Blakey.  There is now such a void for that kind of energy on the scene.  I think if anybody deserves credit for the so-called revitalization of Jazz vis-a-vis the young lions and all of that, it’s Art Blakey.  Because throughout the decades, he kept marching right on, in spite of whatever the conditions were.  I think the Messengers at one time had sort of come down to three pieces and a singer.  But he kept on!  So when it came time again for an interest in Jazz, he was there already, with a whole army of new and young talent.  So I think Art Blakey deserves a lot of credit for revitalizing, if you will, Jazz.

On the 72nd Birthday Anniversary of Charles Earland, An Interview From 1998

In 1998, Joe Fields gave me the opportunity to write the program notes for a terrific Charles Earland recording called Slammin’ and Jammin’ [Savant] with Carlos Garnett, Melvin Sparks and Bernard Purdie. The man known as “The Mighty Burner” died the following year; in recognition of his 72nd birthday, here’s the verbatim interview that I conducted with him towards writing the piece.

* * *

Charles Earland (Ted Panken):

TP:    This seems a little different than your last number of records in terms of the way the band is set up, because you seem primarily to have used working bands on the last records, particularly in terms of rhythm sections.  Why is this one set up in this way?

EARLAND:  Well, sometimes you need to change your taste.  I’m used to working with my band all the time. Eric Alexander, Jim Rotondi, Greg Rockingham, Vince Ector and Bob DeVos, we work together as a group all the time.  On this particular date, I just wanted to do something different, just to change the pace a little bit.  We don’t want to keep giving the people the same thing all the time.

TP:    What’s the difference between coming into the studio with a band like this and let’s say going in with your own working band?  There seems to be quite a bit of care taken and thought given to the material you’re using.  You’re using a different groove on each one, each one has a little different structure.

EARLAND:  Well, when I go in the studio with my regular group, we’re more serious-minded.  It’s just the complete opposite of what you said.  When I go in with the quintet, we go in with the attitude to really come out with something more serious than the normal organ group sound or the way the organ groups play.  A lot of times organ groups play slammin’ and jammin’ music all the time, and they never play anything serious.  With the quintet, we usually do different time signatures and different kind of material.

On this particular date it was more fun.  Four guys got together, and we did stuff that we all knew.  It was nothing that we put together with any…

TP:    Was it all pretty impromptu?

EARLAND:  This was all pretty impromptu, and we all had a lot of fun doing it.  Like, it was good to see Melvin Sparks and Purdie, we slapped hands and went in the studio and had a good time.  We got together the day before and worked out the things we were going to put down.  It was just like that.

TP:    What was the criteria for picking the tunes and using the tunes?

EARLAND:  I already had an idea of what I wanted to do.

TP:    Let’s talk about each tune, a little capsule on each thing.  Your relation to the tune, why you took the approach you took.  “Honky Tonk.”

EARLAND:  “Honky Tonk” has a lot of history with it.  We had just lost Bill Doggett, and I loved Bill with all my heart and I love his wife.  I just wanted to keep his spirit alive.  He was a definite hero as far as the organ instrument is concerned with his life.  He helped us as young guys find our way to where we are today with the music.  He was always in the trenches.  He never really got the recognition that he deserved.  People only know him by the one song “Honky Tonk,” but I feel as though this one song… If you can just write one song that will follow yo for the rest of your life, you’ve made an accomplishment.  Bill Doggett was definitely one of the innovators who I feel needs to get a certain amount of recognition, and whatever I can do to say that he’s a great man, I will.

TP:    When you were getting your organ chops together, was he someone whose solos you studied?

EARLAND:  Oh, yes.  When I was coming up as a kid, he was someone I definitely admired.  I loved his group.  I loved him and I loved to hear that saxophone of Percy France.  Oh, man, those were the good days, especially when I lived in Atlantic City, and these cats used to come to town.  Oh, they used to just knock my socks off.

TP:    Let me step back with a little bit.  I gather you’re from the Philly area.  When did you live in Atlantic City?

EARLAND:  Well, every summer I lived in Atlantic City!  As a kid, I was playing saxophone in school, in the school band at South Philadelphia High School.  I went to school with Frank Avalon and Lew Tabackin and Chubby Checker and people like that.  So I was always being inspired musically by somebody.  Frankie Avalon played trumpet.  A lot of people don’t know that.  He played trumpet in the band.  As a matter of fact, I played baritone saxophone in the South Philadelphia High School dance band, and Lew Tabackin played tenor and Frankie Avalon played trumpet.

TP:    Was baritone sax your first instrument.

EARLAND:  No, alto saxophone was my first instrument.  During the summer vacation, everybody got a job in Atlantic City.  We could read music, so we played in the pits, where they had the girlie girls dancing, the shake dancers and the strippers.  So as a kid, at night I played in the pit, and then during my off-time I was running around to the different clubs checking out the bands, like Willis Jackson and Wild Bill Davis and Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff, and cats like that around town.  And of course, Bill Doggett was one of my favorites.

TP:    So you were 15-16-17 around then.

EARLAND:  Yes.

TP:    Was that the first time you got a dose of live music?

EARLAND:  Well, I was always big for my age, so I looked much older than I was — because I was a big kid.  But that’s when I really got my fill of organ.  I just fell in love with that instrument.  Then I was lucky enough to land a job playing tenor saxophone with Jimmy McGriff, and I worked with Jimmy for about 3½ years, and that’s where I learned to play the organ.  I used to watch him play every night, and then on intermissions and breaks I would sit down and try to imitate what I heard Jimmy McGriff play.

TP:    Did you have a keyboard or piano background before that?

EARLAND:  None.

TP:    So you developed your technique through watching him and trying to apply what he did.

EARLAND:  Watching him, right.

TP:    So you’re totally self-taught.

EARLAND:  Yes.  It’s a blessing from God, what I do.  I’m not what you call classically trained.

TP:    Do you have a musical background in your family.

EARLAND:  Yes, my mother played piano in church, but I never had any kind of piano training at all.

TP:    When did you start playing an instrument?

EARLAND:  I started in elementary school on alto saxophone.

TP:    Who were the jazz saxophonists that you liked?

EARLAND:  I used to babysit at my aunt’s house all the time, and she had this great big James Moody collection, and I used to play James Moody records and try to imitate what James was playing on alto.

TP:    With the Johnny Acea arrangements.

EARLAND:  Yeah, the big band, “there I go, there I go,” all that stuff.  My aunt had all these on 78’s.  Of course I scratched them all up trying to learn the solos!

TP:    So James Moody was your first big influence on the alto.

EARLAND:  Yeah, he was my first influence on saxophone.  There was also Jimmy Heath, Benny Golson, of course Trane.  I lived around the corner from the Heath Brothers, from Percy, Tootie and Jimmy.  Jimmy was always having some kind of musical rehearsal around his house, and one afternoon, man, they had Cannon and Nat and them cats over there.  I used to hang outside the window, Pops, Jimmy’s father, used to chase us from under the window!  I used to see all the greats.  When they came to Philadelphia to play, they would look Jimmy Heath and the Heath Brothers up.  I used to take saxophone lessons from Jimmy. [HE WAS ON CHARLES’ THIRD RECORD]

TP:    Let’s talk about “Sugar.”

EARLAND:  “Sugar” was a tune I fell in love with when I was coming up as an organ player, listening to George Benson and Stanley Turrentine and Freddie Hubbard.  It was a tune I always liked to play.  They used Ron Carter when they recorded it, and they couldn’t have used a greater bass player, but I felt like I could record it and do it with my own bass.  I always wanted to do it, and I finally got the chance.

TP:    Anything particular about what you put on it?

EARLAND:  No, we just had fun playing it.  We did it as a trio with Melvin Sparks and Bernard, and the three of us always clicked whenever we played.  It was like old home week.

TP:    When did you first start playing with Melvin Sparks?

EARLAND:  That was back when I played organ in Lou Donaldson’s band.

TP:    That was the late Sixties, and you did some of those Blue Note records.

EARLAND:  Yes, I did some of those Blue Note records with Lou Donaldson.

TP:    How about Purdie?

EARLAND:  Oh, I used to watch Purdie back in the R&B days.  He played with everybody.  We did a couple of LP’s together, though I can’t remember how far back.  We were always jamming and always on sessions together, and when the musicians get together and do jam sessions together, they get a feeling for each other.  Matter of fact, we just did the Playboy Jazz Festival Together, me, Bernard, Joey De Francesco, Stanley Turrentine and Lou Donaldson and Kevin Eubanks.  Bill Cosby put together what he called “The Cos of good music thing,” and we were the “Cos of good music.”  He likes them Philly boys.  Plus he likes Kevin, too.  Kevin is a real nice cat and a good guitar player.  That was the first time I had a chance to work with Kevin, but I had played with everybody else before.

TP:    Talk about “Mercy, Mercy,” your association with the tune and what you put on it.  You have that long sort of building solo at the end.

EARLAND:  We kind of changed it up and put another groove to it.  More Funk.  I don’t use bass players, but I did on this tune.  I wanted to get a more funky sound.  I was really kind of experimenting, working with a bass player; I’m my own bass player, because I’m my own bass player.  Joe Zawinul is one of my favorite players, and it’s his tune, and you reach back into your history, Cannon and Nat… [LAUGHS] Then living out here in Chicago also, where they made it live, so I hear it quite a bit.

TP:    “Mercy, Mercy” is popular in Chicago.

EARLAND:  Oh yes.  I live in the south suburbs, out in Madison(?), about 30 miles south of Chicago.

TP:    “Johnny Comes Marching Home”.

EARLAND:  I could say that was one of my favorite organ albums with Jimmy Smith and Donald Bailey.  That was some group he had.  I just loved that “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and I thought I’d stick that in here and people will remember it.

TP:    Was Jimmy Smith pretty much of a first-hand influence for you?

EARLAND:  Oh yeah.  He was one of the cats, man.  I loved Bill Davis and Bill Doggett.  You know what I liked about these guys the most?  They could groove!  Man, when I would come down Kentucky Avenue in Atlantic City, I could hear them organs screaming all the way at the end of the block.  As soon as you hit that block on Kentucky Avenue (and Kentucky Avenue looks like a ghost town right now, man, when the casinos came and put everybody out of business), I could hear those organs, and you would automatically… We had a certain kind of walk in those days anyway, man, and as soon as you’d hear them organs on Kentucky Avenue you’d go into your bop walk!  You’d start to struttin’ with the groove, man, because you could feel the pulse all the way a block away.  You’d just groove right on up to Club Harlem, or across the street to the Little Belmont.  Usually they’d have Chris Columbo and Gatortail playing at the Harlem Club, and Wild Bill Davis or Bill Doggett playing at Little Belmont, right across the street.  Right down the street from that was the High Hat, where there was Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff.  All these orsgan players in town at the same time.  Then down at the Glass Hat you’d find the Don Patterson Trio with Billy James on drums.

TP:    So you learned from watching Jimmy McGriff, but you were studying the nuances of everybody’s style.

EARLAND:  Oh, yes.  I loved the way Jack McDuff voiced his group.  I still voice my group similarly today, to make my little group sound like a big band.  Jack McDuff was using a quartet then.  I use a quintet because I like a brass sound, so I have a trumpet player in my band.  Jack had Georgie Benson and Joe Dukes and Red Holloway, and I used to follow this quartet around Jersey.  If they went to Newark, I would be in Newark; if they were in Trenton or Atlantic City, wherever they were, if I could be there, I went to see this quartet.  The way Jack arranged his band was phenomenal.  He’s a great arranger and a great writer.  He’d have that little quartet so dynamically rehearsed and the voicings were just incredible!  That’s the only thing I could say.  I loved the way Jack voiced and structured his band, and I learned from that how to voice a band, how to make a little organ group sound like a big band.

That’s one of the advantages of an organ, too.  Because it has so many voicings, you can add to what you already have, and all you’d have to do was put a lead voice on the top and an organ underneath and another voice in between, and you had a full orchestra sound.

TP:    Well, you really put the moan on the organ.  I know your phrasing comes from your saxophone background, but I hear a lot of that Don Patterson single-line approach.

EARLAND:  Yes, I play staccato.  Cats with Classical training have a tendency to play legato.  But since I don’t have Classical training, I play staccato.  My attack on my notes is completely different. I play like people play typewriters.

TP:    “Organic Groove” is where Carlos Garnett starts making his presence felt.  A bit about him and his participation in this, and that tune.

EARLAND:  Joe Fields recommended Carlos Garnett, and I remembered him from the days he played with Norman Connors and people like that.  He was always a fascinating player.  He wrote this tune called “Organic Groove,” and we said, “Let’s do it.”  That’s what it was.

TP:    A few words about the tune.

EARLAND:  It’s just like what it is, a groove.  I guess he was thinking about something organic at the time he wrote it.  I can’t really elaborate on it, but we liked it.

TP:    How do you like his sound?  Did you know him in the ’70s?

EARLAND:  Oh, yes.  I knew him back when he played with Norman Connors.  Plus, you know how Norman was; he was playing a bit of everything back in those days.

TP:    Well, the thing that really got me of the whole album was “Let The Music Play,” because of the way it built.

EARLAND:  Man, I love playing that song.  Randy Miller, who produced one of my albums back in the ’70s, and was the bandleader of Brass Construction, wrote it.  I recorded it once before on electric piano for Mercury Records, back in the ’70s.  It was a big hit.  It never was a hit in the United States, I believe because I did on piano!  But every time I go to London, if I don’t play that song, I get shot!  It’s like a European hit.  But I never did it on organ.  So I figured if it’s a hit in Europe, now I can try it out in the States.  We had fun doing it.  I love that tune.

TP:    Here’s the time to say something about what Purdie is like as a drummer.  He just takes those grooves like a pit bull with some meat, and he doesn’t let them go!

EARLAND:  Oh yeah.  Bernard Purdie is one of the greatest drummers that ever played the instrument.  He is super-versatile.  It doesn’t matter what you come to play.  He’ll play heavy metal, he’ll play R&B, he’ll play Gospel, he’ll play Jazz, and then he’ll play the intricate way-out Jazz.  It doesn’t matter to him.  All you have to do is let him know what you want to play, and Bernard Purdie will play it.  I don’t know any other way to describe this man but saying that God has blessed him with a super-talent and he has used it efficiently.

Melvin Sparks is an organ player’s guitar player.  Not only that, but he’s also a virtuoso in his own right.  Melvin Sparks can play it all, from R&B right down to the heaviest Jazz.

TP:    Talk about your composition, “Sheila’s Blues.”  You do that locked-hands Milt Buckner thing at the end.

EARLAND:  See, I had those influences all my life.  I have a whole lot of Milt Buckner and Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett still locked in me that I haven’t released yet.

TP:    Do you think the loose nature of this record let you put some of that out where it might not have with the quintet?

EARLAND:  Yeah.  A lot of that stuff is like groove stuff, and you get into one of those Bill Doggett grooves or one of them Wild Bill Davis grooves or one of them Milt Buckner grooves on the end, and it’s just automatic.  I never know what I’m going to play.  It just becomes automatic.  It’s just like a computer; before you know it, something just poppped up on the screen.  You get into one of those feelings, man… If I can’t feel it, man, I won’t play it.  If I can’t feel it, I have a problem with it.  That’s how I describe music.  Anything that I listen to that moves me emotionally or touches something in me is good music.  If I listen to something and I don’t get no kind of reaction from it, to me it’s not good music.  Now, it might be good music to somebody else, because it’s a matter of taste, but that’s how I judge music.  And I listen to Classical music, I listen to R&B, Heavy Metal; it doesn’t make a difference to me.  If it moves me, I like it.

TP:    I interrupted you when you were talking about “Sheila’s Blues.”

EARLAND:  Sheila is my wife, and there’s just something about the way that she walks.  So this is more like describing how she walks.  She has this sexy litle flair about her that just knocks my socks off.  We’ve been married now going on eight years, and it’s still there, man.  Sometimes you write about those things.

TP:    What’s that riff on the end of it?  The call-and-response thing you do on the end.

EARLAND:  That’s that old Jimmy Smith groove.  That’s my Jimmy Smith interpretation! [LAUGHS] SPOON-SKRANK… Jimmy used to play that kind of stuff all the time, where the guitar player would automatically go into a 4/4 thing, CHOMP-CHOMP-CHOMP-CHOMP.  We used to even break it down from a 4/4 to a 2/4, but I think I played in four on that.

TP:    One of the things you like to do to keep yourself interested is play with time signatures.

EARLAND:  Yeah.  I do a lot of different time signatures.  I’m the only organ player who plays in 10/4.  I like to do things like that.  I just produced an album by my guitar player, Bob De Vos, and we did a couple of 3/4 things in there.  I also produced an album with Eric Alexander where we do some 3/4.

TP:    One more tune, “Mr. Magic.”

EARLAND:  All right.  “Mister Magic Man” was always a Funk favorite of mine, and the only cat I knew in the world that I could play it with wad Bernard Purdie.  So we just did it for the fun of it.  I don’t know that it sounded as good as Grover and the guys, but Grover’s a good friend of mine, and…

TP:    His first recording was on a record of yours.

EARLAND:  His first record was my second record.  I think it was Living Black: Live At the Pea Club.  I had a young Grover Washington on there.  His brother Darryl was on there, who plays drums with Darryl right now.

TP:    When did you leave Philly?

EARLAND:  Oh, I left Philadelphia at a young age, when I was in my teens still.  Still about 17-18 years old.

TP:    How long have you been in Chicago?

EARLAND:  I’ve been out here now about ten years.  I got married out here about 7½ years ago.

TP:    Does being in Chicago have an effect on the way you play?

EARLAND:  Yes.  I got a chance to relax, I got a chance to plant some roots, and I came out here and slowed my life down, and I found Jesus Christ, and I turned my whole life around.  I’m going to school now.  I’m studying for the ministry.  I’m giving my life to Christ, and I’m completely dedicated.  I just love living now.  I’m glad that I met this young lady I’m with.  I couldn’t be any happier than I am right now.

TP:    Do you play a lot locally around Chicago?

EARLAND:  At least once a month.  I’ve got two clubs I do, and a third I do every now and then.  I play the Cotton Club, at 1400 S. Michigan, and I play Green Dolphin Street at 2200 N. Ashland, at least once every month that I’m in town.  My drummer, Greg Rockingham, lives in Chicago, so I’m fortunate to have Greg wherever I go.  Now, I broke in Eric Alexander, who lived here before he moved to New York, and he worked with me a long time before he got to New York City.  I broke him in…how can you say it, man?  I don’t want to say like I did something great, man.  But I just pulled him through.  I got another little young cat, tenor player that I’m doing the same thing with now.  His name is Frank Catalano.  I see he just did his first CD with Willie Pickins and a couple of cats from out here.

TP:    Who did that for you?  Who were your mentors?

EARLAND:  Lou Donaldson.  Lou Donaldson was like a father to me.  And not because I didn’t have a father, because my real father was a great father.  Lou taught me not only music, but he taught me about the business end of music.  The musicians today are much more intelligent than the cats were when I was coming up.  When I was coming up, all the musicians wanted to do was play and make a record.  But Lou Donaldson told me that music wasn’t only to be appreciated and enjoyed, but it was also a business.  He taught me how to make a living playing music.  A lot of musicians die poor, or they never have anything, because they don’t treat it as a serious business.  The treat it as having a good time.  And the good time runs out when the gig is over, and then you don’t have anywhere to go afterwards.  But now I have a home and a wife and roots and a career.

TP:    And Lou Donaldson helped you set that foundation.

EARLAND:  Oh, Lou Donaldson definitely helped me set that up.  He taught me that it’s a business.  He said you can still enjoy playing music, but you’ll even enjoy it more if you’re a secure person.

TP:    Who were your influences as a tenor player?

EARLAND:  Oh, Trane, of course.  Wayne Shorter.

TP:    So you were into the Modernist sound on tenor.

EARLAND:  I always loved the good players.  That’s why I love Eric Alexannder so much.  Don’t get me wrong, now.  When I first started playing tenor, I listened to cats like Gene Ammons and Red Prysock and Willis Jackson and I imitated them, too.  But I kind of matured, and I started listening to cats like Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane and Benny Golson — always Jimmy Heath!  I always listen to Jimmy.

TP:    It sounds like you had a really top-shelf musical education in high school, like that prepared you for anything you’d have to do later.

EARLAND:  Kinda-sorta.  It was kind of rough for me in high school.  That’s why I left.  I was getting a fair deal over there where I was at.  They made me play baritone saxophone because nobody else wanted to carry it.  It was a great big Buescher, weighed a ton… [LAUGHS] It was one of those kind of things.  I just wasn’t getting what I wanted to get out of high school.  I was around a lot of people, and everything that I got, I got it because I wanted it.  Nothing that anybody took any time with me in high school and sat me down to try to do anything.  Lew Tabackin showed me a few things.  He was always a nice guy.

TP:    I won’t try to paint a rosy picture of high school days.

EARLAND:  No, high school wasn’t that great. I got all my real street training from Atlantic City and places like that, then being with Jimmy.  As a matter of fact, Jimmy had a big influence on me switching to organ.  I used to watch him play.  Jimmy McGriff is so dynamic.  He plays with so much feeling.  He just rocks you.  Jimmy rocked me for a long time, and I just had to do that.

TP:    You’re talking about being into Coltrane and Jimmy Heath and Wayne who put very advanced and cerebral harmonies on top of the groove.  Talk about that in terms of the function of being an organ player in the type of venues that you play over the years, that balance of keeping yourself interested but pleasing the people as well.

EARLAND:  That works perfect with organ, see, where piano groups can’t particularly do that.  With the organ quintet, we might just play, for instance, a song like “Cherokee.”  A piano group will play “Cherokee,” and say we play at the same up tempo.  When they play it, it will sound really far out there, but when the organ group plays the same song, the same arrangement, the same tempo, it will swing harder.  So whatever we played with the organ group, the groove is always going to be there because the instrument is such a percussive type of instrument.  It’s hard for any player, unless they don’t use the bass pedals, to not be able to swing.  And Jimmy McGriff was one of the hardest-swinging organ players.  He had the most dominant bass line, man, of all the players.  Now, Richard Groove Holmes had the trickiest bass line of all the players.  His bass line was more intricate than others.  But if you wanted a steady pulse, a real hot beat that never skipped a beat, Jimmy McGriff was the guy.

TP:    And you got your conception of the bass function of the organ through him?

EARLAND:  For sure.  The groove that I use today came from cats like Jimmy McGriff and Bill Davis and Milt Buckner and even Jimmy Smith.  Jimmy Smith’s bass line is good.  Jimmy Smith was one of those kind of players where everything he did was good.  He didn’t have any one particular part of his playing that stuck out more than the other.  He was a well-rounded player. But you take a cat like Jimmy McGriff, his bass line was outstanding.  The walls would shake!  When we played little clubs, everybody sitting at the bar or the tables, if their heads wasn’t moving, their feets was pattin’.  That’s the kind of thing he had over people when he played, and he still does today.  As a matter of fact, we just played the Blue Note together, Jack McDuff, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and myself.  I had a chance to see all of the guys again, and those guys still have it.  And Jimmy McGriff was still kicking like he always has.

TP:    A few words about your feelings about this date.

EARLAND:  It was good being with my friends again — Bernard, Melvin and Carlos.  I had a great time doing this album.  It was a lot of fun, and we shared a lot of good music together.  God blessed us with the serious groove.  I know that people will like this record because it was definitely slammin’ and jammin’.

TP:    Is that your title?

EARLAND:  Yes.  And that’s really the kind of feeling we got from it.  We came in slammin’ and jammin’, really having a good time and laughing, slapping hands.  Like a good time!  God blessed us with a real seriously musical good time.

Interviews with Charles Lloyd on WKCR 1994 and 1995

ECM’s recent release  of Charles Lloyd’s first five recordings for the label, made between 1989 and 1996, made me remember a vivid encounter I had with Lloyd at WKCR in May 1994, while he was in residence during at the Blue Note supporting his then new-release (and 3rd  for ECM), titled The Call. I’m posting the full transcript of that session and a much more restrained and less discursive encounter a year later, when he was in NYC to support ECM date #4, titled All My Relations.

Charles Lloyd (Out-To-Lunch, May 11, 1994):

[MUSIC: “Brother On The Rooftop”]

TP:    Billy Hart was the drummer, on top of just about every move Charles Lloyd makes on The Call [ECM] and probably every note you’ll be playing this week, I’d say.  Yes, Charles Lloyd?

CL:    All over me like a wet blanket.

TP:    How long have you and Jabali been hooked up in this particular…

CL:    In this incarnation, what happened was that he heard that I was leaving Cannonball, and I was putting my first group together… This is Jabali telling me.  He said he that he was in Washington, D.C., playing with Shirley Horn, I think, and he said, “Oh, I want to be in that group.”  And somehow, Jack De Johnette called me at 3 in the morning and said, “I want to play with you, man.”  So somehow, Jack’s bodaciousness and… People said, “Well, don’t get Jack because he’s too loud” and stuff, but he turned out to be one of the most tasteful ever.  Jabali said that he was supposed to be in the group, and I didn’t understand the rhetoric until he and I started playing together recently in the last year or so.  It’s like they used to talk about love and stuff like that, you know…

TP:    How about the other guys in the band, Bobo Stenson and Anders Jormin?  Your hook-up with them, a few words about their musical qualities.

CL:    That’s a little strange in the sense that in the early Sixties, late Sixties, I had to go to Europe… You know, America, the beer tavern thing, and I couldn’t get the music to fit right and stuff like that, and when I was trying to play, oftentimes they thought I was too much of a cadet or something.  And I went to Europe, and the people testified, and they liked the music.  And there were these little kids in the audience in Stockholm, you know, youngsters, but they just loved the music so much.  And I didn’t realize that that was the group with Keith Jarrett and Jack De Johnette and Cecil McBee.  We played in Stockholm, like, non-stop, and you’d have to claw your way to get out of the place and stuff like that.  People…they were just so hungry for the music, you know.  And these little boys, years later they came around, and… We were playing at the Seed, and essentially what happened was that… You know, the Vikings came over here way before Chris Columbus, and they took their butts back home.  You know, they didn’t try to claim some stuff that people was already living on.  Those guys heard the music, and they were fearless, and they loved it, and I couldn’t… You know, I couldn’t deny the universal living room.  Bobo is for me one of the best pianists on the planet, and Anders is right there also, always selflessly serving the music.

And I always have to have an orchestra, you know, like people who are just dedicated to the full service of the music.  Because I grew up loving Mingus and Duke and Monk, you know, Lady Day and Trane, just all this beautiful music, the Five Spot, and I was out in California with Ornette and stuff, I was in Memphis with Booker Little… Phineas Newborn saw me at an amateur hour show and said, “Boy, you need lessons bad.”  So all that kind of stuff…

TP:    Well, let’s organize a bit, and…

CL:    I can’t organize!

TP:    Well, I’ll try to do it.

CL:    Oh, okay.

TP:    Maybe we can hook up.  You were talking about Memphis, and you came up in Memphis at a time when there were many special musicians all around the same age performing.  Talk about those days and those experiences a little bit.

CL:    It was very powerful, because we knew at a very young age that nobody could touch our stuff.  I don’t know what it was, but there was something in the water or something, maybe the Mississippi flowing through, and Mister Armstrong south of there, coming from there and stuff.  My father went to school with Jimmie Lunceford.  You know, Jimmie Lunceford taught at our high school before…

TP:    Which high school was that?

CL:    Manassas.  Manassas is where all the bad cats went.  Now, there was Booker Washington, where Phineas went, but that was an earlier age.  Phineas was older than us, you know.  But Manassas, man, there was… Just check.  During my time period, there was Frank Strozier, Harold Mabern, George Coleman had gone to school there, Hank Crawford had gone to school there.  There were a lot of musicians you’ve never heard of.  There was another pianist in Memphis named Charles…oh, man, why can’t I think of Charles’ name?

TP:    Charles Thomas.

CL:    Charles Thomas.  Thank you!  Anyway, he played like Bud Powell in those days.  And I keep asking Harold and James Williams about him.

TP:    He played at Bradley’s here in New York about a year ago.  James Williams set that up.

CL:    Did you hear that?

TP:    I did.

CL:    Well, man, I would like to hear him play.  Because he was beautiful, and he was tall and elegant, and he had this kind of refinement and this aggressiveness on the stuff.  He was always dropping half-steps on cats, you know, and if he didn’t like the way a cat played, he would just half-step him to death and just get him off the stage.

So we came up… George was kind of like a Santini.  Do you remember that film?

TP:    The Great Santini?

CL:    Yeah.  George was kind of like that task-master, you know.

TP:    Elaborate a little bit.

CL:    Well, George, you know, he just was like that with all of us.  There was a trombone player, I can’t remember his name, but I remember we had to learn “Cherokee” in B-flat, and then we called it and George played it in A the next time, and he’d call it in E, and you just… You’d say, “Man, just learn ‘Cherokee.’”  He’d say, “Fine, let’s play it in E right here.”  And George would play it real fast…

TP:    I think he’s still doing that to people.

CL:    Right, I know.  But quiet as it’s kept, I think that was an interesting university that he ran.  But when I go really back, earlier, I have to look at Phineas, because there I was, like, ten years old, playing on an amateur show.  Phineas Newborn comes backstage and says, “You need lessons bad,” takes me around the corner on Beale Street, sits me down at the feet of Irving Reason(?), who is a beautiful alto player, who is here in the city somewhere, or was.  They played in Bill Harvey’s orchestra, sometimes society…

I just love Mandela now.  How many of us can do 27, you know what I’m talking about, and come out with that kind of graciousness and bigness, and just say “Freedom for everyone.”  I’m still dreaming of an ideal.

But back… Phineas…playing with him as a kid… So after I took these lessons, later on Phineas had me in his father’s band.  You know, played over in West Memphis, Arkansas, at the Plantation Inn, Mister Morris Berger’s place, okay, and we’d play for dancing and stuff like that.  But amidst all of that we’d be putting stuff in.  And then there were gigs with people like B.B. King.  Bobby Blue Bland was one of the first gigs I ever had.  He was a singer.  He was not featured.  It was Roscoe Gordon’s band.  You ever heard of Roscoe Gordon?

TP:    Mmm-hmm.

CL:    Mmm-hmm.  Well, anyway, Roscoe Gordon played good, and he had some hits around there.  So you’d come hearing all this blues stuff.  My grandfather had lots of property down there.  There was a man named Mister Poon, you know, and he used to play the guitar, and my cousin and I used to hear him play a blues, the Robert Johnson kind of stuff, and we’d jump up and scream and do somersaults and stuff like that.  So I knew real early I was supposed to be a musician.

But getting back to George, he was interesting in the sense that… First of all, Phineas was very big and tolerant.  He gave us lots of love and encouragement.  George did the Santini, a hatchet-chop.  If you didn’t have the stuff together, you know… The trombone player I was about to tell you about, Harper, he was playing, and he turned around and George was putting the evil eye on him, you know, the ray.  So he turned around and looked at… He said, “What was that change right there?”  George said, “What about all those other changes you just missed?  Don’t be asking about that change.”  So George was right there, you know.

And Booker Little was my best friend, and he and I would meet at Thunderbird Pass every morning, and we’d go to school, and Booker… We’d get up at 6 o’clock and practice until about 8:30 or 9, then we’d get a permit to come to school late, and… Like that.  We just were on it.  We just loved the music.  I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to go on so much about Memphis.  Do you have a specific question?

TP:    Well, I think you answered it.  Why don’t you talk a little bit more about your relationship with Booker Little.

CL:    Man, could I.  See, Booker was the incarnation of… Pardon my lyrics, but he was a wise man.  He died… I think we buried him, he was 22 or 23.  I can’t think about that, it hurts so much…

See, here’s what happened.  Booker was a saint and a sage.  I mean, in the full sense of the word.  He was a holy man.  Okay?  Now, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t like the barbecue sauce, and the ladies were all over Booker.  But he had a way of… Booker just had a graciousness, and everybody wanted some of Booker.  I remember one… Anyway, I could tell you about that, but it’s not for radio play, so… I like radio, though.  It’s confessional.  And I love the city, I love the energy… Anyway.

So Booker and I were in Memphis, okay, and we were playing, you know, we heard Bird and Diz, and Dewey when he was Dewey, before he put a dress on—and we loved that music.  It just turned us on so much.  Later, Booker came to… He went to Chicago, you know, with Frank… He followed Frank and those guys to the Chicago Conservatory.  And I either was going to go to Juilliard or the University of Southern California.  I chose Southern California, because I loved Bartok’s music, for some strange reason, and they had a professor there, Halsey Stephens, who Bartok was his specialty.  And I don’t know, somehow I… A kid gets a weird kind of notion on this stuff.  So I went to school there.

But later Booker came through with Max Roach, and that was really inspiring.  In those days I was playing with Bobby Hutcherson, Ornette, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, Scott LaFaro… Now, this is interesting.  In Memphis I was in the right place at the right time.  It was always pregnant with elixir and all these bad cats were just playing their buns off.  Forget Albert(?).  He’d be standing around the corner, peeping, wishing he could be a fly on some of that!  Jamil Nasser.  Jamil said that we remember him as an iceman… I was a swimmer, I used to win prizes and stuff like that, and I quit swimming because I wanted to learn to play the saxophone.  I love the saxophone!

So anyway, when I got… Then I got to California, and I wanted to learn all there is about music.  They only wanted to show me about three hundred years of Europe.  That’s cool, but what about, you know, all this other stuff?  And they didn’t have no elixir ration for that.  So I found out my tribe, you know, in these people I just mentioned.  There was the Coal Man, Ornette, and stuff like that.  He had the Studebaker that went backwards and he ran over his saxophone, and that’s why he later got the plastic one because it ran over the other one.  Sorry.

TP:    I never heard that one.

CL:    After a jam session one day, you know, he backed up… Do you remember those Studebakers?  You couldn’t tell the front from the back.  I don’t remember the years.  But some car aficionados could call in.  So pardon me, I’ll be brief here; I’m sorry about this verbal diarrhea.

What I’m trying to say is that I love the music, I’ve always loved it, I still love it.

So there in California I had all these great people I told you about.  I also played in Gerald Wilson’s Big Band.  There are a lot of people I don’t mention.  For example, I forgot to tell you about Willie Mitchell in Memphis.  I played in his band.  Do you remember Willie Mitchell?  He produced Al Green, man, and all that stuff.  I played with Rufus Thomas and all these people, too.

TP:    So you had a whole range of experience.

CL:    I had a whole range of experience.

TP:    You were playing in almost every genre of the music, with a full cultural experience.

CL:    Yes.  And in the high school band, you’ve got to come in contact with Bach and Brahms and stuff like that…

TP:    Who was your high school band teacher?

CL:    Matthew Garrett.  Matthew Garrett!  I hear this girl Dee Dee Bridgewater, that he’s her father.  Now, I can’t research all this because I’ve been in hiatus for years.  I’m not in hiatus, obviously, now.  You can check.  I’m just zooming, because you know, pshew, I’m home.  So happy to be home.  I like the woods, you know, for a minute, but I stayed too long in the woods.  You know what I’m talking about?  Like, remember that t-shirt, “heading out for the woods.”  So I had to check that out.  But that’s the way I am.  When I go into something, I just go knee deep.  Sorry.  I get drowned.

TP:    Who were you listening to in formulating your sound as a young musician?

CL:    Well, I’d stay up all night listening to Yardbird Parker, you know, Mister Parker.  I knew that he flew through the air with the greatest of ease any time he wanted to, and he lived in luxurious penthouses in Manhattan and had people driving him all over the place, you know, and anything Mister Bird wanted to do, everything was cool, you know.  So Bird was my main hero, because think about the… I mean, this stuff came up later about Superman, flying… Bird was my hero when I was a little kid.  And of course, I loved Fats Navarro.  I mean, I heard all this stuff.  And Mister Hawkins and Prez and Lady Day.  Coming up, all that just moved me so much.  I sat at the feet of Mister Hawkins here in New York.  He wasn’t so much into talking; it was just like the saint would impart something to you with just the ray, you know, just looking at me.  I’ve got a photo to this day (I’ll send you a copy of it) backstage at the Vanguard, and I’m sitting at his feet, and he’s just looking at me, and like he’s just elixiphizing me with all this stuff.

So I’m just blessed to be a part of process, you know what I’m saying?  I’m not at all any good.  I want you to know that.  I’m not the dust of the dust of their shoes.  But I love this music.  And I’ll tell you, sometimes the little stuff gets out of the way, and the music comes through, man, and I’m home.

TP:    We’re speaking with Charles Lloyd, who is laying a lot of information on us…

CL:    But let me tell you just quickly about Booker.  Then when I got to New York… Because we found in California that a pineapple hits you on the head, and another day goes by.  Well, what is that?  And you’ve got to drive about nineteen years to get to the gig or something like that, and then the gig was tired.  I played a wedding with Billy Higgins, Don Cherry, a pianist named Terry Trotter, maybe Scott LaFaro was on bass.  Anyway, we get to the gig, and we couldn’t wait to play, you know, because that’s what we loved doing.  And we said, “LA-DA-DU-DO, BALEEDLE, DA-DUT,”  [ETC.] You know what that is, “Doctor Jackyll.”  So we don’t get that far at that wedding.  The father said, “Please, please, please stop.  I’ll pay you.  Here’s the money.  Don’t play any more.  Please stop.”  You know, that’s the type of stuff we had to come up against.  So we knew we had to get to New York.  Fortunately, Ornette came to New York and was playing at the Five Spot non-stop, and that was an encouragement for all of us.  So slowly, slowly… Eric Dolphy left Chico Hamilton and joined Mingus’ group, and Eric recommended me to Chico.  I joined Chico.  I was playing with Bobby Hutcherson then.  I had a bad group with Bobby Hutcherson and Scott La Faro, and I’m trying to think of who was playing drums with us at that time.  There was a lot of great drummers in California.  Lawrence Marable.  There was…

TP:    Frank Butler maybe?

CL:    Frank Butler!  Yeah, oh, man!  Frank Butler told the judge… The judge said, “Frank, you got to do five years.”  Frank said, “I can’t do that much time, your honor.”  He said, “Just do the best you can, Frank.”  I’m sorry.  We laughed as kids.  That’s not laughable now.  But his real message was, you know, if you don’t make five, Jack…

But I don’t like a society or a system where… I want everybody to be able to rise to their full potential.  I mean, on the for-real side.  I don’t like impediments.  So we’ve got to find some way to make this thing a level playing field, where everybody… The big fault of the whole thing… See, this music is the music of freedom, okay.  It’s the music of enlightenment.  It’s the music of transformation.  It’s a music of wonder.  I don’t know what this media thing is all mis-used for.  I come to town, man… You invite me to your show, and I see nobody else wants to talk to me.  That’s cool.  I don’t want to talk to nobody anyway.  All I want to do is do the music.

However, I am a servant.  Okay?  I am a part of this process.  I sat at the feet of Mister Hawkins, the father of the modern tenor saxophone.  And they tell me, “Well, Mister Gumball and them cats don’t want to say nothin’ to your stuff because, you know, it’s not presentable,” or maybe it’s not… Well, quiet as it’s kept, man, it’s their tradition, and not only that, it’s all of our traditions.  And this music is a music of full-on uplift played by great creators.  It does something to you and for you that gets you up in the morning with the right attitude of just, “Yes, how are you,” and you be kind to each other, and you learn to love yourself and the higher principles and eternal verities — and quiet as it’s kept, change your character if you get deep off into it.  So I don’t know what this pablum is all about and all this useless information and stuff like that.  You’ve got the computer and the chip and all that stuff, and it moves faster than the speed and stuff… Well, this music has always moved faster than the speed of light.

When I got to New York, Booker was here, and I came down the first night, man, and Booker was playing with Eric and Roy Haynes and stuff at Birdland.  I went downstairs, man, and it was just… I was just home.  I knew I was home.  And Booker took me to his pad.  He was living up on East 92nd Street then, across from the Y; you know the Y up there.  Booker sat me down and he said, “Man, it’s different now.  We’ve kind of gone into different camps.  But the thing is that you’ve got to be living about truth, and you’ve got to be sincere, and you’ve got to be straight with yourself and people.  And this music, we all loved it, we’ve always loved it, but here we are.  Just keep working on your character.  Your music is great.”  And man, I was dipping and diving.  Booker was on his way out then.  His health thing was in decline.  But he was imparting this wisdom.

Well, man, I got just hit with all of that, and I am a part of that.  Please pardon my lyrics, and I’ll be quiet, because it’s about playing the music.  But I do want to say that there is something behind this music, and I live in adoration of that, because we are spirit, and this material thing… Nobody gets out of here alive, and we ought to find a way where we can all dance here.

I blew a fuse as a young man.  That’s why I went away into hiatus, because I blew a fuse.  Because I just thought… I wanted to change the world with music.  I realized I’d failed at that.  So I said, “Hey, I’d better change my character, as Booker said, straight up.”  And Mom’s love at home is real important.  That really helps kids, you know.  So I’m really for education and for the uplift of the thing.  But music, man, in our lives, we really need it, and we aren’t getting enough of it.  What you do here and what’s happening in some other places gets to us, but it’s just too little, brother, and it may be too little, too late, unfortunately.  But God bless you for what you’re doing.

TP:    Well, everybody’s got to put down only what they can put down, I think.  And I think what we should do is listen to some recent music by Charles Lloyd, then we’ll return for more conversation.

[MUSIC: “Monk In Paris”; “Imke”; “Figure In Blue (Memories of Duke)”]

TP:    Talk about your experiences in New York in the 1960’s.  How has it changed for you coming back here?

LB:    Well, I moved here in 1960 (as I said, I replaced Eric Dolphy with Chico Hamilton), and I first stayed with Booker Little, then later I stayed with Frank Strozier.  Because when you’re a young musician, you know, and haven’t heard Bird, and Bird living in the penthouse, it took a while… I didn’t have the penthouse together, so they let me sleep on their sofas, you know, for a while.  Then later… Fortunately, I was a composer, so I had some kind of publishing thing where I got an apartment at 1 Sheridan Square in the Village.  So that was good for me.  So I lived there.

And my experiences were incredible, because all my old friends from California were here.  Ornette, Eric was here, all of Ornette’s group.  Scott La Faro was here, who was my best buddy.  You know, he used to drive a car like Steve McQueen.  Looked like him, too.  Same thing, he would drive through anything.  It’s unfortunate he went out in a car accident, too.

But my experience here was very… There was just music everywhere.  Bill Lee had this Citroen, you know; we’d all pile up in that, and we’d go from Birdland down to the Jazz Gallery to hear Monk, and then we would go to the Five Spot to hear Saint Newk, and then we’d go over to the Half Note, and then we’d come back up to the Vanguard, and then we’d go back uptown.  It was kind of like that.  Harold Mabern and stuff… We’d just stay up all night and laugh, and we’d go to movies during the day, and we’d practice and we’d play.  It was just living for the music, the Holy Grail romantic notion of that.  That’s what it was like.

It was a simpler time, in a way, and I think there was also… Everybody was deep off into the study and the pursuit of the music.  There wasn’t commerce or anything like that.  It was just purely for the love.  Of course, it was a simpler world and a simpler time.

TP:    Was there a political or ideological component to what was happening in the music, or was that laid onto it by observers from the outside, would you say?

CL:    I think this music has always been (how do you say?) dealing on such a level that it encompasses everything.  So I would be remiss if I would say it was only just… The purity of the pursuit was one that made your scholastic or your scholarship thing… You had to know everything about it.  And New York does teach you that there is something indestructible in the spirit, and you’d better get to that fast.  So the question of was there a political aspect or was that laid on it… Of course, we knew that…

Shirley Horn said, “Ten cents a dance.  That’s what they pay me.  Gosh, how they hurt my toes, fat guys and sailors” — you know.  So we were kind of… I love Shirley Horn down there.  I wanted to sing my little trumpet solo with her, you know, but I just… I mean, my sax solo.  I remember Dewey used to play down there, and she would sing that “Ten Cents a Dance.”  Oh, man, it used to just make me cry in tears and stuff.

We were all optimists.  We hoped for a better world.  And for some reason… To answer your question, frankly, at a certain point, I just blew a fuse and had to go away and try to heal, you know, and to change my character to be able to… I had the indestructibility sutra down where I could live in my lifetime with that; I knew what that was about.  But I still believe that there was a way that I could transcend the madness, liberation amidst the chaos.  And with the music, I wanted to bring something of inspiration and consolation to sisters and brothers and sisterettes and brotherettes around the world.

So for me, I think that on the level that you’re speaking, when you talk about the political arena, I would say that we’d better deal with the spirit.  Because it’s a spiritual quest.  That’s what we really are here, and he who is stepping on who, or who is first and who is last, I mean, all that is misplaced thinking.  I think if we have a world… I mean, obviously… You know, I wanted to marry Lady Day when I was ten years old, and protect her and look after her.  So what can I tell you about any of this, you know?

TP:    Let me ask you about three musicians who you’ve mentioned in the course of our discussion, and who you came into contact with.  In California, you hooked up with Ornette Coleman, and knew him and heard him, and Eric Dolphy as well.  And many people, of course, saw a certain analogy between your approach and John Coltrane, who you’ve also talked about.  And indeed, you also mentioned, when we were off-mike, spending a week at the feet of the Ellington band in Antibes.  So I’d like some reflections from you on each of those musical entities.

CL:    We’re very fortunate that Ornette is still alive today.  I love him very much.  He for me was someone who was very great in my life.  I was an alto player, and when I moved to California to go to college, I was very intense…and there were lots of jam sessions around Los Angeles those days.  Incidentally, I didn’t mention Ellis Marsalis.  He was out there in the Service at El Toro Marine Base, and he would come up, and we’d jam a lot.  He had the Santini School approach to life also, as you can see from his siblings [sic]. Essentially that’s a great school to come from, because in a way…it prepares you for half-steps, you know.

Getting back to these folks you asked about.  Ornette was… I can’t put words to him, because… We used to argue a lot, because my approach and his approach… I used to say, “Ornette, you can’t read and you can’t do this,” and he said, “You know, you can play the saxophone, but that don’t have a whole lot do with music.”  So we would have approaches like that.  I was a kid, you know… One day, Ornette and I stopped arguing.  Because he walked from his house over on Jefferson over to my house over on 36th Street at S.C., and he brought his horn.  He was going to follow all of the… He actually solved the universe for me that day.  He came over… It was a very enlightening experience.  I have to tell you about Thelonious, who also gave me… Thelonious is the one who sent me away into hiatus.  Remind me if I go too far on that…

But Ornette came over to my house one day, took his alto out, didn’t say a word.  He played the lowest note on there, a low B-flat, his B-flat, which is concert D-flat or something.  (I’m not here trying to be pedantic.)  He played the lowest note on the horn, then he played the highest note.  You follow this?  Low note, the highest note.  Then he came up a half-step to the next to the lowest note, then he played the next to the highest note.  You following this?  He did this on the whole saxophone!  He compressed the instrument (you understand?) from the lowest to the highest, and he kept bringing each of them up.  But what he did was, he alternately played each.  He played the low B-flat and he played the high F, and then he played the C, and then he played the E, and he kept compressing it.  But what he did was, he did it in a nanosecond.  He said, WWHHOOMMPP!

And so, we never argued about music any more.  I just said, “Okay,” and I prostrated, and from then on we didn’t have to deal with that.  And he opened me up to something, which was the organicness of the music.  Because I had come from that school where…the Santini school from George Coleman and Ellis and stuff, about not going across the line, you know, and Ornette had blurred the line.  And it turned out that I was very entrancillated [sic] with all that.   (Pardon my lyrics.  I have to make up words.  Because I don’t think that it’s adequate for musicians, especially.)

And Eric also… Now, there’s someone who Eric comes from that’s very important who is still also alive.  That’s Buddy Collette.  I don’t know if you know him.  This is very beautiful, and I’m very touched.  I lived at this place, 1 Sheridan Square, and I’m with Chico.  Remember when Mingus had the concert at Town Hall with the big band, way back then.  Well, Buddy came to town because Buddy was his Gil Evans.  Buddy was orchestrating and doing all the stuff.  Because Mingus had that Corvette, you know, with the Confederate flag and his bass sticking out of the green Corvette, riding around the Village, and Mingus would park his Corvette anywhere, and nobody would mess with his space.  Believe me.  Nobody.  Even the dudes today, they may… I can’t speak… I can only speak in our lifetime, okay.  You can’t say what it would be, because now some other son may cut your foot off or something, or your left (?).

But anyway, Eric was very beautiful and very scholarly.  He came through Buddy, though.  Buddy is a very sweet, compassionate man.

Then when you ask about Trane, I don’t know what to tell you about him.  I loved him also so much.  He for me embodied so much.  You know, like, Bird discovered the atom train, smashed it, you know, and it was kind of like… So much beauty of tone, lyricism, swing.  I mean, you talk about it.  Trane embodied it all!  When I think about the saxophone, I start thinking about Prez and Coleman Hawkins and Big Ben and Don Byas, you know, all of that.  And I’ve just come up, and there’s so many great tenor players, Newk… But you know, Trane for me…you know, it was something very special.  Again, it was that sage, that saintly quality, you see.  Because I always hooked that up with these musicians.  For me, they were guiding us and leading us, and they were talking about it all.  I just had great adoration for him.

And when people say, well, that I sound like him or something… Man, I wish I did!  What I’m saying is I loved him so much, and I take that as a compliment.  However, time has borne out that… I think I have grown to have a sound and an approach that certainly comes from all those great masters…

But again, getting back to Trane, he profoundly affected me, as did the others.  Ornette also.

TP:    Do you remember first hearing him?  And Ornette.

CL:    Dig this.  Do you know where I first heard Trane?  This is very interesting.  I first heard him in 1955 with Dewey, and they were playing at Jazz City in Hollywood.  I had gone to California to interview for the University of Southern California.  This is interesting, because he played in starts and stops.  He would play a little bit… Then Dewey also was doing the Santini thing of sending him off the stage!  He was being hard.  You know how Lady Day…I mean, Dewey could be a nice bunch of guys… So he was sending him off the stage, and all kinds of nonsense like that.

But I just kept following him.  Then I remember they made that record, remember “Stablemates” and all that stuff, and I was listening to that, and it was like…it was so… It was so fulfilling.  You know?  It was so rich.  It was so much quality and so much beauty, and his search and his aspiration.  All I can say is that I always had that in me.  When I wasn’t good as a little kid, I still had the great search.  And that thing we definitely had in common, a great spiritual quest.  And he definitely… As I said earlier, I’m not the dust of his shoes.  But sometimes all these great masters come through and they bless me with this special benediction, and I feel really uplifted.

TP:    You asked me to remind you to say a few words about Monk, and also Ellington if we have time.

CL:    Oh, I’ll be real quick.  Okay.  The thing about Monk was, I was playing opposite him at the Village Gate, and he would kind of dance around the walls and stuff.  You know that beautiful dance he used to do?  And Nica, the Baroness, you know… By this time I was a precocious kid, you know, like youngsters can be.  I thought I knew everything.  I’m in my late twenties, I had the group with Keith Jarrett and Jack De Johnette and Cecil McBee.  So we were playing at the Village Gate.  So I had a special thing in my rider that I had to have fresh orange juice, no more than six hours off the tree, and that kind of nonsense, you know.  I was trying to be a brutarian or something like that.  So Monk would come in, he’d be checkin’ Junior out…

Incidentally, one other thing I have to tell you quickly is, before I joined Cannonball I had an invitation from Monk’s manager to come and play with Monk.  He called me on the phone and said, “Why don’t you go to Monk’s house and play with him.”  I said, “I’d love to.”  He said, “Well, Monk wants you to play with him.”  I said, “Well, great.  Have him give me a call.”  I didn’t understand intermediaries in those days.  So somehow I didn’t get to do that.

But anyway, we were backstage at the Village Gate between sets.  So I told Nica, “Nica, when Monk comes here, please tell him not to drink the orange juice because it’s tainted tonight.”  So Monk comes in and she said, “Thelonious, Thelonious, Thelonious, Charles said don’t drink the orange juice, it’s tainted, it’s tainted!”  And he didn’t pay any attention to anybody, he’s just dancing.  So finally he gets over by the pitcher of orange juice, he picks it up, and he kind of dances over by me, and he just goes [GLUG-GLUG-GLUG…”] — he gobbled the whole thing down.  And he looked straight into my eyes and he said, “Tainted, huh.”  I was reading a book at that book called Milarepa, a hundred thousand songs from this Tibetan saint.  He would take poison and turn into soma or elixir.  So I said, “I’m not ready.”  It was getting to be time for me to leave.

The thing about Duke, I was in Antibes, and Harry Carney and Johnny Hodges, they just took me to their feet, and they took me to Sidney Bechet’s gravesite over there, and they gave me an initiation that remains with me to this day.  And Duke told me that if I keep stirring the soup that one day I’d have something.  They just gave me love and conviviality, you know, and again, they transformed something.

TP:    Made you feel very connected also.

CL:    Oh, man!  And Mister Carney was…both of them were so beautiful.

* * * *

Charles Lloyd  – (5-31-95):

TP:    Last year you came up for an Out To Lunch, and we spent a long time talking about your early years in Memphis.  It was a fascinating show.  It seems to me that the title of this release and the liner notes all refer to Memphis…

CL:    That’s only because of your show. [LAUGHS]

TP:    You tell some of the similar stories.  A few words about what’s behind this record and how you conceived it.  And why would you say it was because of that particular show that you’d start thinking about Memphis?

CL:    I was humoring you.

TP:    Oh, thank you.

CL:    No, Memphis, it’s in Egypt, and it was someplace that formed me and informed me.  I heard Bird, you know.  That’s so great, man.  I have to get up so early in the morning, like 8:20 in the morning, to check Bird out on the air.  That’s wonderful, to be on the airwaves.  No other city does that!

TP:    Where did you hear Bird in Memphis?

CL:    Uh…

TP:    Oh, did you say you heard Bird in Memphis, or you were hearing him this morning?

CL:    I hear him every morning.  I get up.  Even when I play at the Blue Note I’ll still get up to hear the music.  And when I was a little kid, I’d go to bed, and Bird wouldn’t come on the radio until midnight, because this kind of music wasn’t played during the daylight hours on the radios at that time.  So I’d have to stay up all night and fool my mother that I was nuts, that I was asleep, and I’d wait for Bird to come on, and I’d soar.  So it’s always been like that.

TP:    Well, you were around the music from the beginning, because I gather your mother had a rooming house…

CL:    No, she didn’t have a rooming house.  It was just one of her girlfriends, you know, worked at the theaters and knew that these musicians, these great artists, needed accommodations on a very (?) level.  So my Mom had a nice home.  So Lionel Hampton and a few people stayed there.

TP:    Well, you have vivid memories, expressed in the notes, about seeing the musicians in Lionel Hampton’s band as a youngster, and being very impressed.

CL:    Oh yeah.

TP:    And hanging out with Quincy Jones, approximately a peer of yours.

CL:    Well, he’s got a little more mileage on the chassis than me.  But we were precocious little kids, you know.

TP:    Has this been a busy year for you?  Have you been doing a lot of writing, thinking, performing?  You said you just got back from 20 concerts in Europe.

CL:    Yes, I just played 20 concerts in about a month in Europe.  So I would probably normally be a basket case.  But there’s something strange about this music.  You kind of get energized or something.  Something happens where it goes beyond the physical situation.  Because that travel and all that stuff can be quite arduous, but when you get to play the music and get people to be so touched by it, it’s always been very beautiful for me.

TP:    It’s a different band this week.

CL:    This is true.

TP:    You have Billy Childs and Santi DiBriano.  A few words about the members of the band.

CL:    Well, the tour was with a group that I’ve been recording with, with Bobo and Anders and Billy — with Jabali there.  Coming back home, there were problems in bringing the guys over this time, because two of the guys live in Sweden, and Billy lives in New York — and I’m not quite sure where my home is.

Billy Childs is someone that I’ve been observing over the years, and he makes recordings and such that I can’t quite… I think he has large talent that’s something… and in the wildness of my music I can bring something out in him.  I’m taking on a challenge here.  Santi, of course, comes from Jabali’s world, and Jabali recommended him very highly, as did Billy Childs.  But Billy I think has a very large talent.  And I like pianists, as you probably know; of course, drummers I love.  So I have always tried to develop something, some rapport there.  Billy’s instrument is normally too clean, but I think playing with me it will get a little more ragged, you know.

TP:    Well, let’s hear some more music from All My Relations.  You said that today you want to speak in more or less sound bite chunks…

CL:    Well, no.  I just thought last time I kind of probably OD’ed the airwaves with this verbiage, and I really love music, and so I thought, “Gee, Ted will probably…”  And the listeners, they want to hear music.  I got this kind of monotone on the Memphis thing…

TP:    Well, dynamics are everything, and we’ll be contrasting here.  So let’s hear a little piece from All My Relations…

CL:    You mean I’m not being rambunctious today or something?

TP:    You’re fine just the way you are.

CL:    I don’t want to control this, Ted!  You know?

TP:    Let’s hear “Little Peace,” a flute piece…

CL:    Little Peace.  That’s my dear friend, Booker Little, you know.  Booker Little Peace.

TP:    You knew him from Memphis.  A few words about him before we play it.

CL:    Great sage, great saint, beautiful soul, died at 23, or at least left the body at 23.  In Memphis we played together in various bands.  Phineas Newborn was a real focus for us, or was our big mentor, and all the other string of tradition that you already know about.  Booker had something very special.  When I first arrived in New York in ’60, I joined Chico Hamilton; Eric Dolphy had left and gone with Mingus.  I checked into Prez’ old hotel, because I have some fascination with Prez and Lady Day, as you well know.  Booker said, “no, you can’t stay there,” and he took me home up on East 92nd Street with him, and he talked to me long into the night about the eternal verities and about character building and all kinds of things that we never really talked about in Memphis.  It was like he was a wise man then and ready to… He had made his peace.  And to this day I’m still moved by my relationship with Booker Little.  Very profoundly so.  He was a real… I still hear that saintliness and that sage thing in all of this music, because obviously, you know, this mad hassle, gymnasium world that we all live in, you realize that these music-makers have brought so much great beauty into the world.  So that’s what happened for me.  And then Booker put the other thing on top of it.  He brought the spiritual value home, and was really… I also think that when he died, he was the most advanced on his instrument for me.  I loved him very much.  And it’s kind of strange that Max lost Clifford and Booker.

You know, when Booker left Memphis, he went to Chicago and he stayed at the Y, and he met Sonny Rollins there at the Y, who was doing a kind of sabbatical in Chicago at that period in time, and also he met Clifford and Max and all.  He loved Clifford so much.  And when Clifford died, Booker, who was very young then, a teenager, he said, “Why couldn’t it have been me?”  I mean, how many of us have that kind of compassion or such a big soul?

So I was touched by someone who was extremely profound.  If people sometimes ask… I remember once Freddie Hubbard asked someone, “Where is Charles Lloyd?”  He said, “Oh, don’t tell me.  I know he’s out there in the woods, meditating or something.”  But the point is, Booker and a lot of these sages, like Monk and Milarepa and all of them, sent me packing.  And I try to bring something back now.

[MUSIC: “Little Peace”, “Thelonious Theoniyus”]

TP:    I assume from the title of this album that these compositions have many layered meanings to you, and many references.  So a few words about “Thelonious Theonyus.”

CL:    But they have many layers.  I would spoil it by coming in there, putting meringue and stuff on it.

TP:    That’s true.

CL:    I like my mangos.  I still like barbecue sauce, but I put it on corn and stuff like that.  Corn on the cob, you put some barbecue sauce on it.

TP:    When was the last time you had that?

CL:    From my garden, you know, when the season is right.  I have stuff in season.  I have a nice garden.  Have you ever had really fresh mulberries off the tree?

TP:    No, never.

CL:    They’re so sweet, man, but you’ve got to get them really true.  I just love mulberries.  And you wouldn’t think of that, you know, when you think of Mulberry Street.  You wouldn’t get all extaterated, you know…

TP:    While we were on microphone, you were talking about hearing Booker Little with Eric Dolphy and Blackwell at the Five Spot.  You succeeded Eric Dolphy in Chico Hamilton’s group in the 1960’s?  Were you friends in Los Angeles?
CL:    Yes, we were.  We played in Gerald Wilson’s Big Band together.

TP:    [SILENT]

CL:    Oh!  Yeah, I’m sorry, man.  Monk was very important to me.  He had something extremely special, and I’m glad that his music lives on in the airwaves of all of our hearts.  He taught me a lot.  We used to play opposite each other at the Village Gate, and I told you about the orange juice story ages ago.

TP:    I guess you did.

CL:    And Milarepa.  But you know, he’s just so deep and so pregnantly powerful with his silent night stuff, that I just loved him very much.

What were you asking me about?

TP:    Dolphy.

CL:    Now, Dolphy… See, there’s a guy behind all of that.  Buddy Collette was, like, Dolphy’s teacher.  Now, Buddy Collette is a very special cat.  Now, Buddy Collette also was Mingus’ teacher.  Buddy Collette is a very strange individual in that he has not only persevered, but he has sort of…how do you say… He has made peace with himself in the world.  He even went and did studio work out there for years.  But what I’m trying to say is… I’m now looking at this thing that we stand on all the shoulders of all these greats.  Like Lao Tzu was hiking one day, and the guy with plague was happening, and he had all this stuff on his back, and he said to Lao Tzu, “Old man, is this all you got away with?” — and Lao Tzu was walking with his walking cane at about 80, you know.  So he said, “Yes, precisely.”  It’s like a larger nation can always… But it doesn’t work that way in politics.

You asked me about politics last time.  I thought that was such a wrinkle.  Who is not touched in their lifetime by the adversity and the strangeness of the whole mechanics of greed and all that…you know, racism’s grandmother and stuff.  So enough said on that.  I’ve dealt with it, see.

Becoming an elder, the kid in me is still… We’re all ecstatics at birth.  We have that possibility.  So what I’m trying to say is that somehow this music is always… I remember I always had this tricycle.  Like, I was maybe 3, and I’d be riding it around really hard, and I remember my Mom would yell outside, “Charles, Junior, what are you doing on the tricycle?”  I’m trying to get rid of the third wheel.  Because I wanted to leave Memphis, you know.  But I had to meet Phineas and all that kind of stuff.

But anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the ecstatic in us… There’s something about this music.  It’s a music of wonder, played by these great creators.  It’s just… I think we live in a world where people don’t get to hear… The music, it’s sort of… It’s like what happened to me when I was a kid.  I’d have to wait until midnight to hear it.  Now there’s so many layers of Pop stands and Coca-Cola refreshment places or something, that you can’t get to the real Matuki.  You know what I’m saying.

TP:    In the liner notes, you referred to a teacher named Irvin Reason.

CL:    Irving Reason.  I talked to you about him last time.  He and Don Cherry, I’d say, were together.  They met each other in the Tombs and talked about those days in Memphis.

TP:    You played a lot of blues when you were in Memphis also.

CL:    I still play the blues.

TP:    Again, I’m referring to the very informative liner notes.  If you buy All My Relations you get to hear a kind of compressed version of our show last year.

CL:    Yeah, you inspired it.  Then they said to me, “You’ve got to write a book now.”  Then this publisher ran up to me in Italy recently, and he read the liner notes, and he said, “Oh God, these are incredible.  I must have the rights in Italy.  I must have the rights.”  They over there doing programs on the indigenous people who lived over here way before these people, Columbus and these cats, came over here claiming to be discovering stuff.

Where are we, brother?

TP:    “I’m always playing the blues,” you said.  You and a lot of the musicians you came up with in Memphis really cut your teeth on those type of gigs.

CL:    Well, those were the gigs, but that wasn’t what we were really aspiring to.  You understand?  It’s sort of like a guy has to do a day job to do his thing.  I mean, nothing against the Blues, but the Blues was so… I wanted to play up in Mitchell’s Hotel with Bill Harvey’s band, with Irvin and all the cats, Louis Smith, Booker Little’s older cousin.  I did play in Phineas’ father’s band when Phineas and Calvin were in the band.  I played in all those groups.  Willie Mitchell had a big band that played like Dizzy’s big band, you know, and that was a precursor to Gerald Wilson.  Now, Gerald is from down there, around Memphis also.  So there’s something that happens.

But you see, although I am from down there, the Modern thing in New York, it filters through my song, because I came here… I always knew I had to get here.  But I had to take the detour, the pineapple hit me on the head en route to go to California, and then we all finally got here.  But that was quite wonderful when we got here… See, giants roamed the earth then.  It was a simpler time in some ways, simpler in the sense that the neighborhood and the community and the musicians, there was some real simpatico.  Ornette and Eric and I had been together in California.  Billy Higgins and I played together, and we used to love to play… You know, Billy Higgins and I still play together sometimes, man.  It’s come back after all those years, and it just makes me so thrilled.

TP:    You said you were going to be performing with him this summer, with Dave Holland on bass.

CL:    Billy Higgins and Dave Holland and myself, we’re going to play some music together.  That should be interesting.

[ETC.]

Working with you is like another chance to tell the truth, you know?

TP:    What was the Chico Hamilton experience like for you?

CL:    Why do you go there?  Why don’t you talk about my dreams?  My dreams are actually bigger than my memories, quiet as it’s kept.  If you think I’m just a memory lane cat…

TP:    No, not a bit.  I’d feel a little awkward saying “What are your dreams?”

CL:    No, I’m not going to talk about those.  But the time thing that you bring up, you see, there is no time, if you look at it from a pull-back… You know, if you pull back and look at it from a macro level, the time thing gets squashed.  The music happens, there is no time.  It’s the eternal verities and all that stuff, getting back to Booker and that.

What was it like playing with Chico?  I was a young man, and I wrote all this music, you know, and I had a place that I could play it!

TP:    A good workshop.

CL:    A good place to play it!  I got cats to play it with me and stuff like that, and Chico was very open to it, because… Like that, you know?  Then one time we were playing in Canada, and Miles came onstage in Montreal, and he said, “Here’s the cat who stole your band!” [LAUGHS] I hadn’t stolen his band!  We were having a good time.  Chico is very brilliant.  Look who he had in his group.  He had Buddy Collette, he had Eric, he had different cats in the group all the.

TP:    Gabor Szabo, Arthur Blythe.

CL:    Gabor Szabo.  People don’t understand.  Gabor had a little twang.  I liked that.  He heard the gypsies over there in Hungary when he was a kid.

Oh, man, time is ticking away, Ted.  Don’t do this to me, man!  Play some of the music.  Look, here’s what you do.  Play “Piercing The Veil,” “Hymn To The Mother,” and then you play “Evenstide.”

TP:    Well, we have to be off at 3.  So I can only do one.

CL:    Well, this is a university, so you do have your freedom.  And universities are places where you can put ideas in the air.  We all need education, we need love, we need this home thing happening, and it’s important to hear the music in spite of all those filters that go on that keep the music away from the people.

A 1992 WKCR Interview with Ira Sullivan, Who Turned 82 Yesterday

Just noticed that yesterday was the 82nd birthday of Ira Sullivan, the magnificent multi-instrumentalist who has inspired several generations of South Florida musicians since moving there from Chicago more than 40 years ago. I had an opportunity to interview the maestro on WKCR in June 1992 while he was in residence at the Village Vanguard with a quartet, and am presenting the transcript below.

* * * *

Q:    It’s my pleasure to introduce a musician who is really beyond category, a virtuosic instrumentalist on trumpet, fluegelhorn, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, flute…and what am I missing?

IS:    Oh, I don’t know.  I play some drums if I have to.

Q:    Did you ever do a record as the whole band?

IS:    I’ve been asked…

Q:    You once did a record where you played all of the instruments.

IS:    Yeah, I have never heard that.  I have heard about it.  But I have been asked to do that, but I haven’t planned anything yet.  The only time I think I did any overdubbing was on that Bernie Brightman Stash record with Hank Jones and Duffy Jackson.  We went in, and we had seven hours; we did seven tunes in seven hours.  I went back another couple of hours.  I left the holes open, you know, so I could go in the next day and overdub the fluegelhorn parts.

Q:    And there are some sections where you do exchanges with yourself as well.

IS:    Right, right.  That was interesting.

Q:    Anyway, we haven’t even introduced you.  The person I am talking about, as many of you may already know, is Ira Sullivan, and he is appearing at the Village Vanguard at the helm of a quartet this week, featuring pianist Reuben Brown, bassist David Williams, and drummer Steve Bagby.  When was the last time you led a group in New York playing your music with this type of a band?

IS:    Well, I always feel I’m the leader, because I only have myself to contend with, you know.  I have never believed that man needed a leader.  I have always thought that to be starting so young, the leader was Christ.  Jesus is the leader to me, and everything else is just superfluous.  I mean, we just do…we bring all our talents to what we do, and do it.  I never think of pecking order, you know.
I play with different people so much.  See, growing up in Chicago, when I’d get a job for a quartet, I’d get calls from 12 or 18 musicians saying, “Hey, I hear you got a job this Friday night.  I’m available.”  Well, you can only hire three other guys.  So I always had this wonderful wellspring of great musicians to choose from, that’s what I’ve done all my life.  I’ve never really kept a band together for a long time.

Q:    When did you start performing professionally in Chicago?  How old were you and…

IS:    I was 16 when I started playing at the jam sessions.

Q:    Was that about 1948?

IS:    No.  I was still in high school then.  I think 1948 is when I got out of high school.

Q:    What was the situation that led up to you performing?  You’ve been playing since you were three or four years old.

IS:    I started when I was 3-1/2, yes.

Q:    On a record you did for Horizon, there’s a picture that shows you playing the trumpet, and the trumpet literally is almost as big as you are.  Was that your first instrument?

IS:    Actually, as you notice, I’m almost resting it against my knee there.  The trumpet was my first instrument, yeah.  I never picked up anything else until I was in high school and I had to for the school band.  I became a trouble-shooter.  You know, when somebody was absent, I got the call.  My father had a record by Clyde McCoy called “Sugar Blues” that I wanted to play.  I wanted to work the wah-wah mute, the little Harmon mute on the end that makes it sound like a baby’s cry.  So he got me one of the little short German cornets, a little fat cornet that you’ve probably seen some guys in the early bands play.  I think Joe Thomas used to play one in Basie’s sextet.  And so I could work that wah-wah mute.  But the trumpet you saw was a long, full-sized trumpet, and that was my first instrument and it remained my first instrument until high school.

Q:    You grew up in what part of Chicago?

IS:    The North Side of Chicago, and then later the South Side.

Q:    And your father I gather was an avid listener to music and collector of instruments.

IS:    My father was from a family of fourteen children, and they all played instruments.  One uncle was with Souza’s band, and another was in what I guess they called Ragtime at that time — you know, free Dixieland.  He was an improviser.  He was the first one who taught me about playing Free, actually, way before Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and all those fellows.  He taught me about playing impressionistic music when I was ten years old.

Q:    What was his name?

IS:    Tom Sullivan.  Thomas Sullivan.

Q:    Did he play professionally?

IS:    Yes.  He was in the Jazz band I talked about.  I had never heard him, but he was an improviser.  My Dad played.  He had beautiful chops and a very good tone, and he just played for relaxation when he came home from his business.  He was like a Charlie Spivak, Harry James, very clean, you know, straight melody — he didn’t improvise.  In fact, when I was five and six and we used to play together he always would turn to me and ask me, “Ira, where are you getting all of those extra notes?”   See, because I’d be putting little obbligatos in and stuff.

Q:    And was that coming from your imagination at that time?

IS:    Yes.

Q:    So there was always music around you, from the very earliest part of your life.

IS:    Always.  Always.  Our family reunions were meals, the women cooked all day and then we had dinner about 4:30, and then we played the rest of the night.  All the neighbors would come in.  Every one of my aunts played.  One played violin.  One just played a snare drum.  She had a snare drum with brushes, and she would come in and keep time.  And the gentlemen all played, and another aunt played piano.  So we had quite nice family sessions then.

Q:    Were there records in the house also?

IS:    Oh, sure.  I was firmly steeped in the music of Harry James before he was a popular bandleader.  He was quite a Jazz player, you know.  I had that record of him with Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, you know, playing Boogie-Woogie, and I was fascinated, because I had only heard Harry with the big bands.  I listened to Basie, and really just to every kind of music.  I discovered Classical on my own, because we had it around the house.  But nobody forced me, and said, “Oh, listen to this, listen to this — this is what you should listen to.”  I was given complete freedom.

Q:    Did your parents take you to hear music, the big bands at the theatres or anything like that in the 1930’s and 1940’s?

IS:    Yeah, after I asked them.  Yeah, later on, I’m sure… Well, see, that was a beautiful thing about Chicago.  When you went to see a movie in Downtown Chicago, you got a live band performing.  It could be just Glenn Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra, or even just a dance band.  But I was always thrilled, you know, when the curtains opened.  And one day I remember, I was 14, I saw Woody Herman’s band, with that theme song, you know, they’d come out with.  That was really a very exciting time in my life.  It was common then.  Now it’s hard to find big bands, you know.

Q:    And in these years (we’re talking about, I imagine the years before high school and the early years of high school), which instrumentalists really impressed you?  You mentioned Harry James.  Who apart from he?

IS:    Well, remember I was only a five-year-old child!  Well, I grew on Harry James.  There was Clyde McCoy and Henry Busey, and Muggsy… I heard Dixieland players; I didn’t know what they called it.  I didn’t ever hear the word Jazz until I was 16 and in high school.  To me it was music.  I didn’t call it Swing or Funk or whatever labels they put on.  Then when I got in high school, a senior in high school introduced me to some records I had never heard before, such as Coleman Hawkins on Commodore with young Dizzy Gillespie playing trumpet [sic], then we moved from that into Dexter Gordon and Allen Eager, Charlie Parker — which all gave me another musical direction.  I was definitely intrigued.

Q:    So that turned your head.

IS:    It certainly did, yeah.  And as I say, it set me off in a new direction.  I wanted to learn that language, that Bebop language.

Q:    What sort of musical education was available to you in high school in Chicago?  I know you were already a proficient musician.  But I think it was much more prominent in the schools then than it is today.

IS:    Oh yes.  Yes, that’s the bane of my existence, to go around and talk to these poor musical directors in the schools the people who are trying to promote music, and realize they have trouble actually getting a little band together, whether it’s a stage band to play modern arrangements or just a concert band.  When I was in sixth grade, I had a 90-piece orchestra, 90 to 135 pieces, depending on how many children were graduating and moved out of the school.  So it’s quite thrilling to play with an orchestra when you’re that young, you know, and hear violins and clarinets and everything.  And they weren’t that badly  out of tune.  We had a very good director, as I remember.

And then when I went to high school, I moved right into the concert band in my freshman year, and had certainly enough music… I had two periods of band every day, and I was playing trumpet, and two days of the week I went upstairs to the orchestra room, and got to play with the orchestra.  So it was quite nice.  And of course, I also had a double period of Art.

And it breaks your heart.  Because when I see schools in Florida that can’t even get a music program started, and I realize how kids respond… We did clinics at this Pennsylvania festival.  We start Friday night, and then Saturday morning we do clinics with the high school kids around there.  And we had a young boy who was about 10 years old, Jonathan, and he’s in sixth grade — and you should have heard him play alto.  He went out and played with the high school band.  He’s very precocious now.  When you see children like that, it’s great if they have an outlet in school.  I mean, imagine little children who grow up and they already love, say, poetry or creative art and music. And then the teachers find them falling behind in their other subjects.  Education has lost the idea that if you give a child something that his little heart desires, his spirit is bursting to produce, it might straighten out the rest of his or her’s mental outlook towards the process of education.

Because God, I think, He imbues us each with a unique spirit.  We don’t all love the same things, the same foods.  And what we want to do with our life I think a lot of us know very young.  As I say, I went from crib to the trumpet.  I never asked for anything else in my life to do.  I was quite happy, as long as I could play music.

Q:    [ETC.] We’ll create a set of you performing on trumpet.  We’ll hear “That’s Earl, Brother,” which I imagine you heard at the time you were first introduced to Bebop.

IS:    Actually the first time I heard it, it was by Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Stitt with a rhythm section, and then later I heard it with Dizzy’s big band.

[MUSIC:  “That’s Earl, Brother (1977),” “Angel Eyes (1968),” “Everything Happens To Me,” “Our Delight”]

“Angel Eyes” comes from Horizons, which was issued in the Eighties on Discovery, featuring I guess the band you worked with in Miami at the time, shortly after you moved there from Chicago in the 1960’s.

IS:    Yes, it was.  1968 that recording was originally done.

Q:    Tell me about your early experiences with Bebop.  Did you hear it on records, or hearing musicians that came through Chicago?

IS:    Well, I started hearing musicians coming through Chicago, as you say.  You were asking earlier about concerts.  I remember when I was 16, my Dad did take me to see… We went to a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert, one of those early ones at the Chicago Opera House.  That was quite exciting.  Then, of course, I heard Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band.  Then when I was about 18, I went to my high school prom, and Gene Krupa was playing in town, and that’s when I met Red Rodney, who was the featured trumpet soloist.  Charlie Ventura was still in that band.

Then, as I say, in high school, I met this gentleman who turned me…had some Dexter Gordon records.  He was a Jazz collector; he had Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie with “Salt Peanuts.”  It threw me for a loop, because I had always been able to, as they do in college now, transcribe solos.  Now the fellows sit around and transcribe the solos off the record, write them down, and then play them.  But I didn’t use this process.  I just memorized the solos, and would try to recreate the phrasing and the breathing that I heard from Roy Eldridge or Buck Clayton or any of the Jazz trumpet players.  Again, reminding you I didn’t know they called it Jazz.  It was just music.  So I just tried to reproduce what I heard.

But then when I heard the Bebop idiom, I could not get near to that at all.  The rhythmic concept, the syncopation, the fast triplets…

[END OF SIDE A]

…or the writers that this will never last, a bunch of silly symphonies, and it’s not going to be around long, and then 20 years later it was so assimilated into the culture, I heard Bebop licks coming out of Lawrence Welk’s horn section, because these young arrangers had grown up and were slyly sneaking some of it in — you know, it was wonderful to see it become part of our culture.

Q:    Of course, you were one of many young musicians in Chicago who were assimilating and developing very individual artistic statements out of the Bebop idiom.  When did you begin to interact with that broader Chicago community of musicians?

IS:    In the jam sessions.  By the time I was 18, I had met a lot of the… Lou Levy, who we used to know as Count Levy in those days, who played with Stan Getz and Peggy Lee, and he’s one of the finest young… I still call him a young player.  He still is, because he was 19 when I met him.  I was out playing with these fellows, and then I finally sort of built a little reputation.  But I noticed they always called me for the jam sessions and not enough for the gigs, see.  So then I had to change that a little bit.

Q:    Now, when did you start incorporating the saxophones into your repertoire?  Were you doing that at this time as well?

IS:    Through being a trouble-shooter with the band.  Well, I didn’t mention my mother also played piano and alto saxophone.  So I always had a saxophone around the house, but I never was really interested in them.  Then in the high school band, as I say, we had 19 trumpets.  So we lost our baritone horn player; he graduated.  So I said, “Well, let me try the baritone horn.”  I started playing on that, and then I took it out to a couple of sessions.  A month or so later, we had a Father’s Night concert, as they called it, in the auditorium.  We had 35 clarinet players and only two tenor saxophone players, and one of them got a cold and was absent.  The band director said, “I don’t what we’re going to do; we need a replacement.”  I said, “I think if you let me take that tenor home, I can handle the part.”  Because tenor saxophones in a concert band, they have nothing to do but long tones, you know.  I took that tenor home, and I sat down, put my Lester Young record on, you know, sat down and just played one… You know how Lester would just get one note, DI-DA-DU-DAH-DOOT… I said, “Gee, I think I can do that.”  So I sat there with my one note all day long, phrasing, getting the rhythm phrasing.

Then I fell in love with the tenor.  I said, “This is quite a horn.”  I started fooling around with it.  It was just nice to be holding a tenor, because now I’d been listening to… I knew they called it Jazz now, and I had been listening to Allen Eager and Dexter Gordon and, of course, Lester Young and fellows around.  So the tenor became fascinating.

And then, when I was about 18 or 19 and started working in Chicago, I couldn’t get a job with a trumpet with a quartet.  You’ve got to remember, now, Chicago is a tenor town.  They had Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Dexter Gordon was around, Sonny Rollins spent some time there, Sonny Stitt, and you had Tom Archia, Melvin Scott — great tenor players all over the place.  Don Lanphere was there.  He was one of my early heroes.  I mean, he could play faster on a tenor sax than anybody I’ve ever known.  Kenny Mann was around there.  So it was a tenor town.

So I took that tenor, that borrowed tenor from school, and I started getting in the shed, as they say, and practicing on it — and I learned three tunes.  I learned the Blues, and I learned “I Got Rhythm,” and my fast tune was “Fine and Dandy.”  That way I got a gig.  Once I got a gig…

Q:    “I Got Rhythm” will get you through a lot of jam sessions.

IS:    Get you through a lot of jam sessions.  And the Blues will, too; I mean, you learn them in two or three different keys.  And then I went out, and like I say, we got a job with a quartet.  But then, when I pulled my trumpet out, the club-owner was quite impressed.  He’d say, “Hey, I’ve got a triple-threat man.”  But I could not get hired with a trumpet and a rhythm section.

Q:    Well, how about your history on the alto saxophone?

IS:    Well, as I say, my mother had an alto saxophone at home, so then I started… Well, once I fell in love with Bird’s sound, that naturally would make you curious about the alto.

Q:    When did you first hear Bird?

IS:    I think the first recording would be… I remember the intro: [SINGS REFRAIN]

Q:    “Now’s The Time.”

IS:    “Now Is The Time,” right.  And the other side was “Billie’s Bounce” probably.

Q:    When did you first hear Bird live?

IS:    That would have been at the Jazz At The Philharmonic concert.

Q:    Now, Bird was frequently in Chicago.  Did you get to know him at all, or play alongside him?

IS:    I got to know him after we played together at the Beehive in ’55, actually, which was the year of his demise.

Q:    That was only a couple of weeks before he passed away, I think.

IS:    About a month.  Because he had asked me to come to New York.  He wanted to send for me and bring me to New York.  So I was considering the possibilities of that.  But at the time I could see he was also quite ill.  Not so you’d know it, but I mean, when you’d hang out and talk to him, there were things happening in his life.  His daughter had passed away a year before, and I think that still was taking its toll.

Q:    So you met him at a low ebb.  But musically, what was the experience like?

IS:    Oh, musically it was great.  He had found a doctor who was taking care of him a little bit, and getting him to feel a little better, and giving him the proper medication.  I think they got him full of Vitamin B-12, and sort of… I remember he came in the second night, and he had his usual libation, and he looked at me bright-eyed after the second set, he says, “Strange, I can’t get drunk.”  But he was feeling good, you know, and he was playing good — and we had a really nice time there.

Q:    Who was that band?

IS:    I was just going to say.  I think Norman Simmons was on piano, Victor Sproles on bass, and Bruz Freeman on the drums — Von Freeman’s brother.

Q:    Another tenor player who was prominent in Chicago.

IS:    Oh, Von was another one that I got to play with in the early days.  So it was like growing up with Bird.  It’s like they say, you reveal from one spirit that God had, and when you’re in Jazz, you find that the spirits are one.  We all have individual statements, we’re all trying to get our own voice on our instruments, but the common bond…. For instance, I was just reading some of these liner notes on my albums which I’ve never seen, and I talk about going over in Europe, meeting people over there, they don’t speak the language, but once you sit together in a session, you just mention a tune and you’re off and running.  So that’s one universal language we know that never fails us.

Q:    Well, Chicago in the 1950’s is almost universally described by musicians as one big workshop, where everybody could get their creative self together, so to speak.

IS:    Exactly.

Q:    Just describe the scene a little bit.  There was music on almost every major crosswalk on the South Side, I know.

IS:    Well, yes, and on the North Side, too, as I said before.  We spoke about those big bands.  I mean, you’d go down and see a movie, and you got an hour-and-a-half movie, but you also got a stage show with a great band, and maybe singers, jugglers, dancers, comedians, whatever — but my focal point was always the bands and the musicians.  And there were a lot of clubs to jam in, different clubs where trios were playing.

You had a lot of clubs in downtown Chicago, little bars where there would be a single piano player or a duo or a trio or a quartet.  Downtown, I remember there was a place called the Brass Rail upstairs and the Downbeat Room downstairs.  Henry “Red” Allen had a band there with J.C. Higgenbotham.  Red Saunders was the drummer.  The trumpet player Sonny Cohn was there.  It was really interesting.

As a youngster, I would go downtown, at 16, 17… I remember I’d wear my Jazz coat, and one night I painted a false moustache on with my mother’s eyebrow pencil, you know, so I’d look older.  Naturally, I couldn’t get in; they spotted me right away.  But I went downstairs.  There was a fellow that had worked at my father’s restaurant, and he was now working at the Downbeat room.  So he opened the fire door, and through the fire door, in the mirror there, I could see Henry “Red” Allen and Higgenbotham up there, and I could just catch the two of them.  He let me stand up there, but he said, “Now, if anybody comes by, close that door and get out of here!’  So there I was with my phony moustache and my tweed coat down there, soaking up the Jazz.

Q:    I’d like to ask you about a couple of the musicians in Chicago who have somewhat passed into the realm of legend because they were insufficiently recorded.  Did you ever have a chance to play with the drummer Ike Day behind you?

IS:    Oh, yes.

Q:    Can you describe his style a little bit?

IS:    You’d have to hear Guy Vivaros, who is a gentleman who is quite alive, travels with me a lot, does concerts with me.  Guy was Ike’s second nature.  I mean, that’s all Guy did.  Guy and I have known each other since we were about 17.  Guy got together with Ike Day, and Ike loved Guy, and Guy loved Ike, and Guy had given all his time, just like many teachers do now with young students, and they hung out together, and they just were inseparable.  And he gave Guy as much as he could of his stuff, this phenomenal and quite unusual method of drumming.  I mean, drummers certainly can appreciate it.  You say it to the average person, they wouldn’t tell one drummer from another.  But Ike had something that nobody else had, and Guy is the closest living representative I know who plays something like Ike.  But nobody can duplicate what it is.

Q:    Do you have words to describe what was special about Ike Day’s style?

IS:    Well, see, I played some funny sessions… You were asking me about the scene around Chicago.  I mean, a lot of us, we’d go jamming the blues clubs if there were no Jazz clubs open that night.  We just wanted to play.  So once in a while there would be a session after the Blues band had finished playing, and the Jazz fellows would go in, and we’d set up.  And Ike, one time I saw him play, he had literally a pie pan for a cymbal, and another gold cymbal that had a big chunk broken out of it, and no sock cymbal, and a hat box for a snare drum that he’d play with the brush, and then a regular tom-tom, and then a big bass drum with a Hawaiian scene painted on it, a waterfall scene from Hawaii painted on it.  And he played that set, and at no time did you know that there wasn’t anything… It could have been a brand-new set of Slingerland drums behind you.  So that was some of his magic.

Q:    I’ve heard that from a couple of drummers who had heard him, that he could play magically musically in tune with the band with almost anything, or a minimum of equipment.

IS:    Yes.

Q:    Others say that Buddy Rich actually used him briefly as a second drummer.

IS:    Yeah.  He also used Philly Joe Jones as a second drummer.  You’d have to hear Ike to know.  They say, “You’ve seen one drummer, you’ve seen them all,” but when you heard that inside magic that Ike had…
Ike used to play without his shoe, take his shoe off so he could get the feel of the wheel a little better.  One night he was playing at a long… In those days at the sessions there may be ten or twelve horn players on the stand, tenor players, maybe there would be one or two trumpet players, a couple alto players, all waiting in line to play — and the tunes would go on interminably.  I’ve actually seen a bass player where there was a phone the bar, pick up the phone and dial another cat, stop playing under a chorus, and say, “Hey, you want to come down here and get some of this?”  He’d been playing thirty-five minutes on the same tune, probably “I Got Rhythm,” and call another guy that was in the neighborhood to come over and relieve him.    Well, Ike took his sock off one night and played a tom-tom solo with his toes.  I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.  He just put his foot up on the tom-tom, and you could hear his…

Q:    Well, that’s really some independent coordination.

IS:    That’s some coordination I don’t think many drummers have tried yet.  But I wish Ike had been recorded just a little bit.  I think he is on a record, Tom Archia…

Q:    He is on a record, Tom Archia and Gene Ammons…

IS:    But not well…

Q:    It’s submerged to the point where it’s almost indistinguishable.

IS:    Right.

Q:    Would you say a few words about Wilbur Ware?

IS:    Oh, he was another one.  You know, the symphony players from the Chicago Symphony used to come to hear Wilbur when we played out at the Beehive, which was the going Jazz club then, where a lot of us worked in and out of.  I was always sort of brought in as the extra added attraction.  They’d have a quartet with Wardell Gray, and I got to play with the late Wardell Gray there, or Roy Eldridge and Art Farmer and Sonny Stitt, and so they’d bring me in as a trumpet player.

And one of the outstanding musical experiences of my life was playing with Wilbur Ware.  Wilbur Ware had… He told that his father had made his first bass out of an orange crate and thick inner tubes cut to different sizes of the strings and they played on the street and stuff like that.  But he had a touch unlike any other I’ve heard.  Very light.  He didn’t play heavy… Of course, the bass players of today sound heavy because they now have amplifiers.  Wilbur just played a wooden acoustic bass.  But he had this gorgeous, beautiful tone, just like with a feather touching the bass, and the sound that came out was wonderful.  I think a good example is that Sonny Rollins, Live At The Village Vanguard, where there is no piano, and you can really hear Wilbur outstanding.

And I used to watch these symphony players come down and be fascinated and watch him, because he had this almost legitimate technique — but he was definitely a self-taught musician.

Q:    Also, he often was not on what you’d call even close to a first-rate instrument…

IS:    Oh, no.

Q:    …and was yet able to elicit a tone.

IS:    Right.  He’d get up in the morning… We’d be rooming on the road, and he’d get up in the morning, at maybe 11 o’clock after the gig, and pick up his bass, before he’d even taken his pajamas off or brushed his teeth or had a cup of coffee; he’d pick up his bass and start playing “Cherokee” at a breakneck speed, you know, and just play… And he wouldn’t disturb anybody in the hotel.  You couldn’t hear him beyond the room.  Just… [SINGS RAPID WILBUR WARE LINE SOFTLY]  He’d just be working off the little patterns and everything.  It was wonderful, the love that he had for the instrument.

Q:    What were the circumstances that led to Art Blakey calling you and Wilbur Ware to join the Messengers in 1956?

IS:    Well, I guess because, as I say, I was always around jamming with everybody in Chicago, and when he’d come in, if I had a chance I’d get up with Art.  We had met, and everybody met, and so he’d call me, “Come on up and sit in, Ira.”  Then one day he just called me, and asked me if I’d want to go with the band, and brought Wilbur and I up at the same time.  Kenny Drew, Senior, was the piano player then.  I have to say Senior, because his son is around and performing.  He’s been up in Sarasota, Florida, for quite a while.  So Kenny Drew was in the band, Donald Byrd was the trumpet player — so I originally went in to play trumpet and tenor.  That’s when that terrible tragedy happened with Clifford, and Donald Byrd was given the call from Max to come in and replace Clifford Brown in the Max Roach-Sonny Rollins Quintet — the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet actually they called it.  So then the next young trumpet to come in the band, after we went through Philadelphia, was Lee Morgan, who was 17 years old at the time — and I was playing tenor then.  Then a gentleman who was in last night to see me at the Vanguard, Danny Moore, was on trumpet for a while with that group when we left, because Lee was, I think, still in school, hadn’t quite graduated yet.  So we left Philadelphia and we got Danny Moore…

Q:    Lee Morgan joined Dizzy Gillespie at the end of that year, I think.

IS:    Yes.  As soon as he was out of high school.  Then Idrees Sulieman came in the band, which was quite interesting to most people, because as we got announced, it was very hard for them to tell the difference between the names — Ira Sullivan on tenor, Idrees Sulieman on trumpet.

Q:    Did you play exclusively tenor with the Messengers, or would you get into trumpet battles?

IS:    Well, I played some trumpet, but I always had to be careful with sensitive souls who… And I’d feel a little sensitive, too, because I felt like I had an act together or something.  You know, when I’m on my own and I can make my own choices, and pick up a trumpet or a flute or a saxophone when I want to, it’s something else.  But it’s not quite fair to a trumpet player, no matter how they good they are, to come in the band, and here I am playing tenor and trumpet.  Well, now, immediately you’re going to garner some attention.  So I sort of opted to just play tenor in the band, and Art Blakey and I talked about it, so…

Q:    Will you be playing a lot of trumpet and fluegelhorn this week?

IS:    As much as I can handle, yes.  It all depends on what my face can do on that particular night.  I have to always consult my face first.

[MUSIC: “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” “Stella By Starlight,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most,” “Sprint.”]

IS:    A lot has changed around us.  We used to read about pioneers, but in a way we’re pioneers, too, because our mores, our society is changing, even as we speak around us, you know.  So you always have to figure it’s an exciting time that you live in, mainly because you’re breathing in and out.

Q:    Well, you certainly seem to be a musician or personality or spirit that creates excitement around you wherever you bring your instruments.

IS:    I don’t know whether I create it or just sort of nudge.  Somebody says, “You’re a wonderful inspiration.”  I say, “No, I’m sort of a nudge.”  I just open up and let these young people play, and let their natural talent come out.  I think a lot if it is, even as in school, when we teach, overcoming that temerity, to realize, “Hey, man, you can do it; just get out there and do it.”  Most of them have the talent and they’re ready.  You just have to give them a little nudge.

Q:    Which of your instruments do you have this week?

IS:    Well, the tenor, trumpet and flugelhorn, which I always carry, and alto flute and soprano sax, which is enough to keep me busy.  People ask why I play long sets, and I say, man, it takes me at least three hours to get each horn in a proper playing shape, and as I say, get my face to play them all.

Q:    It seems unimaginable to many musicians that you can actually pull off a set because of the different embouchures and musculatures involved.  What do you do?

IS:    Well, you just do.  You have at it.  You keep going for it.  You have problems every night.  Every musician who plays just one horn knows it’s not the same every night.  You always have the physical problems to overcome where your musculature is and your mouth that day, or your face.  As I say, it’s not easy.  But the more I do it… It’s easier when I play six nights a week, constantly, as I was doing in Florida.  Several clubs I played in, I’d stay there two or three or four, five years.  And that six nights a week, that regularity makes it a lot easier.  Now I play festivals on the weekend, then I may not play for three or four days, and then I get in a setting like this where I’m playing six days, and it takes a little time to do it.  But I keep doing it until I get it right.  And sometimes it comes off.