For Bunky Green’s 82nd Birthday, A Downbeat Feature From 2011 about Him and Rudresh Mahanthappa

In honor of the great alto saxophonist Bunky Green’s 82nd birthday today, here’s a feature piece that ran in DownBeat in 2011, profiling him and Rudresh Mahanthappa, Green’s one-time student with whom he was performing the previous behind the CD Apex, on the Pi label.

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Bunky Green-Rudresh Mahanthappa, Downbeat Article, 2011:

On the surface, they make an odd couple. Vernice “Bunky” Green, Jr., 75, Director of Jazz Studies at the University of North Florida, is African-American, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to parents who migrated from Arkansas and Alabama during the Great Depression and settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Rudresh Mahanthappa, 39, of South Indian descent, is the first-generation son of a physics professor in Boulder, Colorado. But on Apex [Pi], their co-led 2010 release, comprising a suite of tunes that both contributed to the project, the two alto saxophonists play so synchronously that it’s a challenging proposition to tell who’s doing what.

Prodded by Jason Moran on piano, Francois Moutin on bass, and either Jack DeJohnette or Damion Reid on drums, Mahanthappa and Green blow like duelling brothers, each projecting a double-reed quality in their tones, Mahanthappa’s slightly “darker” and tenoristic, Green’s slightly more nasal and oboeish. Both work with complex note-groupings, flying over barlines while always landing on the one. Though the feeling is ‘free,” both work within strongly conceptualized structures, and are thoroughly grounded in “inside” playing and the art of tension-and-release, working with fluid harmonic structures that provide space to soar within the form. “It’s surprising what they came up with,” DeJohnette summed up. “They stimulated each other to the higher levels of creativity.”

Two days into a four-night CD-release run at the Jazz Standard in October, the collaborators convened at Green’s hotel. Green recalled their first meeting, in 1991 or 1992, when Mahanthappa—then a Berklee undergraduate to whom Joe Viola, his sax teacher, sensing an affinity, loaned a copy of Green’s 1979 recording Places We’ve Never Been—presented the elder saxman with a tape. “Sounds beautiful,” Green told him. “There’s only a few of us out here trying to think like this.’”

At the time, a short list of those “few” included M-Base movers and shakers Steve Coleman and Greg Osby, who had discovered Green independently as ‘70s teenagers, and subsequently bonded in New York over their shared enthusiasm for his approach, poring over Coleman’s extensive cassette archive of location performances. Many years before, in Chicago, where Green settled in 1960, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Henry Threadgill, then young aspirants, had also paid close attention.

“The level of expertise he displayed in his musicianship and expression were very clear from the moment I heard him,” said Threadgill, after witnessing the group’s final night at the Standard. He recalled a concert, perhaps in 1962, in which Green played pieces “structured in the way of free jazz, the so-called avant-garde category.” He continued: “Bunky was formidable, no one to fool with. I can’t think of another alto player at a comparable level in Chicago at the time.”

DeJohnette cited the “urgency, commanding presence and confidence” of Green’s early ‘60s playing. “Everybody would talk about Bunky,” he said, noting that Green had once brushed off his request to sit in during a gig at a South Side club. “He was legendary even then.”

For Osby, Green was less a stylistic influence than “a guru type figure who assured me I’m on the right track, gave me the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that what I was doing was the right thing, not to let detractors sway me from my mission, that I was put here to establish new goals and force new paths.” Ten years later, Mahanthappa would respond similarly.

“I was around lots of tenor players who sounded like Coltrane and Brecker, and alto players wanting to sound like Kenny Garrett,” he recalled. “Bunky’s voice didn’t sound like anyone else. I needed that affirmation that it was ok to be an individual. I heard things—interesting intervallic approaches—that maybe I couldn’t play yet, but was thinking about. But I also heard the tradition in the music.”

Mahanthappa placed his hand at a 90 degree angle. “I often describe what I do as, ‘This is Charlie Parker,’” he said, then moved his hand to 105 degrees and continued, “and this is me. It’s all the same material, just rearranged a little bit—a different perspective. I heard Bunky doing that at the highest level.”

At the time, Mahanthappa, spurred by a trip to India with a Berklee student ensemble to begin exploring musical paths by which to express identity, was absorbing an album by Kadri Golpalnath, an alto saxophonist from Southern India who, like Green, had systematically worked out inflections, fingerings and embouchure techniques to elicit the idiomatic particulars of Carnatic classical music. As important, he took conceptual cues from such Coleman recordings as Dao of Mad Phat, Seasons of Renewal, and Strata Institute. “Steve extrapolated African rhythm as I aspired to do with Indian rhythm and melody, not playing West African music, but doing something new with well-established, ancient material from a different culture,” he said. “It was an amazing template. Steve doesn’t need a kora player or a Ghanaian drum line to play with him, and I don’t need a tabla or mridangam in my quartet. We’re playing modern American improvised music.”

[BREAK]

In 1996, the third of his four years in Chicago, Mahanthappa invited Green to guest with his quartet for a weekend at the Green Mill. Green declined. “It was more about trying to do something special than about the music,” Mahanthappa reflected. According to altoist Jeff Newell, a rehearsal partner who had studied formally with Green, Mahanthappa “had developed a lot of the things he’s doing now,” projecting them with a “bright, shave-your-head sound,” as though, a local peer-grouper quipped, “somebody threw lighter fluid on Bunky.”

An opportunity for collaboration arose thirteen years later, when the producers of “Made in Chicago: World Class Jazz” approached Mahanthappa—now leading several ensembles devoted to the application of Western harmony to South Indian melodies and beat cycles, each with highly structured, meticulously unfolding repertoire specific to their instrumentation and musical personalities—to present a concert at Millennium Park. In addition to his blistering sax and rhythm quartet with pianist Vijay Iyer, to whom Coleman had introduced him in 1996 (he reciprocally sidemanned for years in Iyer’s own quartet, and they continue to co-lead the duo Raw Materials), Mahanthappa had recently conceptualized Indo-Pak Coalition, an alto-tabla (Dan Weiss)-guitar (Rez Abbasi) trio, documented on Apti [Pi]; and a plugged-in, ragacentric quintet called Samdhi, with electric guitar (David Gilmore)-electric bass (Rich Brown)-drums (Damion Reid)-mridangam (Anand Ananthakrishnan). Then, too, he was involved in a pair of two-alto projects: the quintet Dual Identity, which he co-leads with Steve Lehman, a fellow Colemanite (The General [Clean Feed]), and the Dakshima Ensemble, a collaboration with Golparnath, in which Abassi, bassist Carlo DeRosa and drummer Royal Hartigan meld with Golparnath’s sax-violin-mridangam trio, to perform hybrid refractions of Carnatic music, documented on the widely publicized CD, Kinsmen [Pi].

“They wanted to present Dakshima and add some Chicago musicians, which sounded like a disaster and was budgetarily impossible,” Mahanthappa said. “But they thought Bunky was a great idea. Bunky made it clear that he didn’t want to play 7s and 11s and 13s—it was more about trying to find a comfortable place that would highlight what we both do. It was interesting to compose a blues (“Summit”) and a Rhythm changes tune (“Who”) that sounds like the same compositional voice I’ve done over the last decade. I’m trying to learn how to relinquish control of the situation and just say, ‘Whatever happens, happens.’”

Two of Green’s new tunes, “Eastern Echoes” and “Journey,” reflect his abiding interest in North African scales and tonalities, and another, “Rainier and Theresia,” is the latest addition to a consequential lexicon of searing ballad features. “I didn’t want to get involved in anything with a lot of changes,” Green said. “I don’t feel that music too much now. Our things kind of hover on the edge. There’s all kinds of room in what we write, and we both like that you can take it where you want to.

“Like Rudresh, I do a lot of analyzing. Maybe I play a phrase, and some experience comes up from my life or I see some beauty in it, and I decide to keep developing it, and it leads into a song, or pathways I can utilize on whatever I’m working on. To me, a tune can’t be just pretty. It has to fit into the way I feel about life, so I can express it. The blues, too. It’s not just a word, it’s a feeling. It’s something that you have, and right away, if you play the right notes, the feeling will be there. It’s bending notes. It’s moaning. How are you going to play about pain unless you’ve experienced pain? And how are you going to package it like Charlie Parker, who just cried over his horn? Those aren’t notes. It’s a man’s life.”

Green discovered Bird in his early teens, which coincided with the release of his studio sides for Dial and Savoy. He got them all. By the time he was 17, he said, “I could play everything Bird recorded in terms of imitating. I didn’t know what the hell I was playing. I was just stretching, trying to find the notes.”

Around this time, Green contracted viral pneumonia. “A doctor came to the house, and I overheard him telling my mother that he didn’t think I’d make it,” he recalled. “I decided that if I did live through it, all my friends would be ahead of me, so I should practice just in case—I could hear the ones in my head, so I didn’t need my instrument. I took the hardest songs I could think of—‘Cherokee,’ ‘All The Things You Are,’ ‘Just One Of Those Things’—and transposed them mentally through all 12 keys. The people my mother worked for brought in a famous doctor, who gave me new drugs, which knocked it out, but not until I experienced the white light at the end of the tunnel, the light closing, then fighting for air to come back, the light opening up again. When I was able to get back to my instrument, I was able to play everything I’d practiced.”

While attending Milwaukee Teachers College, Green worked locally with pianists Willie Pickens and Billy Wallace, walking the bar on rhythm-and-blues jobs, soaking up Gene Ammons’ spare, vocalistic approach to ballads like “These Foolish Things” and Lester Young’s poetic treatment of “I’m Confessin’.” He had New York on his radar, and first visited in 1957, staying in the Harlem Y across the street from Smalls Paradise, where Lou Donaldson held a steady gig. He sat in with Max Roach’s quintet with Sonny Rollins and Kenny Dorham on the sayso of Wallace, then Roach’s band pianist. “I was always able to play fast, especially at that time, so I was able to hang in and do it,” he said. That fall, Donaldson recommended him to Charles Mingus.

The audition produced a second transformative moment, after Mingus told him, “the first tune we’ll play is ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus.’” Green continued: “I sat there, ‘Hmm, pithecan…’ ‘You know what that means, man?’ That’s the way Mingus talked. ‘No, I really don’t know.’ ‘That means the first man to stand erect.’ He said, ‘Play this’ and played something like BINK-DINK-DOM-DEEENNGG. I said, ‘Have you got that written down so I can see it?’ Then he went off on me—if he wrote it down, I’d never play it right. I said, ‘Then play it again.’ I was able to hear it and play it back, and he smiled, and moved on.

“Mingus validated how I was starting to feel about the music—that there must be a systematic way to break free of the major-and-minor system. He’d have you do things like take the neck off your horn and blow into the bottom part to get a very low timbre on ‘Foggy Day’ because he wanted you to sound like a ship out in the harbor.”

Mingus drove Green cross-country to a run at San Francisco’s Black Hawk. On the return trip, he dropped him off in Chicago so that he could attend to family matters in Milwaukee, with the expectation that Green would make his way to New York for more club dates and a recording. But Green stayed home, imbued with notions of the freedom principle, with the late ‘50s innovations of John Coltrane as his lodestar. Green continued these explorations in Chicago, where—unable “to afford New York at the time”—he moved in 1960. He quickly made his presence felt on a scene that he describes as “very fast, but more laid back than New York, so you could do yourself in a less frantic environment.” He cut a straight-ahead sextet date for Exodus with Jimmy Heath, Donald Byrd, Wynton Kelly, Larry Ridley and Jimmy Cobb, and a quartet side for Vee-Jay with Wallace, bassist Donald Garrett, and drummer Bill Erskine. He frequently partnered with Garrett, on “out of the box” projects, including an exploratory trio that did a concert—Threadgill attended—on which they “just started playing and tried to interact—that was the whole gig.”

A third transformative moment occurred in 1964, when Green, in Morocco on a State Department tour after winning “Best Instrumentalist” and “All Around Musician” awards at that year’s Notre Dame Jazz Festival, traveled “through the back woods” to hear a performance. “We saw three musicians sitting on the floor in a circle,” he recalled. “One guy had a bagpipe, another had a small violin, and the third played a small drum that he put his hand into and played on top. I became mesmerized by the bagpipe player’s skill. It blew my mind, because he put together what I was hearing in my head. No chords. There was a drone of a fifth, and you played around that fifth and resolved it within yourself. Later, I started studying it and building from it, pretty much the way Rudresh visited his culture and started drawing on it. I’m not trying to copy the sound. I’m trying to get into the essence of their phrasing and how they circle the open fourth and fifth tonal centers that they use. I had to give up the standard jazz lines in order to do that.”

Ten years later, Steve Coleman, then 18, heard Green—at this point heading a newly-formed Jazz Studies department at Chicago State University—either at Ratso’s on the North Side or Cadillac Bob’s, around the corner from his South Side house. “Bunky worked out patterns that sounded calculated, like a deliberate effort to get to his own thing,” Coleman stated. “As a result, his playing is very clear, precise, direct, and I could dig into it, try to analyze it and find out what it was. I wanted him to show me what he was doing, so I asked for a lesson, but Bunky turned me down. He told me, ‘I only give lessons to cats who need lessons, and you don’t. You need to go to New York.’ So I decided I’d listen and grab what I could.

“Although I noticed the patterns early on, Bunky used certain devices that intrigued me. He developed a special fingering to get a hiccup quality that you hear in North African singers. He also picked up a lot of augmented second intervals, as well as quartile stuff and pentatonics, from that part of the world. Whereas in those countries, the pitches stay pretty much the same, Bunky moved the intervals around in different ways. To me the blues is basically a modal music, without a lot of progression. Bird managed to put sophisticated progressions in the blues that gave it motion, but let it sound like blues. Coltrane figured out a way to move the music that influenced him from Africa and India. Bunky figured out how to do this with the North African-Middle Eastern vibe.”

[BREAK]

Along with what he does on Apex, Mahanthappa’s recent sideman work in DeJohnette’s new group with David Fiuczynski, George Colligan and Jerome Harris, and in Danilo Perez’ 21st Century Dizzy project (there are several open-ended Perez-Mahanthappa duos on Providencia [Mack Avenue], from this year), may go some ways towards countering a critique that his musical production—particularly the 2006 release Codebook [Pi], comprising original pieces constructed intervals drawn from Fibonacci equations, and Mother Tongue [Pi], on which the compositions draw from melodic transcriptions of Indian-Americans responding, in their native dialect, to the question, “Do you speak Indian?”—is overly cerebral and insufficiently soulful.

“Everyone I look up to is simultaneously right brain and left brain, to use a dated term, or simultaneously intellectual and seat-of-the-pants instinctive,” Mahanthappa said. “Bartok played with Fibonacci equations. Bach played with Golden Section. Even Dufay’s motets, if you pick them apart, have a somewhat mathematical, formal approach. ‘Giant Steps’ and ‘Central Park West’ are math jazz. A lot of non-Western music has a foot in math as well. A lot of algorithmic thought goes into the way South Indian beat cycles are constructed and played; when the players solo, they know exactly where to start this polyrhythmic thing so it lands at a certain spot two minutes later.

Throughout the recording, and on the bonus video clips offered as value added with an Apex download, Moran prods the flow into unexpected, “right brain” directions. He first recorded with Green on the 2004 date Another Place [Label Bleu], produced by Coleman, who persuaded Green to use him instead of the esteemed master bebop master pianist Green had asked for. “I wanted to hear someone interact with Bunky who wouldn’t just lay down a carpet for him to play over,” Coleman said. “Jason was one of the few piano players I could think of who had enough of the stuff Bunky wanted to hear—the sensibility of how to play a ballad, and so on—but could throw him some curve balls, push him in his thing so the album would represent something like the way he plays live.

“There’s a wild element, an abandon in Bunky’s playing. He lets his feelings out. It was there early on—he’s one of those cats that got it young. He has a very strong embouchure, and his pitch is very centered, his alto tone is crystal-clear, nothing muscly about it. But he does false-fingerings to offset this, to get more rawness in his sound. He plays in the upper register without pressing the octave key, so he gets a throaty split tone quality, an overtone sound, holding the pitch right in between the upper and lower registers, which is how an ancient Greek instrument called the aulos is described.”

Moran described his strategies. “When Bunky gets into his own language, I comp behind him in a way that uses some of what I gleaned from McCoy Tyner, not the chords or voicings, but the power,” he said. “He gets to an angular sound that kind of free-floats up into the stratosphere, and what’s attractive is that just when you think he has no further to go, there’s like another mile and a half, whether way up into the top of the instrument, or into deeper levels of rawness.”

Discussing Mahanthappa’s qualities, Moran referenced an old video game called Punchout. “You’d press ‘Body Blow’ and it said, ‘Body blow! Body blow!” he laughed, swinging his arms back and forth like a pendulum. “Or like Neo punching in Matrix, where you saw these multiple arms hitting the same spot. Rudresh has that kind of rapid fire, and when I play with him, I punctuate and jab. It isn’t just that he plays really quick ideas, but his tone and attack is very different from Bunky’s—more direct, while Bunky slides more.”

Both of Mahanthappa’s recent employers note his open mind and fierce, unmediated execution as a selling point. “Rudresh does things that remind me of a little kid, like, ‘Let’s go and play,’” Perez said, cosigning Moran’s analogy. “When he develops a line, there’s much excitement and raw energy, but he also improvises with great clarity.”

“There was a lot of commotion about Rudresh,” DeJohnette remarked. “He gets a sort of Indian flute or Arabic nai sound on the saxophone, and I’ve been interested in Indian scales and ragas and rhythms since the ‘60s, so I thought his sensibility—and the rawness he brings—would work out for my music.”

“I’ve been dying to play with Danilo and Jack forever,” Mahanthappa said. “There’s a certain validation in working with them, as well as Bunky. At Berklee or when I lived in Chicago, I was inspired when people who I thought were authentic, regardless of jazz genre, would say, ‘Yeah, man, keep doing what you’re doing.’”

Green himself intends to devote a greater proportion of the second half of his eighth decade to performing than has been his custom since the ‘60s.

“I’ve never been desperate about getting ahead,” he said. “All I ever wanted was some recognition for my place in history. I believe in my heart that I’m responsible for a stylistic thing that spread all around the country, and nobody really knew the source. That’s the only thing I’ve regretted, but now I seem to be getting credit. It always took someone else to motivate and push me. I’m not an aggressive person, and unless you’re aggressive you become complacent and don’t move. Maybe it would have been better for me if I had been, because I would be quite established now. But I’m going to keep pushing in terms of playing more and getting more exposure—and we’ll see what happens.”

[—30—]

For Bass Maestro Richard Davis’ 87th Birthday, A WKCR Interview From 1993

Richard Davis, one of the great virtuosos of the contrabass in jazz, turns 87 today. I had the privilege of hosting the maestro on WKCR in August 1993 — the transcript appears below. I wish we’d had a little more time, so we could have spoken more about the ’60s and ’70s, not to mention his years with Sarah Vaughan, but I’m glad to be able to share his testimony about the Chicago scene that formed him.

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Richard Davis, WKCR, August 18, 1993:

 

TP: Richard Davis is one of the many gifted musicians who emerged out of Chicago onto the national scene in the 1960s. You’re a musician who has covered both the jazz and the classical areas. Does your orientation toward both idioms go back to your early education on the instrument in Chicago?

RD: Definitely. Because my high school teacher, Walter Dyett, Walter Henry Dyett, had that type of background himself, and he caught on a universal way. His approach was total universal . . .

TP: He was a concert violinist, I believe.

RD: A concert violinist. Also he played banjo in Erskine Tate’s band. And he played also piano. So his background himself entailed, you know, music of all types, and he encouraged and taught his students to be that way.

TP: Now, he was the music teacher at DuSable High School.

RD: DuSable High School, right.

TP: And many, many professional musicians of note, jazz soloists and people in other areas came out of there.

RD: Oh yes.

TP: Who were some of the people you heard there in your years . . . ?

RD: Okay. When you went to that school, even as a freshman, you were in awe of the people who had gone there before you in music. They were very popular and very successful, so you knew that you had some kind of shoe to fit into. Amongst them was Dinah Washington. Milt Hinton had gone to the previous DuSable . . .

TP: Phillips High, I think.

RD: He went to Wendell Phillips. And DuSable, when it was built, was I think called the New Wendell Phillips, but then they changed it to DuSable, which was a very prominent name in Chicago . . .

TP: The founder of Chicago, Jean Baptiste DuSable.

RD: Yeah, he was the first one to settle.

TP: Milt Hinton, I think, came up under Major N. Clark Smith, who had been the bandmaster at Phillips High, I believe.

RD: See, that’s information that you’re giving me that’s something new. I don’t know. But that sounds very logical. And then there was Gene Ammons, there was Johnny Griffin, there was Clifford Jordan, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins — you name them. John Gilmore. I can go on and on, and not even remembering half of them who are very prominent today. But that was the kind of thing he built, was a pure professional attitude toward the music, and his approach to the music led you to believe that anything you wanted to do was up to you.

TP: He also organized, I think, bands outside of the school, and had kids join the union and actually work as professional musicians.

RD: Oh yeah. I worked in his band.

TP: Tell me about that. What kind of material were they doing?

RD: Well, mostly the band that I worked with for him was mostly for dance, ballroom dancing. But he would play Jazz charts, and the people would dance because it was a big band. I worked with another band around there, too. Eddie King had a band of that same type. But Walter Dyett’s band I worked in, and . . .

Walter Dyett never left the teaching podium. I mean, when you were around him, you just sat and listened, because you knew you were going to grab something that would be meaningful for the rest of your life. Even after I left high school, I mean for the next 20 years . . . Let’s see. He died, I think, in 1968; I graduated from high school in ’48. For the next 20 years I was learning things from him. He was visiting New York. You’d see him anywhere. And he was always telling you something that was directed toward a positive attitude toward what you what you were wanting to accomplish on your instrument. He would have us sit down in the band room for twenty minutes without even touching our instrument, and we would talk about things that we wanted to get accomplished. Mind power, he called it. It was fantastic.

TP: Did he select you to be a bass player, or were you playing bass when you entered as a freshman?

RD: No, no. I asked him could I study bass with him.

TP: What was the fascination for you? Why did you want to be a bass player?

RD: Well, my dearest friend at the time, Ernest Jones, was in the band. And every day we would walk home together, because he lived in the same direction that I lived in, and he’d tell me about all these things that he was doing in the band room, about counting bars and rests, and recognizing this . . . And I used to stand over him while he was practicing at home, just to watch what he was doing. And I said, “I’ve got to get into this.” And I was always fascinated by the bass anyway. So I just went up to the band room and asked could I get in.

TP: Did you have the opportunity to listen to records when you were a kid . . . ?

RD: Yeah!

TP: . . . or see bands around Chicago? I mean, there was so much music around Chicago in the 1930s or 1940s.

RD: Well, see, there wasn’t any television. You know, you couldn’t sit at home and get all this. So what you’d do, you’d go . . . In my case, it was only four blocks from me. I would go to the Regal Theatre. And every band you want to mention would come into the Regal Theatre, and you saw them live. And you could stay in there for as long as you could stay in there. Because you’d just pay one admission there, and you’d stay around the clock if you could afford the time.

TP: And did you sometimes?

RD: Oh yeah! And then you . . .

TP: Who did you go to see?

RD: Well, all the great bands. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jay McShann, Lucky Millinder — just any band that you could mention was in that theatre.

TP: Did you have a chance, say, to see Jimmy Blanton?

RD: Well, it’s funny you mention that. Because he died in 1942, and I was 12 years old at the time. Now, it’s possible I heard him, but I really can’t recall. There were some older friends I had at that time who would take me to their homes and listen to records. In particular there was Karl Byrom that I would hang out with. He was in school at an older age than the normal high school student, because he had TB and he could never finish the term, so he was delayed. Which was to my benefit, because he kind of took me under his wing, and played all these fantastic records he had at home with Oscar Pettiford, Milton Hinton, Jimmy Blanton, you know.

TP: And these were the people who initially inspired you as a bassist.

RD: Oh yeah. It was a congregation of good feelings. Because you’d just sit there and listen to these older musicians play. I remember . . . I was a freshman when Johnny Griffin was a senior, and I remember watching him on the football field playing a clarinet, you know, in the marching band and stuff like that. And I remember Lionel Hampton heard him at what we called a booster concert, you know, to start off with the football season, and the jazz band would play, the school jazz band — and Lionel Hampton was the guest artist. And he heard . . . Johnny Griffin stood up and took a solo, and that was it. He took him right out of there. “Hey, you’re the one.”

TP: Now, you’re the generation that came under the sway of bebop, and you were a teenager when those records were coming out. I remember Clifford Jordan telling me about hearing “Red Cross,” I think . . .

RD: Uh-huh.

TP: He didn’t know it was “Red Cross,” and then he found it out — but that really just took him all the way in that direction. Did records like that have a big impact on you?

RD: Yeah, well, I hated it when I first heard it. Because I was just beginning to learn how to play boogie-woogie bass lines, and things of the swing era, you know, learning tunes off of records, and here comes Charlie Parker — I said, “God!” But it was lucky for me that it came at that time, because it caused me to develop. I remember playing a 78 record over and over again of “My Old Flame,” trying to find out what Tommy Potter was doing with the bass line.

TP: Were you listening to the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band with Ray Brown . . . ?

RD: Yeah! And Charlie Mingus. Listened to the whole thing.

TP: Everything.

RD: I mean, it got so that once I got involved, knowing I wanted to do that, which was from day one, I started going back and reading all of the old jazz magazines, doing research on the roots of the music I was wanting to play. And I started listening to, you know, an enormous collection of music, go to everybody’s house and exchange records. And I remember those Jimmy Blanton records I took from my friend’s house and went to a recording studio and had them copied from one disk to another. I still have those.

TP: Now, I recollect reading a profile of you in Down Beat from maybe 25 years ago where you talked about playing the Calumet City circuit . . .

RD: Heh . . . Yeah!

TP: . . . and doing all these gigs in Chicago after high school . . . It’s just such a full range of experience you’d get in Chicago. It sounds like you were doing your classical training . . .

RD: Mmm-hmm.

TP: . . . and playing blues and boogie-woogie gigs, and bebop gigs, and jump bands and the whole thing.

RD: Mmm-hmm.

TP: Is that how it was in Chicago?

RD: Yeah. Chicago was wide-open. I mean, you could go to jam sessions, like, five or six o’clock in the morning. That’s when they started, breakfast jam sessions. That’s when I met the great Ike Day and Wilbur Ware, playing at these sessions. So you had all that music just flowing around you. It was just wide open.

I should go back and say that my mother also had brought in records from New Orleans. I had records made in 1904 of, you know, different people who had recorded on RCA-Victor. And she was, of course, a contemporary of Louis Armstrong. They were born the same year.

TP: Is she from New Orleans?

RD: Yes. She was from Homewood, Louisiana, which was right outside of New Orleans.

So then you’d have all this exposure! You’d go to the Club DeLisa and hear big bands, shows, everything. You’d hear vocalists, Joe Williams, everything. Then, of course, you would jam with your friends. You’d go to each other’s house, you know . . . I was just looking over some old pictures of mine, because I had to do that to send off for some promo, and I saw a picture (and I’d forgotten I had it) of Sun Ra, Jimmy Ellis, a guy named Charles Hines and myself, right in my house rehearsing.

TP: You’ve mentioned a few names in the last couple of minutes who I’d like you to comment on. The first is Wilbur Ware, who really held sway over all the bassists in Chicago at that particular time, I think.

RD: Yeah, he was the king. He was the king. But the guy I really admired, and thought that he was really the king, because I knew him personally and hung out with him a lot, was Karl Byrom. Now, he was the all-around bassist, very talented. It’s just that his health just didn’t allow him to emerge into, you know, the atmosphere of getting to New York. It reminded me . . . It was almost as if I had my own Jimmy Blanton right in my own high school.

TP: He was that strong.

RD: Oh, he was strong. And all the recordings that Jimmy Blanton made, he knew them note for note, Slam Stewart note for note — and he had his own particular way of doing things. And I just loved him.

TP: Another bassist who was in Chicago a lot at that time, and one of the great masters, was Israel Crosby.

RD: Israel Crosby was another one. Ooh! See, we had all these great bass players around to listen to. Like Eddie Calhoun. Eddie Calhoun was the first one to show me something about the middle part of a tune, that’s called a bridge, and the “Rhythm” changes. And I grasped it very fast, because I already knew triads and chords. And he told me that, and I said, “Man, it. . .” Eddie Calhoun was the first person to order a drink for me in a nightclub. He was with Ahmad Jamal. Because I had gotten to legal age. And he said, “You want a drink?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What do you drink?” I said, “I don’t know what to drink.” I’ll never forget it, he ordered a burgundy with a ginger ale! [Laughs]

But Eddie Calhoun was a fantastic player. You had Israel Crosby, you had Wilbur Ware, and there was another bass player — I can’t think of his name at the moment. Oh, what was his name? A very short guy.

TP: Leroy Jackson?

RD: No. There was Wilbur Edmonson(?) there, too. He was phenomenal.

TP: We’ll call it to mind in a moment, I’m sure, probably when we’re doing something entirely different. You also mentioned the name of Ike Day, who has recorded I think one session, and you can hardly hear him, so any time I have someone up here who heard him in the flesh I ask them what he sounded like.

RD: Well, let’s see. At the time I heard him, I don’t think I was mature enough to analyze and say what it is that you want me to talk about. But I was fascinated, because I saw this very small, skinny guy approach the drums, while I was playing, and when he started to play it was like a football field. Every person in the audience started saying “Ike Day, Ike Day, Ike Day.” And I looked around, and I got very nervous, because then I knew who it was. And then Wilbur Ware came up with his bass, and we played together, two basses and Ike Day and whoever was in the front line. But I can only estimate that his contemporaries being Max Roach and any other drummer along that line of time. . . I heard that they all . . . when they came to Chicago, that’s where they made tracks to, was to hear Ike Day.

TP: You mentioned Sun Ra as well, and a picture of him in your house. That period of his career has been talked about and written about, but again we haven’t really heard it. Can you talk about what Sun Ra was doing in 1950, ’52 . . . ?

RD: Oh yeah! Well, thank the Lord that he was around. Because I learned a lot from him about not only just music, but about life. And at that time, his name was Sunny Blount. It all goes back to a period in my life where I needed to hear a concept of someone who was individualistic, as he was, who was dynamic in their resolve philosophies; you know, philosophies that I think had been tested by him already. And it was during this period where they wanted to take me into the Korean War and all that crap that I had never heard about. I had never heard the word “Korean” or “Korea” before the war started, and I didn’t think it was my business, heh-heh, to be involved. But Sun Ra was definitely the person to put a cap on that, to tell you philosophically what was happening in the world.

And I remember the first time I met him, the first thing he said to me . . . He said, “I don’t think you’re ready to go to the Moon yet.” That’s the first thing he said to me. And I listened . . . As a matter of fact, I’m going to have some tapes transcribed that I interviewed him when I worked with him in Paris, oh, maybe ten years ago. I have a lot of things that he talked on tape, maybe three hours of it, you know. But that’s one of the projects that I have in mind to get done for historical-archival things that just should be documented, you know. Because his thoughts were just dynamic.

And I had never heard a person talk like him before. My father also was a great talker and a spiritual guider. But then this was a contemporary in the sense of recent thoughts that he penetrated through. That’s why so many people stayed with him, because he was the man.

TP: But he was running rehearsal bands, even at that time, with many of the top young musicians in Chicago (yes?) in the late ’40s , early ’50s?

RD: Well, I don’t know. You can verify that yourself. But my association with him was that he would have meetings every Sunday at his house, talking. And then, if we had a gig, then we’d have a rehearsal for a gig. And I’ll never forget him saying . . . There was a tune I didn’t know that was a very popular standard, and he said, “You should have known that eons of years ago.” He said, “We have to advance towards some other aspect of tunes.” And when he said that to me, with the respect I had for him, I started learning more and more and more tunes as fast as I could, because I came to play with him — I knew I had to perform. It was him I worked with in Calumet City. You mentioned that word; I worked with him in Calumet City.

TP: What was the band? Do you recollect?

RD: I just remember Sun Ra and the drummer. See, a band . . . It was a burlesque house in Calumet City. The bumps and grinds of females, you know. They usually would hire a piano, trumpet and drums, just enough to make it a band. And of course, the musicians are used to playing with a bass player, so they would all chip in ten dollars of their fee, and hire a bass player. And I was a bass player in that particular group. I was going to college at that time, getting off at 4 o’clock in the morning and I had to be in school at 8, you know. But it was nothing, because I was with Sun Ra and, you know, learning a lot of things.

If you want to, I can tell you a beautiful story about my impressions of him at that time.

TP: Please.

RD: While . . . See, there was kind of a screen between us and the dancer. We could see her through a veiled curtain of some type, so that the drummer would catch the bumps and things like that. And we arrived back together back and forth to work from Chicago to Calumet City. And one of the waitresses used to ride in the car with us, and we met a couple of the dancers that way, too.

But the thing that impressed me about Sun Ra was that for the whole time . . . This was like you call a factory job. He would be reading a paperback book for the whole time he was playing, and he’d turn the pages, you know, and play and never missed a beat, turning the pages and reading. I said, “This guy is phenomenal.” I can do that now. I can do two or three things at once, and do them quite well.

But the thing is, he looked over at me and he said, “See the guy over there who’s drunk?” I said, “Yeah.” There was a guy laying on a booth, who had probably seen the show more than once or twice, but he was drunk — I mean, he was actually very drunk. As the expression goes, he was pissy drunk. And he said, “Watch me sober him up.” And I watched . . . And we were playing “Body and Soul.” Then Sun Ra started going further and further out with the chords, and I was watching his left hand to see what he was doing . . . He wasn’t playing any louder than he had been playing before, because it was all background music. And sure enough, this guy must have been about 50 feet away from us, and he stirred . . . and within three minutes he was standing straight up as if he was a soldier standing at attention. And then Sun Ra looked at me kind of with that little grin he had; he just looked at me and said, “See?” [Laughs] And I said, “What else do you do?”

TP: It sounds like a very impressive moment in the annals of music!

RD: Uh-huh.

TP: We’re speaking with Richard Davis on “Out To Lunch” on WKCR-FM, New York, 89.9, Ted Panken here, and Richard Davis and Friends are appearing at Sweet Basil this week, through Sunday. It seems to me we’ve been talking a while, and should get to some music. But since we’re talking about Chicago, maybe we can do the bridge this way and talk about . . .

RD: Bill Lee?

TP: Well, how you wound up . . . Well, Bill Lee, but also I guess the events that led to you coming to New York, and I guess leaving with Sarah Vaughan. . .

RD: That’s a funny one. Okay.

TP: . . . was your path away from Chicago.

RD: That’s a funny one. I can tell you about that.

TP: Well, Richard Davis, you worked with Sarah Vaughan’s group, I guess, for five years, was it . . . ?

RD: Right.

TP: From ’57 to ’62. And this really introduced you to the broader audience and to musicians all over.

RD: Mmm-hmm, yeah.

TP: So that’s the prologue to what Richard Davis will say, I guess.

RD: Do you want to play music first, or . . . Should we talk now?

TP: Well, let’s play some music. Tell us about the piece we’re about to hear, and then we’ll resume the interview.

RD: All right. It relates to Bill Lee. Bill Lee, in my estimation, formed the first two-bass combo group — to my knowledge. And I think this was 1969. I was playing the melody bass (it was my actual date; I was the leader on the date), and he played supporting bass. Bill had a . . . His melodic and harmonic concept was just powerful. He employed Chick Corea on the piano and Sam Brown on guitar, Sonny Brown on drums (where is he nowadays?), and Frankie Dunlop on percussion. I think I told Bill that I liked the melody to “Dear Old Stockholm.” That was all I said to him. And he came up with this arrangement on “Dear Old Stockholm.”

This session was reissued two or three times, as called With Understanding, and then it was released under another name with Chick Corea as a leader! I think that the company probably thought that his name would help them in the sales. I’m assuming this.

TP: In your group, usually everybody writes and you incorporate a number of your compositions, but the compositions from various members of the group as well. At least in the past that’s been the case.

RD: Right. I encourage that to happen. I think it’s a good idea to have people do their thing. I think it’s good for morale boosting, and the quality of the music has different attitudes because of different composers.

TP: We were speaking before, in a lengthy interview segment, about your formative years and coming to maturity as a musician in some sense in Chicago, playing at various joints in and around Chicago, with various policies, and you were in school studying the classical bass, and really covering a whole range of musical styles. You emerged from Chicago, I believe, with Sarah Vaughan — or perhaps it was before that. Were you in the ’50s traveling outside of Chicago with your contemporaries? If so, who were some of them?

RD: I did a lot of jobs with Harold Ousley around Chicago, playing cabaret parties, they called them, where you’d bring your own whiskey, and people would give you a set-up, or something similar to that. I didn’t understand exactly what it was, because I wasn’t into drinking, so I never, you know, found out what cabaret really meant in that sense.

But I gigged around with lots of people, John Neely and a lot of my peers in high school . . . But the first time I got which was more than local, in a sense, was a guy who lived in Chicago at the time, who had come from Pittsburgh — that was Ahmad Jamal. And that was the first job I got that had that kind of . . .

TP: When were you part of his group?

RD: This must have been 1952.

TP: So it was in the early group before he started using a drummer? Was that in the guitar-bass phase of the group?

RD: Yeah. He had Eddie Calhoun . . .

TP: He had Ray Crawford on guitar?

RD: Yeah. Ray Crawford on guitar, and then there was another guy on the guitar — I can’t remember his name now either! Then there was Ahmad, and I was playing bass, of course. Ahmad had a tune which required me to play maraca while I was playing the bass; I had to learn to do that with him, so he’d get this effect. And then Ray Crawford would thump on the strings and make it sound like a conga drum. It was a fantastic thing. And Ahmad had a sound and a concept that was just unbelievable. And of course, he attracted all of the guys coming in traveling to the club to hear him play, and it was always jam-packed. It was the first time I was with what you might call a consistent professional successful group.

TP: Was he working steadily with, like, several-week engagements at a time? And what clubs was he playing in Chicago?

RD: He would work at the Pershing Lounge, which was in the Pershing Hotel, oh, six weeks at a time, or more even.

TP: There were several levels to that club, weren’t there? There were like two or three different venues within that hotel . . .

RD: Well, the ballroom. See, the ballroom is where all the great traveling artists would come through. Like Lester Young; I remember seeing Lester Young. And several people would come. Charlie Parker . . . They’d all work in the ballroom. And the lounge was the place . . . I think that’s when first heard Eddie South, the violinist. I can’t remember all the groups that worked there, but I remember being there with Ahmad. And it was a classy kind of a joint. You know, there was a nice stage presentation, a lot of room on the stage, storage of the instruments — you know, it was very pleasant.

TP: Good piano.

RD: Good piano, yeah. And Ahmad . . . It was a good thing for me to be with Ahmad. The one thing I’ll never forget him telling me at a rehearsal, he said, “Who is your favorite piano player?” And I said, “Oscar Peterson.” You know, who else? And he said, “You want to know who my favorite bass player is?” I said, “Tell me.” I thought he was going to say Ray Brown or somebody. He said, “You are.” I said, “Me?” He said, “Yeah, because you’re here with me.” I said, “God, what a lesson!” I was the number-one bass player for him because he was confronted me being with him. That was a real booster.

But then after that, in 1952 . . . or was it ’54 . . . Yeah, in 1954, I was approached by this bass player, Johnny Pate, whose son is Don Pate. And I knew Johnny Pate; he was a helluva bass player, you know, and I used to hear him on different jobs around town, and Johnny Frigo was around, too . . . He said, “Do you want to go to New York with this guy I’m working with?” And I said, “New York? Yeah!” And he said, “Well, I’m getting ready to leave this guy because I don’t want to go to New York, and I told him about you, because I thought you were the one qualified to play what he wants out of a bass player. I said, “Well, thank you.” So I went and auditioned for the guy, and he liked it, and he said, “Okay, we’re leaving at such-and-such a time” and all that stuff, you know . . .

And man, I got the New York jitters after that! I said, “New York!” You hear about New York and all these great musicians there . . . And what happened is that we exchanged jobs. He went with Ahmad and I went with Don Shirley. But my job didn’t start until we got to New York, and I think we were going to exchange jobs at an appropriate time. But just before I supposed to leave for New York, I went to him and I said, “Look, man, I want my job back. I’m not going to New York. I was frightened half to death.” For some reason I was at the Blue Note; I can’t remember what for, but . . .

TP: The Chicago Blue Note on the North Side.

RD: Yes. I remember being there in the daytime, and Sarah Vaughan was beginning to rehearse there. But her bass player was there; Beverly Peer, I think was his name. And he was working with Sarah Vaughan, and I was asking him about New York, and I knew Sarah Vaughan was going to come to that club and rehearse, you know . . . That was frightening me to death, man.

So then, Johnny Pate said, “Look, man, you can’t have your job back. You belong in New York, and that’s where you’re going to go.” I don’t know what made him say that, but it was the best thing for me . . . heh-heh . . .

TP: But it seems to me that Chicago would be the ultimate preparation for going to New York and dealing with the music, just considering all the types of experiences you could have. I presume you were sitting in with the people when they were coming through town and doing these types of gigs . . .

RD: You’re right! You’re right. I mean, some of the experiences I had in Chicago, you wouldn’t believe. You know, I learned a lot from another saxophone player who taught me a lot of . . . You know, people would teach you in Chicago, as for your grounds. But still it’s frightening. Even leaving Chicago to go to New York is frightening. And I just didn’t want to go. I got nervous. And he said, “You’ve got to go.” And he wouldn’t give me my job back, so I had to go!

TP: What was it like working with Sarah Vaughan for those years? One thing that I think probably gets lost to the general audience is the level of her musicianship. I’ve heard a story that she was on a tour with a number of musicians, including Nat Cole in 1952 or so, and Nat Cole couldn’t make it, couldn’t make a night, or he was sick . . .

RD: Mmm-hmm.

TP: So she came out and sing his whole thing and played all of the piano parts.

RD: That sounds like her! Like Shirley Horn today. Boy, that sounds like her.

But the thing about . . . See, Roy Haynes used to come through Chicago, and I met him — and he was working with Sarah Vaughan at the time. And he and I kind of pal-ed off right away. And it’s possible that he was the one who recommended me. I never knew that for a fact, but looking back, I think that’s what happened. But I went to do the job with her, and man, I was too frightened to play. And the first two or three nights playing with Jimmy Jones and Roy Haynes and Sarah Vaughan on the stage . . . I just kind of just. . . I was tip-toein’ through the tulips, just making little announcements out of the bass and all that kind of stuff. And then I looked around and said, “Hey! They must have called me here for a reason.” And so I said, pardon the expression, but I said, “Hey! I’m gonna just play. What the . . . ” — you know. And then I started opening up, and started playing. And right away, I noticed they started looking back and saying, “Oh, he’s opening up now.” But it took me two or three nights before I could really relax and really begin to play.

TP: Were you based in New York while you were working with Sarah Vaughan?

RD: Yeah, I moved to New York, and they called me. I went to New York with Don Shirley. That’s the guy whose job took me to New York. And I stayed with him for two years, I guess to 1956, and between ’56 and ’57 I was just gigging around, taking any little gig I could get, and then I got a call from Sarah Vaughan’s office in 1957.

TP: I guess the series of recordings that really started to put your name internationally on the map, where you could begin to express your creativity as a musician and so forth begins in the early 1960s with a series of recordings for both Blue Note and Prestige . . .

RD: Right. Because after I decided to leave Sarah, after five years, the first person I ran into with a prominent gig was Eric Dolphy, heh-heh. . .right in the subway station. And he said, “What are you doing next week?” I said, “Nothing.” And he said, “Why don’t you go down to the Five Spot with me?

TP: 1961.

RD: Yeah. And that was it! I said, “Man, oh God, what a way to come into New York.

TP: You did some very famous duets with Eric Dolphy where he played bass clarinet and you on bass, the Douglas sessions.

RD: Mmm-hmm.

TP: A few words about him, and then we’ll get back to some more music by your current group.

RD: Well, I think that first session was supposed to have been under my name. I can’t remember whether it was or not. Not that it really matters. But [engineer/proucer Alan] Douglas, who I had done a lot of folk music with, I was playing a lot of folk music, folk singers and things . . . . He said, “If you were going in the studio to play a duet, who would you choose? Who would you want to play with?” I said “Eric Dolphy.” And that was the beginning.

TP: Where did you first meet him?

RD: On the subway!

TP: Oh, that was it? You hadn’t known him before?

RD: I don’t think so! [Laughs] Maybe he knew who I was. But when I saw him, to be honest with you, I couldn’t tell whether he was Eric Dolphy or Ornette Coleman. Because I think they both wore goatees at that time.

TP: Well, you and Eric Dolphy were part of a very famous date which is at the top of the stack right next to me, called Point of Departure by Andrew Hill, one of four or five recordings you did with Andrew Hill then . . .

RD: Yeah!

TP: This was such a creative period. You were on Bobby Hutcherson and Andrew Hill records, really extending the form, and there’s a real sense of speculation and searching in these records.

RD: Uh-huh.

TP: Can you talk a little bit about the attitude that was behind the making of them?

RD: You mean as far as my contribution as a bass player?

TP: Your contribution and the overall spirit of the groups and the musicians.

RD: Well, first of all, you had a company that really organized these sessions, like Alfred Lion and those guys. They really rehearsed, they paid you for a rehearsal, the rehearsal was set up in the studio, you went over what you were going to do, who was going to solo, and the tunes and all that. And I remember Alfred Lion always eating chocolates, and he always gave me some, because I liked that . . . ! But then his friend, Francis Woolf, he was always taking pictures. So it was a great organization of a type. These guys were dedicated to the music.

And on this date also was Kenny Dorham. Now, Kenny Dorham, I worked a lot with him in clubs in New York. And I just loved Kenny Dorham. He was slick. He used to call me the Fox, because he thought I was kind of extra. . .

TP: Well, then he wrote a tune after you, didn’t he, on Trompeta Toccata! That’s you!

RD: I don’t know whether he related it to me exactly on that tune, but he called me the Fox. And Eric called me the Iron Man, and he wrote a tune called “Iron Man.” Because he thought I had endless energy — which I do. And he said, “Man, one day I’m going to be like you; I’m going to be as busy as you are and be able to . . . ” A lot of people thought I was using dope to do all of the things I was doing!

Of course, that’s always applied to musicians anyway if they’re doing something that is beyond the ordinary. Even Eric Dolphy, with his performance ability . . . I remember a guy running backstage when we were at Birdland one night, and he said, “Where is he?! Where is he?!” He was all excited. And he says, “Does he use dope?” Man, Eric Dolphy was so far removed from dope. . . He was just high on the music, all the time. The music was so tremendous.

And Kenny Dorham had this very, very professional approach to his writing and to his sound. He was a guy who I had heard when I was just learning how to play the bass! And for me to be on the stage with him, it felt so good. And then there was Joe Henderson, with that unique sound and concept that he plays with . . . Man, I was in heaven. And there’s a young Tony Williams from that date.

TP: We don’t even have it cued up. Would you like me to put something on from it?

RD: Yeah.

TP: Which one?

RD: I wouldn’t know what to select, because I haven’t heard this in years. You probably have heard it more recently than I have.

TP: Maybe so. How about “New Monastery”?

RD: Okay. Whatever you say, doctor.

TP: You’re the doctor . . . By the way, are you a Doctor in Music. You do teach at Madison.

RD: Well, I do have a doctorate. I have what is called an honorary doctorate in music. I am a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison camps.

TP: Your curriculum at University of Wisconsin and the band . . . Is there an enthusiastic turnout for the jazz history course that you teach? Is it well- received, well- attended? What’s your impression of the students at this point?

RD: Well, the class usually closes out in the first day of registration, which means there are four days when students are still trying to get in and wanting to be on a waiting list — which I don’t encourage. Because I want a nice, intimate, smaller group of people. And I try to limit it to 85, but it normally creeps up to about 110. And it’s an auditorium which seats 200, so it’s comfortable for everybody. And I see students all over the country who have been in that class, and they come to see me when I’m in their town. Like, I was in L.A. last week, and I saw about six or seven students who had been in the class, and here in New York I saw three or four last night, the first night.

But it’s been a good experience for me also to enhance my continued growth and knowledge about the traditional jazz heritage. It has given me lots of reasons to read more global things, because I relate them back to the situation with jazz and how it fits into our society — things like that.

TP: What’s your approach to the curriculum? Do you cover it chronologically from the beginnings up to the modern?

RD: The way I handle that, to keep from being bored (which I dread that feeling), is that . . . At first it was like 1920’s to present, general history. What I did, I broke it down into four categories. One semester you have saxophones, concentrated on that. Then the next semester, trumpet players. The next semester, vocalists, miscellaneous instruments and trombones. And the next semester you have rhythm sections and combos. I don’t do the big band, because another professor does that; he’s the band director, concert band and marching band — and he does big band things.

But what I do is concentrate on making the student know a particular personality who is innovative in the role of how the music developed between the 1920s and the present. I talk about the social stimuli, economic conditions, and other things related to the music being produced the way it is produced. One of my favorite subjects, generally speaking, in the music (and I just received a grant for that) is jazz protest songs and experience in the 20th Century.

TP: One last question before we get to the final piece of music is your sense of the way the music is being produced today and the conditions under which it’s being produced. Particularly the kind of repertory approach to jazz amongst many of the young musicians. Just generally, what’s your sense of the attitude to music by the younger musicians who will be the future of the music that you’re aware of?

RD: If I’m understanding your question correctly . . . This might be something that does not answer that question per se . . .

TP: It may not be a clear question, too.

RD: Yeah. I’ll just give you kind of a capsule conception of what I’m seeing today with the younger musicians. I see them as the next generation to what’s happened before them, and the ones that I’ve met . . . Javon Jackson, I just spent a week with him in the band in California. First of all, it was great to see the personality that he has, which is dynamic. I mean, he asked me if he was my son! And I was honored. Because he’s not my son, but when you see the next generation coming up, you look at it in the same sense of the Son of the Music — the next generation. And his talent, to my estimation, is very strong, and his attitude towards honoring the music is just tremendous.

I also have a godson, Eric McPherson, who plays with Jackie McLean on the drums. I was there in the hospital the day he was born, just taking his mother to the hospital. And to watch him come up and watch his attitude as a gentleman, first of all, and a kind person . . . You know, we used to just go out for McDonald’s hamburgers and go to movies, just to keep an association when I’d come to New York, and then he starts playing drums, and he’d come to the club every night, and he’d sit there and sip on that Coca-Cola, and he was listening to Freddie Waits and any drummer that I had with me at the time (Billy Hart), and he started studying drums . . . And now to see him actually playing professionally, it tells me that the music is honorable, because the next generation deems it necessary to want to play it — and the challenge of trying to play it is very demanding. He got a scholarship to go and study with Jackie McLean. And I can mention his friend, Abe, alto saxophone . . . He sat in with me once because our saxophonist didn’t show up, and he really roused the audience . . .

TP: There’s some amazing talent out there.

RD: Amazing, amazing talent out there. And I can name quite a few guys that I have heard and have heard of, you know, through recordings and whatever you want to talk about, that tells me that hopefully we’ve handed the baton, and we have handed it to the right person.

Plus, the other thing that is so phenomenal is that their business attitude is quite different than ours was. They have nice, prominent young lawyers representing them, like Terence Blanchard . . . I worked with him on that memorial thing for Eric Dolphy. He had a bright young lawyer right there talking in his behalf, and the guy was in his mid 20s, if that old, but he was very, very polished!

Whereas some of the older guys in our generation had all this talent and equipment with writing and playing, but never really quite handled the business well enough to escape the plantation. You see what I mean? Because it was almost like saying, “I’m glad to get what I can get.” But these guys now know that they have something that’s marketable, not in the sense of a Michael Jackson recording . . . But whatever it is that people are buying from them, they are selling it with more intelligent attitudes.

TP: I guess we can safely say that you feel good about the future of the music.

RD: Oh, I feel good about it.

TP: And you continue to be part of the future of the music.

RD: Oh yeah!

TP: As is evident to anyone who will go down to hear Richard Davis and Friends this week at Sweet Basil.

RD: Yeah!

TP: We’ll conclude with something from a recording from 1987 that’s a dedication to your daughter . . .

RD: “Persia.” That’s my heart right there . . 

For Trombonist Steve Davis’ 50th Birthday, An Interview From 1998 for the Criss Cross Recording “Crossfire”

The exceptional trombonist Steve Davis turns 50 today. For the occasion, here’s an interview I did with Steve in 1998, when I was putting together the liner notes for his Criss Cross CD, Crossfire.  At the end is a brief conversation with Steve’s mentor, teacher and early employer, Jackie McLean.

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TP: Birthday.

SD: 4-14-67.

TP: So you’re just turned 31. You’re from Binghamton?

SD: I was actually born in Worcester, Massachusetts, but I pretty much grew up in Binghamton, New York, from the age of 6 until 18.

TP: Music in the family?

SD: Yes. My Nana, or Grandmother on my mother’s side (I called her Nana), played piano by ear. She didn’t read any music. She was actually semi-professional. She used to do some gigs around Westchester and Connecticut actually, down in the Southbury area, Waterbury, Connecticut. She passed away when I was 19 and I had just started at Hartt; I finished a year there. She played in kind of the stride, maybe Teddy Wilson style. She really liked Oscar Peterson. She used to play “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Them There Eyes,” and sing it.

TP: And she performed?

SD: Yes. She played all types of tunes. “Embraceable You,” a lot of the great standards. She had like a hybrid sort of boogie-woogie, some of that in there. It’s funny, because I guess for her time, it was… She was of WASP heritage or whatever, and it just wasn’t really the thing for a woman to be a Jazz pianist…

TP: A Yankee woman.

SD: Yeah, exactly, a Yankee woman. It was kind of like a novelty. “Oh, Betty is going to play now,” and at parties and stuff like that. She played everything in C or F, but man, she could really play her ass off. I have some tapes that I’ve got to investigate further. She was really gifted, and I just wish she had lived a little longer, because I really could have learned a great deal from her.

TP: And she improvised.

SD: Oh, totally. She didn’t read a note.

TP: Like Eddie Higgins or Dave McKenna.

SD: Exactly. That kind of thing. I’d say she was probably, of course, compared to someone like Dave McKenna, very limited. But she really could play.

Then on my Dad’s side, my Grandsir, who is still alive, played a little trumpet. He’s a real swinger. He’s a big Ellington and Louis Armstrong fan, and Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, that’s his stuff, and a little bit of Bix he talks about. But he would always tell me about hearing Ellington on the radio. He’s from Boston, and…

TP: The Southland Ballroom.

SD: Yeah, right, and in 1932 he was at the Roxbury Latin School, and he remembers hearing the shows from the Cotton Club and all that.

My old man didn’t play. He plays a little electric bass as more like a hobby. But he is the one who really exposed me. He had tons of records, man, when I was growing up in Binghamton. He had all kinds of Blue Note, Horace Silver, a couple of Messengers records, a lot of Miles Davis, Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder which was one of the first things I heard that grabbed me, and a lot of Blues, like Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Otis Rush and people like that.

TP: So you were listening to music all the time.

SD: Yeah, it was around all the time. I was going through the usual paces of the Rolling Stones, things like that, or the Beatles…

TP: But were you playing an instrument from…

SD: I picked up the trumpet in fourth grade, and I switched to euphonium, to baritone horn, when I got braces halfway through the fifth grade.

TP: Because the embouchure was bigger?

SD: Exactly. Because I almost was going to quit. I liked music, and I was about to quit, and I was encouraged not to by my band director and my old man. That’s how I got into bass clef, and I played tuba for a while in junior high school. The trombone came around last. I was hearing these jazz records with J.J. on them and Curtis, or Bob Brookmeyer…

TP: Where were you hearing those records?

SD: My Dad. Then I was told, “Well, if you want to be in the stage band and that kind of stuff, you really should learn the slide trombone as opposed to baritone horn.” My band director in junior high taught me the correlation between the valves and the slide. It’s pretty similar once you get the same correlation. Then I just kind of took it from there. I really didn’t start taking trombone lessons until the end of tenth grade.

TP: But you had a lot of musical background.

SD: Oh yeah.

TP: And you could read music by then?

SD: Yes. Although it was quite a switch from the treble clef baritone, like, B-flat trumpet treble clef music, to all of a sudden like sousaphone ledger lines bass clef. So for a while I was playing the tuba by ear, because I couldn’t make the cosmic leap into the bottom of the bass clef. But that was good, because my ear always gravitated to the bass, and my Dad used to talk about the bass in blues bands and the bass in Rock-and-Roll and certainly in Jazz, so I had an affinity for that.

TP: What were some of the outlets for improvising and such?

SD: Well, the director of our junior high school stage band was very encouraging, as was our high school stage band director, Mr. Mann. They really encouraged us to take little solos and improvise. There was a little kind of cadre or whatever of guys that were playing. There’s a trumpeter named Tony Kadleck, who is in New York now, does a lot of sessions, big band stuff — he was a great player. So that environment was encouraged. Then at SUNY-Binghamton, there was a guy named Al Hahm(?)…

TP: Did you go there because of the Music Department?

SD: Well, I didn’t attend. I used to go to workshops and play in their jazz ensemble when I was in high school. They had summer workshops, and I think 1982 when I was maybe 15, they brought in Bob Brookmeyer one year with his sextet. I think that was in ’82, and I was maybe like 15. I had already started listening, I had the bug, and I got to hear and spend a week with Bob Brookmeyer, who had Dick Oatts and Joe Lovano and Jim McNeely and I think Nussbaum and Michael Moore. But Dick Oatts and Joe Lovano took a particular interest in me and a friend of mine named Chris Jenson, a really good tenor player. Dick Oatts, I remember vividly, said, “J.J. Johnson.” I said, “yeah, I’ve heard a couple of records.” He said, “No, man, go really listen to J.J. Johnson.” And that stuck with me. They really were very encouraging. So kind of after that I started listening to “Giant Steps” and “Kind of Blue” and henceforth.

TP: Was it apparent to you at this time that you were going to be a musician?

SD: Of some kind, yeah. My Dad’s a journalist, a newspaperman, his parents, Grandsir and his mother, were both journalists, and my mother is very literate. So it was kind of encouraged. The humanities thing for college was pretty much a given; that I was going to go someplace that was a university as well as the music. I mean, the music was never discouraged; it was always encouraged. But my parents really wanted me to have a broad education as much as possible.

TP: And you did.

SD: yes. My mother took me to audition at the music schools, Manhattan, Rutgers, New England Conservatory, and then to Hartt at the University of Hartford. She liked the campus environment. And I met Jackie McLean when I auditioned, and he really charmed my mother. I’ll never forget the audition. I played “Summertime” just by myself for him, no rhythm, and then he played the piano, and he started playing this little vamp from D-minor to E-flat-minor, and he said, “Let’s see what you do with this, son,” and he started playing these little rhythms, and I played some little response, and he said, “Yeah, you got it, man; you got all the shit happening. Come on, where’s your Mom? Let’s…” [LAUGHS] It was hilarious, man. So he talked to my mother and really made her feel at ease about coming to school and not going right to New York first, but coming up there to the campus and getting a real education, and that he would… Especially at this time in the mid-’80s, his program was really taking off, and he was there a lot and he was overseeing all the students very much. So he kind of sold my Mom on that one.

TP: And at Hartford you pursued primarily music but also other things.

SD: Yeah, a little Shakespeare. I was close to a minor in Political Science. I think I had three credits left. But mostly music. By the time I got to my junior year, all I wanted to do was play and get to New York.

TP: Talk about some of the affiliations you made at Hartt.

SD: Well, besides the faculty, which of course, Jackie just for me and for so many others of us just turned our whole world around. Especially his history course was really important. You’d take that ideally as a freshman for two semesters. He used to call it “Man and Music,” and now he got politically correct — it’s called “People and Music” or something. He goes back to Africa and makes you realize… He gets into the origins of Man, and things that we take for granted and that you don’t get educated about in public schools generally. Maybe nowadays you do moreso than 1985. Then he takes you through the whole music of slavery and field hollers, and how that evolved into the blues and brass bands and all that kind of stuff. So by the time you get up the second semester, to Charlie Parker and what he can really first-hand tell you about him, it’s pretty exciting. It really gives you a tremendous concept for the history. So that was important.

Jaki Byard was still there, and being around him was great. Hotep Galeta was just coming into his band, and he was starting to teach there, and he was a very big role model for me, as was Nat Reeves. Hotep and Nat not only taught ensembles at the school, but they used to gig a lot around Hartford. There were several little clubs. So the two of them, they might play duo in a restaurant, or they’d grab a decent drummer from the area. And Hotep started hiring me eventually to play quartet. To me that was just the thrill of my life. It was such a privilege to be on the bandstand with those guys. This is leading up to and during the Dynasty record that they made, and Rites of Passage was after that. That band with Carl Allen and Rene would rehearse sometimes at the school, and it was very exciting to see that developing. They’d go out to L.A., or go on the road to Italy, and Jackie would send a postcard. It was just my dream to ever play in that band.

Also, when I first got to Hartt, Antoine Roney was still a student there. It was his last year. And he had a huge influence on me. I mean, he taught me so much. He was the first guy… Within my first week, we borrowed somebody’s car and drove down to New York together and went and heard Joe Henderson at the Vanguard, and he took me to the Blue Note session Ted Curson was running where you’d sign the list. Ted Curson was doing it. He showed me around Harlem a little bit, showed me where Bud Powell lived and all that stuff.

TP: Well, Antoine and Wallace are soaked up in the lore.

SD: Oh yeah, big-time. So meeting and hanging out with Antoine was a big…

TP: So that must have helped you when you made the transition to New York.

SD: Oh, it did. Because he moved down there within a year or two after that, so I used to go hang with him. We used to go to Rashied Ali’s house to play a little. Jackie recommended me to Charlie Persip when I was still a student at Hartt, and my first real New York gig was in the Superband, at Visiones in 1988. There was a club in Hartford, too, called the 880 Club. Nat was in the house band of that with Donnie De Palma, a pianist. They used to bring every Thursday night, like, you name it, man…Junior Cook, Tom Harrell, I got to play with Pepper Adams there… When Eddie Henderson first came back East he was coming up there all the time, and I met him there. Kenny Garrett. A whole lot of people. So that was also really exciting, and it gave you a taste of what the real Jazz world is like.

TP: So it doesn’t seem like New York seemed particularly overwhelming to you, that you were quite well prepared arriving here.

SD: Yes and no. I mean, I was, but it was still overwhelming, trust me. When I got there… And ’89 is when I really moved to New York… I had been kind of zipping in and out quite a bit, and I got there to live, and for six months I basically went through all the money I had saved gigging around Connecticut and living cheap up there. It was scary. That’s when Jesse Davis was doing Augie’s. He had Antoine in the band, and Eric McPherson, and that’s where I met Chris McBride, Ugonna Okegwo had just moved to town, Marc Cary went there. That was an exciting time, and I used to go sit in a lot up there. But I wasn’t working that much. The gig with Art Blakey came up right at the end of ’89, and it was right on time, boy, because I was starting to scuffle.

TP: What sort of gigs were you doing?

SD: Well, not a whole lot. I was coming back to Hartford to do a lot of gigs. I was doing a couple of little club date kind of gigs, because they paid good, and I wasn’t happy about, but… A few little big bands. I was rehearsing with Charlie Persip every Thursday, and what work he had I was doing. Just trying to make jam sessions and be around. That’s what was happening.

TP: How did you get to Art?

SD: Jackie had told him about me. I never stood in the same room as the two of them, which is ironic to me, because they’re both such big mentors.

TP: Frank Lacy preceded you with Art?

SD: Yeah.

TP: Was it a situation where someone suggested you go hear the band at Sweet Basil and linger around the bandstand, or were you just called to make it?

SD: No, Jackie had encouraged me… I was doing that anyway at Mikell’s and Sweet Basil for years, hearing all the different bands. But by the time it got to that, I was around a lot. I think I sat in in September of ’89, and Art knew about me. He said, “Oh, that’s you” or whatever; “bring your horn back Sunday.” I sat in on “Moanin'” or something with a bunch of other guys. Then at Christmas-time, I saw him again, and he told me, “Don’t go far.” I figured, well, okay, that must mean something. I went home literally for Christmas Day, and the next day, the 26th, I was coming back, and that’s when Jackie called me in Binghamton at my parents’ house, and said, “Steve, call Buhaina; he’s looking for you.” He gave me the number, and I called Art’s house, and he got on the phone. He said, “Well, can you make it tonight?” It was 4 in the afternoon, and I was three hours away — I said, “Sure!” It was hilarious. I left my keys in Binghamton. I didn’t have any dress clothes. I had to borrow a suit from a friend of mine. I barely made the gig on time. Frank Lacy was still on the band, too, so that was a very interesting week.

TP: A few words in general on Art Blakey’s impact on you in general musical terms, and maybe specifically on your style as a trombonist.

SD: Well, it’s hard to put into words, of course. Javon Jackson once said something that I really agree with, that I thought was great, that he had a way of showing you what to play, or how to play, without actually telling you anything. He just did it through the drums, and he guided you… One night we were in California, and Freddie Hubbard was there, and I was scared to death. We played “Minor’s Holiday” and some of the classic things. We came off the stand and he put his arm around me. He said, “Steve, listen. You make your statement, you build to a climax, and you get the fuck out. Right?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Simple, right? Okay. Well, do it.”

Art taught me, as has Jackie later, from a different vantage point, how to get to the point, how to get to the fire quick, and say what you’re going to say. That’s what they say about Charlie Parker. If you listen to Curtis Fuller, he never plays more than two or three choruses. So it was such a lesson in getting to the stuff, getting to the point quick.

The other thing is just that beat. Being around Art at time of my life, I was just turning 23, and it’s like he plants a seed in you that hasn’t even blossomed, hasn’t even grown yet, and it’s going to grow as you grow. He told me one time… He was singing all these Fletcher Henderson arrangements and doing the trombone parts, and he said, “You watch, that’s going to be your style; swinging, that’s going to be your style.” I was listening to and kind of captivated by Miles and Wallace Roney, and I wanted to be that on the trombone. Not obvious, but more subtle, mysterious, maybe cold, not cold like spiritually cold, but not the kind of warm breathy sound, but more icy or something, like slick…

TP: Or abstract.

SD: Abstract. I was really thinking about that stuff, and how J.J. and Miles had a certain no-vibrato, and I really liked that. But then being around Art put things in perspective, and then I started to really listen to how Curtis took the Lester Young-Miles-J.J. influence and brought a warmth to it. I’m still trying to find the balance, actually.

TP: So you’re trying to blend the older trombone approach of the big band, pre-J.J. trombonists with the harmony and authority of J.J. and… Do you feel that Curtis Fuller kind of embodies that?

SD: Oh yeah. He’s got the tradition… You can hear it. He comes after J.J., but he was born in 1934, so certainly the Swing Era…he grew up in it. He talks about people like Jack Teagarden and the Basie Band. The thing that I love about J.J., too, is that they came from that tradition so much, that it was such a feat for them, as with Bird and Miles, to break out of that, and to start defining this new approach, and maybe more stark melodies and playing harmonically, more daring, but also precise at the same time. That’s what I really like, is Miles and J.J. and the choice of notes. Curtis was very close to Trane, obviously, when he first came to New York. He talks a lot about that, being around Coltrane and Freddie Hubbard. Obviously Trane was a huge influence on Freddie in phrasing… To me, what Curtis has done with the phrasing, just playing groupings of notes, is like saxophone stuff. J.J. certainly opened that can of worms in a lot of ways for the trombone, and certainly guys even before him did. J.J. had the prowess and the focus to really start to think that way and approach the instrument that way, but Curtis took it another step, where he’s just daring, he’s going to throw it out there, and he doesn’t care if he gets his feet muddy.

[PAUSE]

TP: Anyway, you stayed with Art Blakey a year, and he dies at the end of ’90. The what happens between that and your joining Jackie McLean?

SD: Some tough times, actually.

TP: Do trombonists have a particularly tough time in the business right now.

SD: Well, I’ve been extremely lucky. A couple of good things happened. I did play with Lionel Hampton’s band for a period, and it was great just to be around him and be a part of that legacy for a minute. But that’s a tough gig. Everybody knows that’s a dues-paying kind of gig, but I’m very glad I did it. But the thing that blew me away, though, I did two concerts with Elvin Jones. I was subbing for Wallace Roney, actually. I’d met Elvin at Art’s house about a week prior to Art’s passing. He was very nice to me (I don’t think he’d ever heard me play), and he took my number. Keiko was there. I was just thrilled to meet Elvin. It was a terrible circumstance to meet him under, because Art was kind of laying on the couch, sleeping, he wasn’t well, and Elvin was sort of watching over him. At first he didn’t even know who I was. He kind of asked if he could help me, like he was protecting Art, then I told him I was the trombonist in the band. I just never imagined, ever, that he would call, but he did, and I did a couple of concerts with him. That was a great experience, and something I would love to have an opportunity to do again.

TP: Say a few words about drum styles, and playing with drummers, and the trombone as a rhythmic instrument.

SD: I know for a fact that Art loved the trombone. He used to play a certain way, and you can hear it particularly with Curtis on all those records. I think he inherently understood… The trombone is the underdog instrument, in a way, especially… I always refer to Curtis Fuller as such a role model. He stood next to people like Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter, and transcended those limitations that the horn might present. It’s the last thing you think of when you hear Curtis playing…

TP: That there are any limitations.

SD: Whatsoever. His velocity and authority was astounding. A lot of it is just the timbre of the horn. It’s where the voice is for a male, which to me is the greatest thing about the horn. But that can get lost in the density of the music; sonically, you can lose the sound a little bit. And you’ve got more to travel. There’s more horn. You’re moving a slide with your arm and your wrist, as opposed to valves, so it’s physically more demanding to get around in terms of speed and articulation. Art had a way of goosing… He kind of prodded you and rooted for you, and gave you some stuff to play off of. It’s like riding a tidal wave. All you’ve got to do is stay on the surfboard, and all of a sudden you’re up here where you never thought you’d play.

TP: Talk about Elvin Jones a little bit in this regard.

SD: Elvin was different. Eddie Henderson warned me. He said, “Oh yeah, you’re going to play with Elvin?” He said, “Don’t try to assert the beat the same way you did with Buhaina, because it will be like stepping in quicksand.” I didn’t really figure that out well enough, I don’t think, at that time. I noticed there was a great similarity in just the sound of the drums. To me it was a similar feeling between Art and Elvin, but at the same time vastly different. Elvin didn’t play as loud as often. He could play kind of soft and sort of exposed you in a different way, which I think about all the time now. I just hope to have a chance some day to play with him again, but even if I don’t, I learned a lot just in those two hits.

TP: Then there were various little gigs here and there, that sort of thing?

SD: Yes. There’s a trumpeter named Kenny Rampton. He was Geoff Keezer’s roommate, and I used to hang at their pad in Brooklyn a lot. Kenny had a nice sextet with Sam Newsome and myself and Keezer and Dwayne Burno (Benny Green and for a while Chris McBride did some gigs) and Greg Hutchinson. We did a little like demo tape that I thought sounds pretty good actually, with a lot of Kenny’s music. So that was important for me at the time. We did Birdland and Visiones.

But there wasn’t a whole lot happening. I actually took a little part-time day job handing out flyers for Manhattan Podiatry. [LAUGHS] That’s the only day job I ever had to do.

TP: You joined Jackie when? What happened?

SD: He called and said there was going to be a potential opening back at the school, conducting the big band.

TP: You had a degree in music at this point.

SD: Yes. And I had been out of the school maybe three years. So I certainly hadn’t fashioned myself going back to Hartford so soon. But Jackie sort of indicated…

Well, one thing I’m forgetting before this is that I did meet Leon Parker in ’91, and I formed a group with him, Brad Mehldau, Ugonna Okegwo and Mark Turner on tenor. That was a huge part of my development at that point, particularly with Leon — we had gotten real tight.

Then Jackie had kind of extended this offer for teaching. Mary and I had moved to Rhode Island for a while just to kind of get our stuff together — we had gotten engaged. And Leon was living up in Rhode Island, just because he liked it. He just wanted get away from New York for a minute. We were in Westerley, and Leon was up around Newport and Providence, and we’d kind of band together. We started getting some little gigs. It was like a collective led group, but then it eventually was under my name and most of my music.

TP: So you were writing a lot at this time.

SD: Oh yes.

TP: You mentioned in the interview for One For All hearing Tony Williams’ band and being very impressed by the openness of the material. Talk a bit about the evolution of your writing.

SD: Obviously, Jackie and Hotep and Rene McLean had a huge influence on my compositional influence. As I mentioned, I was around everything. The three of them together in that band (under Jackie’s auspices) had a real sound happening, a real vibe.

TP: Let’s describe that sound. I haven’t heard any music that really sounds like those records, Rites of Passage and Dynasty.

SD: It’s really something. To me, it’s got so much in there. There’s such a recipe. There’s a lot of South African kind of influence in Rene’s and Hotep’s music, but at the same time those guys were both long-time New York cats through the ’60s and ’70s. So there’s to me a real earthy, but hip kind of thing. It’s very rhythmic. It’s hard to explain. I think the vamps and the rhythms and then the way chords move laterally kind of, then coming up with some melodies or lines over that, is real interesting to me. Like, with Jackie you might find a vamp-sounding thing… I think the goal is always to have something just a little different about it. Jackie’s music is always accessible, it’s catchy, but there’s some different stuff in there, some notes you wouldn’t expect, and little jagged edges here and there that makes it what it is — identifiable.

TP: You mentioned the ‘big room’ concept, that he may want to have it sound distinct, but he wants to really express your personality or not be too confined within that structure.

SD: Exactly. Believe me, Jackie can run some changes, and Rene can too. Like that tune “Jay Mac’s Dynasty,” that’s like some “Giant Steps” stuff, but then boom, you’re out there again. So there’s a temperament of kind of hitting you with some density, and then opening it up at the same time, so you encompass a lot.

TP: And there’s also a sort of Monkish, very specific rhythmic quality to what Jackie does, too.

SD: Yeah, and Rene… I think Rene is a tremendously important composer. He’s left-handed, and Hotep and Alan Palmer and Nat Reeves, all of them have said, “Southpaw, Rene. I forget!” He writes these wicked bass lines, and these guys are always groaning, “Oh, man, what are you doing to us?” Rene is very important to me — and Jackie, of course. They bridge the kind of outside and inside so nicely and with such integrity and honesty. Then Hotep’s writing, too, is terrific.

Anyway, if you take all that… Then I was kind of on my own after the Art Blakey-Elvin time, so I had no choice. I had to start a band, because I really wasn’t doing very much playing. Leon was sort of in the same boat, and we’re roughly the same age. It was a drastic switch, and all of a sudden Leon’s got me practicing duos where he’s just playing one little ride cymbal. Then I got into the Miles thing, and the suspended chords and what I’d mentioned about Tony Williams’ writing as one good example. I knew Brad Mehldau from Hartford, and I always liked the way you could hold a note, and he would dress it up and do some things. So we kind of got into that, and I was starting to write with all these things in mind.

TP: So you were into some very open stuff the whole way through.

SD: Yeah, I really was.

TP: So you joined Jackie, a position opened up at Hartt…

SD: Right. We were doing some stuff with that little group. We did a week at the Village Gate in early ’92, and made a demo tape that we were shopping but never got anywhere with it. I wasn’t satisfied with my own playing, but we did all my music. Anyway, it was funny, because Jackie kind of grabbed me, Mark Turner went with Delfeayo Marsalis and moved down to New Orleans, Leon was starting to get work with Tom Harrell and a whole bunch of different people, and Brad went with Josh Redman. So it just kind of went poof. But see, in retrospect, it all made perfect sense, and I got to come back and really fulfill my destiny, in a way, with Jackie, to really play in his band.

TP: It was the first time he’d really… Well, that’s not true, because all through the ’60s he was taking young players in New York and creating his sound around what they were doing with his ideas in a lot of ways, so I guess this band was an extension of that. But in New York, they weren’t his college students; they were young cats on the scene, though some were out of Juilliard or something. Let’s talk about the arc of the band musically from when you joined it through your six years playing with it.

SD: Okay. Well, Alan Palmer and Eric McPherson had come in the group about six months before, replacing Hotep and Carl, and they had done maybe one week at the Vanguard and a couple of little gigs. I remember it was somewhat of a struggle for Jackie at first; he had two very young cats, people loved that other band and everything. But as with any transition, it took a little time, and those guys learned quick. I think both of them are very special players, particularly Eric McPherson as a drummer. I mean, he’s got something going on that is very rare and unique, and I think he is going to become known as a pivotal young drummer. I have no doubt about that.

TP: All he needed to do was smooth off a rough edge or two.

SD: Sure. So anyway, that was very exciting. I always call Nat Reeves “Uncle Nat,” because he was kind of like our big brother. Especially when Rene wasn’t there, Nat kind of pulled all the rest of us up to a certain level, and particularly in the rhythm section he really pulled the other guys along and kind of helped them get it together.

We did the Rhythm of the Earth record right at the beginning. I had been in the mind like a few weeks. Jackie brought in Steve Nelson and Roy Hargrove as guests, which was smart, because I think that helped kind of smooth everything over. But then I’d say within a year after that we did a lot of touring as the front line with Rene, myself and Jackie (there was no trumpet yet) for about a year-and-a-half, in Europe, South Africa, the States. For me to become a third voice with Jackie and Rene, whereas Jackie hadn’t had another horn besides Rene for maybe twenty years before that, was such an honor. We basically played the Dynasty and Rites of Passage book, adding new things all the time, and then the Rhythm of the Earth stuff and some other things that we brought in that we never even recorded. But they already had it together. They had a sound. It sounded great without me. So I just found my own third parts.

TP: Were you investigating Grachan Moncur?

SD: Very much. Grachan, who I also know and greatly admire, he… You know the records. I once asked Jackie what he dug about Grachan, and he said, “His nerve,” which I thought was quite an answer. He liked his sparse approach, but Jackie liked that he had the nerve to try to do something that different — and he liked his writing a lot. He was a big inspiration to me to not always try to keep up, or don’t feel like you’ve got to play a million notes, and go ahead and stick some big colors out there. Go ahead, man, as long as you’ve got the ceiling.

See, being next to Jackie always made you feel special and that nobody could mess with you. You’re always scared, you’re always daunted, because he’s playing so much stuff it’s just ridiculous. But he always rooted for you. Every solo, man, you could feel him over there rooting for you. Every little thing you played meant something to him. If you crack some notes, who cares about that? “Nobody knows but you, man,” he used to say. “All my favorites, man. Lee, that was my baby; he could crack notes. Miles, K.D.” He just gave you that spirit, to go ahead and try.

TP: Now, this raises a couple of points for me. The ’70s was a great decade for the trombone, because people like Ray Anderson and George Lewis, and then people like Watrous on this other end of incredible technical capacity. But in terms of the open approach to the trombone, did you ever check out the former approach, like what George Lewis and Ray Anderson did with Anthony Braxton, taking advantage of the huge sonic possibilities.

SD: Yeah, Craig Harris, and Joseph Bowie I’ve heard a little. Sure, I’ve listened to some of that. But that was never really it for me. It was nice, but I wanted to play like Bud Powell and like… I wanted to be able to do that like Jackie, and play the lines and play the slick stuff and get up in there with those guys, with Woody Shaw — that kind of playing. Certainly Miles and Curtis do that. I know what you’re driving at… I like the spirit, but I don’t… Just as with the plunger, I love to listen to it, I love the spirit of it, and I want to get all that in my sound without literally having to do it.

TP: So you don’t want to be Tricky Sam, but you’d like to have a reference.

SD: I think you have to. How can you play the horn and not know something about Dickie Wells and Lawrence Brown and Jack Teagarden, as much as they played, and with that feeling and lyricism. I love it.

TP: A second point. You’re talking about Jackie saying it’s okay to crack a note or “no one knows but you.” I think one characteristic that’s often been noted about the generation you’re roughly involved with is almost the fear of failure as like a reason not to stretch, because they’re not going to do it right.

SD: Oh yeah. I want to get to that point where I feel totally comfortable with just playing. Actually, going out with Chick is going to be a really great experience in that regard. We did that week at the Blue Note, and they recorded it, and they’re going to put out a CD, and all of us just couldn’t believe it — like, “No, you’re not recording already; we hardly played together; my God, a live record, the music’s so hard.” Chick said, “you know, one of the liabilities you have to take in being an improvising musician is you have to accept the fact that some nights, sometimes it’s going to go nowhere — to you. It’s going to feel like this is going nowhere. So let it go nowhere. Then the next night, the next set, the next tune, you try again.” I felt there was so much wisdom in that. He’s been through it, and he’s a guy that wants to take chances. You wouldn’t necessarily lump Jackie McLean and Chick Corea together, but that’s something that I see in common, that they’re artists, they’re going to be daring, they’re going to let the work show, they’re going to let the flaws be there and make it become part of the music. And you’re absolutely right that our generation… When you hear some of these recordings from the mid and late ’60s, you just say, there’s no way we would do that in this day and age if we’re in the studio, and say it’s some up-tempo thing and the time got kind of funny, and then it just kind of disintegrates into some free-sounding stuff — everyone would stop the take and say, “No, man, this sucks; this is unacceptable.”

I think there’s a lot of good values to that, to really trying to… I think we’ve all kind of slowly but surely raised the overall level of expectations in each other, what you’re supposed to be able to do and handle. But at the same time, there’s a spirit in the process that’s maybe lacking. I think you nailed something on the head. I’m still going through trying to really play good, just play good melodies and learn how to swing and play changes well. But eventually, I’d like to move to a point where I’m not so conscious of that, and thinking about more artistic kind of things, and let it be what it’s going to be.

But right now for me, particularly with the One For All guys and some of these Criss-Cross dates, it’s been a great experience just trying to make good, solid records that are going to stand the test of time, but still you’re trying to lay it out, with no baloney.

[ETC.]

I’ve yet to really flesh out my own original music, and especially the chance to record with Harold Mabern is a privilege right there… I keep thinking that no matter what I get to eventually, I’ll always like to play pretty melodies and try to swing too much to not do it. There’s something about it, that you like it too much to just abandon it or sacrifice it in the name of something else.

Jackie McLean on Steve Davis, 1998:

TP: What do you remember about Steve when he came to Hartt?

JM: He just came with his parents, like most students do, to go to school. That’s when he enrolled in my program, and that’s how I met him. I was very impressed with him. Mostly that I liked the background that he had in the music. He had a good concept and a good understanding of the music, and a great appreciation, plus he’s a very-very nice young man.

TP: He obviously developed a lot, because eventually he came into your band. Can you discuss his progress over the years?

JM: Well, he didn’t waste any time at school. We spent an awful lot of time together. He would come to my saxophone ensembles with his trombone and play, and he was there all the time. He was an A-student, he was great in his ensemble work, incredible in the large orchestra under Mr. Al Lepack’s(?) leadership, and he just took advantage of all the opportunities that the school offered him. Then when you link that with his natural talent, you see the result.

TP: Did you stay in touch with him between when he left Hartt and rejoined you in ’92?

JM: He never went anywhere. I got him a job immediately. He never left Hartt. The first thing I did for Steve is when Art Blakey needed a trombone player, I recommended him. But he never left Hartford, and he’s still teaching there.

TP: So you were always in touch with Steve.

JM: Yeah. From the time he walked in the door, we’ve been in touch with each other.

TP: Talk about the events that caused you to ask him to join your band.

JM: Ted, it’s very simple. When I hear somebody who plays at a particular level, and I like their concept and I like the way they write, the way Steve does… Steve writes wonderful, plays wonderful. There’s nothing other than that. Just “come on and let’s try to play some music together.”

TP: But it augmented your ensemble in a lot of ways. You were starting a new band. It was kind of a transitional time at that time?

JM: No, it just happened. He was up in Canada, and I told him to come play with me at a concert. I had our quartet, and he came and played. Then Rene and I had our quintet, and we added him to that, and he played there for a while. Then he just stayed with me all that time.

TP: He said that one of the great things he got from you that he thinks he’s brought to some of the contemporaries he’s worked with, is your idea of the “big room,” taking small cells of material, and then expanding on it. Did he always have that facility, to be very creative within the situations you present?

JM: He’s very talented in many-many ways. His ability to write music the way he does, his great feeling for harmony and colors… He’s another young great musician developing and playing very well.

TP: Was Grachan Moncur the last trombonist you worked with before Steve?

JM: Yes, he was the first trombonist after Grachan.

TP: How do you hear his playing evolving from when he began to work with the ensemble in 1992 to now?

JM: It’s very difficult to put into words how somebody grows. He’s playing better. He came to the school playing very well for a freshman, and over the four years he was there, his playing… It’s like he was always in my band, I felt like, because we were always playing together, not on the bandstand so much, but around the school, at my house, in different places. Yeah, he’s grown, just like everybody grows. He’s grown immensely. He’s a wonderful musician. He’s one of my favorite trombone players of all time, as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t matter that he’s not my contemporary. I like his sound, I like the way he writes. He’s just a very special musician.

TP: Anything else you want to say about Steve?

JM: Well, I’m just very much in love with him, and his wife, Mary, who is also very talented. His wife is a wonderful musician, great piano player, and his little boy, Anthony… He’s part of my family. I feel like he’s part of my existence. He’s magnificent and wonderful. I feel great that I’ve had this relationship with him, first as a student and now as a colleague and a compatriot in the music. Just because right now we’re not playing together so much doesn’t mean that we’re not going to play together in the future. I’m looking forward to hearing Steve more at some future time.

 

For Herbie Hancock’s 77th Birthday, A “Director’s Cut” DownBeat Feature from 2003 and an interview with the Barnes & Noble Review From 2014

Readers of this blog need no introduction to Herbie Hancock, who turns 77 today. For the occasion, I’m posting the “director’s cut” of a DownBeat cover piece I had the opportunity to write about HH in 2003, and the proceedings of an interview he did with me on the occasion of the publication of Breaking The Rules for the Barnes & Noble Review ‘zine, in which he states: “Jazz is really a foundational music. Jazz musicians have the flexibility to be able to move around freely in other genres. It doesn’t work the other way around. I would say that’s a badge of honor for jazz.”

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Herbie Hancock DB Cover Story, 2003

The opening sequence of Herbie Hancock’s new DVD, Future-2-Future, Live, follows Hancock, elegantly casual in a bespoke black suit, as he enters stage left at the Los Angeles Knitting Factory. Hancock bows, addresses a Korg Karma Roland MK-80 keyboard plugged into an Apple PowerBook computer, and triggers a series of ascending and descending swoops of varying duration. Against a backdrop of swirling rave images, bassist Matthew Garrison bows complementary tones, D.J. Disk interpolates whispery swatches of color, keyboardist Darrell Diaz plucks soft chords, drummer Teri Lyne Carrington elicits rubato, bell-like beats from her cymbals.

Then Hancock takes the microphone in his right hand. “Simply put, knowledge is the past,” he says in a calm, deliberate voice. “It is…” — he smiles, and sweeps his left hand across the keyboard — “…technology.” He pauses, cues an oscillating wash of sound, and continues, stretching out the words: “Wisdom is the future. It is philosophy. It is people’s hearts that move the age. While knowledge may provide a useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future. By contrast, wisdom captivates people’s hearts and has the power to open a new age. Wisdom is the key to understanding the age, creating the time.”

Concluding the invocation, from a text by his spiritual guide, Daiseku Ikeda, Hancock sustains the tone poem, setting up a Carrington chant, which is sampled polyphonically and to which she creates a complementary drumbeat on her electronic pads. Hancock shifts, sits at the acoustic piano, states the melody of “Kebero,” and launches a pithy, majestic solo, constantly developing the theme and sustaining a complex rhythmic dialogue with his drummer, deploying a precisely calibrated array of attacks to treat the piano simultaneously as both an orchestral harmonic instrument and a drum. Carrington’s sampled chant is a break chorus that paves the way for trumpeter Wallace Roney, who bobs and weaves through the rhythm with long combinations that sum up the harmonic material, not stopping until Hancock returns to the Korg with a declarative chord that winds up the piece.

Through the ebb and flow of the remaining 90 minutes of Future-2-Future Live, Hancock improvises through his entire timeline, bouncing off the ensemble to navigate seamlessly through electronic and acoustic environments with a holistic sensibility that he has not displayed on previous recordings. On “This Is D.J. Disk,” a call-and-response with the turntablist, Hancock uncorks a solo that evokes Inventions and Dimensions, his 1963 encounter with bassist Paul Chambers and two Afro-Latin percussionists. He creates a completely reconfigured 20-minute suite of “Dolphin Dance,” originally recorded in 1965 on Maiden Voyage, and one of several dozen Hancock compositions that stand among the sublime achievements of late 20th century jazz. He presents 21st century versions of “Hornets,” a Techno epic originally recorded in 1973 by the groove-based experimental coop Mwandishi on the aforementioned Sextant, and “Butterfly,” a soulful melody from Hancock’s late ’70s fusion period. On the encore, a balls-out “Chameleon,” he comps wickedly under an inspired Kurzweil solo by Darrell Diaz, then takes a thematic counterstatement on the Korg and an orchestral variation on acoustic piano.

Much of the repertoire comprises Hancock’s arrangements of material from his self-released studio CD, Future-2-Future [Transparent], refined over the band’s 50 or so dates during 2001-02. “We committed ourselves to Future-2-Future from an artist development point of view, going on the road and playing smaller clubs to younger audiences, almost as if Herbie was a new artist,” explains his manager, David Passick. On the CD, producer Bill Laswell situated Hancock in the Electro-Hiphop-Ambient-Techno dancefloor environment that he foreshadowed thirty years ago on such albums as Sextant — specifically the piece “Nobu,” built on scratch-like beats — and Dedication, and that he helped to launch in the ‘80s on Future Shock and Perfect Machine. Laswell collects beats from Detroit Techno producer Carl Craig, Afro-Brit drum-bass avatar Gerald Simpson, DJ Rob Swift, Grandmixer DXT, and tabla-percussionist Karsh Kale, deploys the resonant voices of Chaka Khan, Gigi, and Imani Uzuri, and calls on old master instrumentalists Wayne Shorter and Jack deJohnette – and a sampled drum track laid down by Tony Williams not long before his death – to impart gravitas and depth.

“Bill thought it would be interesting if I worked with people who are creating this kind of music who were influenced by records I did when I was their age,” Hancock says. “What would be the future-to-future end product? Bill likes to prepare fragments — some harmonic material or drums or drum-and-bass — before he meets me. Stimulating things. On our past albums, I would evaluate what he prepared, decide what to do, and then go back in the studio and shape it into my record by adding and changing things. The technology has evolved, and when I heard his material I was in the studio in front of a keyboard with a ‘Record’ light on. Bill wanted my immediate first reaction, my gut-level, right-brain response. I’m listening to something; I don’t know where it’s going or where it starts, or anything.”

“When we talk about Electronica, we’re speaking about programming, not playing as a jazz musician would,” says Laswell, reinforcing the point.  “But Herbie thinks in terms of playing and programming simultaneously. He can imagine a sequence as a repetition, not something that’s reproduced electronically, but a spontaneously played musical part. He hears patterns, and he thinks in terms of structures — very advanced harmonic structures.”

“I’ve played with a lot of great musicians,” says Roney. “Sometimes with them, we’re playing, it’s great, we’re having a good time. But with Herbie, from the first chord, the first run, my jaw would drop. You never knew what you were going to hear next and it always took your breath away. Every time.”

“In a way, improvising is like composing,” Hancock says. “I am interested in making it more spontaneous and less intellectual, getting the thinking brain out of the way and letting the music flow through. The structure or balance will inherently reveal itself as a natural consequence. Now, the Mwandishi band played very spontaneous music, and the Future-2-Future band comes from a perspective very similar to when I did Crossings and Sextant. But in the early ’70s it was more raw, whereas now it’s reached some kind of maturity. The music was unrefined, like laying your guts out, letting it all hang out, which a young person may do. Today I’m letting it all hang out, but there’s a sense of the importance of responsibility and other things you learn as you get older.

“Except on rare occasions, I haven’t practiced scales and exercises, the way we normally think of practicing, in many years. What I want to draw from is not technique. I’m no longer interested in being a piano virtuoso in any way, shape or form. That’s not what I’m about. I’m interested in allowing the innermost person to express itself, to respond to whatever the musical environment may be, moment to moment, and to encourage others to have the courage to not be afraid to walk into that kind of darkness.”

Although Hancock has numerous plans for the remainder of 2003, none involve touring the Future-2-Future band. Hancock’s next project will piggyback on his eighth Grammy-winning album, Gershwin’s World [Verve], a critically acclaimed response to the Gershwin Centennial. Joining forces with arranger-conductor Robert Sadin, who conceptualized the album, he will play his own music as well as compositions by Gil Evans, Wayne Shorter, Duke Ellington and Gershwin with philharmonic orchestras in America and Europe. Nor is he neglecting his distinguished legacy in hardcore jazz, with engagements booked for his quartet (Carrington, saxophonist Gary Thomas, and bassist Scott Colley) and with Verve labelmates Michael Brecker and Roy Hargrove in the New Directions Band, which last year released a 2001 location date from Toronto’s Massey Hall, devoted primarily to the music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Massey Hall was the venue where, in 1953, bebop icons Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach convened to document the legendary “Greatest Jazz Concert Ever,” and Hancock will go there in May to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary with Roy Haynes, Dave Holland, Kenny Garrett and Nicholas Payton.

It will also be roughly fifty years from the time when the 13-year-old Hancock – a classical prodigy who at 11 had played Mozart’s D-Minor Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — heard a classmate play jazz trio at a variety show at Hyde Park High School. “I didn’t know anything about improvising then,” Hancock recalls. “I played Classical music and Rhythm-and-Blues. If it wasn’t on the page, I didn’t play it. I had no idea what this guy was doing, but it was organized and rhythmically it was cool. I became curious and decided to learn how to do it, and the more I investigated, the more I liked it. He was playing things that George Shearing had recorded, like ‘I’ll Remember April’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,’ which we had at home. I found phrases I liked, and tried to find the notes on the piano or by singing the part. Then I’d write them down, continue until I got the whole phrase, and try to play the phrase by looking at the notes on the page. I noticed it sounded different from when George Shearing played it, and I looked more closely at what was happening. I noticed that some notes were louder than others, that he used accents, held some parts of the phrase longer — little nuances that made the difference. So when I was 14 and in high school, I was getting experience in ear training and sight-singing.”

Progressing rapidly, Hancock began to participate in Chicago’s bustling scene towards the end of high school, going to jam sessions and picking up ideas from such reharmonization-oriented local pianists as Billy Wallace, Jodie Christian, Willie Pickens and Muhal Richard Abrams, young progressives like Eddie Harris, Ira Sullivan, and Wilbur Ware, and future bandmates like George Coleman, Julian Priester and James Spaulding, the latter two members of Sun Ra’s ’50s Arkestra. He matriculated at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he initially majored in electrical engineering. During summer vacations he took club gigs, including one for which he recalls hiring Jack DeJohnette to play bass. With increasing regularity he attended the jam sessions, including one produced by Joe Segal at the Gate of Horn on the North Side. There he heard the blind pianist Chris Anderson.

“Right after I heard him, and wiped the tears from my eyes, because what he played was so beautiful, I studied with him for a week,” Hancock recalls. “His harmonic thinking and the heart that went into his playing stunned me. When I looked at him – blind, bones brittle, using a crutch — I said, ‘Who is this mother?’ Then he got up and played, and he was playing some harmonic things that Bill Evans was not dealing with at the time. I said, ‘I want to learn what this stuff is!’ For anybody at that time, to have studied with Chris would be a great advantage.

“I also heard Sun Ra a couple of times. Once he was rehearsing in the basement of the Sutherland, I somehow found out about it and checked him out a bit. I didn’t really dig it, but it was interesting. It was a bit much for me at the time.”

In a sense, Hancock is a prototype Chicago musician of his era, sharing philosophical affinities with fellow South Side products like Eddie Harris, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jack DeJohnette, Andrew Hill, Charles Stepney and Maurice White. In his preoccupation with process, technology, collectivity and self-determination, in the risk-taking imperatives that drive him, in his iconoclastic temperament, in his desire to express himself in populist and highbrow forums, to crack the codes of multiple musical languages towards humanistic narrative ends, he embodies the ancient-to-the-future perspective postulated by the Art Ensemble of Chicago during the decade after he departed for New York and began his storied career.

“I describe the whole Chicago experience as school,” he says. “You learned all the basics and got exposure to elements coming from a wide variety of sources, from the total avant garde, which Sun Ra could be, to things from Gene Ammons, the blues, and the way different cats played bebop. The musicians and audiences always encouraged some form of experimentation. You didn’t have to have things perfect; Chicago’s jazz fans supported whatever you were into. Chicago was the best foundation I could think of for going to New York.”

Like his former employer Miles Davis, Hancock is a musician who actually has guided the future and changed the time. Personal modesty aside, he remains a virtuoso on his instrument, and his music has a novelistic scope. Pianists acknowledge his unsurpassed sensitivity of touch and nuance, and since his days with Miles Davis — think of “81” or “Stuff” — he’s known how to switch on a dime from the highest highbrow abstractions to the most soulful soul brother funk. He defined the modern Fender Rhodes electric piano sound on Filles de Kilmanjaro and Fat Albert Rotunda, and was a pioneer in establishing a vocabulary from early synthesizers. He led the curve in groove-based experimental music with Mwandishi, in rhythm-and-blues with Headhunters, and in blending hip-hop and Euro-Techno aesthetics, without ceding innovative status in the hardcore jazz pantheon.

“I think Herbie’s a genius to the point that when he chooses to go Pop, without sacrificing everything he is, he becomes authentic Pop,” says Roney. “When Headhunters came out, he changed the way pianists and keyboard players play R&B; now they all do that little tremolo and those comping riffs he does. Herbie listened to Sly Stone, and he and Stevie were friends, but he comes into the arena without offending it, and ups the ante. The jazz purists hate it, and the pure R&B people get mad. But you turn around, and everybody’s trying to play keyboards like Herbie Hancock.”

“Tell the members of a symphony orchestra, or a jazz musician, or a rapper or R&B guy, ‘You’re going to work with Herbie Hancock,’ and they’re thrilled,” Sadin says. “This is a person who goes into a room and is equally comfortable with the executives and the people who prepare the food. And it’s reflected in the scope of his music. He absorbs messages from a wide range of peoples and cultures, and then transforms and develops them into his own language. But not solely in a technical-analytical way, like being able to transcribe the beats and say they’re playing on the three or some such thing. He responds deeply to the emotional climate that brought those accents into being. He plays with a conviction and naturalness which is different from someone who studies a musical style and recreates it.”

As in the Mwandishi days, Hancock, who authored some of the most sensuous and evocative songs in all of jazz history before his thirtieth birthday, has turned primarily to collaboration and recomposition in constructing the sonic environments in which he operates. In most cases, like his old friends Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea, he works with younger musicians whose sensibilities coalesced in a climate that involved absorbing his music and forming their own conclusions from it, refreshing Hancock through their ability to interact with him on many levels.

“Writing was always a painful process for me,” he says. “It’s a lot of hard work; I have to practically beat myself into it. When I was much younger, my perspective was narrower. I had a lot of time on my hands, everything was kind of new, and I wrote a lot of things. The more material you put out and the deeper you dig in for that material, especially if you’re a guy like me who doesn’t like to do something he’s already done, it gets harder. Also, I’m getting older, which I think makes it harder to do. Collaborating is a great way to extend yourself.”

Now eligible to collect Social Security, Hancock is thinking about a project on which he’ll respond to some of the brightest lights in progressive Hip-Hop/Urban. “The Future-2-Future record represented a more international and European look at music,” says Passick, who cites discussions with Amir from the Roots, and also the producers Rashad Smith and J.K. “I see a great correlation between the Roots and Herbie’s Electric Funk period. He had a major influence. When I talk to prominent people in Hip-Hop, the amount of Herbie’s music that is prominent in their life is astounding.”

For Hancock, it’s all part of a lifelong process of discovery. “To want to put something out there, I need new stuff,” he sums up. “Whether the new stuff is old stuff with a new hat, or old stuff treated in a whole new way, or whether it’s actually new material, that’s what I want. I need to feel I’m making a new perspective.”

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Interview for Barnes & Noble Review, 2014:

No living musician hews more closely to the notion of “Renaissance Man” than Herbie Hancock, whose artistic production over the past half century continues to stamp the twenty-first-century soundtrack.

Consider the range and depth of Hancock’s career markers. Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, he performed Mozart’s D Major Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at eleven. When he left the Miles Davis Quintet at twenty-eight to explore his own vision, Hancock was already a key figure in the jazz piano pantheon, had defined the modern Fender Rhodes electric piano sound, and had composed some of the most sensuous and evocative songs in jazz history, some of them for the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Two decades he would win an Oscar in that genre for Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight.

By the early ’70s, Hancock was pioneering in ways to incorporate synthesizers into real-time musical flow with Mwandishi, his first working band, which led the curve in groove-based experimental, improvised music, and would influence numerous practitioners of electronica and other turn-of-the-century beat musics. Mid-decade, he led the curve again with Headhunters, his enormously popular band, and yet again in 1984 with the hip-hop/techno hybrid put forth on the album Future Shock, his first of fourteen Grammy winners. He earned a twelfth Grammy, in 2008, for River: The Joni Letters—only the second jazz album ever to earn an Album of the Year designation—on which he framed reinterpretations of the Joni Mitchell songbook by Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, and the composer herself. His fourteenth Grammy, in 2011, acknowledged The Imagine Project, a one world–oriented extravaganza on which Hancock traveled to various locations around the world to record pop repertoire with an international cast of characters.

What makes Hancock tick? Some answers appear in his memoir, Possibilities, released six months after the seventy-four-year-old UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Professor of Music at UCLA, and Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz fulfilled his obligations to Harvard as the 2014 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry with a half-dozen lectures on “The Ethics of Jazz.” It’s the latest step in an iconoclastic career driven by risk-taking imperatives; a preoccupation with process, technology and collective expression; an equal comfort zone in populist and highbrow forums; and a desire to crack the codes of multiple musical languages and refract them into his own argot. Hancock’s narrative—he collaborated with ghost-writer Lisa Dickey—vividly portrays these qualities. It’s as no-holds-barred as his jazz playing—intuitive and logical, refined and raw, pragmatic and utopian, real-world and spiritual. —Ted Panken

The Barnes & Noble Review: You were initially an engineering major at Grinnell College, and your relationship to technology is one of several through-lines that thread through the text. Another is your creative process.

Herbie Hancock: I’ve always been a very curious person. It’s in my DNA.  It’s in the book that I’d take apart watches and clocks and other things before I showed an interest in music. That curiosity led to my interest in jazz. When I was thirteen, I thought that to play jazz, you had to be older than I was, and I never paid attention to it because it didn’t make sense to me and didn’t move me.  Then I saw a kid my age playing jazz on piano, and got the sense that he knew what he was doing, that it wasn’t just a bunch of notes.  Rhythmically it was cool; there was a beat to it. I was a pretty good piano player at the time, and I decided then that I wanted to learn how to do it.  So that curiosity opened the door. Later, that curiosity led me to work musically in many different genres, to put things together that maybe hadn’t been put together before.

BNR: You describe how each of your encounters with various new technologies in beta phases—tablets, synthesizers, MIDI, musical software, the vocoder, drum machines, the mini-disc—stimulated an entirely new project, a new world of sound.

HH: That’s true. My curiosity enabled me to integrate the technology with music. Once I changed my major in college to music, I still would have been a geek and a gadget guy, but I didn’t think there would be a way to combine music and technology until synthesizers came along. That opened up new doors.

BNR: In actualizing your technological vision during the ’70s and ’80s you worked closely with Bryan Bell, who taught himself programming language and, in one vignette, from 1979, predicts, “We’ll be able to sell music on the computer.” Two years earlier, well before MIDI, he engineered a working synthesizer that powered and fully controlled all your keyboards.

HH: When I bought my Apple II+ computers in 1979, there were scarce examples of interfacing computers and music, but I was convinced computers would become a strong element in the music field. I could never have predicted how true that would be with iTunes and so forth today. Bryan always jokes that when something new arrived at my studio, the first thing I’d say was, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this?” This would be something it couldn’t do, but Bryan would try to make it happen. That led to a lot of explorations that preceded commercial products made by someone else. We were just trying to make stuff that I could use.

BNR: How has your M.O. for research and development evolved? A different process than during the ’70s and ’80s?

HH: A new development in the way I look at my creative output, which is primarily due to my practice of Buddhism, is that I think about purpose when I make a record. In other words, what is it that you want to encourage in other people, not just share musically, but perhaps stimulate or point out or champion?

BNR: A passage in the second chapter portrays a moment in high school, when your parents punished you by not allowing you to attend a party. You assuaged disappointment and anger by thinking through the situation rationally. That theme of using logic to control your emotions—of detachment—is consistent.

HH: When I was young, I did that to avoid pain or punishment or whatever. Later on, I realized that in doing that I’m cutting off part of my own humanity. I didn’t realize how damaging it could be if carried to extremes. I also didn’t understand the concept of “no pain, no gain.” We know that applies to physical exercise. But suffering and challenges are part of life. Without them, you’d be bored to tears; if you let them control you, you are losing the battle. You can’t necessarily grow from nice things happening. So I don’t look at suffering as something I need to get away from, but can actually use to move forward.

Revealing my experience with crack was a difficult decision. My daughter and my wife felt that the book was the vehicle for talking about this. I had been trying to suppress this experience, as though it had never happened. But I should have known better. I thought I could accomplish a couple of things by discussing it. Most important is that someone struggling with addiction or whatever other challenge might benefit from seeing my path in winning this battle. Also, I wanted to acknowledge that my life hasn’t been all goody-two-shoes. So I freely pulled back the stuff I was trying to throw out of my life, to reconsider the reality of those things. In Buddhism, we talk about the phrase of “turning poison into medicine.” This is the way for me to do that.

BNR: You certainly do not paint yourself as a saint, particularly during the ’60s and early ’70s. Your depictions of several acid trips speak to your powers of description.

HH: That’s the way it was.

BNR: From beginning to end, Miles Davis is a constant presence. He was a mentor to you, a kind of father figure. Sometimes sons rebel against fathers, and I’m wondering if you expressed resistance to him in ways that inflected the course of your career.

HH: I was twenty-three when I joined Miles’s band. Tony Williams was seventeen. Now, Tony did have that kind of rebellion you’re talking about with Miles. But Miles wasn’t that kind of father figure for me, and I didn’t feel a need to be rebellious against him. I admired his music, and I admired many things about his ethics in music. He had so many aspects to his character that were valuable to the musicians who played with him. When people who played with Miles’s different bands have an opportunity to converse, we all have similar stories we can tell.

BNR: How do you denote a successful performance? What’s your metric for critique?

HH: That’s hard to describe. I’ve had the experience where I’ve thought something didn’t work so well when I was playing, but on the tour bus we’d listen to a recording from the mixing console, and, in fact, the stuff was killing!

BNR: You describe that dynamic in talking about the Plugged Nickel recordings by the Miles Davis Quintet in 1965.

HH: Yes, that was a surprise. I guess when I play, I experience a certain freedom from spontaneous connection. When the music is flowing, and the joy of discovery is happening, and there’s a very open space for a wide variety of approaches to transpire moment to moment, and all of us feel that joy—to me, that’s a successful performance. Not the applause that comes from the audience. Of course, it’s nice. I love it. Who doesn’t love that? I’ve had eggs thrown at me, too, in Germany. But I knew that we were hot and the music was smokin’, so it didn’t bother me. It was maybe the first time I experienced that. But it gave me the opportunity to feel courage and conviction about what I was doing.

BNR: Throughout the book, whenever you refer to jazz, which you don’t try to define, you are eloquent and passionate about your relationship to it, as, for example, in your acceptance speeches for receiving an Oscar and a Grammy. You’re one of the very few who has both attained eminence in jazz as a stylist, an improviser, and a composer, and been a highly successful practitioner in popular music. Do you see the idioms as related or separate? Do different components of your personality come into play when you address one or the other?

HH: I don’t think I could do what I did if I drew a fine line between the two. But jazz is really a foundational music. Jazz musicians have the flexibility to be able to move around freely in other genres. It doesn’t work the other way around. I would say that’s a badge of honor for jazz. I’m fortunate that jazz is my foundation. Yes, I started with classical music, and classical music is also foundational for me. It’s through classical music that I learned to read music, to sit and hold my hands and fingers properly at the instrument. That’s a big reason why I’ve never had any physical problems. Granted, I don’t curve my fingers exactly like I did when I first started off, but that’s the nature of the process. You find your own space. From what you’re taught, from what other people have done, you find what’s best for you. We’re all different, and you have to personalize these things.

BNR: The notion of individualism is a component of jazz culture, too, particularly in the period when you were coming up.

HH: Absolutely. The cool thing is, in the ’60s, at the time I joined Miles’s band, rock ‘n’ roll was hot. Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz to Come had become a landmark recording, and avant-garde, even though it was still kind of underground, was influencing the post-bebop musicians who were more visible. Of course, there was John Coltrane and the group we had with Miles. It was a very fertile time for creativity on all levels. Look what the Beatles did. Sgt. Pepper. Whoever thought rock ‘n’ roll artists would do stuff like that? Joni Mitchell! A lot of stuff was going on.

BNR: You developed very sensitive antennae, to pick up and assimilate these diverse sounds. I guess you were also absorbing James Brown and Sly Stone during those years.

HH: Right. When I did Head Hunters, I was thinking about Sly Stone. That’s why I named one of the songs “Sly,” as an homage to his influence, even though the music had nothing to do with him.

In the book, I describe that Miles’s attitude made me decide it must be cool to be open. Even though I didn’t admit it then, I liked James Brown’s music. I liked the beat. When I was a kid, I didn’t just listen to classical music and jazz. I was listening to R&B, and I played R&B. Things like Head Hunters and “Rockit” connect to my background, as offshoots of R&B, in a sense. I was born in 1940, so I’m a little older than the rock ‘n’ roll generation. I didn’t really like rock ‘n’ roll, but I did like R&B. It’s funny that Jimi Hendrix was associated with rock ‘n’ roll, but he was basically a blues player. Of course, that’s what rock ‘n’ roll grew out of. What he played was perhaps . . . I was going to say more authentic, but that’s not what I mean. Maybe more connected with those roots.

BNR: Well, he had a direct and lineal connection to the real blues, the blues that was going on not far from your house on the South Side, not once-removed and studying records.

HH: Exactly. But the thing is, I wouldn’t even listen to Jimi Hendrix, because to me, his name was associated with rock ‘n’ roll. I didn’t start checking him out until later, when the rumor was getting around that Miles and Jimi might do something together, which would involve me and Tony Williams and Ron Carter. That aroused my curiosity, but then he died.

BNR: Although it happened too late to be discussed in Possibilities, you served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard earlier this year, and presented six lectures on “The Ethics of Jazz.”

HH: I got a call from a representative of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard who told me that they wanted to bestow upon me the Norton Professorship of Poetry, which I hadn’t heard of. I had no idea how heavy that was until I saw names like Igor Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot and Leonard Bernstein. Then I was told that I’d have to do lectures. To make things fit with my career, I gave three in February and three in March. I ordered Bernstein’s lectures from Barnes & Noble, but the tone was too pedantic for me to emulate. He could pull that off, but I wouldn’t want to. It wouldn’t be me.

One of the lectures is called “Breaking the Rules.” I wanted to share an important concept—that the people we study broke the rules, and created new ones. Whoever heard of the people that followed the rules? Of course, it’s important to learn the rules. I’m constantly in the process of doing that. But don’t confine me to those rules. It’s important to think outside the box, and not be stuck inside the comfort zone.

For Master Drummer Arthur Taylor’s 88th Birth Anniversary, The Proceedings Of a WKCR Musician Show With AT and Walter Bolden in 1992

Yesterday was the 88th birth anniversary of master drummer Arthur Taylor (1929-1995). I got to know “A.T.,” as he was familiarly called, when I had an opportunity to engineer a number of Musician Shows that he conducted at WKCR  during the mid- and latter ’80s, and subsequently when he asked to transcribe a number of interviews for a prospective volume two of his essential Notes and Tones, which never did get published. These included conversations with Red Garland, Billy Higgins, and a number of other greats. During the last 5-6 years of his life, AT put together a tight, ferocious group that included such outstanding musicians  as Willie Williams, Abraham Burton, Jacky  Terrason and Tyler Mitchell.  In 1992 I had an opportunity to turn the tables on AT and interview him on a Musician Show together with drummer Walter Bolden, the transcript of which I’ve appended below.

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

Arthur Taylor/Walter Bolden (11-11-92) – (Musician’s Show):

[MUSIC: Taylor’s Wailers, “Mr. A.T.”, Coltrane, “Good Bait”]
Q: Now, you’ve reconstituted Taylor’s Wailers over the last couple of years, and you’ve been associated, particularly in terms of writing, with Walter Bolden, another superb drummer. You’ve really been on the scene together ever since you emerged. Your careers span just about the same amount of time, I think.

AT: Yes. Well, we have similar feelings about drumming, and our styles of drumming are similar. We’ve been friends since Walter came to New York. He came out of Connecticut. To get from that point to this moment, his writing, to me, has the same flavor as Horace Silver or Gigi Gryce, who are two great composers in my estimation. I later found out that they had studied together, so maybe that’s the reason why rhythmically… Well, Walter’s a drummer, so what he would write would be interesting for a drummer in the first place.

Walter wrote the title song of Taylor’s Wailers’ latest CD, which you heard, “Mr. A.T.” I went to visit Walter one afternoon, and I walked in, he was playing the piano. He said, “Yeah, T, how do you like this?” — and he started playing this song. I said, “Yeah, I like that, man. That’s fantastic. I really like that.” He says, “Do you really like it?” I said, “Yeah, man. You know I wouldn’t jive you. I really like it, you know.” He says, “Yeah? Well, that’s for you. And we’ll call it ‘Mr. A.T.'” Now you tell them about it, Walter.

WB: That’s exactly the way it happened, too. I had written the piece, and I was wondering who I was going to give this piece to that I thought could really do it justice, the way I would like to hear it played — and I thought Arthur Taylor and Taylor’s Wailers would do a wonderful job with this. So I had named the tune “Mr. A.T.” because it was really especially for him. And I was very-very-very pleased with the job that they did on it.

Q: Well, Walter Bolden, tell us about your impressions of A.T. back when you first met him. When was it, anyway?

WB: Well, this goes back to December 1950 on into 1951.

AT: You even know the month.

WB: [LAUGHS] Well, I have a knack for that. Of course, naturally, I didn’t read it off the record jacket right here! But ever since then we have been very, very good friends. We used to hang out a lot together, and be on some of the same scenes, and we had the opportunity of playing with some of the same great musicians through our career.

Q: Who were you playing with at that time?

WB: Well, before I left Hartford, I was playing with Gigi Gryce, studying with him, and Horace Silver, and a bassist named Joe Calloway, and an alto player by the name of Harold Holt who was up there, and a trumpet player by the name of Richard Taylor. Horace Silver formed a trio with Joe Calloway and myself. We were working around Hartford and up in Massachusetts, and different little towns in Connecticut. We were working at a club called the Club Sundown up in Hartford, and Stan Getz was booked there as a single to work with our trio. He liked what we were doing, and he talked to Horace about hiring the trio to go back to New York with him and work — at which we were very, very elated. And this is what really got us out of Hartford, working with Stan Getz.

Q: You recorded with him for Roost, and the results are on a recent set called Stan Getz: The Roost Quartets. But you and Horace Silver go back a long way. About how far back do you go?

WB: Let’s see. We go way back, I guess to ’47.

Q: So since your late teens, basically?

WB: Right.

Q: And you were working around Hartford as a teenager?

WB: Sure, I did. I was in a band of Gigi’s that had Joe Calloway in it, and a piano player by the name of Gene Nelson. We used to go down to New Haven, and hook up with Horace Silver and Keeter Betts and different people from that part of Connecticut. At that time, Horace was playing tenor saxophone — which he leaned towards the Lester Young type of sound and feel, very, very warm — and he also played piano. But the three of us, Horace, Joe Calloway and myself, got together, and we decided that we would just get into a trio type thing. That’s how that happened. We were working all over the place at that particular time.

Q: How long have you been playing the drums, and who were the first drummers you liked and modeled yourself after?

WB: I started playing professionally around Connecticut at 16 or 17 years old.

AT: You’ve been playing since you were 16? Hey, wait a minute, now…

WB: [LAUGHING]

AT: I don’t like this disadvantage in here. This stuff is getting serious, now!

WB: Well, it was right around Connecticut, you know, which was great. A lot of musicians used to come through Hartford. In fact, the State Theater was the big band theater there, where Count Basie and Duke Ellington used to come through from New York. When I was a kid, we’d sit down in that theater all day long, and listen to these people.

Q: So you’d see all the drummers from the big bands.

WB: All the drummers, you know, from Lucky Millinder, Chick Webb, I would say Jimmie Crawford…

AT: You saw Chick Webb.

WB: Sure.

AT: You’re a lucky man.

WB: [LAUGHS] You know!

AT: Yeah.

WB: Sonny Greer…

AT: I saw him, too.

WB: I know you did.

Q: When did you first see Chick Webb, A.T.?

AT: I saw him at the Apollo, the Apollo Theater, yeah. That’s when he had Ella Fitzgerald, she was a star, a child star, like.

Q: So it sounds like he really impressed you, as I’m sure everybody who had the good fortune to hear him in person.

WB: That’s right.

AT: I would say the young Tony Williams.

WB: That’s it. Very, very fast hands, and his concept, everything. Beautiful. Beautiful to watch, too.

Q: So those were the drummers who affected you when you were coming up.

WB: Early, right.

Q: Walter, when you and Horace Silver were playing together, it was after World War Two, and Charlie Parker’s records had come out. Did those really turn you around when you heard them, and Horace as well?

WB: Of course! It was really a totally different thing with Dizzy and Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. Now, Horace and Joe Calloway and myself used to model a lot of things we did in our trio after the Bud Powell trio, with Max Roach and Curly Russell, which recorded in 1947.

Q: You can hear that in some of Horace’s trio recordings in the early 1950’s, too, which are very much in that style.

WB: Right.

Q: But I interrupted you.

WB: So we were influenced very much by that. And Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Art Blakey, you know…and on up! [LAUGHS]

Q: Now, did you get to hear these guys in Hartford? Would they come through Hartford and play?

WB: Max did. And Art Blakey used to come through with Billy Eckstine years ago. I used to sit down in a hall up there called the Footguide(?) Hall, where all the big bands used to come when they had dances and whatnot. I remember Art Blakey with Billy Eckstine’s band. He used to roll up his pants leg on his beat-a-ball, [LAUGHS], on the bass drum, you know, and I thought, “Why does he do that?” Then I found out later on that if you roll your pants leg up, your pants leg won’t get caught in that ball when you’re playing. [LAUGHS]

AT: That’s a drag, isn’t it?

WB: It happens, you know?

AT: It’s a drag.

Q: Now, A.T., growing up in New York, in Harlem, you had a chance to see just about everybody who came through in person as a teenager. Is that what you did? Were you able to hear a lot of music when you were a teenager?

AT: Yeah. Well, I think I was very lucky, because my father would take me to the Apollo Theater. I don’t know whether he liked it that much. Maybe he was just trying to get out the house or whatever he was doing, but it was really groovy. So he’d take me the Apollo Theater, and I’d see Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Duke, Charlie Barnet, Buddy Rich, oh, all the big names. Oh, I mean, all the big stars… I mean real stars. I’m talking about real stars. You know, when these people do their stuff, they’d turn the place out every time from the hearts. So that really impressed me.

And seeing all those drummers, you know… Then I saw Buddy Rich. That was impressive. Then we’d play hooky from school and go to the Paramount Theater to see Gene Krupa and people like that. But my real day was the day I saw J.C. Heard. I couldn’t be-lieve that. I’d seen Chick Webb and I’d seen Buddy and I had seen Gene Krupa, but when I saw J.C. Heard, I said, “Well, that’s it. That is it!” And I have modeled my drumming after J.C. Heard. Most people don’t know that.

Q: Well, now they do.

AT: I don’t know. Is anybody out there? Do you think somebody is listening to this show?

Q: Well, you can give us a call on the next break. You still remember the phone number, right?

AT: No, man.

[LOTS OF LAUGHTER]

Q: Was this before you heard Max Roach and Kenny Clarke?

AT: Oh, yes. This was before I was even interested in drums. I was supposed to be an athlete.

Q: You were supposed to be.

AT: Yeah, I was supposed to be an athlete.

Q: What did you play? What was your sport?

AT: I was a heckuva center-fielder, a heckuva second-baseman, and I was not too bad a guard in basketball.

Q: Could you hit?

AT: I could hit. It’s funny. I’ve only seen out of one eye all my life, but I could meet the ball. I can’t figure that out today. I could always meet the ball. I could drive it sometimes, but I could always meet it. And talking with the boys I grew up with now and the people in my family, I’ve found out I was better than I even thought I was. But at that time, in professional athletics, they didn’t allow Negroes in, you know, so there was no future. My parents would say, “Are you crazy?” Everybody else in the family was going to Columbia University and all that kind of stuff, and here I wanted to play baseball. They said, “You must be out of your mind! Get out of here, boy!”

Q: What got you interested in playing drums as a profession?

AT: I’ll tell you what it was with me. I went to a jam session is, where Lincoln Center is, where I am playing tomorrow night, where the Walter Reade Theater at 8 o’clock, Taylor’s Wailers will be performing… Almost on the exact spot I went to hear…went to a jam session. And playing in this jam session was Fats Navarro and Miles Davis and Big Sid Catlett and Max Roach and Bud Powell and Freddie Webster — and I can go on and on and on. What really impressed me was the joy and the pleasure the people were having, and all the beautiful ladies there were…you know, thrills with their shit. I thought about that, and I said, “This is good. You don’t have to get up in the morning either. You can sleep late…”

WB: [LAUGHS]

Q: You go to bed whatever time…

AT: You can go to bed when everybody’s getting up, you know. So I said, “Yeah, that looks like that’s for me.” So that’s really how I got into it. Seeing Big Sid and Max that day, I said, “I have to try it.”

Q: Were you self-taught, or was there somebody showing you the fundamentals?

AT: I was basically self-taught. I had a teacher, but he couldn’t stand me, you know, so that didn’t work. He was a very fine teacher. He became a big union official in Local 802. His name was Aubrey Brooks. I didn’t have enough discipline for him, so he didn’t go for me too much.

Q: Walter Bolden, what got you interested?

WB: Well, growing up in the State Theater, when all the bands used to come through. But there was music in my family. See, my mother played piano, my father played the French horn, one of my brothers played trumpet, one played piano, and the other one played guitar. I used to fumble with the various instruments in the house, but I didn’t want anything that was there. I wanted something that wasn’t there, and that was drums. And I was influenced by the drummers that I saw at the State Theater and the drummers that used to come in through the clubs up there in Hartford.

Later on, Kenny Clarke and Max Roach and Art Blakey and Roy Haynes really got to me in my way of thinking about playing drums. See, before that it had been like, Chick Webb, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, as A.T. mentioned, J.C. Heard, people like that…Jimmie Crawford, you know…

AT: Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.

WB: The new music at that time really grabbed ahold of me.

[W. Bolden with Getz/Silver/Calloway, “Split Kick,” “Strike Up The Band” (1950); H. McGhee Sextet, “Ittapnna” (1953)]

WB: “Ittapnna” is Patti Ann spelled backwards.

Q: [ETC.] Our guests are Arthur Taylor and Walter Bolden.

AT: You’re a guest also, Ted.

Q: I’m a guest?

AT: Yeah, you’re my guest.

WB: [LAUGHS]

Q: Thank you. Are you doing the Musician’s Show with me?

AT: I’m gonna interview you.

Q: I can hear radio sets clicking off around New York City as we speak. Boring the audience in New York! But maybe we can put you back in the role of Musician Show host with Walter Bolden. How about that, A.T.?

WB: Well, we think along the same lines.

Q: I remember the type of questions you would ask. I’m sure people would like to hear a little set.

AT: Yeah, well, Walter, what do you feel about Love and Marriage?

WB: Oh, my goodness. [LAUGHS]

Q: We can ask Sammy Cahn, and then…

WB: [LAUGHS] That sounds like “Tones In Bronze” or something.

AT: “Tones in Bronze”!

WB: [LAUGHS]

AT: Why don’t we just continue?

Q: Okay, we’ll continue. Then I’m going to get into ordinary biographical stuff. Look, A.T., around the time Walter Bolden’s first composition came out, I think you were working with Bud Powell…

AT: What year was that?

Q: 1953. That was June 8th of ’53.

AT: Yeah, I was working with Bud then.

Q: Was that your first real professional gig?

AT: Oh, no!

Q: What were the events that led to working with Bud Powell?

AT: Okay, let’s see if I can get it in some kind of chronological order. My first real… Well, I used to play the neighborhood with Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean. That was real as you can get — even then, you know. As I was telling some people today, they were talented then and could play then. It wasn’t like that they were young and couldn’t play. They could play. They were great musicians at that time, too.

Q: Did you meet them in high school? Did you meet them around the neighborhood?

AT: We lived in the same neighborhood. We lived on Sugar Hill in Harlem. We were all interested in the same thing, which was, like, Charlie Parker, Bud and Dizzy Gillespie and people like that. They were the tops.

Q: And you were uniquely advantaged, because you were able to go and hear them frequently.

AT: Yeah. Well, Bud lived right down the street from me. I was telling some people today, we would go to Bud’s house, and he’d sit down and play Bach and Beethoven off the top of his head. It would frighten you, you know, like it was nothing — without any music. It was unbelievable. Well, Kenny Drew was a Classical musician anyway, first of all. Sonny Rollins had taken me to hear him and his sister do a Bach duet. I said, “Is this the guy I’m gonna play with? Shit, he’s playing Bach duets…” [LAUGHING] We all know what a great musician Kenny Drew is, I’m sure, also, at the same time.
We were in the same neighborhood, and some of the guys went to the same school, which was Benjamin Franklin, which was a very fine school in Harlem, and produced some really great musicians. Rollins came out of there, I think McLean went there, Percy France went there, I think Gilly Coggins went there — I mean, really fine musicians came out of that school. And we were in the neighborhood, and we had this little band. We were burning, playing for all the dances. People were able to dance to the music, then.

Q: That’s another thing. There were a lot of dance halls. People often said that Bebop was something that people couldn’t really dance to, but I think that’s really not the case, is it.

AT: No, no. I played many dances with Charlie Parker. Many dances. The Audubon Ballroom, Rockland Palace, the Renaissance. I played several places with Charlie Parker for dancing.

Q: Did people develop new dances for Charlie Parker?

AT: No, you just had to swing. You had to be able to swing. If you could swing, it’s all right, yeah. But then the music got a little different. You can’t dance to it. You’ve got to have a computer to figure it out, have a pencil and a piece of paper and everything. Which is all right, it’s okay, it’s good. I hope they keep doing that. Because I’m not going to play like that. [THE A.T. LAUGH]

Q: But we’ll get back to the places where you would play dances, though. Because I did interrupt you.

AT: Well, I told you the places. The Audubon Ballroom was our main spot. At that time, musicians were producing, you know. Art Blakey used to produce every Sunday afternoon at Rockland Palace, and that was the event. People would come from Jersey, Connecticut and everything. The biggest event of the year would be when he and Max Roach had the drum battle. People would come from all over, they’d come from Boston to see this. This was the show of all shows.

I was born in Harlem and I lived in Harlem, and I didn’t have to go out of Harlem to work. I had plenty of joints there to work, and I’d always get a Sunday afternoon once in a while at Art Blakey’s thing — once a month or something I’d get a gig over there with Art.

Q: When did you first meet Art Blakey?

AT: Ah, gee, I don’t know. Art was always very active in helping young people. We were young fellas, and we used to go and visit Art when he lived at 117th Street and Lenox Avenue, and it was just a thrill just to sit there and look at him — if he didn’t say anything, you know. Just to be in his company, you’d learn something about something, or music at least! Or something. You learned something. He was so beautiful. He was one of our greatest, and one of the major contributors to modern improvisation. As far as I am concerned, if anybody, it’s Art Blakey, yeah.

Q: What I want to get to is how it came to be accepted that you could and get the jobs. Was it just through working around the neighborhood, people hearing about you…

AT: No. I’ll tell you how I got accepted. Lockjaw Davis was the bandleader at Minton’s, and if you couldn’t play, you had to get off the bandstand. When we went down there to play, Lockjaw gave us an invitation to come and play any time we felt like playing. That’s the highest point that I have ever reached in music! When Lockjaw Davis told me I could go and play any time, I didn’t even speak to myself! I may not even speak to you any more! Ha-ha. Because nobody knows about that. They have some guys over here, and somebody says they’re great, but when Lockjaw said “you can come and play,” that means you can go and hone your craft on the bandstand with guys who are better than you! And you can’t ask for more than that. For me.

Q: So when did the gig with Bud Powell come about? How did that happen?

AT: That came about in 1951. I had been playing with Coleman Hawkins. I played with Coleman Hawkins for a year with Kenny Drew, Tommy Potter and Harry “Sweets” Edison, which was a very fine group. The musicians that I play with now, I try to teach them some of the things that Hawk taught me.

Q: Such as?

AT: How to be able to maintain your stuff without being a dummy, without acting stupid, acting with humility, to have good manners, but don’t take anything from anybody at the same time. Because we’re exposed when we play this music. Anybody can walk up to us and say anything. They walked up and shot Lee Morgan down! It’s hard to get to people when they’re big stars, but musicians in improvised music, it’s…you know, you’re exposed.

Where was I… We were talking about…?

Q: Coleman Hawkins.

AT: Okay. My first job was with Howard McGhee. He took a band with Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins (I got the job through Kenny or Sonny), and Percy Heath and myself to Utica. That was my first trip on the road.

Then, I started working with Hot Lips Page. Hot Lips Page, he was a rough man. He was a rough man. They need a guy like him around here now. Because he’ll punch you in the mouth if it don’t sound right. He’ll knock you out. And maybe you can beat him, but I don’t know, because he was a big, strong guy, rough — a rough, mean man. So I’d like to see… We need somebody like that around here now, and a lot of people wouldn’t be acting as tough as they think they are — physically.

Then after that, my main job was with Oscar Pettiford. I made my first record with Oscar Pettiford. We made 36 takes of “Love for Sale,” got in a car and drove in a snowstorm to Chicago. Super hip stuff, you dig it? [LAUGHS] 36 takes. If I’m on the bandstand now, if somebody calls “Love For Sale,” I get a cringe up my back. And I was the one messing up.

Q: It was you?

AT: It was me messing up. And every time I made it, I was getting worse, I was getting more nervous and getting worse and worse and worse. He was ready to kill me. Oscar was a perfectionist. He was a master. Oscar was a master.

WB: Hell, yeah.

AT: Oscar was a master. If you talk about bass, oh, man, wait a minute. [LAUGHS] Oscar Pettiford!

WB: Cello, too.

AT: Yeah, that’s right. Oscar was the first one to use an electrical attachment on a string instrument, as far as I know, in this field of improvised music. And the way the basses sound now, with the electrical attachment, that’s the way he sounded when he put the electrical attachment on the cello in Paris.

Anyway, after Oscar Pettiford, I got the job with Bud Powell, which is what I wanted. If I never did anything else in my life, that’s the only thing I wanted to do, was play with Bud.

Q: You worked with Bud Powell for five or six years.

AT: Yeah, for three years straight, and then off and on many times. Yeah.

Q: What was his manner as a leader?

AT: He never said anything. The only thing he’d ever say to me was, “‘Peanuts,’ Arthur.” That was my big solo. I had the introduction to “Salt Peanuts.” That’s all he said.

Q: That’s all he said to you in five years?

AT: Yeah, that’s about all. I would always say, “What do you want me to do?” And he would say, “Don’t worry about it, you’ll dig it.” I said, “I’ll dig it! Are you crazy?” [LAUGHING] I’ll dig it? Man! I don’t know what it was. I don’t see any reason for him to have that much confidence in my ability. But for whatever reason, he said I would dig it. So we made dozens of albums. They’re still classic, and people like them, too.

Q: I think we should play something with you and Bud Powell later, but right now we have cued up something from a wonderful Kenny Dorham session from 1961 titled Showboat.

AT: Yeah, I love Kenny Dorham. He’s one of our great… Well, he writes like Bud Powell. His writing is similar. Yeah.

Q: Did you first meet him at this time, too?

AT: Well, Kenny lived up on the Hill. Other people, too… Kenny lived on the Hill. Denzil Best lived on the Hill. And they were like gods, you know. Kenny Dorham! Because Kenny Dorham used to play with Fats Navarro. That’s enough right there, if you never heard him! [LAUGHS] That’s enough right there, if you played with Fats Navarro.

That’s a funny thing. You know Allen Eager, the tenor player? Some young guys were getting smart with him one day, or something about something. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I played with Fats Navarro. I don’t know what you did.” [LAUGHS] That’s pretty rough.

Q: We’re with Arthur Taylor and Walter Bolden on the Musicians’s Show, and Taylor’s Wailers is performing Thursday night at the Walter Reade Theater. By the way, we haven’t mentioned who’s in the group yet.

AT: Well, we have Jacky Terrason. He’s from Paris. I heard him in France about two years ago, and he’s really developing. I think he can develop into one of the finest pianists around. So I’m looking for very fine things from him within this decade. I would figure by the end of this decade he should be at the top of his form. Because it takes fifteen years to get your stuff together to start with; you know, to get your own sound, where you develop your own sound where you don’t sound like nobody else, and everybody can recognize that it’s you. That takes fifteen years.

Q: Do you think that’s always been the case? A lot of the people who were your idols, say, in the Forties, were just in their late twenties at that time.

AT: Well, I didn’t figure that out myself. In talking with Freddie Hubbard… As a matter of fact, it’s probably in my book, Notes and Tones, where we were talking about that. Freddie was saying (and I agree with him, which is why I repeat this) it takes fifteen years to get your own sound. It’s not like you’re going to say, “I’m going to get my own sound, and sound like me!” or something like that. This comes through practice and experience and discussion and listening, and you arrive at your place — and it’s you! It’s nobody else. It can’t be anybody else but you. And some people never arrive. Some people never get it. Ha! That’s one of our songs we’re going to play tomorrow night, too, “Some People Never Get It.”

Q: Who wrote that one?

AT: That’s my piece, and then…

WB: [LOUD LAUGH]

AT: [LAUGHING] Then we’ll follow that with a piece by Walter Bolden, where we’ll say, “Some people never get it, because they’re all stressed out.” [LAUGHS] It’s all right if they never get it. That’s true! Some people never get it. It’s just like that. Everybody doesn’t get it, you know. But the Sun shines on everyone.

Q: But at any rate, after Jacky Terrason, you have two very talented young saxophone players.

AT: Yes. First of all, at the bass we have Tyler Mitchell. We have Tyler Mitchell on the bass. He’s a fine bassist. He’s been with me the longest of all the musicians in the group. We used to go to Europe and do tours with Steve Grossman, tenor player Steve Grossman. We did tours with him, and I would have Tyler on these gigs, so that we got familiar with each other. He has developed tremendously over the last two years. He’s just got to do a little more, and he’ll be all right.

Then we have Willie Williams on tenor saxophone. Willie was known for playing with Dollar Brand and different groups like that. What impresses me with Willie is his sound. He’s got a sound, you know. I’ve always played with saxophone players who can play loud. That interests me most if they can play loud. Gene Ammons can play loud. Jackie McLean can play loud, and Hawk can play loud, and Bird could play loud… You could hear Bird in Chicago if he was playing on 42nd Street, boy! He’d be loud, man. Anyway, you have to be heard before anything can happen. And at that time, they didn’t have all these sophisticated electronic things for your sound. So you had to blow. You had to put some air in those horns. You don’t just be foolin’ around. So Willie has a large sound, and he has a piercing sound that cuts through, too, which is what impressed me about him first of all.

Then we have Abraham Burton on alto saxophone. He’s a protege of Jackie Mac, my old friend, Jackie McLean’s. And he has a powerful… He’s a powerful guy. I mean really. They’re both powerful, you know. I mean, I’m amazed sometimes. I said, “Man, these guys are powerful!” And when the two of them play together, you know, when we play the ensembles, I said, “God…”

WB: [LAUGHS]

AT: Am I right or wrong?

WB: That’s right!

AT: Let Walter Bolden tell you about that, now. Because he’s written five songs at least that we use in our repertoire regularly. Since we’re talking about the saxophone, let’s talk about the power of these two young men, please.

WB: Yes. Willie and Abraham, when they play together, they get a sound that’s big. It sounds like a brass section. You don’t miss the trumpet. It has depth, and it’s wide-open. But being wide-open, it’s still warm. They have a knack of playing very, very mature even right now, although they have a little bit more to offer, I’m quite sure. But they are two of the strongest musicians out here that I have heard in a long time, really. Wide-open sound.

AT: That’s pretty rough, huh? Wow.

WB: Wide-open sound, right.

Q: The drummer is Arthur Taylor.

AT: Yeah, the drummer, man. I just go along.

Q: What do you think of him, Walter Bolden?

AT: Oh, it’s gonna get funny now….

WB: Well, you know….

AT: It’s gonna get funny.

WB: When you have two guys on the same instrument…

[EVERYONE LAUGHS]

WB: A.T. and I, we used to practice together on the pads, you know. A.T. has a way of playing musical drums. You see, a lot of people play drums, but just patterns and so forth and so on. He has his dynamics, you know. He knows how to pull the sound out of the drum instead of beating the sound into the drum.

AT: Beat it out!

WB: He pulls the sound out. He pulls it out. And it’s amazing, some of the things he does, his coordination — it’s tremendous.

AT: I told him to say that, you know.

Q: He memorized all that? You wrote that? That’s beautiful. That’s great.
[EVERYONE LAUGHS]
[MUSIC: KD/J. Heath/Kenny Drew/AT, “Make Believe” (1961); Gene Ammons, “Canadian Sunset” (1960)]

Q: I know that Gene Ammons, A.T., was one of your very favorite of all musicians.

AT: Yeah, Gene was great. First of all, my mother was a big Sonny Rollins fan for this piece, “This Love Of Mine,” that he did at one time — I think Blakey and Kenny Drew and I think Percy Heath was the personnel on that. She loved that record. But when she heard “Canadian Sunset,” Gene Ammons got her. She loved Gene Ammons. So I had to play this record. I’d have something on, and I’d have to put “Canadian Sunset” on. She liked that piece.

Gene was one of those saxophone players, you could hear him in Brooklyn when he was playing in Manhattan. He had that big sound, you know. God, he had this big sound. And he would tell me, “When we get to the end of the chorus, I want you to drive me and kick me and spur me on and everything.” It was a great learning experience, because he was so much more experienced and so much older. I learned so many different things from Gene Ammons. Plus, he was such a sweetheart, one of the sweet guys of the music business.

Q: Well, you did a lot of recordings with him.

AT: Quite a few.

Q: You recorded on those jam sessions in the mid-Fifties.

AT: That’s right. Coltrane played alto on some of them. Jackie McLean used to be on them, and Art Farmer, Donald Byrd. We had a lot of great musicians. Doug Watkins used to do a lot of those things with us.

Q: When did you first hear him? On one of your first trips to Chicago?

AT: Yeah, I heard him in Chicago. They used to have the all-night jam sessions. And I had known of Gene Ammons, but to hear him in person and electrify the people… When he’d play a ballad, you just went, [SIGHS]; you’d just melt, you know, with the sweetness and the power at the same time. It was so beautiful.

Q: He was a star musician in Chicago since his early twenties, and he’d been performing since his teens.

AT: That’s true. And the Billy Eckstine year also. What about Jug? What about that sound? Let’s talk about sound. What about that sound he gets on that instrument, the texture of his tone?

WB: Well, T, I’ll tell you. With Gene, for me, like his sound was so broad and so warm, when you would hear him in person, you could feel it in your stomach. That’s the vibration. It was just that broad. You could feel it in your body with him. And his ideas. And the way he used to hold back on his phrases and things like that. It would just take you over. Pull you right into him. For instance, there’s a song I really like by him, and it’s called “Didn’t We,” where he…

AT: An original piece or something?

WB: No, it goes, [SINGS REFRAIN], “Didn’t we girl?” You remember that?

AT: “Didn’t we girl?”

WB: [LAUGHS]

AT: Wait a minute, I heard that!

WB: No, that’s the way the lyric goes!

AT: Oh, yeah, okay-okay-okay…

WB: If the man sings it. “Didn’t we, girl,” you dig? But he did a tremendous job on that. And he did so other wonderful performances. To hear him in person was like a magic…

AT: He had a persona (is that the word?) on stage.

WB: That’s right.

AT: He was such a big man, and he had this big sound.

WB: He had a presence that was… Oh, man, it was something else. Really-really-really something.

Q: Well, it seems like most of the saxophone players you played with were players with the big sound. John Coltrane had a huge sound, Sonny Rollins…

AT: Yes, that’s true.

Q: So what else do you want to talk about, A.T.? Bring up some topics!

AT: Well, Gene Ammons is… He’s quite a topic right there, you know, because he’s not spoken about that much these days. We would be on those record dates, you know, with Jackie and Coltrane and all those people, and Gene…I mean, whatever he said, nobody questioned anything. Because he was a master musician, first of all, plus he was a great, great creative person and a great improviser, had tremendous imagination. Looking back, I can picture it in my mind right now, these sessions we would do with Jug. Everybody was so thrilled just to be in his presence. And to be on the record date with him, that was a big thing in itself.

Q: We have cued up “Appointment In Ghana,” a sextet track by Jackie McLean, A.T.’s long-time partner, who you recorded with extensively in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

AT: That’s a piece that I like. I think we’re going to put in our book. That’s one of the new pieces we’re going to put in our repertoire. [SINGS REFRAIN] Tina Brooks, he was a heckuva saxophone player, too.

WB: Oh, yes.

Q: He was on this, and Blue Mitchell on trumpet.

AT: Blue Mitchell, oh, wow!

Q: And we have Kenny Drew and Paul Chambers…

AT: Oh, my goodness! Oh!

Q: You recorded with Paul Chambers on about eight thousand sessions.

AT: Oh, don’t get me…

Q: He’s going to say a few words about Paul Chambers.

AT: Oh, Chamb, Chamb, Chamb… Well, you know, Chamb’s favorite expression, I use it a lot of times with people, Paul Chambers would… I would say to Paul, “Oh, Paul, that was so beautiful, what you played, man. I love you so much. And he would say, “It’s only Chambers’ music, T,” and “We’re going to speed on to victory.” Whatever that meant, you know! He was a sweetheart. He was a sweetie.

Q: [ETC.] Arthur Taylor and Walter Bolden want your phone calls. They want to see the phone lines flooded.

AT: At 8 o’clock. If somebody’s out there. Anybody out there listening? I don’t see… Nobody’s calling. It’s just the three of us talking here, seems like to me. Nobody calls or anything. What’s going on?

Q: I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know the phone number.

AT: How many listeners do you have out there usually? Two or three or four?

Q: Maybe at most.

AT: Five.

Q: Maybe at most.

AT: Six.

Q: Possibly, if we’re lucky, on a given night.
[MUSIC: J.McLean/B. Mitchell/AT, “Appointment In Ghana” (1960); R. Garland/PC/AT, “Hey, Now” (1959); PC/H. Jones/AT, “Yesterdays” (1958)]

AT: That was “Yesterdays” by Paul Chambers, with Hank Jones, Kenny Burrell and Arthur Taylor on the drums. And I will be performing with Taylor’s Wailers…tomorrow evening…at 8 o’clock…at Walter Reade Theatre…in Lincoln Center — and we’re gonna wail. And we’re waiting for you to call us. Now, we’re getting a coupl’a calls, but they’re all from guys. There are no ladies out there listening to this music? I mean, this stuff is getting strange now. I can’t handle it. You know, it’s getting out of hand. It didn’t used to be like that, you know, but it’s getting strange now. So I want to see… First, I wish you people would call and let us know you’re out there. Well, we’re sitting here with Walter…

Q: Well, the number, A.T. Give them the number.

AT: Well, you tell them the number. [ETC.]

Q: Why the theme Autobiography In Rhythm for this concert, A.T.?

AT: You want me to be honest?

Q: I wouldn’t want you to lie.

AT: Oh, okay. It’s a tricky situation, because Lincoln Center wanted me to do a program of Bud Powell’s music, and I love Bud Powell as much as anything I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. One of my greatest thrills is playing music with Bud Powell, and all of us, people like Walter Bolden and myself, we have a great regard and a great respect and love for Bud Powell, and his music, and his artistry — and him as a person also. But things like that have been done already. I had done that already at the United Nations, and I had done it at the JVC Festival. It’s been done. And I’m really most interested in promoting and developing the band that I work with, Taylor’s Wailers. We incorporate the music of Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Walter Bolden, Monk, Jimmy Heath, Jackie McLean. We play the music of all the master composers of Modern Improvisation. And just to put it in a box that you’re going to play this one type of music was a little too much. That’s how that came about. And even though I rejected it, they went ahead with it anyway. The opening piece of the program tomorrow night is that “Some People Never Get It,” you know, and then the second piece by Walter Bolden, “They’re All Stressed Out,” you dig, and then we can get into Abbey Lincoln’s “You Made Me Funny” — you know, “you’ve made me funny, you’ve made me sneaky…” I don’t want to be that way. I mean, I talk about it, but I don’t want to be funny. Do you know what I mean? Does that cover that question?

Q: I guess it does. A.T., I’d like to ask you if, in that last batch of phone calls, any topics came up that you’d like to discuss with Walter Bolden.

AT: Yes, well, one gentleman called and said, “Yes, you’re talking about a lot of musicians and this and that, but you haven’t said anything about Elmo Hope or…” He mentioned another pianist, I can’t remember…

Q: I think he mentioned Richie Powell.

AT: Richie Powell, that’s right, Bud’s younger brother. He used to play with Clifford Brown and Max Roach. The gentleman was correct. Those are wonderful musicians. Now, I never played with Richie, but I played with Elmo, and Elmo was, PSHEW, unbelievable. Unbelievable. Elmo Hope was something else. He was really something else. He epitomized the artistic manner of accompanying, of imagination and quick thought. I mean, from the brain right to the hand, immediately, at the right time and the place, the right note, the right chord, the right time, where everybody says, “Ah!” Where you don’t say, “Grrr,” you say “Ah!” — a sigh of relief, you know.

Q: He was a contemporary and a close friend of Bud Powell.

AT: That is correct. That is correct. I would see him at Bud’s apartment sometimes, quite a bit. Yeah, Elmo was quite a musician.

Q: A very distinctive style of writing…

AT: Yes.

Q: …and many enduring compositions.

AT: Definitely. But for me, his main thing was the way he would comp. Unbelievable. He was one of the masters, along with Bud and Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, and others also I can’t… The list goes on. But it’s not that long either now!

Q: It’s long enough, though. Of course, you played in hundreds of rhythm sections, with many bassists. I would guess (I have to hear it from you) that Paul Chambers epitomized maybe the ideal bass player.

AT: Well, I did most of my work with Paul. A lot with Doug Watkins, too. Paul was masterful. Like, when you go on the bandstand and start to play, you know what I mean, you go in a trance. I mean, you’re out of it. I mean, you’re only involved in what the other musicians are doing. Well, that’s the relief of playing music, because when you can play music, and if you really get involved in it, and you love it and you enjoy it, and you enjoy and respect the people you’re playing with, there’s nothing like that in the world. There’s nothing like that.

Paul epitomized that. He’s like a guy that goes in a trance. He’s right there, you can look in his eyes, but his brain is only in the music and only what the other musicians are doing and what he is doing. That requires a great deal of concentration. You have to be sympathetic. You have to be understanding. You have to be friendly, mean, nasty, cold-blooded and everything at the same time, you know — without being hateful, though. Paul was just a sweetheart. He was a sweetheart.

Q: Was the Red Garland Trio working a lot in terms of gigs, or was it primarily done for recording dates?

AT: This was primarily recordings. We would do gigs sometimes, but that was occasional, because Red and Paul were playing with Miles Davis at this period, just like John Coltrane was playing with Miles Davis at this period. But there were a certain group of guys, I guess you could call it a clique. It was like a clique. And it was hard to get in that clique. Pianists like Red and Tommy Flanagan, Wynton Kelly, a couple of people like that, and the bassists were Doug and Paul, and the drummers were Philly and myself, and then there were other people, too, like Louis Hayes was in there…

Q: Sam Jones recorded with Red later.

AT: Sam Jones. That was later, though. That was later. Jackie McLean and Donald Byrd. Joe Gordon, the trumpet player, a great trumpet player who died — Joe Gordon. Those are some of the main guys. And we would work with Gene Ammons, like I said before, and Art Farmer. So there was like a circle of musicians at that particular time. It was very difficult to get into that, because you really had to be playing, first of all, and second of all, the people had to like you, or it didn’t make any difference — you were out! Heh-heh.

Q: Of course, Red Garland and Paul Chambers were playing together all the time.

AT: Yes.

Q: But they sound like it was, you know, a working trio with a book, as though they were on the road or playing gigs like the Ahmad Jamal Trio or other trios of the time.

AT: Yeah. Well, Red was a very sensitive man, you know. I met Red when I was playing with Coleman Hawkins, and he had taken me to his apartment in Philadelphia. He said, “I want you to hear this,” and I sat down and listened to him play. He said, “Yeah, when I get to play with Miles, I’m going to use these chords; these chords are going to set him off.” It’s like you train yourself to play with another musician. And it was really like that, because you know, Miles would say, “Oh my God, do you hear that stuff Red’s playing? That’s too much, isn’t it?” He said, “I don’t have to play. I just stand there, you know.” And Miles was serious. “I don’t really even have to play. Because he’s doing so much beautiful stuff there, I can just do almost anything and it works.”

[MUSIC: W. Bolden, “Gift Of Life” (1978); Monk Big Band, “Friday The 13th” (1959); Bud Powell Trio, “My Heart Stood Still” (1953)]

Q: That was a Rodgers and Hart composition, “My Heart Stood Still” performed by the Bud Powell trio, with George Duvivier on bass and Arthur Taylor on drums. That was a working trio at the time.

AT: That was a working trio, yes.

Q: Speaking of great bassists you worked with, George Duvivier was one of the consummate masters of the instrument.

AT: Marvelous. I couldn’t figure out how he followed Bud. It was something else. It was incredible. It was really incredible. I would be amazed every night.

Q: Would Bud play something different every night? He didn’t have set…

AT: Every night. Bud was a real improviser, you know. He was never the same. Never the same. That’s what real improvisation. Every night it was different. He’d play the same song every night, but it was like another song, heh-heh — every time. People knew this, too. So that was nice also.

Q: So people would come every night because they knew it would be a different set.

AT: Every night, that’s right.

Q: Prior to that we heard you with Thelonious Monk…

AT: Thelonious! Yeah.

Q: The Thelonious Monk Big Band at Town Hall.

AT: That was quite an evening, yes, with Thelonious. The great Monk.

Q: Some drummers have said it was very hard to play with Monk. Philly Joe Jones talked about the difficulty of following him.

AT: Well, it was difficult. But we all had a great respect and a great regard for Monk because of his knowledge of music, and he was original at the same time, too. Nobody sounds like Monk. There’s nobody! Nobody sounds like that. Even when somebody plays some of his riffs, it doesn’t sound…it’s not Monk. But he was original. And as far as playing with him, I found it very difficult. That was my most difficult job.

Q: Why was that?

AT: Because Monk’s tempos were in between. It was just a fraction in between, which was the hardest tempo to play. It’s harder to play slow than it is fast, because when you play fast, you make errors going by so fast, you don’t know the difference. But if you’re playing slow… This is just my opinion, now; it’s not no gospel truth or nothing like that. But it’s harder to play slow. I could play something fast, at a great rate of speed, and I could mess up…

Q: Supersonic, as you like to say.

AT: Supersonic speed, that’s right, and mess up five hundred times, and nobody would know the difference, I wouldn’t know the difference even, it’s going by so fast. But when you play something slow, and you make an error, it stands out like a sore thumb with a big bandage on it, you know.

Q: [ETC.] We’ll end with a version of “Bullet Train,” from A.T.’s recent release, Mr. A.T.

AT: On Enja Records, which is available at all the record stores in the city. Go buy the records, because when you hear it, you may like it — and go buy it. Because we need the money.

Q: Now, I’ve heard somebody else say that before. “Tell your square friends,” right.

AT: We’re using some of Art Blakey’s stuff. We’ll use his stuff, too, you know, because he’s a master, and you have to use things from the masters also.

Q: [ETC.] Before we conclude the show with “Mr. A.T.,” we’re going to hear you on a recording with someone who was one of your closest friends, I would guess, you recorded with him frequently and played with him in Europe for many years, Johnny Griffin, from a 1962 recording.

AT: Oh yeah, the Little Giant. That’s my man, Johnny Griffin. Rough musician. He had one of those big sounds. You could hear him in Brooklyn when he was playing in Manhattan.

Q: I can hear you in the Bronx when you’re playing in Staten Island, too!

AT: [LAUGHING] Even when he’s playing fast.

Q: This is kind of an obscure recording.

AT: Yeah, I haven’t heard it. I forgot about that. We did that when he was leaving for Europe the next day. He hasn’t come back yet. He was leaving for Europe the next day, yeah.

Q: We’ll hear an original blues by Griff called “Slow Burn.” After that we’ll hear the short version of “Mr. A.T.” from your recent release on Enja…

AT: Actually, I’d like to hear the long version.

Q: Well, we don’t have time to play the long version. We played that at the start of the show.

AT: How long is the long version?

Q: It’s eleven minutes.

AT: But that’s what we’ve got. Exactly eleven minutes.

Q: No, but I have to play this, and then the short version.

AT: Is it necessary for you to play this?

Q: Yes, it is!

AT: [LAUGHS]

Q: We played the long one at the top of the show.

AT: Okay, compromise. You always have me in a compromising position. It’s okay. I just hope everyone enjoyed the show, sitting here with my buddy, the great drummer Walter Bolden and my good friend, Ted Panken. It’s really been a pleasure being back here at WKCR for a short visit this evening. And I’m thinking about you, Mo!

WB: And I’m very, very thankful to be invited here, especially with A.T. It was really-really-really a pleasure.

[MUSIC: Griffin, “Slow Burn” (1962), AT, “Mr. A.T.”]

[-30-]

For Pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach’s 79th Birthday, A 2013 DownBeat Feature

I’m a fan of the German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach, a pioneer in the development of speculative improvising in Germany and on the broader European scene, both through his involvement in Globe Unity Orchestra, his long-standing trio work with Evan Parker, his own ensembles, his comprehensive investigation of the Thelonious Monk’s corpus, and his concept of improvising in a 12-tone context. I had an opportunity to interview Schlippenbach in Heidelberg in November 2012, and to document that encounter in Downbeat in an early 2013 issue. I’m posting that piece in honor of his 79th birthday.

***********

In 2004, pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach observed the sixtieth birthday of his old friend Evan Parker by presenting him with a folio containing the complete works of Thelonious Monk, hand-transposed in pencil from the key of C to a saxophone-friendly B-flat.

While this extravagant gesture denoted Schlippenbach’s loving esteem for a kindred spirit, it also encapsulated his decades of immersion in Monk’s music, as documented on Monk’s Casino [Intakt], a 3-CD opus from 2005, on which Schlippenbach assembled a quintet to perform Monk’s entire corpus in a single evening of three 75-minute sets. Seven years later, Intakt released Schlippenbach Plays Monk [Intakt], a solo piano meditation on which he intersperses less-traveled Monk repertoire with original works and improvisations based on 12-tone material, a subject that Schlippenbach explored on the intense, mid-aughts solo recitals Twelve Tone Tales (Volumes 1 and 2) [Intakt], and on 2011’s Blue Hawk [Jazz Werkstadt], on which he and trumpeter Manfred Schoof, a his collaborator for more than half-a-century, perform 15 duets. Serial music refracted through a jazz sensibility is also part of the fabric of Iron Wedding [Intakt], documenting a 2008 two-piano encounter with pianist Aki Takase, Schlippenbach’s life partner.

“In the same way that Alex is an undying fan of Monk, he’s also an undying fan of Schoenberg,” said Parker, who first played with Schlippenbach in 1968. In 1972, he joined Schlippenbach and drummer Paul Lovens in a still ongoing trio—most recently heard on Gold Is Where You Find It [Intakt], from 2007—that has remained steadfast in its commitment to tabula rasa improvising over the ensuing forty years.

“He’s assembled a huge arsenal of patterns and vertical structures,” Parker continued, noting that these raw materials are the bedrock of the spontaneous conversation undertaken by the trio—or the international ensemble known as the Globe Unity Orchestra, of which the trio is the core—in any performance. “Nothing is discussed in advance, and everything is allowed. What matters is what happens after the first gesture.”

Schlippenbach launched the Globe Unity Orchestra in 1966 at Germany’s Donaueschingen Festival, a premier showcase for European contemporary music. It was a ground zero moment in what Joachim-Ernst Berendt has termed “Die Emanzipation,” denoting the process by which a trans-national cohort of young musicians from Britain and the Continent, initially inspired by such American avatars as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler, broke away from their models and started to develop their own sounds.

“Globe Unity was like a hopeful political metaphor,” said George Lewis, who referenced his own long history with GUO in the program notes for the 2006 date Globe Unity—40 Years [Intakt], on which he also performed, augmenting recent collaborations with Schlippenbach in both the Trio and various chamber configurations. “He’s addressing European contemporary music, which is perceived as a very elite, high-culture art form, and he says, ‘I am going to play jazz and jazz is going to be part of the European high-culture consensus.’ That challenged a lot of fundamental ideals—nationalist ideals, even racial ideals.”

Lewis noted that Schlippenbach, concerned that the term “free improvisation” “might be used to distance him from the jazz tradition,” was firm about describing his music as “free jazz.” “At this point you have to say that he is part of the jazz tradition,” Lewis said. “He likes to make the piano ring, like Fred Anderson made the saxophone ring. There are these sharp, intense gestures, and he gets into this trance of ecstasy, which he then cuts back on, so there’s an awareness going on at the same time.”

That awareness was evident at last November, at a lecture-performance at a “Jazz and Social Relevance” conference sponsored by the University of Heidelberg’s American Studies Department, where Schlippenbach, 74, followed a brief recital with a pithy discourse—in English—that traced, as he stated, “the emergence of free jazz in Europe” and GUO’s origins. Later, he sat with DownBeat for a conversation.

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DB: What’s your personal history with Monk’s music?

AVS: I have been busy with Monk, strange enough, almost from my beginning with jazz. For one year at the end of the ‘50s, there was a jazz school connected with the Cologne Musikhochschule, where I had a very nice piano teacher—the only jazz piano teacher I ever had—named Francis Coppieters, a Belgian from the radio band. He introduced me to the Monk piece called “Work,” which I rehearsed and played. I found it quite interesting and very different from the other jazz with all the well-known cliches. So I tried to find a way to learn Monk’s other pieces, and over the years they came together.

All 70 of his tunes are gems, each with its own strong character; this is what I appreciate most about him. But I don’t think there is much of a link between Monk’s music and my style of playing. When I improvise, I am trying to find a way to keep with the theme, not just do brilliant choruses on the changes like most of the piano players do, but to get the IDEA of the piece.

DB: Through what threads in your consciousness did you relate to Monk’s music?

AVS: There was a guy in my boarding school who could play the boogie-woogie, which impressed me, and I tried to imitate him. I learned the blues with this. Through the years, every night from 12 to 1 a.m., I listened to the Voice of America Jazz Hour with Willis Conover, which was very important—it gave me good information about new things. All my money went to buy records, which I transcribed and copied, trying to play bebop and traditional jazz. I heard Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie with Jazz at the Philharmonic, and it changed my life. Oscar made an impression on me—one of the greatest piano players in the history of jazz, with fantastic technique and swinging and can play blues and everything… Horace Silver was a great influence as well. I copied all his records. I wouldn’t say he has any cliche. He has his own very strong style, which is true of all the great jazz musicians. Nowadays in school, they learn from books how the blues scale works, and then they can do anything with it. This makes things flat, I would say.

Then at the beginning of the ‘60s, when all these changes happened, we heard Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, just to mention those two. We were fascinated with this new language, this new sound. We quickly adapted that influence and developed it, writing little tunes that we used as a boost to do something somehow more free. At the same time, I was a student of composition in Cologne, where I was in contact with contemporary composers like Bernd Alois Zimmermann, worked with them, and got some experience in what’s called “serious contemporary music.” Zimmermann had places for improvisers and jazz players in his later compositions, which I performed with the Manfred Schoof Quintet. In 1967 and 1968, Penderecki and Luigi Nono tried to get in contact after they heard Globe Unity Orchestra.

DB: I gather around 1965 you played a gig at the Blue Note in Paris with Gunter Hampel opposite Kenny Clarke, after which you’d attend a jam session that Don Cherry was doing at Le Chat Qui Peche.

AVS: Yeah, it was fantastic. We always could hear their last set, because we were quite interested about the way Don Cherry led the band with his horn—he’d raise it, suddenly there was a new motive, a new theme that the band immediately followed. This was quite impressive for me. I can relate to this the way we play today, especially with Rudi Mahall, a fantastic bass clarinet player, who I play with both in duo and with a rhythm section. We have these Monk tunes and Eric Dolphy stuff, and he’ll change, then I’ll follow, as though we’re not only playing one piece, but can surprise ourselves as different things come up.

DB: You recorded Dolphy’s songs solo on Twelve Tone Tales. He seems to be as important to you as Monk.

AVS: Yes. His tunes went more in the new, freer direction than Monk’s music. I heard him with Mingus in the ‘60s, and I heard him perform with Coltrane in Stuttgart, and also on radio recordings. I listened to his records—especially Out To Lunch was one that gave me an enormous idea where jazz can go. Monk was a pianist, so it’s piano music. Dolphy was not a piano player, but a melody-maker, and I was curious how to play his pieces—some of which are literally extended bebop—on the piano. Of course, you have to see what you can do with the other hand, so it’s not just the melody.

DB: Does your thematic orientation when interpreting Monk and Dolphy remain in the completely improvised context of your trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens?

AVS: When I play with Parker and Lovens, this is completely different. No themes at all. It’s what we call improvising without any prior agreement. We never speak about what the program is, so we don’t have pieces. We have all our certain material. Motifs. Evan has his scales. I have my very full chords which are built up for the right hand and for the left hand in a convenient way for the piano. I have, of course, also other things to do in my improvisational material. Paul has developed his own way of drumming through all these years, and since we’ve worked together continuously, we have developed our own style, which is I think quite unique. It’s not so much adapted from any American jazz. Nothing against the bass, it has its function, but I do like groups without bass, so I can do more things with my left hand and feel freer. Of course, I heard Cecil Taylor’s trio with Sunny Murray and Jimmy Lyons at the Montmartre. I also liked the old Benny Goodman Trio with Gene Krupa.

DB: How is consensus reached on the first gesture of a performance? The first sound that generates everything else?

AVS: Usually I start with some motif, but it can come from Evan or from Lovens. Of course, we know each other, and when they start, I can immediately jump in, or pick up something, and go on. But the way we do that is not predictable. It comes out of the moment.

DB: Do you listen back to the performances? Do you analyze them after the fact? Or do you just let them go?

AVS: I more let them go. If the thing is done, it’s done, and I go to the next thing.

DB: So you don’t listen to yourself to find, say, patterns that might exist.

AVS: Not so much. More by chance. Sometimes, by chance, I listen to things we recorded 40 years ago, which is quite interesting to listen to…

DB: What do you think of Schlippenbach forty years ago?

AVS: Forty years ago, he was more kind of an angry young man, I think. The music was quite fresh, quite new at that time. We were very optimistic, just go in and play as much as possible. We were very convinced of what we were doing.

DB: Can you speak about the interplay between your considerable technique and your compositional and improvisational interests?

AVS: I have developed improvisational material on 12-tone chords. Already when I started I’d been interested in this for many years, and it came out stronger and stronger. So I found things convenient for the piano that I practiced a lot to improvise with that material. I was working sometimes with Steve Lacy, who showed me chords where you can press two notes with the thumb or with other fingers, which means you can put six-tone chords in one hand and six-tone chords in the other, which together is 12. I practiced on a couple of chords and scales and material to improvise with, and did it in a specific jazz way. For me, the difference between jazz and classical music is mainly that jazz has a rough, forward driving force. That’s always what I was most interested in, and I tried to transfer this element to my improvisation. Through this mode of practice, I developed maybe a specific technique.

DB: I think the most obvious reference point is that Cecil Taylor was a jumping-off point for you. I’m wondering if he was or if he wasn’t.

AVS: He was, of course. I saw him first in the ‘60s and also as a solo pianist in Amsterdam, and I was really overwhelmed. It was something very new. It was just air from the other planet at this time. I followed him to Rotterdam to the next concert, and I was very impressed about his ability to play the piano with a new sound and a new approach even to the music. It was exactly at that time when we also found out about our own possibilities. But he is still for me maybe the most important piano player in what we call the new jazz.

DB: In the mid ‘80s, after Jimmy Lyons died, Taylor started to work a great deal with European improvisers. Can you describe the maturation of European new jazz during those years of consolidation? You yourself have stated that in Globe Unity Orchestra the concept became more refined, more intuitive.

AVS: Yes. This is something that happens in music, I think. In the beginning, when the thing was completely new, many musicians, even beginners, tried to jump the train, as they say, even if they are not so great on their instrument. There were no fixed rules, that you have to know this tune, or play on the harmony. They could feel like, “I can do anything.” Of course, this is a basic error, because you have to make music, and you have to find a way to make people understand the music is not just fooling around or anything and saying, “this is free” and “this is not free.” So there was some chaos in the beginning, but after a while the wheat separated from the chaff—it became evident who is really serious about playing. The language became clearer. Nowadays we know with whom we want to play, and what we want to do. Today I would say there has never been so much free jazz as now. In Berlin, there’s a third generation of younger musicians who are working on their stuff with great passion, exactly as we did. I can feel this new movement, because I am playing around all the time. The seed grows up.

My trio with Evan and Paul is a kind of nucleus of Globe Unity Orchestra. Since we are always improvising, the band has gone more and more in a direction that we call ‘complete improvisation.’ Sometimes there is a little idea to start with something on overtones, or something with single notes—but not more. There is no need to talk about it. You can hear it, and then it comes from itself.

DB: Was music in your family background?

AVS: There is nothing to say about that. My father played a nice accordion, and my mother played a little piano. But I grew up after the war, when there was nothing to be done about music…

DB: You had to survive.

AVS: Survive, yes. So I started with piano when I was about 10 years old, relatively late. Then I saw this guy with the boogie-woogie, and I listened to jazz, and I got amazed about jazz…

DB: Were you from an aristocratic family?

AVS: Yes. This is a very long story. I am not a specialist about the family history, but I know it goes back to the 9th century or something—very old roots. Everything is lost anyway, because the high nobility of Prussia was put down after the war to nothing, or even worse sometimes. I try to hide my real name as a musician. I say “von.” But I am “Graf.”

DB: Graf is Count.

AVS: Yes, I’m a Count. But I don’t use it. I leave it to Count Basie.

DB: What music do you like to listen to now?

AVS: I like to listen to the old bebop, to the real bebop, the original bebop. Some things in contemporary music. Some things of new players, but not so much. I am very busy with my own things.

DB: What’s the quality that grabs you?

AVS: I find in this something of a darker side of jazz. That music was very strict in the form, with real tension, very convincing and very strong.

DB: Do you feel there’s a darkness in your music?

AVS: I can be light and a little bit funny with that. But if I use the chords, there’s a certain darkness in it, yes.

DB: You like to play in a lot of different ways—within forms and also total improvisation. Are they separate files of activity, or interrelated?

AVS: I think my way of playing—a certain touch, certain material—comes through even if I play traditional forms. But it’s always ME that plays. I don’t say, “Now I play like Horace Silver” or “I play like Monk.” I play maybe a piece of him, but I do it in my way.

DB: Is it your opinion that you’ve developed your own language?

AVS: Yes, of course. We all start following some idea, try to imitate even great musicians from another generation. You learn from it. Now I’ve developed my own language in terms of my own improvisational stuff and material, and someone who knows my music and hears me could say, “This is Schlippenbach.”