R.I.P. Don Sebesky, Dec. 10, 1937 – April 29, 2023 – A Brief Interview from 1999

In honor of the influential arranger Don Sebesky, most famous for his superb collaborations with producer Creed Taylor on big-selling albums for Verve and CTI during the 70s and 80s, I’m posting an interview from 1999. At the time, I was doing a fair amount of reviewing and interviewing for the bn.com (Barnes and Noble) website for editor Steve Futterman, who gave me an opportunity to speak with Sebesky about his new album, Joyful Noise, an Ellington tribute, and his previous album, I Remember Bill, featuring his orchestrations of solos by Bill Evans. My review is below, followed by the interview, which was not comprehensive, but still gives a nice flavor of his personality and aesthetics.

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With Joyful Noise Don Sebesky — the ex Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson arranger whose charts for Wes Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard, Paul Desmond, Chet Baker and other distinctive improvisers defined the sound of some of the best-selling mainstream recordings of the ’60s and ’70s on the A&M and CTI labels — takes on 8 iconic Duke Ellington compositions of provenance ranging from 1927 (“Creole Love Call”) to 1962 (“Take The Coltrane”), and offers an original suite based on various classic Ellington motifs. As he did on last year’s I Remember Bill” — which featured imaginative orchestrations of iconic solos by legendary pianist Bill Evans — Sebesky, now 61, captures a tone parallel to his subject, referencing influences ranging from Dizzy Gillespie (“Chelsea Bridge”) to Claude Thornhill (“Warm Valley”) to Gil Evans (“Caravan”), built on the signature sound of his scrupulously detailed voicings. They are executed to a t by a first-rate band, propelled by the superb rhythm section — borrowed from the Vanguard Orchestra — of pianist Jim McNeely, who takes a sublime feature on “Warm Valley”), bassist Dennis Irwin, who could make a dead man swing, and immaculate drummer Dennis Mackrell. Sweetening the pot are a stellar cast of guest soloists. Bob Brookmeyer’s smooth valve trombone entextures “Caravan”, while Phil Woods brings forth bestirring solos on alto sax and clarinet, swinging ebulliently on “Creole Love Call,” keening the blues in the best Johnny Hodges tradition on “Sadly.” “Satin Doll” is a concerto for Ron Carter’s supple, resonant bass. Trumpeter Tom Harrell rises at all times to his accustomed level of invention; he’s matched by bandmember Barry Ries’ strong solos on “Chelsea Bridge” and “Mood Indigo.” Sebesky caps the feast with an idiomatic transcription of “Koko,” a magisterial Ellington masterpiece.

Don Sebesky for BN.COM re Joyful Noise (9-24-99):

TP: I’d like to first talk about the impetus for this project following on the Bill Evans tribute from last year.

SEBESKY: Steve Gates at RCA felt that it would be a good idea, given that it was the Ellington year. He felt I might give my individual slant to the music, and I was happy to do it because I was thinking about it anyway, so I just thought it was a natural fit. We didn’t try to imitate Ellington. We just tried to take the tunes that I always loved and felt that worked through the channel of the kind of style we’re trying to project.

TP: What was your process in dealing with the tunes? Did you get the sheet music, which is now available, and deal with it, or did you deal with your ear impressions, your various studies and transcriptions over the years?

SEBESKY: Well, the only transcription… We did a transcription of “Koko,” which is taken off the original RCA recording. It’s the original recording, but of course it’s done in a modern way and the guys have a looser feel, so it’s interesting to hear modern musicians play an arrangement that was 60 years old. But the rest of it, no, I had to sheet music. All the tunes were done because I felt that those specific tunes blended well with the kinds of characteristics and stylings that we do. We do a lot of cluster things and we do a lot of this-and-that, and I picked the tunes that I thought were a natural fit.

TP: Would you elaborate on what is “this-and-that”?

SEBESKY: Cluster voicings are one of the things that we feel are unique to this band. We use it on “Mood Indigo,” we use it on “Chelsea Bridge,” we used it on several places on the Bill Evans album. In fact, in the “Waltz for Debby,” it’s sort of the heart of the arrangement,, where everybody is just packed very closely together, seconds apart, and it creates an…oh, what kind of sound would you call it…

TP: A hocketing effect?

SEBESKY: Yeah. And it floats above a very fast bass, so it creates an interesting rub where the voicings are more diffused, and the chords, since they have so many notes in them, have a floating quality. But in the original suite “Joyful Noise,” I concocted specifically in a way to quote from many Ellington tunes. There must be 20 of them in there.

TP: Yes. And I kept searching for them, but you were too quick for me.

SEBESKY: They go by pretty quick. Sometimes they were only a couple of bars or 4 bars, and sometimes just a little refrain. But it was meant specifically to do that, around an original. The basic tune is actually taken from a fragment of an Ellington tune, just the little tail end of it, and that served as the germinating motif for the rest of it. But the reason for picking some of these tunes was that I felt they lent themselves to the style that we like to play in. So the only transcription was “Koko”; the rest was all by ear.

TP: Talk about the choice of soloists. I know in the case of Tom Harrell and Pizzarelli, apart from their musicianship, you’re also under contract to the same record company. But a la Ellington, were you listening to the individual sounds in creating your own concept of the arrangements?

SEBESKY: Yes. I think that Tom Harrell is as good a trumpet player as there is, and he blends right in. And then, of course, Bob Brookmeyer you could look at as kind of the modern counterpoint to Juan Tizol. Of course, he’s a more elaborate player and a much more chromatic player. He was the only choice for “Caravan.” As I said to him, I wrote it for him, and I said, “You have to come down and play this, because if I don’t, what am I going to do? Look in the union book under valve trombone? How do I get somebody to play this.” Because it’s built around… That’s the way Ellington did it. He built arrangements around individual voices. Of course, Bob Brookmeyer is a unique individual voice, and he was the only one who could play that, and that’s what the arrangement is built around — his sound.

TP: It seems like “Warm Valley” was built around a certain aspect of McNeely’s playing.

SEBESKY: Yes. It’s a very Claude Thornhillish kind of sound. It floats and it’s very… It’s kind of along the lines with some of the things that Brookmeyer did for the Vanguard Orchestra, too. There are several things that have that warm quality. In fact, Mulligan did some, too. I love that hanging cloud kind of a sound. We use some clusters in there, too. Phil Woods was the number one choice for a saxophone. He just floored me. He just roared in and, in an amazingly short time, he listened to the tracks and integrated all the backgrounds into his solo so that it sounds like… He’s got such great ears. So he became an organic and integral part of the whole total picture. He wasn’t just going his own way. He making himself part of the total fabric, which I thought was just great.

TP: “Satin Doll” sounds like a Ron Carter concerto, more or less.

SEBESKY: Right, it was written with Ron in mind — and his sound in mind. I made sure I was going to have him. We were lucky enough to get him for one day, because he was flying in and out to Japan and wherever. He also played on “Creole Love Call.” Again, that’s the way Ellington thought, that you build these things around specific instrumentalists. Of course, another one can play it, but it doesn’t have the same personality.

TP: And his orchestrations are infinitely mutable.

SEBESKY: Yes.

TP: You were speaking of the Thornhillish sound of “Warm Valley.” Your “Caravan” arrangement seemed redolent of a certain type of color that one might associate with Gil Evans..

SEBESKY: Yeah….

TP: And “Chelsea Bridge” was Dizzy Gillespieish in a sense.

SEBESKY: Of course, Gil Evans comes out of Duke Ellington. He’s an Ellington disciple. So it’s all organic. It flows together. There are no… I mean, these people who are geniuses (what’s the phrase?), they stand on the shoulders of giants and then they become one themselves. That’s the way I look at it. “Mood Indigo” is actually two songs in one. It’s got two separate melodies. What I did is, I pulled apart all the motifs… There’s a specific chromatic up-and-down motive that I use as a linking mechanism to hold the whole thing together. I tried to take some of the Ellington tunes in directions they hadn’t been taken before. For instance, “Chelsea Bridge” was originally done as a ballad, and I did it as an up-tempo. “Mood Indigo” was the same thing; it was a ballad, and I did it as an up-tempo thing. So I tried to go in new directions. But the basis for it, of course, was listening to the original Ellington recording. I listened to so many of the old records just to get my feet grounded, and what the original Ellington stance was, and then just go from there in my own direction.

TP: Have you been listening to Ellington since you were first involved in music?

SEBESKY: Oh, sure. I started writing and playing when I was 16 or 17, and had my first things recorded — so it goes back to high school in the middle ’50s.

TP: Were you listening to Ellington’s whole spectrum, or the things he was coming out with in the ’50s?

SEBESKY: His whole spectrum. Actually, I thought the greatest Ellington band was the one in the early ’40s, the one that did “Chelsea Bridge” and “Koko” and “Warm Valley” — the Blanton band. The next group of tunes, “Mood Indigo” and “Caravan” came a little later. Then again, yet later, was “Sophisticated Lady” and, of course, “Take The Coltrane,” which was something that I hadn’t even been aware of that someone sent to me just kind of out of the blue, and I thought it would be perfect. It just sounds like such an unusual tune, and so I decided it would make a good vehicle for the band.

TP: Is the trumpet soloist on “Mood Indigo” Barry Ries?

SEBESKY: Yes, and on “Chelsea Bridge.” He’s a great player.

TP: And Andy Fusco is playing alto on “Chelsea Bridge”?

SEBESKY: Yes, with Tom Christenson on tenor. Andy plays great. Phil Woods just has, as I say, that sense of… Well, it’s like he has a composer’s sense. That’s how I can best put it. Brookmeyer and he are composers, so they think in those kinds of terms where they integrate their contribution into the total picture rather than go their own way without reference to it. I really admire that.

TP: Would you tell me about the scope of your activity in the last ten years beyond these very specific projects? Are you writing for films and commercials and so on? How are you using your creative energy?

SEBESKY: Well, I do what you said, films and commercials and recordings. Actually John Pizzarelli and I did a couple of nice albums. We did one of Beatles tunes this year with a lot of the same guys in the band. I’ve been doing a lot of orchestrating on Broadway. I actually got a Tony nomination for a great show last year called “Parade” — a Hal Prince show. Then commercials. I’m doing a big album project with the Prague Symphony next month, conducting the Prague Symphony. So there’s a little bit of everything. I did an album for Barry Manilow of Sinatra-style stuff. There’s some Pop, there’s some Jazz, there’s some Broadway. There’s sort of a little bit of everything, and I like that, but…

TP: Do you feel very unified in all the different personas? Do they seem like a seamless entity to you? Or do you have to get into a different mindset?

SEBESKY: I really do. You have to place yourself into the context of what they’re trying to present, because the frame of reference usually is very specific. If you get with a performer who has a definite idea of what they want to see happen, you have to kind of place yourself inside their mind and make it come out right. Because it’s basically writing to order. They have a specific idea, they think you’re the guy to do it, and you have to make it come to life. So I can’t use any of the kinds of sounds I did on my albums in any of these other media, because they just won’t fit right.

TP: I guess the same would go for the Bill Evans project.

SEBESKY: Oh, absolutely. That was more difficult than anything I’ve probably done in a while, because Bill’s music is so unique and delicately balanced, that the slightest wrong note that doesn’t blend with what he doesn’t present… It’s easy to go off the track. So I had to be very careful about making sure that I felt, at least in my own mind, that I was being true to his style.

TP: Is that what keeps you coming back to the jazz lifeblood, the intellectual challenge and spirit of it?

SEBESKY: Oh, sure. Some of these people are my heroes. Bill Evans is somebody I listen to every day. I just feel that his attitude toward music was so pure. It’s the kind of music that actually will last forever. He never wavered from his commitment to excellence and perfection, and it comes through. He’s always searching for the right note, the exact right chord, and he wouldn’t settle for anything less than that. And when people around him would try to settle for less, he would get really angry.

TP: Give me a similar encapsulating statement about Ellington, if you would.

SEBESKY: Duke started so early that it’s hard… I don’t know if you’ve seen my little liner notes.

TP: I haven’t.

SEBESKY: We didn’t go into a long thing, but basically we just say that he was one of the pillars of jazz, one of the giants, and it’s really difficult to imagine what jazz would be like without him because he’s influenced so many people in so many ways. These people like Bill Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, who actually told me that he almost went and played with the Ellington band at one point, and I told him, “boy, that would have been quite a combination if it had happened. Mulligan. All these people built their music on the germ that Ellington presented. And talking about Bill Evans, he recorded a lot of Ellington tunes as well. It’s just impossible to conceive of where jazz would have gone without him because his approach was so unique and so… It was all built on the idea that… His orchestra was comprised of not sections, but individual people who happened to be in sections, and the way he wrote, when he would write a specific chord, he would think to himself that that note would sound best if this guy played it. What it did is, it crystallized what jazz is about with its individuality. And even if they’re playing a note that’s written, if their sound is the one sound that’s going to make that note to come to life, then that’s what the essence of jazz is about.

TP: My editor’s question, which you have answered: What are your five favorite Ellington compositions and arrangements and a few sentences why?

SEBESKY: Well, the ones that we included in the album. I would say “Warm Valley,” “Koko”… If I had to say one tune that I thought exemplified the Ellington style, I would say it’s “Koko”. That’s why I included it. We opened it up a little bit to give Bob a little bit more solo space. I think “Koko” is the quintessential Ellington tune. “Rockin’ In Rhythm” is one of my favorites. I quote from that in the suite. I’d have to say that “Chelsea Bridge” is a unique piece of music. Strayhorn and Ellington blend where you can’t tell where one starts and the other leaves off. It’s similar to the way Stan Kenton and Pete Rugolo used to work together, where they started to just trade ideas and you couldn’t tell who’s was whose after a while. “Jack The Bear” I’m very fond of. So a lot of them come out of that early ’40s band. A lot of critics would say that was the peak of Ellingtonia right there.

TP: Were you very interested in that ’60s band?

SEBESKY: Well, to some degree. I have those records. I think what happened is that jazz was changing then. When Ellington was at his peak, he was defining what the jazz sound was about. Then when it started to change, when Bebop came in and he wasn’t playing Bebop, then his band starts to sound dated at that time. So he was still sort of playing more loose phrasing, because then he would have players in the band who were listening to some of those records. So it became a little bit of a mixture of things. But it was very pure in the early ’40s, and I think that’s where his greatest contribution probably lay.

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R.I.P. Nancy Wilson (Feb. 20, 1937-Dec. 13, 2008) — An Uncut Interview For BN.COM From 2002

R.I.P. Nancy Wilson, who passed away yesterday at 81 — I had an opportunity to interview her in 2002 when EMI put out a four-CD box set of little known older material, which was released concurrently to a date with Ramsey Lewis.  This is the unedited version.

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Nancy Wilson (2-8-02):

TP: First I’ll ask about the box set, and then a few things about MEANT TO BE, because both will be reviewed on the website on the date they come out. As far as this lavish set, what made this such a good time for you to release this project in the manner that you did it.

WILSON: Actually, EMI had the idea.

TP: So it was basically you cooperating with them.

WILSON: I was glad that they released the four-box set, yes.

TP: I’m under the impression you had quite a bit of input in it.

WILSON: Months ago, when we talked about what should go in it, yes.

TP: In the publicity they’re sending out, the impression is that you had your hands on a lot of what went in.

WILSON: I didn’t know what went in it. Initially, I picked certain songs that I thought should be in it, and I wanted that live album to go in it.

TP: You wanted that live album from the Sands.

WILSON: Yes.

TP: But did you pick all the material that’s on Disk 3, as you said?

WILSON: yes.

TP: Are you someone who’s very analytical about yourself, your records? Do you listen to them once you’re done?

WILSON: No! [LAUGHS] Not at all. I do it, I did it. I can’t tell you how it came about. I just go in there and do it.

TP: That said, in making these selections, did you go back and listen to your records?

WILSON: I know the songs. “Over The Weekend” and some of the other songs are songs I rarely get a chance to do on songs, and they’re some of the most wonderful songs. The lyrics deserve to be heard more.

TP: The box is interesting in that it spans four decades, and spans such a range of styles and sonic palettes and approaches to music, and also many different sounds to frame your voice in.

WILSON: Mmm-hmm.

TP: Depending on the situation, do you change the phrasing or timbre of your voice? Does the instrumental context make any difference in how you project your voice?

WILSON: I never thought about it. I just go ahead and sing the song over what is being played. I’m certain that certain music will bring a different feeling to it. Certain music will bring out something else in a singer. But I don’t analyze what I do. I hear it, what they’re playing, I listen to it, we go in and I usually play the chart down, I hear what they’re doing and I hear where I go, and the downbeat comes down and we do the track.

TP: About how much time would it take you to internalize the lyric?

WILSON: Internalize the lyric?

TP: Or get it to the point where you can sing it and want it to be documented.

WILSON: It doesn’t take but a minute.

TP: Really?

WILSON: Yeah. [LAUGHS]

TP: Is that right? You make it sound so easy!

WILSON: But it is! I mean, it isn’t a job. It’s not work. But that is my gift, I guess. I don’t really sweat over a song, or worry over it or anything. If I like it, I sing it, and it just comes out.

TP: You mean, you just know what to do.

WILSON: Yes.

TP: And has that always been the case?

WILSON: Yes. I tell stories, and that does not change.

TP: But it’s interesting because you’re projecting your story through the medium of someone’s lyric, and with the range of material you address, it’s really quite a gift.

WILSON: But that’s my gift. I am an interpreter, and have always known that. I am not a writer of songs. I interpret lyrics, and I’ve been blessed to have some of the greatest lyrics ever.

TP: I’ve been reading up on you. When you were 18 and dropped out of Wilberforce College in Ohio to go with Rusty Bryant’s band, would you say that gift was in place at that time?

WILSON: Yeah. I had a television show when I was 15, with a big band, called “Skyline Melody” in my home town, twice a week. People would call in or write in and request songs, and I would sing their songs for them.

TP: At what point in your career, would you say you got beyond influences?

WILSON: I think I’m a product of everything I ever heard. I know there’s… On, say, the love of the humor, the chit-chat, probably I would say is Dinah Washington. The gowns, the look and whatnot, I loved Lena Horne. The sound? There’s a lot of Jimmy Scott there. The phrasing, there’s a lot of his. I heard male influences when I was 3-4-5.

TP: Nat Cole, Jimmy Scott?

WILSON: Mmm-hmm. Billy Eckstine. I loved Louis Jordan.

TP: This was the music of the day. So you just heard this, and by osmosis it got into your style? Or did you break down those recordings and study them?

WILSON: [LAUGHS] I was 8! No, I didn’t break down anything. I’ve never broken down anything in my life. I don’t even know what that means.

TP: I guess I mean playing the records over and getting whatever you got.

WILSON: No, I never did that. I listened to the song, learned the lyrics, and then I didn’t pay any attention to that any more when I sang my song.

TP: Do you play any instruments?

WILSON: I played piano for a hot minute, but the more I sang, the less I could play. I would be singing and my hands would not be moving.

TP: Would you care to offer a song or two by Billy Eckstine and Dinah Washington and Jimmy Scott that you’d cite as a total favorite or very influential?

WILSON: Dinah Washington, “This Better Earth.” “If It’s The Last Thing I Do” is on my first album. Jimmy Scott, “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So,” “Very Truly Yours.” Billy Eckstine, “Cottage For Sale.”

TP: How much autonomy did you have in choosing either material and/or the people you recorded with when you were with Capitol?

WILSON: Complete. I get asked questions often, “Well, who told you what to do?” and “Who picked material?” It wasn’t like that back in the day. We were artists. We weren’t fodder. Nobody came in and told us what to wear, and how to do this and how to do that, or set us up there and said, “You’re going to sing this.” They submitted songs, I had a management, I had an excellent record company, and my producer was a good guy — Dave Cavanaugh. We sat down and went over many, many things. We went to Broadway for a lot of stuff. We did the best stuff that was out there.

TP: You did a lot of film music, too, it seems like.

WILSON: Yes.

TP: This question may be immaterial given your answer to my first question. But in listening back to yourself, if you did at all, can you look upon how your sound has changed over the years?

WILSON: Well, I’m forty years older than when I started recording. The voice has lost maybe… Most of the songs that I sang when I was 22 I still sing in the same key. Rarely do I have to change or drop it down a half-tone. I have a much wider and prettier bottom. I’ve always had that little growl, the whisper; that’s still there. So I haven’t lost a great deal of anything. But if I listen to it, I think I like the Nancy Wilson sound at 50 as much if not more than I did at 20.

Listen to someone like Rosemary Clooney. Same thing. Her voice is just as mellow and beautiful today as it was 30 or 40 years ago. Because they have VOICES. They have naturalvoices. We’ve always sung where it was natural, where we could do it. We weren’t going around singing falsetto, and singing songs all high-pitched and out of our range. We were able to go in a comfort zone. And when you do that, you have a tendency to keep your voice.

TP: Let’s talk about Ramsey Lewis. You met him in the early ’60s.

WILSON: Yes.

TP: But you didn’t record until ’84.

WILSON: Right. We did a lot of work together, though. We did a lot of concerts together. My trio, his trio, we would go out and package it.

TP: Apart from being born around the same time and having gone through a lot of similar experiences, what would you say is the cause of the chemistry that you have?

WILSON: He’s funky. When he played, back in the day, The Three Sounds and Ramsey Lewis had two of the swingingest trios out, and… I mean, they could play a ballad and make you cry. And it was soulful. It wasn’t just technique. They touched your heart with their playing. And those were two trios that I thought were very much similar to the kinds of things that I liked. When Cannonball came along with “Mercy, Mercy” and all, unhh!, that stuff was great! That’s the music of my life. That’s the music I like.

TP: I gather this record was done on September 11th?

WILSON: We were supposed to record the first tune on September. We stayed in Chicago and did it the 12th and 13th.

TP: Tell me about the tunes. There are three signature ballads, and “Moondance”…

WILSON: “Moondance” turned out to be really nice. I liked it. It’s a good tune. I heard it by Grady Tate. I heard about Van Morrison, and then I knew that I wanted to do it because I heard Grady, because it was swinging, really singing. Now I will put it on the floor next week at Yoshi’s with my own trio, and we will do it different, probably. We will keep the same tempo, but it won’t be as structured. It will be freer.

TP: Can you tell me about the three ballads you sang?

WILSON: On “First Time Love,” the composer is Patti Austin. I know she sang it; I think it’s her tune. I don’t know who wrote “Did I Ever Really Live?” But I went out and did, oh, like 21 days with Joe Williams a couple of years ago, and he used to do it at the end of his show. I would stand in the wings. I thought it was one of the best songs I ever heard. It’s a beautiful song. Especially when you’re a senior citizen, and you’ve reached the point where you have grandchildren (or I was about to have some hopefully; and I did), then that’s something that you really pay attention to. Brenda Russell wrote “Piano In The Dark.” It was an R&B Pop tune, and I thought it was really apropos for Ramsey.

TP: “Peel Me A Grape” was fun. You got to pull out the stops on that.

WILSON: It was. I remembered it so well by Blossom Dearie when I was a young girl. Then I’ve heard it obviously by so many others. I just thought it had been done very soft and gentle, and I just thought it needed a little more edge! Heh-heh.

TP: Is it just intuitive to you that you treat songs as a dramatist?

WILSON: Yes.

TP: You’ve always done it?

WILSON: Always. That’s who I am. That’s what I do.

TP: How much did your early experiences singing in the church inflect your musical personality?

WILSON: Well, I don’t think singing in the church did, but being a child of God did. I couldn’t sing in my church, in the Pentecostal church. I sang in the choir at the Methodist Church. My Mom… I would be out in front with her or her sisters for a few times, being the lead singer at like 12 or 13 with them. But I didn’t consider myself a gospel singer. Because I sang secular music, consequently, I wasn’t able to sing in the choir in my home church.

TP: But in your voice there are so many sounds and techniques that one would associate with that.

WILSON: I think that’s just osmosis. That’s how you grow up and you are what you are.

TP: Did you ever, when you were learning how to sing, emulate instrumentalists as well as other singers? Did you ever think of your voice as an analog to an instrument?

WILSON: No. I was singing lyrics. I was all about what the song said.

TP: And the phrasing was always just whatever the song required.

WILSON: Yes.

TP: It’s amazing to have 80 selections that have barely been reissued and encompass so much scope.

WILSON: Yes, that’s what I like about it.

TP: You’re rather emphatic about including some of the material you recorded in Japan in the ’70s and early ’80s. Was there a qualitative difference in attitude for you in recording for the Japanese labels?

WILSON: No. Unh-uh.

TP: You said that they allowed you to be yourself and record who you were.

WILSON: But I was able to do that always. That I was able to record was more important. I couldn’t get a record label in this country. It was good. I had a wonderful producer, a pianist-arranger, Masahiko Satoh, who was brilliant. And I was able to sing, “If You Want To Sing Me, I’ll Be A Song” and “I’m A Balloon,” some really wonderful pieces of material, that were only imported into this country, and I think they should have some exposure now.

TP: Do you have your next recording project in mind?

WILSON: No. I’ve got a lot of work between now and June. Really busy.

TP: You’ll be on the road?

WILSON: Mmm-hmm.

TP: Concerts or clubs?

WILSON: One club, the rest concerts.

TP: What material will you be performing? Things from the new record, or a mix?

WILSON: Some things from the record. Always a mixed bag. Certain songs I have to sing, or the audiences will walk away disappointed.

TP: How do you stay fresh on “Guess Who I Saw Tonight” after you’ve sung it 20,000 times?

WILSON: That song is so great, it does not matter. You can bring something new to that always. You can make it funny, you can make it bitter… It depends on the audience. But it’s still a fabulous tune.

TP: Do you feel that way about all the songs that are signature songs for you?

WILSON: Yes. I don’t mind singing “Save Your Love For Me.” In fact, I study it every now and then. I can sing any of the Shearing things and feel comfortable with them today. Anything from Cannonball, I can do and feel comfortable with. We just changed direction on “The Masquerade Is Over.” We don’t do it as a ballad any more. We’ve funked it up. The guys just had a ball doing it.

TP: How long have been working with this trio now?

WILSON: Twenty years with the drummer and bass player, almost 15 years with the conductor.

TP: What is it about them that makes them so suited for you?

WILSON: Well, they’re excellent. They’re wonderful. The bass player has just got richness and tone, and that’s my major instrument. That’s what I need. I’ve always had a great bass player. And great piano players, too! [LAUGHS]

TP: You may have been asked this 8,000 times for all I know, but if you could name the three arrangers that you most enjoyed working with, who would they be and why?

WILSON: Jimmy Jones, whose harmonic structure was wonderful, who played piano so brilliantly. He was a great accompanist; consequently, he was able to surround the voice with instrumentation that was wonderful. I thought Billy May wrote the best music ever on LUSH LIFE. I love Gerald Wilson and Oliver Nelson on the big band things, and I loved the harmonies and how they phrased the brass sections, and the woodwinds were wonderful. They always did a good job. They were so dependable, and they wrote… Their music just went different places. You can find so many things in their music.

TP: I’m not familiar with everything you did for Capitol, but I’m under the impression you didn’t do too many things with small ensembles.

WILSON: A few.

TP: And you included three tracks with Hank Jones from the BUT BEAUTIFUL record, which are lovely. Why so few?

WILSON: Well, that wasn’t what was being done during that time. I was a supper club singer. I sang with big bands. That was what I did, other than with Cannon and with Shearing. When we were out, we would usually try to have a big band. The only time we didn’t was in some of the concerts and the theaters, like at the Apollo and things like that. But if I was in a club, it was at a supper club with a big band.

TP: Again, do you find yourself approaching the different functions in different ways?

WILSON: no.

TP: You just go out there and do it.

WILSON: Yes. Actually, it doesn’t change anything. It spans it. I don’t necessarily have to sing anything differently because it goes from rhythm section to 18 pieces? The music is still the same. It still surrounds my voice, as opposed to me having to change because it’s a big band. The music is written for my voice as opposed to being just written for anybody. It is written for me to sing, and it does not get in my way. They write stuff that…it’s really wonderful how they do it. They leave space, open space for me. You could sing the same song exactly the same way with either a rhythm section or an 18-piece band.

[-30-]

For Marcus Roberts’ 53rd Birthday, a Jazziz Feature From 2014, a 2009 Interview on Jazz.com, and a 1999 interview for bn.com

A day late for the 53rd birthday of the singular pianist Marcus Roberts, I’d like to present a feature piece that I was given an opportunity to write about him for Jazziz in 2014,  a lengthy March 2009 interview that initially appeared  on Ted Gioia’s now-much missed http://www.jazz.com ‘zine, and a 1999 interview for the Barnes and Noble website when selling CDs was still part of their business model.

 

Jazziz Article (“Visionary Man”) — Spring 2014:

Wynton Marsalis, who does not suffer fools and has built an empire doing things his way, does not readily accept criticism. But when pianist Marcus Roberts speaks, Marsalis listens.

During a 2005 interview, Marsalis enthusiastically recalled discussions with Roberts during the pianist’s 1985-’91 tenure in several of his bands. “We discussed philosophical questions about music, like whether in jazz the bottom can move like the top,” he told me. “It’s hard to create a groove with melodic motion in the bottom. So what do you do with the bass? We talked about a lot of harmony versus no harmony; atonal music versus tonal music; should we focus more on abstract concepts or on melody? Is abstraction a dead-end street or on the cutting edge?”

Two years after that conversation, in October 2007, Marsalis drove 1,100 miles from New York City to Tallahassee, Florida, to collaborate with Roberts — who teaches at Florida State University — on a range of educational activities, and to play a concert with the pianist and record in the studio with Roberts’ trio, then comprising bassist Roland Guerin and drummer Jason Marsalis, Wynton’s younger brother. Six years after that busy week in the Sunshine State, in November 2013, Roberts simultaneously released separate CDs of the proceedings — Together Again: Live in Concert and Together Again: In the Studio — along with a 2012 studio session titled From Rags to Rhythm, a 12-movement suite performed by his current trio, with Jason Marsalis and bassist Rodney Jordan. All three discs were released on Roberts’ imprint, J-Master Records.

The Together Again albums document the Marsalis-Roberts partnership for the first time since the 1991 performances included in the Wynton Marsalis Septet’s 7-CD box set Live at the Village Vanguard. “We wanted to showcase the natural way we communicate, and we chose music you could play without much rehearsal,” Roberts says, speaking by phone from his Tallahassee home in December. “The playing is spontaneous and comfortable. We both know way more about music than we did when we were making records together. But the way we relate hasn’t changed, as it probably never will.”

The settled, old-master quality contained on the Together Again discs contrasts with the exploratory quality of earlier encounters like ]J-Mood, Live at Blues Alley, Marsalis Standard Time, The Majesty of the Blues, Blue Interlude and the three volumes of Soul Gestures in Southern Blue. Those albums represent Marsalis’ shift from the vertiginous, high-energy rhythmic and harmonic abstractions of his 1983-85 quintet (with Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland and Jeff Watts) to the blues-grounded, groove-oriented, orchestrally sophisticated, “all jazz is modern” conception that, after 1988, would define the Wynton Marsalis Septet and continues to bedrock the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

“We attacked specific problems,” Roberts says of those albums. “When I entered the band, we were playing primarily original music, but our ballads sounded terrible. I identified that to Wynton as something we needed to work on. When we played standards from the ’30s and ’40s, that didn’t sound good. I remember mentioning that we needed to play more blues, but when we played them, it wasn’t that happening either. So the blues pieces on some of those records were us working on putting more human feeling into the music, making it more accessible to lay people.

“Wynton taught me a lot about how to identify the things you work on. With his notoriety and fame, he could easily have continued in our prior vein of music. But for him — and for me — it’s always been a question of dealing with the code of ethics that the music itself imposes.”

Those ethics were already in place in 1980, when Marsalis, then 19, met Roberts, a 17-year-old senior at the Florida School for the Deaf & Blind, at the Jazz Educators Convention in Chicago. As his own career ascended, Marsalis stayed in touch, sent Roberts recordings by Thelonious Monk, brought him to various gigs to hang out and sometimes sit in. After Kirkland and Branford jumped ship to tour with Sting, he offered Roberts a job. Drummer Jeff Watts recalls Roberts’ command of the repertoire on his first gig with the band, in Salt Lake City. “What he played, I’m sure he would like to take back,” Watts says. “But he knew it cold. There was nothing that was going to prevent us from playing anything in our book. I use Marcus as an example to people who make excuses about not having one thing or another together. He is at the top with regards to work ethic.”

Himself no slouch in the hard-work-is-good-for-you department, Marsalis attested to Roberts’ diligence and his refusal to allow his disability to impede creative expression. “Marcus was still developing his playing then,” Marsalis said. “I called him because he had the most intelligence and depth of feeling and integrity — personally, as a man — of any musician I’d encountered around my age. I knew it from speaking to him, and I wanted to be around that kind of feeling. The size of his mind was good for me. I found out how serious and thorough he is about studying and learning and playing. We had long, long pieces, and he’d learn the music by ear before we could learn it by reading.

“From watching Marcus develop, I learned that your artistry is your integrity and who you are as a person. That’s the most important component, not whether you can hear chords quicker or play a more complex polyrhythm than somebody.”

For Roberts, putting in the hours is as much a matter of necessity as an ethical imperative. “Because of my disability, I’m not able to sight-read,” he says. “If I don’t learn the piece inside and out, the likelihood of something going wrong is greater. So from the time I was 12, I didn’t just learn what the piano was playing; I tried to understand the whole structure. I don’t learn music quickly; to this day it takes a long time to absorb it into my system. But when I really know something, I can hear what it should sound like based on what I can bring to it. It’s almost like I can manipulate it as I go along, hearing it in my head as I go, based on how I can use the piano to shape the overall architecture.

“After our first tour, I worked just on comping for two months, six hours a day, before our next set of gigs. I listened to a lot of Duke Ellington and Hank Jones. When we went out, everybody was shocked that I’d advanced so much in that short a time. But the bottom line was that if I was going to be out there doing it, it needed to be right. I was always taught there’s not much point in doing anything halfway. This music is only desirable to people if played at the highest level. Enlightenment comes from above, not below.”

[BREAK]

Between 1988 and 2001, Roberts released 14 solo, trio and ensemble albums. Before the arrival of 2012’s Deep in the Shed: A Blues Suite and Across the Imaginary Divide — on which his trio finds common ground with banjo giant Béla Fleck — and the three new albums, Roberts had released only two discs since 2001.

He began his recording career as a leader with The Truth is Spoken Here, an all-star ensemble gathering, which he followed with the first version of Deep in the Shed, a suite of original music with a unit that included Marsalis and other close generational contemporaries. Then came 1991’s Alone With Three Giants, a solo outing on which Roberts found new routes into repertoire by Jelly Roll Morton, Ellington and Monk; 1992’s As Serenity Approaches, which contains solo and duo performances of original pieces and items from the American Songbook and stride-piano canons; and 1993’s If I Could Be With You, another solo recital. Portraits in Blue, from 1995, features Roberts improvising to the piano parts of orchestral works by George Gershwin and James P. Johnson, while on The Joy of Joplin, from 1998, he offers solo renderings of 16 numbers by early-century ragtime poet Scott Joplin.

On these albums, Roberts grapples with the vocabularies of the European canon and the foundational streams of American jazz, addresses the material on its own terms of engagement, interprets it with virtuoso execution and conceptual freshness, pulling a thick, sweet, legato sound from the piano. He advanced his goal of “always expanding while using the whole history of the music all the time” on a pair of late-’90s trio sessions (both released just after the millennium by Columbia, which then dropped him) with Guerin and Jason Marsalis. His statements on the 16 Nat Cole-Cole Porter-associated pieces that comprise Cole After Midnight and the 12 Ellington-inflected originals on In Honor of Duke incorporate elements of Ellington, Monk, James P. Johnson, McCoy Tyner, Kirkland and Danilo Perez.

Roberts contends that From Rags to Rhythm represents the most comprehensive realization of his aesthetic. Composed in 2001 on commission from Chamber Music America, and reworked and refined as the aughts progressed, it’s a 12-movement work with interchangeable themes that reappear in various contexts as the piece transpires. Roberts explains why it, the 2006 session From New Orleans to Harlem (issued in 2009) and 2011’s Celebrating Christmas are his only trio releases of the 21st century.

“I’m sure a lot of folks wondered whether I’d disappeared or wasn’t doing much,” he says. “I recorded a lot of stuff during this time. But I was no longer on a major label, and the industry was changing. Possibilities on the Internet had not matured. So I decided to wait while figuring out methods and strategies to disseminate my work to the public. Also, I was exploring more deeply how classical music and jazz could be presented together, so I needed to invest myself in the piano to prepare for the next big stage of my career. I was overhauling my technique, exploring a more refined approach to sound, expanding the amount of nuance I can play through voicing and pedaling, playing contrapuntally with a certain balance and articulation.

“I was happy with the trio, but didn’t want to record again until we were able to organically improvise that concept with a certain feeling. At this point it’s more a way of life, a philosophy, what we believe in. Whatever we play, it sounds completely different from night to night.”

“Marcus always plays experimentally,” says his 48-year-old bassist Rodney Jordan, who regards Roberts as a kindred spirit to a pair of his own early employers, outcat veterans Kidd Jordan and Alvin Fielder. “To my ears, he’s no different than them in terms of feeling free when you play music.”

Roberts takes the comparison in stride. “What interests me is that, whatever we’re playing, we all communicate and respond to what each person is playing, so that we can freely determine what should come next,” he says. Then he preemptively addresses brickbats thrown at him over the past quarter-century for paying too much attention to older styles and too little to bebop and beyond.

“Most people think I’ve been playing that stuff my whole life,” Roberts says, after observing that he didn’t begin to investigate Jelly Roll Morton’s music until 1988, for a “Classical Jazz” show that Marsalis presented at Lincoln Center. He notes that his formative sensibility gestated not only from playing piano in his mother’s church and accompanying her in their Jacksonville, Florida, home, but also covering ’70s hits by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Natalie Cole. He pinpoints his jazz epiphany to age 12, when a local swing era-oriented radio show exposed him to Duke Ellington, as well as Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson and Mary Lou Williams.

“I’d never heard any chords like what Ellington played on the piano, and the sound interested me,” he says. “The music was from the 1930s or 1940s, but to me it was like new. It was modern. It was the same with Jelly Roll when Wynton got me into him, and I realized how profoundly difficult his stuff really is; it turned my approach and world of piano upside-down. As I got deeply into it, I saw relationships to the church music I grew up hearing. When I hear two styles, what intrigues me is not what makes them different, but where they intersect, how to unite those two sounds into something else.”

One way Roberts individualizes his sound is by utilizing orchestral devices initially borrowed from the Ahmad Jamal Trio. In the course of a single piece, he constantly modulates grooves, tempos and keys, plays separate time signatures with the right hand and the left, and, as he puts it, “flips around the roles of the piano, bass and drums by giving everyone an equal opportunity to develop the concepts and themes, to change the form, to get us where we’re getting ready to go.”

“I’ve always experimented with whatever music came into my environment and tried to figure out how to use it in my own way. ‘New’ is anything of value, anything that’s relevant to helping me do what I want to do right now. There’s no big agenda. The goal is just to play better every day. Your individual identity as a musician is there, just like the identity of the sound of your voice. The question is what vocabulary to use through that voice. That’s what Wynton and I always understood without having to state it. It’s never been about jazz, per se. I don’t consider myself to be a New Orleans pianist or a stride pianist or a bebop pianist or a classical pianist. I study the whole history and try to develop globally that way.”

SIDEBAR

Title: Leaning Classical

In 2012, Marcus Roberts composed a three-movement piano concerto, titled “Spirit of the Blues: A Piano Concerto in C-Minor,” dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King. He premiered it with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and his trio on April 4, 2013, the 45th anniversary of King’s assassination.

After receiving the commission in 2010, Roberts spent more than a year preparing and contemplating. “I didn’t want it to sound like a jazz guy who is dabbling in classical music,” he says. “I had Rimsky-Korsakov’s Principles of Orchestration and Samuel Adler’s The Study of Orchestration scanned to Braille, and I studied them thoroughly.”

Once the composing began, Roberts used CakeTalking for SONAR, a program developed by Dancing Dots Braille Music Technology. “I established maybe 30 tracks, put an instrument on each track, and played in what I wanted each instrument to do,” he says. “To hear what the flute is doing at measure 32, I press a command, jump to the measure, solo the flute, and hear it exactly. Once I finished each movement, I exported the file into Sibelius, and my copyist and I would prepare it to [conductor] Robert Spano’s requirements. The tempos change constantly, so they had to be communicated clearly. Since I’m a blind guy playing a new piece with an orchestra, we wanted to make sure the transitions from section to section were seamless.”

Roberts modeled each movement after iconic concertos from the classical canon. The first movement, “The Blues,” connects blues chords to motifs refracted from Beethoven’s “Third Concerto in C-Major, Opus 37”; the second movement, “The Dream,” is inspired by the second movement of Ravel’s G-major concerto; the third movement, “Freedom,” whose Latin elements and percussive textures palpably connect it to the jazz continuum, evokes both Bartok’s second piano concerto and the third movement of Prokofiev’s third concerto.

Roberts is proud of more than the notes and tones. “In a weird way, it’s symbolic that I’m representing this struggle to independently compose a piece of this scale that blind musicians have faced for decades,” he says. But he also feels that the work embodies his aim of “continuing to push the envelope in bringing jazz and classical music together.”

“The orchestra authentically plays the classical part, the trio does the authentic version of the jazz,” he says. “Hopefully I’ve written into the composition how the two forms coexist and melded them into one unified entity that represents modern life, which is global.”

*_*_*_*_*_

Interview with Marcus Roberts for http://www.jazz.com, March 24, 2009:

 

Jazz criticism over the last two decades has usually ascribed to pianist Marcus Roberts the aesthetics of “conservative neotraditionalism.” But the truth of the matter is somewhat more complex.

A virtuoso instrumentalist and a walking history of 20th century piano vocabulary, Roberts is concerned with sustaining a modern dialogue with the eternal verities and transmuting them into present-day argot; abiding by the motto “fundamental but new,” he takes the tropes of jazz and European traditions at face value, and grapples with them on their own terms, without cliche.

“What I’m advocating is always to expand while using the whole history of the music all the time,” Roberts said in 1999, articulating a theme that he more fully develops in this interview, conducted a decade hence. At the time, he had recently presented his nascent, individualistic conception of the piano trio on a songbook homage to Nat Cole and Cole Porter Cole After Midnight and a suite of original music inspired by his muse, Duke Ellington called In Honor Of Duke, augmenting a corpus that included an improvised solo suite on Scott Joplin’s corpus and customized arrangements of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and James P. Johnson’s “Yamacraw.”

“As an example,” Roberts continued, “Ellington was not somebody who was going, ‘Oh, there’s Bebop; let’s throw away the big band and solo all night on ‘Cherokee.’ He was about using the logical elements of Bebop that made sense inside of his ever-expanding conception. I don’t consider myself to be a New Orleans pianist, or a stride pianist, or a bebop pianist or any of that. I study the whole history and try to develop globally that way.”

Now a working unit for 14 years, Roberts and his trio (Roland Guerin, bass; Jason Marsalis, drums) deploy that approach on New Orleans Meets Harlem, Vol. 1,”his first release since 2001. They address repertoire by Joplin, Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and Thelonious Monk, laying down a pan-American array of grooves, channeling the essence of the old masters without regurgitating a single one of their licks.

“Marcus Roberts was a whole other whole category of musician for me to play with,” Wynton Marsalis told me a few years, reflecting on the ways in which Roberts, who replaced the mercurial Kenny Kirkland in Marsalis’ band in 1986, helped trigger a sea change in the way Marsalis viewed his own musical production. “I had never encountered a musician around my age with that level of intelligence and depth of feeling about the music. He gave me a lot of strength. He made me understand you can’t make it by yourself. You have to play with people, and his music is about getting together with other people. Marcus made me understand that if a person has a belief, that is their artistry. What Marcus Roberts told me then (and we were both very young men) is the truth: Your artistry is your integrity and who you are as a man. Who you are as a person. What you are about. What’s inside of you. That’s the most important component, not whether you can hear chords quicker than somebody or play a more complex polyrhythm. I learned that from him, and from watching him and his development.”
Is From New Orleans to Harlem the recording that you’ve been trying to find the right time to put out over the last few years, or is it very recently recorded?

I first recorded it in 2004. I edited it and mixed it and mastered it, and ultimately it just wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be, so I re-recorded it in 2006, and now I’m putting it out. It’s really the second version. I re-did the whole thing. If I’m going to put it out, in my estimation, I need to be happy with it if I’m going to expect anybody else to be happy buying it.

What dissatisfied you about the first incarnation?

I can’t even put my finger on it. I just didn’t feel that it captured where we had evolved to. By the time I’d fixed it and edited it and did all the post-production, we were playing—honestly—so differently that it didn’t feel to me as though we had captured that in the first iteration. The other issue was that the last recording of mine on a major record label, Cole After Midnight, came out in 2001, but it was actually recorded in 1998. In other words, the last anybody heard of my work really dates back 11 years.

What are some of the reasons for that gap? It’s not like you disappeared and hid in a cave. You’ve been performing a lot.

It’s been a few things. For one, after leaving Columbia I knew that I didn’t want to sign with another major record label. So I was no longer interested in going in that direction, but at the same time, a lot of possibilities now available on the Internet had not matured yet. A lot of changes were still in process, and I wanted to wait and allow us to use these different methods, strategies, and approaches to disseminate our work to the public.

The other reason was that, as happy as I was with my group, we needed to do some work to fill in some conceptual holes that I thought were there, and I didn’t want to record anything until I felt those things had been resolved.

The third reason is pianistic. I needed to look at some major things to overhaul my technique, which you really have to do every five or ten years. You need to constantly examine what you’re doing, what you think about your general approach to sound, what new technical principles you’re interested in exploring that might require real time. So I felt I needed to take some time and invest myself in the piano to prepare for the next big stage of my career.

Those were the main reasons, off the top of my head, why it’s been so long. One final one is that I took a job, a half-time position at Florida State University, my old school, to teach jazz and help them with my jazz program. I’ve been teaching young people my whole life, since I was a kid. I always liked doing it. You learn a lot when you teach, because you really have to think about what they need, what their talents and gifts are, and find a way to develop them using their skills and abilities, not just your perspective. It’s hard work if you want to be good at it, and it took a long time. I’m in my fifth year at FSU, and finally I feel I’m making a real contribution to the program.

Let me follow up on points two and three. You said the trio needed to bolster some things conceptually and you needed to overhaul your technique. What specific technical and conceptual things were you looking to do?

I was developing a real interest in exploring more deeply how classical music and jazz could be presented together. That meant I needed to invest more time. Conceptually, I was and am interested in exploring a much more refined approach to sound, which meant that I needed to pick up some old repertoire and really investigate it. Bach, for example, which is the foundation of any keyboard technique. I wanted to go back to Bach for my concept of contrapuntal playing, viewing the piano as an instrument that is primarily interested in more than one line at a time, which is one of the big gifts that the piano offers. Another issue is to be able to play these lines with a certain amount of balance and clarity and articulation—so Bach is perfect. Then, another issue has to do with balance, being able to work on voicing and pedaling so that you can increase or expand the amount of nuance that you are capable of playing on the piano at any given time. I tried to focus on making sure that, if I’m playing something soft. . .well, where is the threshold when I feel I’m starting to gain control of that nuance, of these soft colors? You can play a lot of different things when you study classical piano. The literature is clearly laid out, so if you know which things to study, you can cover a lot of territory. For example, if you’ve been trying to work on articulation and more of a light, clear touch on the instrument, you’ll play Mozart for that. If you want to deal with color and sonority, well, you can’t get any better than Debussy and Ravel. If you want somebody who is in a direct line from Bach and Mozart, but a more romantic, sensual attitude, then Chopin is challenging, because you have to be able to play things very light and beautiful, but also play certain passages with tremendous power and virtuosity.

 It’s hard to do consequential R&D when you’re on the road a lot, too, isn’t it.

Well, it is a difficult thing to do when you’re on the road. It’s difficult to do when you’re in the middle of presenting music that you’ve been playing for a while. New information reinvigorates you. Inspiration, in my opinion, is the key to a good imagination. Without inspiration, you just start playing the same old stuff, and your playing becomes, in my opinion, annoying and predictable—and I just don’t ever want to go there. I’ll stop first. There is no point putting on the stage something that you don’t care enough about to work on. That’s just for me. Whether we want to call it “new” or “old” or “innovative” or whatever else, if you’re not investing in it every day of your life, then you’re not as serious about art as some great artists have been. That’s all I can say.

Back to point two, what did the trio need to accomplish?

I have to say that they’re so talented. Jason Marsalis is capable… You might sit down with him and be playing just a regular B-flat blues, and say, “You know what? We’re going to modulate to A-minor, and when we modulate to A-minor I want you to keep the same form but play it in 7/4 time.” He has perfect pitch, so when you modulate he knows you’re there, plus he can keep track of those two time signatures at the same time. No hesitation. Roland has a different kind of natural ability to use syncopation and grooves on the bass in this more folk type of style—funk music, zydeco, Louisiana playing—and also has a love of Ron Carter’s role in the Miles Davis Quintet, and a real deep connection with Jimmy Garrison from Coltrane’s group—he’s figured out a way to put all of that stuff together. The two of them playing together get this sophisticated, more abstract view of groove and time and rhythm.

What I wanted to achieve with them was showcase that talent, write arrangements that would make it easier for them to exploit nuance. That’s one component that the public can address and digest comfortably. In the same way that when you go to a very sophisticated restaurant, you may not know the 20 ingredients in this chicken dish, but you know that it tastes good, and you know that there are some subtle reasons why. So I wanted to pay attention to these nuances and go in the direction of some of the other great trios that existed. The Oscar Peterson Trio was fantastic. Their execution was flawless. They had such a huge dynamic range. When Ray Brown would start to take a bass solo, it was a bass reflection of OP’s virtuosic piano sound and style. Or Ahmad Jamal, who right now, today, can sit down at a piano and blow you away by himself, with a trio, with his conception, with his accompaniment… Frankly, we live in a loud culture, so everybody’s view of a jazz trio is kind of, “Oh yeah, cocktail music” or “it’s kind of cute, it’s kind of nice…” Now, if we want the American people, or any other group, to take a jazz trio seriously, we have to work hard to present a group that has the same power, virtuosity and delicacy that we can find in a quartet, or quintet, or septet.

Then the second way to do it is by flipping around the roles of the piano and bass and drums. My modern view is that if we make room for the bass and the drum, they’ll be able to have equal access in bringing us where we’re getting ready to go. If Roland wants to change the form or the tempo, how do we set up a cue system so we actually can do that without the piano having to set it up? We had to figure out how to do it, and that changed the way we play.

You’ve been evolving that concept for some time, haven’t you. You were talking about this ten years ago.

We talked about it ten years ago as a conception. It became a philosophy when we really started to be able to do it. That’s the difference. The conception is always something that we can talk about, but the question is whether you’re going to really push and figure it out, or whether it’s going to be mainly conception.

Looking at the repertoire and the concept of the recording, I can’t help but be reminded of the recording Alone With Three Giantsi, from twenty years ago, on which you interpreted repertoire by three of the composers—Morton, Ellington, and Monk—whom you represent on New Orleans Meets Harlem. Let’s talk about the arc of the repertoire. It seems to represent a fairly chronological timeline from the turn of the century to modernity, beginning with Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin and concluding with tunes by Monk and your own original piece.

When you’re putting any record together, you’re trying to sequence it in a way that shows contrast and the naturalness of the set, so that when people listen they don’t get tired in the process. I’ve even listened back to some of my own records and thought it was a little too intense the whole time. Just general observations.

So you want an ebb-and-flow.

Yes. You want people to have time to digest what they’re hearing. So we start the thing with Jelly Roll; he’s at the beginning anyway, so why not? “New Orleans Blues” I thought was a good selection to start it off. Also, we kind of used that blues by Jelly Roll to be a sort of microcosm of jazz, because the way we do it, we are able naturally to cover a broad range. From my vantage point, the 21st century in jazz music has to be about presenting or being informed by the entire history of jazz at all times, not restricting oneself to a particular ten-year period. Which may have been how the music was built, brick-by-brick. But at this time in history, we live in a collaborative community, a world community, a global community. Where technology is right now, everything moves at the speed of light, and jazz music is the one music that can keep up with it. It has everything in it. It has virtuosity. It has folk music. It has stuff from the inner city. It has grandeur and sophistication and aristocracy in it. It has democracy in it. It has perhaps even tyranny in it, depending on who the bandleader is. Everything is there.

Most of the pieces on this CD I’ve been playing for years. There’s not really a whole lot of new material. What is new about it is that it’s all trio, and the concepts are organic, because I’ve been playing this stuff for a long time, and I’ve figured out how to rebuild from the ground-up to where it has a specific individual sound. To me, that was an important component.

So your Duke Ellington homage, In Honor of Duke,” which was primarily comprised of original compositions, or Cole After Midnight, or Gershwin For Lovers, all trio recordings from the ‘90s…how do you see those now?

I don’t really see them in any particular way. A record just reflects where you are in your development. For example, Gershwin For Lovers was with Wynton’s rhythm section, not my band. That was about slick arrangements, to give a good record to Columbia that I thought they could sell. In Honor of Duke represents the beginning of my original trio conception. When you come up with a concept that you believe is different or new, you often have to use original music to bring it to the forefront, because there’s no music written for the conception yet. So I wrote that music, and also the previous record, Time and Circumstance, to represent the concept, if you will. But New Orleans Meets Harlem represents the philosophy. It’s matured. It’s grown-up. It’s no longer really a concept. At this point it’s more a way of life. It’s how we play, what we believe in.

At what point in your life did the notion of having entire timeline of jazz interface in real time become part of the way you thought? I’m sure it took a while to germinate, and once it begin to germinate, it took you a while to find your way towards articulating it. Were you thinking this way before you met Wynton Marsalis?

I guess it’s always been there. Meeting Wynton was more confirmation than introduction. But the thing about Wynton is, he’s the only one in my generation who could articulate intellectually and with any real clarity what we were doing and why we were doing it, and he was the only one who really knew how to execute and operationalize it. Again, a lot of people have great ideas, but they don’t know how to make them operational. You’ll get in the middle of it, then: “Oh, I didn’t consider it whole.” “What do we do now?” “I don’t know.” So making ideas operational is important, and as I have developed, I have had to work very hard at sniffing out how to streamline some of my concepts, to bring together an operational structure with a conceptual structure. Those are the real problems artists like to solve. For example, when you write a piano concerto, it needs to be playable. I mean, it might be difficult, but it shouldn’t have you doing something that’s physically going to hurt you. So if you play a great piano concerto, or a great piece by Chopin, what’s amazing is how well it lies within the natural reach of the hand. He’s got all these problems with thirds and octaves and chromaticism and these kinds of elements, but he also has the solution right there. You just have to practice it!

As far as when I started to think in terms of the history: Well, I’ve always been in search of one general sound that I heard in church when I was 8 or 9 or 10 years old. I can’t even explain what that sound is. From time to time, you hear and play things that have an eternal resonance. You’ll play or hear a melody, and you don’t know when it could have been written. It could have been ten thousand years ago. Somebody might have hummed that way in Africa someplace, or in Japan, or in Europe. It’s timeless. It’s beyond the scope of our understanding. It’s like a subconscious-unconscious thing. Then, there’s the conscious implementation of a design that you impose on it. That’s more “modern,” new, relevant for our time, relevant for our generation, etcetera. But to me, you need both. I’ve always thought in terms of integration—of more than one thing. That takes you into the realm of multiplication as opposed to addition. I mean, it becomes easy to play something “new.” I’ve never had any shortage of creativity or imagination. I’m sure if you talked to Wynton for any length of time, he could say the same thing. It’s never been a problem actually to find new things to do.

One thing you do that Wynton likes to discuss when he talks about you, which he says is new and is pretty distinct unto you, is your ability to play different time signatures with two hands.

That came as a result of playing with Jeff Watts. It’s a different view of rhythmic syncopation. Monk was a master of syncopation; his music has syncopation built in on multi-levels. There’s the syncopation that occurs between any two notes that are a half-step apart. That’s my real view of blues—the tension that is established harmonically between two chords that are a half-step apart, two notes that can be a half-step apart, between a rhythm that could occur on-beat and another rhythm that could occur on the end of one. Syncopation means we’re imposing something on it against the ear. The ear’s got into this, and then we’re going to change it this little bit. It could even be dynamic syncopation—your ear has gotten accustomed to something soft, and all of a sudden, BAM, here’s something loud. It could be the syncopation of two instruments playing, and now, all of a sudden, we’ve got a third instrument. It’s a real complicated thing.

When you get to rhythm, once you have the general understanding of where the quarter note pulse is, and a tempo that is carrying that pulse, then the only issue is to determine on how many levels can we interject this quarter note pulse. Tain was able to calculate and understand the real math behind these permutations. To be honest, I never really understood it the way he and Jason Marsalis do. They’re on a whole different planet as far as understanding the rhythms you can play at these various tempos against other things. So that was a big part of Wynton’s philosophy, and my philosophy with my group. I was interested in adding blues to that concept, so that always, whatever the tempo or concept, it has the real feeling of jazz. That’s that folk element I’m talking about. Like, when you hear Mahalia Jackson sing. That voice—she could have been singing it a thousand years ago. It goes way beyond the generation you’re in. As I said earlier, you want to get beyond reducing anything to a ten-year period, which is kind of what a “generation” is. When you hear a Bach chorale, are you really thinking about 1720? No! You’re thinking that it’s moving you right now. “Wow, this is beautiful. How did somebody write that?” If somebody could write a Bach chorale right now, trust me!—nobody would be mad! They’d say, “Oh, Well, my-my. Somebody can do that again?” So we’ve got to be real careful in terms of how we evaluate critically the value of something based on the time period that it took place in. That’s a delicate issue.

New Orleans Meets Harlem begins in 1905, with “New Orleans Blues,” and ends in 1956 with “Ba-lue Bolivar Blues Are.” So you’re spanning the first half of the twentieth century in American music—in Black American music. Do you have any remarks on the broader implications of this body of work?

Again, they solved problems. “Ba-lue Bolivar Blues,” or any great blues that Monk wrote, has layers of syncopation that we can look at. Monk’s music to me always sounds like poetry or real modern folk music. He’s almost a modern equivalent of Jelly Roll Morton. Monk’s music is strictly jazz. Strictly. You’re not going to confuse it with German music, you’re not going to confuse it with African music, you’re not going to confuse it with anything. American jazz. Period. If somebody said, “Give us four pieces of music that sound 100 percent like jazz,” well, you’d pick a Jelly Roll Morton piece or a Louis Armstrong piece, you’d probably pick a Monk piece, you might pick something from <i>Kind of Blue</i>. I won’t speculate on the final thing. But for sure, you couldn’t go wrong picking a Monk piece. You couldn’t go wrong picking a Jelly Roll piece or a Louis Armstrong piece. You probably couldn’t go wrong picking a Duke Ellington piece. Why? Because that music has such expansiveness. Monk, Jelly Roll, Fats Waller, Joplin, and Ellington, all were serious about the piano and serious about exploring different forms, different types of nuance, which is what I’m interested in. For me, it’s always a question of figuring out who has the information that I need to develop my artistry. That’s the selfish component. Now, I’m not necessarily going back to Jelly Roll Morton to be caught up in recreating what he did. First of all, it would be very arrogant to pretend you could do that anyway. Because you’re talking about somebody’s life’s work, what they REALLY went through. And again, these recordings are just a snapshot of part of a day of your life.

And Jelly Roll Morton had quite a life.

Man, quite a life. So I think the more relevant issue is what part of Jelly Roll Morton is also part of me and what I believe. So I’m playing “New Orleans Blues,” which is a staple piece that I always will play and always have played. “Ba-Lue Bolivar Blues,” I don’t know how many arrangements of that tune we haven’t thought up in this trio. We’ve played it all kind of different ways. “Honeysuckle Rose” is another one that we’ve played several different ways. The version on this record is not exactly the same version from 2004.

So I think the importance of all the great composer-pianists, first of all, is that they reflect a range of understanding of the piano. Scott Joplin wrote down his music. He knew what he wanted people to play. Of course, he didn’t really want folks improvising on it, but we do it anyway. But he was a serious scholar of the piano. His music, again, has this urban sound, but also this melancholy—a kind of aristocratic Folk sound. It also has this connection between pre-jazz and the classical music of Chopin. In other words, it has variety built into it. It has options built into it. It’s an operating system, like Windows XP. You can put anything that you conceptualize inside of that. It doesn’t impose the moves of what it can be, but it does say, “Well, you’d better write it in 32-bit code, or the operating system won’t acknowledge it.” There’s the science of it, and there’s the art of it, the creative element. Again, you’re always balancing the design with the conception.

Who are some of your contemporary piano influences? By “contemporary,” I mean roughly within your generation. Ten years ago, you mentioned to me Danilo Perez, and I’ve heard people who know you mention Kenny Kirkland, whose chair you filled in Wynton’s group. Are there other people within striking distance of your birthday who have influenced you?

Those probably would be the two. Kenny Kirkland, first of all, just his knowledge of rhythm, his knowledge of harmony, and how he could intersect the two using not just Latin influences, but also chordal structures taken from the music of Bartok and Hindemith. He was a modern thinker. A lot of stuff Kenny was playing was way more profound than the structure that he played in. He understood theory on an extremely high level. He’d play a chord that had a rhythmic function to hook up with Jeff Watts and a harmonic function to hook up with Wynton or Branford, whoever was soloing at the time. He also, frankly, was typically the most serious person on the stage. Kenny Kirkland was one of the most consistent pianists that you could hear. I mean, tune after tune after tune, he was swinging, playing an unbelievable modern vocabulary, a great sense of Herbie Hancock’s and Chick Corea’s conception, but again, put in this really modern but delightfully percussive manner—because it still has the theory and this European training behind it.

Danilo is someone who understood another culture’s view of our music, and was able again to interface them very organically. He could sit down with you and explain how he did it. Again, it’s that concept of making something operational. Any programmer, before they start writing code for a computer program, first has to understand the function of the process. Once we know the manual procedure, then we can automate it. Danilo understood manually each of these styles, then he figured out where they intersected, and then he picked music to showcase what he’d figured out. It’s just brilliant stuff. It’s well-executed pianistically. I personally hate sloppy piano playing—somebody who doesn’t understand that the sustain pedal is there and what you’re supposed to do with it. He’s a refined player. He understands the vocabulary of these Latin cultures, where he can get away with superimposing it, where he should leave it alone. Also, he inspires the musicians he plays with, which is another job of a pianist. You have to provide an inspirational environment for the bass player and the drummer to do their thing. You have to know when to lay low and stroll so that the piano doesn’t get in the way of what somebody else is trying to play, even if it’s your conception, your philosophy and your group viewpoint. It’s a hard job. It’s not for the faint-hearted.

You were mentioning earlier that you’ve been looking your whole life for a sound that you heard as a kid in church. One development in jazz since you and Wynton got together has been a burgeoning of black musicians with church backgrounds and southern roots. This coincides with a period when MTV and hip-hop were rising in visibility and influence, and jazz wasn’t part of the zeitgeist. Any speculations?

Well, I can’t speak for anybody else’s experience. I can only tell you that this was the source of my upbringing and what led me into the piano, led me into jazz music, and that sound spoke to me. Now, did it speak to me differently than it spoke to Charles Mingus from Los Angeles, California? Probably not. I don’t know.

I’m thinking of the time and place in which you grew up.

That’s still so personal. The only thing I can tell you is, somehow or other, you’ve got to access two conflicting things. One is the value of something that is bigger than you, older than you, greater than you; the other is the physical organization that is from your generation. That’s the issue. If you grew up in church, then you found access to it that way. If your parents were jazz musicians, like Jason and Wynton and Branford… Look, they didn’t play in church. Obviously, the church is not the only way to find it. I think the main key for any jazz artist, any serious artist of any style, is you must find a connection with the beginning of it somehow. Somehow. It is never going to be enough for it to come just from your generation. That’s never enough. You’re not going to find anything great without it.

With your own label, do you plan to document your work more frequently?

Well, I’ve been documenting a lot. That hasn’t been the problem. There are a whole bunch of records still to come out. Oh yes! But I’m just starting to put the stuff out. We certainly won’t be waiting another eight years to put out a record. It will be more like six months.

Primarily trio, or a diverse range of contexts?

It’s diverse. I have a solo piano record that’s already done. I have another trio record of original music that’s done. I’ve got some septet stuff from live shows that I plan to put out—I don’t know if I’m going to go in and redo it. But yes, I’m always trying to deal with a diversified viewpoint.

Any special projects for the spring and summer?

The most important concerts that I have coming up are with the Atlanta Symphony. [These occurred on April 4th-6th.] We’re doing Gershwin’s Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra. That’s important to me, because that’s the first major symphony orchestra in the United States that we’ve done this work with. I hit it off with Robert Spano; he’s a great conductor over there. So I’m hoping that we can do a lot more work with them. I’m talking to him about possibly trying to do the same sort of thing with the Ravel Left Hand Concerto that I did with the Concerto in F. For me, that would be a huge undertaking, and it would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to pull off. But we are discussing it. At this stage of my career, I’m interested in meaningful collaboration. It’s certainly a little more streamlined. I’m not interested necessarily in just the regular play-gigs type of career.

*_*_*_*_

Interview with Marcus Roberts for BarnesandNoble.com, October 22, 1999:

 

TP: I would like to ask you first of all about a contention that you make several times in the press material, which is that your concept of the interactive trio and of all of the members of the trio being in a position to lead the proceedings at any given time is a new concept. You say “fundamental but new.” Now, I think the trio does it with great skill and imagination. But would you explain to me a little more why it’s a new concept, as opposed to what, let’s say, Ahmad Jamal was doing in the late ’50s and the ’60s?

ROBERTS: Well, first of all, we have to address the fact that new doesn’t necessarily mean better. “New just means that no one has done it.” If we’re talking about Ahmad Jamal, the way his trio was set up, the piano was fully out front, and Ahmad wanted space so that he could manipulate through cues, visual cues…so he could manipulate the direction of the music. What he would do is, if he wanted Israel’s voice to come out more here, he would leave space and point to him as if, you know, “Play”… In other words, he was a very-very hands-on, great trio… I mean, he put together, in my opinion, the best trio I ever heard! [LAUGHS]

TP: Was he very influential on your concept of trio playing?

ROBERTS: Oh my God, yes.

TP: Talk a bit more about the dynamics of that, and talk about your antecedent trio concepts that inflect the way your sound has evolved to this day.

ROBERTS: Well, we’ve been influenced specifically by Ahmad Jamal, and certainly Errol Garner’s playing has had a profound impact on me — that whole Pittsburgh school of piano playing.

TP: What are the characteristics of that Pittsburgh school?

ROBERTS: Well, they believe first and foremost in swinging and grooving, number one. In the case of Errol Garner, we’re talking about somebody who sort of was a transitional figure from the Big Band swing players and sort of the Bebop era. Errol became very popular in the ’50s at a time when everybody was kind of into the Hardbop of Blakey and Miles, but Errol Garner just had such a hard-driving swing. In his left hand he typically used to emulate Freddie Greene’s guitar playing in the Count Basie band, and then in the right hand he would play a lot of times what you might think of as saxophone figures or trumpet figures in a big band. So he organized this within a trio concept, and the power has always been very attractive to me — just the swing and the power of Errol Garner’s playing.

Then sort of the finesse and the imagination of Ahmad Jamal, who again influenced… Most of what Miles Davis got done in the ’50s, he got pretty much directly from Ahmad Jamal, and Ahmad’s concept of expanding the form. So Ahmad would take a tune like “Autumn Leaves” that has a pretty straight-ahead AB kind of form, and he would expand the A-section until he just didn’t have to play on it any more. He’d point and say, “Okay, now we’re going to go to the bridge.” So it was a very-very flexible way of expanding form. Now, he might put a different kind of groove on the bridge. It just brings the whole tune to life, a whole different way. That’s something that I definitely was very taken by and very influenced by, that this was just a brilliant bandleader who knew how to make the piano sound like an orchestra, how he would make a single line played in the highest register of the piano ring, and then you’d hear Israel Crosby playing all kinds of hip stuff underneath; you know, Ahmad’s left hand wouldn’t be in the way or anything with the harmonic direction that Israel might want to go in…

But again, what I think we’re trying to do is introduce a concept that has an agenda that says that there are many times where the piano does not have to be out front, and rather, there are times where you have to relinquish not only a solo space, but an actual direction, an unanticipated direction that you as bandleaders don’t control, to the bass or drums. And this just isn’t done.

TP: In some ways, this is a very Ellingtonian notion, isn’t it. I mean, Ellington always had control, but it was always control based on his knowledge of what the untrammeled imagination of his improvisers would do. It’s like his concept was built around that intimate knowledge of each of his voices. Since the recording is called In Honor Of Duke, and you say it’s not Ellington repertoire but more an impression of Ellington, the idea seems consequential.

ROBERTS: We are certainly building on very, very fundamental aspects of what Ellington did. He wrote music, number one, specifically for the talents of all the men and women that he worked with throughout his career. And I think in his case, you’re talking about somebody who certainly preferred that his orchestra vision not necessarily be expressed from the standpoint of piano alone, but typically from the expanding of other people’s ability to shine. And he gave them tremendous flexibility, but he did tailor-make the music for them that allowed their imagination to come forward. But again, Duke Ellington did typically maintain control at the piano. This is why we have typically a piano introduction, because Duke Ellington was not going to risk the wrong tempo being set — he was not going to risk any of that stuff. So he did permit imagination, but you have to understand, it was definitely from the standpoint of him making sure that the environment was how he wanted it to be for that to happen. And he had very clear visions as far as what the bass and drums were going to be doing in the big band. He wanted that foundational groove there, and not being manipulated too much.

So again, if we’re talking about the bass and the drums, this is the issue that makes this new. The issue is that there hasn’t been a band that I know of where the bass and drums can dictate throughout an evening the direction that the band goes in. I haven’t heard it.

TP: Talk a bit about the cuing system you use to keep the collective spontaneous interaction organized in some sense.

ROBERTS: Well, we can have, for example, one cue that allows for anybody to either speed the tempo up or slow it down, on any tune. We have another cue system where the tempo can be changed above abruptly at any time. Then we have the music itself, which is organized in a way where there are moments where the direction of the music is in the hands of somebody other than myself, again both in terms of tempo… For example, on two separate occasions, that particular tune, every 8 bars in every break after the …(?)…, control shifts, and it’s beyond just taking a break. Typically when you take a break in jazz, you take the break at the tempo of the preceding material. Well, in this case, we don’t feel that you have to do that. The break could be at any tempo. And you can set up a whole different tempo after your break is done for the next person, so you are dictating the tempo that they play at. So that’s just like one small example of it.

So it’s just things like that. And it’s not to say it’s new like there is no relationship to using material or concepts about the form, because that is certainly not where I’m coming from at all. It’s just a matter of trying to identify things that you don’t feel have been done that can perhaps be a contribution.

TP: A quality you share with a lot of the older piano players is a very organic two-handed conception and orchestral conception of the piano within your trio concept. I don’t know if that’s a question or not, but is there anything you care to say about that?

ROBERTS: Well, I agree with that 100 percent. I love to hear the piano explore with the sense that it could be an orchestra, because it certainly has the range to do it, and it has the ability for you to play many voices at one time. So yeah, I think that is one of the things I certainly strive for every time I play the piano.

TP: You make a comment here that as a youngster and someone with a gift for playing the piano, that Ellington was really the person who turned you around when you first heard him, when you were 12 years old.

ROBERTS: Yeah.

TP: Who were some of the other pianists you encountered in your formative years, let’s say between that and going to Florida State University?

ROBERTS: Well, Teddy Wilson. Mary Lou Williams. Of course, I was listening to Classical music as well. I mean, I heard Horowitz the first time when I was 13 after one piano lesson. Art Tatum, obviously. And probably McCoy Tyner to a lesser extent.

TP: It differentiates you from a lot of your peer group who weren’t exposed to any of these prewar musicians at all until maybe later, and kind of came up with the orthodox piano lineage that’s taught in universities and academic institutions. It kind of puts you apart from a number of them.

ROBERTS: Well, the only thing that puts me apart from them, honestly, is just philosophy. You have to understand that in jazz music, typically (or more disciplines, I guess), people tend to look a generation back. That’s just what people do. Because they want to take issue with what’s been done, and either change it or agree with it or just totally reject it. So I think that what I’m advocating, and what somebody like Duke Ellington certainly advocated throughout his illustrious 50-year career, is that you should always use the whole history of the music all the time. That was obviously his conception. He was not somebody who was going, “Oh, now there’s Bebop; let’s throw away the big band and solo all night on ‘Cherokee.'” He was saying, well, let’s use the logical elements of Bebop that make sense inside of his ever-expanding conception.

TP: It was an incremental concept.

ROBERTS: Yes. And this is where I think the power of Ellington’s legacy is second to none. Because it’s always expanding based on the whole history. My philosophy is, I don’t consider myself to be a New Orleans pianist, or a stride pianist, or a bebop pianist or any of that. I mean, I study the whole history and try to develop sort of globally that way. For example, I studied Mildred Falls, so I could really understand how you should accompany a Gospel singer. She played behind Mahalia all those years; she must know something about that. So I mean, I studied her playing on about four of Mahalia’s records, so I could know, and correlate what I heard in Mildred Falls that I also heard in McCoy Tyner. What was I hearing in Teddy Wilson that was being passed down to Nat Cole and to Oscar Peterson? These are the things. Or how did Count Basie go from studying directly with Fats Waller and understanding that whole Harlem Stride thing, and then over time developing actually what a lot of people would think was a contradictory way of playing, with all this space.

TP: Actually, what I hear when I listen to you and reference older pianists is a kind of rhythmic affinity for the way Earl Hines phrases and sets off rhythms. It’s the most visceral connection I feel. Which may or may not have anything to do with your reality.

ROBERTS: Well, Earl Hines, man, that’s…again, that’s another… I try, you know. But I think… See, a lot of the young pianists that I talk to, they pick, like, an era that they’re into, or they respond to a particular philosophy that they don’t want to be associated with. You have some kids who maybe they’re just into claiming that they are expanding based on the 20th Century view of the European piano is what they’re doing, or some people make it clear that Bebop is what they’re interested in. Whatever it is. I mean, that’s fine, whatever a person is into. But I just encourage them to get as much information from the reservoir as you can.

TP: Which certainly puts you on a similar track to Wynton Marsalis, and hearing you say that makes it clear to me why the two of you have been so close over the years.

ROBERTS: Well, yeah. But again, like I say, we have a model far greater than Wynton and myself in Duke Ellington. We have a very clear example of somebody… Or Thelonious Monk. We have figures where this is not some newly discovered fact. I think in most disciplines, this is how things work. Now, we aren’t really suggesting that Einstein wasn’t influenced by Copernicus or Newton; we’re not really suggesting that. So to me, it’s kind of basic, kind of fundamental. I think that Wynton, certainly, just based on how he hit the scene and everything… A lot more is made of that really makes sense to me, but maybe that’s just because that was my experience and I was there.

TP: Let’s talk about your trio. You’ve been together four years now?

ROBERTS: Mmm-hmm.

TP: A few sentences about their individual qualities and the blend you’re able to get.

ROBERTS: Well, I think that first of all if we were to begin with Roland… Roland likes to groove. He comes from a generation where he’s got Parliament-Funkadelic records and Earth Wind & Fire records and all that stuff. He’s a lot like Reginald Veal in that he just loves to groove. Anything that’s got a groove on it, he’s interested. So he actually likes the traditional role of the bass and drums as just laying that groove down. In a strange way, that’s sort of what helped unlock this new way of thinking, to sort of fluctuate between those states in a seamless way. And he has, over time, developed a very-very strong solo vocabulary and has a lot of really nice things that he does, like with slapped bass based on Slam Stewart, and taking that to another level that I haven’t heard. So he brings strength and just a whole lot of soul and grit to the bandstand.

In the case of Jason Marsalis, this is just like a brilliant, genius kid who can hear three or four tempos simultaneously. He’s somebody who has a completely perfect photographic memory. You can tell him to play “a Roy Haynes conception, but I want the touch to sound somewhat like Tony Williams, and then when you come out of it I want you to play like Baby Dodds but in five.” So you can tell him that…

TP: Is that the way you talk to him?

ROBERTS: Oh yes. I can look right over to him and just say, “Baby Dodds,” and he will go immediately into like a modern depiction.

TP: So the image is correlated into a sound for him.

ROBERTS: Yeah. I mean, he’s a genius. I have no idea how it happens, but I can tell you it’s like split second. A lot of it honestly is just there. I mean, from what I understand, he knew the solo to “Giant Steps” when he was 4 years old. I mean, he didn’t go to school and somebody teach it to him. Nobody knows. I mean, he’s somebody who just has an unusual, tremendous amount of natural talent.

But the other thing about him is that he is very dedicated, and in terms of this particular trio he has gotten very interested in taking a very active role in helping to develop it. One of the things that he told me that he’s doing… I asked him. Like I say, I’m not interested in me dictating every step. He’s interested in taking a lot of the drummers who were not trio drummers, like Max Roach and Elvin and Tony, and using their concepts in a trio context. A lot of drummers, if they play trio, they build pretty much from what we consider to be the traditional trio figures — Ed Thigpen, Vernell Fournier, etcetera. What Jason is saying is that he wants to contribute a modern dialogue with the vocabulary of some of the other drummers who are not associated with trio, and put it in that context.

TP: Just as those drummers would do when they found themselves in a trio context. Because Elvin and Tony and Max Roach and Roy Haynes all did play trios, but they weren’t “trio drummers.”

ROBERTS: Well, no. And I mean, they didn’t play trio in the way that Vernell did. They were not known as helping to develop a particular trio conception. But I think what he’s talking about is developing an identity inside of a trio that is based on not just the standard trio figures, but is (?).

TP: Was all this music more or less collectively developed over time? Talk about the process of composing the music for this trio.

ROBERTS: Well, the music for this trio really began with Time and Circumstance. That’s where my philosophy about piano, bass and drums really is put on record the first time.

TP: With another bassist.

ROBERTS: Well, it was recorded with another bassist, but actually I’d worked on a lot of that stuff with Roland. Roland was not on the record, but believe me, he was very instrumental in the development of the music. Then it sort of went there. Time and Circumstance was composed probably over a 5 to 6 month period of time. In Honor of Duke was done in a 2-1/2 month period of time. But the key thing is that it was written specifically for those two improvisers, and that it was written specifically — honestly, from the very beginning — with the concept: How can we bring the bass and drums more up-front? How can we sort of flip-flop these positions, so that the position of the piano is not lost in power, and we’re not just having these sort of generic, traditional ways at times of playing behind bass players, which I hate. It’s like every time a bass player starts to play somebody starts playing on the sock cymbal. There’s nothing wrong with that. But why is that the only way that we can think of to play behind a bass solo? It’s ridiculous. So we try to find different ways to accompany instruments that are typically not out front.

TP: You use a lot of Latin flavors on this record, explicitly and implicitly. There’s specific clave and then that sort of New Orleans inflection which has an inherent Caribbean feel. Have you been exploring Latin rhythms a great deal in recent years?

ROBERTS: A lot of that has to do with having heard Danilo Perez play. I love what he’s doing. We sat down and played, and I explained some things to him about the sort of straight-ahead piano philosophy, and how he can continue to develop his very incredible, hip, innovative Latin was that he takes a lot of the jazz standards and things; and then he shows me a lot of the basics of Latin playing, and explained to me some things that I can do to sort of bring that into what I was already doing. What I figured out is that it’s another huge reservoir of material and conceptual knowledge out there about that. So that’s why you’re hearing that. It’s something I’m feeling very driven to explore.

TP: Is composition a constant process for you? Are you always writing, or project-driven?

ROBERTS: Well, both. I have an arrangement for Trio and Symphony Orchestra of “Porgy and Bess” that I’m almost done with. That’s really consumed a lot of this year, along with the Ellington. I have a solo record that I’m working on for Columbia of all ballads, because I haven’t ever done a record quite like that, solo. I’m always trying to think of different things to do, to sort of do two things. To keep me in touch with the Folk foundation of life, but also to always stretch my imagination, always stretch my mental intellect. Because I think it’s really the combination of both things without losing one or the other that keeps progress in modern thinking kind of moving forward.

TP: In terms of your own pianism, what do you feel you need to work on? I’m assuming you’re never satisfied with what it is you do, but I assume there are certain aspects of what you do that you’re more comfortable with than, let’s say, others — or maybe I’m wrong.

ROBERTS: What I’m working on is trying to get to the point where my playing is, for lack of a better word, beautiful and poignant and clear. Balanced. Playing of Bach and Beethoven sonatas and Chopin. Those are the things that right at the moment I’m interested in doing. I have not had a whole lot of time, but I am very interested in just playing through a lot of those things. Because, see, a lot of the European masters did write specifically for the development of piano. So it’s one of the few instruments that has such a huge history both in Europe and America, you see. It’s a huge history. So to the extent that I can understand as much as I can, that’s what I plan to do. I don’t know how much better I’ll get, but that’s essentially what I’m driving by.

TP: Do you see the European Classical tradition and Jazz as a seamless entity in your mind, or are there separate personalities that come out for you?

ROBERTS: For me it’s seamless in that it’s all put and organized in a context that is jazz-based for me. I’m not interested in playing note-for-note the Beethoven Third with the New York Philharmonic. I have no real desire to do that, because I don’t have the hours and the days that it would take to really authentically represent that repertoire. But I am interested in writing music that will showcase the piano in a jazz context, but being drawn from a lot of European roots and Latin roots and other sort of merging of sensibilities.

I’d like to mention that the music is always ultimately only valuable if there is an audience for it that you can reach. That’s the most important (?) thing of any of it.

TP: And therefore the extent of your educational activities.

ROBERTS: Yes. And not only that. You are being educated. When people spend two hours getting dressed up and showing up to your event, they are just as interested in communicating with you as you are in communicating with them. I think this is where Jazz music has introduced a whole nother element, this interactive element, which I think has had a tremendous impact on how quickly jazz has moved in the past hundred years.

For George Benson’s 71st Birthday, an Interview from 2000

In acknowledgment of guitar icon George Benson’s 71st birthday, here’s the proceedings of a phone encounter from 2000 for the bn.com website on the occasion of his release Absolute Benson. He offered quite a bit of information about his formative years.

* * *

George Benson (My Favorite Things) – (5-19-00):

TP:    On ABSOLUTE BENSON, there are a number of Latin tunes, a number of pieces that refer to the sound I remember from the late ’60s and early ’70s when your career was getting underway.  I wonder if you could tell me some of the people you were listening to seriously at that time, what records fed your attitude towards music.

BENSON:  When I entered into the ’60s, I was just starting to get serious about the guitar.  I was always a singer.  I’d done a lot of singing over the years, and was very popular locally, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  But now I was venturing out… In 1963, I left my home, and I was now a national touring…or international, I should say…I was with a touring band.  I had just been listening to out of the ’60s Sam Cooke as a vocalist; Nat King Cole, who was a musician-vocalist — a pianist… I knew all the pop singers of the time, Sinatra and even Mario Lanza way back…

TP:    Can you name one or two tracks by any of those singers that stand out for you?

BENSON:  In the case of Sam Cooke, his recording of “You Send Me” was gigantic.  But he had lots of incredible things.  He did one called “the Chain Gang,” which was quite a unique song.  But it was style and the tonality of his voice that really came through.  He could sing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and it would sell.  In the case of Mario Lanza, who was really the first Classical singer to cross over into Pop so easily, “Be My Love,” which is still a very powerful song — his performances will last, I think, a long as there is music.

But I knew all of the popular singers of our time.  And remember, before that I was exposed to a lot of R&B from the old days.  I had heard Chuck Berry’s beginnings of Rock-and-Roll, and I had heard all of Elvis’ first records.  And Elvis was a powerful singer.  A lot of people underestimated him.  Of course, the kids liked him; he was a handsome guy and he was exciting.  But there was something about his voice that was very unique, and I recognized that, too, way back then, and I became a fan then.  I was pretty universal in my listening.

TP:    It sounds that way.

BENSON:  Just to mention on the jazz side, the things that really inspired me: Jimmy Smith had just made the organ a household word — brought it to the forefront.  Before it had been considered just a unique instrument; there were no masters of the instrument who stuck out, who were commercially received.

TP:    And it created a whole new market for guitar players.

BENSON:  And he put the guitar up front, so it was a great platform for guitar players.  So that’s where I was coming from when I was coming out in the ’60s.

TP:    Was Jimmy Smith coming through Pittsburgh?  He recorded quite a bit with Stanley Turrentine, who was from Pittsburgh.

BENSON:  Yeah, that’s right!  And some of his best recordings were made with Stanley Turrentine.  In fact, some of his early recordings in the late ’50s were made with Stanley Turrentine, and just before 1960, when he came out with “Walk On The Wild Side,” which was a huge success pop-wise, which really made him household.

TP:    Do you have any favorite Jimmy Smith record?

BENSON:  I recorded one called “Ready and Able,” when I started my band which was a fantastic recording, and showed his prowess on the instrument…

TP:    That was a recording you were on?

BENSON:  I wasn’t it.  I recorded it with my own band.  Of course, his recording is awesome.  Ours was exciting, but his was an awesome performance technically.  It was a classic performance!  Anyway, I heard that stuff, and it made me interested in guitar players in a much larger way than I had before.  Because I only knew Charlie Christian and maybe Barney Kessel and some others.  But after that, when I came off the road to travel in 1963, I was exposed to Wes Montgomery, and people like Grant Green and Kenny Burrell, who was also on those Jimmy Smith records.

TP:    I know you were hearing those people coming through town or criss-crossing paths, but I have to orient this towards records.  Can you tell me one or two favorite Grant Green or Wes Montgomery sides?

BENSON:  I can explain that.  When I was about 17 we started going to jam sessions.  Every Saturday we’d have a session at a local musician’s house.  He was probably the best guitar player locally.  He would pick up records for us to listen to.  We could steal licks from these records.  The records we were listening to were Jimmy Smith’s ALL DAY LONG, and also we were listening to Hank Garland’s recording called JAZZ WINDS FROM A NEW DIRECTION, and Grant Green’s first recording called GRANTSTAND — all these people.  And the new Wes Montgomery guy!  He was just becoming famous at the time.

TP:    After ten years of being famous in Indianapolis, he was becoming famous everywhere.

BENSON:  The record that woke me up by Wes Montgomery was from an album called SO MUCH GUITAR (Riverside) which was put out I think in 1959.  It featured the song “While We’re Young,” and when I heard him play that I knew that he was more than just a guitar player.  It convinced me that he was someone very special.

TP:    On ABSOLUTE BENSON you have some covers in your style of tunes by Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway.  What are some of your favorite recordings by them?

BENSON:  When I was a young man, my manager said, “George, if you listen to this guy named Raymond Charles (which is the name he used in his early years), you will be successful.  Copy him, because he is the best, and he is going to be very big.”  But after hearing his early recordings, I knew that he was incredible, and “Come Back, Baby” was one of my favorites, a very special song that he recorded years ago.  Had that Gospel feel, but it was different.  It was an honest approach that had everything in it.  It had Gospel-Blues-Pop…everything was in that one song.  So I immediately was a fan of Ray Charles way back then.

In the case of Stevie Wonder, who was very much like Ray Charles in being a prolific writer, a good musician, and excellent singer, above average in all the approaches… They didn’t specialize.  They did everything well.  If they touched it, it was done well!  So Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder in a much more contemporary…of the later days, I should say.

TP:    You play Stevie Wonder’s “Lately” on ABSOLUTE BENSON.  Are there other recordings by him that will be eternally with you?

BENSON:  Oh, yeah, let me think now.  The one Barbra Streisand recorded of his…let me see, now.  My memory is loaded down.  It’s like a computer with so much stuff in it, it’s hard to sort things out.  Let me think about that a little.

In the case of Donny Hathaway, his recording of “For All We Know” is something I sing bits and pieces of almost every day.  I’ve been doing that since it was recorded, way back.  Because it was such an incredible impromptu performance.  I even know the story behind it.  I did hang out with him a little bit to get a chance to feel him out up close and personal, so I got a chance to understand where he was coming from with it.  At one point, I was in touch with him and we were writing songs together.  I went to his apartment and gave him a song that I was working on, and I found out later that he recorded the song, although it never came out.  Then he wrote two songs for me which I never got, because he passed on before I had a chance to get those songs.  But I did hear them.  He wrote them and played them for me, and I said, “When are you going to give those to me?”  He said, “I’m finishing them up; they’re not ready yet.”  But his vocal technique was quite unique, the timbre of his voice.  Those are the things as a singer I had to pay attention to.  But he had many recordings that were great, like the album he did with Roberta Flack called BLUE LIGHTS IN THE BASEMENT.

TP:    There’s a real Latin tinge to this record also.  Have you always been attracted to Latin music and the Latin style?

BENSON:  When I moved to New York from Pittsburgh in the ’60s to play with Jack McDuff, I had a cousin who lived in Spanish Harlem.  So whenever I was in New York, which was very little during my traveling years because we were usually out on the road… But when we came home, what we called home (New York City was my home base), I would stay with my cousin, who lived on 108th and Third Avenue, which was considered Spanish Harlem.  And by the way, I have a son who is Spanish and so does he.  My cousin married a Puerto Rican girl, and my son is half Puerto Rican.

But anyway, we had a lot of association and we heard a lot of the music.  We heard the Joe Cuba records, which were gigantic — “Bang, Bang” and the song “To Be With You,” which was on the jukebox for over ten years around New York.  We were in touch with Johnny Pacheco when I started recording; he was recording with us.  We saw the whole beginning of Salsa music, how it was unacceptable at first to… A lot of Latinos around the world didn’t particularly like Salsa because they considered it a bastard music, but we saw it grow out of that, and now it’s full-grown with Santana!  So things do move.  You know, it was the a lot of the music of that era when we were living in New York.

TP:    Did you listen to très players at all?

BENSON:  Strangely enough, my office was one floor down from Tito Puente.  So my manager and he were very good friends, and he introduced me to him, and him and I became good friends, and eventually we ended up working a lot of the same gigs later.  When my manager introduced me to him, at the time Latin music was not so acceptable to persons who were not in the Latin world.  My manager introduced me to him and said, “George, this is the greatest Latin musician in the world right here.”  I said, “Yeah?!”  From that point on, I began to pay attention to the name Tito Puente.  Sure enough, the whole world has accepted him as being one of the great icons of Latin music.

TP:    Any particular favorites by Tito Puente?

BENSON:  His version of “On Broadway,” which is based on my version, which won him his first Grammy award, is a great example of what he can do.

TP:    Has Joe Sample been part of your world for a long time, or is your collaboration on ABSOLUTE BENSON a first?

BENSON:  No.  Joe and I have been on the same gig, but we’ve never worked together.  It’s usually his band and my band working different sets.

TP:    Well, the Crusaders were a paradigm of the type of band that was covering all the bases and putting them into some sort of very digestible and very musical form in the ’60s, when you were starting out.

BENSON:  That’s very true.  And when jazz music started to wane a little bit, and we had a hard time getting it played on the air, they dropped the name “jazz” from the Jazz Crusaders and became the Crusaders.  But the group was the same.  They did what you mentioned earlier.  They really connected with the audience.  They could take any tune to do that with.

TP:    Were you a fan?

BENSON:  Yeah.  I like uniqueness, and they were unique.  “The Young Rabbits” was the thing that probably… It was more jazz-oriented than anything, but it had a real feel to it.  You didn’t have to be a jazz lover to appreciate it.

TP:    Would you say that when you went out on the road in the early ’60s, your guitar concept was fully formed?

BENSON:  No.  There was a young man in San Francisco… When I decided to go out on my own in 1965, I happened to be in San Francisco, and I spent several days out there.  I was walking around the city, taking in the scenes, and by quite by accident I walked into this club, and I heard a piano player playing who was very good.  I told him who I was, and he said, “Go get your guitar.”  So I went home and got my guitar and came back.  He gave me a lesson in harmony.  He stopped playing for the public… He was a guy who had a big jar on his piano (you know the scenario) for the dollars to be dropped in, and people making requests.  Well, he stopped doing that to show me what he was talking about.  Because I didn’t understand anything he was saying to me.  He was calling off chord changes; I didn’t understand any of them.  He would say, like, “C!” I’d play a C, and he’d say, “No, not that C.”  I said, “Wait a minute.  There’s more than one C?”  And he began to explain.  And man, what I learned has been with me to this day.  His name was Freddie Gambrell.  There’s not much on him.

TP:    Was he blind?

BENSON:  Yes, he was blind.

TP:    He did a record with Chico Hamilton, one trio record.

BENSON:  Is that right?  You know a lot, man!  Freddie Gambrell, man.  He was quite unique!

TP:    In other words, you were an ear player, and as the ’60s developed and your career developed, you learned much more about theory and you’ve been able to continually apply it.

BENSON:  Yeah.  I think people began to notice me when I started to apply the theory that I embarked on after spending that little time with Freddie Gambrell.  I began to experiment.  And what I learned from him I think separated me from the normal guitar thinking.  So I think that made me interesting to other players, who used to ask me all the time, “Where you coming from, man?”

TP:    So he gave you a kind of pianistic conception of harmony which you were able to put on what you did.

BENSON:  That’s right.

TP:    What have you been listening to lately?

BENSON:  I just came back from Hawaii, so I heard a lot of Hawaiian music, and there are a lot of Latin musicians over there.

TP:    You heard them in person.

BENSON:  Yes.  Then they gave me their records, and I listened to their records.  I’ve been listening to Rodney Jones’ latest album, THE UNDISCOVERED FEW.  He’s got some new stuff happening that’s really wonderful.  So he’s reaching out and stretching out!

TP:    A couple of others?

BENSON:  I’ve been listening to a guitar player from Spain called Tomatito.  He’s the newest hot guitar player from Spain.  He’s second only to Paco De Lucia.  Everybody is into him right now.  Tomatito is the cat I’m listening to.  It means “little tomato,” I think.

Let’s see what’s in front of me.  What I do is take stuff and just throw it on.  You’re going to be surprised at this one.  I went back in my archives and put on the Anthology of Smokey Robinson.  The reason why, there’s a song on there that nobody knows about it… You ask people if they’ve ever heard this song, and they say “No.”  It’s called “Bad Girl.”  You ever heard of that?

TP:    I might have… No, I’m thinking of “My Girl.”

BENSON:  “My Girl.”  I think he wrote that, too.  I think Smokey Robinson was one of the writers on “My Girl.”  But this song is called “Bad Girl.”  And the reason why Smokey Robinson is still on my mind is because we used to perform with them.  Whenever they came to my home town, we would be on the same show with them.  That’s way back in like 1959 or the very early ’60s.

TP:    When everything was mixed up, and there would be five-six bands on one show.

BENSON:  Uh-huh.  Well, see, I had a singing group then.  We had the most popular singing group in Pittsburgh.  So they were brand-new, and he was the first artist on Motown when they came out in 1959.   But the song “Bad Girl” was one we used to sing all the time from their early recordings, something he wrote that we sang all the time.  That’s the reason  why I picked up the CD.

TP:    One more, then I’ll let you go.

BENSON:  Let me think of something  that people will recognize.  I don’t want to get too much…

TP:    We can be esoteric and right down the middle, too.

BENSON:  All right.  Whoo, boy.  Well, what’s happening now is people are going back to Django Reinhardt, man, because the French guitar players… Oh, I’ll tell you something else that’s exciting.  Jimmy Bruno and Joe Beck, POLARITY.  There’s some exciting stuff on there!  I was up with Bruno the other day.  I went up to see him at the club in New York, and they lit the place up, though Joe Beck wasn’t with him.

TP:    And you’ve been listening a lot to Django?

BENSON:  to Django, yes.

TP:    Have you heard the Mosaic Box (THE COMPLETE DJANGO REINHARDT AND QUINTET OF THE HOT CLUB OF FRANCE: SWING/HMV SESSIONS, 1936-1948)?

BENSON:  Tell Barnes & Noble to send me that!

[-30-]

For Pat Metheny’s Birthday, an bn.com Interview From 1999 and an Oral History Interview from 2006

In 1999, I had my first opportunity to interview the master guitarist-composer for the editorial component of bn.com, in conjunction with the contemporaneous release of the soundtrack recording A Map Of The World.

Metheny also graciously submitted to a bit of bn.com silliness that we titled “My Favorite Things,” a short-lived series in which various musicians cited favorite recordings, instrumental influences, and the like.

The questions at the end about Michael Brecker were for a DownBeat feature I was putting together at the time about Michael.

There follows a lengthy conversation from 2006.

What follows is the unedited  transcript of our conversation.

* * *

Let’s address the various recordings you’ve done in recent years, beginning with the soundtrack that the record company is interested in, Imaginary Day.  I haven’t seen the movie.  Would you tell me something about the logistics of how A Map Of The World came to be.

It’s a very well known book.  It was a best-seller a couple of years ago, written by a great author, Jane Hamilton, who has written several really nice books in the last couple of years.  It’s one of those projects that I feel lucky to have been asked to do.  The thing of doing film scores in general is something that I’ve done a bunch over the years.  I did a bunch of them during the early ’80s, Under Fire, The Falcon and the Snowman, and one called Twice In A Lifetime, and a couple of smaller independent ones, one called Big Time, which had Mia Farrow in it, one called Little Sister which was with John Savage, one called Lemon Sky with Kevin Bacon.  I’m a big movie fan, I love movies, and from a young age thought, “Wow it would be cool to write movies someday,” and did that bunch over a few years.  Then I realized at that point in my life, and in some ways it’s still true, that if I was going to take three or four months to do something, I’d rather do a record or do a tour — do the things that I do.

You commented in one of these old interviews that’s on your website (and I read all of them this afternoon) that you found it very difficult to really get to your sound on a film soundtrack. You said if somebody gets 2 minutes of good music out of a movie, your hat goes off to them.

Yeah, it can be a very difficult process on the sort of committee level.  One thing about films is that it’s usually the last thing that happens, and it’s at the point in the film where people are often kind of desperate for things to come along and make things better.  More than anything, music is one of the subjects that many people feel that they can talk about, including producers’ wives, girlfriends, buddies, everything else, and have opinions without necessarily knowing that much about it, and it’s a hard thing to do in a consensus way.  It’s a little different than visual arts, where somebody can say, “Oh, I don’t really like the purple part over there.”  You get somebody who doesn’t know about music talking in those kinds of terms, and you can really wind up with a kind of Frankenstein, committee-ized version of something that might not have been that great in the first place!  Those aspects of it are part of what every major Hollywood kind of guy can deal with… A lot of it is just human skill.  I actually don’t interface with Hollywood well at all.  I kind of figured that around the time of Twice In A Lifetime…

Are they a bit too oblique for you?

Well, part of it is that I’m really spoiled.  I’ve been able to make my own kind of music kind of on my own terms pretty much from day one.  On the other hand, the part of film scoring that I really love is, in fact, the collaboration of it.

This particular project, Map Of The World, was sort of like a dream.  It was a complete pleasure on every level right from the beginning.  It was a great story.  The acting is amazing.  Sigourney Weaver has probably never done anything this great in her career.  It’s her career performance, no question about it.  It’s the director’s first film, but he’s actually quite a well-known theater director here in New York, heading an interesting theater group called The New Group.  I was the guy that he wanted to do the score, there was no one else they were really even considering… In a way, it’s kind of gotten me back in the thing of, like, “Wow, doing film scores is kind of cool again.”  It was a very pleasant and very rewarding experience.

Was there an Americana aspect to the film that made it felicitous with your aesthetic, or the way a lot of people perceive it anyway?

Yeah.  The movie takes place in a small town in Wisconsin, and has a very strong Midwestern theme to it in the sense that… Well, actually one of the interesting things about it is that it’s sort of a look of the darker side of that.  By that I don’t necessarily mean the evil side of it.  But there’s this Americana thing that people think of as whatever that thing is.  But having grown up in a small Midwestern town myself, there’s also a lot of sort of closed-minded, ignorant kind of stuff there, too, that kind of gets shoved under the rug of all those major chords! [LAUGHS] This film really just deals with that.  And the film also…

It’s the underbelly of Americana type of thing.

Yeah.  It also deals with a certain aspect of current American culture that’s interesting, which is the thing of, like, when something does go wrong, this incredible need to find a place to put blame, to identify somebody who fucked up, and how it’s sort of just like an obsession right now.  The music doesn’t really get down and dirty with all that stuff.  The music functions in the film as kind of the… I hope to try to keep it sort of neutral to several different things…

Is it used ironically in the film?  Because it doesn’t have a very dark sound, frankly.  Are they using it as ironic counterpoint to certain scenes?

I would say that it’s not ironic at all.  It’s kind of neutral.  Hopefully, it’s not happy, it’s not sad, it’s just kind of the way it is.  That’s kind of the tone I wanted it to have.  And that’s a zone I try to address often anyway, this kind of thing, especially on a melodic level, where things don’t necessarily push it too much one way or the other in terms of the actual notes that are on the page.  It’s just kind of like almost making a commentary on what the thematic element is.  If you had to say the movie is about one thing, it’s about forgiveness.  That’s the tone of it.  There’s all this other stuff that happens, but I really wanted to keep the music in that specific shade of forgiveness.

Does that shade have a color for you?  You’ve said you think in colors, and you think of your compositional process as sound painting in a certain sense.

Yeah, but I would say that the color of it only would exist in the syntax of music.  It doesn’t exist outside of that realm.

Why the use of the full orchestra?  Was that a directorial choice, or was that the way you were hearing the music?

That’s the way I heard it.  To do a score for me, there’s a moment early on where I either sort of hear it or I don’t know, what the basic sound of it is.  To me, this was very clearly acoustic guitar and orchestra.  That’s what the tone of it was for me.  Also, it was great, because that’s an area of writing that I love to do and hadn’t done that much of in recent years, so it was a great chance to explore that kind of writing, too, again.  The feeling of the scenery and everything is big.  It’s out there in the spaces, and it kind of needed something bigger like that to represent that.

Before I get to Imaginary Days, this might be a good place to segue to Missouri Skies, the duo with Charlie Haden.  I know he’s been such a significant musical figure for you over the years, from close to the beginning of your getting out into the great wide world as a working musician.

Yeah, we’ve known each other for a really long time.  When I first started playing with Gary Burton’s band, which I guess was in 1974, we’d play opposite Keith Jarrett’s band of the time, all the time.  That’s when Charlie and I became friends.  We didn’t really start a strong musical relationship playing together until ’80/’81, and from that point on it seems like we’ve played together on project after project.  I’ve just always had a thing.  It may be because we’ve become such good friends, or may not be — I can’t even quantify what it is.  But there is a thing that happens when we play together that we can anticipate each other.  I mean, Charlie is good at that with anybody he plays with.  But for me, the way we play together, it almost becomes like one instrument, and that’s something rarer and great to participate in.

Is there a certain vibe for you of a very acoustic feeling in playing with him?

I mean, that word “acoustic” is one that gets thrown around so…

Oh yes, you’ve had much to say about it in many of these interviews.  I shouldn’t have opened that can of worms.

Yeah.  To me, Charlie is just Charlie, and whether he’s plugged into his amp or not doesn’t have too much to do with the Charlieness of it all.

So the vibe that the two of you have is an ineffable thing.

Yeah.  To me it all boils down to listening.  All of the musicians that I really love playing with have one thing in common, and that’s that they’re able to sort of absorb and respond to what’s happening on a sort of microsecond-by-microsecond basis, and come up with really cool answers to whatever question the music is asking at a moment’s notice.

In his liner notes Charlie Haden says that he calls your sound “contemporary impressionistic Americana.”  Can you talk about the arc of that record?

Well, that was a special one, and one that kind of surprised me, because I never would have guessed that record would become as successful as it’s become.  That’s going to be one of the most successful records I’ve ever been a part of. I’m so proud of that record, because it’s so direct, it’s so intimate.  At the time we were making it, it was almost like we weren’t even making a record.  We were just kind of hanging out, playing, and we’d work on something, then we’d do another one, and about ten tunes in I remember turning to Charlie and saying, “Charlie, it seems we’re doing an awful lot of ballads here!”  “Yeah, I know, I know, that’s what I want to do.”  I was like, “Well, okay.”  It’s probably not something I would have thought of, to do a whole record of ballads like that on acoustic guitar, and yet at the same time I’ve learned so much about the way I play, and that record kind of reveals a side of me as a player that I didn’t even know.

Can you quantify what that is?

No.  I guess I didn’t realize that somehow over the years I had gotten a thing going on acoustic guitar that I just didn’t know about.  I mean, I would play a tune here or there on acoustic guitar, but Charlie would always rave about my acoustic guitar playing to other people and to me.  I didn’t get it exactly.  But now I listen to that record, and I… “First Song” especially.  It’s like, I get it, man.  It’s like, “Oh yeah!”  I don’t think anybody else really plays like that on an acoustic guitar.  So that’s good.

So the record gave you a sense that you have a singular sound on that end of the spectrum.

Yeah, more than just… I guess I always knew I did that and I could do that.  I didn’t realize… It’s something I guess I can’t even put into words.  Maybe I can’t really quantify what it is.  It’s a way of playing melodies, where the melodies can really stand on their own, without there necessarily being any chords, where it’s just sound.  That’s about as close as I can get to it.

Let me segue to another record you did a few years with Derek Bailey that was almost all about sound… It was interesting to read these interviews, because in the early ’80s you were talking about the dangers of basing compositions only on sound because it was too easy to get new sounds, and so therefore the pieces might tend to wane in value in a few years.  Then as time goes and these new sonic options make themselves open to you, you’re moving more and more to this incredibly expansive sonic palette.  It’s interesting to read all those interviews in one spot, and brave of you to try to put all that stuff in one spot…

That’s an interesting comment from the early ’80s.  I mean, in a lot of ways I still stand by that.  Especially my regular group… A big part of what my group is, is the sound of it.  That’s been true right from the very beginning.  Yet at the same time, Lyle and I, being the guys who write most of the music, are aware of the temptations of just using sound as the final thing.  At the same time, we’re aware of the power of that.  The idea is to get a lot of things working together.  That’s to me one of the fun and exciting things about being a musician at this particular moment in time, is that we have all these options, we have all these possibilities, and we have a whole set of new things to explore and try.  In that range of possibilities, to me, is included acoustic guitar, duets with Charlie, playing the way that I was playing with Derek, playing with synthesized stuff and combining it with acoustic instruments, like we do with the group, using an orchestra for a film score, or playing solo guitar, or playing in a quartet or something like that.  All of those to me are very viable, sort of real, everyday kind of musical situations that I feel very lucky to get the chance to address.  And all of them are primarily about sound.  All of them are kind of within a palette or a range of sonic color that’s very familiar to me.  Yet at the same time, the sound is just the envelope, and what you put inside that has to do with kind of everything that’s happening to you outside your life as a musician.  I think that might be more what I was talking about in the ’80s there.

So it’s not about style for you.  It’s really about sound.  It’s like one enormous palette.

It was never about style for me.  To me, style is the easiest to talk about and the least resonant aspect of what music is.  In fact, that’s the area that I would say 90% of — for lack of a better word — criticism is talking about, is style and idiom, both of which are absolutely meaningless to me and to most people, I think, post-1965 or so.  I mean, it’s just not an issue now.  I think that hasn’t completely sunk into the culture yet, how deeply that’s been obliterated from the scope of the world that we live in.  I mean, we live in a world where everything is completely smashed together.  For those of us who are making records and trying to work as musicians or as artists or whatever, it can be extremely confusing.  But I welcome that confusion, too.  That’s part of it.  And to try to avoid that confusion by retreating into a world of nostalgia or some, like, mythical purist kind of way of thinking of style or idiom or whatever, it’s a real copout for me.  It’s much more valuable to just, “okay, be confused.”

That said, the Pat Metheny Group does operate within a certain sonic parameter.  Or not.  I mean, you’re not going to step out, for instance, and do what you do with Roy Haynes, say, when you’re a sideman with him.

I would say that if you look at however many group records there are now, 10 or something like that, the range of sound from the earliest group record through Imaginary Day, and including records like Quartet or Off-Ramp or whatever, you can find things on those records that absolutely refers to the way I play with Roy Haynes.  In fact, Roy has even covered several of the group tunes on his records.  I do think that there is sometimes a perception of the group that is based on two or three tunes.  I mean, a lot of bands have this same thing.  But if you really go deeper into some of the records, there’s a lot of other stuff going on there that maybe isn’t as noticed as some of the other stuff.  Addressing your question in particular, there are things on Quartet, which is the group record right before Imaginary Day, that would be way too far out for a Roy Haynes record.  So it’s  hard for me…

Let me change gears.  This band has been together for 20 years now, right?

Yes.

And how much are you still touring… Oh, here’s another quote from about 15-16 years ago.  You said, “I don’t expect to be on the road 300 days a year when I’m 50.”  Now you’re 45.

45, yeah. [LAUGHS]

Are you close to meeting that aspiration?

It has changed a little bit.  Although the year following the release of Imaginary Day, I think we did do 220 shows or something like that.  Also, the scene in the world is wildly different now than it was when I did that interview.  There’s fewer places to play, and it’s harder to get gigs for everybody.  That may have been the last time, actually, that jazz was not separated from Pop music.  Since then, there’s been a strong movement to get jazz to be something more like Classical music, like almost a defined little branch separate from the sort of like mainstream music that was just people’s music.  We used to play like in the same places that Rock bands would play and everything like that.  The generation immediately after me kind of gave up on that, and took what for me is the easier route of playing for much older people rather than playing for their own generation, and kind of dressing and acting like people much older than they were, while we were… Like I say, I think we were the last generation of guys who really were of the generation we were in.  There’s of course lots of exceptions to that, but I’m talking about on a sort of larger scale.  Now I think there’s been two or three generations of kids, jazz is just not part of their world because they’ve never had people their own age playing it.  The people who were their own age were playing it for people older than them.  And that’s made it harder, because the scene sort of lost its momentum.

A lot of the young players hear it in school.  They sort of get tracked onto it, I think.  Whereas you are from a generation who was able to grow up in proximity to smaller cities and play with very strong musicians and work out your own ideas about music in a situation that was without orthodoxies and without an academic program, as it were.

Yes, I’m so lucky for that.  I look back on that often and think what a lucky thing it was for me to be near Kansas City, where there was this very real kind of scene — and also lucky to be able to participate in it when I was 14-15-16-17 years old.

And you were working fairly much from the age of 15 or 16?

Yeah.  By the time I was 16 I was working five or six nights a week.

By that time, when you were 15 or 16, did you have any inkling in your mind’s ear of the type of sounds that you eventually started moving toward during your time with Gary Burton?  Talk about the development of that inner ear.

I think there was a certain kind of harmony that I always liked and a certain kind of rhythm thing that I always felt good playing.  When I look back on it now, kind of in retrospect, those two areas were what defined a lot of what I do even now.  I never had any fear of triads.  A lot of jazz guys, if there’s not at least four notes happening, they’re going to stick one in there.  For me, triads were always a viable option.  I think when people talk about Midwestern blah-blah-blah, a lot of that is just simplicity.  I’ve always loved to play simple.  As much as I like playing things that are very dense and complicated now, underneath all that is this thing where I just love playing real simple things.

It seems you’re also able to find the essence of simplicity within very complex forms, and get right to the point, which I’m sure is one reason why you’ve stayed so popular for so long.

Well, it’s a hard thing to do, what you just said.  Now, you want to talk about Brecker’s thing.  To me, that’s one of the real challenges of playing his music, is that it’s so dense.  I mean, that is the hardest music I could ever imagine playing.  And that’s true on all three records of his that I’ve been on.  He’s another guy who can really find ways of playing sort of straight lines through really complicated sets of changes.  I would aspire to try to be at that same level.  I mean, Brecker is one of the guys I really look up to, like Herbie is.  Those two guys kind of remind me of each other in that respect, in that harmony becomes…it’s just not an issue because they’re so advanced harmonically.  What I try to do is, I aspire to that level of harmonic wisdom, but I also really want to play things that even if you don’t know anything about the chords you could still kind of sing it.  That’s kind of what I try to go for.

Do you look objectively at your records once you’re done with them, or do you just let them go and move on to the next project?

I just have to let them go and move on.  I think everybody’s like that.  You do your best and… For instance, the first record I made, Bright-Sized Life, which almost 25 years ago now…that record for me was just a horror at the time and for maybe ten years after it came out.  I thought, “God, how could I have blown my first record that much?”  Yet there were people who kept talking about how good that record was, and how it was a really nice record and all that sort of thing.  I’d go, “Oh, people are just nuts, man!”  Then about ten years afterwards I was somewhere, and I heard it, and I was like, “Well, that’s not so bad.  Now, 25 years later, I listen to it and I think, “Man, I was 19 and Jaco was 20… We were onto something!”  It’s something I would never have gotten for years after it.  On the other hand, there’s records that at the time I made them I thought, “Ooh, that’s really good,” and now it’s like, “Whoa, what were we thinking?”

Tell me a bit about the arc of Imaginary Days.  You mentioned that each record tells a complete story and set of circumstances unto itself.

I think that’s one of the better group records.  And I’m only a couple of years away from it now, so what do I know?  But it’s a record where I think we upped the ante on several levels in terms of what the group could be, sonically and in terms of the instrumentation, and also just in terms of the density of the writing.  We kind of had an idea early on, which was to try to get this arc of a day.  Even if that doesn’t come through in the music, it gave us a place to start and get our foot in the door, which sometimes is enough.  The group’s thing… I think that a lot of people like the group for the sort of trip quotient, the way that we have these long pieces that really kind of develop over these 9- and 10-minute periods as opposed to just a little tune where everybody solos or something like that.  We really try to write fairly elaborate environments for improvisation to live in.  And it always does boil down to the improvising, but the settings are particular to the possibilities that are available to that band, with those people and the instruments that are available to us, and the way of making records that are available now.  We try to address all those things, and tell a story about them.

You’ve certainly always embraced technology wholeheartedly.

Well, to me, because I’m a guitar player and all that…

You had to plug in.

My first musical act was plugging it in.  If you’re a guitar player, you have no choices, because the acoustic guitar really has, in my life, one true function, and that’s if I want to play a tune for my girlfriend sitting on the bed.  Beyond that, there’s going to be a mike or an amp or a pickup or something like that, and if I want to play with a drummer there’s got to be.  I’ve spent a fair amount of energy examining those details to try to be hopefully creative and hopefully musically responsible with what those things offer.  And it’s exciting.  It’s an exciting time to be a musician right now.  I’m always a little bit puzzled by what appear to be creative musicians who, from what I can see, have their head in the sand as to what’s possible now, like preferring to just deal with the tried and true.  I can dig that, too; it’s easier.  But there’s some stuff that a lot of people could be doing now, and aren’t, because… I don’t know why they’re not.  There are some cool things out there.

That’s a good segue to ask you about your duo with Jim Hall (Pat Metheny and Jim Hall).  You’ve said that along with Wes Montgomery he’s the guitarist who had the biggest impact on you.

Definitely.  I’ve said this before, that I call him the father of modern jazz guitar, in the sense that all of us — Frisell, Sco, Mick Goodrick, Abercrombie, especially the five of us — are all very easily traceable through Jim’s thing, yet at the same time we don’t sound very much like each other.  That’s an interesting thing.  I think you could say the same thing about Charlie Christian and Jim and Wes.  They both point to Charlie Christian, yet they don’t sound like each other either.  It’s an interesting thing.  To me Jim is also a bit like Roy Haynes in the respect that there’s Jack and Tain and all those other guys who would talk about Roy without really sounding like each other.  It’s like Jim, especially with The Bridge and Undercurrent, sort of opened up a door of thinking.  And when I think about the way I actually play, it doesn’t have too much to do with the way Jim actually plays.  It’s more just a way of thinking of what the guitar can mean than anything else.  I think that there was a point where guitar was a little bit of an odd piece in the puzzle.  Let’s say prior to The Bridge, even, you had guitar players who were leaders, like Barney Kessel, Kenny Burrell and various other guys, but they weren’t playing in major bands.  It was sort of this other thing.  Then you’d have guys like Herb Ellis who were half rhythm guitar players and half single note or soloist kind of players.   But to me, until The Bridge, there wasn’t a guy who kind of said, okay, the guitar can really function in this sort of in between zone, the way Jim…

Not Wes Montgomery?

Well, Wes didn’t really play in those kind of bands.  Wes is one of those guys who came on the scene as a leader.  Wes is like the original Joshua Redman or something like that, just kind of showed up and became a leader instantly.  That’s very rare.  Nowadays that seems to happen more.  But in terms of players who make a major impact it’s very rare that somebody comes along just out of the blue like that.

[ETC.]

One other recording I think we should address, because it seems to be a very summational thing for you, is Like Minds on Stretch, with Gary Burton and Roy Haynes.

That was a fun record to make, actually.  It was really easy.  Actually, we did that record in a day.  I think Gary had booked three days, and we did it in one day.  You do a take or two, and…

Nothing else to say.

Right.  It was real fun, because everybody knew each other and had played together in different situations, even though we hadn’t all played together… I mean, the criss-cross lines of the different situations that everybody had played in was kind of funny almost — how many different contexts we all had shared at various points.  But it was a great, pleasant experience.  Gary to me is a musician who is kind of underrated, even though he’s famous and everything like that.  Having been around at this point a lot of really good improvisers, some of the best improvisers around, from Herbie to Sonny Rollins to Ornette, all the different guys I’ve had the chance to play with, in terms of somebody who can really come up with the stuff at a high level night-after-night-after-night-after-night, and really just play… I don’t think I’ve been around anybody like Gary, who can just deal like that in terms of melodic-harmonic invention, and playing his ass off, and grooving, and just coming up with the goods! — and really making stuff up.  He is something else, that guy.  Because it’s the vibes and because he plays with four mallets and there’s a lot of ringing going on and stuff, I think sometimes people miss it a little bit with him.  But he’s an incredible improviser.  He’s a heavy cat.

And that band put you in the big leagues real quick, I mean, with Steve Swallow and Mick Goodrick…

Oh, I was so lucky to get that experience.  I mean, I was 18 really when I started playing with those guys, and all four of them, Swallow, Mick, Gary and Moses, just had a major-major-major impact on the way that I play to this day.  They were already an incredible band, and they had to make room for me, in a way, which kind of caused them all to have to talk to me in very specific terms about, “Do this; don’t do that” kind of thing. Which was actually kind of difficult at the time.  First of all, it would be hard for me now to walk into a situation as perfectly balanced as a vibes, guitar, bass and drums quartet, and make it a quintet with another guitar.  It was just hard.  There wasn’t an obvious thing to do and an obvious place to be.  Combined with the fact that, like you say, I wasn’t exactly green prior to that, because I had played a lot with great musicians even, but I hadn’t played with people at that level night after night after night before.  It was a fantastic experience.

Why don’t we do the “My Favorite Things” component of this interview now. So you’re still traveling a huge amount…

This year it’s been a little bit less, but generally speaking, yes.

What CD or CDs would be things you would want to accompany you if you’re flying from New York to, say, a gig at the Japanese Blue Notes?

The honest answer to that question is nothing.  Because I rarely listen to music except when I can really like sit in front of a good stereo and sort of hear it.

In that case, what five CDs are in your rotation at this point?

Let me go over here, because I’ve been listening to a bunch of stuff lately.  Well, the new Keith Jarrett solo piano record is in there.  Larry Goldings’ new trio record. Larry is something.  I’ve got actually Brecker’s record sitting here.  I’ve got Tenor Madness, Sonny Rollins.  And I’ve got Brad Mehldau’s new trio record, Live At the Vanguard, which for me is the release of the year.  I’ve loved Brad ever since he came on the scene.  In fact, my favorite prior to this one was that Live in Barcelona one that he did.

What albums, if there were albums, inspired you to get into music?

Oh, there are some real specific ones.  There’s four sort of like big records for me.  New York Is Now is one.  Miles Davis, Four and More is another one.  Four and More is really the reason I became a musician.  In fact, it has probably as much to do with Tony Williams as it does with Miles.  I heard 10 seconds of that ride cymbal and it just blew my mind.  Wes Montgomery, Smokin’ At the Half Note.

Two sentences about New York Is Now and Smokin’ At the Half-Note.

I got New York Is Now I got when I was probably about 12, and I had no idea about the controversy surrounding Ornette or anything.  I didn’t know there was any difference between the way Ornette played and the Beatles and marching band music.  To me it was all music that was on record.  All I knew was they were on records.  To me, it just sounded like they were having a lot of fun.  I just remember thinking, “It’s fun.”  I think in a lot of ways that’s the essence of what Ornette’s thing is, is that it’s fun.

Smokin’ At the Half Note for me is the record (I think everybody has got one or more) where you actually learn every note that every person on the record plays.  I mean, there was a time I could sing you every note of every solo on that record.  It’s not only a great Wes Montgomery record or a great guitar record.  That’s a great jazz record.  I mean, that’s people playing together the way people are supposed to play together.  And also the sound of that record always… It’s just so stuck in my brain, the tone of that record.

The fourth one is actually the Gary Burton Quartet, Live In Concert at Carnegie Hall on RCA, which I don’t think was ever reissued, and isn’t very well-known record.  It’s Gary, Swallow, Moses and Larry Coryell.  That record blew my mind in a whole other way.  It was jazz, and yet at the same time it was guys sort of addressing the other stuff, the kind of Country and Rock thing, but not doing it for any reason other than you could tell it was natural for them to do that.  I guess a lot of people point to Bitches Brew as sort of the beginning of a movement.  To me it happened some years before that, and it’s somewhat uncredited, which is, you know, Gary’s band of the time, and there were a couple of other bands like the Fourth Way and Jeremy Steig’s band in ’65 or so… What those guys were doing kind of predates the Miles thing significantly, and in some ways it’s a little bit more interesting.  But that particular record has a few things about it… Larry Coryell on that record is just staggering.  He’s a musician who is still around and still plays really good and everything, but what he was suggesting on that record is kind of mindblowing to me.  And it still blows my mind.  I still get that record out every now and then, just to check out what Larry did on there.  I’m a fan of him in general, but that record is just light years past anything else he ever did.  In particular his solo on “Walter L,” which is just a blues, is one of the greatest blues solos anybody ever played.

Speaking of Gary Burton, he said in his liner notes he thinks you carry around a secret list of people you want to play with and you just walk around, do a project and cross it off.  Is there such a list, and if so, or even not, what artists haven’t you played with that you’d like to?

You know, I saw that Gary wrote that, and actually it’s funny, because I don’t really think of it that way at all.  In fact, honestly… Playing with people that I don’t know is not something I do easily or casually.  For the things that I’ve ended up doing compared to the things that I’ve been asked to do, it’s a small sub-group.  If I’m going to play with somebody I have to first of all really love what they do, and also, more importantly, feel like I can play with them.  There’s musicians that I absolutely love but I know I wouldn’t play that well with them.  For me, each time I go into a project, I go into it with the same commitment to making it as good as it can be that I put into my own band or any records I make on my own.  So it’s not really that easy for me to go playing with people.  On the other hand, I look at the list of people I’ve played with, and in fact, it does include literally all of my favorite musicians, with one exception, and that’s Joe Henderson.  We’ve talked about doing something two or three times over the years, and it just never happened for one reason or another, most recently because he’s been ill.  But I think that he and I could play really well together, and that’s one thing I haven’t done.  The other one was Elvin, and I actually would love to play with Elvin more.  It was so much fun playing with him!  But I got to do that on Brecker’s record, and that was a real thrill.

Given that the premise for this interview is the film score, give me five of your favorite films, and perhaps you can mention soundtracks in there as well.

Let’s do it featuring the soundtracks.  Number one would be Cinema Paradiso.  I recorded a couple of the songs from that on Missouri Skies because I love it so much.  Ennio Morricone is awesome, just the greatest really.

Schindler’s List, besides being one of the most incredible movies anybody’s made, also has for me one of the greatest scores ever written.  People almost dismiss John Williams, oh, Star Wars and Spielberg and all that.  He is such an incredibly great writer, and he’s got such a great mind for texture and kind of density and… With him, I really get this feeling of a canvas, and the way he places colors and everything is really something.  Even on a craft level, just what he does with those really big movies… It’s kind of hard to do that.  It’s hard to keep something going for 45 minutes buried underneath explosions and everything like that, and have it still kind of swing, in a way.  Swing in the sort of broadest sense of the word, glueing everything together with this forward motion thing.  He’s a heavy cat, John Williams is.  But that score in particular also has some incredible melodies in it.

Henry Mancini.  You could pick a number of scores, but in particular “Two For the Road,” which I covered on Missouri Skies.  It’s a score that basically is that one song sort of repeated endlessly.  In fact, a number of Mancini scores were like that.  You can say Breakfast at Tiffany’s with “Moon River”… He just had this thing where he could actually write an amazing melody that you really wanted to hear over and over again.  So many film scores have a theme, and you do hear it over and over again, and you couldn’t sing it if your life depended upon it two seconds after you walk out of the theater.  Mancini, it’s like the first time you hear it, it’s like stuck in your brain forever.  Then he can really do something with it, too; his sense of how to develop those themes was kind of unparalleled.

Sticking with a contemporary guy, James Newton Howard to me is the best of the current guys who do a lot of scores.  That David Mamet play about real estate, Glengarry Glen Ross, with Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin… His score for that is incredible.

One more is a guy who people have a little bit of the wrong impression about because he can do other things, and that’s Danny Elfman.  His score for Dolores Clairborne is one of the most interesting harmonic pieces of music that I’ve heard in several years, just for this sort of floating, like nondescript harmony thing he gets going, which is absolutely perfect for the movie, but just to listen to as a kind of modern composition is really advanced.  Also, his way of writing, from what I understand, is wildly different than a conventional composer who sits at the piano and writes notes on a page.  He’s almost doing it in a sort of intuitive way, it sounds like.  But the result is really special.

I should also ask you about your favorite guitar players.

Of all time?  Number one would be Wes Montgomery.  Wes was the guy who embodied everything about music that makes me love music.  He had incredible time and one of the great rhythm feels of any modern improviser.  He has the most incredibly soulful, inviting, warm persona as a musician, which I think more than anything is what made his music accessible to people who  maybe only have one jazz record in their collection.  They can feel it.  They get it.  To me, he’s like Stevie Wonder that way.  You know, everybody digs Stevie Wonder.  If you’re a musician, you can dig it because of all the incredible melodies and the aspects of it that deal with Funk and all that stuff.  But everybody digs it because it’s just THERE, and Wes has that same thing.  It’s just there.  You can’t help but dig it.  It’s just there.

Django Reinhardt would probably be number two for just finding a way of making the instrument sound that no one before him and no one after him has ever even approached.  I mean, he was completely singular.  There may be somebody who could imitate that a little bit, but even the people who have tried to imitate it sound kind of silly.  It’s like he just found a voice.  And that voice sort of crosses time and space.  It’s like hearing Bird.  It just doesn’t sound old.  Like, you hear all these things around him that sound old, and his thing sounds as modern now as it must have been when he was playing it, just like Bird.  Maybe he’s the only guitar player who has that quality of sort of transcending the time that he actually played in.

I have to mention Jim, who opened the door for the guitar’s place in modern music with a very subtle touch and a very quiet way of presenting the instrument.  He sort of expanded its voice more than if he had turned it up to 10!  Somehow through reduction he expanded things.

I’d have to pick amongst my contemporaries John Scofield, who for me is everything that a great musician should be, and he happens to be a guitar player.  He makes everybody around him sound better and play better.  He is an incredibly interesting and inventive and exciting improviser.  He can deal with harmony in a very expanded way, but he can also play blues probably better than almost any other jazz guy on any instrument right now.  He’s such a great blues player, and that sort of informs everything he does and gives it the spirit that makes it… Again, anybody can dig John.  They don’t have to be a jazz fan.

Just a few questions about Michael Brecker.  You gave me a very nice quote about his being so authoritative harmonically.  You and he have been close for many years, and he said that being in the ’80/’81 band opened him up in a certain way, it gave him a sense of freedom he’d never experienced before, even in his first days in New York in that sort of Coltraneish loft scene out of which a lot of things emerged.  How do you see his sound having evolved from 1980 and when you first knew him to now?

I’ve heard him say that a lot of times, and some of his friends from that time have said that, too, that he came back from that tour kind of a changed person.  Which makes me feel really good!  Because that music really was written for him. That way of playing was the way I imagined he sounded like.  It’s a little bit like me with Charlie.  Charlie showed me a way that he thought I sounded that I didn’t even know I sounded like.   Sometimes in this kind of broad community of musicians that every guy functions in, the guys you play with sometimes illuminate your own thing to yourself in a way that you might not notice.  So it makes feel good that Mike feels that way.  I think that there is kind of a pre-’80/’81 Mike and a sort of post ’80/’81 Mike that exists even on his own records.  I think it’s a more adventurous.  I always felt like his first record, that Michael Brecker one, was kind of the followup to ’80/’81.  It’s basically the same band, and we kind of took up where that record left off.  The thing that I have seen evolve, and starting with that record, is what a great composer Mike has become.  You could see that coming in the Brecker Brothers records.  Regardless of what anyone thinks of them stylistically, the writing on there, Randy and Mike, is really advanced.  There’s very little three-horn writing going on today in any sphere that approaches the sophistication of the three-horn writing on the first Brecker Brothers record.  I mean, I go down to Smalls all the time and hear guys play; I don’t hear anyone writing three-horn charts that are that hip.  And that’s 25 or more years ago.

Mike’s thing for coming up with tunes that you play like night after night after night I think has evolved as he’s become a bandleader, which has been going on now for almost 15 years.  For me, it’s incredibly flattering that he asked me to play on his records.  It was flattering the first time.  Then Tales From the Hudson for me, of all the dates I’ve done in the past few years, or really ever, as a sideman, is the one I point to as the most satisfying.  It was just a great record to be a part of.  I thought the band was absolutely perfectly suited for the music.  Everybody played well together, and played as a band.  To me, that’s what Modern Jazz is in the ’90s.  That kind of playing, those kinds of tunes, the way that the record felt as a whole… I was really proud to be on that record.  Now the new one is sort of a continuation of that Tales From the Hudson thing, and compositionally it’s the best of them all in terms of his writing.

He’s a heavy cat, Brecker.  I said the same thing about Gary Burton before, but I mean… Again, he’s famous and everything, and I think well-respected and all that, but sometimes I see people put Brecker down.  Like, you would know the criticisms the same way I would, some people say, “Oh, Brecker…”  I’d like to see any of those guys follow him anywhere.  Following a Mike Brecker solo is like nothing else that I have ever experienced.  There are very few musicians on any instrument who can follow Brecker.  And it’s because he’s deep!  You can say, “Oh, it’s technical and it’s flash.  No.  Man, by the time he gets done with an audience, people are standing on their chairs screaming.  He gets to people under their skin, and that’s what makes him heavy.  Yes, I can sit here and talk all day long, and it’s true… In terms of harmonic knowledge and really understanding what Trane did, there are not too many people at his level.  Yet at the same time, he’s not about that any more.  What makes him, him, is what he does to people.  He drives people crazy!  People will like start screaming and stuff.  He can just keep going.  It’s kind of the way Herbie can do that, too.  He just gets people where they live.  And it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that technical stuff.  It’s what he does to people.  He whips them up.

 

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

Pat Metheny (April 10, 2006):

TP: Since this is an oral history and it puts your life on the record, I’ll ask some boilerplate questions that I’m sure you’ve been asked before, things about your background and influences and family and things like that. Introduce yourself.

PAT: My name is Pat Metheny. I’m a guitar player.

TP: Pat, you were born in 1954 in Lee’s Summit, Kansas or Missouri… Missouri.

PAT: On the Missouri side of the Kansas City area.

TP: What kind of place was Lee’s Summit when you were growing up as a small child and in the 60s?

PAT: Well, as the years have gone by, and I sort of reflect on where I grew up, which is a little town in Missouri called Lee’s Summit, a really attribute a whole bunch of things that kind of have made me not just the musician I am, but the person that I am, that have fairly direct connections to that kind of coincidence of geography. The first one is that during the time I grew up there, it was really kind of typical — a peaceful, very pleasant Midwestern town, of which there were many. But in my particular case, Lee’s Summit was a town that my dad had grown up in, that his dad had grown up in, and his father (which would be my great-grandfather) didn’t grow up there, but lived there the last years of his life, and died there.

So my family’s connection to this place, especially in terms of American history, is quite lengthy.

The musical location of Lee’s Summit, relative to Kansas City, which was the next big town, about 30 miles away, wound up having a very profound impact on kind of the trajectory of my life as a musician, in the sense that it was a city that had a very active jazz scene, and had annual jazz festivals that we intended. That was the first exposure that I had to the music that I wound up devoting myself to.

Also, Lee’s Summit was a town that had a very special music program (I realize now, in retrospect) that was headed by, as many of those Midwestern music programs are, one singular person who happened to be an absolutely brilliant music educator. I should add that my family was…my mom and my dad, but also I have an older brother named Mike, who is a fantastic musician, who was kind of a child prodigy trumpet player under the guidance of this teacher that I am going to mention named Mr. Keith House. Mr. House was himself an incredible trumpet player, who happened to get a job in Lee’s Summit, and kind of singlehandedly formed one of the most effective and well-regarded music programs in the state of Missouri.

Through Mike’s studies with Mr. House, I think that sort of trickled down to me. I began playing trumpet myself when I was 8, and there was opportunities in Lee’s Summit for people to play the trumpet in ways that had nothing to do with jazz. Jazz was about as far from the radar in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, as it could possibly be anywhere.

TP: What were some of the situations in which you played trumpet before you got to jazz?

PAT: Let me finish this, because I’m headed towards stuff like that. Especially if you’re not going to be in it, then I’ll just kind of go on. I’m usually thinking in terms of what’s going to be a paragraph.

The band program and the music program under Mr. House had absolutely no jazz connection whatsoever. And it happened that my older brother, Mike, brought home a Miles Davis record when I was about 11. There were two or three kids in his class that had sort of become jazz-aware. I know that the rap usually goes that jazz is supposed to be this very complex, detailed art form that you have to spend an entire lifetime learning about and everything like that, in order to appreciate it or even comprehend it, and that may be the case for some people. But for me, as an 11-year-old kid (this would have been 1965), Mike had a copy of a Miles record called Four And More, and literally within 30 seconds of hearing that record, I would say my life changed. It was like somebody walked into the room and turned on the light. And pretty much every waking minute from then until now has been devoted to trying to understand what that thing is, and what it was that kind of happened in that burst of attention that opened up in my brain that has really caused a lifetime of research and incredible pleasure and incredible joy of trying to kind of crystallize what that quality of music is that has been so incredibly absorbing for me.

TP: How did you move to the guitar from the trumpet?

PAT: Well, in 1965, 1964, around that time, I would have been 9-10-11 years old, that would coincide almost exactly with what happened in the world, where suddenly the guitar became not just a musical instrument — it really became kind of an icon of an entire movement. It kind of transformed the world. You can almost measure the flow of the culture in that sort of pre-1960, post-1960 thing. So much changed. And somehow, the guitar was then and, as I’m speaking right now in 2006, I would say remains a sort of focus of whatever that thing was. Its focus comes into play in the culture, in the music itself. But for me as a little kid, it was just the THING of a guitar. It just kind of represented all this stuff, and somehow got on my radar. And I started to draw guitars and look at guitars in the Sears Catalogue, and want to know about guitars. Electric guitar. Does that mean you like plug it into the wall? Thank goodness, I didn’t try that, but that did occur to me that that’s what they meant.

So kind of coinciding with that, my parents, being parents of kids in the ’60s, to them the guitar represented everything that they feared about what was going on outside of Lee’s Summit. That pretty much caused them to really be concerned, as my interest in the guitar grew — which, of course, as a 10- or 11-year-old kid, was like pouring gasoline on a raging fire. It was like, that made it even more appealing, that they didn’t want me to do that.

So it happened that kind of close to our house, in fact our neighbor behind our house, it was a mom and a dad with two kids…the dad had an electric guitar. The kids knew about it, but they had never seen it. So we, like, snuck into the closet after school one day, before the guy came home, and looked at it, and it was this Gretsch Country Gentleman Electric Guitar. It was like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life. And the kid’s mom saw that we ad done that, and, rather than getting mad about it, the guy was actually kind of excited that his kids and one of the neighbor kids had shown some interest in the guitar. In fact, he was a bluegrass guy, as were many of the people around Lee’s Summit, that being a very popular form there. He had weekly kind of jam sessions, where a bunch of guys would get together with guitars. At that age, that was probably the first time I sat close to somebody who could really play, and it made quite an impact.

That would be sort of going along in parallel to just kind of rock-and-roll bands that were kind of exploding around the world, and certainly in the United States at that time. I heard a lot of kids practicing, older teenage kids playing kind of the pop and rock music of the day with their instruments in garages, literally.

The ironic thing in my case was that for all the play that this iconic guitar cultural thing may have had on my interest in the instrument, as soon as I got one, which would have been when I was about 12, because I’d heard this Miles record, I immediately turned my back and totally lost interest in anything having to do with pop culture, and particularly rock-and-roll, and became completely, you know, a jazz snob. I would make the most jazz-snobby-guy-in-the-world look liberal. I was completely, absolutely devoted to trying to understand the language in a pretty pure way. But my version of what that purity was, in fact, quite ecumenical. I mean, I was very interested in all aspects of what jazz was at that time, and kind of tried to make it my business to understand what that was, and to spend many, many hours listening to records and really concentrating on it. Which made everybody very concerned about me. As a parent myself now, I understand, in a way that I never understood before, what it’s like…what it must have been like to have a kid, 11 or 12 years old, devoted completely, 10-12-14 hours a day, to this music that was probably quite foreign…not probably…was quite foreign to everyone.

But the luckiest part for me was this geographical connection to Kansas City. Because once I started to get some kind of a flow going on the instrument, which would have been a couple of years later (I would have been 13 or 14), I started to get the chance to play in jam sessions with older Kansas City musicians, and almost immediately they started hiring me. All through my junior high and high school years, I was able to work in Kansas City 4-5-6 nights a week with great musicians. In junior high, it was just occasionally. Starting in high school, it was pretty much regularly.

The Kansas City scene at that time, which would have been 1969-70-71-72, was very active. Just a little geography here. There’s Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. It’s basically one city, divided in the middle. The Kansas City, Missouri side had kind of one scene; the Kansas City, Kansas side had another scene. But it happened that because of liquor laws at the time, the Kansas City, Kansas side was able to stay open very late, and that had a different kind of feel to it and also brought a lot of players to Kansas City to continue to do gigs that I was able to hear and also to play with sometimes.

The main group of players that I was playing with around Kansas City… I had no way of knowing this at the time, because that was pretty much all I had access to, but it was an incredibly exceptional group of people, particularly a drummer named Tommy Ruskin (who I still play with occasionally out there, who is literally one of the best drummers I’ve played with), a piano player named Paul Smith and a trumpet player named Gary Sivils. Those three guys pretty much took me under their wing, and during those years would hire me and use me on lots of gigs.

I kind of got to learn how to play from playing. It wasn’t a theoretical, music education kind of situation. It was more that there were players who were excellent players who were coming me a chance, but at the same time they were expecting me to play as a professional. I had to do some funny stuff to make this happen. In order to even go into a place that served alcohol, I had to get a special permit from the Mayor, because I was by that time about 15 years old. It became kind of a thing, that there was a teenage kid playing in these places with all these older musicians. I suppose I probably became somewhat of an attraction. I played on a lot of jazz festivals and stuff around that time, kind of billed as this young guy who could sort of play. But the main thing for me was just the opportunities that I was able to have around Kansas City with guys who could really play. That was the main focus of I think my early life as a musician, was just trying to absorb the realities of what I was expected to do each night.

TP: I’d like to ask a two-part question. First, for purposes of this museum, concerning an interview that will be seen by people who may not be familiar with Kansas City’s role in the history of jazz, perhaps you could talk about that and whether you were aware of this during that period of time. Secondly, kind of a related question: Although it wasn’t a music education situation, I’d assume you were under the influence of certain guitar players, emulating them or transcribing them or just absorbing them. If that’s the case, who were those players and what were the characteristics of what they did that you incorporated into what you do?

PAT: The details of my life around Kansas City, as a teenage guy playing nightly with the better players around town, sort of was typical I think of what younger players go through, in the sense that I would kind of absorb and shed styles kind of like a snake. I would be completely crazy about so-and-so for a while and do everything I could do to emulate that kind of feeling, and then I would switch to somebody else. That seems to be quite a common trajectory for guys.

But in my case, there were a couple that were really, really big. The main one was Wes Montgomery. In fact, the first couple of years I played, I played with my thumb, I did everything I could do to sound as much like Wes as I possibly could. He’s a good model for a young guy. He plays great notes. He’s got a great feel. Then there’s this whole sub-sub-sub-level of things about Wes’ playing that I feel, even to this day, are almost completely unappreciated, even by the most astute jazz people. To me, he was really one of the greatest improvising musicians ever, particularly on a melodic level, which to me is the hardest and most difficult to discuss or quantify part of what it is to be an improvising musician.

Through my kind of very willful attempts to try to incorporate Wes-type things into my playing, it was an interesting difference between that time and let’s say a post-1980 period in jazz. Because at that time if you sounded like somebody else, it was sort of not cool. People didn’t really… I mean, I would take some heat for that. While kind of in this period that we’re in now, a more reflective, some would say conservative, certainly more fundamentalist type view of jazz, it’s totally fine to sound like somebody else. In fact, nobody would even question it. But lucky for me, particularly given my particular political bent as far as jazz goes, I was very discouraged by people to try to emulate other people. The message was loud and clear. The idea was to try to find your own way of playing, your own way of hearing, your own way of thinking, which to me is in fact an essential part of what makes jazz the incredible form that it is.

And I was very lucky to have that kind of hammered into me, by not only musicians. There were a couple of fans, who were older jazz fans, who followed the scene very closely, followed me closely, who would have these talks to me on the breaks. “How come you’re playing that Wes Montgomery stuff? You should try to get your own thing.” I was happy just to be on the gig and to be able to hang whatsoever. That discussion was a little bit past where I was actually at.

But there was a point when I was 16 or so that I was… I got pretty good. I could do a pretty good Wes thing. And it always would get a lot of house. People would always dig it on that level. But it just kind of struck me. It’s like: My favorite guitar player is Wes Montgomery, this guy who found this completely unique, absolutely singular, innovative way to do this. That’s what you’re supposed to do. From that moment, actually up until very-very recently, just the last few months, I have physically been unable to play with my thumb or in octaves. It’s like I just won’t do it, out of respect and out of the incredible love that I have for Wes.

That’s something that’s really set apart from any other musician I could mention. His thing was very, very important to me. But I also realized that what’s so great about it was its singularity. But in fact, that’s what I could say about every single figure that I think is important in jazz, is that there’s one of them, and there will ONLY be one of them — always. To me, there were a few figures like that. Wes would be one. Ornette Coleman would be another one. Certainly Miles Davis would be one. They are real models for me in their individuality. As much as people have tried to emulate all of those guys… I would even add a contemporary of mine, Jaco Pastorius, one of the most imitated musicians ever, probably. No one can do it. No one will ever be able to do it. Because you can’t imitate this stuff. It just is. It’s like somebody’s voice, when it’s the real thing. That lesson was brought home to me quite early, kind of thanks to Wes. That’s one more thing I have to thank him for.

But to follow through with the specific of it: Along with Wes, there was another major figure for me, Jim Hall, and also Kenny Burrell was a real important guitar player for me. But I listened to everybody. I always, especially at that time, kind of made it my business to know certainly every guitar player that had ever been on a record, just about, and, as much as I could, all the other instruments. Which is again pretty much par for the course. That’s pretty much what everybody does, I think, if you’re serious about it. You spend those years, weeks, months, days, hours, in a kind of complete, total immersion into the music. Because the truth is, it’s so vast, it’s so complex, there’s sort of no other way to get to it other than that.

TP: I don’t know if this is too esoteric for this purpose, but I’ll throw it out anyway. You developed a musical syntax in a way that involved phrasing it a not-guitaristic way, but in a horn-like way, maybe somewhat influenced by your brother, who is a trumpet player, and you also were, as you said very ecumenical about the type of music you played as a kid. I think I read on your website that you played Albert Ayler charts maybe in a garage band. You heard Ornette’s New York Is Now in 1968 or 1969. You had Jim Hall, Django Reinhardt; there were all these different musics you were sorting through. Since the style that you were emerged with in 1978 and 1975 was so immediately distinctive and attended-to, I’m wondering if you can (a) talk about those people, and for the people who will be seeing this, who they are and why they’re important, and, as much as you can, how you assimilated those different languages into your language.

PAT: I think for this general area of music that I find myself sitting in and that I’ve participated in throughout my life, there’s sort of the playing and then there’s sort of the conceptual thing. Having a concept, having a way of thinking, to me, is at least as important as how you actually render it into sound. In my case, I think because I started out as a trumpet player myself, my whole family is trumpet players, there’s trumpet everywhere in my list of favorites… Miles certainly is a huge one, but Freddie Hubbard would be right there with Miles in terms of just my sheer love of their music. But I’d also have to add Clifford Brown right there, in a very specific way in terms of phrasing. All of those players (and then, I could start listening saxophone players, too) had a huge effect on me in terms of how I wanted the conceptual spirit of the music to sound. A lot of that has to do with phrasing.

To me, phrasing was the aspect on the guitar that was kind of lagging furthest behind in terms of what sort of was the vernacular. In fact, it’s quite difficult to get the guitar to emulate the sense of singing, breathing, particularly on an instrument…an archtop guitar, which is what’s traditionally used in jazz, which has a kind of dry quality to it. It’s quite different than in Rock, where there’s a lot of sustain and distortion and all that sort of thing. There’s a real challenge to coordinate these two acts together, the picking and the fingering. It’s different than tonguing, where it’s just kind of one thing with breath, or a piano where it’s kind of one action. There’s a bunch of weird things about the guitar that became my business, that became sort of part and parcel of what kind of almost every waking minute was directed towards.

The general way that the guitar sits into my overall view of music is one of being a tool. It’s simply a way for me to get ideas out. Yet, I’ve had to reconcile the limitations of the instrument — and particularly my limitations with the instrument, which are significant — to hopefully come up with a way of making my voice present in all of the world of possible sounds that’s resonant and true.

That process began in high school, for sure. But by the time I left Kansas City, and somehow was given a mercy graduation from high school… They never should have let me out. I basically had not taken a book home since the sixth grade, and was functionally illiterate, I might add. But somehow, they did let me go. And much to my parents’ relief, right around that time, the Dean of the University of Miami in Florida heard me play a gig in Kansas City, and offered me a full scholarship to go to the University of Miami, which was just, like, unheard of. I mean, people were wondering what was going to become of me. I certainly wasn’t going to get into any real college under my own academic steam. And with this opportunity, I also was really ready to get out of Kansas City by that time. As much as I loved it, it was great, but I had done pretty much everything I could possibly have done there, and was also really looking to move — and of course, wanted to move to New York, for which I would not have been anywhere near ready at that point.

So Miami became a place that I went. I started to go to school there, and I lasted about six days. There was absolutely no way I was going to be able to bluff my way through college courses the same way I’d bluffed my way through junior and senior high. I told the Dean, “Thanks, but I can’t do it.” And they offered me a teaching job, to teach improvisation. They sort of had just opened up the program to electric guitar, suddenly had a lot more students than they had teachers for, and I was quite experienced, if not very old.

So that worked out good, and that’s leading me to this conceptual thing. Because it was that year, the of…

[PAUSE FOR TAPE BREAK]

I remember the first class was History 101, and I’ll never forget — they were talking about the Romans. I was like, “The Romans…” Just to show you how… But it was like detail, and everybody was like, “Yeah.”

Also, I’d never been around East Coast kids. I’d only been around Lee’s Summit kids. This was like New York and New Jersey… They were so sophisticated and so smart. I was like, “Man, I’m not going to be able to pull this off.

[ROLLING AGAIN]

TP: Why don’t you start back in with they offered you the teaching job because of so many electric guitar students.

PAT: It was during that time in Miami that the conceptual aspect of what music is, how it fits into all of this thing, kind of almost on an existential level (which wouldn’t be age-appropriate for age-18), started to really kick in.

I also, at that point, encountered one musician in particular, but there was a whole group of musicians who were much, much more advanced than any people my own age I had ever seen. In Kansas City, there were a couple of other younger guys who were good friends of mine who were really good players. But just to cut to the chase, about the second week I was there, I went to a concert that was led by Ira Sullivan, who was a really good musician and quite a force around Miami at that time, and out for one tune came a guy, a bass player whose name was Jaco Pastorius, and he proceeded to pretty much make me want to just get on the bus and go back to Kansas City. I really had no way of knowing that there weren’t people like this in every single city in the United States, because I had never been anywhere, and as far as I knew, this was typical. Of course, as we all know now, it wasn’t.

We became very good friends. We talked after the concert, and it happened that we were on some gigs coming up. Really dumb gigs. We both had to do that to just pay our rents and stuff. But we became like very involved in each other’s musical aspirations. Of course, that led to things later. But we’re talking about…this would have been 1972. This is several years before Jaco joined Weather Report, before I joined Gary Burton even. Jaco already…even though he was only a couple of years older than me, he had already gotten a certain amount of underground attention as the bass player with Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, and in fact, they had been in Kansas City just a month or two before I moved to Miami, and everybody was talking about this bass player. Then I finally put 2 and 2 together, that this was the guy.

We did gigs together often, and not long after my stay in Miami I played a gig back in the Midwest with Gary Burton, who… I kind of skipped over that part in the earlier section. But of all of the things that I loved as I was becoming a jazz fan, Gary’s band had a very special place, because it was a group that was doing all of the things that I wanted to hear in terms of great harmony and great playing, all that stuff, but also, somehow, they were looking at the broader picture of the culture and involving themselves with that as jazz musicians, and as much as people kind of give credit to Bitches Brew and what happened with Miles and all that stuff, that’s actually two, almost three years later from what Gary and those guys were doing, in terms… Doing a different version of that idea, but at least as effectively..

So when I got the chance to play with Gary, it was the Wichita Jazz Festival in 1973, in April, and it was sort of like getting to play with one of my major heroes of all time. I played this one concert with him. I was invited to teach on a couple of teaching things that he was also in, just coincidentally, a month or two later. We played a lot more then. Then, basically, he invited me to come teach at Berklee, when he was teaching. When I moved to Boston, I started to bring Jaco up a lot to play with the drummer who I was playing with a lot, starting to play with Gary — Bob Moses. That became the trio that became Bright Sized Life.

I would say from that period of time when I left Kansas City up through the years that I spent teaching in Boston, right up to the recording of Bright Sized Life, that’s when this conceptual thing that I think involved me taking all of these materials, and playing all these gigs with all these different people, and sort of distilling them into what became whatever the sonic message is of that band, those tunes, and that record.

TP: Before we discuss your career once you recorded that album, I’d like to talk to you about Boston and Berklee. During the years you were there, the student body included a number of guitar players who’ve influenced the sound of jazz music over the last 30 years. Forgive me if my chronologies are off, but John Scofield would have been one of them, Bill Frisell would have been another, Mike Stern would have been another. John Abercrombie was a little older. Mick Goodrick was around. These are people who have a big impact on the sound of guitar in jazz today, as, of course, have you. So I’m wondering if we could speak about the climate in Boston at the time, what ideas were in the air…

PAT: It is an interesting chapter. It’s a funny thing in my case. Historically, in retrospect, I am often grouped in with what people call “fusion,” which is actually a term that… I don’t know any musicians who actually use it. It was a marketing term that sort of emerged actually not really until the late 1970s or 1980s.

In fact, I was, at the time of living in Miami in 1972 and 1973, and particularly when I moved to Boston, a complete reactionary to the whole idea of heavy electric guitars, backbeat, drums, distortion on instruments and all that. In fact, to me, it was very problematic on a kind of orchestrational level. And virtually all of the music that was available in terms of jobs, you know, with well-known musicians involved some form of this kind of playing. Like, it was a sort of post-Mahavishnu Orchestra, post Bitches Brew way of thinking of the guitar. It was real fast and lots of pentatonic stuff, lots of string-bending and stuff. My thing was completely against that.

When I moved to Boston, the climate there, I would say, was almost entirely defined by a guy who was the reason I moved to Boston — Gary Burton. With him as the sort of center, there was a lot of stuff orbiting around that. Some of that came in the form of students, some of that came in the form of people who had been around Boston who kind of were able to crystallize their way of thinking through their experience of playing with Gary. But nevertheless, make no mistake about it, it’s a Gary Burton-centered universe in Boston in 1973-74-75-76.

On a guitar level, the kind of instant guitar fit for Gary when he moved to Boston was a guy named Mick Goodrick. Mick was a player of the same generation as John Abercrombie, who had also attended Berklee and sort of came up through the Berklee way of thinking, as Gary had many years before. Mick was also a musician who was a sort of non-traditional thinker in terms of what the guitar could be. I first heard Mick on a tape…it would have been summer of 1973, when I was teaching with Gary at this band camp type of thing — and I was instantly struck that, whatever I was trying to do, this guy was already basically doing. When I moved to Boston, we got together immediately and started playing duets, and did duet concerts, and continue to do duet concerts every now and then to this day. You occasionally run into musicians where you have a sort of instant rapport, and it was that way with me and Mick right from the beginning.

I was teaching at Berklee. By that time, Mick had stopped teaching at Berklee and was sort of just teaching privately. But among the students who I had at Berklee was a whole array of guys who have gone on to do different things, but the guy who I would say was my star student in a lot of ways was a guy named Mike Stern, who continued to be a student of mine for about 6 years, off and on — but especially during that first couple of years there, he was somebody who I know I had a certain amount of impact on.

Another prominent name… I got a phone call one day from a guy who’d just moved to Boston from Denver. He wanted to come over and take lessons – Bill Frisell. He came over with his 175, and just already had a way of playing, but it was very Jim Hall-esque at that time. I said “You don’t need any lessons; what the heck are you talking about?” That was quite a few years later. It was late 70s by the time he got to town.

John Scofield was another guitarist who predated me actually in Boston. He had graduated from Berklee by the time I got there. He’s a few years older than me. But he’d already started to do gigs with well-known musicians, and in fact, after my stay with Gary… I played with Gary for three years. John took my place almost right afterwards. Although that band didn’t record, he did play with Gary for a year or so.

But all of this is sort of revolving around Gary, and I have to put a little sub-paragraph here, which is: Not just Gary Burton, but Steve Swallow, who was also teaching in Berklee at that time, great bass player, one of the greatest electric bass players ever. Swallow’s thing I think particularly had a major impact on me and John Scofield. We both played a lot with Steve. I of course played with Steve for the three years that I played in Gary’s band, and John would have, too. But John and Steve also played together a lot in other situations. Steve and I played a lot together in other situations. I would hire him to do gigs whenever Jaco couldn’t make it. Steve and Mick and I did a lot of trio gigs. But Steve had a way of phrasing and a way of getting around the instrument that I think certainly impacted Sco and I a lot. We both know it. We joke about it a lot. We know what these Swallow kinds of things are that we both do. We’ve taken them in very different ways. But Swallow deserves a special mention for that Boston period as someone who was very prominent and very influential.

The big thing for me of all big things was that in 1974, after kind of checking me out for a few months, Gary Burton actually hired me to be in his band, which was sort of for me the rough equivalent of getting to be the fifth member of the Beatles.

TP: You haven’t yet mentioned what instrument Gary Burton plays. When they edit, perhaps… People won’t know.

PAT: The day that invitation was made official, I could easily say that was the happiest day of my life, prior to the birth of my first son. It was really the most unbelievable thing. That band was the band that really I admired the most. I knew most of their tunes anyway, and had followed the development of that band since 1967 or 1968. That was it for me. If I had never done anything else except play with vibist Gary Burton for a year or two, it would have been enough for me. But as it turned out, it became the beginning of a whole bunch of other things. But the best part was I got to spend three years in a band with Gary, Swallow, Mick Goodrick for the first year, and Bob Moses, from all four of whom I can trace a million specific things that have made me the musician that I am.

We played a lot. We played all over the world. Just being on the bandstand with musicians of that level… As much as I had been around great players — Jaco, Ira Sullivan, the people I’d played with in Kansas City, I’d been doing little sideman things with Paul Bley and Hubert Laws and other people… But night after night getting my ass kicked around by players at that level was just unbelievably instructive for me.

Not to mention that Gary himself is an incredibly eloquent and spectacular teacher. I don’t think he was particularly interested in teaching me. I think he wanted his band to sound as good as it could sound, and we were playing major festivals with major groups. I mean, we played a lot of concerts opposite Keith Jarrett and his band. That was how I got to know people who later on became very important to me — Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Paul Motian. We were playing gigs at that level. He wasn’t running a master class for kids. The things that he had to say to me were things that needed to get said from a musical standpoint. It was just the best situation I could possibly have been in.

That, of course, led to Gary’s sort of suggestion to his record company at the time, which was a new company, it had just started, called ECM (it was a German label), that maybe some-day I might do a record for ECM. Manfred Eicher, who was the producer and owner, whatever he is of all the ECM stuff, had expressed an interest in me after he’d heard a concert, and the idea was sort of posted really early. “Maybe you’ll do a record for ECM pretty soon.” This would have been in early 1974.

I really didn’t feel quite ready yet, and also it wasn’t quite clear to me what exactly it was I wanted to do. Gary also offered me a lot of really great advice around that time. Because he himself had started making records, probably, he would say…I don’t know that this is the case, but he would say…several years before he should have. I think he started making records when he was 16 or 17. I would have been 18 or 19 at that time.

In fact, I did wait. It seemed like a long time then. In retrospect, it’s just a year. And I think I grew a lot from playing from Gary. But also, the whole way composition became a thing for me sort of emerged during that year. I wrote a lot of music, and finally settled on the band which was my working band. I wasn’t sure if that should have been the first record, or if I should have done something else. But at the time, I realized that was my thing, and that trio with Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses, during a recording session that was a Gary Burton record, which was the second record I made with him, called Dreams So Real… We stayed one day extra and we did Bright-Sized Life. We had one day to record and a day to mix, and that was that. I think we did it all in 6 or 7 hours. It was very fast. I didn’t quite know what had hit me, but that was my first record in my own name, December 1975.

TP: Having the record galvanized you to write this material? Or had composition been an interest early on?

PAT: The compositional aspect of my life as a musician is something that emerged later. And it emerged out of, like, the practical reality that hit me kind of all at once — that there was a way I wanted to play, there was a kind of improvising that I wanted to do, that I was increasingly unable to fully do playing on standards, playing on blues forms, even playing on forms of modern, really hip composers like Wayne Shorter or Carla Bley or the most up-to-date stylists in jazz. There was something I wanted to be able to do that I wasn’t able to get to in those environments.

The first tune I wrote was a tune called “April Joy,” which isn’t on my first record. It appeared on a later record. But that tune was really written because I wanted to have a vehicle to do this-that-and-the-other thing. That’s kind of where my playing was wanting to go. And it was so great to be able to come up with a context for this stuff, that composition quickly became just a method, a way of setting myself up to do things. I would say that Bright Sized Life, compositionally, is almost entirely that. It’s like: Ok, I want to be able to do this; what’s a good way to get to that?” I want to have a blues that’s got a bridge that’s got a lot of these kind of chords in it. That’s “Missouri Uncompromised.” I want to be able to do something where it sets up Jaco to do his Reggae kind of thing. That’s “Omaha Celebration.” There’s a certain kind of modulation that I love; where can that be? And etc., etc. it was all very practical kinds of things.

Once I got a taste for writing, it sort of got to the point over the years, as time went by, where it’s at least as important to me as playing. The ultimate conception of my band, which came a few years later, was exactly like that. How can you achieve a balance between lots of written material, not just a little bit of written material, and improvisation. Which is kind of one of the ultimate challenges in jazz, whether it’s my band or whether it’s a big band. That thing of writing a lot of notes, having a lot of stuff there for guys to play as ensembles, and finding the right balance with improvising, is an endlessly challenging task. That road began there.

TP: In 1977, I believe, you formed the Pat Metheny Group, linking up with Lyle Mays. You’ve functioned as alter-egos over the years. Talk about how that happened, and say some words about the essential qualities that give you that synergy and what initially attracted you to each other?

PAT: The three years that I spent playing with Gary Burton’s band were incredible. I was able to not only travel around and have this incredible experience of playing with these amazing musicians, and also to get a sense of what it really is to be out on the road, but I was able to make a few records of my own. And some stuff started to happen after a couple of records. I started to win some little polls in Downbeat and this-that-and-the-other-thing. There’s that thing that happens when you’re new on the scene. You get a lot of press. You get a lot of stuff that actually never happens again at any point in your career. It’s just that thing. New fodder for the machine of it all, particularly on a press level.

After three years, as much as I loved playing with Gary, it was time for me to move on. It just had gotten to that point. Unfortunately, there were no other sideman gigs that were available/or appealing to me. There were still a lot of Rock-type gigs. Playing with Miles at that time was really more of a rock gig. There were certainly no changes involved. The one gig I was offered that in retrospect I kick myself that I didn’t take was playing with Stan Getz, which I would have gotten incredible benefit out of for a year or two. But honestly… There were a couple of other things that were floating around that I might have done. But there was this sort of funnel happening where I kind of almost couldn’t help it. I was going to have to start a band of my own. I had the desire to do it, because I had a lot of ideas, and I was really ready kind of not to be a sideman by that time.

Also, when you’re 21 or 22, you think you know everything, and I was certainly one of those kind of kids, and kind of buoyed by a certain amount of attention and dap and everything else. When I look back on what I did now, it’s like, man, I was nuts to do that. But on the other hand, in retrospect, it sort of worked, you know, that we were able to do it.

Key to that decision was, ironically, at the Wichita Jazz Festival again in 1976. I was there playing with Gary. We had actually a very strange set there. Anybody who would ever tell you about the Wichita Jazz Festival in 1976, and Gary’s performance, would tell you about it. It was an odd one. But lucky for me, at that same festival there was a group of kids from North Texas State, which was always a well-known jazz school, and I noticed that there was a quartet led by a guy named Lyle Mays, which is actually a name that I was already familiar with. He and I had a mutual friend (have a mutual friend) named Dan Hurley, a great piano player-educator, who knew both of us since we were 15 or 16 years old, and always told us about each other. Somehow he knew that we would be a good fit.

Anyway, I went to hear Lyle’s quartet, and I mean, just instantly it was like, “We would play great together.” I just knew it. Also, I have to say that it was the first time I heard somebody exactly my age… I mean, he’s a year older than me, but we were within a very close age difference. He was really addressing all the same stuff that I was interested in. There were lots of guys I’d heard around Boston who were really good bebop players, or really good free players, or really good this-that-or-the-other-thing. With Lyle, I heard that it was a guy who was kind of interested in music. Yes, the best place for us to investigate this stuff is going to be under the jazz umbrella. But it’s really looking at music in a much broader sense. And that was clear to me RIGHT away when I heard him.

We hung out after the concert all night, and just talked, and agreed that it would be great to do a gig. And we did our very first gig together… I remember it because it was July 5 or 6, 1976, a couple of days right after the Bicentennial.

Lyle, by that way…this would just be a few months later… He left North Texas, spent a period of time playing with Woody Herman as a sort of piano player-arranger, and we did a gig in Boston with Steve Swallow on bass and Danny Gottlieb on drums (Danny by that time was the drummer with Gary Burton’s band). I can remember the first tune that Lyle and I officially played together. It was just like we had… The same thing that everybody talks about now, 30 years later. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we developed that.” It was, like, there, right from the beginning. And what’s kept us playing together for all these years is that. We have an enormous amount to discuss. We always have a lot to talk about, and it was that way right from the beginning.

The rapport that we had became kind of the basis of the band. Yet, I didn’t anticipate the extent of the compositional collaboration that would emerge, nor did I ever anticipate in a million years the length that would ensue. It just is a surprise, and a really great surprise, that we’ve continued to play all these years together.

[BREAK]

I would say that my vision of what I wanted to achieve as a bandleader actually had emerged several years prior to the time that I became a bandleader. Even prior to the time that I met Lyle, I sort of had an idea of what it was that I had hoped to achieve, which in a lot of ways reflects something that I’ve kind of chronologically skipped over, which was: As much as I was adamantly devoted to a very kind of narrow sense of music that was totally about jazz, and bebop in particular, that was a struggle for me. Because the truth is, I always loved all kinds of stuff. I always loved bluegrass. I always loved country music. I loved the Beatles. I loved Albert Ayler. I loved Bach. I loved Stravinsky. I loved actually all that stuff equally.

For me, the “Jazz Nazi” years were actually just the musical metabolism kicking in that demands absolute, total focus, because it’s so hard. It’s such a difficult language. It’s sort of like if you’re going to learn, you know, ancient Greek, you pretty much have to go completely into that, or you’re not going to get it. Jazz is a little bit like that. I don’t know anybody who’s ever sort of bypassed this sort of total immersion, 4-or-5-year stage that it takes. In my case, those four or five years were pretty much 14 til 18.

With much relief, when I got to Florida, then later Boston, that burden was lifted from me, and I could just go back to really being the enthusiastic fan of music that has really caused me to be a musician in the first place. I really play music because I love it. And my development as a player, I think, really took off when I realized that the natural course for me was that I love some music and I want to know why it works, and then I address it as a player. My whole thing as a player is that — that I have learned how to play what I love.

The conception that I think I had as a bandleader before the band started was that I wanted to have a group that could play everything that I love, that wasn’t limited to playing just this or that. And in particular, these kinds of tunes that I was writing at the time, these kinds of tunes that were on Bright Sized Life and Watercolors, had some very specific qualities to them that were not even involved with jazz kind of on a fundamental level. Particularly the whole area of rhythm. I loved even-eighth-note rhythm. By that I’m talking about rhythms that go like this [CLAP-CLAP-CLAP-CLAP-CLAP] as opposed to triplet. I love them both. But the even-8th note thing at that time was really limited to these kind of Jazz-Rock type beats, and didn’t have the kind of breadth and expansion that the triplety kinds of things had. And to me, it was like: Well, why can’t they go together? And if I want to play, like, a major triad, which I love, why can’t I mix that in with very dissonant chords? Why do they have to be mutually exclusive?

Those kinds of arguments were sort of the critical mass that made the general conception of the group, I think, what it ultimately became.

The other emergent thing at that time was that the sound aspect of jazz, to me, had really gotten stuck. It was sort of like, even in 1971, how many records had we heard that were trumpet, tenor, piano, bass, and drums? It was sort of like, “Ok, got it.” It’s great, but shouldn’t we be working hard to do something else as fresh as thatwas for the 50s and 60s? Isn’t that our obligation? Isn’t that what has always happened in jazz, that people come along and look at it from a different standpoint and offer different things to it. To me, I felt like, wow, there’s this whole new set of orchestrational possibilities. Suddenly, there’s the possibility for four guys to have this gigantic, huge sound. But why does it have to be loud all the time? Why can’t it be soft sometimes, and then really loud, and then even louder than anybody’s ever played? Why do these things have to be, you know, separate from each other?

The kinds of things that I’ve been talking about the last four minutes are what the band was, and what the band became about. I would say the mission of the band for me was always one of trying to reflect the realities of the larger culture through the prism of the sophistication that jazz guys bring to the table, and to really look at the culture, to really look at the broad possibilities of it. Not to say, “Oh, yeah, well that part of the culture…that doesn’t really count because I don’t really like that.” If I think about playing on standards: A lot of those tunes, the way they were presented by the culture at large, you wouldn’t even guess that they were as hip as they ended up being through the lenses of all the great jazz guys who have addressed it?

My feeling in 1977 — and now — is that it’s our job, it’s our mandate as jazz guys, to look at all this stuff around us, and do something with it, and take those materials and offer another look at them sort of through this prism. That was really the mission of the band. We began a period of about three years of playing literally every place you could possibly play, several hundred nights a year. For a good chunk of it, just the four of us. I had hired a bass player, Mark Egan, and the drummer who had been playing with me with Gary Burton, Danny Gottlieb, who was also a really good friend of mine. That was the band.

All the money that I had saved from my paper route as a kid in Lee’s Summit, I took to my dad’s little car dealership in Lee’s Summit, and put a down-payment down on a van, and we put something close to 280,000 miles on that van in a little bit over three years. So we really hit it, and played every place you could possibly play, playing our thing. Trying to make a case for our sense of things.

I would say that the impact that we had at that time was, in the context of the jazz scene, fairly significant for a young band. We put out our first album, which was just called Pat Metheny Group, on ECM in 1978, which included the basic set that we were playing live at that time. Honestly, Bright Sized Life, my first record, it sold probably 2500 copies by that time. Water Colors, maybe 3400 copies or something like that. The first group record within a few months had sold 100,000 copies, which honestly I didn’t even know what to do. In fact, I thought I had done something really wrong. Because by that time, if you sold a lot of records and you were a jazz guy, you were automatically suspect. I was like, “But the tunes are 15 minutes long; it’s not like we tried to water it down or anything.” We were just doing what we do. The truth is, the reason we sold so many records is because we had toured relentlessly and had really developed a very solid and devoted following in that period of time. Also, I think the music really offered something that was quite unlike anything else at the time, which is sort of a key component.

TP: I’m going to read to you a comment from you on your website. You said: “There was a period where I was concerned about the amount of people who could play on chord changes. It seemed like it was becoming a dying art. Now it’s no problem at all to find guys who can really deal with the way their instrument has evolved and say something, using the correct musical grammar and putting together complete sentences.” You date that period from 1974 to 1979. Maybe this was a web interview for Musician Magazine.

PAT: Right.

TP: Can you speak to the climate in which you were making your name at the time, the milieu in which this was happening?

PAT: It’s funny, because there’s this strange revision that gets run up the flagpole and saluted in certain communities that the 70s was like the worst time that ever happened in jazz. To me, it’s quite the contrary. To me, it was one of the most interesting times in jazz, mainly because it was a time that people from lots of different communities, even on a racial level, were working together in ways that they never had before.

The music that resulted from those collaborations is to me fascinating. It was really people trying almost anything. The level of raw creativity that was going on then was so fascinating to see. If people talk about that period as some kind of commercial period, I just have to laugh. Anybody who thinks that Bitches Brew is a commercial record is out of their minds. It’s sort of like, “What planet would that be commercial on?” Not this one. There’s just this sort of look then, as if that was some kind of dark period in jazz, which it wasn’t at all for me.

When I think about what Keith Jarrett’s band was doing at that time, to me that was, in fact, the last significant acoustic music played in jazz. That was the last band that really found a sound and a way of playing that you could say that’s a band that has achieved, kind of the way the Coltrane band achieved that, or the way the best Miles quintets achieved that. They had their sound. They had their music. Every single person in the band had a completely unique conception. That has not happened since in acoustic jazz. To me, that’s very reflective of that time.

My feeling was, it was a very challenging time to be a leader and to try to come up with something, like… Ok, I think about Keith’s band, or I think about what Gary’s band was conceptually, or, more close to home for me, there was one really huge one — Weather Report. I mean, that band conceptually was…that’s about as good of a conceptual argument that can be made in music— that band at its best. To me, that was sort of the context.

The challenge was that, first of all, we were very young and not that advanced, the same way those players who I mentioned were. I was playing an instrument that was and remains a very challenging, very difficult, very odd instrument of jazz. And yet, at the same time, I do think we made a case for some stuff. I could hear the ripples of what our arguments were musically in other places a lot over the years that followed. The good thing was that we were able to improve a lot by playing so much. Just me personally, I found that was the only way I could really improve, was by playing hundreds of nights a year, and really having to address the issues that I knew I needed to work on. In fact, that’s still the case for me. As much as I love making records and doing all those things, nothing compares with playing. To me, the end product is always the gig. It’s not the record. That was certainly true during those years of intensive touring.

TP: There’s a discography posted on the web, and it seems to me that around 1979 maybe, probably because you’d sold 100,000 records, people start calling you to get your sound on their project. You did a record with Joni Mitchell in 1979. You recorded with David Bowie. You first record with Michael Brecker on that Joni Mitchell record in 1979, and then a year or two later, you release 80/81 with Michael Brecker, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins. So I’m hoping you can make sense of this somewhat confused question, and bring up what started to happen once the Group was established and you started to take on other projects, and juxtaposing those projects to your activity with the Group, as has become your pattern over the last 25 years.

PAT: After I left the Gary Burton Band, lots of people were starting to call me to play on record dates and to do various things, and I made a conscious decision that I wouldn’t do anything, that I was going to just try to make my own records and try to develop the band, and kind of try to do everything on my own terms.

I really maintained that until 1987, which was when I got the call from Mike Brecker to play on his first record. Sort of between 1977 and 1987, I didn’t play as a sideman on anybody’s record except for a couple of very particular things. One was a thing that came up from my friend Jaco Pastorius in 1979 to participate in a tour with Joni Mitchell, who actually had been a real favorite of mine forever, and I just couldn’t say no to it. As much as I was devoted to the band and wanted to keep it going, I did take a summer off to do that tour, and it was an absolutely incredible experience to be around her. On that tour is when I got to play with and know well Mike Brecker. We had known each other a little bit, but we became very close friends on that tour. His participation in a couple of other things was very significant probably for both of us.

From meeting Mike, a couple more years went by…I can’t even remember the exact chronology… Actually it wasn’t a couple of years. All this stuff, in retrospect, seems longer, but it was really just a year or so later. I had done a couple of records in the meantime, American Garage in my band, a duet record with Lyle Mays called As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. By that time, I had five records out under my own name, and I realized that I had made all these records and had not really documented the kind of playing that I had actually done the most of, which was more or less playing in a straight-ahead kind of situation.

Also, I mistakenly assumed that everybody could hear that all of that stuff was in everything else I was doing. I mean, it was as obvious as, you know,my two hands that that was the case, that you couldn’t deal with the kinds of harmonies and the kinds of things we were dealing with… I always saw that as a post-post-bebop thing. But I just completely underestimated the hipness quotient of the critical world and the audiences and everybody else.

So it seemed like…ok, I had become really good friends with Charlie through lots of gigs when he was playing with Keith, and had gotten to know Dewey a little bit, and Jack DeJohnette was my next-door neighbor in upstate New York where I had a place at the time, and we had played together a lot — and Jack and Charlie had never played together, so I thought that would be a great combination.

So it was like, yeah, let’s do this record. It was just going to be one record. It went so well, we ended up doing a double record. And much to my shock, it was considered this wild revelation. “He’s playing with these guys.” It’s like, “Yeah… And?” I was surprised by the surprise at it. Actually, that record is quite in line with the records that preceded it and followed it. It’s all kind of one big record for me, because my thing is to just try to play the music that I feel really close to, and that’s what was reflected on 80/81.

TP: That brings up a statement you’ve made in several contexts about the difference between style and dialect and style and sound. Perhaps this is a place to discuss your ideas on that. Because you I think resist the notion of style.

PAT: I’ve always resisted the idea of genre. Kind of the same way I resist the idea of nationality. Yeah, we’re all American. Some guys are Chinese, some guys are Japanese, whatever. But we’re all human. That’s 99.9% of it. The thing is, everybody gets so caught up in their stylistic bents. It’s a lot like religion. It’s a lot like politics. It all goes together. It’s the way people define who they are. But the reality is, we’re all musicians. This is all about music.

There was jazz before there was Jazz. This is something that doesn’t… I almost never hear anybody discuss this. It’s kind of like there were human beings before there were these four or five major religious, iconic figures that our entire culture is based on. What about all those people? The impulse to do this, to be creative with music and the sound, is something that manifests itself beautifully in jazz. But that impulse is something that goes way beyond jazz. That’s what I’m interested in.

Yeah, the dialect of jazz is one of the most incredible inventions, as a platform, in art history. As a conceptual basis to formulate your vision of what it is to be on earth, man, that’s as good as it gets. But it’s just that. It’s a form. It’s a process. It’s not anything other than a tool or a platform. When you start putting your tools instead of the result, you wind up with something that I feel is somewhat misdirected. Not to say that a misdirected person can’t come up with a great work of art. It’s more an aesthetic argument at this point.

But in my case, the beauty of jazz is in fact its malleability, and where I see it being most effective is as a way of reporting on things. To me jazz is at its least effective as a sort of backwards look upon itself. In fact, I don’t think it can even do that at all. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody do that. As much as people have tried to emulate this-that-or-the-other-thing, or wear this influence or that influence on their sleeve, you go, “Oh yeah,” but then it makes you want to go listen to the original. It doesn’t really satisfy on that level. But on the other hand, jazz is something that lives only in the people who play it at a particular moment in time. It’s really bad at sort of trying to remind us of other things. It’s really good at showing us things. I think it totally fails as a nostalgic form. It’s ok to listen to the records in a nostalgic way. But as a kind of ongoing thing, it’s really got to be about current events (that’s the way I see it), to do what it does.

TP: That being said, when you perform with musicians on these special projects who are coming out of a particular dialect or language, however flexible or virtuosic, you adapt to them. If you play with Roy Haynes, you probably play differently than you play with…

PAT: Derek Bailey.

TP: Derek Bailey. There we go. Or for that matter, Brian Blade with Kenny Garrett…

PAT: Right.

TP: …or with Ornette Coleman and Billy Higgins. Can we piggyback off this rather general comment about the malleability of jazz and jazz being a music of the moment, to the way these dialects can mold themselves to suit current events, which I think you’ve been an exemplar of?

PAT: One of the real privilege and luxuries and honors that I’ve had throughout my adult life as a musician is that I’ve gotten to play with almost every single one of my heroes. The only one who I didn’t get to play with, who I was all set to play with (we were planning a project together, and I’m sad about it every day) is Joe Henderson. I think we would have done something really special, and it was just right around the time that he got sick.

But beyond that, the major collaborations that I’ve had in my life as a musician have first of all been very selective. Even though I have done a lot of things, I’ve never played with somebody who I didn’t have a strong adoration for as a player. That love is what has I think allowed me to kind of speak in these different dialects that are somewhat distinct from each other, but at the same time stay true to my own way of thinking and my own way of imagining what sound can offer people.

I am reluctant to collaborate with people. It’s got to be just right for me. The thing is, most of the time I’m going to go play in their yard. That’s largely the way it goes. It’s only recently that I’m finding younger musicians who have sort of absorbed my dialect, and it’s actually quite exciting for me to go play with them, who have a whole bunch of other things but my thing is part of it, and find that I can play my way and not have to change and not have to adapt anything. They’re kind of adapting to me. That’s part of what it is to be 50 as opposed to being 20. That’s thrilling. Probably that’s something like the thrill that some of the older musicians, if they felt any thrill at all playing with me…that’s probably what they experienced, that I was able to kind of do my thing. Yes, Roy Haynes, I’ve listened to this record, this record, this record, this record. I know you like to go so-and-so, and I am ready, willing and able to play in a way that’s going to go with that.

That’s one of the great exchanges that happens daily, hourly in jazz, on kind of every level, is this sort of shared language of it.
[BREAK]

TP: While we have this break, could I ask you to be a little specific… For instance, you’ve said that you liked the way Roy Haynes played over barlines on McCoy Tyner’s Reaching Fourth record, or you listened to New York Is Now and heard Ornette Coleman and Dewey when you were 14. For an encounter like this, I think it would invaluable if you could be concrete about the musicians you played with, and say a little something about them.

PAT: In this collaborative area, one of the most exciting projects that I was able to participate in was with… If somebody said, “You have to name your one name, that’s like the one guy you’re going to have to focus on, or take just his records,” I would be able to comfortably say Herbie Hancock. To me, Herbie in all of his different forms is…he’s kind of an idol for me, I would say. Kind of everything about Herbie is, that’s just the way you should be. I just can’t say enough about what he represents to me. And not just me. I think he’s kind of under the radar. But he’s the closest thing we all have to Miles in terms of… He’s the leader of the jazz community at this moment in time.

I’ve gotten to do a lot of playing with him over the years in lots of different situations, and every time it’s everything I hope it could be and more. But in particular, there was a period in the early 1990s that there was a quartet with Herbie, bassist Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and myself that kind of toured as a collaborative group over a six-month period. Every night, getting on the bandstand with somebody like Herbie Hancock…I mean, we’re talking about one of the greatest musicians ever, and a musician who you really have to play in his yard. He has a very strong-willed, very intense way of approaching music that demands a certain kind of attention. In my case, Herbie is one of the musicians that I have listened to and continue to listen to the most.

[BREAK TO CHANGE TAPE]

So that playing situation required that I sort of bring to the table everything that I knew about Herbie and his playing, and everything about who he is as a musician, because he’s a formidable companion on stage, each night — and very challenging. He’s not a guy that just kind of lets you play some stuff and… He’ll really throw stuff at you.

That requires a certain kind of listening skill. That’s sort of what I’ve noticed. Any of these collaborative things. As much as there’s different dialects involved, the one thing that is constant is the ability that I think you develop as a player, year after year, not only to hear what’s going on inside your own head, but kind of almost hear what’s going on in everybody else’s heads, too, and to be able to adapt on a kind of microsecond by microsecond basis to this (if you’re talking about Herbie Hancock) very high level, let’s say scientific level quality of information that’s being broadcast to you.

The more you know about somebody, and particularly the more you love somebody’s playing, the more that you’ve probably absorbed the mechanics of the way they play – I mean, just to put it on a sort of rip level. When I think about Herbie, or if I think about Roy Haynes and I think about the way he played on the four or five records of his that really mattered to me the most, like We Three (that was a record he made with Phineas Newborn) or Reaching Fourth (a record with McCoy Tyner) or certainly Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (a record he made with Chick Corea)… That spans ten years of Roy’s history right there, but there’s a quality that he brings to it that, from listening to those records a lot, when I get on the bandstand with him, it’s sort of like I know what to expect, so I can go play with him in his comfort zone, but at the same time I can keep track of my own thoughts, too.

Regardless of whether it’s playing a single chord with Joni Mitchell, or playing some really complicated stuff with Herbie, or trying to find Roy’s pocket, it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s like I’m happy playing lots of notes, I like playing very simple, I like playing very loud, I like playing very quiet… All of those things are kind of incidental almost to the human exchange that happens. That’s where it’s at for me. That’s the fun part. That’s where, in all of these cases, you see the exceptional quality that these guys have. Yeah, they sound great. They’re amazing virtuoso stylist musicians. But that’s kind of not even the coolest part. That’s the part that most people who are listening to it are going to get. But when you play with somebody night after night after night after night after night, that’s when you really get to see what the REAL deal is with somebody. Man, every single one of the giant kind of heavy cats that I’ve had the opportunity to play with, you just admire them and respect them more after you do it, because you see how deep it really goes.

To me, Herbie Hancock and Roy Haynes are both like real models of sort of how to be, what it is to be on earth — besides the fact that they are just the greatest musicians ever.

TP: You’ve also been involved in…I’ll use the word advisedly…esoteric projects with Ornette Coleman in the mid-80s, Song X, which you just reissued this year, and a project with Derek Bailey. I think it would be interesting to hear about how the Ornette Coleman project came about.

PAT: I know that people have often described my thing as being eclectic or sort of all over the map. I’ve even heard “schizophrenic.” Throughout the life that I’ve had as a musician, there’s always been a fair amount of talk about my particular case.

For me personally, it’s just natural that the things that I’ve had an interest in as a fan and as a player, I’ve offered my take on it through a recording or a gig or whatever. And there have been a variety of things. But I have a hard time qualifying any of them as being esoteric or even out of the ordinary. Because in fact, all of the music that I’ve played is music I’ve kind of grown up with and that I’ve had a consistent connection to, right from the beginning.

One of the projects that happened a little bit later, after a few years, I’d made 11 records for ECM and finally was ready to move on to a different situation, and was able to start my own record company, basically, which is sort of what continues to this day, where I make records and have different companies distribute them… The first record that I made under the auspices of this new thing (Metheny Group Productions is the name of the company)… I’d been playing a lot in the early 1980s in a trio with Charlie Haden, my good friend, great bass player, and Billy Higgins, a great drummer. We’d done a record together, which was actually the last record that I made for ECM, called Rejoicing. We’d played about a year together on the road before and after the release of that record.

Of course, Charlie and Billy came to prominence playing with one of the major figures of our time, Ornette Coleman, the great alto saxophone player and trumpet player and violin player, and general giant of conception. And of course, Ornette had always been a favorite of mine anyway, ever since I got one of his records very early in my life as a fan of the music, and I’d always followed his career and his playing very closely. He came to hear us a few times down at the Village Vanguard here in New York, and was real enthusiastic about the band. He said, “We should play.” Of course, for me… I remember saying to Charlie afterwards, like, “Does he really mean that?” and Charlie said, “Hey, if he’s saying that, he means it.”

Right about that time was when I switched record companies, and I really wanted to do something extra-special for the first record, under this new thing. I got together with Ornette and explained to him that there was this new situation emerging, and what would he think about doing something? He was really into it. The result of that talk became he and I spending about two months together in a practice room. I think both had an interest in trying to come up with something that was different from anything that either one of us had done up to that point. For me, that was a real important factor in this. I didn’t want it to be just something like what Ornette was doing at that time, and it obviously wasn’t going to be what I had been doing right up to that time. But I think we both also were approaching it cautiously, in a way. The hours that we spent together in this room I think resulted in us, first of all, developing a strong personal rapport — we had a lot of fun — and also just developing the music and the way we were going to play together.

The result is a record, Song X, that came out in 1986 (it was recorded in the winter of 1985). The record had a certain impact at the time, got a lot of talk and everything like that. But the main thing that I am proud of with that record is that in fact it has functioned in exactly the way we intended. It’s a record that’s quite unlike any other record. As the years go by, I think that becomes more clear. It really sort of stands apart. That’s what we were hoping to do and what I think it kind of did.

TP: Let’s talk about your collaborations with other guitar players – you and John Scofield, you and Bill Frisell with Marc Johnson, and you with Derek Bailey.

PAT: Let me think about how to roughly connect this. Before we do that, you said you wanted to talk about Brazilian music. That would be now.

By the mid-1980s, the Group had changed a fair amount. We had a great new drummer, Paul Wertico, and I had met an incredible young musician from Argentina named Pedro Aznar, who offered an enormous wealth of sonic possibilities to the band. It sort of fixed a problem that I’d always had with the quartet of guitar, piano, bass, and drums, which is: We never had any breath in the music. I couldn’t find a trumpet player or a saxophone player who would have been able to deal with what we were dealing with harmonically without just coming out and playing bebop, which I didn’t want. Even though bebop was sort of under everything, I didn’t want to make it the up-front quality, and I struggled to try to reconcile this thing of the music needing breath. And when I heard Pedro singing, it was like: That could solve it.

Kind of concurrently, during that period, the mid part of the 1980s, I had started to do concerts in Brazil, and the minute I got off the plane I felt at home in a way that I probably never felt in the States, in terms of just this musical world that involved all these hip guitar chords that you just don’t find in any other form of popular music. And they were, in 1982-83-84-85, all-pervasive in Brazilian music. The added benefit for me was, as hip as all these chords were, there really weren’t any soloists down there that could kind of deal with what these chords suggested on an improvisational level. I was invited to participate in recording sessions with Milton Nascimento, other artists like Leila Pineiro or Celia Vas or Toninho Horta, people who were not as well known as Milton, but very evolved harmonic-type musicians. I could play my let’s say harmonic concept type soloing over these great chords that these guys were playing, which was a really exciting thing probably for all of us.

The group sort of in parallel was kind of taking this even-eighth-note thing that I was talking about before, which was inside the group’s music anyway, and with the addition of a couple of South American guys (Nana Vasconcelos first, Pedro, and then later Armando Marsao), these kind of even eighth-note beats that I was writing anyway suddenly took on this whole other flavor. Yet, at the same time, we were still writing these very complex kinds of tunes with odd meters and all that stuff.

That resulted I think conceptually in what became three records that are connected together — First Circle, Still Life Talking, and Letter From Home. All those records are often…I see people talk about them as being Brazilian-influenced. In some ways that’s true, on a rhythmic level, and certainly having Pedro (and then there were a couple of guys who followed him) singing the melodies with it gave it that sort of sheen. Kind of underneath the hood, honestly, there wasn’t much going on in Brazilian music at that time that could compare with what we were actually doing in terms of the harmonic language, and certainly the form-type things that we were dealing with. As much as I loved Milton’s records at the time, and a few other guys, we were already kind of on another road in terms of what was going on, particularly on an improvisational level. But nevertheless, there was a kind of shared freeway there for a minute, and having those guys in the band just sort of emphasized that connection. As it happened, I wound up living in Brazil for a few years during that period, which just felt right, and was part of that ongoing research.

One thing that I always mention to people whenever the topic of Brazil comes up, that I feel is important to mention, is the connection between Brazilian music and American jazz is a very unique one. I don’t really think you can see as a one-way street. It’s a real two-way street that has been going on for 40 or 50 years. Maybe I was the resident of that highway for a couple of years there for a while, Certainly, Stan Getz preceded; there’s a million other people who have done it, too. But I think you can’t underestimate the other direction, which is the impact all the American jazz guys have had on Brazilian musicians. It often gets talked about the other way, how much impact Brazilian music has had on us, let’s say. But it’s at least as much the other way.

That would start including the Jobim tunes, that are, at least in my case, the foundation of all of it. I mean, I learned those 15 famous Jobim tunes at the same time I was learning all the Bird heads and all the Sonny Rollins tunes and everything else. To me, it was part of the jazz language. That whole harmonic way of developing things compositionally I think is something that he really got from bebop. It’s not something that comes out of fado music or comes out of the older Samba forms. I mean, that’s in there, too. But we’re talking about like really overt jazz language being present kind of in all of those guys that form the basis of Bossa Nova. That I think has continued through the years. They’ve freely drawn from the kinds of research that has happened in American jazz, and that’s fed their thing, which has then fed us back. I can’t think of anything — except for maybe Cuban music, but to a far less extent — that has had that sort of cyclical thing, the way Brazilian music and Jazz has had.

TP: Let’s move on to the guitar collaborations. I forgot to mention Jim Hall earlier…

PAT: This is kind of sticking with the chronology, which is just easier for me to think of. Let me fill in a blank here, too.

By the late 1980s, I had felt like my goal of not playing on other people’s records, for the most part, in order to focus on…

By the end of the 1980s, I had sort of fulfilled whatever it is I had hoped to achieve by somewhat limiting myself in the participation of the larger jazz community. Mike Brecker, who had been a friend of mine for a long time, had played on 80/81 by that time, had never made a record of his own. He was 15 years into his career. He finally decided to do his own record. I was thrilled that he called me and invited me to be on it.

That began a period for me of being really involved in the jazz day-to-day community that I had really avoided. From 1987 until actually Brecker’s last record, which was a record called Ballads, about four or five years ago, I did lots and lots of projects, with lots and lots of different people. For the last four or five years, I’ve stopped again, for other reasons, and really basically just do my own projects now. But that was a really fun time for me, those years, about 15 years there, where I was playing on lots of people’s records.

Some of the most exciting and interesting ones were collaborations with other guitar players, and people who I really admired and, I’m happy to say, people that I’m real good friends with. We’re all sort of colleagues in our quest to try to reconcile the instrument with the larger language.

The first of those was a collaboration with probably the favorite for me, in a lot of ways, of all the guys who have emerged sort of roughly in my age group, and that’s John Scofield, who of course I’ve known for many, many years — and yet, we had never played together. John and I did a record called I Can See Your House From Here in I think it was 1994, and we did a tour that followed it. It was with Steve Swallow (as I’d mentioned earlier, he was an important figure for both of us, so it made sense to have Steve involved) and Bill Stewart, an exciting young drummer at the time, and still a very exciting player.

It was just incredible to kind of compare notes with John in a very intimate way, of kind of…we’d both been so on the same road of trying to kind of figure out all this stuff that we love about jazz, and put it on this instrument, and try to find ways that we could offer these other opportunities to our fellow players that had not really been kind of presented before under what the guitar can be. I think both John and I, and the other favorite for me is Bill Frisell…the three of us are often talked about together. We’re all within a few years of each other, and I feel like we’ve all been on the same road, of trying to come up with a way of making the instrument work.

In a real tight collaborative situation, you get to kind of see each other in action in ways that were just mainly very inspiring for me in both cases, with John and Bill. John and I did this record, I Can See Your House From Here. A year or two later I did a record with Bill, not either one of our records; it was a collaborative record with Marc Johnson – it was to be the third Bass Desires records, which was his band’s kind of concept name, and for contractual reasons he couldn’t call it “Bass Desires”…something like that, but it really is the third Bass Desires record, which is a two-guitar, bass and drums setting that he came up with as a format.

In both cases, with Bill and John, it was just incredible fun and amazingly easy to play together. Jim Hall has a great saying about guitars. When you’re talking about two guitars, his response is, “One is usually too much.” I think we would all share that basic philosophy. Two guitars is a really hard one. It has to be two players who are very aware of their roles and each other, and also are capable of finding a sound together. I think that John and I were able to do that; Bill and I were able to do that. John and Bill have played together a lot. There’s a real sense of community amongst the three of us.

It’s funny, because one of the three of us I think has probably won just about very poll, like, every other couple of years, depending on which one of us has a hot record or whatever at the time. I don’t even know who’s won more. It’s kind of been passed around between all three of us for the last 15 years or so. There’s no rivalry or anything. I think we’re probably our biggest fans, and I’m so happy about that. I’ve kind of watched what goes on in some of the other instruments, and it’s like, wow, they’re really fighting each other. With us, it’s just the opposite. I could see the three of us playing together as a trio or something. We’ve got that kind of thing amongst us, which is something I feel very happy about and very proud to be a part of. When people do talk about the three of us as a sort of representative three of our generation, I am so happy to be included with those two guys in that conversation.

A few years later, I did a collaborative record with kind of the father of all three of us musically on the instrument, and that’s our collective hero, Jim Hall, who I think found a way to make the instrument work in jazz that opened up the doors for all of us that had followed chronologically. Jim’s records with Bill Evans, particularly a record called Undercurrent, and then the record, The Bridge, with Sonny Rollins, are to me two of the absolute evolutionary records in the history of the instrument. If somebody makes one record like that in the course of their career, they can be happy. Jim has made at least two, and I would add to that his duet recordings with either Ron Carter, Red Mitchell, and other people, that opened up a new way of thinking about the instrument in jazz.

Jim had never done a duet record with another guitar player, and I never had either. I think it was kind of fitting that we did this thing together. I felt like I was a representative, kind of, of all of us, able to work as a younger player for Jim and to hopefully come up with some situations that inspired him in a duet setting — and he certainly did that for me. That was a really cool project to be involved with.

Then, another guitarist that I had the chance to work with a little bit later, was a very different kind of player, but a player who I connect with Jim in a lot of ways. They have a very similar sound in terms of what comes right off the instrument, they’ve got a very similar touch, but an entirely different dialect of playing. That’s an English musician, to me one of the great conceptualists on the guitar — Derek Bailey. We did several nights of playing together in a concert situation and one full day of recording in a studio environment. It wasn’t just a strict duet setting. It was with two drummers. And the record that we came up with is one, again, that I think is unique for both of us — maybe a little bit less so for Derek than for me. But it was a way of playing that I think I played that one time, and I’ve never played before and never since. That’s always good if somebody can offer you that kind of platform. The record was called The Sign of Four.

The other major guitar collaboration for me is one that has continued for more than 30 years now, but we never made a record together, and that’s with Mick Goodrick, who is just one of the best collaborators that I have. We have to fix that. We really need to do a record. We did a concert this past summer in Montreal that was an hour of just complete joy. We just can play together. We know how to do it.

There’s one other guitar player that I’ve played with a lot, and again it’s undocumented, and I hope we would get the chance to record sometime — Joe Diorio. He’s a guy who I played together a lot with in Miami. He was playing with Ira Sullivan a lot at the time. We’ve continued to play together occasionally over the years, but have never documented it.

[BREAK]

TP: Let’s talk about the current Pat Metheny Group and Trio, and the way it’s evolved. Several things. One, although you’ve always done longish pieces, your current record (for audiences 50 years from now) is a 68-minute long-form piece. And you’ve incorporated new personnel, and personnel that exemplifies what you were saying about the current generation of musicians who’ve been influenced by your playing. So somehow, I’d like you to speak about the development of your group with comments about those post-Baby Boom musicians you’ve played with — Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart were your trio; you’re hiring people like Antonio Sanchez, Cuong Vu and Gregoire Maret.

PAT: For me, the spectrum of things that I did throughout the 1990s continued to get broken down into these three areas, roughly. There’s the Group, which I’ve talked about a lot. There’s playing as a sideman in other people’s situations, which I did a huge amount more of in the 1980s and 1990s than I did prior to that or since then. But there’s another big one, which is playing trio, which is something that’s kind of continued over the years. The first trio was with Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses. The second one was with Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins; I mentioned that briefly. There’s a third one, which was important, with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes — we probably played together the most of all of those three trios. We did an enormous amount of touring over a several-year timespan.

In the late part of the 90s, I had been playing a lot as a sideman with so-called younger…what they used to call “young lions,” although that’s a term that probably none of them really ever appreciated too much, and certainly, as they’ve gotten older, has no real meaning. But for me it was significant, because I was always the young guy. I was the youngest guy in every band I was in, including my own, for significant chunks of time. Everything kind of changed in the early 90s, when I did a record with Joshua Redman, who, interestingly, was the son of a guy I’d played with a lot — Dewey Redman, a great saxophone player who is on the record 80/81.

Along with Josh came a group of…a generation of guys who I felt an immediate closeness to. I had never felt a closeness at all to the generation that was immediately younger than me. I was kind of scratching my head at those guys, which was the most conservative…they were like wildly conservative compared to where I was at, and even compared to where Roy Haynes or Billy Higgins or Charlie were at. It was a reactionary thing to something. But the Josh generation, which I would include…has produced Christian McBride, Kenny Garrett, Brian Blade, Bill Stewart, Larry Grenadier…all these guys are in this zone that’s somewhere between 12 and 15 years younger than me. Which, not coincidentally, is pretty much the same age difference between me and the generation that really affected me, which was the Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett generation. It seems like there’s an interesting thing kind of throughout jazz history; you see that rough age difference as being a kind of fertile one. People who are sort of old enough, but not really old, OLD guys to them.

Throughout the 90s I played regularly with guys of that generation. Finally, towards the end of the 90s, it was time to do some more trio playing, and I picked two favorites of that generation to play with — Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart, musicians who I have the highest regard for. All the things I would ever hope for in any musicians, those guys really reflect. Individuality, incredible musicianship, and incredible listening skills.

That sort of completed the trio thing up to that point. In recent years, I’ve got a new trio going on with two other musicians of that generation, one guy slightly younger…Christian McBride is right in the middle of that zone (probably the greatest bass player of that generation), and Antonio Sanchez, a great young drummer. That’s the most recent trio that I have.

The Group has continued its growth over these years. As much as people talk about the Group, and what we have done, and what we do, there’s always lots of talk about the sound of the band, what it is and what we do…the success of the Group. But kind of under the hood of it all, it’s been largely about form. We’ve spent enormous time and energy trying to develop what the formal language can be…what it is to be a jazz group in the modern era. What is it? Is it ok to use electronics? Sure. Is it ok to use synthesizers and sequencers and all this stuff? Sure. Is it ok to present a show this way instead of just kind of stumbling out on stage and tuning up in the traditional jazz way? Why not? We’re doing all that stuff, too. But sort of beyond all those things, the actual nuts and bolts of the way the music has been put together has resulted in probably the average length of our tunes being somewhere between 8 and 14 minutes anyway.

That all led up to our most recent record (at the time I’m speaking now, in 2006), which is The Way Up, which is one tune that’s 68 minutes long. In many ways, that’s sort of the summation of what the band has always been about, which is to take ideas and really develop them. To me, that’s a viable quest, and it will always be a viable quest. The whole power of development is one that…it’s timeless. As much as I talk about how good improvisation in jazz is at these sort of markings of time in a sort of microscopic sense, there is this larger issue of music, and the way music itself has evolved over the years. If you think about the skills involved in Western orchestral music, Western Classical music, or if you think about the skills involved for the Beatles to do what they did, or the skills Duke Ellington brought to the table, or the skills that Steve Reich brings to the table — all of them have to do with the way people are able to take ideas and sort of work them over time. Whether it’s happening in a spontaneous way or in a structural way, that’s kind of the quest for me. And in the context of my band, it’s been so satisfying especially to work with Lyle Mays, to develop this aspect of what it is to be a musician.

TP: Could you elaborate a bit more on the qualities of the younger musicians you’re working with? Are they a different type of jazz musician than when you were coming up? What characterizes this generation of jazz musicians who are coming into their own voice?

PAT: One recent development in jazz that I guess I have unwittingly been right in the middle of is the way jazz, as a so-called American form, connects to the world that exists our nationalistic pride and sense of things. For me, my life as a human being has been that of someone who travels a lot. Since 1977, I’ve been gone more than I’ve been home, and for a period from 1977 until about 1992, I was gone all the time. I didn’t even know where I lived. I was just in transit. I didn’t even have a place for a good chunk of that time.

Everywhere that I’ve been, I’ve collected things, whether I wanted to or not — ideas, images, and a sense of things that have nothing to do with American, Cambodian, Brazilian, Mexican, Vietnamese, or anything else. I’ve also felt very comfortable and very confident sort of putting little stamps on my suitcase of where I’ve been that manifest themselves in sound.

I made a record in the early 90s (it wasn’t a Group record; it’s actually unlike any record I’ve done before or since) called Secret Story, that was really just a portrait of that life. It was sort of a culmination of everything up to that time. Included on it was a Cambodian traditional hymn that I kind of re-did. I have no particular connection to Cambodia, but when I heard that music, I knew that it was something that I felt. It was resonant to me, and I was able to take that and do something with it.

The connection that I talked about before with Brazilian music is not even one that I particularly see as Brazilian or this-that-or-the-other-thing. It has more to do with harmony and love of chords. That’s a shared affection that exists there.

In parallel to that, there’s all these musicians who have emerged, who are now in their twenties and thirties, and maybe forties and fifties, teens, who grew up listening to Miles Davis records while growing up in Cameroon or in Argentina or in Spain or in Italy or Switzerland or wherever. The truth is, we all have a lot more in common with each other than we do with probably 99% of the people that live in our own respective communities, because we’re kind of in on it. We’re IN on what this language offers us. And whenever and wherever you find that possibility of conversation, it’s sort of like you’re wandering around in outer space, and you’re a Klingon and you meet another Klingon on some other planet. It’s like, “Wow!” In our case, it’s, ‘Let’s play ‘Autumn Leaves.’” You don’t even have to talk about it. You can just start playing. It’s a common language now. But it’s a language that’s spoken by a very-very-very small percentage of the population of the earth, and they are scattered throughout the whole place now. There’s concentrations and pockets of people here and there, and they probably tend to be around metropolitan areas. But it doesn’t have a thing to do with where that person is from. It has to do with who that person is.

That’s something that, without my intention, has just manifested in the population of the bands that I’m playing with. My most recent band had a guy who was born in Vietnam, a guy whose mom is African-American and his dad is Swiss, a Brazilian guy. I’ve had recently a guy from Cameroon who grew up listening to Jaco Pastorius. My current trio, it was recently pointed out to me (I hadn’t actually noticed this), a white guy, an African-American guy (Christian McBride) and a Hispanic guy — we represent the three major groups of the American population. Some German interviewer made a huge deal of this and why I had decided to do this. I was like, “Yeah-yeah-yeah, you’re right!” But that’s the last thing I was thinking about. Christian is Christian, Antonio is Antonio — whatever. But it’s not an intentional thing. It’s just the way it is now. That’s the way the community I live in looks. It’s people from everywhere who are sharing this common language.

TP: You segued into my second-to-last question that was on my talking points list, and then you raised another point that I’m not sure I want to touch on or not, but I’ll throw it at you…

PAT: No, let’s not. I know where… There’s no point in going there.

TP: Well, you don’t necessarily know…

PAT: [LAUGHS]

TP: I want to talk about being a jazz musician in a pop culture world. And as a jazz musician, you’ve been very commercially successful. You’ve made a good living, and you fill large halls, maybe arenas…

PAT: Yes, sometimes.[LAUGHS]

TP: You’re one of the few jazz musicians… Maybe 99% of the world doesn’t know jazz, but they may know your name in whatever sense they know it. And you’ve done this without being like your doppelganger, Kenny G, who’s done it by appealing, as you’ve said, people’s baser instincts. You’ve done it by appealing to the more exalted instincts in people, in a certain sense. There’s no particular question involved here, but I wonder if you can speak to what it’s like to be a jazz musician in a pop culture world.

PAT: Well, as I sit here right now, and kind of look at the larger culture, and not just my place in it, but pretty much all the musicians I admire and respect and whose musics I love, it’s not a pretty picture in a lot of ways. Because the larger culture right now, in 2006, is I would say in a fairly conflicted and… It’s at a place that’s less than at its best, let’s say.

On the other hand, I feel like we have hundreds, thousands of years to go. This is a long process we’ve got ahead of us here of civilization, and we’re still early on. It’s not that long ago that we were living in worlds with the reality of death being there at like age-25. It’s within spitting distance of where we’re at now. The whole idea of tempered harmony is a relatively new one. Down the line… Not to mention the incredible trauma of the Information Age, that I think is literally, as we speak, causing the evolution of our species to be altered. I think we’re all physically having to adapt to a completely new set of circumstances that defines our existence.

Nevertheless, it is not a culture that is particularly interested in music, in general. The things that I value in music — harmony, melody, complexity, form, structure — are really kind of not really there right now in terms of the average everyday person’s interest in what music might offer them.

But you know what? If we’re doing this for posterity, and there’s going to be six generations of people or more who might see this interview someday, all six are going to have wildly different contexts to complain in and to exalt in or whatever.

The reality that I’m shooting for is one that, as much as it is of this time, I hope it will be beyond this time. Because the reality of music, to me, has nothing to do with pop culture of this year, that year, that year, or that year, other than as a sort of propulsion device.

There is a cliche that’s one of my favorites, and I think it’s really true. The things that are the most personal are the most universal. For that reason, I feel like every musician has to understand, reconcile, wring their hands over, be troubled by, be concerned with, be aware of every aspect of the culture that they’re living in, and come up with a way of connecting that to what they have to offer as human beings that play music. But at the same time, I think you have to say a good note has a life that goes beyond just now. It just does. When you hear the best music from any period, it connects, the same way it did then… The things that are the same are always the same.

We have…all of us that attempt to be musicians have this 800-pound elephant in the room, which is Johan Sebastian Bach, who you could take almost any 4 bars that he wrote and spend a lifetime on it. The guy wrote so much music that is so perfect… And he was one of the first people to really deal with harmony like that. And he kind of did it… It’s sort of like, “Well, there you go; that’s it.” That has everything to do with the time it was made in, and it has nothing to do with the time it’s made in. And I think you can say that about Billie Holiday. You can say that about John Coltrane. You can say that about Louis Armstrong. You can say that about the Beatles. You can say that about Dolly Parton. You can say that about all kinds of stuff. It’s absolutely of that time, but it completely transcends that time.

That’s pretty much the way I see our thing fitting into it now. I am deeply involved with what’s happening in the world. It’s a very troubling time politically in the United States right now. It’s absolutely 16 horrible… Well, it hasn’t been 16 yet. But 16 of the last 24 years, as of 2008, will have been the lowest point in American politics in its history, with two god-awful Presidents who almost have completely wrecked the country — Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. If we survive that, we will have done ok.

But the damage done by those two Administrations will take decades to fix, particularly in the area of education. Of all the things that are just tragic about those 16 years, the main thing is that education in America has been just decimated by greed and by the fact that people have preferred to not pay taxes, and therefore, not support the main thing that makes America what it is, which is the future Americans, for no reason other than their own selfishness. And that basic quality is one that defines the Republican eras that I spoke of — selfishness. I’m sure that it won’t always be that way. But for now, it’s a pretty bleak period, and the culture I think sadly reflects that. But there’s a lot of people trying to fight against that, and I hope to be one of those.

TP: If jazz reflects the culture or mirrors the culture, what does that tell us about jazz in our period?

PAT: I think there are very few musicians who are willing to look at it. There’s a huge comfort factor in jazz, which is it’s a much safer, more “credible” (and I use credible in heavy quotation marks) to emulate rather than to just take a hard look at it. If you play good, it’s always going to be ok. But to me, that’s not what our job is. Our job is to ask questions.

TP: Finally, since you’re Pat Metheny and you play guitar, and you’ve been involved with technology, and the cutting edge of technology for many years… I don’t know if you can do a quick soundbyte on this one. But we should touch on your introduction to the synthesizer, because you came on the scene just after the first real-time synthesizers entered the mix (Paul Bley recorded on one circa 1970), then also Synclavier, on up to the 42-string guitar you’re using now.

PAT: For me, the last 25 years have been an unbelievably unique time in the continuum of musical history, in terms of what the technology offers us as musicians. If you’d told a guy in 1787 that there would come a day where he could play something on the piano and it would write it out for him as he played it, it would have been like a miracle from God! We take all this stuff so for granted now, and it’s just an everyday occurrence. I was very…I don’t know if ‘fortunate’ is the right word… But I was right in the middle of the very early stages of all this stuff — sampling and sequencing and music notation and all that — by way of an instrument called the Synclavier, which predated MIDI and all that stuff by a number of years.

I think so far we’re still largely in shock that we can do all this stuff. When I think about the incredible opportunities that these tools offer us, and then I think about the way it’s largely implemented, at leastr at this point in 2006, I don’t think we’ve seen the real flowering yet of what that technology will offer us. That was two minutes.

TP: Can we also talk about the guitars?

PAT: I can do that, and I can also do a conclusion.

As a guitar player, it’s been frustrating but ultimately exhilarating to be involved with this instrument that has played such an important part in this culture of the last forty years or so, just as a figure instrument. In my case, in terms of jazz, I’ve wanted to really explore what else it can be besides just a guitar. I’ve had people make me weird guitars with lots of extra strings, and I’ve been involved in every guitar synth that’s come along; I’ve tried it, and a couple of them have even become important instruments for me in my range of sounds. Steel strings and nylon strings and 12-strings and tunings — all those things are interesting to me.

But ultimately, they’re interesting to me the same way a screwdriver is interesting to a guy that’s going to build houses. They’re just tools. They’re just ways of getting the sound out. The idea always comes first for me. I always think, “Ok, how can I get this to be?” It’s always driven by the conceptual stuff.

I think that’s something that will always be true with young musicians who come along. They are always going to have something that they need to express — a picture that they need to paint, a story that they need to tell. For me, that’s what it’s always been about, this narrative story-telling thing that jazz has been incredibly effective for me to use as a platform to offer what I have to offer. But I think each generation is going to have to find new things, and new platforms, and new contexts, and new ways to find their personal version of what is universal. That’s pretty much what I’ve tried to do, and I feel very proud and happy to have been part of a long line of people in jazz on the guitar who have done exactly the same thing.