For pianist Luis Perdomo’s 53rd birthday, a Downbeat article from 2007 and a liner note from 2016

For the fabulous pianist Luis Perdomo’s birthday, here’s a Downbeat article from 2007 framed around the release of his second leader recording, titled Awareness, and a liner note for his fourth Criss Cross release, from 2016, titled Spirits and Warriors. (This album, as well as The ‘Infancia’ Project and Links, which are referenced in the liner notes, can be heard in their entirety on Youtube, as of this writing.)

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Luis Perdomo Downbeat Article (2007):

One night backstage at the Jazz Gallery a few years back, a colleague of Luis Perdomo speculated that, contrary to his stated birth date of 1971, the Caracas-born pianist, a ubiquitous presence on New York bandstands since 1999, was in his fifties. The comment was in jest, but it spoke to the old soul clarity, grit and maturity of Perdomo’s idiomatic contributions to Latin jazz dates with Marlon Simon, Ralph Irizarry’s Timbalaya, and Ray Barretto, and his fresh formulations, still ongoing, with such informed pan-genre hybridizers as Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany Terry, Miguel Zenon, Brian Lynch, and Ravi Coltrane.

With the 2006 release of Awareness, his second leader recording for Coltrane’s RKM label, Perdomo makes a strong case for himself as a leader of originality and conceptual breadth. Each of the eleven tracks is a Perdomo composition, and he organizes them into a suite with a narrative arc that unfolds from beginning to end. Six tunes are trios with bassist Hans Glawischnig, a stalwart on many important Jazz Latin art music scenes over the past eight years, and drummer Eric McPherson, a New York native with an encyclopedic beat vocabulary. On the other five, Perdomo sets up a double trio with old master outcat bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Nasheet Waits, McPherson’s chum since grammar school. Using the percussion coloristically, he phrases freely across the open-metered, surging pulse, while paying keen attention to harmonic development and pianistic touch.

“I’ve always been in love with the idea of two or three basses,” said Perdomo, citing Cecil Taylor’s 1967 opus, Conquistador, on which Grimes performed, as an early model. As a teenager Perdomo  also heard Grimes with far-outcat Frank Wright on an ESP trio album. The source for both records was his teacher, an Austrian emigre pianist named Jerry Weil, a bandmate of Perdomo’s uncle, a salsero. “He taught me jazz and salsa, Bach and Chopin,” Perdomo recalled. “Every lesson he’d give me music—to begin with, Keith Jarrett’s Memories of Tomorrow and Charles Lloyd’s Forest Flower as well as Solar.” He cites a panoramic range of other formative influences, among them Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue with Andrew Hill, Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, Monk, Tatum, Weather Report, Eddie Palmieri, Martial Solal, George Gruntz, and Alexander von Schlippenbach, timba from Cuba, ‘80s sounds from Brazil, and traditional Venezuelan music.

“The first record I bought was John Coltrane’s Om, when I was 16,” Perdomo said. “I’d get up in the morning and put it on—or Spiritual Unity or Faces and Reflections by George Duke with Ndugu Chancler—and when the teachers were talking about a math problem or something in class, I could go to a certain part of my brain and listen to it.”

Already in demand as a keyboardist with local dance bands, Perdomo at 16 first played jazz professionally on trio gigs at Caracas hotels, and got his on-the-job seasoning on a Monday-through-Saturday, 9-to-4 residence at a popular local jazz club from 1989 until 1993. Then Perdomo moved to New York.

“A Cuban trumpet player I knew would visit his uncle in New York to buy records and listen to music, and he invited me,” Perdomo said. “Every record I had said ‘Recorded in New York.’ My Dad was a big Bud Powell fan, and when I’d hear Oblivion, I’d see the New York skyline.” On Perdomo’s second trip, a friend mentioned that Manhattan School of Music was holding auditions. A year later, a 95% scholarship in hand, he sold his equipment, gathered his savings, and spent the next five years as a full-time student.

“I’d been listening to a lot of avant-garde music, but I didn’t understand Charlie Parker,” he related. “When I got to New York, something clicked, and I started working backwards. I was aware of all the new music that was being done around the city, but I was listening to Bird, Bud Powell and Fats Navarro. Now I’m totally into James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. In fact, I’d like to do a piano record playing the music of Fats Waller, Ernesto Lecuona and Scott Joplin.”

If his salsaphile family had their way, Perdomo reported, that next project would instead be more explicitly Latin. “I want to be true to myself and play what I hear,” he explained. “From growing up in that background and playing salsa, I hear all the percussion—the congas, bongos and timbales. I also love straight-ahead. All this music touches me, and  if I like it, I’ll learn it real fast, and do it.”

He recalled an encomium from Branford Marsalis during the session that generated Miguel Zenon’s first Marsalis Music record, Ceremonial, on which Perdomo excels. “Branford  said, ‘You guys are part of a movement; you’re changing the way Latin music is heard.’ But I don’t see myself as an innovator. I just see myself as well-equipped to do all these things.

“I’m glad to be living during this time. A lot of people say it would have been great to live during the ‘60s when so many different movements were happening, but a lot is happening right now, too.”

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Luis Perdomo, Spirits and Warriors, Liner Notes:

Last fall, when Criss Cross proprietor Gerry Teekens offered pianist Luis Perdomo his fourth Criss Cross leader date, the 45-year-old, Caracas-born pianist—who had recently recorded a solo piano album for another label—accepted immediately.

“I wasn’t planning on doing this record,” says Perdomo, a New Yorker since 1993, and a first-caller of long standing. “But there are so many great people in New York I’ve never played with before, or have played with but not enough, and I’ve taken these opportunities from Gerry as occasions to do something with them. For me, putting together these bands is like cooking—get the right ingredients, take a lot of time to prepare and you know it’s going to be great.”

For this musical repast, Perdomo assembled an A-list quintet of individualistic tonal personalities. Not least among them is tenor saxophonist Mark Shim, who returns from Perdomo’s 2012 opus, The ‘Infancia’ Project (Criss-1348), on which Perdomo addressed four originals and five pieces, primarily drawn from the lexicon of hardcore modern jazz but also including a Hector Lavoe bolero, with master clave-to-swing bilingualists Andy Gonzalez on bass, and Ignacio Berroa on drums.

“Mark is an under-recognized musician,” Perdomo says. “I particularly love his robust tone, and his rhythmic concepts are unique. I always like to play with people who are rhythmically inclined. By the time I was 12, I was playing in salsa bands in Venezuela, so I come from a tradition that incorporates a lot of percussion and beats. I always talk about rhythm when I teach and give master classes. To me, rhythm is the most important element in Western music. Most of the bands I really enjoy playing with, and that I have spent a long time playing with, tend to go in the rhythmic direction.”

In this regard, Perdomo cites long haul tenures with the Miguel Zenón Quartet (the alto saxophone master appears on Perdomo’s third Criss Cross date, Links [Criss-1357]), in which he has played for 16 years, and the Ravi Coltrane Quartet, in which he held the piano chair from 2001 to  2011, as well as groups like Ralph Irizarry’s Timbalaye, and various units led by Yosvany Terry and Dafnis Prieto. More recently, Perdomo notes, he’s focused increasingly on his own solo piano project and his trio, The Controlling Ear Unit, with bassist Mimi Jones and drummer Rudy Royston.

Spirits and Warriors marks Perdomo’s first encounter with trumpeter Alex Sipiagin, leader of 11 Criss Cross dates and sideman on nine others, including four by the cooperative quintet Opus 5. “Gerry asked if I wanted to do a quintet with trumpet, and I asked about Alex,” he recalls. “He made a huge impression on me the first time I heard him, and many times since. I always wanted to play with him.”

A regular in various Tom Harrell units for the past decade, and with Jacky Terrasson’s trio from 1994 to 2002,  bassist Ugonna Okegwo played on Perdomo’s first leader recording, Focus Point, in 2003. “Ugonna is very rhythmic and I love his tone,” Perdomo says. “When it’s time to walk the bass and swing like crazy, he’s the guy to do it, but he’s  also played very openly in groups like Sam Newsome’s Global Unity. Ugonna won’t overwhelm you with technical stuff. He plays just the right amount of notes to make everything sound good, and at the same time puts his imprint on the music.”

If septugenarian drum titan Billy Hart is the oldest protagonist on Spirits and Warriors, he may also be the youngest in spirit.  Still maintaining an intense touring schedule, Hart—most frequently heard these days at the helm of his quartet with Mark Turner and Ethan Iverson, and propelling generational contemporaries like Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson and George Cables in the Cookers—makes his first Criss Cross appearance since 1987, when he joined Ralph Moore on 623 C Street.

“Billy’s playing is like a tree,” Perdomo says. “It’s firmly rooted in the tradition, but he can go in different directions. His groove and rhythmic feeling are strong, like a tree’s trunk, but sometimes the tree has no leaves, sometimes they change colors, sometimes there are creatures living in it and around it, sometimes there are none. These are the images that appear to me when I think of Billy—or Jack DeJohnette, Ralph Peterson and Eric McPherson, who I’ve played with. They are constantly listening.”

He adds: “I also like being like that. That’s why I like to play with flexible musicians, with a foot in tradition and a foot in the modern. At any moment I can go either way, and I like musicians who can back me up. Music is just music. It should make you happy. For some reason, boundaries don’t exist in my head.”

Having resolved the issue of personnel, Perdomo focused on the music they would play. The centerpiece is the six-piece suite for which the album is titled. “I was thinking of a lot of people, some really good friends, some not so close, who either died too young—who are the spirits—or have come through an illness—the warriors—and are still with us,” he says.

The late and much missed bassist Dwayne Burno, who played on Links, is the subject of the suite-opening “Face Up,” a stalwart swinger so titled to signify Burno’s penchant addressing his instrument with his head at an upward tilt. “I imagined the type of changes Dwayne liked to play on, and the kind of song that he played masterfully,” Perdomo says. He opens the solo rounds, followed by Sipiagin and Shim.

“Sensei” evokes the aura of Woody Shaw’s and Bobby Hutcherson’s musical production at the cusp of the 1970s, a feeling reinforced by Sipiagin’s mercurial, virtuosic solo and Perdomo’s lilting, percolating declamation. The title references Perdomo’s uncle, Eliazar Yanez, a drummer and master taiko player who introduced his nephew to pianist Gerry Weil, an Austrian emigre who had moved to Caracas, under whose ministrations Perdomo would subsequently absorb recordings spanning “avant-garde and straightahead jazz, salsa, Bach and Chopin.” “My uncle was very fit, but he passed away in his fifties from an aneurysm,” Perdomo recalls. “This piece, like the other spirit pieces, is less like a mourning than a celebration of his life and his being around in my time.”

Hart’s ebullient intro launches “Aura,” a crisp finger-snapper with an ebullient feel not unlike Bobby Watson’s Horizon circa 1990. Perdomo’s intention was to represent the inspiring attitude of a friend and musical colleague who resolutely refused to complain about or be held back by serious medical issues while on tour several years ago. A gnarly horn unison shout chorus leads to solos by Shim, Sipiagin, Perdomo and Hart.

Clarion piano chords open “Ralph,” a turbulent, anthemic number dedicated to the aforementioned Ralph Peterson and Ralph Irizarry. Propelled by Hart’s staunch, multi-directional beats, Sipiagin and Shim exchange and intertwine their lines; Perdomo evokes Andrew Hill, as he finds ways to phrase his harmonic path with stacked counter-rhythms, before a penultimate vamp that allows Hart to say his piece.

Shim’s keening EWI solo illuminates the bittersweetness of “Her Eyes,” conceived in memory of the “expressive, big eyes” of pianist Shimrit Shoshan and saxophonist Rebecca Buxton, who both died much too young. Perdomo and Sipiagin admirably sustain the emotional mood.

The ballad “Year One” is dedicated to the Italian-born, Venezuela-based pop singer Yordano, who employed Perdomo when he was 18, and who, at the time Spirits and Warriors was recorded, was one year past a bone marrow transplant for lymphoma. “He doesn’t really like jazz, but he likes ballads—Chet Baker,” Perdomo says. “I imagined he likes the softer songs that Chet Baker played.” Sipiagin’s golden, blue-tinged tone and Shim’s testifying tenor infuse the flow.

After the suite concludes, Perdomo presents two rarely-covered jazz songs and an iconic standard. He designates Clifford Jordan’s classic “Glass Bead Games” (from the 1972 album of that name), as a quartet feature for Shim, who displays enviable textural control on a tour de force declamation. Solos by Perdomo and Okegwo follow.

There follows a trio treatment of Hermeto Pascoal’s “Little Church (Igrejinha)” debuted in a more sonically extravagant context on Miles Davis’ 1970 album Live Evil (the composer whistled, Miles played trumpet with effects, Herbie Hancock played organ, and Dave Holland played bass). Perdomo presents it as a trio feature, on which he and Okegwo, pushed gently by Hart’s just-right brushstrokes, sculpt cogent melodic variations from the gorgeous chords.

Sipiagin alchemizes his trumpet into a voice on the melody statement for the album-closing “Portrait of Jenny,” a blue ballad previously covered by such masters as Nat Cole, J.J. Johnson, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, George Benson, Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Blue Mitchell, Donald Byrd and Joe Lovano. Hart switches between brushes and sticks, providing an airy cushion for extended solos by Perdomo, Sipiagin and Okegwo.

“It’s a tune that you can treat traditionally but also go in different directions,” Perdomo says, stating the attitude that permeates this latest documentation, on which the clarity, grit and maturity that make him such a valuable contributor to contemporary jazz piano expression is palpable throughout.

“I see myself as well-equipped to do a lot of things,” Perdomo told me a few years ago. “A lot of people say it would have been great to have lived during the ’60s when so many different movements were happening, but a lot is happening now, too. I’m glad to be living during this time.”

For Guitarist-Composer James Emery’s 72nd Birthday, a liner note for “Spectral Domains” (1998) and an Interview for the liner note

I might be mistaken, but it’s my impression that the brilliant James Emery’s just-announced new release, Inside Outlier, is the guitarist-composer’s 9th album as a leader (and first since 2003), joining 16 dates by the String Trio of New York and numerous sideman appearances with fellow speculative spirits like Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins and Gerry Hemingway. I had the honor of writing liner notes for Emery’s fifth album, Spectral Domains, his second for Enja, on which he presented music for an septet comprising himself, Marty Ehrlich, Chris Speed, Mark Feldman, Michael Formanek, Kevin Norton and Hemingway. In addition to the liner note, I’ve included the long interview we did for the occasion.

James Emery (Spectral Domains) — Liner Notes:

 

 

For a quarter-century James Emery has survived —  more than survived; he’s flourished — as an improviser occupying the fluid territory I like to call Post-Jazz.  That’s my term for music that could not exist were its practitioners not thoroughly immersed in jazz vocabulary.  They incorporate the jazz experience as bedrock for reflection and elaboration upon a wide spectrum of source material, weaving together diverse strains in a manner that transcends idiomatic genre.

 

“Unfortunately,” Emery says, “this music isn’t for everybody.”  How has he sustained himself?  “I’ve got it broken down to a four-part plan,” responds the 46-year-old guitarist.  “First is talent, to have something people want to listen to, something with integrity, originality, beauty and power — all the qualities that make a good musician.  Then hard work, being single-minded about getting your music heard and playing.  Third is is desire.  You can be talented and industrious, but if you don’t really want it, you won’t be able to pay your dues, hang in there and get through the bad times.  Finally, luck.  Circumstances have to come together.”

 

Emery isn’t blowing smoke.  Best known through his twenty-year participation in the String Trio of New York with bassist John Lindberg and a succession of first-class violinists (currently Diane Monroe), gigs with the likes of Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins and Leo Smith, and extensive experience as a solo guitarist, he’s carved out an unmistakable improvisational and compositional voice, marked by impeccable craft and unbridled imagination.

 

On Spectral Domains, Emery’s second Enja release, those qualities are showcased abundantly.  It’s music for 11 instruments performed by seven state-of-the-art musicians, composed in 1995-96 under the auspices of a Guggenheim Fellowship grant.  “After all those years writing for something as austere as a string trio, trying to extract every last bit of sound color, I was like a kid in a candy store,” Emery chuckles.  It’s music abrim with creative juice, employing surprising instrumental combinations, poetic voicings, striking harmonies, dynamic rhythms, virtuosic improvising — the sound is wholly Emery.

 

The Cleveland native started playing organ at 6, switched to guitar at 10.  At 11 he began studying with Ann Stanley, a violinist in George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra who played classical guitar.  “She taught me not only the guitar, but music,” Emery recalls.  “Some harmony, theory, the way rhythm works.  She gave me a very thorough education.  So when I encountered Charlie Parker’s music at 17, I was able to break it down into its component parts, define it for myself musically, theoretically, and transfer that to the guitar.  Later I had to do the same thing with Ornette, Coltrane, Braxton and the AACM, and everyone else.  I’m not talking about the emotion or anything like that, just the nuts and bolts of music.  Being able to do that is invaluable.  Digesting Bird and Monk and Bud Powell will take you to some different places on the fingerboard.”

 

As a teenager, Emery gigged weekends in rock bands, then began immersing himself in the blues — “more fun to play; you could bend it, stretch out, take extended solos.”  Later he began teaching at a music store owned by guitarist Bill DeArango, a virtuoso who’d played and recorded with Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in New York in the ’40s.  DeArango advised the talented neophyte to listen to Lester Young as a bridge to richer blues expression.  “For me, it was a new way of looking at the blues, even though it was the late ’60s!” Emery enthuses.  “Lester was using more notes, notes beyond the basic pentatonic scale; his placement of those notes and the way they swung and his sense of space was all new to me.  Prez led to Bird, and hearing Bird was shocking.  It was a lot faster; the energy was a lot higher.  Bird took the music into another rhythmic realm.  All the elements are there — incredible time, chromatic usage of melody, all the apoggiaturos, ornamentations, extended harmonies, and chord substitutions.  Bird innovated in every area except form, but the existing forms were just fine with him.”

 

Continuing his search, the restless youngster found form-breaking paradigms in Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor.  “The way Ornette structured his melodies and worked with them orchestrationally appealed to me.  One hallmark of a good composer is to find a few good ideas, continually reworking them while keeping the integrity of those motifs throughout the piece.  And in his blowing, Ornette liberated the music from the tyranny of the bar-line, as they said back then.  Later I heard Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound and Anthony Braxton’s Three Compositions of New Jazz, which vibrated with me.  I knew I wanted to get into it, and that I had to get to New York.  First I moved to the Five-College area of northern Massachusetts, played in an avant-garde group, and began listening seriously to Bartok, Boulez, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg.  I was running to New York every chance I got, scoping out the scene, and finally moved there in 1973.”

 

From today’s perspective, it’s difficult to imagine the atmosphere of New York City twenty-five years ago.  A stream of improvisers of all aesthetic inclinations migrated from Chicago, St. Louis, California and other points to make their statements.  Violinist Leroy Jenkins, a 1971 arrival from Chicago, mentored Emery into the mix.  “Leroy ran an ad in the Village Voice for students, which I answered,” he remembers.  “Lessons basically amounted to us playing and discussing his music.  He dug that I was already into Roscoe and Braxton.  Leroy got me an apartment right above his, and I observed the way the Revolutionary Ensemble operated.  He gave me my first record date, For Players Only, which led other cats on the scene to start hiring me.  I worked with Kalaparusha, taught at the Creative Music Studio, began going to La Mama, and got involved with the Human Arts Ensemble with Bobo Shaw, Joe Bowie, Luther Thomas and John Lindberg.  In 1977 John and I formed the String Trio Of New York.”

 

His assessment?  “New York was everything I thought it would be.  The music was exploding past any boundaries.  Anyone was playing with anyone.  It was about who you are, what you have to say that’s personal to you on your instrument, not whether you can cut a set of changes or play some music of the past.  It was exploratory and creative.  As Cecil Taylor said, you can draw from anything compositionally to further what you’re trying to express and make it your own.”

 

That’s precisely what Emery does on Spectral Domains.  Everyone he mentions inflects the music, but the sound universe is sui-generis.  A primary component is Emery’s control of the guitar unamplified.  “I feel the acoustic guitar speaks best for what I’m trying to do,” he asserts.  “The shapes I’m trying to make and the devices I’m trying to play come out better on the acoustic.  I conceive the guitar as somewhere between a piano and a horn, the lower register being more like a bass.  You also get a range of dynamics in the softer shades that is difficult to express on an electric guitar.  I started on acoustic guitar, and that’s what I’ll end on.”

 

Emery’s cohorts are a who’s-who of speculative improvising, musicians of the highest skills and subtlest empathy.  Without them, Emery emphasizes, “I wouldn’t have been able to write this music.  I challenged them, writing just what I wanted, without other considerations.  To play on this record, you have to be a great reader, able to make statements in a variety of different areas as an improviser, execute music with a high percentage of accuracy.  Like Duke Ellington said a long time ago, the musician in the future will have one foot in the university and one foot in the street.”

 

Consider the eventful opener, “Red Spaces In A Blue Field,” performed by the full ensemble.  Emery comments: “On Part One, I use four or five motifs, put together with a cut-and-paste method, giving you increasingly longer hearings of those motifs as the piece evolves.  There’s changing time signatures, counterpoint, stretto, tempo changes, different kinds of improvisation.  I’m fascinated by the interstices of composition and improvisation, where the identities start to blur and improvised sections take on a composed aspect, as well as written material taking on an improvised cast so it isn’t rigid and doesn’t sound like somebody’s reading it — removing the music from the paper, so to speak.  Part 2 is a 40-bar form, with a 16-bar bridge, influenced by Monk, Mingus and Ellington.”

 

This dovetails into Emery’s nuanced orchestration of Charles Mingus’ exploratory lyric-to-ominous “Far Wells, Mill Valley.”  “Mingus is one of the first who wrote compositions that start in one place and end somewhere completely different, which the AACM guys and modernist composers have taken to heart,” Emery remarks.  “He let his imagination run wild here, creating all sorts of different sections.”  So does Emery.  Listen, for instance, to the high-flying duo passage between Marty Ehrlich’s flute and Mark Feldman’s violin.

 

Emery’s guitar comes to the fore on a quartet arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s gnarly “Trinkle Tinkle,” one of a series of Monk compositions he’s adapted to the guitar, using Monk’s voicings.  Chris Speed offers an idiomatic tenor solo, and Norton’s marimba provides distinctive coloration.  On Ornette Coleman’s “Kathelin Gray,” performed in duo with Speed’s clarinet, Emery harmonizes the melody for guitar and plays the piece down straight.  On “Cosmology,” a solo feature “loosely based on a set of chord changes in the blowing section,” the guitarist, freed from ensemble considerations, unleashes his ferocious chops.  “The beauty of solo playing is that you don’t have to coordinate with anyone else; you can do anything you want with the material,” elaborates Emery, a veteran of hundreds of solo performances.

 

Emery’s “Chromosphere,” built harmonically and melodically on augmented triads, filled with shifting instrumental color and rhythm timbre, elicits resourceful solos and intense contrapuntal dialogues throughout the improvisations.  Formanek, anticipating every move, anchors the proceedings. “Standing On A Whale Fishing For Minnows,” the title track of Emery’s first Enja record, a quartet date, here performed in its original septet setting, “is in 4/4, but the rhythms are subdivided to syncopate it in a different way.”  Hemingway navigates the constantly shifting patterns through the three written and improvised sections with the finesse and drive of a champion slalom skier.  The album’s evocative closer, “Strings of Thread,” also appears on the first record.  Emery describes it as “a 20-bar form whose harmonic motion consists of a series of deceptive cadences over a kind of lilting South American rhythm.”

 

“Sound Action Seven,” a tour de force of sonic color, hearkens to Emery’s AACM inspirations.  The composer comments: “It’s written both with non-traditional and traditional notation methods.  Everyone gets a master score and a key to the symbols in the score, and there are sections with verbal explanations of sound activity.  When I played with Braxton and Leo, I saw how they presented information to an ensemble to get the results they wanted.  I’ve organized those concepts in my own manner.  I get a kick out of playing music like this because you can bring all your forces to bear.  Everything is appropriate.”

 

James Emery can talk high-concept with the best of them.  He backs it up with music that wears theory lightly on the sleeve, weaving the outermost partials of form into cogent narrative.  Spectral Domains is an apt title; this is music created in the spirit of true grit, cell by cell, reaching for the spheres.

 

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James Emery on Spectral Domains – (5-27-98):

 

 

TP: I’ll start with asking you about the continuities between this and the previous recording.  There’s continuity in the personnel, and there’s two of the same pieces.  How did you conceive this recording as dovetailing with or evolving from the previous one?

 

JE: Well, it kind of happened in a backwards fashion.  The septet was born first, so it really should have come out first, but things don’t really work out that way.  Anyway, writing of the septet music began with my getting a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995.  That was my project description, to write extended works…well, not necessarily extended, but actually anything that I really wanted to write at all for a slightly larger ensemble than I’d been accustomed to working with, which is primarily small groups and the string trio.

 

[PAUSE]

 

TP: I want to pick up on what you said about writing for an extended ensemble.  One thing I noticed is that you seem to break up the septet into maybe three discrete units, kind of, so it’s almost as though the units are operating in parallel.  True, or no?

 

JE: Sure, doubling to get more weight out of certain lines or figures is an orchestrational technique.  It’s just one of the many devices one can bring to bear when you’re orchestrating.

 

TP: Timbrally it’s quite striking.  I thought it gave the music a very distinctive sonic palette.

 

JE: One of the others that I thought was very nice was some of the woodwind sounds with violin.  I thought some of those were really exceptional; like, tenor, flute and violin was really striking.  After 20 years of writing for something as austere as a string trio, with violin, guitar and bass, and we’re busting our heads all the time, trying to find new colors and new ways to use those instruments so that it’s not just the regular old sound of the three instruments being played normally, and just trying to extract every last bit of sound color possible out of that combination, to then suddenly write for 11 instruments played by 7 musicians, man, I was like a kid in a candy store.  I didn’t really have to think too hard about, gee, what am I going to do next to keep not only the nuts-and-bolts of the music, being melody-harmony-rhythm-form, but then the sound the timbre of the music — to keep that interesting as well, keep that shifting some.  I didn’t have to work too hard to figure out, “Gee, what am I going to do here?”

 

TP: Was the music performed publicly?

 

JE: At Merkin Hall, with Thurman Barker on mallet instruments.  You know the scene today.  Unless you’ve got some heavy financial backing, it’s very difficult to organize a concert of anything but the smallest possible group.  We’re seeing groups shrinking all the time.  Trios are very popular now, because really it’s an actual group.  A duo is a group, but when you get three people it becomes more of an ensemble obviously.

 

TP: When you were coming up, the most obvious two trios I can think of are AACM-derived groups, Air and the Revolutionary Ensemble, which were active when the String Trio was generated.  Were those compositional models?

 

JE: Yes.  I moved to New York in 1974 because I wanted to play with the people who were there.  I had heard Roscoe Mitchell’s first record, Sound, Jarman’s first record, Braxton’s Three Compositions of New Jazz, and Muhal’s Levels and Degrees of Light, and they really stirred me.  I’d already been into Ornette when I lived in Cleveland.  I came to Ornette by the way, via Bird.  He’s the first musician I heard when I was a musician who astonished me totally.  So I came to the music of the AACM through searching and being very excited about someone’s music, so excited that I would just like go crazy on that person — like Ornette in that case.  I heard all the early Atlantic records, both volumes of Live at the Golden Circle, New York Is Now — but mainly the Atlantic records.

 

TP: Can you put your finger on what it was about Ornette’s music… Ornette is coming out of Bird in a very direct way, but there’s a real paradigm shift in listening to the way he goes about things.  Can you remember what it was that really struck you at that time?

 

JE: Well, it was this wild, untamed, very energetic quality.  I hesitate to say the freedom of it!  It was really untamed and extremely vibrant and alive.  But it also had a lot of substance to it musically.  The melodic qualities and the way Ornette structured his melodies was very appealing to me.  Also the way he worked with them orchestrationally.  He’s a real composer.  He’ll take a couple of good ideas and run with them.  He doesn’t feel that he always has to introduce new material all the time.  That’s one of the hallmarks of a composer, is to take just a few ideas and then continually rework them, recast them, change them slightly while trying to keep the integrity of those motifs throughout your piece.  Ornette’s really got that.  But then the blowing, too, was just so happening.  Again, he had liberated the music from the tyranny of the bar-line, as they said back then.  I love that phrase, “the tyranny of the bar line.”  So it just increased what was possible very much.

 

TP: Let me take you back a bit.  How did the guitar start for you?

 

JE: Well, I just wanted to play music.  I didn’t care what kind of music it was.  I was playing anything.  Like Oralee, some light classics, religious music.  I didn’t really care what it was.  Just so I could be playing music; that’s all I cared about..

 

TP: Did you grow up in a musical household?

 

JE: Yeah, my mother played piano and organ.  In fact, I started on organ when I was 6, and I took to it very quickly.  Anyway, I switched to the guitar by the time I was 10 years old.  I remember my father bought me a book to teach myself how to play the guitar before I went to a teacher or anything like that, and after about a half-hour I figured out that this book was just going to teach me how to play chords which were meant to accompany a singer.  I said, “Oh, no, this isn’t what I want.  I want to play the melodies myself.  I don’t want to sing them and just accompany myself by strumming some chords.”  I knew that’s not what I wanted to do.  So I wasn’t going to make a very good folkie, obviously.

 

TP: This was about 1963 or so.

 

JE: Early ’60s.  I remember a period before I went to the guitar, after I had lost interest in the organ, where I really wanted a wind instrument.  I wanted an oboe, a clarinet or an alto saxophone, and my parents would not get those for me.  I was really into Tchaikovsky and Grieg, too, back then.

 

TP: And that’s the music that was around the house?

 

JE: Well, that, and Ray Charles was being heard on the radio, my parents had a good record collection.  My Dad was a big band fanatic.  He loved the Dorseys and Count Basie and Glenn Miller, he really came out of that strongly.  And he used to play the trumpet.  He had quit playing by the time I was old enough to pay attention to anything.

 

TP: So your parents were musically literate and quite a bit of musical taste, it sounds like.

 

JE: They had pretty good taste.  Yeah, they definitely did.

 

TP: When you first heard Bird, were you playing… Outside of just practicing for yourself, when did you start gigging?

 

JE: Oh, I was already gigging.  I started working when I was 14 in Rock groups, playing parties and dances.  See, I had already studying classically by that time.  My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to study the guitar formally, and that was okay with me.  As I said, I just wanted to play music.  I didn’t really care what kind of music it was.  I really liked all kinds of music, and still do.  I had the great fortune, though, of getting a teacher named Ann Stanley, and Ann was a violinist in the Cleveland Orchestra.  She was also a very fine classical guitarist.  Well, the Cleveland Orchestra is one of the world’s finest, if not the best.  At that time, George Szell was the conductor, and he was running a tight ship there.  Obviously, to be in that orchestra, you had to be a very accomplished musician.  So Ann Stanley started teaching me not only the guitar, but teaching me music.  I continually come back to this.  What I’m trying to do is play music.  It just happens to be on the guitar.  The guitar is the instrument that’s expressing my music.  But first and foremost, it’s music, then secondly it’s the guitar.  Anyway, Ann trained me in music, not only the guitar.  She taught me some harmony, theory, the way rhythm works, subdivisions of the beat, and just gave me a very thorough education and really enabled me to teach myself and to define for myself music that I might encounter later.  What that meant was when I finally encountered the music of Charlie Parker I was able to break it down into its component parts and define it for myself, and then transfer that to the guitar.  That’s an invaluable thing to be able to do.  I had to do that, too, when I ran into Ornette’s music and Coltrane’s and then the AACM music.  I had to define what they were doing in musical terms.  I’m not talking about the emotion or anything like that, just the nuts and bolts of music.  I was able to take what they were doing and define it musically, theoretically, and then transfer that to the guitar.  Now, obviously, you have to know the finger-board really well to do that.  But by that time, I had digested a lot of Monk and Bud Powell, and those guys will get you into some different places, as will Bird, on the guitar.  So her training was invaluable.

 

TP: What were the ages when you were studying with her?

 

JE: I guess I was between 11 and 15.

 

TP: Do you remember how old you were when you encountered Charlie Parker’s music?

 

JE: Yeah.  I was still in high school.  I was 17.  I was born on December 21, 1951.

 

What had happened is that I’d started to gig then, in these little Rock bands, and we’d become quite popular so I was working quite a bit.  I was working a lot of weekends.

 

TP: Were you listening to Rock music in the same way, and taking it apart theoretically?

 

JE: Sure, I did that, too, to figure out what they were doing, but that wasn’t too hard, because that’s so limited.  But anyway, when Bird hit, I had already started to lose some interest in Rock.  It had a nice energy, especially back then in the ’60s.  Rock was really happening then.  It was pretty exploratory, with Hendrix and Cream and the Beatles groups like that.  But performing that music night-in, night-out, it can become extremely tedious and boring.  So what happened was, man, I just started getting bored to death.  I mean, harmonically you’re playing maybe five chords, and melodically…

 

Actually, I’m sorry.  Coinciding with my losing interest, becoming bored with Rock, I’d gotten really deeply into blues, old-time blues, like Son House and Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Skip James, all these Delta cats, and modern guys like Albert King, B.B. King, Magic Sam and a lot of those guys.  The blues was a lot more fun for me to play.  There was more you could do with that, and you could stretch out and play extended solos.  But then even that blues started to get a little boring, because that’s just your basic straight-up 12-bar blues where what you’re playing over it is basically pentatonic melodic material.  But you’re doing a lot with it.  You’re stretching it, bending it, and it’s… The message is probably the strongest thing in that music.

 

TP: Were you specific idiomatic blues gigs also on top of Rock?  You played with blues musicians?

 

JE: Yes.  After I kind of faded on the rock scene, I started… By now I was out of high school.

 

TP: So it’s about 1970, 1969…

 

JE: Well, I continued to do some blues gigs, but I had already heard Bird by that time.  The way that happened was, I ended up teaching at a music store that was owned by Bill DeArango in Cleveland.  I didn’t know of DeArango, I wasn’t into the music at that time, but I had gone into his store to buy a new instrument, and he heard me playing, and he asked me if I wanted to teach at his store.  I said, “Fine.”  So I started teaching there after school.  One day he gave me the changes to “Cherokee” and asked me to play the changes while he soloed over it.  So that was my first taste of anything that was not music I’d heard around the house or music that was not popular at that time.

 

TP: And what did you think?

 

JE: Well, I didn’t know what to think, man.  I heard all kinds of stuff going on.  I was just hanging on to those changes for dear life!  But I got more comfortable with it. Then he started to show me other stuff.  “All The Things You Are” was a big favorite of his.  Anyway, I told Bill I was getting really bored… I wasn’t getting bored with the blues because I knew it was a real strong thing, and somehow I knew that a lot more could be done with it.  I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew that there was more going on than what I was aware of.  So he said, “Listen to Lester Young.”  I got a double LP of Count Basie with the classic Lester Young stuff on them, and I dug it a lot.  I went home and learned some of the solos, like “One O’Clock Jump,” “Jumping At The Woodside” and “Every Tub.”  For me, it was a new way of looking at the blues at that time, even though by then it was like the late ’60s!  Can you imagine that?  By the late ’60s some kid hearing Lester Young from the late ’30s and thinking that’s a new approach.

 

TP: Well, qualitatively put your finger on how that was a new approach and how it would affect your aesthetic about music.

 

JE: Well, compared to the blues guitar music that I was hearing, first of all, Lester was using more notes.  As I said before, blues solos are pentatonic for the most part, using a five-note scale.  Lester Young was using notes that were beyond that pentatonic scale.  And the way he was using them, his placement of those notes and the way they swung and his sense of space, was all new to me.  I’d never heard anything like that.

 

TP: The phrasing and the linear playing.

 

JE: Yeah.  He was just using more musical elements in his solos than what I had been used to hearing out of the blues guitar solos.

 

So anyway, Prez led to Bird, and then when I heard Bird, it was like shocking.  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  First of all, it was a lot faster.  The energy was a lot higher.

 

TP: You could probably relate to that from the rock music.

 

JE: Definitely.  Man, that stuff… In fact, it smoked that rock stuff so bad!  I remember my rock musician friends saying, “Jesus, what’s wrong with Emery?  He’s going out there, listening to…”  They thought it was like old-time stuff, probably because the hi-fi aspect wasn’t that good. They weren’t really hearing the music.  They were just hearing scratches and pops and shit like that.  Bird took the music into a whole other realm rhythmically, playing on all the off-beats… His music is all over the place rhythmically.  It’s incredible, the drive and the swing of what he’s doing.  Then he’s using anything he wants to use musically.  All the elements are there.  Chromatic usage of melody, all the apoggiaturos, the little ornamentations.  Bird innovated in every area except form.  But he didn’t have to innovate and come up with new forms, because the existing forms were just fine with him.  He didn’t need to do anything in that area, because what he was doing fit perfectly with the existing forms, which as you know, were 12-bar blues, “I Got Rhythm” and show tunes…

 

TP: 32-bar.

 

JE: Yeah, 32-bar tunes by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Gershwin and so forth.

 

TP: Did you proceed to start immersing yourself in that language?

 

JE: Yeah, like never before.  Incredibly, at that time Charlie Parker’s music was not easy to get at all in Cleveland.  I had to mail order all his LP’s.  The first one I ever learned was “Bloomdido” by Bird and Diz.  It must have taken me about 12 hours just to get that 12-bar melody.  None of the music was available that I knew of, so I had to go the record player.  Fortunately, my record player slowed down to 16-2/3.

 

TP: Was DeArango helpful in this?

 

JE: Yes.  He didn’t show me any of the melodies, but he helped me with the changes and he helped me with just the playing of the music.  But I still had to go get those melodies together myself, and it was a long time before I could play something like that at tempo.  Because it’s very difficult.  They used to put down guys, saying, “Oh, man, he sounds just like Bird.”  Well, to just play the instrument like Charlie Parker, you have to be a helluva musician.”

 

TP: There seem to have been a number of like-minded musicians around Cleveland, not least of whom was Lovano…

 

JE: I wish I’d known Lovano.  He was doing it, too.

 

TP: But did you start to get together with a cadre of Cleveland musicians, being able to play jazz?

 

JE: Yes, I did.  There was a bass player named David Johnson, and he and I became real good buddies.  We were running buddies.  He later played electric bass with Roy Ayres, and moved to New Jersey for a while, and then he went back to Cleveland.  David and I were doing gigs.  There was a trumpet player  named Kenny Davis with whom I worked, who was a very good player, but I didn’t work with him very much.  I really looked up to guys like Bill Dobbins and Ernie Krivda and Val Kent, who had a group called Omnibus with David Johnson.  These guys blew me away.  They were playing the music that was happening then.  Like, “Freedom Jazz Dance” was a big thing.  Miles-oriented stuff, but the current Miles.  Filles de Kilmanjaro and Nefertiti.  Then Joe Lovano started playing with them, but I had already left town by that time.

 

Everything I ran into, I just went crazy over.  And Bird led to everything after that — Miles, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean.

 

TP: So a lot of your influences are saxophone players and piano players.

 

JE: Yes.  It’s the musicality.  I’ll come back to that again.  It’s the music that I hear that captures me, not necessarily the instrument that it’s played on.

 

TP: You’re talking about getting into the blues guitarists real deeply.  Who were some of the jazz people?

 

JE: Well, obviously, I got into some jazz guitar players just because I would hear them playing the kind of music I wanted to play.  Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery were the two cats I heard who got me.  They were playing the music in a real honest, natural way.  I heard the music that I’ve come to deeply love, started by Bird, being playing on the guitar in a… They were just killin’ it, man, and that’s what I dug.  I don’t know what I could say about them, except that they were just playing the hell out of the music — in their way, with their own voice.  That’s another thing about Bird, just reading things he’d said, that what it’s all about is trying to find your own voice.  It’s about what you think and what you feel, not about doing what somebody else has already done.  Even though you have to come out of something, the idea is to add your voice and to bring that forth.

 

TP: So you’re about 20 years old, playing jazz in Cleveland, and you hear Ornette around this time?

 

JE: I’d probably heard Ornette earlier than that.

 

TP: Were you feeling constrained in any way by the forms you were playing in?

 

JE: Not necessarily.  It was just something new, but something that related to Bird, and just something different.  I did like the idea, though, that it felt good to not have to always refer to an older form.  For me to just play and to not have to think about the form so much, that felt nice, and it was kind of liberating.  That’s what I was hearing people do anyway.  Miles’ group at that time and Trane… Coltrane, by the time he got to Expression wasn’t playing on a form any more.

 

TP: He and Ornette Coleman had very different approaches to making music.  Let’s re-address Ornette, Ornette leading into the AACM music, and you applied that to your next move, which is what seems like happened.

 

JE: Well, I did the same thing with Ornette that I did with Bird.  I started to learn all his compositions, as many as I could.  Some of them I really couldn’t play on the instrument, like “Change of the Century” or “Moon Inhabitants.”  Maybe I could play them nowadays, but back then I couldn’t.  I thought, “Man, this stuff is too fast for me, it’s too foreign” — but I dug it.

 

Anyway, I just kept moving with it, man, then I heard Cecil Taylor, and that opened another possibility, a whole world of music.  Cecil seemed to be dealing with this kind of molten energy, but that still had a lot of integrity to it harmonically.  But the energy was what captivated me with him, and just that the music had a certain sound to it that was really evocative.  I’m talking about Conquistador and Air, that early group with Archie Sheep, and Unit Structures I dug too.

 

I was catching up with the present, basically.  I had come from deep in the past with Lester Young, one thing led to another, and finally I caught up with the current day.  First of all, Miles was happening.  He was going into a Rock thing at that time, like Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, and I dug that.  But on the other hand, he was Roscoe Mitchell doing this Sound thing.  There’s a piece on there called Ornette, and it was Roscoe’s take on Ornette and what Ornette had done and the melodicism there.  Man, the way those guys soloed on that was really wild!  What they were doing with the music was exciting and tremendously intriguing to me.  All the music I’ve talked about just touched me.  It vibrated with me, and I knew it was something that I wanted to get into.

 

TP: Did you have people you could do that with in Cleveland?

 

JE: Not that stuff.

 

TP: Was there any residue from Albert Ayler, Bobby Few, Frank Wright having been there?  Did that inflect the scene in any way.

 

JE: Probably it inflected the scene, but I wasn’t a part of that scene.  Whatever scene that was still resonating with, I wasn’t on that scene.  I was probably too young for some of those cats.

 

TP: I know Lovano knew people like Bobby Few.

 

JE: Joe was lucky because he had his dad.  His dad hipped him to all kinds of stuff, man.  That was a helluva scene.  He was incredibly lucky to be in a house where to find out something he wanted to know about music, he just had to go upstairs and ask his dad.  I just had to lay with that record player in the basement and figure it out for myself!  I wore out a lot of records.  They sound like hell.

 

TP: Let’s talk about moving from Cleveland.

 

JE: I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere with my career in Cleveland.  I mean, I could have stayed there and continued to do what I was doing, but I knew I was supposed… For one  thing, my parents took myself and my brothers and sisters to New York in 1964 to the World’s Fair, and I said, “Man, this is my scene here; I’m coming here as soon as I can.”  So I knew I wanted to live in New York. [LAUGHS] I didn’t know what I wanted to do there, but I knew I wanted to live there, because it was so fast.  I loved the pace.  All the big buildings and all the people, man… I dug it.  So I wanted to move to New York anyway.  It turned out that the guys I wanted to play with, the AACM cats, they were moving to New York by the early ’70s, and Leroy was one of the first guys to get there.  They formed the Revolutionary Ensemble in 1971, when they did Vietnam.  Anyway, I went to New York to play with the cats and to make my statement and let my scene happen.

 

TP: You got to New York in ’74?

 

JE: Yeah.

 

TP: Did you know anyone?

 

JE: No, I didn’t know a single soul.  I went to Brooklyn, ended up in Brooklyn for two months, and just to make ends meet while I was there I got a job on a shoe truck selling steel-toed safety shoes to Con Ed workers.

 

[END OF SIDE 1]

 

Before I got to New York, I’d moved to Massachusetts.  My best friend from high school went to Amherst, which is up in the five-college area, and I started playing with kind of an avant-garde group up there.  One of the main things that I got when I was up there… I was just turned on to, as always, music that I liked.  I didn’t care who was doing it or where it was coming from.  If there was something there that I heard, I really dug it.  So at that time I got into Boulez and Schoenberg and Webern and people like that, and I’m still into them a lot.  Alban Berg is a monster.  I’ve been studying the Lulu Suite.  So I heard something there that was close to…well, obviously very different from Bird and Monk… But I read that Monk said they were influenced by that stuff.

 

TP: I know Parker certainly was.  I know stories where he’d sit down with Stravinsky records and dissect it.

 

JE: Well, he called Mingus up one time, and he was improvising along with the Vercuse movement of The Firebird Suite.  Anyway, I started to get into that music, too, living in Massachusetts in 1972, doing local gigs.  But I was running into New York every chance I got, just scoping out the scene.  Ornette had his loft then on Prince Street, and I was going to stuff there.  Later, after I moved to New York in 1973, I met Ornette and hung out with him through Leroy.  Leroy opened the door for me, man.  Leroy had an ad in the Voice for students, and I called him up and said, “I want to come over and take lessons.”   So I went over.  Lessons basically amounted to us playing his music.  He’d pull out what he was writing, and we’d play it and talk about it.  He dug that I was already into Roscoe and Braxton and people like that, and I was playing their music.  I had begun taking Braxton heads off the record by ear, like I’d done with Bird, Ornette and everybody else.

 

TP: On that 1991 record, Braxton sounds like a big influence on you, like his Kelvin stuff.

 

JE: Well, I basically recorded that to document that music.  Because that’s a lot older.  A lot of that music is from like the late ’70s and early ’80s.  But Braxton’s definitely an influence on me, no doubt about that.

 

TP: You’d been checking out the New York scene and watching the influx of musicians from Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, which was starting to happen right then.

 

JE: Yes, it was. 

 

TP: Let’s address the milieu in New York during that period.

 

JE: It was so hip, man.  I was very fortunate to meet Leroy.  I’d been in Brooklyn for two months, then I moved over into a cheap hotel in the West Village because I wanted to be in Manhattan.  Then Leroy got me the apartment right above his at 18 Bedford Street, and I stayed in there for twenty years over Leroy.  For about a year, Jerome Cooper was a roommate of mine.  So I was right in that Revolutionary Ensemble scene, just checking out the way these cats operated, the way they were approaching the music.  I was living the stuff, right in there with these cats.

 

TP: When did you start gigging in New York, first affiliations?

 

JE: Kalaparusha was the first guy I worked with.  I worked with Kalaparusha for nine months, with Warren Smith on percussion and Milton Suggs occasionally on bass.

 

Anyway, that was the greatest time in New York for me.  It was unbelievable.  I started hooking up with all kinds of people.  I started teaching at Karl Berger’s Creative Music Studio in 1974.  He heard me play with Kalaparusha, and he didn’t have a guitar teacher up there.  CMS was kind of loose, and you could learn what… They didn’t have a structured curriculum in place yet.  But what it presented to the students was an opportunity to meet all these guys who were really playing.  I started playing with Karl and teaching up there, and I did a couple of gigs with Ed Blackwell and David Izenson on bass, and Dave Holland — a lot of great players, man.

 

But in New York I’d been playing with Kalaparusha, and that led to my going to La Mama Theater a lot and becoming part of the Human Arts Ensemble.  The basic core group was Bobo Shaw, Joseph Bowie, Luther Thomas, Lindberg and myself.  But Lester Bowie and George Lewis did a lot of gigs with us in New York.  It was blasting.  Philip Wilson would play percussion sometimes, and Bluiett or Hemphill would play.

 

TP: It was all very loose configurations.  Anyone would play with anyone.

 

JE: It was awesome.  New York was everything I thought that it would be.  Anyone was playing with anyone.  If you could play, the scene… There were so many people coming to New York and making their statement.  That’s one of the key things it was about at that time.  It was about who you are and what do you have to say that’s personal to you on your instrument, not can you cut these changes or play some music of the past.  It was so exploratory and creative.  It was really about creative music at that time.  But I didn’t think that in just a few years the whole scene would be shut down and all these lofts would be closed up, and this glorious growth period would come to an end.  I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been a part of that.

 

One of the hippest things, I thought, was Studio Rivbea.  I thought that was the hippest place of them all.  In fact, Sam Rivers was doing some of the most incredible music, man.  As I look back on it, Sam’s stuff was some of the heaviest that went down.  Just the relentless creativity and energy that he played with.

 

TP: He starts with a tabula rasa, then does a suite and fills it out on each of his instruments.

 

JE: Yeah, and the content of what he’s playing on those instruments is really deep.  Back then, he was doing it with so much energy and passion.  It had a freshness that sounded like they were just hitting it for the first time, but it was backed up with a lot of integrity and ability, and it never got boring or labored at all.  But that didn’t have a lot of the compositional aspects that were very attractive to me, too.

 

TP: The compositional aspects started actualizing when you hooked up with Lindberg?

 

JE: Well, no, with Roscoe, Braxton and Muhal.  I always thought that one of the main things about them was that the composition was in balance with the improvisation, and it’s something I’ve always strived for since then in my own music, is to not let one aspect outweigh the other, and try to get some balance.  Also, what you could draw from compositionally could be anything.  That’s something that Cecil Taylor said that I took to heart, was that you could really draw from anything.  Just let it be yours and use it in your way to further what you’re trying to express.  Don’t just copy it.  You can take someone else’s technique, apply it to your own music, and have it further your own voice and make it your own.  They were drawing from all kinds of sources.  Like, Braxton’s really into Stockhausen and all that music; it’s certainly informed what he does.

 

The music by that time I thought was just exploding past any kind of boundaries.  I see the music as this gigantic tree which has roots and a big trunk and major branches, and then these branches have flowered out into all kinds of like exotic growths.  But it’s still all a part of the same tree.  It came from the same place.  Hybrids have come out, too.

 

TP: I want to talk about your aesthetic starts to take shape out of this raw material.

 

JE: That’s a good question.  I’m not sure how it happened.  It was pretty organic, though; I’ll tell you that.

 

TP: Did it come through setting up situations where you had to come up with things, and what came out started to come out, i.e., in the String Trio.

 

JE: Yeah, just creating situations to have your music played.  So what you’re trying to do is express the music that you’re hearing inside your own head, and trying to bring that forth.  To me, that goes way back.  When I was a little kid, maybe 3 or 4 years old, I can remember hearing music just in my head that was fascinating to me.  My memory of it is some of the hippestI stuff I ever heard in my life!  That was stimulating, very stimulating.

 

TP: Let’s talk about the musicians who are on this record, a few words about each.  Chris Speed, who I imagine is a much more recent acquaintance than Marty Ehrlich.

 

JE: Chris is a lot younger than Marty and he hasn’t been on the scene as long, but he is old beyond his years, I think, in that he can play the whole tradition of the instrument but he’s also got an ear to what’s happening right now in the music.  Essentially he’s been through and has assimilated all kinds of stuff on his instrument, and he’s been able to find and to strengthen and refine his own voice on both tenor and clarinet.  He’s one of the young guys who really wants to play music and is not worried about any kind of boundaries on it.  I think he’ll follow his musical instincts wherever they might lead.  That’s really the kind of person I’m interested in playing with.  If it goes into maybe an area that’s not swinging or it’s not blues, they don’t say, “Oh, I’m not going to go here because this doesn’t swing or this isn’t blues.”  He’s not like that.  He’ll go wherever the music goes.  Certainly I don’t always want to play music that isn’t swinging or that isn’t blues-informed, but I don’t only want to do that.  So Chris is one of the young people who is in tune with what I want to do, and that’s why I’ve got him.

 

TP: Marty has been well-known for years as a musician who can play something that sounds like it’s his primary focus on almost any style of music, and can make any instrument sound like his instrument.

 

JE: Isn’t that something?  I really admire that, how he can get a handle on something so quickly, and have something of meaning to say.  I met Marty at Ali’s Alley probably in 1976.  I was playing there with the Human Arts Ensemble.  This is before John joined the group.  We had another bass player, an electric bass player from St. Louis.  Anyway, Marty came up and introduced himself to me, and had some complimentary words.  I’d already been aware of his playing, his name anyway, through the Under The Sun record.  He was still in Boston at the time. So we go way back together.  We first played together in ’78 on this seminal Braxton big band tour.  Anyway, this Braxton thing brought a lot of people together.  It was like 23 people.  I’m sure none of us will ever forget that, to be able to play the music on that level and to rehearse it as much as we did.  We had three solid days of rehearsal, so that stuff was really up-and-running by the time we hit it.  It took a bunch of us to Europe for the first time on a high level.  Braxton was really hot at that time, Jazz Musician of the Year and Record of the Year and all that kind of stuff.

 

Anyway, I’ve known Marty since then, and he played in some of my earliest groups.  Actually, my very first group concert of playing my own music and all my own stuff in New York was in 1980, at the Peace Church.  It was with Ray Anderson, J.D. Parran and Robert Dick.  So it was three winds and guitar.  Also, that’s one of the instrumentations you used to encounter earlier at that time.  Then you had all kinds of weird instruments and unusual combinations going down.

 

It was like paradise for an improvising musician in the ’70s in New York.  It was like anything goes.

 

TP: Anything you’d think of, you could probably realize it and hear it, a big-big workshop.

 

JE: Yeah, you could do it!  And you could gig in New York like crazy, too.  You could go on tour and never leave the island.  That was hip, man.  I mean, we used to work all the time.  It was probably the hippest thing since 52nd Street, in my opinion.

 

TP: Say something about Kevin Norton.

 

JE: Norton can read on these instruments, which is important.  To play on this record, you have to be a good reader, and you have to be able to make statements in a variety of different areas as an improviser, to play in different situations, and to be able to execute music on a variety of levels.  He can do that.  There really aren’t very many mallet players who can on the one hand execute technically on a high level, but then also improvise on a high level.

 

The same thing goes for violinists, which leads me to Feldman.  I consider myself an expert on improvising violinists.  The String Trio of New York is for jazz violinists probably what Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers was for young horn players.  We’ll take them in for a number of years, show them the ropes, take them on the road, get them recorded, and then we’ll cut them loose or they’ll cut themselves loose, and they’ll go on to other things.  Feldman can do what I just describe.  He can execute the music flawlessly and improvise his ass off in a variety of situations.

 

TP: Formanek and Marty have these qualities.

 

JE: Right.  How can you lose with guys like that.  I really challenged them, though, by putting some music out there.  I just wrote what I wanted to write, without any other kinds of considerations.  Now, I thought about who was going to be playing it.  If I had some other guys on some of those instruments, I wouldn’t be able to write the music I wrote because it couldn’t be executed.  So I had to have the highest-level guys, because just to play some of this music, you have to be really up on your instrument.  I’m not talking about improvising now.  I’m just talking about interpreting the written music.  You have to have your instrument totally down.  This is something we’ve come to now at this point in the music.  You’ve got to have your instrument down in both areas, in my opinion, to be functioning at the highest levels of the music now.  It’s like Duke said a long time ago, that the musician in the future is going to have to have one foot in the university and one foot in the street.

 

TP: Well, Feldman, Formanek and Hemingway didn’t do the university thing.

 

JE: Well, the reference to the university is not a literal thing.  And me either.  I went to university for not a long time; I never got a degree… It doesn’t matter where you learn it, just so you learn it — however you get it together.  Lindberg, too.  He’s a dropout of middle-school!  The university is just a metaphor for having your instrument together in what they call a legit sense, to be able to read anything, or most things, and then to be able to execute those things with a high percentage of accuracy, 90%-95% accuracy.

 

TP: Well, you do write some gnarly music.

 

JE: Yeah!

 

TP: Why don’t we talk about the tunes, and tell me something structurally about them.

 

JE: These were all written in 1995-96, all pretty much in a year’s space on this Guggenheim Fellowship.  It’s a good chunk of bread, like 30,000 bucks, and you don’t have to think about anything else for a year.  From May to May, all you have to do is write music.  So I turned myself loose and spent a lot of time writing that music.  Even I was gigging a lot with the String Trio, but that’s been ongoing for a long time, spending time on the road touring with that group, I was able to devote a lot of time to these pieces.

 

Part 1 of “Red Spaces In A Blue Field” deals with four or five motifs, and it’s kind of a cut-and-paste method of putting those ideas together, and also with giving you increasingly longer hearings of those motifs.  At first you’ll just hear a little bit, then it will be another one for a little bit, and then the next one.  Then as the piece evolves, you get to hear more and more of the material that it’s all based on.  There’s a number of techniques that I’ve used, just regular compositional techniques, nothing real revolutionary or anything like that.  There’s changing time signatures, counterpoint, tempo changes, and a couple of different kinds of improvisation — some small group collectives.  Basically, I have a solo at the end of that, which I remember putting in that score “quirky obbligati.”  Just coming up with some off-the-wall, kind of wacko obbligati to my improvisation.  Just come up with something that’s different than what you would ordinarily play.  Unusual kinds of things, is what I asked for.  A great deal of that is written, too.  All the horn parts where you’re hearing counterpoint between the flute and the clarinet are written, but it doesn’t sound like it.  One of the things that fascinates me now… Actually, I’ve been after this for a long time, man, and I’m not unique in this.  But it’s the interstices of composition and improvisation, where these two come together and their identities start to blur, and improvised sections take on a composed aspect.  Spontaneous composition is an old definition of improvisation, but it has the integrity of something that’s been composed.  Composed stuff takes on an improvised cast by the way it’s played.  It’s not very rigid and it doesn’t sound like somebody’s reading it.  That really happens with what Chris and Marty are playing.  It’s got an improvised kind of feeling to it, but it isn’t improvised.  In fact, there’s compositional aspects running through everything I wrote for the septet, and a lot of it is played over composed music.  So I really worked hard on the composition on this one.

 

TP: That dovetails very neatly into the Mingus piece.

 

JE: Well, I was just dealing with Part 1.  But then Part 2 goes into this older music, which is original to me.  I wrote all the melodies and the changes and everything that’s going on in the background.  But it’s really from another era, and obviously it’s influenced by Monk and Mingus and Ellington.  Do you hear that?

 

TP: Yes.  That’s why I thought it was a seamless transition to “Farwell,” which I recognize as explicitly Mingus because of his signature melodic motif.

 

JE: Well, there’s a good 3-4 second space.  Well, Part 2 of “Red Spaces” is definitely coming out of that vibe.  It’s a 40-bar form.  It’s a 32-bar form, but I added 8 bars to the bridge.  I made it a 16-bar bridge, which makes it a 40-bar form.  There are various other additions and reconfigurations.  Then I broke the solos up, giving Marty the first 16, I got the next 24, the bridge and the last A, then Feldman has the first two A’s, the first 16 of the next chorus, then we’re all back on the bridge, and the bridge on the out head is more elaborately orchestrated.  There’s also an insert of material which is in groupings of five eighth notes.  It’s the one that has a very strident chord on the end.  It’s got a mysterious but tonal flavor all the way through, and then for the last chord it’s like… Well, you’ll hear it.

 

The Mingus piece comes right after that.  Looking back, Mingus was one of the very first guys, at least in… If Duke Ellington is not “modern jazz,” which I’m not so sure about anyway, then Mingus is one of the first people to write compositions that start in one place and end somewhere completely different.  Which is something that the AACM guys and the modernist composers in jazz have really taken to heart, to not play a head and everybody blow on it, then not play the same head going out.  That worked for a long time, it’s still cool, but there’s a lot of other things you can do, too.

 

Sue Mingus tells me he got his first Guggenheim for this piece, “Farwell, Mill Valley.”  It goes through all kinds of section.  He really let his imagination run wild. It was a beautiful piece.  It was a pleasure for me to orchestrate it for my own group.  I worked off a three-part transcription to come up with my orchestration.  I had to spend a lot of time listening to the original which is on Mingus Dynasty, which has “Slop”, “Diane”, “Song With Orange,” “Gunslinging Bird.”  It had a different LP title.  It’s for 11-12 piece groups, and just a killer.  It’s the most compositionally challenging and exploratory piece on that record.  I’ve always loved that piece, that whole record, and Mingus in general, because he’s bringing composition to the forefront along with great improvisation.  There’s more of a balance there.

 

TP: Then you have a solo piece, “Cosmology.”

 

JE: “Cosmology” is the most recent writing on the record.  I tried to get an energy on that piece.  It’s loosely based on a set of chord changes in the blowing section, the blowing section being… I tried to get this flow going of very rapidly lines.  I had material, melodic and motivic material that appealed to me, and juggled them around and tried to come up with the best sequencing of the ideas.  I got a little vamp in there that’s kind of a mysterious Bud Powell-ish vamp that has a certain amount of tension in it and a dark kind of mood.  Anyway, I think I came up with a successful performance.

 

I still do solo concerts, not frequently, but I’ve done five or six in the last couple of months.  The thing I love about playing is that you don’t have anyone to fall back on.  You have the whole thing.  You’ve got to keep it moving by yourself.  You need a lot of material; at least I do.  But the beauty of it is that you don’t have to coordinate with anyone else.  You don’t have to be locked in with a rhythm section or any other instrument.  So if you want to take like a hard left turn from the existing material, you can, and you don’t have to worry about anyone else following you there — so you don’t have to coordinate with anyone else.  That’s one of the beauties of solo playing.

 

TP: Talk about the dynamics of acoustic playing vis-a-vis electric.

 

JE: I feel I can express what I’m trying to express more easily on the acoustic guitar.  It speaks better for what I’m trying to do.  The kinds of shapes I’m trying to make and the devices I’m trying to play come out better on the acoustic.  Chords sound better.  I kind of look at the guitar as somewhere between a piano and a horn, the lower register being more like a bass or the low end of a cello — and the whole thing is like a piano.  You also get this dynamic thing in the softer shades that is pretty damn hard to do on an electric guitar, if not impossible.  It seems like I’ve always noticed when groups are playing electric, when they’re plugged in, there’s a certain dynamic below which they will never go.  There’s whole worlds of dynamics.

 

TP: It’s true.  Even Frisell or Joe Morris or guys like that.  It’s true.

 

JE: Yeah.  Who are really fine players.  They’re just not going to get down there.

 

TP: I guess your feeling for acoustic guitar emanates obviously from your early Classical training.

 

JE: Oh yeah.  I’ve always played acoustic guitar.  That’s what I started on and that’s what I’m going to end on.  The electric’s been fun in those places where I’ve played it, and I still like to play it sometimes, even though I haven’t performed on electric since ’91.  There’s a good chance that I won’t perform on it any more, because I’m happy playing acoustic guitar.  Every now and then I have to plug it in, when I’m playing with drums or horns or something.  But for the most part, in all the String Trio concerts, John and Diane are completely acoustic and I still have to mike my instrument.  But I just mike it enough to bring it to the level of the violin.  I mean, you wouldn’t believe how softly you can play an acoustic guitar.  I mean, no one might hear it but you and the person sitting next to you, but you can play it really softly.  The thing about when you can play really soft is that you can play really fast, too.  It’s hard to play… I think Trane is probably the only one who could play really fast and really loud at the same time.  Dolphy, too.  So it expresses what I want to express.

 

TP: “Chromosphere” is kind of an involved composition.

 

JE: The melodic material that you hear in Chromosphere is almost all derived from augmented chord formations, built on major thirds.  It produces kind of a sound.  You’d know the sound,, but you might know what musical devices you would need to bring into play to produce that sound.  So it’s built harmonically and melodically on augmented triads.  The other big thing that’s happening in it is that there is a lot of counterpoint going on.  In fact, the working title of that piece was “Augmented Counterpoint.”  Chromosphere is the surface of a star.  We have atmosphere; they have chromosphere.

 

TP: Is there a metaphorical component to the use of augmented thirds and counterpoint with the atmosphere of a star?

 

JE: Well, we’re trying to play it in a burning way.  I tried to burn on that baby.

 

TP: You’ve been performing a lot of Monk, with the String Trio record, and you recorded “Crepuscule.”

 

JE: I may do a Monk record.  I’ve written a bunch of Monk music applied to the guitar, and tried to get as close to Monk as possible, and I sent the charts off to Lacy.  He said that he had never seen better, but he had seen a lot worse.  Anyway, I’m probably going to do a Monk record at some point.  Some of it will be solo, there will be some small groups.  I’ve got a bunch of the charts together now.  I’m using Monk’s voicings.

 

Anyway, “Trinkle Tinkle” was a blast to do.  Off the record, I think I’d do it with bass being in there. even though that group got a nice sound.  It’s swinging!

 

TP: I thought having the marimba in there was pretty inspired.

 

JE: Right.  That was a hip thing.  But I still miss that bass.  That’s the underpinning.  Gerry’s swinging, and he’s got a killer bass drum, which helped a lot.  Anyway, I like the performance we came up with, and it was nice to be able to do it in a different color, which the combination of those instruments lent itself to.

 

TP: “Standing On A Whale” is common to… You used to work a lot with Anthony Davis, and I wonder if there’s a gamelan root to it.  I was trying to count the time signature.

 

JE: It’s really 4/4.  The confusion is because of the way the rhythms are layered.  It’s subdivided, and the layering just syncopates it in a different way.  There are some meter changes, but that whole opening section is 4/4.  I really deconstructed that piece a lot, and as I was saying before, I stuck with a few ideas that I had in there, recast them, and just used the principles of orchestration to make that composition.  There’s an interesting thing that goes on.  The improvisational strategy is one where there are three distinct sections, and there’s different written music for each section, and the improvisations take place over the written stuff.  Check out the improvisational strategy.

 

In the beginning, after the bass plays the opening exposition of the melody, then that melody is chopped into component parts, and it’s separated by rhythmic elements that stem from the beginning also, but that are expanded harmonically.  Then there’s an extended counterpoint section, where you hear the same melody again, but this time with a counterpoint line, which is also constructed out of materials that were used to make up the initial line.  It’s actually so much fun, Ted.  Once you’ve got your raw materials that you’re going to make a composition out of where you want them to be, then you can just take those materials and go wild with them, let your imagination just run.  If you’ve got really strong structural materials that’s going to be your foundation of the piece, then you can create quite an elaborate structure on top of that.

 

TP: “Kathelin Gray” is the opposite of an elaborate structure.

 

JE: All we did was play the piece down.  I think it’s Ornette’s most beautiful composition.  We did it pretty fast.  There’s really not a lot to say about that.  We didn’t blow on it, I didn’t do anything to it except harmonize it on the guitar so I could play the changes and chord melody stuff.

 

TP: “Sound Action Seven” is a very involved piece.

 

JE: “Sound Action Seven” is written where everyone gets a master score and a key to some of the symbols that are in the score.  I used non-traditional notation in that as well as some traditional notation methods.  Also there are sections in which verbal explanations of sound activity are given.

 

TP: So this seems to stem most directly out of your experience with the AACM music.

 

JE: Definitely.

 

TP: It doesn’t really sound like any of it, it just has the vibe, as opposed to the Kelvinesque pieces…

 

JE: Okay.  Well, the thing is, I learned to write that way through playing some of Braxton’s music and Leo Smith’s music.  Marty and I were also in one of Leo’s groups in the mid-’80s.  So it was through the experience of playing them and seeing what sort of results they got, and how they got those results, through what kind of information they gave the player… How do you get an ensemble to produce certain music, and what kind of information do you give to get the results you want to get.  So I learned that from them.  But they’ve got their own ways of doing it, and I learned the basics of it.  Then you find things you want to do that work better for you.  So I’ve organized it in own way.

 

To me, playing music like that is just so exciting, and I get such a kick out of it, because you can bring all your forces to bear.  You can play any sound that you can play on your instrument.  Everything is appropriate — with taste, of course.  So you can bring all your forces to bear in music like that.  I feel that the composition and the improvisation is very balanced in that piece.

 

TP: Let’s talk about “Strings Of Thread.”  How did you do it differently than on the other record?

 

JE: Both “Strings of Thread” and “Standing On A Whale, Fishing For Minnows” were originally written for the septet.  When I did them in the quartet I had to use reduced versions.  I couldn’t have all the parts I had in the septet.

 

TP: You had Hemingway doubling on marimba.

 

JE: Right, on the quartet.  He didn’t have to do that on the septet.  Also, you didn’t hear the violin and tenor parts on the quartet version.  Other than that, it’s pretty much the same.  It’s a set of changes that move, and it’s kind of a deceptive cadence that continues throughout the harmonic cycle, and a 20-bar form.  It’s got kind of a South American rhythm to it, a lilting rhythm, and what I think of as a bittersweet kind of melody.  Henry Threadgill has done some stuff like that, too.  I felt this coming out of me.  I never intended to write a piece like that.  I had that basic chord structure and I was hearing parts of those melodies, so that piece just started to come out!

 

TP: What’s interesting is that you’re using a lot of involved structures in composing, but there’s a real melodic component.  If I could compare the stuff on the electric record with this, it seems you’ve come much more towards melody.

 

JE: But I thought that material was melodic, too.

 

TP: I think the electronic effects and synth stuff turned me off. 

 

JE: If I did some of that stuff acoustically, it would be a whole different ballgame.  One of the things I didn’t dig is that people were judging the music on the sound of it rather than the content.  There’s a lot of melodic material on there.

 

TP: Well, the String Trio has always had a lot to do with melody.  Maybe you’re forced to because of the violin and the instrumentation.  Maybe I can get some reflections from you on how your compositional sensibilities may have formed within the String Trio.

 

JE: One of the things that’s important to me about the String Trio is that it’s enabled me to grow as an artist by performing my music and the music of my colleagues, obviously, year-in and year-out.  There’s no substitute for that.  You can rehearse and practice as much as you want, but you’ve got to be performing the music, I think, to really grow.  That’s why I’ve devoted so much time and energy into the String Trio over these years, because I’ve wanted to grow and not remain in one place, and I realize the way to do that is through performing.  The String Trio, fortunately, has always had opportunities.  There’s always a certain number of gigs that we could do year-in, year-out, no matter what was going on.  This group has always worked.

 

So it’s being in that group has enabled me to grow as an artist, but it’s also enabled me to perform music that’s unusual and outside the so-called norm, and exploratory music.  The way we do it in the String Trio is that obviously we don’t just perform one kind of music.  It’s not all totally out-there, uncompromising music.  We mix it up.  Especially after Charles Burnham joined the group after Bang in 1986, then we started bringing in some Monk and Mingus and so forth, mainly because we could do it.

 

TP: He’s a more formally trained musician.

 

JE: Bang couldn’t do that and make it sound right.  So with each change in the violin chair in the String Trio, we’ve been able to take on a whole nother aspect of repertoire that we weren’t able to do before that change.  So the group has continued to grow.  And I’ve learned a lot through writing for that group, and seeing what works and what doesn’t work.  Being able to perform compositions over a period of years, you learn about these pieces, what’s good and what isn’t good.  I mean, some of these pieces have been in our repertoire for over ten years.

 

TP: Lasting 20 years is quite an accomplishment in and of itself as an ensemble performing improvised music.  When I raised this with you, you got a little salty with me.  You said, “Well, I didn’t just survive; I’ve been flourishing.”  I again want to talk to you about surviving and flourishing for 25 years as a performing improvising musician.

 

JE: I’ve got it broken down to a four-part plan.  The first part is talent.  You’ve obviously got to have something happening that people want to listen to.  You’ve got to have something that has integrity and beauty and strength.  All the qualities that make a good musician.  You’ve got to have that, first of all.  But then you’ve got to work hard, man.  I mean, you’ve got to be single-minded in your pursuit of getting your music out there, getting it heard, and playing.  That’s the second part — hard work.  The third part is desire.  You’ve got to want it!  Without that… You can have the first two, but if you don’t really-really want it, you’re not going to be able to pay your dues and hang in there and get through the bad times, man.  There were some times when I went hungry and I didn’t have electricity for like 14 months.

 

TP: Because you had to play this music.

 

JE: Because that’s all I wanted to do.  I didn’t care.

 

TP: You didn’t want to go out on the road with Jack McDuff for six months or something.

 

JE: Well, I probably would have done that if I could have.  I didn’t have the opportunity!  But I was okay with that, because that’s what I really wanted to do — and I did it.  Desire is the third thing, and the last thing is luck.  Circumstances have to come together.  The only control you have over that is putting yourself in the best position and just trying to live right and keep your stars aligned.  There’s only so much you can do about luck.  You can have control… I guess you can’t make yourself desire something.  You can make yourself work hard… To me, you need those four things.

 

TP: I think the important thing is that you have to do it, the inner necessity.

 

JE: Compulsion.

 

TP: And I gather that for you, there’s never been a moment where music wasn’t going to be your life.

 

JE: There hasn’t been.  That’s correct.  There was never any doubt about it.  I knew I was going to be a musician when I was 6.  When I started playing the organ, I said to myself, “Man, this is it.  This is going to be your life.”  Because it brought me so much joy and made me feel so good that I knew that was going to be it, at that point.  So then I just had to go to work on it.  But it’s always been a labor of love.

 

TP: It sounds like you’ve been able to please yourself and hone in on whatever sound was on your mind at any given time.

 

JE: Yes.  So I consider myself very fortunate.

 

For the 69th Birthday Anniversary of Pianist James Williams (March 8, 1951-July 20, 2004), A Pair of Interviews Conducted For The albums “Jazz Dialogues” and “Memphis Convention”

To honor the 69th birthday anniversary of pianist-composer James Williams (March 8, 1951-July 20, 2004), I’ve posted my liner notes for a magnificent 4-CD set of duos that he self-produced in 2003, titled Jazz Dialogues, as well as the interview that I conducted with him for the project. I’ve also posted a comprehensive 17,000-word interview that we did in 1993, when James asked me to write the liner notes for a pair of albums  (DIW) devoted to Memphis, Tennessee, his hometown — Memphis Piano Convention featured solo performances by “Memphis school” pianists Donald Brown, Harold Mabern, Mulgrew Miller, Charles Thomas, Russell Wilson, and James himself; while on Memphis Convention James convened those pianists as well as saxophonists George Coleman and Bill Easley, trumpeter Bill Mobley, and guitarist Calvin Newborn with the stellar bass-drum pairing of Jamil Nasser and Tony Reedus.

James was a very important person to me. He was frequently my guest on WKCR (someday I have to  transcribe the interviews we did on several Musician Shows and a Sunday profile), but also brought musicians who were important to him (Charles Thomas, as an example) to the station for interviews and profiles, particularly when he was booking his favorite pianists into Bradley’s, where he was an essential member of the rotation. The Memphis Convention dates were my second-ever liner notes, coming 12 years after I was given the opportunity to write the notes for Art Blakey’s Album of the Year. James was extremely giving, kind, gracious person, and a magnificent talent. He is missed.

One of my favorite tunes by James is “Alter Ego,” which Roy Hargrove recorded early in his career. I’ve linked to a youtube clip of a performance of “Alter Ego” performed live at Bradley’s by a trio in which James and Robert Hurst sidemanned for guitarist Kevin Eubanks. If you look very closely at the cover photograph, by Jimmy Katz, you may be able to discern the shadowy profiles of two women — one is my late wife, Donna Sturm, the other is her best friend, Lezlie Harrison.

I don’t have time to do full fact-checking or spell-checking on these texts, but will certainly respond to remarks from those who read this.

 

Liner Notes for Jazz Dialogues:

In January 2001, his fiftieth birthday fast approaching, James Williams decided to give himself, in his words, “an early birthday gift.” The result is “Jazz Dialogues,” a summational program of 43 musical conversations on a capacious repertoire spanning Williams’ own originals, jazz and songbook standards, even a composition by 17th century Middle Baroque composer Henry Purcell. “Jazz Dialogues” takes place between Williams and 24 top-shelf improvisers, almost all of them friends from his three decades as a professional jazz musician.

“It was a labor of love, something I’ve long wanted to do,” Williams says. “I didn’t think I could put together a big band, and I couldn’t do a concert with all of them, so I decided to make something a little different. I wanted to express myself in a wide range of approaches. Media seem to put me into one or two categories — ‘James Williams, oh, he was a Jazz Messenger, and his piano playing is soulful,’ and so on. I thought this would be a chance to break down some preconceptions about my total musicianship.”

Williams was a church organist in his native Memphis during formative years, and the voicings and time feel of spiritual music and the blues deeply inflect the sounds he conceptualizes and executes. His playing throughout Jazz Dialogues reminds us of the elegance and idiomatic authority with which he deploys the tropes of those languages, and of bebop and harmonic impressionism to suit the requirements of the moment. The tonal personality is cosmopolitan and downhome, flexible and holistic, attuned to storytelling and dialogue, averse to didacticism and self-absorption. It denotes sophistication, an open mind, and a willingness to listen, qualities that any pianist must possess to flourish in New York, where on any given day they must address new material, make sense of it, and impart to it a fluent, natural sound.

A member of the New York piano elite since he settled in Brooklyn in 1984, Williams honed his savoir faire the hard way — on innumerable wee-hours-of-the-morning solo, duo and drummerless trio jobs at various New York piano emporia, and through extensive sideman work with, to name a few, the likes of Boston drum-master Alan Dawson, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Milt Jackson, Benny Carter, Thad Jones, Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, Ray Brown and a host of others.

“There’s a certain energy, a certain swagger, a certain recklessness,” he says of the New York state of mind. “Carefree might be a better word for it. When I think of New York, all those things should be present, up-close and personal. But New York is also very unpredictable, and that’s the perspective here.”

Williams made sure that would be the case by organizing the recordings in a manner suited to imperatives of spontaneity and confident professionalism.

“We did the date in 3 days, and I had everyone come in at different times, every two or three hours,” he recalls. “Some things were planned and others were spontaneous. Steve Nelson has played with me a lot, and he showed up with my book of music; we ran down the tunes — very in-the-moment. I wrote ‘Le Wizard de Basso’ for Ron Carter, which we’d played on a tour with Billy Cobham and Donald Harrison. I wanted to hear Joe Lovano’s take on two of my originals, and after a couple of runthroughs we did them on the spot. Ray Drummond often played ‘For My Nephews’ with me at different piano rooms; I didn’t even have to bring out the music. The only vocal I rehearsed in advance was the Purcell piece with Roger Holland and Thomas Trotter. I wanted to make sure I could play it! Freddy Cole taught me ‘That’s My Desire’ and ‘Close To You’ in the studio prior to the recordings. I told Miles Griffith that I heard his voice with ‘These Foolish Things;’ he said he knew it, and we found a key and did it. Etta Jones told me she’d never recorded ‘Skylark,’ which I thought was perfect, because I didn’t want anyone to sing songs they’d already done five or six times on record.

“I basically wanted to make everyone do things a little differently than they would in their own situation. Usually, I let them lead and zoned in quickly on their mood at that moment. I didn’t go by their reputation and what they’d recorded. If we were laughing or silly and clowning around, I’d try to bring that kind of buoyancy. If they were playing behind the beat, I had to make sure that I wasn’t following them so much that the tempo would drag or things would get sluggish. Throughout, I was less concerned about how well I played as a soloist as much as I wanted to be really on top of my game as an accompanist. Accompanying means being a team player, even if, in a sense, I am half of the team. I wanted to move things along, to do two or three takes maximum, and not have anyone work that hard. I wanted it to be more like a gig or a party.”

The festivities never flag; from start to finish, “Jazz Dialogues” documents serious musicians having serious fun.

[—30—]

 

James Williams for “Memphis Convention” Liner Notes (1993):

Q: I think we should talk about the different people on the album, and why you wanted each of them, and your experiences with them over time.. So your brief biography, let’s say; your brief account of the circumstances through which you know everybody.

JW: I will say that there are numerous artists from Memphis that I really wanted to participate in this session as well, that deserve to have been there perhaps moreso than I did, but due to the fact that, obviously, for one session it wouldn’t be fair if we had everybody…if we had each and every soloist from Memphis that deserved to have been there. No one would have gotten a chance to play much more than a chorus at best. So it was a decision made on several factors, some of which were availability and things like that, and who was interested in doing it at that point in time, that we came across… But fortunately, everyone that did participate in this particular session was a high priority anyway.

Q: Let’s start with the veterans, because it’s a multi-generational project. Calvin Newborn.

JW: Calvin Newborn, of course, is from one of the distinguished families and one of the first families of Jazz, especially down in Memphis. Of course, everyone knows of his brother Phineas. But his father… He really got his experience, both of them did, playing with his father’s band, Phineas Senior. They had many great artists come through that group while they were there in Memphis playing in perhaps the late Forties or early Fifties in particular, including people like Frank Strozier and George Coleman, Booker Little, Jamil Nasser, and different ones that would come through who actually played with that family band. And it literally was a family band, because Calvin’s future wife, Wanda, at that time was also the vocalist and trombonist in the group, and others participated along the lines(?), and all of the guys doubled and that whole thing.

So I think he was essential, because he is really one of the premier Jazz guitarists to come out of Memphis. And of course, he’s excellent in his own right, in addition to being Phineas’ brother. Had they not even been related, he would have deserved to have been there.

Q: I think you may have been the person responsible for bringing him into Bradley’s a couple of years ago.

JW: Yeah, that’s correct. He played up there with a quartet that I was leading. We had just a real festive time. And people that consider him one of their mentors, people like George Benson was by, Milt Jackson came by to see him, Kenny Burrell sent regards… It was just really a real, like, homecoming, because he hadn’t played in New York in over thirty years at that point in time..

Q: Would you say that Calvin Newborn is the primary source of a certain guitar style…? What are his sources as a guitar stylist?

JW: I think it would probably be Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery and Grant Green in particular. I’m sure there would be others that he would name and he would have been influenced by. But particularly, those are the three I think that can serve as inspirations.

Q: Was he playing in Memphis at the time you were there?

JW: No, actually he wasn’t. As a matter of fact, his brother only had moved back when I was just kind of peripherally starting on the Jazz scene around there, and playing… I was a student in my early days at Memphis State. And Calvin wasn’t living in Memphis at the time. He was still traveling with Hank Crawford’s group and doing, I imagine, some other freelance work, but still living in Los Angeles during that period of time, and really didn’t move back to Memphis until the Eighties or maybe the late Seventies perhaps. And of course, that was after I had left and gone to Boston, and subsequently come to New York.

Q: Let’s talk about his rhythm section mate, Jamil Nasser, who in the Fifties in Memphis was known as George Joyner.

JW: That’s correct. Likewise, I didn’t know Jamil in Memphis at all, too, because he left in the early Fifties, going into the Service and later on playing with B.B. King’s band — both he and George Coleman. B.B. really transformed George from an alto player to a tenor player. And Booker Little and a few others got to work with B.B. during that period of time. And of course, B.B. was at that time living in Memphis himself.

So I met him a little bit later. I saw him play in about 1975, after I had moved to Boston, with the Ahmad Jamal Trio (he was a member of that group for about ten years). Then occasionally, he would come home. I do remember him coming back to Memphis one time prior to my leaving Memphis, but I didn’t get a chance to meet him on that particular occasion. And he would still come down maybe once a year. Because both of his parents, I may add, are still living in Memphis, and his sisters and brothers. One of his brothers is a distinguished minister down in Memphis as well.

So I got a chance to know him a little bit there, and then I met him a little more… I got to know him much better in the latter part of the period he was with Ahmad, and then he played Monty Alexander for a while. And then I guess I knew him even better at the time he started working with George Coleman’s quartet, and we would be on certain tours together, for instance, in Europe or something like that when I was with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, or they would play in New York or come to Boston or something like that.

Q: How would you characterize Jamil’s playing and contribution at the session?

JW: Jamil is certainly inspired by people like Oscar Pettiford and Ray Brown, and he is really a throwback, which a lot of the younger bassists have kind of gone back to more, or being a bass bass player. I mean, that is really coming in there and playing good time for you, walking you to the Moon and back, making sure everything feels real good for the soloist. I wouldn’t say that he was a distinguished soloist in his own right. But he gives you everything you need, the right kind of energy, the right kind of pulse and sound for that, and really knows how to drive a band, has an extended repertoire of standards and things like that, and is really… When you hear the word “bass,” it really typifies what he or Ray Brown or Milt Hinton or some of the young bass players like Christian McBride and Peter Washington and others who are coming right along, and bringing that tradition back. Because it’s like when you build a house, when you say the base, it’s got to be something firm, and you can build everything else around that. And the same thing with building a band, an ensemble around the bass and subsequently the rhythm section.

Q: Were there any bassists in Memphis who preceded him and who he might have listened to as a young musician in the late Forties and early Fifties?

JW: I’m sure there were. Because Jimmie Lunceford is from Memphis, and that band was there… Of course, I don’t know some of those names, unfortunately, that I can’t call. But I would love to speak to him about that, and find out…

And a bassist that came up of note after his time, who is a contemporary of mine is Sylvester… [PAUSE]

A bassist of note, a young, charismatic bassist who is named Sylvester Sample, as I mentioned, one of my contemporaries, grew up there. But his specialty… He played the bass violin, but he was a magnificent Fender bass player, and he was one of the first ones… He was kind of innovative in his own way, because he was one of the first bassists to play the fretted bass, combining the Jazz bass with the fretted neck and, you know, things that people like Jaco Pastorius and Jeff Berlin and Stanley Clarke eventually started picking up on and doing a little bit later. But he chose to become an engineer, a civil engineer, and didn’t pursue music full time as a career. And now he’s in Chicago, and he tells me he’s now thinking that he really wants to come and do some things like that. But he was really, really something, and really was instrumental, because having someone like that really helped me to grow as a pianist — and certainly I think Donald and Mulgrew can attest to that, and Russell and Charles, too, for that matter. Harold didn’t really know Sylvester that well, although he did play with him a couple of times on one of the first occasions that I met him as well.

Q: Let’s also talk about George Coleman, who also came up in Memphis in the 1950’s. He and Mabern both went from Memphis to Chicago at a certain time.

JW: Well, actually, George went a little earlier. Because once again, as I mentioned, George went out with B.B. real early. And Harold and Frank Strozier actually went to Chicago together. Booker Little had been up there… Now, let me get it right. Harold and Booker Little went there together. Frank had already gone up to the Chicago Conservatory, and Booker eventually joined him there, and of course, Harold soon followed.

So actually, I knew George Coleman’s name more from the Miles Davis period than anything else when I was growing up. But he did come down to Memphis when I was a student at Memphis State, and he was a guest soloist with our little Jazz ensemble. And that was really the first time I really got a chance to meet him. I heard him play in Memphis a year or so earlier, when he came down to one of the local clubs that was bringing artists in. That was a real good period of time, maybe somewhere like around ’72, ’73, that time, and maybe even a little earlier, too, that they were bringing in different artists, many of them Memphis musicians coming home, like George Coleman or Frank Strozier, Marvin Stamm, but they also brought in people like Clifford Jordan, Hubert Laws, Pepper Adams, Freddie Hubbard came down… All playing with a local rhythm section. As a matter of fact, Charles Thomas, who is on this session, was the pianist for all of those performances.

Q: George started out as an alto player, I think. Yes?

JW: Yes. George’s brother Lucious was an alto player, and I think it was one of his first inspirations. And as I mentioned, B.B. King bought his first tenor for him….

Q: To go on the circuit.

JW: Yeah, playing that Rhythm-and-Blues out there. You know, he had to go out there and do that and walk the bar, and probably a number of other things I don’t know anything about!

Q: How would you characterize George’s playing and his contribution to the session?

JW: Oh, energetic. A virtuoso performer. That goes without saying; that’s been known for thirty years. But at the session, he was just absolutely beautiful, a model to follow all the way. On time, willing to give up extra time if we needed to rehearse or a little something else. Wasn’t at all caught up with being of the stature that he is, that he could have taken a different attitude. He was there for us. He was just loving being around his colleagues and friends and stuff like that. And it was just really a nice time, even though he was always on time…

As a matter of fact, most of the guys were there early. It was like they couldn’t get there quick enough to see each other.

Q: And his soloing is extremely consistent, and you know it’s him, of course, right from the first couple of notes.

JW: Sure. And on the selections that George does solo on, I deliberately was wanting to hear him play in selections that… He has an extensive repertoire and plays a wide variety of things. But I wanted to hear him play even things that I had never heard him play on club dates or concerts and things like that. Of course, I knew he’d be quite at home with playing something like “Our Delight,” but I had never heard him play it. And I wanted him to do some music like Tadd Dameron, some things like that.

I wanted to challenge the guys, but yet at the same time have everyone fairly comfortable in what they were going to be doing, so they could be as relaxed as possible, yet at the same time not just do something that they have been doing almost verbatim in many of their concerts or club dates or something like that as well.

Q: And Harold Mabern is the fourth member of that particular generation on the session. As a pianist, I’m sure you have a certain relationship to his playing that perhaps you don’t to the other three.

JW: Of course, Harold made such an impression the very first time I met him. Like I said, my first really professional engagement was at a Holiday Inn. This was 1972 in Memphis, and Harold had come home to visit his father, who was ill. And I… I was working with Herman Green, who is actually one of the other veterans on the date, and I guess someone had told him that Bill Mobley and I were on that engagement. And he came down to the club and hung out, and of course, Herman invited him up. I even remember that he sat in and played “Green Dolphin Street” and “Secret Love,” and it was just so impressionable hearing him, how he was able to play my Fender Rhodes piano, which they called it at that time, and still, you know, capture a certain energy and spirit.

And he was always so giving and gracious, you know, because we were just learning — on-the-job training, literally. And he was still very open, even though he was already, you know, quite well-celebrated as far as being a recording artist. And of course, he was in that last Lee Morgan group there, and at that time it was just a matter of a few months after that tragedy had happened. And all the great people like Wes and Miles and Sweets Edison that he’s been associated with.

So that main impression has always carried over, how much he was comforting and encouraging to all of us there on that engagement. With the exception of Herman, all the rest of us were just students there, glad to have our first gigs.

Q: This may not be fair to ask you, since you’re now his producer. But how would you characterize Harold’s style and his playing and, again, his contribution to the parts of the session that he was on?

JW: Well, he contributed a lot beyond just even what he did on the session. First of all, Harold was there for every note that was played on those sessions, even at the rehearsals. He was there. You know, we were having dinner together, he was at the hotels with the guys. Any other assistance we needed… He said he told his wife, “Look, just don’t even plan to see me this week. I’ll come home for dinner or something like that, but these cats are in town and I’m going to be hanging every night.” So of course, she understood that, and said, “Okay, well, I’ll see you next week then.”

So he was just there and doing everything, and like our main cheerleader, when somebody was playing, whether it was Russell playing some of Phineas’ favorite Classical pieces, or whether it was me out there going through whatever I was doing, playing the B-3 or something, and certainly not only the pianist, but Mulgrew and the arrangements he was… He contributed a beautiful tune that Mobley orchestrated for us. And he was just there, well beyond… And then, of course, he comes out and plays the daylights out of the piano.

So you know, that kind of spirit there is really… You know, you have somebody… It’s always one or two people you can just focus when things are down or you’re a little tired, that you can rejuvenate and reinvent yourself around. Because this person always has that little extra intangible or energy there that you need to really get through the remainder of whatever is going on at that point.

Q: Let me return to the first part of the question, thought and talk a little bit about his style and a little bit about his history in Memphis.

JW: I did get away from that. Historically, like I said, he left Memphis in 1954, too. So that was a little soon for me to get to know any of those guys.

But his style has eventually evolved where I see influences of people, certainly from Phineas and people like that, but also I hear Ahmad Jamal and even people that he initially inspired in Chicago, like Herbie Hancock or people like that, or Andrew Hill. But also, you certainly hear the stylings of Bud and Hank Jones or Red Garland there. But he has a real deep Blues feeling, and he is always about playing the Blues. Because the Blues is never far away in Harold’s playing, whether he’s playing some of his beautiful contemporary pieces, or playing compositions of John Coltrane, or whether he’s playing standards or playing the real Blues. So that’s the thing, that he has really absorbed much of the history of that, and yet he has a very personal sound. When you hear little young pianists like Benny Green and Geoff Keezer out there playing, you really hear how he has had a profound effect on them — and others as well, all of us Memphis musicians.

That’s where I hear Harold coming from. And he was influenced a lot by horn players, too. You hear stylings of Clifford Brown, and certainly, like I said, Lee Morgan and people like that, that he’s worked with over the years. The singers… He used to work with the choice singers like Joe Williams and Sarah Vaughan.

So he’s been around, you know, people who really did the stuff so authentically that he was able to absorb all those things, being basically a self-taught musician. And that’s one of the purities of it, of being self-taught, is that you absorb things. You don’t dissect and say, “Well, do I really need to do this or should I do this?” You know, if it sounds good and it feels good and it feels natural, your instincts will carry you that way. And I think that’s where Harold’s style is coming from. You know, people like… Buddy Montgomery is another example of some of those purer Jazz players, pianists, in terms of… You just don’t hear anything academic in their playing at all. It’s just music there. And certainly Erroll Garner is probably one of the greatest examples of that.

Q: I think what you just said about Harold you might be able to use on one of his records… [ETC.]

JW: Oh yeah…

Q: Now, Herman Green was the last of that people of that generation, and he would be the least known to the general public. So a little detail on his background…

JW: Herman Green is a woodwind player. He’s a saxophonist, he plays alto and tenor and flute. But actually, Herman has been around. He has had extensive experiences on the road. He played with Lionel Hampton for about three years. He played with Lloyd Price’s band when Slide Hampton was the musical director. He has been around and been in different settings. He knew Coltrane and Philly Joe, and lived in New York in the early Sixties, and lived all over the United States it seemed like, you know, even before he returned to Memphis.

And it was a critical time when he came back, because just at that time was just when I was just starting to play, and some of the rest of us, you know, we were really too young to even go to the clubs… We’d go down there and try to get in, and we’d sit out there for a few moments, and you know, the club owner would come and waltz us right back on out of the club. So we’d stand outside and listen to him playing at a place called The Music Box, right on Second and Beale Street — I can remember where it was.

So it was a little later… So when he settled down there, he was playing with a group sort of commercial… Herman is also the kind of guy who was sort of a jack of all trades, who could… You know, he adapted. He really was a musician that if he had to go play a commercial gig, he went on and made that gig, because that’s what had to be done to take care of his family and get this thing done. So he wasn’t playing Jazz full-time, and even, I’m sorry to say, at this stage of the game he’s not playing Jazz full-time. He’s not getting a chance to play very much Jazz at all down there.

But he would do this… He would play with another group at that time, just before… I was just ready to become a study out at Memphis State, so I was aware of who he was. And because, like I said, at some of these concerts, he would sit in… George and those guys would have him sit in with them and different things. So we knew that he was bad at that point.

So after this commercial gig broke up, he got this gig at the Holiday Inn. Because all of the other guys left, and since he was already a member, he stayed on and put a group around that. Well, of course, he hired young guys… He hired me on one of my first Jazz engagements where I didn’t know hardly any tunes. I might have known maybe “The Girl From Ipanema” and “Satin Doll” and maybe five other songs. Marvin Stamm was in town. The late Joe Dukes was on the gig; he was home visiting. And we had a bass player that was on the gig, that…you know, he couldn’t help me. They called “Stella By Starlight.” I said, “What are the chords?” He said, “Well, the first note is an E.” This is where we were coming…! So I knew I was going to be in for a long evening.

But I guess he must have heard something, because he let me hang around. I figured that Charles Thomas and those guys were already busy. So I said, “Well, everybody else must be busy, too.” So luckily, I was able to get this on-the-job training. Later, Sylvester Sample and Bill Mobley were able to join in and get some of this as well.

And that really happened, oh, maybe several months later after that first thing I mentioned in the Holiday Inn. And that was a beautiful engagement, even though it was a commercial job. The waitresses danced on the table and sang pieces like from “Those Were The Days, My Friend” and from Cabaret and from Hair… Anyway, that was a good experience.

But we also had three band sets. We just wanted to play, and I would be… I was trying to learn some of these Chick Corea tunes and all this stuff. And he was teaching us standards and all these things; you know, he would play them, and we had a little book… So we had a chance to really go out and play. We were playing six nights a week, five hours a night. And that was a good experience with Herman there, leading us and letting us get that playing time in.

And also, as I mentioned, when different musicians were either coming through town or either hanging out, that would be the only place it would be that many nights… The first time that I met Bill Easley was down there at this Holiday Inn. Phineas used to come down and sit in. Clark Terry would be in town, and Jean-Luc Ponty, George Duke….

Q: This was the center of Jazz in Memphis.

JW: Yeah, this was downtown, and they had… At the time I didn’t realize it, but it turned out to be a very hip gig. And we were making fifty dollars a night; we thought we were on top of the world. I’m living at home, no expenses and playing at church, too, getting paid — so I was in seventh heaven. I didn’t have to work no job.

Q: So Herman Green was in the center of that for you.

JW: He was for us and, like I said, for Bill and several other of the younger musicians. Donald and Mulgrew got some taste of that a little later, too, as well as different ones floating in and out at different times. Although I was much more…you know, worked with much more than either Mulgrew or Donald. So he was really good.

So that’s another reason… This is sort of my way of reminding him that I did realize that his contribution to my career, especially at that stage of the game, was considerable, and I did remember that. But beyond just trying to just repay him back for that, he deserved to have been doing this, and he was qualified to be on there and everything. So it wasn’t any kind of favor that I felt obligated to acknowledge, you know.

Q: Let’s just keep running through everybody on this same tack. You just mentioned Bill Easley. Are you contemporaries, you and Bill Easley?

JW: A little bit. He’s a few years older than I. He’s about seven years older than I am. So we had him up on that pedestal as well. Because he was the only person… I never heard anyone who could play all those instruments so well, and who was a virtuoso and had such soulful feelings…. He was around there. And then at that point, we would hear him… He was playing with Isaac Hayes and doing all kinds of gigs like that. But whenever it was a Jazz gig that he had, we’d do it.

And I can remember going over to his house asking him would he come and jam with us sometime! And here’s this guy, he’s already an accomplished musician. He had been with George Benson and these people and lived in New York, and we were over there asking him… I said, “Man, come on over. Would you like to come to a jam session we’re going to have?” You know, I think about that, because sometimes when someone has asked me to do this in subsequent years, I try not to just sort of look back and say, “Oh, man, you’ve got to be kidding.” Because I remember that incident, it’s so vivid in my mind, and how nice he was, that… Like I said, I didn’t have his telephone number, but I had given him a ride home one night. So I actually went to his house and did this! So I think back on it, you know, and think, well, he could have just really canceled me out, and my feelings would have been hurt forever. But you know he was nice. He declined making the jam session, I may add. But the way he did it was very tactful.

Q: Say a few words about Bill Easley’s background.

JW: First of all, Bill Easley was really from Olean, New York, and had come there from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — of course, that’s part of where the George Benson connection was. Then he settled down in Memphis. Actually, he said he got stranded in Memphis, and then, as it turned out, he got a gig like about two days after he was there. Somebody told him… He was staying at this hotel, and the guy who was working there was a part-time singer. He said, “Oh yeah? Well, look, I can you a gig.” Easley said, “Oh really?” He said, “Come down to this club at a certain time.” And lo and behold… He didn’t believe it; he just went down there anywhere. And that’s how he got… And he ended up loving Memphis. To this day, Easley is still talking about he’s going to buy him a house in Memphis.

So that’s how he settled down there. And I just started hearing a little bit about him. Because like I said, we were just peripherally on the scene, and we couldn’t get in a lot of these places, and we’d hear about these people… But he is just such a magnificent musician and can play so many different styles… That’s one reason why he’s so popular here in New York, because he can vacillate, and he floats back and forth between doing Jelly’s Last Jam and Broadway things, and doing all kinds of other Rhythm-and-Blues gigs, lounge gigs, and recording, and doing all kinds of different things with the Lincoln Center Orchestra — you can just see him everywhere.

And that impressed me in a lot of ways, that he could do that. I said, “Well, I like all that kind of music; I should be able to do that, too.” So in an indirect way, it sort of set the tone for the way I started thinking. Why do I have to just play this? Because if I like all these things, I can kind of float back and forth. But my passion was still to go and really learn how to play Jazz, because that was the most challenging, and that was where I was really feeling the direction I wanted to go most of all.

Q: How would you characterize his contribution to the session? I guess one thing is because he plays all the instruments so well, he makes it very easy to do certain type of arrangements.

JW: Well, he only played tenor, alto, clarinet and flute; he didn’t bring his piccolo to the session. Well, that says it in itself. He gave us the extra dimension to combine different instrumentations that we needed just to add a different variety of texture to the recording. You know, if it would have been just all saxophones, and maybe a trumpet here and there or something like that, or guitar or whatever, I think the sound of the record would have been a little more monotonous than it turns out to be. Now you’ve got these things, and you’ve got a clarinet solo here on what’s generally considered a bebop tune, and just a couple of little curlicues thrown in there along those lines. So he really gave us an added dimension there.

And of course, like I said, he was just thrilled just to see all these guys again and to see what everybody’s been doing and all of this, and he and Lewis Keel getting a chance to play together for the first time in a long time. So through his artistry, and equally as important, his enthusiasm too was just there.

Everybody just smiled… I wish we had recorded the conversations that were going on in the back room there between takes and so on and so forth. That would have been worth almost releasing as well; at least, a certain segment…

Q: The private issue.

JW: Right, the private collection of the Memphis Convention.

Q: Let’s talk about Lewis Keel.

JW: I met Lewis Keel when I was seventeen years old, coming into Memphis State. Lewis Keel was a student at Memphis State; a graduate student there. It was several different things. First of all, he was directing the Third Jazz Ensemble, which was just being assembled that year. Because that first year I was there, I couldn’t even place in any of the Jazz ensembles — according to my director at least. But when they put this together, he directed that. So I met him during that time. Actually, I didn’t even play piano in that ensemble.

But he was the director and was around, and he was the best soloist in the school on any of the instruments. So we always just loved to go hear him play. And he had a few gigs around town. We didn’t get a chance to catch him there, at that point, but on a couple of concerts around school, and then guys would play over in the student center, and just any time he was playing, we were just there. So we were going through that.

And Lewis was just so special that way. And he would tell us, because he knew some of the guys from Memphis; he knew George Coleman and Hank Crawford and all these people. So he was a great story-teller for us, too. He said, “Oh wow, what these guys do,” and he would tell us about records and stuff. I remember he always said, “All you cats need to do is get you some records and some exercise books, and then you’ll learn how to play Jazz. You learn the instrument and you learn how to play.” You know, learn your instrument.

He and Charles Thomas were always very clear. They were given a lot of academic information about theories, and flat ninths and this and that, and voicings and so on. They would give some basic information, and if you could dig it and really hear what they were saying, you would just follow that practice, and you would be able to get to a source of the music.

So like I said, he had a profound effect during that time there. And I eventually got a chance… He even hired me for a gig one time down there. I was glad to take my electric piano over there; I would be there with bells on.

Q: How would you characterize his style? He’s very in the blues thing…

JW: Yeah.

Q: He has a sort of Plas Johnson type of sound.

JW: Yeah. But I would say it’s probably more influenced… He’s really very influenced by Hank Crawford and David Fathead Newman and players like that, Stanley Turrentine. See, when I knew Lewis in Memphis, he was playing tenor always. He’s now just kind of… He told me he’s not even playing that much tenor any more. I wanted him to play tenor. When I called him about this, I said, “Yeah, man, bring your tenor,” because I was thinking, well, Easley will play to cover the alto stuff. And he said, “Well, I’m really not playing tenor. I really would rather play alto if I’m going to play saxophone.” I said, “Okay, bring your alto then; no problem.” I was aware that his recording was on alto, but I was just assuming that he still played tenor, because all those great solos we remember out there at school were tenor solos.

I think he played flute on something, too. I’m not sure if he did. Maybe we thought about it and we didn’t record it or something.

Now, his alto sound, like I say, is very distinguished. I like his choice of notes, his ideas, the way he plays. Mobley and I were talking about that. At times, on the Rhythm changes and stuff like that, he really finds some different notes to play there, how he resolves some of his phrases. I said, “Yeah, man, that’s some bad stuff; I need to figure out exactly how he does it.” And these are things, you know, that I think are personalized, because I really haven’t heard anyone else… It’s not that it’s innovative as such, but it’s really just some personal statements that he was finding. And I always liked his feeling, because he was about that always, too.

And he was around here. He used to play with Frank Foster’s Loud Minority band, and he played with Howard McGhee in the Seventies. So he had been in New York as well. He knew Russell from back in college days, too, so they were able to catch up on a lot of things there. So once again, he was a source…

Everybody showed up at all the sessions, whether they needed… Sometimes I said, “Well, look, I only need you for an hour-and-a-half or two hours.” But the guys stayed around. Everybody was there. Nobody wanted to leave or miss anything, no matter what was going on there.

So that was another way…stylistically… You said Plas Johnson. I can hear that. But I guess I hear it more directly between Hank and maybe David Fathead Newman and Stanley Turrentine.

Q: Let’s talk about the last of the horn players. Bill Mobley is someone who is highly respected by many musicians, and he contributes a couple of arrangements on this album as well, so he has two roles here. [ETC.]

JW: Well, I sort of made Bill our musical director. I said, “Bill, we’re going to do this date; it’s really going to happen. But I know James Williams to know that I’m not going to be doing this stuff like I want to do it. So you’ve got to do it.” So he said, “Oh man, are you sure?” I said, “Yeah, sure. We know what we’re going to do.” So I told him what we had in mind, and worked out the instrumentation for each tune, and said, “Look, this is what we’re going to do, and we’ll have this… Now, this is just a general idea of what I have, but basically do what you want to do with this. I don’t want to restrict you, but at least I want to give you a concept of what I’m hearing with the ensemble in terms of soloists on each tune and what kind of instrumentation on each tune.”

And he was just magnificent on those, especially the ones where we had more than two horns playing on that. And it was creative, it was inventive, yet it was challenging. We had the guys there, you know. I told the guys, “Look, you all got to practice this music now.” I knew he wasn’t going to have a lot of time, so I said, “Bill, xerox them for us and send them to everybody,” and I got all the addresses and sent them to him so he could do that. And he just took care of all kinds of business like that before he picked up the trumpet or the fluegelhorn.

Then he came in and just quarterbacked the whole session like that along those lines. And Bill is a very shy person. I am always on him about being a little too shy. But he is an excellent, excellent musician, and he is solidly fundamentally sound.

I’ve known him since he was sixteen years old. We attended the same high school. I’m two years older than he is, but we came out of the same high school. So obviously, we go way back.

Q: Which high school?

JW: Central High School in Memphis. Probably every city has a Central High School.

Q: Was that a high school with a certain type of arts program?

JW: No, that wasn’t fashionable then, unless you just went to a music school…

Q: Was there any in Memphis. Detroit had one, Cass Tech, and…

JW: Right. But they didn’t really have that in Memphis that I knew of. But I went to Booker T. Washington for a year, which is the school where the Newborns and Charles Thomas and Booker T. Jones and a lot of folks came out of that school…Jamil…

Q: Was there a particular teacher there when they were going?

JW: Yes, W.T. McDaniels. He was the head of all the Black music programs in the high schools. So he got a chance to rub shoulders with Charles Lloyd, he had Frank Strozier — you name it. Everybody who came out of Memphis through that whole time, from the Forties right up until the Sixties came up under him. Even Russell and those guys just barely missed him. They might have gotten a year of him, but not really; you know, they didn’t get the full thing. But Charles Thomas, the Newborns, Garnett Brown, Isaac Hayes, Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire — all these people who came up under that whole tutelage of them. Booker T. Jones from Booker T. and the MGs. So you really got a wide range of folks that dealt with him. And before he was there doing that, Mister Jimmie Lunceford was the cat. So you see where that was coming from — and with that whole tradition there.

So the late W.T. McDaniels… His son, Ted, Junior, now is the Chairman of the Jazz Studies Department at Ohio State. So he’s kind of keeping that tradition alive, unfortunately not in Memphis, but nevertheless, very much so involved in it.

So Bill Mobley and I, we played in the first Jazz… The first time I was trying to play Jazz with a group, Bill Mobley was just about there I think without two months of that time. This other trumpet player friend of mine was from Memphis, and he was around, and he knew a little more than Bill did. But Bill was always real quick and sharp, and picked up on things real fast. So we’ve really been playing together for that length of time. I can remember playing our first concert together and playing Jazz compositions like “So What” and trying to play stuff way over our heads, that we had no business trying to do some of those… Like “Joshua,” those kind of tunes!

So like I said, to this day I can call up Mobley and say, “Look, we’ve got to have this done” (we’ve got some other projects we’re involved in) and he takes care of it. And then he’s going to come out and he’s going to play the music so well. I think he’s very underrated. I would love to see him really doing more things, because he is so gifted and so unassuming in some ways. That’s a certain nice quality to have in this day and age of real aggressive kind of mentalities.

Q: Finally, just a few words about his style and his playing.

JW: Stylistically, I think he’s coming from people like Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell, as well as Freddie, Lee Morgan, maybe to a slightly lesser degree Booker Little. But I really think those are his primary influences that I hear coming through. Woody Shaw also, I should say. Woody Shaw I would say is a major influence. So that’s where he’s coming from in music. He really checks them out. But that doesn’t mean that… He certainly knows Miles’ and he knows Dizzy’s and Fats Navarro’s and Clifford’s playing very well. I mean, we play all these tunes he’s transcribed, and so he’s done an in-depth study. But you know, he’s never really focused around those players as such in terms of the way he developed his own approach.

Q: And he arranges “Our Delight” and “There But For The Grace Of,” Harold Mabern’s composition, on the recording.

JW: That’s right…

Q: Now Tony Reedus, your nephew.

JW: Yeah…

Q: So we don’t have to talk so much about Tony…

JW: People like Tony and Mulgrew and Donald are so well-documented right now that anything I’d say would probably be repetitive.

He came in there and he was ready… Once again, I was saying, “We’ve got a lot of music to play.” But he comes to the session prepared. He does homework. If you say, “Look, we need you to really lock in on this,” and so he did that very thing. He came in and he knew what was happening. He took the extra time if things may have been questionable. He’s always going to be swinging. I think he’s still one of the most exciting young drummers on the scene. And I knew he would make a major contribution.

He and Jamil don’t play together that often, so I was glad that they were able to develop a rapport to get things going there. And of course, he plays with Mulgrew all the time, so he… With many of the musicians there. Tony a little later got a chance to get a little experience around playing with Calvin Newborn and Herman Green in separate situations around Memphis when he first started playing, around ’77 or ’78, something like that. So we had that connection, too. So he knew that. And of course, since he’s been in New York, he has certainly played with George and Harold and Easley and those guys — he’s on Easley’s albums.

So I think he was not only the logical choice; I guess you would say he was the only choice. Because anyone else… The only thing I do regret is that I couldn’t get in touch with Joe Dukes. I would have probably asked him to be on some of the session. And just off the record, I was even hoping that we… We were planning on doing a second session, and I was going to just have Joe make the entire one. But I didn’t have the vision for what happened there prematurely.

[ETC./NOW THE PIANO PLAYERS]

Q: Russell Wilson.

JW: Russell Wilson was my piano teacher at Memphis State. He was a graduate assistant there. Actually, as a matter of fact, many people there, when I talk with faculty members, they feel that he’s probably the finest pianist to ever come out of Memphis…

[END OF SIDE A]

Russell Wilson was a gentleman I met shortly after I got to Memphis State, and he soon was one of my piano teachers while I was a student at Memphis State, although in some ways he’s sort of like a contemporary. Actually, he’s more of a contemporary of people like Bill Easley’s and that generation there. He was a source of inspiration there. Many people felt that he was probably the finest pianist to ever come out of Memphis State, speaking to his various teachers that are still on the faculty, the chairman of the Piano Department and different ones.

Russell is also well-versed in the European Classical literature, and has done perhaps more formal study in that area than any of the others of us that are participating in the session.

Q: And he performs pieces by Ravel and Chopin.

JW: Yes, that’s right. One of the reasons why I asked him to do that is because I knew that Phineas was fond of a lot of that literature, because he had actually played a number of those things as well. Even on one of his recordings, he used part of the “Sonatine” for an introduction to “Lush Life” — on the World Of Piano album. So that was one of the reasons why that particular Sonatine was chosen to perform. And hearing Russell play it was really the first time I had heard it played in its entirety. I had never heard a recording of it. I hadn’t been able to find one other than that. So in a way, this is a sort of rare presentation, and unique. And it gives a different thing for the recording, too, because it shows the expansiveness of the Memphis musicians and the artistry of the Memphis musicians that have come through there as well.

And of course, he also chose a composition in addition to that; he chose a beautiful composition by one of my favorite pianists and composers, Randy Weston — “Little Niles.” That likewise was recorded by Phineas on one of his earlier recordings.

Russell stylistically is hard to pin down, because, like I say, he has that influence there, but very much so the people that he enjoys listening to… You’d think, with his virtuoso skills, it would be just pianists along those lines. And naturally, he loves Art Tatum and people like that. But he’s a big fan of people like Cedar Walton and Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones. So when you’re dealing with that kind of touch and things like that, you can never go wrong.

I think in a lot of ways, Russell has come back… He’s such an expansive musician. He’s always interested, curious and listening about learning things. I think he’s probably been influenced by some of us younger musicians who came up under him, some of the younger pianists, obviously like Donald and Mulgrew and perhaps myself there as well, and other musicians. Because he’s always interested, and asking, “Well, what do you think are some good tunes I should be learning?” or “Who are some of the younger players out here; tell me about some of these people.” He has that enthusiasm, which I like.

And that’s another characteristic of all of the artists represented here, is that it’s never “Well, okay, because I have attained this level, this is the end of it.” I’m always curious to know what else is around the corner there, and who is doing what, and what can I do to kind of improve. And I think everybody wanted to play well for each other. For ourselves, but for each other, too, just so that everyone could see just how we’re going to make this spiritually nourishing as much as it was musically.

So Russell brought some of those intangibles. You know, he only played on the solo selections, but likewise, he came up for the entire session. He was there doing everything, from just support group to videotaping to taking photos, as well as playing the daylights out of the piano.

Q: Was he working on the Memphis scene when you were there in the clubs? Or is he primarily an educator?

JW: No, he was doing a couple of engagements. I also have to thank Russell, because Russell is the one who introduced and first told me about Charles Thomas. I had never even heard of Charles Thomas and hardly many other musicians, and he told me…

Russell was working with a singer, a guy who kind of wanted to sing like Johnny Hartman around Memphis. He was doing those things. And they had a little TV show, they would be on on Friday nights about midnight or something like that. And he was leading the house trio. So they would be doing standards and blues and that kind of thing.

So he was out on the scene, being a little older. And he said, “Oh man, I just heard this great pianist. You definitely would love to check him out. His name is Charles Thomas, man. Real fluid and everything, great feeling throughout.” I said, “Oh yeah?” So I filed it away. And then eventually, it was probably another six months before I got a chance to hear him play. So Russell even then had that same kind of thing. He’s always doing…motivating himself and receiving that kind of energy from that.

And he lives now… He teaches… He is a teacher now at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, where he plays a steady job I think at one of the hotels there, but he also is a pianist with the Richmond Symphony Orchestra as well. So he keeps a wide variety of things, and continually updates his repertoire, does recitals, Classical recitals and Jazz recitals every year without fail. Whereas it’s easy… If you have tenure, most people immediately go into retirement.

Q: Is he originally from Memphis?

JW: Oh yeah, he is. And he grew up in the same neighborhood, although younger, that Charles Lloyd was in. He remembers hearing Charles Lloyd practicing saxophone on his back porch. And like I say, he was a contemporary… He was a student at Booker T. Washington when Booker T. Jones and Maurice White was there, and there were some other musicians around Memphis that were not present here on the session who still work regularly.

And I might add, he played… Well, he was a clarinet major when he went to college… He and someone else on this session went to college together; I can’t even think right offhand. But people like Sonelius Smith, who is around here in New York, was around at the school, and others… So he was a real… Oh, I know who else was there. John Stubblefield. So all of these people, they were around there in college together in Arkansas, and then eventually Russell transferred back to Memphis and finished up at Memphis State.

Q: The next person you mentioned was Charles Thomas.

JW: Well, I told you how I met Charles Thomas, was first becoming aware of him through Russell. As I said, I couldn’t go hear him in the clubs. But he did make an appearance on this particular show, this Johnny Scott show, the singer down there. And I said, “Wow, this guy can play some piano!” I didn’t know what he was playing, but I knew he could play. And that’s where I first heard him, very unassuming, seemingly. But a certain presence that always was very captivating to me in a sort of mysterious way.

Eventually we were able to go hear him in clubs, and we were down there all the time. It was a good period. He was working with another vocalist, kind of her style was like Nancy Wilson, and they were doing all kinds of great things. He was the one that really inspired me to think about learning a lot of songs, because they never had music on the bandstand. Never. I never saw them read one note. And they were always doing all kinds of tunes. I could go down there three, four nights a week, and would very rarely hear some of the same songs repeated. She would maybe sing some of the same songs, but their instrumental set would always be… It would range from “The Sweetest Sounds” and “Speak Low” to you’d hear something like “Seven Steps To Heaven” or maybe “Dolphin Dance” or maybe something like “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most, “So What,” those kind of things.

So it was a really inspirational kind of thing to go hear Charles play on that level every night with that trio, even though I wasn’t, you know, as inspired with maybe the trio as I was with him. But the trio played well, though, and they played well with him, too — so in that sense it worked.

And so it was about a two-year period where they had a lot of steady work, maybe a little longer like that. And that was real critical for us, because we got a chance to not only get out there trying to practice this stuff at Memphis State or in my parents’ den or somewhere; we also got a chance to reinforce and hear the great local players play it right down there.

And eventually, I found out that Charles went to school with my older sister, Tony Reedus’ mother. She said, “Oh yeah, I remember Charles Thomas around Booker T. Washington.” So I invited him over to the house, so he could become reacquainted with my sister again and everything. But really I had my ulterior motives, just to get him over there to play and see if he would teach me anything. Well, Charles isn’t the teaching type, but he will sit down and play. And I learned a lot. I just sat down and watched him play. I said, “Oh man, that’s bad. Well, play this. Would you play that?” So I really learned a lot from Charles just doing that, and then, like I said, going to hear him play in person, and he would be talking about different records to listen to — and that’s where his influence was.

In a way, I feel somewhat well that I was able to do that on a much smaller scale for Donald and Mulgrew when they were first kind of coming around a little bit more — and basically we’re just talking about like maybe three years apart here. But by this time I had accumulated a little bit of a record collection, and we would do this, and maybe tape something, or I let them borrow records… I can’t even believe it. I wouldn’t dare let anyone borrow them. Probably a few years later, when I got to Boston, folks stopped returning them!

So it was really a nice connection from Charles and having a chance to hear him play. He now works… It’s a shame that he doesn’t perform in Memphis, but on occasion, you know, several times a year. But he works steady in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he is able to work and make a very comfortable living doing that. I still would love to see him in New York. If he came to New York for two years, I would love to see what level of artistry he would attain.

Q: Where is he cominng out of as a pianist?

JW: Charles is coming from Bud Powell. Certainly he was influenced by Phineas, because he was a few years younger than Phineas, and he got a chance… He told me, “Man, I was in junior high school, and Phineas was a senior,” and he said he could not believe… He heard Phineas playing stuff in high school that he has heard very few people play to this day. He said he would just be down there, and he would be down in the band room practicing all the time, just playing, and playing the most incredible stuff — playing the Classical literature, the whole stuff. Tommy Flanagan told me a story about that. He said one time Phineas came over to the house, and he just went through his Chopin books like it was nothing.

So Charles was influenced by him. He was very influenced by Bud Powell’s playing. He turned Harold and Frank Strozier and those guys on to Bud’s playing and Dizzy’s works and so on and so forth. I would say also he is a big, big fan of Red Garland’s playing, and to a lesser degree, Wynton Kelly. But all of those pianists from that period. I would say primarily more of the Bebop players. And certainly he can play some Stride and stuff like that, so he is certainly aware of Teddy Wilson and Nat Cole and like them, and Erroll Garner and Horace…

Q: Did he turn you on to information also?

JW: Well, like I said, Charles wasn’t really the type of guy who did a lot of verbalizing. Even conversation-wise he isn’t a real big talker that much. But he would tell me about these records. He said, “Yeah, you should check out this,” and you know, listen to Bud Powell. At the time, I was kind of wanting to hear Herbie and Chick and McCoy; I was talking about, you know, give me this hip stuff.

And he likes that… You know, the interesting thing, too, is he is kind of influenced by like earlier things of Herbie’s and McCoy’s, and Chick’s as well — Keith Jarrett, for instance. Although I don’t think it’s apparent in his playing, those are players that he talks about quite a bit, too, that he really admires. He likes Kenny Barron, of some of the contemporaries, and certainly Harold. But those kind of people that I hear him speak of quite a bit…. And he’s checked out George Shearing, and he can play some of those Tatum runs and stuff like that.

I used to say, “Oh man, how do you play those things?” He said, “This is a pentatonic scale” — I remember one of the first times I heard that name he was saying that. But it was just like he was kind of playing it, and if you can catch it, more power to you!

Q: Just a couple of words about his two pieces on the solo piano record and why them.

JW: In terms of the solo pieces, I had no idea what anyone was going to play.

Q: So this wasn’t your prerogative as the producer.

JW: No, I didn’t suggest anything with the solo. I felt like the other part needed a little bit more structure. But with these guys, I didn’t worry. It was just like having a private concert there in the studio, and everybody came out and just played… So I had no idea what they were going to play.

In some cases, it was like we didn’t know what we were going to play. I kind of had thought about it that day. “Well, I think I’ll play this,” because I thought the selection I chose would probably be something that no one else would play and would have, once again, a different flavor to it. We have everything from the European Classics to a traditional Baptist hymn on there, which sort of typifies Memphis music.

So that’s where I was coming from with that. So I had no idea when Charles went in there in the studio what he was going to play. So he played an untitled original piece as well as “What Am I Here For” by Duke Ellington.

Q: That was great, what you just said about the unity of the pieces, in terms of Memphis music. Now, Donald Brown is the next-oldest, I guess, and he had a full range of experience in Memphis. I think that’s one thing we could talk about, him being house pianist at Stax-Volt and the type of things he went through coming up.

JW: Yeah, sure. Probably more so than any of the others of us, Donald has had the versatility and flexibility to jump into all of those genres as comfortably as possible. I think he was actually a staff musician over at High Records, which is where Willie Mitchell and Al Green and Ann Peeples, and I don’t even know if you know some of these Rhythm-and-Blues artists were doing recordings. He might have done some things at Stax, but I don’t… I don’t particularly remember Stax as being… Even when I was just starting to get out there a little bit, it was just at the very tail end. And I got a chance to play a little bit with Isaac and Al, too, but it might have been one of those things…

Q: My mistake.

JW: So he was doing that. And he always kind of was interested in doing that music and all, but he was kind of learning… When he got out to Memphis State, he was picking up on Jazz like a fish takes to water. I have to kid him, because I remember… I think I taught him how to play “Green Dolphin Street.” I shouldn’t say I taught him how to play it, but I sort of showed him the chords on it, and then gave him the records. And he had it and was gone! It just seemed like it was just a matter of weeks, and he already had picked up on the feeling and all of the nuances of what one could do in that short period of time.

Versatile. Can play so many instruments. Donald plays about five different instruments, in which he can at any time…. Of course, we know he’s probably the premier composer in Jazz right now. But any time on any of those instruments, if he needs something to be conveyed, it’s nothing unusual for him to ask someone… He might ask Mister Ron Carter, say, “Ron, do you mind if I play this figure on the bass just so you can kind of see what I had in mind?” Then of course, he says, “Oh, yeah, that’s what you do,” and then, of course, you put it back in the master’s hand and they go right on with it, and you’re able to get that. So you really can get someone who gets to the essence of the music that way.

And it’s influencing his playing, too, because you can hear the independence. When you hear him play “Poinciana” on there, boy, that is just a work of art in itself. The independence, the dexterity that it takes to do it… It sounds easy because it’s so relaxed and it feels so nice and mellow, and then you realize, hey, he’s just playing all this by himself. Because I would have to sit down here and really do some serious thinking and working on that one, I think! But that’s very typical of Donald as a musician.

And I have known him… During that period of time at Memphis State, too, he was always… We became fast friends, even though we played the same instrument. We would hang out, and we would go hear different people. I would try to get him to sub on certain things. And he was always real shy. A lot of times he wouldn’t even accept the jobs, because he wouldn’t feel like he was ready to do it. Probably these days, people don’t care whether they’re ready or not. They say, “If you get the opportunity go on in there.” And there’s some merit to that, too.

So I can’t say enough accolades about Donald Brown. And he brought actually a real spiritual commitment to this session, too. I wanted him to play… I asked Donald…. We sort of commissioned him to write… That’s the origin of

“Squindo’s Passion,” is that…. I said, “Donald, I really want it to have something that all the horns can participate in, and I need you to write something.” I told him the session was going to be these days… About two days before we’re supposed to do this, I get a call from Donald. He said, “James, didn’t you say something about writing something? What kind of thing you had in mind?” I said, “Donald, don’t pull this stuff. You better show up with something. I don’t care if you have to sing the parts to everybody.” And of course, he comes through. And he said, “Well, I had this idea. Let’s see what this sounds like.” And he put it together, and that’s where he is…

He’s very organized. So he’s probably… He and Thad Jones have the same birthday. I always kid him. I say, “You’re definitely an extension of Thad, because you write all these great orchestrations in your mind, and it’s just a matter of sitting down there and getting it to the paper.” But they’re already written. And he brought that in…

The same thing in his playing, the whole spectrum of doing that. And the other selection he did on there was just a completely different mood. I can’t remember what it was that he played… “The Second Time Around,” which is a favorite standard of his. I notice that he plays that every once in a while in a club. One time he was playing with Milt Jackson, and Milt asked him, “What do you want to play?” He said, “Let’s do ‘The Second Time Around.'” So when he did that, it kind of reminded me of something from a few years earlier, that he always liked playing that tune, and tunes that have that kind of quality to it.

Q: We talked about Harold before, so I’ll integrate that into this. Now let’s say a few words about Mulgrew and again his “Memphisism”.

JW: So many people are born elsewhere… Mulgrew was actually born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and certainly considers doing his musical teeth-cutting and growth there i Memphis. Even when we first heard him play, you just saw this raw talent there. There was something there. Bill Easley I think picked up on it before any of us. And I was aware of it, but Bill Easley said “Wow….” We sat down… He sat in at a club down there and played “Blue Monk,” and Bill Easley just immediately said, “Wow, listen to that.” You’re talking about somebody eighteen years old or something like that playing, and you just see where… It’s just enough of that there just coming through that if you have any kind of insight or foresight, you knew this was something great that was going to develop, this was going to blossom into something real special.

And that’s what the case is. I mean, on and off the bandstand. His personality… It’s not at all surprising that Mulgrew is as great as he is, because what you hear is what you get off the stage, too. I know him so well, and we talk two and three times a week on the telephone if we don’t see each other, or grab some dinner, or do something. He is the type of person that you just gravitate towards.

And then you find that he’s got all this musical wealth of feelings and experiences. He’s a tremendous Gospel player. Tremendous! I mean, he could go out there and make a living just playing Gospel music, and we know what he can do out here with this Jazz! And he is developing into a real fine composer, I think, too. It’s not at all surprising… As far as I’m concerned, he’s probably the first-call pianist in New York right now at this stage of the game — arguably. People will try to get him on their sessions. And I guess you, being at the station, know how many sessions show up in the studio there with him on them.

Q: I guess he said that he’s trying to deliberately stop that…

JW: Oh, he’s stopping that right now because he’s going to focus on the trio. But I’m just saying that over the last six or seven years, or maybe eight or nine years, that that has been very much so. I equate him to what Herbie and McCoy and Andrew Hill were doing with Blue Note and some of the other labels back in the Sixties, appearing on numerous dates as sidemen. And he can bring something to everyone’s session, whether it’s original music, whether you’re playing standards, whether you’re playing Blues — he’s a tremendous Blues player, I think.

He’s got great hands. He is a pianist. When you see him, you know, he’s not a piano player. When you watch him play, when you hear him play, the sound he is able to draw out of the piano… It’s not like he’s banging. He’s got that touch that’s really happening, that touch is really starting to convey.

There’s one thing that Calvin Newborn said that I think is exactly true. I think that he perhaps, maybe more than any of the others of us, is really the guy that really carries forth Phineas’ spirit. Not by playing just the two-hand things, not just doing stylistic things that Phineas perfected and innovated, but through the whole persona of how he approaches the instrument, of really being an extension of himself there. I think that he is really… And I don’t think any of my dear, dear colleagues would disagree with me saying that. I think that he at this point in time carries that spirit forth more so than perhaps any pianist in Jazz right now.

Q: Now, I want you to talk about you as well somewhat. But first let me ask you to extend that statement and say a few words about Phineas Newborn, who seems to be the figure whose breadth stretches over everything that’s on this particular album.

[ETC.]

…that Phineas’ breadth is sort of the spirit that’s hovering over the approach to the album.

JW: Oh, he is. His spirit is very much present throughout the entire session, but particularly here with the piano. Because the piano is the orchestra. And the way he approached it, his playing was so orchestral, so deeply rooted in the basics of just good Jazz playing, so deeply rooted in piano playing that it’s a shadow that even if we wanted to get away from it, we couldn’t — because he cast a long shadow in that area.

When we did this, I think all of us had Junior in mind, because he really set the tone for what we realized as possibilities of being able to do on the piano, and still do it with good taste and elegance, and do it with the kind of spirit and swing that’s the full essence of Jazz. He dared to be daring. And he really gave us, I think… And certainly there have been others who have. But more so there, he set the tone as being the inspiration.

In a sense, he could be just like what Earvin Johnson was to the Lakers, what Larry Bird would be to the Boston Celtics, what any number of great artists in theatre or ballet or in any other art form…

Q: It would be like John Coltrane was to saxophonists; Phineas maybe had that impact in Memphis and other…

JW: Yes, very much so. The same kind of thing that John Coltrane, or perhaps in earlier times, Charlie Parker, and a little bit earlier we can say Billie Holiday or Lester Young, that kind of profound…

His was maybe more regional. I think he’s a very underrated artist. He arguably could be the most underrated artist in the history of Jazz. But as far as that region of the South, and especially the mid-South area, people who heard… The stories are legendary, and yet the beautiful thing about it, the legends are true. They are not exaggerated. Him going out and being able to smoke a cigarette with his right hand and play the song with his left hand and not miss a beat; being able to play trumpet and baritone horn, and play vibes and tenor saxophone — as well as, you know, being one of the greatest pianists.

You know, Barry Harris first heard him playing tenor saxophone. He said, “Yeah, this is a good young tenor player coming up here from down there; the father’s band was up there playing.” And he asked Barry… Barry was playing with Yusef Lateef and those guys up there. And Barry told me this story himself. He asked him, “Would you mind if I could play a tune or two on the piano the next set?” And Barry said, “Oh, you want to play piano?” He was probably saying, “Oh, you really must be something if you’re going to run up there behind Barry Harris.” And he sat down and played the piano, and Barry said, “Wait a minute now.”

So that whole story, to see that… And to be able to come up with such unique arrangements. You don’t have to talk just to the Memphis pianists. Those in the know really are aware. You can talk to Ray Bryant or talk to Billy Taylor… And I spoke to the late Red Garland about it, too, and Red Garland told me (and these words are almost verbatim): “Look, when Phineas came to New York, he scared all of us to death, including Oscar Peterson.” That doesn’t necessarily have to be on this. But he said that he really did that… And Sam Jones and different ones have spoken of him in such high regard, including Oscar and Hank Jones and Jay McShann and different people like this.

So this is a thing that goes well beyond… In terms of the general population knowing him, it would be more regional. In terms of the entire Jazz world, it would be more of the people who really are well-versed in the music and have made it a point to really know Jazz piano and Jazz piano history, and the contributions it has made.

And he set the tone of excellence. You know, that’s the reason why we try to play like we do, whether we’re playing a three-fingered Blues or whether we’re trying to play something that’s much more challenging, like Thelonious’ music or whoever, Bird’s music, Thad Jones or whatever. The thing is that he set the tone for us, that it’s got to be of a certain standard and excellence there. And like I say, you have to be daring. You don’t have to be conservative in your playing.

That’s what I was saying about Mulgrew, that what he has done is taken what Junior did and taken it to the next step, in many degree. And I think to a similar degree, Donald and Harold and maybe myself, too, that we are strongly influenced by that, but yet are not completely locked into it, in terms of we haven’t been made a prisoner of just mimicking Junior. He wouldn’t want us to do that. He would want us to take that and to build on it, and find our own personal voice through that. And that’s what we have done. And that’s the reason why, you know, we have a range of pieces and players here that can cover his full spectrum, from Russell Wilson’s stylings on various pieces, to Harold coming in there and playing “For Carl,” something that Phineas recorded, and Mulgrew playing “Dancing on The Ceiling” — that could very well be him dancing on the keys, because of the way his…he writes poetry at the piano for sure.

Q: What’s Mulgrew’s other piece?

JW: In the ensemble with the trio, it’s called “The Sequel.”

Q: I know this will be a little tough, but a few words about you in relation to the things that we’ve been talking about. Maybe you don’t want to talk about yourself in the notes, and that’s all right, too.

JW: Probably not. I mean, what can I say about myself? All I can say is that I just enjoyed… This is one of the most inspirational things I’ve done – certainly musically – in life, because of just seeing the expressions of everyone, the feeling that everybody brought. Like I said, it was such a jovial spirit, and everything that was present in this room, it was like a Church service, but a ceremonious…a real celebration. You know, guys seeing each other… People showing up over at the session, other musicians coming in town, people calling and inquiring: “Is this really happening? Is it really going to go down?” Herman Green… Virgil Jones came by the session. He hadn’t seen him since they were with Lionel Hampton in the Sixties. When the word got out, different folks wanted to see this.

Meeting down at Bradley’s. Donald was playing there every night. Going down there and having meals every night, and everybody… Just the camaraderie. We were just hanging twenty-four hours a day, it seemed like, or roughly sixteen, seventeen hours a day with each other. And it was just the most intense, beautiful five-day period of time that you could see. People were really catching up with each other. Many of the guys who were in from out of town were staying in the same hotel, so they could get together and have breakfast, or walk to the session together. We were recording at Power Station, and they were at the Edison, so they would have a six- or seven-block walk over where they could kind of get caught up in seeing New York at the same time — that same kind of rapport.

So, see, that really made the music, I think, come in even more special. Because when you don’t have time to rehearse or perform before you do that… That extra intangible carries over and adds an extra dimension, you know, that doesn’t show up in any statistics or anything, or maybe not known by anyone else — but I realize that.

Also, like I said, some of the guys… There’s two musicians from Memphis in the Basie Orchestra, and they came by the session.

So that was the main thing that I think feel good about it, thinking that we actually accomplished something of this magnitude. And to my knowledge, no other city has done this — and Memphis musicians have done it twice. We’re talking about thirty-some years in between.

Q: Young Men From Memphis, right.

JW: Yeah.

Q: Well, you titled it Memphis Convention I, so that leaves room for the sequel. Do you want to say a few words about the tunes you selected for the ensemble pieces? Are they all your selections or commissions and so forth?

JW: Yeah, they were. Let’s go down.

“Squindo’s Passion” was… I commissioned Donald brown to compose something specifically for that. Donald, once again, is a person that musically I just trust everything to. I just said, “Okay, Donald, write us something.” No criteria. The only thing we might talk about is, he said, “Do you need something fast or do you need something loud?” — and that would be some very general kinds of things in terms of feeling. And I said, “Well, we can go either way.” And just leave it to him, and he’s going to take care of the natural business there. So that’s how that came about, and that was something that got all of the guys involved ensemble-wise to play.

“Ray-El” was a friend of mine by Thad Jones. Bill Mobley actually suggested it, “Well, maybe we ought to something like “Ray-El”. It’s a Blues, and you know, Memphis is the home of the Blues, but yet at the same time it has a different kind of feeling, it’s sort of a soulful kind of thing, too. So it could come out of different expressions. And I had been thinking about that, because I had been playing that in Elvin Jones’ band, and we brought it in there. So it was a natural choice to go along with that.

“There But For The Grace Of…” is one of Harold Mabern’s pieces. I consider that almost like an anthem. And once the lyrics are applied to it, it could be almost as special as something like “Lift Every Voice” or “Some Day We’ll All Be Free,” Donny Hathaway’s piece — of that kind of quality. It does that. I wanted that… And that was another one that I thought would be just great because it has such a built-in arrangement. Basically, it was still Harold’s arrangement and Bill Mobley’s orchestrations for that.

“The Sequel”: I asked Mulgrew to do something with either solo or with the trio, preferably in a trio setting, that could kind of be just special for Phineas. Of course, he showed up with a piece that he subsequently called “The Sequel.” So in a sense, this is a sort of continuum with what people like Jimmy Lunceford and Jimmy Jones and Phineas and people like that before really did.

And the beautiful thing is, he didn’t try to write a virtuoso piece that… Because see, Phineas had many different moods and different directions he could come out of. Most people, when they think of him, many times think of him as just being a virtuoso artist who could play incredible tempos and things like that, and be real fluid. But Phineas also was a great player… He could play “the real blues,” as Stanley Cowell once said, and he could come down there and play some three-finger piano that just sounds like somebody who don’t play but in one key or two keys or something like that. And of course, he could play a lot of different things; he was inspired through Bud and other composers.

So Mulgrew really came up with something that really on the surface may not sound like that, but was very much in tune with the spirit of what Junior was about.

“Tickletoe”: There was no real reason to play that other than the fact that I like the tune, and it’s something that I’ve wanted to hear Charles Thomas play. I said, “Oh, he would be the perfect guy of any of us. He would play that better than any of us would play it.” Then I said, “Well, hey, it is Lester’s piece, and Prez is special, so let’s get a tenor player on this.” And that’s when we got Mister Bill Easley to do that and Bill Mobley — and they contributed major performances on that as well.

“Night Mist Blues”: Well, you know, Ahmad…

Q: You play the Hammond.

JW: Yeah. I wanted to do something a little different. Because in Memphis, I played…you know, at church, I played organ all the time. So that was as much a part of what I was doing as whatever I was doing at the Holiday Inn. And I’ve been thinking about it, and hearing… Since some of the younger guys are coming out here playing that and kind of inspired by Jimmy Smith, I said, “Look, I can still play organ. I may be a little rusty in places, but I want to play it.” And I said, “What could we use that on?” Then I said, “Well, let’s do that.” Then just at the last minute, I enlisted Donald’s services to come out and set the tone for us on the piano and give us a little body and soul there underneath, to give the organ a little more space, and make my role less defined.

“Our Delight”: I’ll tell you, I have to admit, that was just something I wanted to hear what George Coleman would do on tenor and what Mobley would play on trumpet, what Bill Easley could put on clarinet… Bill Easley plays two instruments on there, alto and clarinet.

Q: Alto on the ensemble.

JW: On the ensemble, yes. Then also Mulgrew… I wanted to hear those guys come out and put a thing on that tune there. I knew it would be challenging, but I knew they would also be able to rise to the occasion for it.

“Cottontail” was a tune I thought… You know, we could never go wrong with playing Duke’s music. But I was thinking that would be good for Herman and some of the guys, because this is some music… Playing “Rhythm” changes is no problem. It would be something that I felt would add another little side to it. Most of the time in Memphis, when I heard people playing “Rhythm” changes, they were playing “Oleo.” So I said, “Let’s just do something a little different, a different head there, and let them just go and get in there.” And that was a good showcase for Calvin, Herman, Lewis and Charles in particular.

“No Moon At All” is an old standard that a lot of vocalists used to sing back in the Forties and Fifties. But it’s really Phineas’ arrangement. He recorded it on the Fabulous Phineas album. All I did was adapt it to the horns there. He did it with just the quartet, with his brother and Denzil Best and Jamil. And Jamil was saying, “Man, I don’t think I’ve even played this since we used to play it with the group.” So I wanted to have something that was close to him there in that way, and it was fun — and we just came in and hit one take and did it. But like I said, I thought I would add the horns just to have a slightly different sound to it other than being just a total mimic of his arrangement verbatim there. So having them in added a little spice to it. And once again, as I say, it’s a showcase for him.

“Locomotion”: That was just an after-thought at the end. I thought we should have at least one other tune, because we were running out of time, and I had hoped to read down some other music or come through something. I said, “We don’t have time to really put any more arrangements together. Let’s do something where the guys can play and just really have a blowing sessions, and just sort of have the horns going back and forth” — just to see who really was up for the occasion as much…

So that was really a fun choice. We just kind of worked out a little ending, and it’s basically Coltrane’s arrangement, what he did with the three horns in unison, and a couple of harmony notes here and there towards the end. And it’s really just a showcase also… I asked Mulgrew… I said, “Well, Mulgrew, this is the horns; you just play some trills there and you’ve got the bridge.” So really there’s no piano solo on there. But I asked Mulgrew because I knew that he’s such a great accompanist that he would be right in there and would maybe just give them that added sparkle that I think the horns needed. And I thought it would be fun, too; that Herman and Lewis would get a kick out of playing with Mulgrew again. And actually, I found out that Lewis and Mulgrew had never played together. So that really added another…

Q: One more question. Say a few words about the connection of Memphis that knits the diverse group of musicians on this session — if you can in any sort of general way.

JW: Maybe you should say the last part of the question again.

Q: What is it about your mutual or shared experience in Memphis, whether you born there or work there, that links you as musicians, that gives you this common ground that you can function like this?

JW: It’s hard to say. In Miles’ autobiography, he said it must be something in the water. But I don’t quite say it oversimplified just to that… I think it was always that Memphis was… You heard good music… Even before I was a musician, I was hearing good music, and I assume this is true for most of the other musicians, if not all of them. Long before I was even thinking about even playing piano or playing music in general, whether it was at church or whether I was listening to the radio. And I caught the tail end of the times when they didn’t have the program directors telling you what to play. So you could hear James Cleveland and Aretha, or you could hear Nancy Wilson or Nat King Cole or Dinah Washington, and then you could hear the Ramsey Lewis Trio or maybe Rufus Thomas or somebody like that all within the matter of an hour or two on the same program. So I have always associated that with thinking that music is not only feel-good music, but artistically there’s a lot happening too. And probably it was more pronounced when Harold and Frank Strozier and Charles Lloyd were playing around Memphis there…

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

Q: I guess what Kazunori wants us to elaborate on is what distinguishes Memphis Jazz. And that’s probably actually a better way of describing my questions. How are all these musicians Memphis musicians, how does it come out in their playing. But I think he also wanted in a more specific way, what distinguished Memphis Jazz from, say, New York Jazz or Chicago Jazz or Los Angeles Jazz and so forth…

JW: Well, I can’t speak about the specifics about all of those other locales. But I think, just my opinion, and probably if you asked another one of the musicians you might get a startlingly different viewpoint…

But in my case, just from my observations, I have noticed many of the musicians that have come out of Memphis, first of all, have been really very conscious about certain standards by which they approach the music, being serious about the music, whichever style they are — they are very committed to that. They also usually have fairly good command of their instruments, too. They take a lot of time and care to really know their instruments. Not to be a virtuoso, but to really know what you’re capable of doing, to draw out of your instrument.

And I think also a lot of emphasis is on being able to play the Blues, being able to keep that inflection there and carry that around when you do that. Presentation and all that. Being able to carry in the most professional way in terms of presenting the music when the situation calls for it. Obviously, sometimes we don’t have control over that and we can’t make those kinds of artistic decisions.

And particularly, just to summarize once again, I think that a certain dedication and also a certain command and love and high standards of being able to play the instrument and know your instrument as well, and like I said, certainly the influence of being able to play the Blues and a love for being able to play the Blues. Maybe with some of the others, like Mulgrew and myself, and even Donald to maybe a somewhat similar degree, that Gospel influence is definitely ever-present too. So you have a whole variety there musically.

Now, in terms of the city, where it’s located… I think a lot of musicians gravitated there historically, because on the Mississippi River, during that time they had groups playing on ships and steamboats going up and down there. So if anyone had an aspiration, say, to go from New Orleans to Chicago or to Kansas City, the chances are they came through Memphis.

Charlie Parker’s mother was from Memphis, and actually he was born in Kansas City two weeks after she moved there. So he easily could have been born in Memphis himself! That’s just for some trivia that ..(?).. Aretha Franklin is from Memphis, Tennessee, but grew up in Detroit — but she lived there long enough to really remember living in Memphis the first nine or ten years of her life.

So you have all these other influences there that people always… The beauty of the city. For many years, even when I was growing up, Memphis would win the City Beautiful Award. So it was a very comfortable place to live in terms of space and in terms of climate. The greenhouse effect has done a little change on that!

And also just the whole historical part of it. Because the Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy is from right there. And you have, like I said, later on a connection with Jimmie Lunceford and hiring many of his students from Manassas High School, from Tennessee State, which is actually in Nashville, a university there…

So these standards were set in a lot of ways. And like I said, the city was always expansive. And even though it was a Southern city, it was probably a little more tolerant than many other Southern cities in terms of the Black families being able to grow. I talked to Milt Hinton. Milt Hinton said he spent time in Memphis, and even his father…. When his father died, he was living in Memphis. So when people came from Mississippi and Arkansas and Alabama and so on and so forth…

So from that perspective, people were able to develop, because even though they knew they still had many of those restrictions, and by no means was it utopia, it was comparatively much better than other cities. You know, the first thing… There was a law at the time when Milt Hinton and my father was growing up that Black men couldn’t leave a state like Mississippi. If you were old enough to work, or like a young adult or something like that, you couldn’t just go up there and just relocate — because they knew people were trying to do that. You either had to have some kind of reason or something like that… So many times, parents would get their young males out when they were young boys, twelve years old or something like that! It’s a whole different thing there.

So I think that, once again, could have set the tone for why people there… And then, of course, people were entertaining themselves, whether it’s through rent parties and other situations, and that whole communal thing made for an effort that… By the time that George Coleman and that generation and then later on my generation and all of us came along, these things were fitting into place — and Beale Street was the place it was jumping off.

I don’t know anything about Beale Street in that sense, because by the time I was kind of coming on the scene, Beale Street had become almost like deserted. You know, it was just a couple of pawn shops open down there. They’ve since renovated it, but anyone I’ve talked to…you know, it doesn’t have the same spirit and the same feeling. It’s beautiful and it looks good for the tourists and all of that, but it’s not really quite the same, you know, heyday as it had… And Beale Street was equivalent to what people know as Bourbon Street in New Orleans…

Q: The Red Light District, and all the entertainment was centered there ancillary to that.

JW: Sure. And some of the more important churches were congregated in that area. The church where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his last speech was just right around the corner; it’s not on Beale Street, but it’s a block away — Clayborne Temple.

Q: Let’s try to focus a little bit on the variety of music that was around when Calvin Newborn, George Coleman and Jamil Nasser were coming up, when you and Lewis Keel and Bill Mobley were coming up.

JW: When the generation of Jamil and George and Harold was there, all the musicians played Jazz and Rhythm-and-Blues; but maybe the reverse order — they played Rhythm-and-Blues and Jazz. It wasn’t any distinction. This was just something that came about in the Sixties, when the music was starting to be separated and stuff. But you know, you went on a gig and you played a little bit of each one of those things, and all that whole thing was carried over. And dance music… The musicians could dance and musicians were all-around entertainers. They could sing, and I don’t mean just sort of go through the motions, but everybody did something…

Like I mentioned with the Newborn family band, all the guys doubled — Phineas was playing four or five instruments, Calvin was doing three or four, Wanda was singing and playing trombone. So you had a whole variety of things that you could change the whole look. They had an organist and they had a pianist, too. So if somebody picks up a different instrument, you’ve almost got a whole different band up there on the stage. That was there…

By the time we came along, some of those elements were there. But it became…the community was a little separated. There were people who were known as Rhythm-and-Blues musicians or Blues musicians, and those who were Jazzers and those who were Rockers and all that kind of stuff. So I caught a little tail end where I got a chance to get some Rhythm-and-Blues experience, and like I say, I was playing religious music, and I also got a chance to subsequently some Jazz too.

But it was kind of funny… By the time… Not only in Memphis, but around the country as well, when you’re thought of as a Jazz player, people just assumed you didn’t do anything else but play Jazz. I still have people walking up to me and say, “Oh, man, I’m surprised. I didn’t know you did that. I thought you were just a guy who was into Bud Powell” or something like that. Now, unfortunately, I see that even happening just within the Jazz thing, that people are thought of as just playing Contemporary or Straight-Ahead and so on and so forth.

So those kind of separations started happening a little bit around Memphis, but it was much less pronounced and more soft-pedaled at that time. So you could still float a little bit… Donald Brown was probably the last of the musicians who really got a chance to float into all of those areas as comfortably and could move into those circles from one right to the other, and not miss a beat, so to speak.

I still love Memphis, you know. If Memphis was in New York, I’d live there any day. If I could only bring Memphis to New York, it would be definitely the best of both worlds, or when worlds collide, or something like that…

[-30-]

 

James Williams for “Duos” (4-16-03):

TP: So what is the nitty-gritty? How long ago did you decide you wanted to do this project?

JAMES WILLIAMS: Not much before I did it. It was done about 15 months ago [Winter 2002]. It was something I thought about doing, sort of an early birthday gift idea, in terms of putting that kind of financial effort and time and labor into this. It was a labor of love, doing something I wanted to do. And it involved many different friends, many of whom happen to be outstanding artists in one way or another. I didn’t think I could put a big band together, and I couldn’t do a concert with all of them, so I said, well, something a little more permanent that can be recaptured. The most logical thing was to do a CD, and that’s how I came to the conclusion to do this and present as wide a range… Most people seem to like to conveniently put me into one or two little categories, “James Williams, oh, he was a Jazz Messenger, and his piano playing is soulful,” and so on. But there are other areas I’m interested in and touch on, and feel very comfortable expressing myself in, so I thought this would be a chance to break down some of those preconceptions of what my musicianship is.

TP: You think people have typecast you after all these years.

JAMES WILLIAMS: Especially after all these years, in some ways. Because they see the associations with Art Blakey or Milt Jackson or Ray Brown or Benny Carter or Art Farmer or Milt Hinton (which I’m extremely proud of), but they don’t quite see the ones with Elvin or Lovano or Joe Henderson or Woody Shaw or Thad Jones, or even Joe McPhee or Frank Lowe.

I just called everybody up and said, “Look, this is what I want to do; can you do this at this time?” Luckily, I feel so good about my friends and colleagues that I know they’re going to say yes. I found this out from doing the Finas Sound Tributes concerts. Kenny Barron used to tell me, “Look, don’t even ask me any more; just tell me when the date is — I’ll be there.” That’s very comforting, and it’s also a lot of responsibility. I don’t want to abuse my friendships or my friends. So I knew that they would do it if we could just find a common time.

We literally did it in two or three days, where I had everyone comes in at different times. It was like I had an appointment book. John Clayton was the first one I did. I told my sound crew, “John Clayton’s scheduled to come in at 12 o’clock, Christian’s going to come in at 2 o’clock,” so on and so forth. Ray Brown was doing that triple bass thing at the Blue Note. Ironically, I didn’t get him, because that was the first open day in the soundcheck, so he said, “I can’t do it; I’ve got a golf match.” He wasn’t about to give up a golf game to come in there and just play a couple of tunes with me at that point. “I’ve given you three albums already; we’ll do it next time we come to town.” So we laughed about that. Etta Jones was coming in, Ron Carter was coming in… I had everybody every two or three hours…

TP: If you can resurrect the schedule… So you basically called everyone, and they came in one after the other over three days.

JAMES WILLIAMS: Yes. The nice thing is that some of the guys came early to hear other guys. Joe Lovano came in early to hear Billy Pierce, and Steve Wilson was in to hear Steve Nelson, Patitucci came in to hear Ray Drummond. [very relaxed]

TP: Did you know what repertoire you wanted to play with person, or did you mutually decide it when you were there?

JAMES WILLIAMS: I had some ideas, like certain originals. Steve Nelson said, “Let’s do that tune of yours I used to play every once in a while that I like so much; we never played but a couple of times on gigs.” I said, “Yeah? Which one is that?” It was “Be Real Special.” I said, “Gosh, I haven’t played it in a long time, but if you want to do it, let’s do it.” We just did it in the studio. Steve played with me a lot, so he showed up with my book of music. He has a Geoff Keezer book, a Donald Brown book, a Mulgrew Miller book. So he just came to the studio with my book of music, and he brought it there. I said, “Okay, let me run through it and make sure I’m clear on it, especially playing solo piano.” I just hadn’t thought of it. In that case, it was very in-the-moment.

Certain tunes I had in mind to play, but I wasn’t sure who I wanted to play them with. Jon Faddis had a request to do “A Child Is Born,” and I hadn’t been thinking about it, but I knew he had a great association with Thad, as had I to some degree.

My originals certainly were planned. I wrote a tune for Ron Carter called “Le Wizard de Basso,” and we’d played it on a tour in 2001 with Billy Cobham and Donald Harrison. I brought the music, but I knew he’d do something to make it interesting and give it a different slant than what we did with the quartet.

TP: About what percentage would you say was spontaneously decided at the studio and how much was pre-planned?

JAMES WILLIAMS: All the originals I had planned to play at some point with somebody, and usually it was someone who… I wanted Joe Lovano to play two of my originals. I wanted to hear his take on them. I’d heard Steve Wilson and Billy play on them, and wanted to hear what Joe would bring to the table. No rehearsals. We ran the tunes down, tried out some things, made sure the parts were clear, the beginnings and the endings, and did them on the spot.

Steve Nelson liked “Old Times Sake,” but he’d never played it with us before. He always asked me, “Look, why don’t you ask me to play with ICU?” I told him Dave Holland and George Shearing wouldn’t let him go away; I couldn’t hire him for anything.

TP: Did more pre-planning go into the vocals?

JAMES WILLIAMS: A couple of vocals were planned, like the Purcell piece. That’s the only thing I rehearsed in advanced, because I wanted to make sure I could play it! I suggested to Miles Griffith that I heard his voice with “These Foolish Things,” he said he knew it, and we found a key and did it. The Leon Ware tune that Roger sang, “I Know It’s You,” which is associated with Donny Hathaway, is one I’d asked Roger about, and we had a little rundown because it’s pretty tricky. I’m not sure if I played it as well as I even think we could have played it. On “For All We Know” I put a little vamp on.

But I asked Etta what she wanted to sing. She said, “You know, I never recorded ‘Skylark’; let’s do that.” I thought that was perfect, because I didn’t want them to come in and sing songs they’d done on records 5-6 times already. I basically wanted to put everyone in a slightly different element and make them do things a little differently than how they’d do it in their own situation.

Ray Drummond used to play “For My Nephews” with me often at Zinno’s and the Knickerbocker and places like that. I didn’t even have to bring out the music. He and Christian always came to my gig and had done their homework; they knew my music before they got there.

TP: Who’s Thomas Trotter?

JAMES WILLIAMS: He’s an opera singer, who is a friend of mine. I wanted to do something a little different, after I chose that Purcell piece. I asked Roger to come up with a little arrangement, a little duet.

Kim Nally is a vocalist from San Francisco. A friend of mine knew her and suggested her, that she was going to be in town that week. I didn’t really know her, although I’d heard her sing, and said, “Let’s go for it.” Same thing with Steve Heck, who’s a former piano student of mine from Berkeley. I ran into a few years ago playing a Howard Johnson’s gig, and I thought, “he sure sounds good.” I said, “He looks like a student of mine,” but he hadn’t been singing at that time, but his piano playing sounded good. I wanted to have someone on there that nobody knew as well as people like Lovano or a singer like Freddy Cole…

Now, the songs with Freddy I didn’t know. Freddy taught me the songs, and then we just recorded them. Right now, I’d be hard-pressed to play them; I’d have to go back and learn them and listen to them again. If he were to call “Close To You” on a gig right now, it would get a little confused. He sat down and played them through a couple of times, and I said, I think I’ve got it.”

TP: This is about four hours of music all-told, and the music is so wide-ranging. You’ve been a professional since 1977, so it’s 26 years as a professional doing all sorts of jobs. What challenges are involved in playing with all these personalities?

JAMES WILLIAMS: A lot of times I wanted to led them lead and zone in quickly on what mood they were in at that particular day and moment, not go by their reputation and what they’d recorded. If we were laughing or silly and we were clowning around, I’d try to bring that kind of buoyancy to the music. Sometimes they’d play behind the beat or play at… I had to make sure that I wasn’t having a tendency to follow them so much that the tempo would drag, or everything would get in a sluggish mode. That was always the other side of the challenge, to be a good accompanist all the way throughout. I was not all that concerned about how well I played as a soloist on this session as much as I wanted to be really on top of my game as an accompanist. Accompanying means being a team player. Even though I was the only team member, or I am the team in that sense.

TP: But you’re the boss, too!

JAMES WILLIAMS: That’s interesting, too. Because in a sense, they wanted to please me. They came in and said, “What do you want me to do?” I said, “I want you to be yourself.” Ron said, “What do you want today?” I said, “I’m not too demanding; just play some of that Ron Carter stuff on my date and sound good for me.” He started laughing. I said, “You probably can handle it; I don’t know. I’m sure you can.” We worked at it. Ron is all business, he doesn’t deal with a lot of small talk unless he’s around people he really likes and knows pretty well.

Now, Etta was totally passive. “Oh, James, what do you want me to sing?” “Etta, let’s just do what you feel.” She said, “Well, I never recorded ‘Skylark.'” I said, “Let’s do it, then; I can play it.” I told her, “Thank goodness you do it in the original key.” I could have transposed it. I probably would have taken a moment and written it out. Because I didn’t want anybody to be doing a lot of takes. I thought two or three takes maximum. I said, “We’ve got to move this right along. I want this to be more like a gig and like a party.” I didn’t want anybody to work that hard and get all caught up like it’s a real studio date.

TP: Did you therefore allow the personalities of your partners to determine your approach to the piano? Some things are kind of beboppish, some things are kind of churchy, some things are bluesy, some things are more harmonic and impressionistic. Does the material rule that? Does the dialogue rule that?

JAMES WILLIAMS: Both, actually. I wanted to play some bebop. I said, “Look, that’s what I do.” I play bebop. I love that music. That’s what really excited me about the music, especially when I first was starting to play more. So that had to be represented. Obviously, the church and gospel and bluesier side of things is also what I seem to have become known as. Now, I don’t think of myself that way. When I hear that, I think of Ray Bryant and Bobby
Timmons and Junior Mance and cats like that, but not so much myself. I’m always sort of amazed. I say, “Is that what people think of me.” I don’t really see myself in that light. I don’t want to dissociate myself from that as much as to add on…

TP: Put it in its proper perspective.

JAMES WILLIAMS: Okay, that’s one dimension. Let’s move on and explore some other sides. That’s the other thing I wanted to keep out front, and hopefully… I don’t necessarily expect this necessarily to change that opinion. It’s a different project. I just want each CD to display another side of where I am at that point in time.

TP: Is this a New York centric CD? You’re a New Yorker since January 1984, when you moved from Boston.

JAMES WILLIAMS: I think it definitely is. There’s a certain energy, a certain spontaneity, even a certain recklessness. Carefree might be a better word for it.

TP: Maybe a confidence.

JAMES WILLIAMS: That, too. A certain swagger to it. I think all of those things are certainly what we look for. When I think of New York, all those things should be present, up-close and personal. But New York is also very unpredictable, and that’s the perspective here. The industry is now volatile and unpredictable. That’s the reason this is happening the way it is. To me, anybody that’s supposed to be in the business would jump on this immediately. It has everything they say they need — marketability, name value, things along those lines. But right now, everyone is doing just the opposite of what jazz is about. For the most part, they’re being very careful and ultra-conservative in some cases, going for the sure thing only, and not deal with anything that wants to take any chances. There’s a whitewashing of the music in a lot of ways. The people making the decisions are saying people only want to hear this and not be challenged. So that’s reflected in this, too.

[-30-]

For the 99th Birth Anniversary of George Shearing (1919-2011), A 2002 Interview Conducted for the

For the 99th birth anniversary of the iconic pianist-composer-bandleader George Shearing, here’s an interview that I conducted with him 2002 in preparation for the liner notes of a Pablo release of a 1957 Newport Jazz Festival concert on which his group shared the bill with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. I’ve appended the notes after the interview, which is unedited.

 

George Shearing (7-23-02):

TP: I’m writing the notes for an album on Pablo. It documents a concert you were on at the Newport Festival in July 1957. Cannonball Adderley came on for the first half, your quintet came on for the second half, there’s one track in which you played “Soul Station” with Cannonball, Nat and your group, and then your band concludes the concert. I was hoping I could speak with you to see if you have any memory at all of the event…

SHEARING: I don’t know whether this is the worst news you’ve heard today, but I really have no musical memory of the date. Sure, I was there, but when I was there, I was 38. Now I’m 83.

TP: I absolutely understand. I wanted to speak about where that event fit into the quotidian of your quintet, and where the selections you used fit into the general pattern of your performance at the time… Firstly, in 1957, your quintet was one of the most popular acts in all of jazz. You were playing, I would assume, quite a number of lounges and nightclubs with it, I’d assume a certain complement of concerts and touring…

SHEARING: More concerts now than then.

TP: So in 1957 not so many concerts.

SHEARING: Not so many. What we would be doing in those days was if either Birdland or somewhere had a tour, we would be doing one of those tours.

TP: So you would tour with the Birdland-Morris Levy junkets as opposed to the Norman Granz, junkets.

SHEARING: Yes, generally.

TP: In an average year, during the first 7-8 years of the quintet after your breakthroughs, from 1949 to 1957-58…

SHEARING: The first place we played was Cafe Society downtown. Then once we started doing the concerts in the early ’50s, we would be doing whole tours.

TP: In concert halls. Would your presentation be different in a concert hall vis-a-vis a nightclub?

SHEARING: It would be about the same. Because when my set ended, when I started going Afro-Cuban in the ’50s, we would end with some kind of a flagwaving situation, whether it was a concert or a nightclub, because that’s the nature of what happens in the show. A show builds to its end. You don’t end with an opening act, for instance.

TP: Did the more subtle arrangements maybe go by the board a little more in concerts, and the more declarative ones…

SHEARING: Yes, I would think so. I’m not conscious of doing it, but it would be a normal development, I would say.

TP: And during those years, what percentage would you be playing clubs and what percentage concerts? Of course, outdoor event were unusual.

SHEARING: I would play more concerts then than I play now, believe it or not. Although of course, I don’t play many concerts now. I kind of choose what I want to do now. I’m in my eighties, and I don’t have to grab everything that comes to my attention.

TP: You don’t have to work 300 days a year now.

SHEARING: No. We would have a regular stream of clubs, like Birdland, Storyville, the Blue Note in Chicago and later on the London House.

TP: And you’d be in there for long residencies, two-three weeks.

SHEARING: At London House, we would, and I guess we were at the Blue Note for two or three weeks, too. That was the first out-of-town job with the Quintet, in 1949, after we played the Cafe Society. I remember Frank Holzstein, who directed the Blue Note in Chicago, and the Ambassador from England came in one night, and Frank got such a charge of announcing him. He said, “I’m very pleased to have Mr. Barkley Gage…” [ETC.]

TP: I would imagine that at Birdland you were always on a double or triple bill. Was that a common thing for you to do?

SHEARING: Yes, I would say so. And of course, the strength of the quintet, when we had the Latin stuff to finish with… We usually closed the show. Never mind our set; we would close the show. Because maybe it would need piano-bass-and-drums to open…

TP: Say, the Bud Powell Trio would open.

SHEARING: That’s right. Or even a pianist…

TP: Billy Taylor or somebody.

SHEARING: Right. And we would close, because we had musical strength, and some of the records we were doing were successful. We recorded “Lullaby of Birdland” in 1952. It took me 15-20 minutes to write. I was sitting, eating a steak in my dining room where we were living in New Jersey, and suddenly this thing came to me [SINGS FAMOUS 4-BARS] I think that if you contrive something, or they want me to write something to see what can I do, they are not usually the successful compositions.

TP: It’s the inspirations of the moment.

SHEARING: That’s right.

TP: Was “Conception” like that?

SHEARING: A little bit. But yes, I’d say so.

TP: That tune continues to fascinate musicians on a musical level.

SHEARING: Yes, the bridge is a bit tricky. Of course, in Miles Davis’ particular style, he would have his own bridge. He wouldn’t play my bridge. I don’t know why… I knew Miles as a young man in his twenties. He didn’t drink anything except Coke, he’d just come and sit down and hear me every night, and we’d talk for hours. That’s not the same Miles we knew later on, when he…

TP: After he lost his voice.

SHEARING: [LAUGHS] That’s right.

TP: But where I’m going with this question about whether it would be commonplace to share a bill with others… Maybe the Basie band or the Ellington band or Machito might be in residence at Birdland.

SHEARING: Absolutely. In which case we would not close! [LAUGHS] No, not really! It would be very much of an anticlimax, wouldn’t it.

TP: Would it be commonplace for your band to be sitting in with other featured artists, or take them as guests?

SHEARING: No.

TP: So this is really an exception, for Cannonball and Nat Adderley to be setting up a spontaneous arrangement with your band.

SHEARING: Yes, I would say so. You see, John Levy managed Cannonball and he managed me. Capitol didn’t come into my life until 1955. John, of course, was my first bass player. When he gave up the quintet, he gave up playing, and became management. He managed Cannonball, Nancy Wilson, Dakota Staton…

TP: A lot of the most popular acts who played the inner city circuit of clubs were under his management.

SHEARING: Yes, indeed. I worked in great interest of the black people. I noticed that when we tried to check into a hotel in Salt Lake City, John Levy was with me, and he asked the clerk, “Do you have a reservation for Mr. Shearing?” He said, “Yes, we do.” He said, “Could we make that a twin?” Frankly, I thought the guy was rather impudent. He said, “Who is the other fellow?” John, of course, not wanting to say anything, although the other fellow was white, said, “The other fellow is Dick Garcia.” “Well, I don’t know whether we have a twin right now.” So John said, “Well, could you put them into two singles and change them when they wake up?” He said, “Then I’d have to charge twice, wouldn’t I.” That’s when I took over. I said, “No, you wouldn’t.” I said, “You’ve been spending this time to find out whether the other fellow is black or white. I’ll tell you now, he’s a white man.” I said, “The gentleman you’re talking to, by the way, is my manager, and I issue an order that you deal with him politely, otherwise you’ll have the pleasure of reading about it in the press.” He said, “Mr. Shearing, you and I could get along.” I said, “Not at all. We refer to you as a public servant, and you’re here to serve the public and the best things for the public in general. I happen to be a member of that organization. I repeat, if you don’t deal with us properly, you’ll read about it in the press.”

TP: Did that resolve the issue?

SHEARING: Oh, yes. Certainly there was a room for Dick Garcia… Oh, yes, it was all solved. And as I say, it should be. It should be anyway, black or white. As it happened, since he couldn’t find out, he’d better not take a chance, so he refused the white customer! So that’s where I kind of got down on him. “Mr. Shearing, you and I can get along.” I said, “Oh, no. I’m paying you my money, you’re a member of the public, you’re here to serve me. I’m not here to get along with you. I’m paying you my money. I won’t be ever seeing you again, with the outlook that you have.” When we got outside, John said, “You know, they’re going to send somebody after you.” I said, “Good. Let’s publicize it. It’s a disgrace. Let’s see it in the press.”

TP: So you were playing a number of concerts, not too many outdoor festivals, John Levy booked the event, and therefore, Cannonball is one client, you’re another client, and thus you’re on the same bill. Had this ever happened before with Cannonball and Nat, to your recollection?

SHEARING: I don’t think so. I don’t know when it first happened. But he was one of my very favorite players.

TP: Did it happen again, that he would sit in with you?

SHEARING: We both had our own groups.

TP: And very well arranged. He had his act and you had yours.

SHEARING: Exactly.

TP: Tell me about your impressions of Cannonball, and, if you had a relationship with Cannon, the nature of it. Your sense of him as a player and musician and public figure.

SHEARING: Well, he seemed to be a very well educated man. I love his playing. Really. Both of them. Nat, too.

TP: He had a beautiful, communicative, declarative style on the trumpet.

SHEARING: Oh yes. I love Cannon’s playing.

TP: As someone who was on 52nd Street and heard everyone close-up and personal many, many times, where… Cannonball is the next generation. How do you see his playing vis-a-vis the original bebop players and the others you came in contact with on 52nd Street.

SHEARING: You can’t compare him with Charlie Parker, because Charlie Parker had a very distinctive style of his own. He and Dizzy were the founders of bebop. Together, they were a miracle.

TP: Did you hear them play unisons?

SHEARING: Yes, of course I did. That’s what I mean when they were absolutely miraculous. [hybrid third instrument]

TP: Did you have your ears wide-open during the ’50s when you were touring? Were you aware of everything consequential that was going on?

SHEARING: Oh, yes.

TP: So you had taken notice of Cannonball, as you’d shared a manager.

SHEARING: Yes.

TP: What do you recall as your first impression of him?

SHEARING: Great big sound. Wonderful facility. A very intelligent man, obviously. Oh, I loved him.

TP: Did you have any personal relationship to speak of?

SHEARING: No.

TP: I’ll run down the tunes. Please tell me what you recall. “Pawn Ticket.”

SHEARING: That’s Ray Bryant’s, I believe.

TP: You recorded a number of his tunes over the years. They’re very catchy and melodic.

SHEARING: A lot. I liked them. They’re melodic, they’re strong, and they come from somebody who really knew how to play the piano.

TP: On “It Never Entered My Mind,” your arrangement superimposes the harmonies of Satie on top of it.

SHEARING: Right. I believe that’s a Rodgers & Hart tune, a standard tune. The Satie was part of “Nuages Gymnopedie.”

TP: Which brings up another issue. You’ve mentioned in interviews that as a child you had a piano teacher in England, a Mr. Lyndon Lodge, who after a certain amount of time informed your parents that you shouldn’t bother with Classical studies…

SHEARING: “It’s obvious that this man is going to be a jazz pianist.”

TP: Why did he think it was obvious that you were going to be a jazz pianist?

SHEARING: I guess I didn’t pay too much attention. I should have learned 16 bars in the ensuing week instead of 4. When I went back to that school, I’d played a number of symphony concerts, played two or three different Mozart concerti, and I said to the teacher, who was still there, “Do you remember the advice you gave my parents when I was 16?” He said, “Yes, I do.” I said, “Has it come to your attention that I’ve played a number of symphony concerts?” He said, “Yes, it has.” I said, “With that knowledge, were you to give them advice today, what would it be?” He said, “Yes.” “Why?” He had said, “Your musical thoughts at your fingers go first and foremost through jazz, and you do this naturally.” You convert classics …(?)…” Years later, he said, “My advice would be the same.” “Why? I’ve played a number of symphony concerts.” He said, “Yes, but I expect your main dollar comes from playing jazz.” I said, “Yes, it does.” He said, “My advice would be the same.” A very wise man.

TP: Well, you did not grow up, to say the least, in circumstances of material comfort.

SHEARING: No. Not at all. And no musicians in the family. None for at least 500 years! I’m serious. There’s a genealogist in England, Mrs. Race, and she went back and discovered for the last 500 years that nobody was a musician in my family in any way that she could ascertain.

TP: When did it become apparent that you had musical gifts? During music lessons?

SHEARING: Yes. When I could go the piano and play things. I remember my sisters on Sunday morning, they all [SINGS THEIR PRACTICE], mostly black notes. Of course, being blind, I wouldn’t know them. I’ve done a little of each — self-taught and I’ve trained to play classical music.

TP: Was absorbing classical music and becoming a proficient interpreter of it always important to you? Did it always speak to you?

SHEARING: Yes. I feel that every musician, whether Jazz, Classical or somewhere in between, should be a thorough musician.

TP: There’s a feature for Emil Richards, “There Will Never Be Another You.” Was it commonplace for you to feature your instrumentalists in live performance?

SHEARING: Yes.

TP: Your succession of vibraphonists was Marjorie Hyams for a few years, then Don Elliott, then Joe Roland, then Cal Tjader. Several great ones cut their teeth with you. In 1949, when Leonard Feather suggested the vibes-guitar format to you, it happened…

SHEARING: Buddy DeFranco and I had a quartet, with clarinet, piano, bass and drums, and Buddy wanted to work with a unit that was purely his own. I had to do something. So Leonard Feather suggested Marjorie and Chuck Wayne.

TP: The other version is that Buddy was negotiating with Capitol and you were with MGM…

SHEARING: I was with MGM from 1949 to 1955. I did things before then for Discovery and Savoy… Savoy was a trio. I don’t remember who it was.

TP: Was it with who you played with on 52nd Street?

SHEARING: J.C. Heard and Oscar? No. We never recorded.

TP: What a shame.

SHEARING: It is.

TP: What was it like to play with Oscar Pettiford?

SHEARING: Well, it’s a real foundation, isn’t it.

TP: So you had to go separate ways…

SHEARING: Yes, and Leonard suggested Marjorie and Chuck. Of course, I was using what we call the locked-hands style anyway, so obviously, Marjorie on top and Chuck an octave lower, and me in both registers with all the locked chords in between. That was the quintet sound.

TP: Did that conception come to you with the same instantaneous sense of revelation as “Lullaby of Birdland”?

SHEARING: Yes. Frankly, I think the description of that sound that everybody would know is, let’s say, the Glenn Miller saxophone section. The clarinet would be playing the same as the vibes, the guitar would be playing the same as the tenor, and I would be playing the long-haired stuff in between. Therefore, we got three voices on the front line.

TP: I’d assume you were quite familiar from the interrelation of piano and guitar from the Nat Cole Trio and the popularity of that format.

SHEARING: Yes.

TP: How about the vibraphone? What was the model in your mind’s ear for the role of vibes in that group apart from the orchestrative aspect?

SHEARING: Upper register. Playing in the upper register. Leonard Feather suggested that I use Marjorie Hyams and Chuck Wayne on vibes and guitar, along with John Levy on bass and Denzil Best on drums. That’s where the quintet came from, and we did a recording for Discovery, before moving to MGM.

TP: Emil Richards stayed with you for a fair amount of time, four or five years. Describe him as a musician. He was so versatile.

SHEARING: Well, he was a studio man. Not only was he a good jazz player, but he was a studio man, so he could read anything you put in front of him. It’s important that those three instruments — vibes, guitar and piano — stay close together, and for the bass always to be on the right note provided in his part, or he knows the chord structure enough to fit in. But mostly I’d write the bass part.

TP: So for this to work, it was necessary that everyone be quite cognizant for the parts they had to play. There wasn’t a great deal of room for the musicians to stretch out.

SHEARING: That’s correct.

TP: So someone playing with you had to be able to improvise and express their personality when called for, but also have the discipline to know…

SHEARING: How to read.

TP: By the way, how would you convey the arrangements? Obviously with sheet music, but some people sing the parts…

SHEARING: I’d give them a sheet.

TP: The guitarist was Toots Thielemans. How long was he with you?

SHEARING: A good three or four years. I used to feature him on harmonica, too, because he was a wonderful harmonica player.

TP: Again, give me the kind of capsule description as you did with Emil Richards.

SHEARING: See, he was guitar and Emil was vibes. So they needed to both play the same melodies an octave apart.

TP: I was thinking of the characteristics that distinguished him to you as a musician.

SHEARING: Toots was a great harmonica player, and I’d feature him on that. Then he played enough guitar to be in the quintet.

TP: So you used him more sectionally as a guitarist, and soloistically as a harmonica player.

SHEARING: Well, that would be my first aim with anybody. Then, during the show, we would feature what there was to feature. In other words, Thielemans on harmonica and Emil still with the vibes.

TP: And you would use Emil Richards’ percussion skills for detail and color.

SHEARING: Oh yes.

TP: Al McKibbon is the bassist. He was with you a long time.

SHEARING: Oh, yes. About seven or eight years, if not more.

TP: Did he replace John Levy?

SHEARING: Yes. He came to me from Dizzy Gillespie’s band when they had Chano Pozo, so he really understood the Latin thing. When Cal Tjader was with me as well, those two… Oftentimes, there would be no keyboard instrument to play. Al would be playing either conga or cowbell or something, and Thielemans would play guiro or shekere, and Emil would be playing timbales. So we had a good Latin rhythm section. But no notes…

TP: No harmonic instrument.

SHEARING: Yes.

TP: Except for you.

SHEARING: Yes. Well, I would even lay out.

TP: By the way, were there any Latin piano players who were influences on you?

SHEARING: I listened to Noro Morales quite a bit.

TP: Did he play in New York in the early ’50s?

SHEARING: I believe so. The first Latin band I heard was Machito, in 1949, when I was playing with Buddy DeFranco in the quartet at the Clique Club. We would have to follow Machito!

TP: Oh, my God.

SHEARING: Or Machito would follow us.

TP: A better scenario.

SHEARING: I would think so! I just did the best I could. I learned a lot from Machito, of course.

TP: Were you friends with him?

SHEARING: Yeah. We didn’t go out to dinner or anything…

TP: But did you speak with him? Dizzy Gillespie learned a lot about Latin music from being in a section with Mario Bauza. Did you learn from talking to a lot of the Latin musicians you played with on 52nd Street?

SHEARING: I just listened. You learn a lot more by listening than by talking.

TP: Did playing Latin music and playing in clave come naturally for you?

SHEARING: Yes.

TP: That takes us to “Old Devil Moon.” I assume you played that arrangement a fair amount.

SHEARING: Al McKibbon told me about that bass part, which he introduced into “Old Devil Moon.” He did it with me. McKibbon would be really on beat with that stuff. But purposefully. That’s what it was. Unlike jazz, the main beat in Latin was four-and, 1-2-3-BUH-BUH…BAHT. It was four-and-two, four-and-two. That would be the conga drums.

TP: So it’s quite specialized, and the rhythms have to be locked in.

SHEARING: Yes, particularly if you’re going to do it in an authentic way. Anybody can… [sings “Cucaracha”] It can be played by any dance hall band in the world. That’s not specialized.

TP: When did Armando Peraza come into your circle?

SHEARING: He was with me for about five or six years, and he was there along with McKibbon and Cal Tjader. McKibbon would be playing cowbell, Armando would be playing congas and bongos… The whole rhythm section was set up with almost no harmonic instrument.

TP: Did you ever incorporate Armando Peraza on swing tunes, or just on Latin tunes?

SHEARING: Latin tunes.

TP: You never used him to give flavor to a 4/4 tune.

SHEARING: No. I wonder even now whether he spoke more English than he thought he spoke then. He had a great sense of humor. I think he’s still with us, as far as I know.

TP: Percy Brice on traps, when did he come in? You couldn’t have had a better drummer than Denzil Best…

SHEARING: I can’t remember if Percy followed Denzil. He might have.

TP: Bill Clark played before.

SHEARING: Right. Well, Percy was a better drummer than Bill Clark. Bill had one thing, and that was… [sound of brushes] Percy would concoct actual parts to play. He’d hear an arrangement and know where the fills would come in. He was a great drummer.

TP: Again, he had the reading skills, the technical skills, and the swing. How long was he with you?

SHEARING: Three years.

TP: The final tune is a calypso, “Nothing But De Best.”

SHEARING: It’s Denzil’s tune. Denzil was very close to the West Indian feeling…

TP: So along with “Move” and “Allen’s Ailey,” that’s another piece from his lexicon. So we have “Pawn Ticket,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “There Will Never Be Another You,” the jam, “Old Devil Moon,” and “Nothin’ But De Best.” So if not by the specific tunes, if the structure, a bop line, a ballad, a instrumental feature, a Latin tune, a Calypso…

SHEARING: What it did was to present rhythmic and harmonic variety. That’s what it did.

[-30-]

 

******

 

Liner Notes: George Shearing/Cannonball Adderley (At Newport):

“At Newport” is a consequential addition to the prolific and distinguished discographies of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and George Shearing, who play back to back and briefly join forces on the concert documented herein. The venue is the Newport Jazz Festival, then in its fourth summer, and the bands let their hair down, playing well-paced, tightly arranged, improvisationally open sets before a relaxed, enthusiastic audience under the stars.

Observers in 1957 might have found the matchup of Shearing — 38, white, English, an established mega-star — and Adderley — 28, black, southern, struggling to ascend the jazz tree — to be counter-intuitive. But in retrospect, they were complementary personalities. For one thing, they shared a manager, John Levy, the black bassist and road manager of Shearing’s first quintet, who left in 1951 to pursue a distinguished and pioneering career in personal management. More to the point, each was an instrumental virtuoso with a populist sensibility, conversant with a full timeline of jazz vocabulary, informed by the imperative to present even the most esoteric music in an unfailingly communicative manner.

One evening precisely two years earlier, Adderley had famously exploded on the scene when he sat in with bassist Oscar Pettiford before an enthralled audience of musicians and hipsters at the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village. This happened months after Charlie Parker’s death, and such contemporaneous young lions as Jackie McLean and Phil Woods were on record as regarding Adderley’s style — he incorporated the harmonic and rhythmic innovations and propulsive thrust of Charlie Parker, with a big, fat Willie Smith lead alto tone, ferocious execution reminiscent of Earl Bostic, and an ability to conjure elegant melodic lines a la Benny Carter — as the next step in extending the vocabulary of the alto saxophone. Adderley grounded his narratives in the tropes of bebop, blues, and the black church, apportioned in equal measure; after the band tears through J.J. Johnson’s 1947 composition “Wee-Dot,” his patter provides a window to his thinking.

“That, of course, was a blues, which we like to play very much,” says the former high school band director. “You’ll find it obvious in our performance here this afternoon, because we feel that the blues reflects what jazz SHOULD be made of.”

Throughout their half-hour set the Adderley Brothers — Cannonball and his cornetist sibling Nat were co-leaders — manifest the trademark collective focus, instrumental prowess, soulful intelligence and insouciant precision that sealed their popularity with black audiences from the moment they convened in early 1956. Those qualities were due in no small part to the contributions of pianist Junior Mance, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Jimmy Cobb, a seasoned young rhythm section that could go primal or delicate at the drop of a hat. In particular, Chicagoan Mance uncorks some big-time solos — think Earl Hines and Albert Ammons mixed with Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk — that show us why Lester Young, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt and Dinah Washington had made him their road pianist of choice in previous years.

The repertoire — “A Foggy Day” (an insistent medium groove, with telling key modulations), “Sermonette” (a Ray Charles-inspired bop-shuffle), “Sam’s Tune” (a train song) and “Hurricane Connie” (ingenious, warp-speed rhythm changes) — comes from “Cannonball Enroute,” “To The Ivy League With Nat,” and “Introducing Cannonball Adderley,” all recorded for Mercury-EmArcy, a label that kept the brothers in the studio, but backed their product insufficiently. Indeed, Cannonball’s bandstand optimism and ebullience flies in the face of the dire circumstances that already faced him. Owing back taxes, the brothers already were deep in debt, and would disband temporarily in the winter of 1958, when Cannonball joined forces with Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

By contrast, Shearing was at a popular peak. A blind prodigy from a working class family in London, the pianist had carved out a successful career in England before emigrating to the United States in 1947. Under the sponsorship of countryman Leonard Feather, he quickly made his bones on 52nd Street, establishing props in a popular trio with Oscar Pettiford and J.C. Heard, and sharing bills with prestigious artists ranging from Charlie Parker to Machito. Influenced in formative years by Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, and Nat Cole, and fascinated with the vocabulary of Romantic and Impressionist European music, Shearing quickly transmuted the vocabulary of bebop into his own voice.

Already a fixture in 1949, Shearing became a mega-star that year when his recording of “September In The Rain” [MGM] with a vibraphone-guitar-piano-bass-drums configuration sold 900,000 copies, imprinting the “Shearing sound” — the vibraphone played the top register of the octave, the guitarist played the bottom, and the piano navigated between those registral boundaries with block chord variations — on the collective consciousness of jazz. In 1955, he signed with Capitol Records, cementing his stature with a series of nuanced, well-promoted albums that showcased his exquisite touch and harmonic ingenuity in a range of contexts. With enviable panache and sophistication, he tackled the fiery complexities of bebop and Afro-Cuban music, intimate solo piano recitals, dialogues with singers Nat Cole, Mel Torme and Peggy Lee, and plush concerti against mellow backdrops of strings and woodwinds.

Here, Shearing’s stylistic flexibility is on full display. For his spread-out Newport audience, he eschews, with one exception, the intimate, tasteful arrangements “for very small rooms” that comprised the bulk of his work in 1957. That exception is “It Never Entered My Mind,” on which he superimposes the melody of Eric Satie’s “Gymnopedie.” Otherwise, burning is the order of the night, and the excellent band rises to the task. On “Pawn Ticket” — a worthy entrant in the Ray Bryant lexicon of catchy tunes with slick changes — Shearing unleashes his bop chops on a block chord solo. A stirring “There Will Never Be Another You” features vibraphonist Emil Richards — the multiple percussion maestro who succeeded malleters Don Elliott, Joe Roland and Cal Tjader in Shearing’s units — over sweet fills from classy trapsetter Percy Brice. Shearing learned clave from Machito, and – with idiomatic support from bassist Al McKibbon, himself a disciple of Chano Pozo with Dizzy Gillespie, and from legendary Cuban hand drummer Armando Peraza — customarily climaxed sets with idiomatic Latin flagwavers. McKibbon provides the vamp that propels “Old Devil Moon,” and Peraza puts intriguing mambo beats on “Nothing But De Best,” an engaging calypso authored by former Shearing drummer Denzil Best.

A stickler for playing charts just precisely so, Shearing required sideman to read immaculately and to improvise and express their personality when called upon to do so. “We are not usually in the habit of inviting guests up to play with the quintet, because normally we have things completely set,” he remarks before summoning the Adderleys on stage. “But we are about at this time to embark on a very special arrangement. As a matter of fact, we are going to arrange it right now.” McKibbon and Brice set the tempo, and the impromptu crew launches into “Soul Station,” a funky blues line with a Horace Silver connotation. The Adderleys soar, Richards uncorks a cogently jagged declamation, and Shearing lets it all hang out with several intense choruses of block chords, the way he might have done on a third set at Birdland following, say, Bud or Bird or Machito or the Ellington Orchestra. Catching his breath in the aftermath, he briefly sheds his unflappable stage persona, saying, “You don’t mind us enjoying ourselves for one night, do you? Whew!”

Neither Shearing nor Junior Mance can recall whether this was the only musical encounter of the two John Levy clients. But it was a special one, and both giants honored themselves in the process.

Ted Panken
Downbeat, Jazziz, WKCR

For Pianist-Arranger David Hazeltine’s 59th Birthday, a Downbeat Article From 2005 and an Uncut Blindfold Test From 2009, and 2 Separate Liner Notes

For the master pianist David Hazeltine’s 59th birthday, here’s a big post, containing a 2005 Downbeat article, a more slightly edited Downbeat Blindfold Test, and liner notes for his CDs Inspiration Suite (Sharp-9) and Blues Quarters (Criss Cross).

 

David Hazeltine (Downbeat Article, 2005):

Barely recorded as recently as 1995, David Hazeltine may be the most exhaustively documented pianist of the ensuing decade.

Hazeltine’s spring release, Modern Standards [Sharp-9], an elegant recital with bassist David Williams and drummer Joe Farnsworth, is his eighth trio date since 1996. That year he recorded The Classic Trio—it lives up to the name—with Peter Washington and Louis Hayes, following 1995’s Four Flights Up, a crackling quartet encounter with trombonist Slide Hampton, and the first of eight Hazeltine-led ensemble sessions for Sharp-9 and Criss-Cross. Hazeltine contributes his distinctive horn voicings and impeccable comping to yet another eight albums with Eric Alexander, Steve Davis, Jim Rotondi, Washington and Farnsworth in the collective sextet One For All, and several dozen sideman dates by One For All personnel and such dignitaries as Slide Hampton, James Moody, Jon Faddis, Louis Hayes, Brian Lynch, Marlena Shaw, and Georgie Fame.

Devoted to the leader’s rearrangements of ‘60s and ‘70s pop, R&B and soundtrack music, Modern Standards is chock-a-block with sophisticated reharmonizations, accessible hooks, beautiful colors, and the long, twisty, immaculately executed lines that are Hazeltine’s signature. A Poinciana vamp frames the Isley Brothers quiet storm hit “For The Love Of You,” and he conjures treacle into diamonds on a detailed trio orchestration of “How Deep Is Your Love,” a Disco Era ditty by the Beegees.

“You can do a lot to a song,” says Hazeltine, who turns 47 this fall. His recorded involvement with the “modern standard” begins with Four Flights Up [“Betcha By Golly, Wow”], followed by the 1997 Criss Cross album, How It Is [“Reasons”]. “Coming up in Milwaukee, I played with a few bands that did all the latest by the Isley Brothers, the Stylistics, Earth, Wind and Fire, and the Commodores. I can’t duplicate their exact mood, because they did it so perfectly, so I want to conceptualize them in my context. If you stick to the original harmony, they won’t sound like anything. I have to find ways to make distinct sections out of passages that weren’t even sections. Addressing these different musical demands and situations is a way to find a new avenue into the tradition.”

An old hand at catering to the whims of singers, and a repository of lyrics, Hazeltine, if so inspired, will ravish a ballad or torch song, as on “You Don’t Know What Love Is” [Close To You, Criss Cross]. But in the manner of saxophonists Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Eddie Harris, all heavy influences on Hazeltinean line construction, he’s as apt to address such material—”Angel Eyes,” “I Should Care,” “My Old Flame,” “These Foolish Things,” “What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life,” “Somewhere”—at bright to blazing tempos. “On these songs, I’m less concerned with the mood of the lyric than the harmonic content,” he says. “Speeding up the harmonic rhythm becomes a point of departure in improvising off a standard tune or set of progressions. In that way, the limitations of an arrangement are a good thing.”

On all his albums, Hazeltine references an exhaustive pianistic lexicon—Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Barry Harris, Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Buddy Montgomery, and Cedar Walton for starters—and channels them into an immediately identifiable voice. True to the musical culture of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Hazeltine spent 32 of his first 34 years (his peer group included trumpeters Brian Lynch and E.J. Allen, bassists Gerald Cannon and Jeff Chambers, and drummer Carl Allen), he creates an ambiance of groovy soulfulness, and he never stops swinging.

As you might intuit from the company he keeps, Hazeltine honors firm roots in bebop and the blues. “Bebop is the fundamentals of music, the foundation, something to learn early on,” he says. “It incorporates the same principles of melody that Bach and Mozart used. It’s the building blocks of anything you want to do that’s hip and abstract and modern sounding or forward moving, the grounding that allows you to move on without being silly or corny.”

Primarily self-taught, a professional musician since 13, Hazeltine has drawn his own conclusions from the tradition since formative years. He spent 1979 to 1981 blowing in public behind the likes of Sonny Stitt, Lou Donaldson, Pepper Adams, Charles McPherson, and Chet Baker as house pianist at Milwaukee’s Jazz Gallery. In 1981, at Baker’s instigation, he made his first move to New York City, and gigged with Jon Hendricks for eight months. Unnerved by New York’s cut-throat atmosphere, he returned to Milwaukee in 1982. Instead of making a name for himself as a contemporaneous “young lion,” he earned a Masters, and chaired the Jazz Department at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music from 1985 to 1992. Then, he relates, “I got tired of sitting on the sidelines and wanted to devote all my energy to playing. I returned to New York to get back in the game, to play with people I respected.”

As Hazeltine puts it, “World music became a category right around the time I came back. A new repertoire, too.” During these years, Danilo Perez, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Ed Simon, Marcus Roberts, Eric Reed, Brad Mehldau and Dave Kikoski were mainstreaming the notion of coalescing genres, cultures and musical eras in idiosyncratic ways. Hazeltine’s stated aesthetic of “swinging and lots of pretty harmonies” seemed insufficiently cutting edge to make an immediate impression.

“I had to work other kinds of gigs for a long time,” he states, recalling dues paid at an age when most New York aspirants either have made it or given up the fight. “One was 7 to 2, six nights a week, with an AWFUL big band at the Rainbow Room. A nightmare. Things began to turn once I started playing with Eric Alexander and Joe Farnsworth. By ‘95 I was playing with Marlena Shaw and Slide Hampton, and got my first record date. My whole life changed.”

This summer, Hazeltine will record a Bud Powell project for Venus. Previous commissions for the Japanese label include an homage to Horace Silver (Senor Blues) and two irony-free tributes to Bill Evans (Waltz For Debby and Alice In Wonderland).

“I want to do not just the commonly known Bud Powell tunes, but some that are a little more out there, like “Glass Enclosure,” says Hazeltine. “I won’t play only like Bud Powell. I’m just going to play his music. That’s how I tried to approach Horace. Of course, the more into myself I got, the more the producer objected. I played “Nica’s Dream” at a slow tempo, and put some harmony in there. It was killing. But at the end of the date, he said, ‘Now we’d like to go back. One more time. “Nica’s Dream” FAST!.’ That’s what they put on the record.

“On the Bill Evans projects, I tried to be as much like Bill as I could. When I was 15 or 16, I wore out Bill Evans records trying to figure out what he was playing, because the way he arranged chords—especially the solo stuff—was so beautiful. I wrote out harmonic exercises on his material. I was very disciplined that way at a very early age.”

Given the consistency and high quality of Hazeltine’s sizable oeuvre, it’s puzzling that he hasn’t escaped the “musicians’ musician” trap. But he remains optimistic.

“Some people do a little of this and a little of that, and some do one or two things really well,” he says, implicitly including himself in the latter category. “Even just playing straight-ahead jazz, you can be into so many different levels and go for so many things that it’s a lifetime pursuit.”

*-*-*-

David Hazeltine Blindfold Test (Raw):

1. Robert Glasper, “Think of One” (DOUBLE BOOKED, Blue Note, 2009) (Glasper, piano; Vicente Archer, bass; Chris Dave, drums)

I don’t know who it is, but there are bits and pieces of different places in whoever it is. Was that an original piece? No? There’s a lot of Monk influence in the writing. What was the piece? Oh, that’s a Monk tune I don’t know. There were elements that reminded me of Kenny Barron a bit in some of the right-hand techniques, but what tells me it’s not Kenny Barron is that this sounds like a harmonically driven pianist. There are different kinds of pianists—harmonically driven, melodically driven. This guy sounds like… First of all, outstanding technique with both hands, and he’s not afraid to show that, and the free stuff in the beginning, the little introduction, was nice—the piano flourishes, I like to call them. During his solo, he seemed to be more concerned with bringing out the harmony, and he did a great job of it, too. Also, harmonically driven pianists tend to play more with their left hands. When they’re not playing unison-like melodies, they’re always playing chords, so you’re always hearing that left-hand chord thing. This isn’t the type of pianist where you hear steady streams of eighth notes, for example, but just playing around the harmonic structure—very well, though. Then he would take time to play two-handed melodic stuff, very fast, very fluent. 4 stars. I’ve never heard him, but I know of him.

2. Geoff Keezer, “Araña Amarilla” (AUREA, Artist Share, 2009) (Keezer, piano; Steve Wilson, alto saxophone; Essiet Okon Essiet, electric bass; Hugo Alcázar, cajon, djembe, quijada, palmas, percussion; Jon Wikan, cajon, palmas)

Whoever it is, it brings to mind Herbie Hancock—that’s for sure. The nature of the piece and the odd instrumentation—different for jazz. The hand-clapping and the whole thing, it seems like something Herbie would do, just to be out there…I mean, to have the variety that Herbie has, and the scope. There were such overly simple chords being played at times, that I thought only Herbie would do that, just to do it. But then, there were other little harmonic movements that reminded me of Herbie. The bassline reminded me of something from Thrust or one of those electric records that he made. 3½ stars. That was Geoff Keezer?! Is Wayne playing on it? Well, he’s a fantastic pianist. I recently heard him when I was doing a concert in Canada and he was subbing for Danilo Perez with Wayne Shorter. He fit right in, sounded great—he was beautiful. That’s why I asked about Wayne; it had the vibe of that night. This wasn’t typical Keezer. Things were scaled back. That’s why it reminded me of Herbie at first, because it’s all this music, then bringing it way down. Simple. Harmonies without a lot of extensions, without a lot of stuff to them, like Herbie would do. It’s Keezer tamped way down, like he’s trying to do something on a different level. Keezer does a lot of different kinds of things, he has a lot of different aspects, but I would never have thought of him as being that guy. But I’ve just been listening to some stuff that Keezer arranged for Denise Donatelli, a singer. Unbelievable singing and unbelievable writing on Keezer’s part. So thumbs-up for Keezer. I’m impressed with the way that he’s really trying to do something different, that doesn’t let it all hang out, an explosion of sound. It’s very tastefully done.

3. Mulgrew Miller, “Farewell To Dogma” (from Tony Williams, YOUNG AT HEART, Columbia 1996) (Miller, piano, composer; Williams, drums; Ira Coleman, bass)

Well, that was the most interesting thing you’ve played so far. First of all, from the very beginning…I immediately liked the touch, the warmth of the sound, and the fact that he approached it with both hands, the sound he got out of the piano using both hands to create these harmonies. As it moved into it, I thought it sounded like Keith Jarrett, which would explain the beautiful touch. But then he did some Herbie-sounding things; I heard some Herbie Hancock. Then some things happened too many times for it to be Herbie. Then he did a couple of things that sounded very much like things Chick Corea would do. I started thinking maybe it was Kevin Hays, because Kevin has all those guys in his playing—mainly Herbie, though. I liked the tune. What I like about it is that it has many different moods. It’s open enough that whatever mood you want to superimpose on the mood of the tune works at the time. I like how it goes different places, has different highs and lows. Even the ending was a surprise. It kept my interest from the beginning to the end. I liked the trio interplay, too. The drummer was doing some very tasty stuff. But that’s the kind of open, straight-eighth note…that’s how most drummers that I would play with would respond. 4½ stars. [AFTER] It makes perfect sense that it’s Mulgrew, just because you can hear the influences. Also, he plays the piano very well. He’s a very good pianist, with a great touch, and incorporates all registers of the piano in the overall sound.

4. Martial Solal, “Here’s That Rainy Day” (from LONGITUDE, CamJazz, 2008) (Solal, piano; Francois Moutin, bass; Louis Moutin, drums)

My goodness. It IS that rainy day! That’s an interesting approach. Very much melodically driven, but not being melodic. I don’t mean that in a bad way either. I divide people into melodically-driven versus harmonically-driven pianists, but then there are all different aspects of melodic and all different aspects of harmonic. This pianist is melodically driven, but out of the box of where most of us play melodically. So it seems like he or she made a point of playing as far out of the box as possible, while still playing that tune somehow. From the beginning, it sounded like it was reharmonized, but it was so chaotic that it was hard to tell what exactly was happening. But it’s definitely a fresh approach to the song, a standard that’s been played so many times. I’m not sure that how out some of the improvisation sounded was because he was trying to do that, or the chords…that if it was harmonized, he reharmonized it in such a way that it would lead into that. Although it didn’t really sound like that. To me, it sounded like he was trying to play out of the box. Which is a great thing. It sounded fresh. But there were moments where he brought it back in. It had a nice balance that way. It sounded like he had chops to do what he wanted to do. I think technique and chops is really about: Can you do what you’re trying to do? I think he did what he was trying to do. Can everybody play like Art Tatum? No. Can everybody play like Oscar Peterson? No. But technique on an instrument is a difficult thing to discuss, certainly in laymen’s terms. A lot of practicing musicians don’t understand the idea of technique in jazz music. Technique in classical music is a completely different ballgame, because there’s standard repertoire that dictates the technique. In jazz, technique is more dictated by can you get across what you’re trying to get across? Can you play what you’re trying to play? This guy could. It was a fresh approach. Interesting sound. I don’t know that I’d want to listen to it so much. It’s not my cup of tea. But it was interesting. 3 stars. [AFTER] The guy who just played that was 80? Wow. For someone that age, it’s a very unique approach—for playing a tune like that especially. It would be one thing if Cecil Taylor got up and played the piano; that’s one side of the coin. But for this guy to play “Here’s That Rainy Day,” sound like that and be 80, that’s very unusual.

5. Ed Simon, “Poesia” (from POESIA, CamJazz, 2009) (Simon, piano; John Patitucci, bass; Brian Blade, drums)

Really liked that. My guess was Chick Corea. Whoever it is certainly styled that after Chick. Compositionally, the movement, the progression of the chords sounded like something Chick would do, and the way he played his lines sounded inspired by Chick, but also the rhythms of the lines, the little spaces that he played in between, and the comping that he did with his left hand while he was playing the lines, reminded me so much of Chick Corea’s style. It was reminiscent of ‘70s Chick, like Return to Forever before they went completely electric. There were so many things that were Chicked-out about the guy. Now, I love Chick Corea, and this pianist really reminded me of that style of playing. Was that his original tune? There were a lot of intricate things where he was playing little melodies with the bass in unison with his left hand. Just nice little things that were going on, and kept my interest throughout. The band was great playing together. More than the Mulgrew tune, which was straight-eighth, and the drum part was more accompaniment. Here, everyone was interacting, very together—definitely a coop effort. 4½ stars.

6. Denny Zeitlin, “It Could Happen To You” (from SLICK ROCK, MaxJazz, 2004) (Zeitlin, piano; Buster Williams, bass; Matt Wilson, drums)

That was “It Could Happen To You.” I have no idea who that is. I have no idea where the pianist is coming from. But I very much enjoyed the playing of the head—it’s almost disguised at first. I like all the different kinds of changes that they took the tune through. It was slow and very much open at first… I very much liked, in the playing of the tune at the beginning especially, the way he used his two-handed technique to get a big sound out of the piano, and he really sold the arrangement. Right around the time when I realized it was “It Could Happen To You” is when they started playing it in an obvious way. I also like where it went from there. It sounded like he changed keys several times during the middle of the tune, but I’d need to hear it again…

I really enjoy the two-handed playing. I mean that in a different way than I meant it before. What I mean is using both hands to do certain things, especially harmonically, and to play melodies… I enjoy a pianist who gets as much sound as possible out of the instrument. Rich. And it takes two hands to be rich, really. A lot of pianists play even single note melodies with their right hand while they play chords in their left. Great pianists play melodies with both hands, or play melodies with a finger and accompany that melody with both hands. I like the way this piece evolved, although I was expecting more out of the solo, for all the piano playing that went on and for all the dreaminess that I sat through, I wanted a little more out of the solo. But that’s not to say that I don’t think that this pianist could do it. It’s just to say that I wanted to hear more. 3½ stars.

7. David Kikoski, “Chance” (from MOSTLY STANDARDS, Criss Cross, 2008) (Kikoski, piano; Eric Revis, bass; Jeff Watts, drums; Kenny Kirkland, composer)

I feel like I should know what this tune is. It sounds familiar, like…it’s not an original… It’s a tune that’s sort of in the third-tier standard jazz tune? That sort of thing. First tier would be the standards everyone knows—Charlie Parker tunes, Horace Silver tunes, and so on. Then subsequent tunes, like Wayne Shorter and Herbie… It sounds like it could be a Wayne tune. I liked the song, but it’s not this pianist’s song, but obviously… I really, really liked this pianist and what he did with the harmony. What I liked most about his harmony was the wide range of harmonic information that he actually put in and also that he didn’t put in. Sometimes with his left hand he would only play two notes, and sometimes he played little clusters that on first listening were hard to identify what the voicing was. I really like the way he obscured the harmony. Was it David Kikoski? I have a lot of respect for his harmonic sophistication and the way he touches the piano. It’s the thing of older guys touching the piano a certain way, their approach to the instrument. When he plays, and through this piece, you hear it from beginning to end. It’s not a beautiful arrangement of a head and then some stuff that doesn’t fit with it or make sense. But it’s through-played, from the time he starts playing at the beginning, and then he morphs into the actual song and the other guys come in, then he plays a solo—but it’s on a continuum. There’s an arc to it. Really well-put-together music and thoughtful music. I really enjoy his playing. 4½ stars. I think I recognized the tune because I had a Masters student at Purchase who was doing his thesis on Kenny Kirkland, so he studied a number of his tunes, and I was involved in him getting the tunes together.

8. Benny Green, “F.S.R.” (from WALK ON: THE FINAL TRIO RECORDINGS OF RAY BROWN, Telarc, 1996) (Green, piano; Ray Brown, bass, composer; Greg Hutchinson, drums)

Was it Benny Green? Unbelievable piano playing. That’s all I can say. Fantastic technique. I knew it was Ray Brown before I knew who the pianist was. 3 stars.

9. Barry Harris, “Oblivion” (from THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, Venus, 2000) (Harris, piano; George Mraz, bass; Leroy Williams, drums; Bud Powell, composer)

Obviously, Barry Harris, and George Mraz and Leroy Williams. I can’t say enough about Barry. Whatever anyone would have said 40 years ago would be the same thing today. It’s not like he’s reached new heights of genius. The genius has always been there. It’s a genius of melody-making in the style of bebop, the style of Charlie Parker or Bud Powell. As I study music, and continue to study music, there’s something about Barry Harris’ playing I found…you need to keep coming back to it. It’s so right and it’s so correct, like Bird was right and correct, but at the same time it’s so melodically unpredictable, in a way. Maybe to some, it sounds predictable because it’s in the bag that he’s in, or the particular idiom he’s in, the time period that he’s remained in, which is bebop. But the imagination that he has within that time period and that language is unlike anyone else who tried to play that music. It’s unbelievable how melodically articulate and melodically interesting… I can’t think of enough words to say what I think about Barry Harris’ melodicism and his musicality. He has that weird thing about being perfect and yet being unpredictable and imaginative and all those things, just like Bird. Now, on this piece, obviously he’s not at full throttle as he was, say, 20 years ago. But it’s still unmistakably him. It’s still that same melodic integrity. 5 stars. Because it’s Barry.

*_*_*_

Liner Notes for The Inspiration Suite, David Hazeltine (Sharp-9, 2007):

The notion of influence is a tricky topic in the arts, not least for jazz musicians, for whom peer group status depends on cultivating a niche—a syntax, a sonic identity; in short, a tonal personality—that is instantly recognizable as theirs. In the struggle to construct a stylistic room of their own, many follow the psychic route described by the critic Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Of Poetry, a much-read discourse on how “killing the father” has catalyzed poetic invention.

Like Bloom’s poets, jazz musicians learn their craft from predecessors; and inevitably establish a point of view about their sources. Some “misread” the precursor, imagine them as incomplete, attain originality of expression through “an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation…, a willful revisionism.” For others, like David Hazeltine, mastery and refinement of the canon is the pathway to artistic depth.

Hazeltine regards Buddy Montgomery and Cedar Walton as his most consequential musical fathers, and pays explicit homage to them on The Inspiration Suite. Under their influence, he relates, he developed strategies to digest vocabulary drawn from the core food groups of jazz piano modernism (Tyner, Corea, Hancock, Monk, Barry Harris, for starters), and to synthesize his own idiosyncratic ideas about improvisation, composition and arranging.

As a teen prodigy in ‘70s Milwaukee, Hazeltine got up close and personal with Montgomery, who established his reputation in the ‘50s with the Montgomery Brothers—Monk, an electric bass pioneer, and Wes, the guitar legend—and eventually settled in the beer capital.

“I saw Buddy play in many contexts as a young kid—solo piano and trio, and also with a larger group with percussion instruments,” Hazeltine recalls. “I heard him manipulate harmony and other elements of music both in his own compositions and fixing up standards. He’s great at creating little hooks, familiar sections of the tune—a tag, or an introductory harmonic area that he gets into and brings back at the end of the head or the end of each solo chorus, or a rhythmic idea that he adds onto, say, a Cole Porter tune. It pulls things together. He doesn’t read music, and his playing and writing have all sorts of little jagged edges; they’re ultra-hip, but so off-the-cuff that you can’t guess what’s going to happen next.”

He discovered Walton via record during his mid-teens, after concluding studies with Will Green, a blind pianist who gave the aspirant invaluable functional instruction on the idiomatic fundamentals. “Mr. Green’s approach was a lot like Cedar,” Hazeltine recalls. “He would improvise fugues on the organ in the style of Bach, with perfect, cleanly articulated eighth notes, in the baroque manner that characterizes the way Cedar plays the piano. Cedar appeals to the side of my personality that needs things to be precise and exact. Everything is crystal-clear, well thought through, delivered with the highest degree of musical intention—in terms of phrasing, articulation, reharmonizing. You can expect certain things from him on the highest level, and he is going to give them to you.”

It is manifest that Hazeltine, now 48, commands similar respect from his own peer group, including his front-line partners on The Inspiration Suite. “Dave has a modern sound that holds onto all the elements of the tradition that I love,” says Eric Alexander, Hazeltine’s collaborator on 11 dates by the collective sextet One For All, and a frequent Hazeltine sideman and employer. “When I think of David’s writing and arranging, I think of clarity,” adds vibraphonist Joe Locke, Hazeltine’s co-leader on Good Hearted People [Sharp-9, 1998]. “As far out as Dave can go harmonically, his harmony always honors what the tune is about—it’s honoring the melody.”

Explaining his decision to reference another explicit precursor, the tenor sax-vibes quintet co-led by Harold Land and Bobby Hutcherson at the end of the ‘60s, Hazeltine cites these very same melodic imperatives. “Although Buddy and Cedar differ in the ways I mentioned, they both write incredibly poignant melodies,” he says. “Instead of harmonizing the melodies with three horns, as with One For All, I brought them into focus with one melodic line backed up with the vibraphone. Joe’s four-mallet technique enables him also to strengthen the harmonic underpinnings and match my piano voicings—so I get my One For All feeling after all!”

The title comes from a four-piece suite on which Hazeltine distills the compositional devices of his musical forebears into unmistakably Hazeltinean argot. The connections are less thematic than vibrational—“They are connected in my mind!” Hazeltine jokes.

Echoes of Walton inflect “Motivation,” an assymetrical 34-bar burner (6-10-6-12) with attractive changes. Propelled by Farnsworth’s unerring ride cymbal, Locke, Alexander and the composer navigate the form with punch and panache.

In composing “Reverence,” a medium-slow ballad with a relaxed Latin feel, Hazeltine kept Montgomery’s predispositions in focus. “I tried to hear how Buddy might hear,” he says. “It’s the kind of haunting melody Buddy would write, and the chord progressions are atypical, with a vamp at the very beginning that the soloists incorporate into their improvising, and that we play every time it comes around. I somehow think of that as characteristic of Buddy—though if you asked me to name tunes of his where that happens, I couldn’t.”

Elements from both mentors inform “Insight,” a slick 30-bar line that opens with a magisterial Alexander solo. “It contains insights I got from studying Buddy and Cedar,” Hazeltine says. “The way the theme is developed, how it comes back at the end, only twice as fast. How the last part is 2 bars short because it’s looped into the first part, so there’s no turnaround; it makes for interesting and insightful soloing—you’re finishing, but you’re at the top again.”

The suite concludes with “Gratitude,” a brisk waltz with a continuously developing form that resolves with reharmonized “Giant Steps” progressions. Note Hazeltine’s informed comping behind inspired solos bv Locke and Alexander, and the graceful way he launches his own ingenious solo flight.

The Inspiration Suite contains many other delights—a classic trio reading of “My Ideal” (for comparison, hear Montgomery’s version on the 1999 Sharp-9 session Here Again); a new Hazeltine arrangement of “I Should Care,” presented here as a medium swinger in A-Flat; a “new standardish” Hazeltine original called “Don’t Walk Away” (“the harmony diverges, but the melody is completely diatonic within the scale of D-flat,” Hazeltine elaborates); a surging Latin treatment, pushed by Daniel Sadownick’s elemental congas, of Montgomery’s “Personage of Wes”; an elegant, witty navigation of the harmonic jigsaw puzzle that comprises Walton’s “Shoulders” (“it has rapidly moving, chromatic harmonies at the beginning, then gets into periods where there’s one chord for 4 measures, then turns more normal and has II-V-I’s, but at the very end come strange, fast-moving harmonies in all major chords, which then change to minor chords every other chorus—that’s why people think it’s difficult”).

“I can say that this is more personal than anything I’ve written before,” Hazeltine concludes. “I did it in total deference and reverence to these two guys, and it came straight from my heart—I heard stuff and wanted to write. The intellect never led the heart around. The heart led the intellect.”

*_*_*_

David Hazeltine (Liner Notes, Blues Quarters):

“I have to say that quartet playing is my favorite format,” David Hazeltine confides while discussing Blues Quarters, his third leader session for Criss Cross (see How It Is [Criss-1142] and A World For Her [Criss-1170]) in that configuration.

The 41-year-old pianist elaborates: “I like an arranged presentation, and in a quartet you can integrate arrangements, just like in a trio setting. Quartet is less restrictive than with three horns, where I have to synch up the harmony exactly to what I wrote for the horns. Since the saxophone is playing the melodies, I have a chance to experiment behind it. I like to play a supportive role as well as being out front in the solo role. I think it sets me up mentally to play looser solos, to play freer than in a trio format, where I am the only solo voice.”

Hazeltine proved unequivocally his mastery of the trio on The Classic Trio [Sharp-9-1997] and Waltz For Debby [Venus-1998], which rank among the finest examples of the genre recorded in the ’90s. And according to the members of One For All, the all-star collective sextet [see Upward and Onward (Criss-1172) and Optimism (Sharp-9)], he’s largely responsible for blending the individual voices of a unit comprised of unregenerate wailers into an ensemble sound with a defined identity.

“I really feel like I could recognize a Dave Hazeltine composition or arrangement at this point,” Eric Alexander, One For All’s emerging tenor titan who shares the front line on Blues Quarters, commented a few years back. “I’m not sure exactly what it is. It’s definitely a modern sound. But it holds on to all the elements of the tradition that I love and, that I think everyone else in the group loves, and that we try to maintain. His arrangements are sort of the quintessential sound of One For All. Dave likes to pick classic standards, or even new Pop standards, and reharmonize and rearrange them so that they fit into our hard-blowing context. But what’s funny is that Dave has tempered our sound. His arrangements, which can be really fiery and exciting, all have a tender side. It’s hard to explain. He uses beautiful colors, and makes wonderful use of the three horns.”

Alexander and hard-swinging drummer Joe Farnsworth join their One For All colleague on Blues Quarters, a session which achieves a judicious balance between untrammeled imagination and the intuitive sense of ensemble structure that adept improvisers attain through years of bandstand interaction. “The more frequently you play with people, the more predictability there is,” Hazeltine notes. “Now Eric is not predictable in the sense of, ‘oh, I’ve heard him play that before.’ It’s more like I know instinctively and immediately that he’s going to play something high or something a little out there. Eric is always fresh, he’s always playing very different ideas, but there is a structure — you can anticipate what he’s doing and work with him.

“What’s predictable with Joe is that it’s going to feel right, that the feeling always will be there, that whatever I do, he’ll support it. There’s give-and-take, but mainly his impeccable sense of time and swinging feeds me. You can have impeccable time in all different parts of the beat; Farnsworth plays the part of the beat that I like particularly. I think it’s the same part that the great drummers in the history of jazz, like Philly Joe Jones and Louis Hayes, have always played. I’d describe it as time with an edge on it.”

Bassist Dwayne Burno played numerous weekend gigs with Hazeltine, Farnsworth, and various combinations of One-For-All hornmen between 1994 and 1997 at Augie’s, the Upper West Side Manhattan workshop-saloon. Hazeltine notes: “Dwayne is a very good writer and arranger himself, and he has a great understanding of harmony. He’s musically very articulate. When I present him with a tune, he understands what makes it work, and he’ll do things that take it to a different place and yet keep it intact as originally conceived.”

Throughout Blues Quarters Hazeltine plays with lucid fire, consolidating an exhaustive range of references — think Bud Powell, Barry Harris, Cedar Walton, McCoy Tyner — into an immediately identifiable style. He churns out long fluent lines with a home-brewed, organic quality, extracting full motivic potential with the clarity and sophistication of a conservatory musician. “What I like about David,” says the tenor saxophonist Michael Karn, who experienced the Hazeltine effect on his recent Criss-Cross date In Focus, “is that he hears other people’s tunes compositionally. F-minor-7 in one tune is not the same as in another. Should this chord have a big sound? Should it have a smaller sound? Should it be a tight sound or a more open sound? He’s superb at finding the right sound for the right spot in his comping.”

That said, a few words about the tunes:

“Naccara” is dedicated to the pianist’s mother, who died a few years ago. The structure is 12 bars, 6 bars, 10 bars. and then 4 bars; “the set of 10 bars references the melodic theme in the first 12 bars, but it’s in no way a repeated section. It takes the motive from the beginning, runs it through a series of key changes, and kind of summarizes the tune that way.”

Alexander and Hazeltine were playing Miles Davis’ “Milestones” (the 1947 Savoy version) as a standard on recent tours. The tenorist roars through the changes, while Hazeltine’s long solo shows how deeply he’s assimilated the language of Bud Powell refracted through the mirror of Barry Harris, whose Live At The Jazz Workshop Hazeltine calls “a bible of jazz piano trio.” “I keep coming back to that concept,” he comments. “My idea is to try to stretch from that basis.”

Hazeltine wrote “A Touch of Green” for Will Green, who gave the young aspirant invaluable functional instruction on the idiomatic fundamentals of jazz in pre-teen days in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I know this tune sounds a lot like Cedar Walton,” the pianist jokes, “but Mr. Green’s approach was a lot like Cedar. In fact, I started listening to Cedar just after I stopped studying with him, when I was 15 or 16. Will Green would improvise fugues in the style of Bach on the organ. You know how Cedar plays the piano in an almost baroque manner, with eighth notes that are so perfect and exact and cleanly articulated and precise? That’s how Will Green played, too. Being used to his approach is what allowed me such easy access to Cedar.”

Hazeltine conceptualized his treatment of “Spring Is Here” while preparing Waltz For Debby, a 1998 album dedicated to the music of Bill Evans. “This version is with mostly his chords,” Hazeltine remarks. The ballad is beautiful by itself, but Bill Evans’ changes really bring out the melancholy of that song.”

Hazeltine describes the title track as a 16-bar minor blues, an idiom in which the teenage Hazeltine garnered ample experience at sessions around Milwaukee with local luminaries like Hattush Alexander and Manty Ellis. “We didn’t play traditional blues per se,” he qualifies. “There were a of blues form tunes and a lot of blues in the tunes.”

Hazeltine became familiar with “Cry Me A River” through his association with the singer Marlena Shaw, who’s employed him as musical director and arranger since 1994. He treats the Arthur Hamilton flagwaver — it’s been covered by artists from Julie London to Ray Charles to Ella Fitzgerald to Joe Cocker — as a bossa-nova, adding some chords and a vamp that Eric Alexander plays over on the end with incredible invention and virtuosity.

“Playing with singers deeply influenced my ability to accompany people,” Hazeltine claims. “I did it since I was very young, beginning with a woman named Penny Goodwin, with whom I played a lot of high profile gigs in Milwaukee. She was a very talented, gifted singer, but she didn’t know a lot about music, so the things you played behind her influenced the way she was going to sing on any given night. I had to play so that her melody notes were always at the uppermost part of my chords. Otherwise, she’d sing out of tune, or sing something completely different and then blame me. So early on I knew that when playing behind singers, I had to be very accurate and be aware of what the melody is while playing chords. I think that started me on the path of comping melodically, which is the quality of my comping that I think people like.”

The quartet addresses “Cheryl,” a Charlie Parker blues, at a medium bounce a tad slower than the original; Hazeltine opens with a five-minute declamation that’s bebop incarnate, filled with teetery syncopations and intriguing postulations that never stray far from the melody. Then the session concludes with Alexander’s “Doing What,” a racehorse-tempo subversion of the chord changes to Michel Legrand’s “What Are You Doing The Rest of Your Life,” a prime ballad for the likes of Carmen McRae, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee.

It caps an album marked by authoritative statements by players who can be said to have transcended their influences to the point of being able to dialogue with the tradition on their own terms. That’s what Hazeltine’s done on high profile gigs in recent years with people like James Moody, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Heath and Jon Faddis.

“New York is so demanding, you get so involved in writing and arranging and recording and doing your own thing and trying to find your voice, that it’s easy to forget about your roots,” Hazeltine reflects. “By roots I mean what I grew up with, who I liked listening to, who influenced and inspired me. Playing with these guys has this magical quality of taking me back there, only now I’m doing the playing. I remember listening to James Moody when I was 13 and being very struck by how he played, trying to figure out some of the things he was doing. I have his sound in my head, and when I get to play gigs with him it takes me back into this very simple, ‘I really like that music; I really like the way this sounds,’ as opposed to being all wrapped up into my own forward motion. It’s a unique thing we have as jazz musicians, that in playing with these guys, we are interacting with history. You’re actually getting a chance to create music with people who have created and are continuing to create such great music over the years.”

A couple of generations hence, apprentice improvisers who admired albums like Blues Quarters may have their chance to play with David Hazeltine and Eric Alexander; no doubt, they’ll talk about the experience in similar terms.

For Trumpeter Jim Rotondi’s Birthday, my Liner Note for the 1999 CD “Excursions”

Best of birthdays to trumpet master Jim Rotondi, who has been teaching the last several years in Austria at the University of Graz.  Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of writing liner notes for three of Jim’s CDs for Criss Cross, the first of which — for Excursions (1999) — I’m posting below. It was a first-class date on which the personnel of One For All (Eric Alexander, Steve Davis, Dave Hazeltine, Peter Washington) plus Kenny Washington on drums, play a series of terrific charts.

 

Jim Rotondi (Excursions):

For Excursions, his third Criss-Cross recording, Jim Rotondi surrounded himself with his top-shelf colleagues from the sextet collective One For All.  “I feel comfortable when I play with these guys, freer to select options that I might not normally choose,” the 37-year-old trumpeter avers.  “I think music works best when you throw something a little different in the mix just to see what happens.  Sometimes you get results you’d never have imagined.”

The familiar surroundings (the only “ringer” is impeccable trapsetter Kenny Washington, replacing regular OFA drummer Joe Farnsworth) spur Rotondi to etch in sharp focus the qualities that have won him numerous admirers in recent years as a featured soloist with Lionel Hampton, Charles Earland and — more recently — Kyle Eastwood.  Projecting one of the most beautiful sounds in jazz, he plays with staunch confidence, nuanced maturity and intuitive melodicism — and reaffirms his charter membership in the no-holds-barred society of improvisers.

Rotondi comments: “One thing that differentiates a Lionel Hampton experience from a One For All experience is that it’s much more blues-based, more elemental.  One For All uses more complex forms, and if we play a blues it probably won’t be straight but a variation on the blues.  Gates grew up in the straight blues, and it’s important to him to keep it in there.  The spirit is to go for it, to try to deliver 100 percent every time.  I think that’s the spirit of One For All, and we translate it to this record as well.  We’ve come to have a reputation as a group that flexes its musical muscles, one with a lot of technical prowess.  Really, we just believe in going for it, in trying to play everything at the peak of its potential.”

Rotondi is effusive about One For All front-line partners Eric Alexander (tenor) and Steve Davis (trombone), both familiar to Criss-Cross devotees.  “We think the same way,” he says.  “The three of us are like one voice; we phrase the same way naturally, without talking or thinking about it.

The Rotondi-Alexander partnership began a year after the trumpeter settled in New York.  “I met Eric when he was attending William Patterson College in the ’80s, and it’s inspiring to see him come so far.  When I first met him, he didn’t have a wide variety of tools and language, and now he has probably the biggest arsenal of any of the young players out there.  He did it with discipline and dedication.  To me, every song that he writes captures his spirit more than the previous one.”  Alexander’s contribution here is “Jim’s Waltz,” taken at the camelwalk pace that Kenny Washington likes to call the “grown-up’s tempo,” featuring Rotondi’s burnished tone.  “It’s typical of Eric’s personality — uplifting, happy,” Rotondi comments.  “The melody is all major key, very diatonic, but still interesting.  It goes to a couple of unexpected places, but makes perfect sense — which I think is his essence as a writer and player.”

Let’s digress with a synopsized account of Rotondi’s pre-New York years (Rotondi scholars who want more should refer to the notes for Introducing Jim Rotondi [Criss-1128] and Jim’s Bop [Criss-1156]).  Rotondi’s mother is a piano teacher, and the Butte, Montana, native played piano from the age of 8; he took up the trumpet upon entering high school.  “My background when I began to play trumpet was more in classical music,” he relates.  “My live music exposure pretty much consisted of Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton and Buddy Rich, but when I was 14 I picked up a collection of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach EmArcy recordings and Woody Shaw’s Rosewood.  After I got those records — and many others — I started experimenting with different things that I hadn’t been aware of before when I was practicing the piano.  I think it’s extremely important for trumpet players to have a piano.  As Dizzy said he told Miles, on the trumpet you’ve got one note, but on the piano you’ve got 88.  If you understand all 88, it’s a lot easier to find the right place to put one.”

Rotondi wound up at North Texas State University, eventually landing in the school’s elite One O’Clock Lab Band.  “When I arrived they automatically placed me on the bottom, because so many musicians are there,” he recalls.  “I didn’t have it completely together; in fact I was quite a distance from it!  I learned a lot in terms of basic skills; pulled up my technique and ability to sight-read music, and learned about the professional ethic.  After school I went to Miami and worked on a cruise ship for a year, with the aim of saving money to move to New York, which I did in June 1987.”

Rotondi, Alexander and Joe Farnsworth stuck together, worked small but steady gigs and sideman jobs.  Farnsworth landed a gig at Augie’s, the Upper West Side saloon that nurtured much of New York’s young talent in the ’90s’; in 1994, they brought in butter-toned Davis — currently a two-year member of Chick Corea’s Origin Ensemble — whose warm, enveloping sound and ability to generate instant momentum in his solos makes him a perfect fit.  Of Davis’ title track, Rotondi says: “This tune is a classic example of the music Steve writes.  Simple melodies, putting interesting chords underneath them; he finds these perfect little chord-melody combinations.  He’s one of the strongest writers of the younger guys.  This tune is a nice Bossa Nova in an AAB form; it goes through a lot of different tonal centers, which makes it interesting and fun to play on.”

Formidable pianist David Hazeltine rounded out One For All in 1995; his up-tempo arrangement of “Angel Eyes” is, Rotondi exults, “classic Hazeltine.  He’ll take a standard and slightly alter the harmony or chord changes, which makes the tune more interesting to solo on.  Eric and Dave like to have everything very well worked out; they think things through, and don’t like to leave a lot to chance.”

The oft-paired (on Criss-Cross at least) Peter and Kenny Washington bring their customary excellence to the proceedings.  “Whatever you think a bass player should be, Peter is,” Rotondi comments.  “And I’ve always loved Kenny’s playing; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything musical, and brings it to every record he’s on.  He’s always an asset.  He completely took care of business, and did it with aplomb.”

Rotondi’s “Shortcake,” a peppery medium-bright minor line with a Latin feel that begins with a pair of storm-cloud chords, “was written for my girlfriend,” the composer remarks.  The bravura trumpeter bites off the notes with brash panache, evoking the sound of Freddie Hubbard, a major influence.  Ditto on Rotondi’s arrangement “Little B’s Poem,” a memorable Bobby Hutcherson melody on which both Hubbard and Woody Shaw have had an earlier say.  This cool, restrained, stop-start version is spurred by Hazeltine’s intuitive comping and Kenny Washington’s ingenious rhythmic formulations.

Don’t think Rotondi is anyone’s style clone; he’s assimilated the entire post Clifford Brown trumpet tree and reached his own conclusions.  He states: “Clifford and Woody were my initial influences.  Though other guys during Clifford’s time — and before — played as much if not more than he, Clifford covered so much and nailed everything perfectly, even though his playing is completely spontaneous-sounding and creative.  I think it’s a testament to his talent and ability that, young as he was, he never flubbed.

“Woody Shaw to me is the last true trumpet innovator; on his early recordings there’s a strong Hubbard and Booker Little influence, but he found his own language.  The way I hear it, playing with McCoy Tyner opened him up to the solutions he ultimately found.  He inspired me to strive to find my own way to play, to find my own voice — because he really found his.  He blended his version of bebop trumpet with avant-garde elements he was exposed to through playing with Dolphy and Coltrane — it was all in his playing.

“The first thing that struck me about Freddie was his sound, a combination of round, darkish warmth with the bit of edge that I think the trumpet needs to have.  Then it was the long melodic lines he constructed that went all through the changes.  Freddie likes to tell the story of running back and forth between Sonny and Trane, and revealing to one what the other was working on; I’m sure practicing with them opened him up unbelievably.

“I’ve done a lot of transcribing of Booker Little; by the age of 22, when he died, he’d completely found his own voice.  Tonally, his playing reminds me of a Classical approach applied to jazz, very precise, the same fat tone from the lowest end of the trumpet all the way up to the top.

“Kenny Dorham to me is the true melodist of all of them;  every trumpet player should study K.D. to learn the importance of making a melody.  They are logical and beautiful, and make so much sense.  He was the first guy I know of to really put Bebop harmony, i.e., tritone substitutions and other devices, clearly in his playing.

“Lee Morgan and Blue Mitchell were early influences.  I still think of Blue Mitchell as the best ballad trumpet player of all time, principally because he never overplayed.  He just played the melody, and let his tone do all the work.”

Rotondi’s gorgeous reading of “What Is There To Say?” — co-arranged with Eric Alexander — would make Mitchell smile.  “I got the tune from Nat King Cole’s ‘After Midnight’ session,” he explains.  “It’s simple, with potential to interpolate some interesting chords.  I try to find lyrics whenever I can to any standard I’m going to play.  It will keep you from playing anything extraneous if the lyrics are in your ear.”

Excursions concludes with Rotondi’s arrangement of Benny Golson’s “Little Karen,” followed by a fingerpopping “Fried Pies,” a Wes Montgomery blues on which all members stretch out.  “On my last few records, I’ve tried to include something from a great jazz composer and see if I can do something different with it,” Rotondi remarks.  “On One To Ten [1961, Argo] Benny took this tune pretty straight-ahead; I gave the A-section a Horace Silver-like mambo treatment.  And Gerry Teekens always likes to have a blues on the record, and I do, too.”

It’s an ideal conclusion for an impeccable album.  For Rotondi and his colleagues, way past their apprenticeships, individual influences are now a point of departure; their voices are prominent landmarks in the narrative of mainstream jazz.

For the 89th Birthday Anniversary of Pianist Kenny Drew (1928-1993), My Liner Note for the Reissue of the Xanadu Album “Home Is Where The Soul Is”

Today’s the 89th birth anniversary of pianist Kenny Drew (1928-1993), one of the great acolytes of Bud Powell. I had an opportunity to delve into his musical production while writing the liner notes for a reissue of a trio date that he made for Xanadu in 1978, with Leroy Vinnegar and Frank Butler.

*_*_*_*_

Kenny Drew, Home Is Where The Soul Is (Liner Notes):

“One might take a single pianist like Kenny Drew and find in his playing many of the period’s dominant tendencies: “funk” [extensive use of blues voicings on tunes that are not strictly blues], Debussyesque lyrical embellishments, finger-busting up-tempo solos, and multiple references to earlier styles both gently contemplative (Teddy Wilson and Nat Cole) and hot and bluesy (stride piano via Monk).” – David Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965.

* * *

Although the late David Rosenthal’s observations on Kenny Drew (1928-1993) pertain to the pianist’s musical production during the 1950s, they also apply to Drew’s performance on the slamming trio date contained herein. Xanadu proprietor Don Schlitten, who wrote in the original liner notes that the Harlem native’s best recorded performances (two enduring dates helming a trio and a combo, and sideman appearances with, among others, Sonny Criss, Dexter Gordon and Paul Chambers) transpired in Los Angeles during a 1953-56 West Coast residence, hoped to elicit a similar vibe by “bringing Kenny home to the ‘cats’” to cut a pair of albums. One participant was bassist Leroy Vinnegar, who had settled in Los Angeles not long before his four recorded interactions with Drew in 1955 and 1956. The other is drum-master Frank Butler, out of Kansas City, whose intuitively spot-on responses within the flow on Home Is Where The Soul Is and For Sure—the latter is a formidable quintet with Xanadu regulars Charles McPherson and Sam Noto on the front line—belies the fact that he was interacting with Drew for the first time. Like Drew, these Los Angeles bebop warriors were 1928 babies.

It’s interesting that the proceedings conclude with Drew’s a cappella tour de force on “Yesterdays,” which he played on 16 separate occasions during his 43 years as a recording artist. This version (not included on the original LP release of Home Is Where The Soul Is) is different in feel and configuration than the brisk interpretation 24-year-old Drew uncorked on his first leader date, done on April 16, 1953 for Blue Note in the percolating company of bassist Curley Russell and drummer Art Blakey. “Kenny’s work is cast in the modernist mold, but it seems to owe allegiance to no one model,” Leonard Feather wrote on the back cover of the original 10″ LP. “On the contrary, a careful hearing of these sides will reveal that he has already developed his own personality at the keyboard.”

Feather was softpedaling Drew’s informed, idiosyncratic, virtuosic allegiance to Bud Powell, four years Drew’s senior and a fellow Harlemite, which is evident in the younger pianist’s efflorescent treatments of “Be My Love,” “Lover Come Back To Me” and  “It Might As Well Be Spring.” But he is nonetheless correct that Drew had already constructed his own nascent voice, one informed by close study of tributaries established by Powell, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, George Shearing and perhaps, by 1953, Horace Silver. He’d been at it for while: Feather writes that Drew, whose mother was a classical pianist, took his first lessons at 5, was a skilled boogie-woogie pianist during adolescence, and assiduously soaked up Tatum, Wilson and Fats Waller during his teens. After high school, he apprenticed at a dance school run by the pathbreaking Trinidad-born dancer-choreographer Pearl Primus, who incorporated African and Caribbean elements into her touring show.

During the latter ’40s, as Ira Gitler wrote in the liner notes to Drew’s 1961 Blue Note record, Undercurrent, Drew augmented his university of the streets education, alternating on piano with Walter Bishop, Jr. in a band with uptown up-and-comers Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean and Arthur Taylor. Feather remarks that Drew entered the fray for real after a maiden studio voyage with Howard McGhee in January 1950 for Blue Note. Over the next two years, Drew would share bandstands and record with the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Rollins, Milt Jackson, Oscar Pettiford, Sonny Stitt and Paul Quinichette. He began to garner national attention in 1952, when bebop clarinet pioneer Buddy DeFranco brought him on the road; indeed, Drew’s aforementioned trio debut date occurred the same week as two DeFranco sessions for Norman Granz’s Clef label. Perhaps Drew’s blend of orchestral chops, impeccable touch, stylistic range, and improvisational imagination, not to mention the level of authoritative intention at which he operated, reminded Granz of Oscar Peterson. Whatever the case, Granz signed Drew to his Norgran imprint, for which he generated two solos and four trio numbers with bassist Eugene Wright and drummer Specs Wright.

On tour with DeFranco in San Francisco in late 1953, Drew was arrested on heroin-related charges. His appearance on a July 1954 Zoot Sims session in Hollywood indicates that he served little if any time, but his relationship with Granz—for whom Drew recorded a marvelous trio recital with Wright and drummer Larance Marable in L.A. that September—fizzled out, and his career gained no traction. He resettled in New York in 1956, but remained on a similar treadmill, despite sidemanning on two hands’ worth of iconic hardbop classics for Riverside and Blue Note (the short list includes John Coltrane’s Blue Train, Johnny Griffin’s Way Out!, Jackie McLean’s Jackie’s Bag and Bluesnik, Kenny Dorham’s Whistle Stop and Showboat, and Dexter Gordon’s Dexter Calling), as well as leading two highest-caliber trio dates for Riverside with Paul Chambers or Wilbur Ware on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums, and an epic duo encounter with Ware. In 1958 (the year his son, Kenny Drew, Jr.—himself a meta-virtuoso pianist—was born), Drew worked with Buddy Rich. In 1959, he moved to Miami for a year or so, before returning to New York City.

The first time Drew saw Paris was late 1961, on a European tour of Jack Gelber’s play, The Connection. After visiting Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, he decided to emigrate. He met and married a Danish woman, and moved to Copenhagen in 1964. By 1978, he was Europe’s first-call pianist, with 8 contemporaneous LPs for Denmark’s Steeplechase label that showcased him in solo, duo, trio and combo contexts, generated on 14 separate recording sessions between 1973 and 1977. During those years, he recorded all but two of the numbers (“Three and Four Blues” and “West of Eden”) that comprise Home Is Where The Soul Is.

The set opens with “Work Song,” which Drew initially recorded in 1965 for Fontana with a trio led by Danish drummer Alex Riel that also included bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson, with whom Drew played extensively for the remainder of his life. At the time, this group was frequently functioning as a rhythm section for touring horns-for-hire at Copenhagen’s esteemed Jazzhus Montmartre, a hallowed venue that offered Drew a mutually beneficial sinecure as house pianist until it closed in 1976. Drew did “Work Song” a second time on a 1969 Ben Webster date for EMI-Odeon, also with Pedersen and drummer Makaya Ntshoko, and again two months before the Home Is Where The Soul Is session, in Warsaw, with a Polish trio.

He debuted Ellington’s “Prelude To A Kiss” with a working quartet (saxophonist Joe Maini, Vinegar and Marable), documented on Jazz West in December 1955, and revisited it in May 1974 with Pedersen and drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath on the sessions that generated the Steeplechase albums Dark Beauty and Dark and Beautiful. That same May 1974 encounter also generated a tour de force presentation of “It Could Happen To You,” a Powell favorite that Drew had previously waxed with DeFranco (the day before his Blue Note debut) and in 1958 with Chet Baker. There, as here, Drew opens with improvised rubato “concertizing” before morphing into deep two-handed swing.

The Drew-Vinnegar-Butler trio addresses Drew’s original, “Only You,” at a brisk clip that imparts a much different ambiance than its balladic representation on Lite Flite, Drew’s February 1977 New York quintet recital with Thad Jones, Bob Berg, George Mraz and Jimmy Cobb. He concluded Home Is Where The Soul Is with the gentle, elegiac “Ending,” which first appeared on Ruby My Dear (Steeplechase), recorded in August 1977 with bassist David Friesen and drummer Clifford Jarvis. The version contained herein stands in calming contrast to the joie de vivre embodied on the preceding track, Drew’s modal “Three or Four Blues,” on which the composer’s solo ranges from Basie-esque pointillism to two-handed Tatumesque turbulence.

Drew’s insouciant, humorous, imaginative treatment of this number and, indeed, of everything else on Home Is Where The Soul Is, completely justifies Schlitten’s determination to illuminate his artistry in this spontaneous, familial context. Here, as on the preponderance of the Xanadu catalog, Schlitten’s instincts were spot-on.

Ted Panken

For Donny McCaslin’s birthday, a 2009 interview and Liner Notes For The Arabesque CD “Seen From Above” and the Criss Cross CD “Give ‘n’ Go”

Tenor saxophonist-composer Donny McCaslin turned 50 recently, which seems like a good reason to post an interesting interview he did with me in 2009 for a Downbeat piece in which I interviewed four tenor players (Ron Blake, Seamus Blake and Frank Catalano were the others) on developing one’s own sound, as well as liner notes I’ve had the honor to write for an album he recorded for Arabesque in 2000 and another album for Criss Cross in 2005.

 

Donny McCaslin (Feb. 4, 2009) – (DB Tenor Sound Piece):

TP: I guess the things I want to talk about generally are: First, the process by which you started thinking about the idea of saxophone as a way of expressing a voice as opposed to just playing it. What sort of vocabulary you assimilated and how you applied that vocabulary. Was the process of creating a sound a conscious thing, or a byproduct of the process of learning. Can you take those sort of general ideas and run with it?

DONNY:   Sure. There’s a lot of things I can say. As far as expressing myself on the instrument, that’s something I got into at a fairly early stage. I started playing when I was 12, and I started improvising shortly thereafter. Especially as I started to learn some language, I found improvising to be a great outlet for my emotions. So I think I was engaging with that at a fairly early age.

TP:   Of course, you had your father as an example.

DONNY:   Exactly. My father would often come to… My parents were divorced, and he’d come over to my mother’s place. We lived in the country, and there were these barns behind the house where I lived, and my father would carry his Wurlitzer piano up into one of these barns, he’d set it up, and then we’d play tunes that I had learned or was in the process of learning that he played with his band. The very first song that I learned was “Tequilas,” which is basically a one-chord jam thing—my dad would basically just comp for me. Then we’d go through, we’d play “A Train,” we played “Satin Doll,” we’d play maybe “Doxy,” we’d play a blues. What was great is that he would comp for me tirelessly. Being young, sometimes I’d get upset pretty quickly, because I wanted to play better, and I didn’t like what I was playing, and I’d stop. Other times we’d play at length, for what seemed like hours. I think it was through that kind of experience, and then starting to… I had a combo with Kenny Wolleson in junior high school, and then that continued in high school. As you know, it was a really good high school band, and I had chances to solo. It was there, at 14-15 years, that I started playing with a fair amount of emotional expression, where you could say it was a primary outlet for me emotionally.

TP:   Were you under any stylistic influences at that time? Were you learning the canon?

DONNY:   Yeah. My first hero was definitely to John Coltrane, which was mixed in high school with heavy exposure to Duke Ellington. My band director had Duke Ellington charts via Bill Berry, with whom he’d been in the service. So he had all these Ellington charts, and we were rehearsing those five days a week, and listening to the records sometimes. Those were my main influences. At 14-15 years old, I was listening to “Giant Steps,” and was playing through Trane’s solo. In probably my later high school years, I got into Michael Brecker and was heavily influenced by him. So in terms of language in that era, I would say… Well, Charlie Parker was an influence as well in the beginning, so probably Charlie Parker, Ellington, Trane, and Michael Brecker were my main influences.

TP: When did they start to become part of your emotional expression?

DONNY:   Mostly with Coltrane it was… One thing I was so drawn to in his playing was this deep sense of expression in his solos, and the emotional intensity. I was really drawn to that, even though I didn’t understand what was going on. At that age, I couldn’t handle Meditations or Ascension or Kulu Se Mama or Interstellar Space. That was too far out for me. But I was really in tune with the records before that, listening to them over and over. It was that emotional intensity that touched, and then I was trying to get to the same thing as I was playing, just as a kid with that limited vocabulary.

TP:   What sorts of things would your father or the other older musicians tell you about individuality or about the voice? What cues were you getting from people?

DONNY:   I have to think about that for a second. My father I don’t think really talked much about that, to be honest with you. The guys in his band didn’t talk much about individuality per se. But I think that it’s something that… Gosh…

TP:   How about critiquing your playing? Were you getting critiques?

DONNY:   Yeah. I can think of a couple of things. I can remember once when I was a senior I was in an Advancement of the Arts sort of talent competition thing. It was a big thing. It was throughout the United States, and I flew to Florida for the finals. Bill Charlap was one of the finalists, John Bailey, the trumpet player, myself—and Rufus Reid was like the jazz judge. I remember Rufus saying something to me about not playing so many notes, not playing so much. I can’t remember exactly how he said it, but the gist was to slow down and to not over-play. Herb Pomeroy, when I was at Berklee, said something similar to me after a concert. I was in his various student ensembles probably my whole time at Berklee, and after one of the concerts he came up and said something about how he was happy to hear me play more melodically and not just playing a bunch of notes kind of thing.

Various people I recall recounting telling the Lester Young story of him being on the bus…I think it’s Lester Young… They’re on the road, and a tenor player is shedding on the bus, and he’s playing all this shit, and Lester—or maybe it’s Ben Webster—said to him, ‘Yeah, but can you sing me a song?’ or something like that. Various people…

TP:   It’s Lester.

DONNY:   Yeah, Lester is who I thought.

TP:   Did that sort of thing have an impact on you? Because I gather that a lot of people were very impressed with your facility and power on the instrument as a young guy, which can be very seductive.

DONNY:   Yeah. I think it helped, and I think I listened to that. Over the course of the years, I feel I’ve tried to reflect on it. At the time, it’s hard to remember, honestly. Did I all of a sudden buy a bunch of Lester Young records? No, I didn’t.  But I definitely have listened to him over the course of my career, and have listened to various singers, and really thought about exploring different ways of playing and not just relying on technical prowess or whatever.

TP: Were you someone who transcribed solos, or you’d listen and put them into a framework…

DONNY:   It was both. I didn’t really transcribe solos until I got to Berklee, in college, my freshman year. Then I got into that. Yeah, I transcribed various solos, then I started learning solos, and that was definitely part of how I developed my language. But also listening a fair amount, and just being on the bandstand a lot. It’s a combination of all those things in terms of how I developed my language. In terms of focusing on individuality, that came into play when I started playing with Gary Burton’s band. Even before that, when I got to Berklee, there were a lot of really good saxophone players who had a lot of facility on the instrument and who were checking out the same guys I was checking out. So all of a sudden I was hit with this reality of individualism. I remember hearing this great tenor player, Tommy Smith, play. We had very similar influences, Trane, Michael Brecker and whatnot, but he had a very individual sound at a young age, and I remember being really impressed by that. That made a big impression on me, like, “Wow, he’s not only playing all the stuff I’m playing, but he’s got a personality, and it’s really tangible.” I thought, “Ok, that’s something I should work on, I should try to develop that.” It’s a hard thing to develop when you’re in the middle of trying to assimilate all this language and all these different players. But what I tried to do—again, at Berklee—was pay attention to things that struck me on an aesthetic level, that seemed to be different from what I was hearing people do. I tried to be open to what struck me, and I’d try to take the ball and run with it kind of thing.

Gary Burton, when I started playing with his band, would talk about how thematic development could get you away from playing licks and things that you practiced, and get you into really improvising. I don’t know if he called it “real improvising,” but… Then when I was in his band, he would give… We’d be on the road, and he’d give the occasional clinic with the group, and I would be there and I’d listen to him do this rap about thematic development and improvisation… Again, it’s not like I just all of a sudden changed course in the middle of the stream, but I was just checking it out. Then, during the same time I had to practice some things in wide intervals, and I was always drawn to that sound, and I started thinking, “That’s not something that I hear people do all the time, and that’s something I really like—maybe I should try to explore that.” So I explored it, and continued to explore it over the years. But I embraced that, and then this thing about thematic development I think begins… Again, I was exposed to it through Gary, but it was a few years later when I really started working on it and really started embracing it.

TP:   A lot of people in your generation are faced with this profusion of vocabulary.

DONNY:   Right.

TP:   so much information. One other thing (tell me if I’m wrong) that you might have used to explore new byways was exploring the pan-American conception and playing with Danilo Perez. I’m sure that brought you to all sorts of fresh places.

DONNY:   Well, it did. My initial exposure to that, again, was playing with my father’s band. He had a group that had percussion and played Cal Tjader-esque Latin Jazz. I think just growing up with that, and playing with a salsa band, I really had an affinity for that music. This was after Berklee, when I first moved to New York, but I went on the road with Danilo, and had been playing Argentinean folk music with Fernando Tarres… That really changed things for me in a dramatic way—especially my relationship with Danilo. He gave me some serious pointers along the way that, if I stopped and really shifted course completely.

TP: Can you be a bit more specific?

DONNY:   The first time it happened was in the early ‘90s, when we were on tour in Argentina with Fernando Tarres. Danilo said to me kind of what you’re saying:  “Man, you’ve got all this vocabulary together, but you need to think more about how you present it, and you need to explore phrasing more.” I was like, “Wow, yeah, you’re right.” Then he gave me some examples, like, “Take a bar of 8 eighth notes and divide them into a group of 3 and then a group of 5, and play your melodic idea, but you can give an accent at the beginning of the bar and then on the 4th eight note. So you’re making this 3 and 5.” That was his initial example. I thought, “God, I’d never thought about working on stuff like that.” So I took that idea and really ran with it, and just worked on my phrasing.

TP:   So it applied to music outside of just Danilo’s music.

DONNY:   Oh, of course. Because in this context, actually, we were both sidemen. Then I did a tour with Danilo’s group not long after that, and then there was heavy exposure to clave, and to Afro-Cuban folk music, Panamanian folk music, etc., etc. Again, that was something that really changed my life, and I embraced it, studying that, playing with a lot of different groups—with Santi DiBriano a lot, with Hector Martignon. I just was studying rhythm, or studying those folkloric rhythm patterns and the patterns that go with them rhythmically. For a fair amount of time, I was thinking of the saxophone more as a percussion instrument…in a way. I would take these rhythms and apply them to how I would practice playing over tunes, and just try to strengthen my rhythmic vocabulary.

I know one of the overviews of this article is about individuality, creating a voice. I found that working on that stuff gave me a lot more flexibility rhythmically, and with that, a lot more freedom to explore leaving wide spaces, and looking at all these different ways I could approach the rhythm that freed me up to have a much greater range of expression as an improviser than I had before. That enabled me, I think, to get to a place where I didn’t have to rely on my technical proficiency, that I could think like a drummer, I could think like a singer, and I could have the confidence to do that, and to leave that space, and not feel like I had to fill it up.

TP:   You’re the third straight person who spoke of thinking like a singer. That’s interesting.

DONNY:   Yeah, that’s a really good thing to check out, obviously, if you’re a melody player, is to study the way singers phrase things, the way they’ll sing a melody. I think it has a real immediate effect on the way you’re playing something. Literally, I’m on the bandstand, I’m playing a melody, and I’m imagining that I’m Frank Sinatra, or I’m imagining that I’m Sarah Vaughan.

TP: Literally.

DONNY:   Yeah. Of course, it doesn’t happen every night. But it’s those times when I feel like I’m playing the melody and I’m just on auto-pilot, or nothing is really happening, and, “Wait a minute, let me change the framework about how I’m thinking about this or how I’m dealing with it.”

TP:   Can you speak about tone production? This is in the context of a commonly stated critique of young players of the jazz conservatory generation, that older players often say it’s hard to tell them apart. I don’t know if this is true or not. But Ron Blake was talking about a sort of orthodox way to play the saxophone, a certain mouthpiece, and so on… But the old ethos that you can tell somebody by their sound with one phrase, as with people in the old days.

DONNY:   I would say that I feel like I can tell… If it’s Mark Turner, when I’m listening, right away I can tell it’s him. Or Chris Potter, or Seamus, or David Binney, or Miguel Zenon, I feel like a lot of people these days have distinctive voices, at least to my ears. I don’t have that feeling of everybody sounds the same. Although I can understand where that’s coming from. I’m speaking about people who are probably pretty individualistic players. Certainly, because jazz education has come so far, and as you mentioned, there’s so much information out there, it’s no wonder that a lot of young players will sound similar because they’re getting similar information. But that’s the challenge for them, is how can they take that information, those influences, and come up with their own sound. That’s up to each individual. In terms of equipment and mouthpiece and so on, I certainly never felt like I had to play this or had to play that—outside of playing a Selmer saxophone, which most people play. But you don’t even have to do that. Dave Liebman sounds amazing on what he plays… Different people play different things. But it is obviously very important to find your own sound and your own way of doing things, but that’s just the journey that everybody is on.

TP:   is that a more challenging thing to do these days because of the profusion of information?

DONNY:   Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. I think it is more challenging to come up with something that’s new or interesting…I’m not even saying new, but a way of putting all the information out there together into a coherent, original language. Now, that’s a challenge. That’s a big challenge. Because it’s not just playing over bebop tunes—which is not easy, I’m not insinuating that. But yeah, there’s a lot more to process now. Because of the way the music industry has changed and the way jazz education has changed, it makes it harder, but it’s easier and harder at the same time—if that makes sense. There’s more available, but yet how to put that together into a real individual language is difficult.

TP: Also, a lot of the most individualistic players of this period did a lot of bandstand playing when they were young.

DONNY:   Yeah, I think that’s true. I can give you an example of that in my own life. When I was rehearsing with Gary Burton… he put together this Berklee all-star group of students to do this jazz cruise. I was pretty nervous, and when I was rehearsing, I’d never really got into my comfort… I felt like I was struggling or whatever. But as soon as we got on that cruise, and we played a gig, as soon as we got on the bandstand, I played a lot better, and I felt much more comfortable.  Gary commented on that to me sometime later during the week that it was a big difference. I realized at that point, it was all the experience I had with my father, and with the group I had with Kenny Wolleson—that really helped me out. Because I was able to get into a more creative zone on the bandstand. I wasn’t nervous, because I was more comfortable there than I was rehearsing the music, ironically enough. That’s not the case any more. But being on the bandstand all the time, having to play solo after solo really helped me out.

For me, as I already said on the individual sound thing, it’s being open to it and following your instinct. What touches you musically? It’s maybe something unexpected, but not being afraid to follow that.

TP:   Do you deliberately put yourself in new situations? For example, this new trio recording. Is that the purpose towards which you’re framing yourself in that context, or is that a byproduct of looking for different environments?

DONNY:   It’s the latter. Just looking for a different… the two records I’d done before that were these more produced, more conceptual things, and I was like, “No, let me get back to blowing.” I was consciously like, “I need to do something different,” and this is different, and it’s a format that I love, that’s challenging, that has all this history, and so on.

TP:   Were you thinking during your developmental years about an individual voice?

DONNY:   Definitely.

TP:   Was it totally for you, or otherwise…

DONNY:   it was something I was aware of and concerned about, in a way. Like, “Ok, how can I find my own way?” It was a process that happened over time, but it was definitely on my mind, how can I find my own way of playing music in a way that seems true to me?’ I think I was at a certain point where I had all this technical proficiency, and I had worked on all these Trane solos… In other words, I could play all this shit. But it didn’t mean anything to me. It was at that time of, “well, if this doesn’t mean anything to me, then what DOES mean something to me?” How can I shed away all this BS and get to the heart of what I want to try to say as an improviser? For me, that was really embracing thematic and melodic development, which Gary Burton talked about and Sonny was really my guiding light for that. So it was like really letting go of… I can remember going to sessions in the early ‘90s, playing, and not even getting into playing a lot of notes at all, because I wasn’t hearing it, and I had made this commitment to try to only play what I was really hearing, and be TRULY in the moment as an improviser. That meant, for me, letting go of a lot of the stuff that I could “play,” but I wasn’t truly hearing it. So I tried to let go of that completely and to be totally in the moment as an improviser.

TP: Getting back to these older players who talked about telling a story and the dialogic quality of improvising, or that Charlie Parker would describe the woman walking into the room, and so on. Do any of these notions play into your improvising. He said that he applied some of the tactics he’d studied in theater improv to his musical improvisation? Do such things factor in, or is music a very different entity than verbal language?

DONNY: I definitely think about it in terms of telling a story. I’ll think about the beginning of a solo is like the beginning of a short story—you introduce a subject or a character. Then the character develops the story. That’s in a perfect world what the solo is like.

*_*_*_*_*_

Donny McCaslin (Seen From Above) – (2000):

Back in 1988, when Donny McCaslin was a 22-year-old senior at Berklee School of Music, vibraphone master Gary Burton hired him for the tenor saxophone chair in his quintet.  The prestigious gig marked phase two of McCaslin’s education.  A New Yorker since 1991, he hasn’t stopped working, navigating the diverse sonic ambiance of a congeries of top-shelf bands in the jazz mecca, which range from state-of-the-art fusion (Steps Ahead) to Latin (Santi DiBriano’s Panamaniacs, Danilo Perez, Fernando Tarres, Hector Martignon) to speculative improvisation (the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band and Lan Xang) to the Mingus Big Band and Maria Schneider’s Orchestra.

All those experiences helped mold the fully-formed musical personality we hear inflecting the open-ended terrain of Seen From Above, Donny McCaslin’s second leader album.  Here’s what the 33-year-old virtuoso brings to the table.  Thoroughly grounded in fundamentals, he knows how to whip up interesting melodies out of the knottiest harmonic progressions, and doesn’t allow melodic essence to waver at even the nastiest tempos.  His lines don’t land where you’d expect them to, he swings incessantly, and he projects a burnished, vocalized sound through the entire range of his horn.  Most importantly, without sacrificing a whit of individuality, McCaslin has internalized a collective attitude to improvising, allowing like-minded partners Ben Monder, Scott Colley and Jim Black, all 30-something 21st century jazzfolk of like sensibility, to imprint their personalities on the musical proceedings.

McCaslin’s story begins in Santa Cruz, California,  a university town and counterculture bastion 80 miles south of San Francisco, where his father Don McCaslin continues to sustain a steady gig as pianist and vibraphonist.  “My Dad has a Cal Tjader thing happening on vibes, and on piano he’s really into Red Garland,” McCaslin states.  “I’d go with him every Sunday morning to the mall where he had a gig from 12 until 5, and help him set up the piano and the vibes.  Before I was able to walk around on my own, he had me sit on a chair in the middle of the band, where I’d watch the whole thing go down for hours.”  A poor study in junior high school photography class, McCaslin decided to enter Beginning Orchestra and — inspired by the saxophonist in his father’s band, “a really colorful guy, very charismatic, a hippie, tie-dye shirts…I remember looking into the bell of his horn and seeing this pool of saliva with a cigarette butt floating in the middle of it; to me as a 12-year-old, he was really cool” — chose the tenor saxophone as his instrument.

McCaslin progressed rapidly, taking advantage of the area’s first-class music programs and first-hand interaction with his father.  “When I was beginning to play, my father would take his Wurlitzer to the barn behind my Mom’s house, set it up, and we’d play for hours on end,” he recalls.  McCaslin also was able to hear top musicians at Kuumbwa, a nonprofit concert venue in Santa Cruz.  “I saw Elvin Jones there with Pat LaBarbera, and Sonny Fortune a couple of weeks later,” says McCaslin, who played a hometown engagement at the attractive room a few weeks before our conversation.  “Every Monday night the big groups came into town, so from age 12 on I was able to hear guys from New York live, which was important and inspirational.”

He continues: “I was the only freshman in my high school band; my director, Don Keller, had a bunch of original Ellington charts, so at 14 we were playing things like ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo In Blue,’ ‘Warm Valley,’ ‘Blood Count,’ ‘Rockin’ in Rhythm.’  I could barely read music, and I was totally in over my head, but I learned a lot.  My earliest influences were Bird and Trane, and then probably Michael Brecker, a little Sonny Rollins, a little Sonny Stitt.  The way Coltrane played seemed so heavy and profound, so urgent; I always have loved the sense of emotional catharsis that can come through improvising, and I felt it embodied in his playing.  Brecker was such a virtuoso, and records like “Steps Ahead” and “80/81″ sounded so modern, like the new happening thing.”

McCaslin matriculated at Berklee in 1984, where he reveled in interaction with a peer group of big-fish young musicians who’d converged in Boston from points around the planet, and took advantage of first-hand contact with teachers like Herb Pomeroy and George Garzone.  “It was very liberating studying with George,” he relates.  “He gave me patterns to practice that broke all the rules you learn in school, a lot of notes outside the chord scale, and wild intervals.  During my years with Gary Burton, I learned a lot about thematic development, thematic improvising, being disciplined in the sense of saying what I had to say clearly and succinctly in, say, two choruses, and then getting out.”

Once in New York, McCaslin began the arduous, rewarding process of shedding chameleonic flexibility to inhabit the skin of his own sound.  “It was only after I’d been in New York for a couple of years that I started to know conceptually how I wanted to play and write,” he confides.  On a recommendation from Burton, he worked with bass legend Eddie Gomez, gigged with various Berklee cohorts, and began to find work playing Latin music of all description.

“I always had an affinity for Latin music in Santa Cruz,” McCaslin notes.  “First, my father was into Cal Tjader and Latin Jazz, and I played in an 8-horn Salsa band called Los Shlepos Tipicos when I was in high school.  While I was in Gary’s band he made a live record with Astor Piazzola at Montreux, which I absorbed.  When I got to New York I sat in with Santi DiBriano at the Village Gate, who started calling me to play with his band the Panamaniacs.  I’d been in the dorm at Berklee with Danilo Perez, who’d played with Santi earlier, and Danilo recommended me to Fernando Tarres, with whom I worked and recorded a lot.  Though I had only a layman’s ear knowledge of clave, I did a couple of tours with Danilo in the ’90s, and he encouraged me to study Afro-Cuban music in a comprehensive way.  I started taking lessons with Bobby Sanabria, and it’s expanded my rhythmic vocabulary immensely.

“Playing with Santi was very important.  The band had tunes that were straight ahead, tunes that were clave-based, tunes that we’d play free on.  I was put into an environment where I had to deal with all these different styles while retaining a unified band approach.  And being the only horn player, I had a lot of space to play and a lot of responsibility.”

McCaslin took on similar responsibilities during his four years with vibraphonist Mike Mainieri in the ’90s edition of Steps Ahead, where he filled the tenor chair Michael Brecker once had held; he’s heard to strong effect on the 1995 recording Vibe [NYC] with musicians like Rachel Z, Michael Cain, Victor Bailey, James Genus and Clarence Penn.  “It was a very good gig,” McCaslin smiles.  “Mike is kind of a hippie at heart, and I relate to him as a person because I grew up in that culture.  Whereas Gary was very exacting as a bandleader, Mike was really loose, gave me a lot of freedom.  Occasionally he would say something, but for the most part he let me do my thing.”

With that background in mind, the stance of open-endedness with discipline that permeates the eight McCaslin originals on Seen From Above makes perfect sense.  “I’ve always had a sense of eclecticism,” McCaslin states.  “When I was at Berklee I played in a Rock band for a while, and I’ve done a lot of funk gigs in New York.  I enjoy playing music.  I’m not a purist about Bebop or whatever, though I love just playing tunes in an open situation with the right guys — it’s like going home.  At the same time, I feel I have something to say as an original music artist, and this is the time to do it.”

The mix wouldn’t work without a band of fluid, flexible improvisers who share McCaslin’s ample comfort zone for articulating a wide umbrella of styles without ever sounding out of their element.  McCaslin knows Ben Monder — who recorded the trio session Dust for Arabesque in 1996 — from frequent gigs with Maria Schneider’s orchestra; the guitarist deploys his vast harmonic vocabulary and nuanced orchestrative capabilities throughout.  Precisely off-center trapsetter Jim Black — known for his work with Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, Dave Douglas’ Tiny Bell Trio, and Pachora — was a Berklee classmate, though, McCaslin confesses, “I’ve hardly played with him since.  The way he plays, utilizing a range of different sounds with a great sense of colors and dynamics, is what I was hearing for some of these tunes.”

Ditto with Scott Colley, whom McCaslin met during the fellow Californian’s late ’80s tenure with Carmen McRae; he’s presently bassist of choice with Jim Hall and Andrew Hill, and is McCaslin’s bandmate in Lan Xang, an open form collective quartet whose other members are alto saxophonist Dave Binney and drummer Kenny Wolleson.  “I heard Scott playing the bass line that begins ‘Manresa’ as I wrote it,” McCaslin relates.  “I knew he could play it the right way — make it ROCK!   Originally it was called ‘Hippie Rock Tune,’ because that’s exactly what it is to me!  Manresa is a beach in northern California, and it conveys the feeling of home.”

The music of Olivier Messaien inspired McCaslin to write the title track — a lovely melody replete with wide interval jumps — and the up-tempo swinger “Frontiers,” on which McCaslin takes a spectacular solo, achieving an inside-outside feel reminiscent of ’90s tenor hero Joe Lovano.  “Messaien’s harmonic language is so interesting, his rhythmic language is so advanced — his music sounds majestic and emotional,” McCaslin explains.

McCaslin penned “Second Line Sally” — both the George Gruntz Concert Band and Lan Xang have recorded it — during Boston days as a swing number; here it gets a fun-house Zigaboo Modaliste treatment, as Black gives it up for the groove.

“These Were Palaces” is a ballad written at the end of a relationship.   “When playing the tune, I’m thinking of the way Jonatha Brook sings,” McCaslin says.  “Her writing actually has had a big influence on me.  ‘Mick Gee’ has a drum-and-bass feel.  Jim suggested we play it faster than I normally do to give it that edgy feeling to contrast with the other relaxed, grooving tempo.  I wanted it to have a shocking effect, with contrasting extremes.”

For “Strange Pilgrim,” “I wanted a swinging bass line with a quirky melody on top,” McCaslin says.  “I wanted to take a simple tune and do as much as I could to make it into a story that develops.”   It’s followed by “Going To The Territory,” a gospel-blues tinged tune with a Rock inflection that reminds you of early ’70s Keith Jarrett.

“Seen From Above” ends with a relaxed idiomatic McCaslin-Colley duo on the memorable refrain of Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” reaffirming deep roots on an album where McCaslin reveals those sources more through phrasing and improvisational acuity than in the formal architecture of the tunes.  “Santa Cruz was very open in music and in art when I grew up,” McCaslin concludes.  “There were salsa bands, straight-ahead jazz trios, free jazz, and I was exposed to all of it.  It was all just music.  I think that notion is something I share with all the guys in this band.  This record is my music, and it reflects all the influences I’ve absorbed through the years.

“The thing that appeals to me about jazz is the freedom of improvisation. I want to do my best to play at the highest level that I can aesthetically.  Playing with musicians of this caliber, who can lift the music into that really exciting and wonderful place, is what I’ve worked towards and practiced for all these years.”

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Liner Notes, Donny McCaslin, Give and Go–2005

Highly regarded by fellow musicians and connoisseurs of hardcore jazz since he settled in New York in 1991, saxophonist Donny McCaslin became a subject of mainstream jazz conversation when he earned a 2005 Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Solo for his soulful, dramatic, architecturally cogent statement on Buleria, Soleá y Rumba, an extended opus by composer Maria Schneider that appears on Schneider’s Grammy winning CD Concert In The Garden.

On Buleria, McCaslin revealed the qualities that have attracted such demanding bandleaders as Danilo Perez, Dave Douglas, Mike Mainieri, and Gary Burton, who in 1988 recruited McCaslin, then a 22-year-old senior at Berklee School of Music, for the tenor saxophone chair in his quintet. In the notes for Seen From Above, McCaslin’s 2000 date on Arabesque, I summarized them: “Thoroughly grounded in fundamentals, he knows how to whip up interesting melodies out of the knottiest harmonic progressions, and doesn’t allow melodic essence to waver at even the nastiest tempos.  His lines don’t land where you’d expect, he swings incessantly, and he projects a burnished, vocalized sound through the entire range of his horn.  Most importantly, without sacrificing a whit of individuality, McCaslin has internalized a collective attitude to improvising, allowing his partners, all 21st century jazzmen of similar sensibility, to imprint their personalities on the proceedings.”

Let’s add that McCaslin’s penchant for exploration rests upon an authoritative command of the vocabularies of hardcore jazz and the Spanish Tinge, which coexist holistically in his tonal personality. A native of Santa Cruz, California, a university town and counterculture bastion 80 miles south of San Francisco, he first encountered both idioms through his father, Don, a gigging pianist and vibraphonist influenced by Red Garland and Cal Tjader. A student of sax gurus Bill Pierce, Joe Viola and George Garzone during his years at Berklee, McCaslin once earned praise from Leonard Feather for “virtually stealing the show” from Phil Woods, Red Holloway, Flip Phillips and David “Fathead” Newman during a saxophone jam on a cruise ship. On the Latin side, he played in high school years with an 8-horn Salsa band called Los Shlepos Tipicos, and as a ‘90s New Yorker, worked intermittently with Perez, a Berklee dorm-mate, with Argentine guitarist Fernando Tarres, and with the Panamaniacs, a Santi DiBriano-led unit that explored clave, straight-ahead and open feels while retaining a unified sound..

On Give ‘n’ Go, his Criss-Cross leader debut, McCaslin draws on lessons learned with Danilo Perez during 2001-02, when he toured steadily on Perez’ Motherland Project, and on his more recent travels with Maria Schneider, a frequent employer in 2004-05.

“Danilo is a great educator as well as a great musician, and it’s inspiring to be around him,” McCaslin relates. “I’d bring blank music paper with me at soundcheck, and as we’d play he’d tell me he was looking at a certain voicing, or discuss some rhythmic progression, and I’d write it down. It was like being back in school—he was sharing so much information.

“One thing that I appreciate about Maria’s writing is how every single part is meaningful. Whether you’re playing the fourth reed chair or the third trombone chair, all the lines have significance and are melodies in and of themselves. That’s influenced me. Also her lyricism and the sheer beauty of her music. She’s not afraid to do what she’s hearing. You can call it ‘orchestral jazz’ or whatever you want, but it is what it is, and she’s just putting it out there.”  Helped by several preparatory gigs at Manhattan’s 55 Bar and Brooklyn’s L&M Loft, McCaslin puts out seven original compositions with support from an A-list cohort. As on all of McCaslin’s dates, Scott Colley, a fellow Californian, anchors the flow on bass. They met while McCaslin was with Burton and Colley was with Carmen McRae, and first recorded together on the 1995 Dave Binney album Luxury of Guessing. After that session, McCaslin, Binney, Colley and drummer Jeff Hirschfield—the latter subsequently replaced by Santa Cruz native Kenny Wolleson—formed the collective quartet Lan Xang, a touring unit until the end of the ‘90s.

Criss-Cross devotees will be familiar with the work of John Swana, the Philadelphia-based trumpet virtuoso, who appears on four selections. “Alex Sipiagin was always telling me how great he thinks John is,” says McCaslin, referring to the Russian trumpet virtuoso (also a Criss-Cross artist), a frequent bandmate. “I played with his organ trio in Philly, and it was a lot of fun. I felt there was some sort of connection, like stylistically he could play straight-ahead but also open at the same time.”

Here as on Seen From Above, McCaslin uses guitar as the chordal instrument, deploying Steve Cardenas, a Kansas City native who currently plays with the Paul Motian Electric Bebop Band, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and a Joey Baron-led quartet called Killer Joey.

“I met Steve more than 15 years ago when he was living in San Francisco, and Kenny Wolleson set up some California gigs for me to do when I came home from college,” McCaslin recalls. “He really gets inside a tune, and brings forth the harmony in a thoughtful way. He’s also a great comper; I feel he hears what I’m doing and makes it sound better, gives me a springboard to play off of.”

A past contributor to Criss-Cross sessions by Alex Sipiagin, Conrad Herwig, Ryan Kisor and J.D. Allen, drummer Gene Jackson is a master at alchemizing hybrid rhythms from ethnic metric signatures. McCaslin began to feel Jackson’s beat on gigs with Sipiagin and on several tours of Japan with singer Monday Ichiru.

“Gene’s playing is very strong, and he likes to go for it and stretch,” McCaslin remarks. “But no matter how busy or wild things get, I still feel a certain sense of grounding that I can latch onto. We egg each other on.

The McCaslin-Jackson simpatico is evident on “Outlaw,” an ebullient long form piece inspired by an Egberto Gismonti tune. McCaslin rehearsed it with Danilo Perez, who included other McCaslin tunes in the Motherland Project repertoire. “One thing we added was the counterpoint bassline in the last section of the melody, which I end up doubling,” McCaslin says. “But the challenge was coming up with the right feel. I’ve played it sometimes as a samba and sometimes with a more straight-eighth rock feel, but it never felt right. Gene and I worked on it, and he came up with what he calls an American samba.” McCaslin and Swana uncork melodic solos with a dollop of saudade.

Based on a synthetic scale from Messaien’s etude book, Modes For Limited Transposition, “Scrappy” is a quirky line with sardonic Monkish phrasing, intriguing intervals, and disjunctive hits. Goosed by the kinetic Jackson, McCaslin and Cardenas incorporate these shapes and dynamics on stimulating solos.

Composed in 2000, “Drift” claims Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” as an antecedent. The A-section has a moody three-feel, while in the B-section Jackson’s rubato soundpainting details the melody and chords. Swana’s exquisite dark tone fits the melody like a custom-tailored suit, and McCaslin sustains the mood, his tenor voice drenched with soulful emotion.

“I was listening to Radiohead at the time I wrote the tune,” says McCaslin of Give and Go, also from 2000. The title refers to the basketball tactic of passing, cutting directly to the basket, and receiving a return pass for an easy shot, a process represented by the Cardenas-McCaslin interchange on the jagged intervals of the theme. “The melody came about when I was improvising on a synthetic scale, and I heard a harmony that to me sounded like a Radiohead-inspired piece. I was looking to hear some music that excites me and stimulates my sense of creativity. I landed on a Radiohead record. The tunes are interesting, the harmony is weird and different, it’s not the typical pop progression, plus all these other things happen in the arrangement through the production.”  The Liberators’ Song is McCaslin’s response to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’  The General In His Labyrinth, a novel in which General Simon Bolivar is the chief protagonist. “It’s a melody and a mood,” says McCaslin of the brooding, Shorteresque refrain, his voice-like tone cosigned by Jackson’s gentle tom-toms and cymbal splashes.

McCaslin addresses clave structures with precision and finesse on “Two/Three,” composed during his stint with Danilo Perez. “I originally conceived of it as a son, but Gene wanted to play it as a rumba,” McCaslin says. “Danilo’s tunes contain a lot of counterpoint between the bass and the melody. Here I conceived of the bass line first, and to me the bass player’s melody is almost the more compelling one.” Colley demonstrates why on his introductory statement over Jackson’s sticked clave modulations. On their ensuing solos, Cardenas, McCaslin (on soprano) and Jackson handle the involved form with elegant panache. Written during McCaslin’s Lan Xang days, Doom Fuss features an angular two-bar bassline pattern and much open-ended McCaslin-Swana call-and-response.

Following his custom of concluding records with a hardcore jazz classic, McCaslin closes with Thelonious Monk’s “Eronel,”  which he learned in Boston days with Ken Schaphorst’s big band. After McCaslin’s reharmonized, rhythmically displaced intro, inspired blowing commences over Jackson’s Frankie Dunlop-inspired swing-with-a-limp.
“I’ve played it at sessions for years,” says McCaslin, who knows how to use a tricky line to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Also, Steve co-authored a book of Monk tunes with Don Sickler, so  I knew he could nail it and get inside the harmony.”

Jazz-obsessed from his formative years, McCaslin tells his stories with the lucid joie de vivre of a natural improviser. But he has never allowed revered traditions to be a ball and chain.

“I love playing tunes and stretching,” he says. “It’s part of my foundation; it feels like home. But I don’t usually play standards when I do gigs as a leader, because I want to get my original music out there. I’ve always had sense of eclecticism. At Berklee I played in a Rock band. I’ve done a lot of funk gigs in New York. I just enjoy playing music.”

For Scott Colley’s 54th Birthday, my liner notes for the 1998 Criss Cross CD, “Subliminal”

Best of birthdays to bass master Scott Colley, who turns 54 today. For the occasion, here’s my liner notes for his 1998 Criss Cross CD, subliminal…, in which Scott spoke at length about his background, influences and aesthetics.

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On subliminal…, his Criss-Cross debut, Scott Colley and a world-class quartet present a seamless, suite-like program of music that has the quality of wide-ranging conversation, at once animated and reflective.  “I knew from playing in trio with Bill Stewart and Chris Potter that it doesn’t matter what material we’re playing because they’re such experienced improvisers,” notes the 34-year-old bassist.  “We’ve done things with no preconceived forms whatsoever, and I know it will work.  I can hear their sounds while I’m writing, which makes me feel free to experiment with my compositions.  When I’m composing it’s important for me to have specific musicians in mind.”

Of Potter, a tenorist of uncanny chops and rampant imagination currently with Dave Holland’s band (his litany of credits is now too long to list), Colley says: “I have very strong feelings about Chris’ playing.  I’m impressed with his directness, his ability to focus which allows him to get incredibly deep into a tune, and in that way it’s challenging to play with him.  Here he explores a lot of different sounds from the horn, using the extreme range of the instrument, changing timbre constantly.”

Of Bill Stewart, a keenly textural drummer of emphatic beat whose rhythmic palette encompasses delicate watercolors to action painting, Colley continues, “As much as Bill can stretch the form and execute polyrhythms in different ways, his playing is very intricate and precise.  He’s aware of exactly where he is in the form all the time.  His focus is amazing.  It’s almost like turning on and off a light switch; when he starts playing, it’s there.”

Of pianist Bill Carrothers, with whom Colley first played a few weeks before the recording, the bassist remarks: “I’m impressed with Bill’s ability, while playing changes, to voice them completely different on every chorus; he’s very present, hears the solos, hears everything that’s going on, and adapts his voicings accordingly.  He’s obviously very influenced by 20th Century Classical Music.  The first night I played with Bill we played a Bill Stewart ballad that I hadn’t played before, and he did what I described.  I soloed, started to pick notes outside of the written chord changes, and he’d immediately incorporate those into his voicings.”

It all boils down to listening for the California native — on the most subliminal level.  That’s how he began.  “A lot of my early experiences were playing by ear,” Colley recalls.  “At 13 I began playing two nights a week at a jam session in Pasadena.  The older musicians would give me records and tell me which songs we were going to play next week.  I’d take, say, the song ‘Old Folks’ from Miles Davis’ Someday My Prince Will Come, which was one of my favorite records at the time.  I’d play Miles’ solo over and over, then play along with Paul Chambers’ bass lines and try to arpeggiate the inner voices, figure out on piano exactly what was going on.  That turned out to my benefit, because I had to rely on my ear.  It wasn’t until later that I realized what I was doing theoretically.  Learning music in this way teaches you the importance of musical conversation.  If all you have is the paper, and you’re learning chord changes by sight, you’ll understand the theory, but you don’t gain the feeling, and your ear doesn’t develop.  There’s so much inflection in the way all these great musicians play, and that’s what you really want to get to.”

Colley’s been a professional musician ever since.  “I did the jam session for three years,” he recalls.  “I would play there until 1, then from 2 to 4 I often went to a place called the Espresso Bar, playing behind poets, duos or trios.  From 16 to 18 I played duo gigs around L.A. with Jimmy Rowles.  He would never tell me what he was going to play; he’d just do it.  I learned song after song that way.  He was a beautiful player and a great composer.

“At 13 I started studying with Monty Budwig, a very giving teacher, a great influence.  He was playing with Zoot Sims and many other players, and he’d take me to L.A. clubs like Donte’s and Carmelo’s.  The lessons were all-day sessions where we’d listen to records, he’d give me records to take home; we’d play classical duets and then jazz standards.  I was studying particularly Mingus, Paul Chambers, Scott LaFaro and Charlie Haden.  Mingus I loved very early on in terms of structure, composition, the variety of sounds and textures he used, the incredible orchestrations, the power of the music — and so much conviction.  With LaFaro, it was his fluidity, melodic sense, and incredible facility, which blows you away at 13 years old — and still does.  I spent a lot of time playing along with Paul Chambers’ solos, which were complete, easy to follow, very direct and beautiful.

“I was really kind of a purist until my older brother, who is a drummer and was always trying to turn me on to different styles of music, took me to see Weather Report during their Heavy Weather period.  It was one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever seen.  Seeing Jaco Pastorius play made me realize that there was so much other stuff out there other than the straight-ahead types of jazz that I’d been listening that I had no idea about.

“Later, at 16 or 17, I listened to a lot of Ornette’s music, and Charlie began to influence me.  He had the same qualities of simplicity and beauty that I appreciated in Paul Chambers.  More than that, I was impressed by his patience.  He never plays anything superfluous; you get the feeling every note is exactly what he means.  The ’70s was a bleak period for recording for bass.  Everybody was using direct-from-the-pickup, losing a lot of the beauty of the instrument’s natural sound, but Charlie never seemed to succumb to that.  His sound has so much integrity; it’s so much part of what he plays.  Like Jim Hall, who I’ve worked with in the last few years, he’s a true improviser, with no preconceptions of what’s going to happen next, reacting to everything going on within the group in the atmosphere of that moment.

“I didn’t take high school too seriously, but I finished, though I didn’t plan to go to college.  Then I heard that Charlie was teaching at California Institute of the Arts, so I auditioned.  They were just starting a jazz department, and they gave me a full scholarship in 1984.  It was a great experience.  I became totally involved in the school’s incredible World Music program, which included traditional African music, Javanese Gamelan from Indonesia, North and South Indian music.  There are classes on theory related to those different musics, and ensembles you play in.  They also had a wonderful faculty.”

In 1986, Colley began touring and recording with Carmen McRae; two years later he received his Bachelors of Music degree, and moved to New York City.  He became one of New York’s busiest bassists, working and recording with musicians representing a 360̊ style spectrum — Dizzy Gillespie, Art Farmer, Clifford Jordan, James Newton, John Scofield, Joe Henderson, Fred Hersch, Billy Hart, Mike Stern, Roy Hargrove, T.S. Monk, Phil Woods, Pat Martino, Chris Potter, Tim Berne, Lost Tribe, and many others.  He leads Portable Universe, a sextet, and is involved in Lan Xang, a new collective quartet.

subliminal… is Colley’s third 1998 release.  He can’t quite put his finger on what triggered this burst of composition after ten years blending as the penultimate sideman.  “I’ve been writing more, and feel it’s time to do more of my own music,” he says.  “The process of recording solidifies your concept.  It forces you to get specific about the pieces you’re creating.  I’ve done more than 60 CD’s in the last eight years, and I’ve been fortunate to play with a lot of great leaders, to observe how it’s done right.”

subliminal… opens with Bill Stewart’s “Don’t Ever Call Me Again,” a 24-bar tune in 6/4 “with a 4/4 bar in there somewhere. I like the way the melody is offset from the rhythm, starting two beats before the bass line begins.  It’s interesting to play on.”

Colley’s compelling title track “was written on the bass.  I like to compose that way because I hear a lot melodically that I don’t hear on the piano — it’s a much more open voice for me.  It’s a challenging line, with the A-section in 9/2 and the B-section in 3/4.   We solo over the 9/2 form, and play interludes between the solos.”

Potter’s burgundy bass clarinet tone is rich and blended throughout “The End and the Beginning,” a mysteriously wistful Colley ballad that evokes complex emotion.  It’s followed by Potter’s “Turangalila,” inspired by the reedman’s meditations on a composition of Messaien.  “Chris wrote it out with no changes per se,” Colley says.  “The improvising is free.  It has a bass and tenor melody in unison.  It’s very open, and points you in a direction that lets you play very freely with the ideas.”

Carrothers’ chromaticism and Potter’s huge tenor sound bring Colley’s slow-medium ballad “Out of The Void” vividly to life, then the band plays Charlie Parker’s “Segment” with inspired idiomatic heat.  Bill Stewart’s solo at the top “really illustrates his ability; no matter how abstract his ideas might be, the form is always there — it always comes back to one.”  Potter’s rhythmically free tenor solo conjures the ghost of Bird ascending, while Colley walks with the confident assertion he imbibed from the playing of Leroy Vinnegar and Paul Chambers years ago.

Colley offers some thoughts on the nature of love with “Is What It Is,” utilizing the familiar changes and “adding a couple of notes.  I like writing over forms I already know that everybody’s done for a long period of time, creating different melodies that give you new things to play over.”

“Impossible Vacation” contains 10 bars of 4/4, 11 bars of 3/4, and 4 bars of 4/4.  “Playing freely over this piece so that it doesn’t seem like you’re marking time is a challenge,”  Colley notes.  The proceedings conclude with “Verbatim,” a spirited blues.

“I think a lot about contrast in general,” Colley concludes.  “Rhythmic contrast, harmonic contrast; thinking about what’s come before a composition when you’re setting it up.  It doesn’t have to be complex.  Jimmy Rowles, for example, would write a simple chord progression, then place one note in the melody to offset it, like ‘Peacocks’ or ‘502 Blues.’  Those kind of compositions interest me.  Also I get bored very easily, so I like music that has a wide range of textures — playing on changes, playing on no-changes, playing on a melody, playing in 4 or 7 or 9, different instrumentations.

“I want to be involved in a lot of different music.  Some music might speak to me melodically, some rhythmically, some intellectually.  If I’m playing with Jim Hall one night, with Andrew Hill the next, and something more groove-oriented like Lan Xang the next, it just feeds a different part of me.  It’s all music I listen to, and absorb in different ways.  Essentially I have my style, whatever that is, and I can subtly adapt it for many different things.  I don’t think of music in terms of ‘this is inside and this is outside’ or ‘this is new music and this is old music.’  It’s more inclusive.  It comes back to listening.  When you’re listening to what’s really going on and not thinking about what you think is supposed to be going on, then you get to the root of what it’s about.”

 

Hilton Ruiz (1952-2006): My Liner Notes for the 2003 CD “Enchantment,” Interviews from 2000 and 2001, and the Proceedings of a WKCR Musician Show from 1994

For the 65th birthday anniversary of the virtuoso pianist Hilton Ruiz (May 29, 1952-June 6, 2006), here are the liner notes that I wrote for his final CD, Enchantment, a 2002 release, plus the interview that we conducted for those liner notes and a WKCR interview from 2000.

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Liner Notes For Enchantment:

It’s long-established that Hilton Ruiz, now 49 years old, is a virtuoso of the piano. Born to Puerto Rican parents and raised in midtown Manhattan, cater-corner from the old Madison Square Garden and two blocks from Musicians Union headquarters, Ruiz studied Puerto Rican folkloric music and European Classical repertoire in early childhood. By 18, the wunderkind was a professional jazzman, gigging with Clark Terry, Joe Newman, Frank Foster, and Jackie McLean, and making an impact on the Latin circuit with soñero Ismael Rivera and Mongo Santamaria. Through extensive tutorials with ancient-to-the-future pioneer Mary Lou Williams, a lengthy apprenticeship with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and postgraduate work with George Coleman and Tito Puente, Ruiz learned how to imprint his personality on a surfeit of styles that encompass the jazz timeline; he’s equally comfortable laying down idiomatic two-handed stride and the blues at its most primal, morphing the piano into a drum on a nasty montuno, carving wicked elongated Bud Powell bebop lines with bell-like clarity, and soaring to the outer partials of abstraction.

Ruiz internalized from his mentors the old-school credo that technique is nothing more or less than a means to communicate and entertain; as he puts it, “Making people feel good, putting on a great show and still playing valid, beautiful music is what it’s all about.” On Enchantment — a seamless set comprising 12 cannily sequenced songs, each referencing some aspect of his professional experience — he does precisely that.

The connecting thread, Ruiz notes, is how the compositions “lend themselves to the ear; even though some might be complex or angular, basically, you can hum all the melodies on the record.” His bottom line: “Play the melodies clearly and make them pretty so people can recognize them and hear the song. The improvisation is the other part of it. But those beautiful melodies are what I wanted to emphasize.”

The pianist’s fierce two-chorus improvisation on “Seven Steps To Heaven,” the set-opener, gets the juices flowing, not least because of the mighty groove set by bass veteran Lisle Atkinson and young Venezuelan trapset whiz Marlon Simon. Then Ruiz plunges into the title track, recorded by long-time colleague Dave Valentin a few years back. The pretty refrain blends Brazilian and Caribbean elements; Ruiz improvises elegant bop-inflected lines with a Barry Harris connotation atop a smooth carpet of rhythm-timbre set forth by Simon and Panamanian percussionist Renato Thoms on cowbell. Note Ruiz’ keen comping over Atkinson’s brief solo before he launches into his final theme-and-variations, climaxing with an immaculately executed parallel octaves sequence.

The versatile tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman comes on board for “I’ll Call You Later,” a swinging blues with a bebop melody. After a horn-like Atkinson solo in the upper register, Freeman uncorks an intense solo with a resonant sound that channels the spirits of Chicago ancestors Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons and Clifford Jordan; lest you forget his modernist affinities, he concludes his declamation with a series of crescendoing arpeggios. Not to be outdone, Ruiz follows with another logical, crisply executed bop statement that contains not one excess note.

Ruiz first played with Freeman as a sideman on the 1977 album, Beyond the Rain [Contemporary], while the tenorist was a member of the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine; in the mid-’80s, they worked in the initial iteration of The Leaders, with Don Cherry, Arthur Blythe, Cecil McBee and Don Moye. “Chico’s playing transcends the ordinary,” Ruiz says. “As a listener, he captivates me, takes me to a spiritual level. It’s always forward motion with him. He’s always searching and looking.”

Freeman sticks around for “Sweet Cherry Pie,” an irresistible line with a cha-cha/boogaloo groove that trombonist Juan Pablo Torres recorded in the mid-’90s. It’s the kind of feel Ruiz danced to — and played — on countless occasions in his teens.

The ’60s were a golden age for Latin music, and Ruiz recalls them fondly. “It was great,” he says. “I got a chance to see Barry Rogers, Jose Rodriguez and Lewis Kahn, and Johnny Rodriguez and Ray Barretto. The St. George Hotel in Brooklyn would have 14 bands going all night. You’d take the IRT to Clark Street, go up in the hotel, buy a ticket, and all of a sudden you’ve got TNT, the Lebron Brothers, the Meditation, Eddie Palmieri, Pete “El Conde” Rodriguez, and Johnny Pacheco; there was constant dancing and grooving and partying. I’d get back on the subway early in the morning.

“Everything was mixed up. I listened to WABC radio in my youth, which involved the Four Seasons, the Beatles, Little Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys. I’d go to the Cheetah and hear the R&B bands, and I listened to hard rock from Jimi Hendrix, Canned Heat, Led Zeppelin, and Traffic. I listened to Classical Music. I listened to everything.

“When I was about 14 I’d hear Ed Williams’ radio program, ‘Maiden Voyage,’ on WLIB, and later on I listened to Ed Beach on WRVR. I heard John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. But when I heard the Bebop, I was captivated how it sounded and how it swung. I could really feel it. I’d go to Slugs and listen to Lee Morgan; I heard Elvin, Woody Shaw, McCoy Tyner and many other people live.

“I listened to a lot of great saxophone players when I did my early jazz studies, and through them — John Coltrane and Charlie Parker and Rahsaan — I was introduced to the great pianists. Hearing Al Haig, Tommy Flanagan, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Cedar Walton, Walter Davis, Jr., Walter Bishop, Rahn Burton, and Bill Evans, I could relate to how the piano works with the horns; they showed me conceptually what and what not to do. When I started working, I had some working knowledge of how to accompany, and for the last thirty years I’ve been an accompanist in addition to having my own gigs as a leader.”

Ruiz goes on to discuss his piano influences: “Oscar Peterson’s trio records with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen had an impact on me like a horn — I could really focus on the piano. I heard Eddie Palmieri a lot at dances, but Herbie Hancock made the strongest impression for his beautiful harmonies and ideas. Then I heard McCoy on the record African Village, with that technique and soloing and fire. That told me there was someone else besides Herbie. I listened to Harold Mabern live, and studied a bit with him. Also Barry Harris, Chris Anderson and Roland Hanna. Cedar Walton, who I also studied with, was a good friend, and so was Hugh Lawson. I liked Bill Evans, especially for the way he comped behind bass players. He directed the music but at the same time left it wide-open, constantly setting up a carpet where you could blend, and that really impressed me.”

“I was around Mary Lou Williams from when I was 18 until she passed. She showed me a lot about what not to do. When I did something wrong, she’d say, ‘No, that’s not right, that’s corny, that’s not happening. Do it like this. Move over. Let me show you how it’s done.’ Then I’d watch her play, and saw the true feeling of a true original. She was effortless, but the things that came out were marvelous. The whole thing was about feeling.”

Keep these recollections in mind when listening to the four Ruiz solos that comprise the next section of Enchantment. The first pair are rare piano readings of “Gemini” and “Black Narcissus,” by saxophone giants Jimmy Heath and Joe Henderson, respectively.

“I’ve worked on and off with Jimmy Heath through the years, and I’ve always looked up to him,” Ruiz says. “He’s very knowledgeable; I could always go to him with questions and he’d straighten me out. I like the melody and the feeling of ‘Gemini.’ It also happens to be my sign. I’m playing it pretty much straight-up the way Jimmy wrote it.

“Though it’s in my resume that I worked with Joe Henderson, I only worked with him once, years and years ago, around 1970, as a sub. I went to his house in Brooklyn to rehearse for the gig. This tune was part of his repertoire then, and he played it for me on the piano. I learned exactly how too play it directly from the composer, so I know I got it right.”

Ruiz shows how thoroughly he’s assimilated the language of Thelonious Monk on a quintet version of “Shades of Thelonious,” an ingenious reharmonization of “You’ve Changed” that he recorded in trio format in 1991 [Doin’ It Right (RCA-Novus)]. “The melody gives my interpretation of Monk’s flavor,” says Ruiz, who grew up a 15-minute walk from Monk’s San Juan Hill apartment. “The flatted fifths and other devices identify with Monk and Ellington. They could make sense out of those intervals, creating beauty from them.

The second pair of solos are an elegant, blues-drenched reading of Billy Strayhorn’s “My Little Brown Book” (“it’s played by some of the more knowledgeable musicians, people who are into the finer points of Ellingtonia”) and “Silhouette,” an impressionistic on-the-spot improvisation with a Gershwinesque flavor.

Bassist Lisle Atkinson plays the melody on the first part of “Goodbye” with a plush arco sound before Ruiz enters on the bridge.

Ruiz cites Frank Sinatra’s iconic reading of the Gordon Jenkins torch song on Only The Lonely as his inspiration. “Guys tend to play tunes in their own style, with embellishments,” Ruiz notes. “Whenever I need to get the lyrics right, I’ll go to a Frank Sinatra album, because of his great articulation. He did it right! Here I put the bass up front to give it another kind of interpretation. In a well-integrated trio the bass can play the melody; if the melody allows, even the drums can do it. The drums have only four or five tuned pitches, but they get other sounds. I’ve always been conscious of leaving space for the drums to be part of the tonality. That comes from my background in Latin music, and also from playing extensively with people like Billy Higgins, Ed Blackwell, Roy Brooks, and other great drummers. When the drummer is conscious of the melody and chord changes, and uses the drums as another melodic instrument, then you can elicit beautiful overtones, which enhances the whole performance.”

That’s what drummers Simon and Thoms do on “Home Cookin,” a funky boogaloo that Ruiz recorded in 1987 [Somethin’ Grand (Novus)] and played during a cameo in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. And he ends with Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “The Business Ain’t Nothin’ But The Blues” (from Kirk’s flute album I Talk With The Spirits), showcasing a Chico Freeman solo that drips with soulful Chicago feeling, embodying Ruiz’ assertion that “the idea of the blues is to play something that sounds good to take the blues away — a taste of real life.”

“All the music I enjoyed was part of the Rahsaan experience,” Ruiz says. “He played the music of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. Real down-home blues, as they’re called. The great composers of Classical music. Music from all over the world — Africa, the Orient, the Middle East. We had to play all these musical flavors every night. I had to research. Rahsaan would come to my apartment, we’d go to the record store, and he’d buy 15-20 records; each time he’d give me one or two, pointing out songs to listen to. Then I’d play those songs on the gig. I learned boogie-woogie and stride piano in the manner required to get it to swing in its own style — do it for real, make it sound right. That comes from within. If you love something and have the talent, then you get to it.”

Ruiz concludes: “I didn’t want to make this album complicated. I wanted it to be straightforward and honest. The listener can make their own decision.”

This listener’s verdict is A-plus.

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Hilton Ruiz (WKCR, 10-19-00):

TP: Was Dizzy Gillespie’s music very significant for you as a youngster in formulating your conception and sound?

RUIZ: Most definitely. I really heard Charlie Parker first, and Miles Davis. The tune I remember is “Back Home Blues.” I had a chance to be around Dizzy a little bit. He was a really funny, beautiful person. Magnanimous. He’s one of those certain artists who reaches the highest level of entertainment 24 hours a day. Make you laugh; taking care of business. I had the honor and opportunity to be on a video and CD called Rhythm Stick. We played together a couple of times, with Jon Faddis and Dizzy and me on the piano, just the three of us. For the few times I got a chance to be around him, I’m really happy to say that I knew the man, because people like this only come once in a lifetime. But thankfully, we have the music to listen to and to study.

TP: About how old were you, what year was it, when you started getting out there in the public world and playing? Mid-’60s, in your teens?

RUIZ: Yeah. I played with Ismael Rivera, a great Puerto Rican sonero, and I played with Ralph Robles for a while in a band called Ray Jay and the East Siders.

TP: What part of New York did you grow up in?

RUIZ: I grew up on 50th Street and 8th Avenue, right by the old Madison Square Garden. But I spent a lot of time on the Lower East Side and a lot of time uptown in Harlem. All over the place. I’ve been all over the city. I know this city very well.

TP: What were your first music lessons? Was it a family thing? How did it begin for you?

RUIZ: It was a family thing. My family really loved music, and they listened to records. My uncle took me to Professor Santiago Mesorana, who was also from Puerto Rico when I was 5 years old. He started me off on the solfeo, which is also called solfeggio, a method of sight-singing. Then after a couple of months went by, he let me get to the keyboard, and I studied folkloric Puerto Rican music. That lasted maybe about two years. After that, I went to Carnegie Hall, and I studied with George Armstrong, a very great pianist. That’s where I played my first recital, at Little Carnegie.

TP: Was that dealing with Puerto Rican folkloric music or Western Classical?

RUIZ: No, that was Franz Liszt and Mozart.

TP: So you weren’t just playing Puerto Rican folkloric music as a kid.

RUIZ: Well, I started with that. Then we did the Bach Inventions and the Handel and the Czerny and the Bartok.

TP: So you had a facility, obviously.

RUIZ: Well, at that time I had a facility, but it hadn’t come out yet. Because I had to learn the setup of the instrument and how to get over the keys. That was tedious. It was a very tedious time in my growing-up, because it was very difficult. You had to have in this place, play this soft, play this long, play this short, put the pedal down here, and then if you didn’t do it right, start again. The next week you’d start again. So you had to trudge through it just to get the next level. So I didn’t know anything about harmony or anything like that. I was just like reading and interpreting the Classical music. I did that for about four or five years.

TP: How old were you when the notion of improvising, when jazz started entering your picture?

RUIZ: When I was about 13-14 years old, I used to listen to a radio program, Ed Williams, “Maiden Voyage” [WLIB], and later on I listened to Ed Beach. I heard John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders, Rahsaan Roland Kirk…

TP: Who you later played with.

RUIZ: Yeah. Almost five years with Rahsaan. It was super-beautiful. One thing led to another, and here I am.

TP: Who were the jazz pianists who attracted you and who you tried to emulate? Was it that sort of process for you?

RUIZ: Yeah, it was. The first, strongest impression was Herbie Hancock. Of course, I had been dancing and going to see Eddie Palmieri a lot. I had been going to see Lee Morgan live quite a bit, and Woody Shaw and Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner, and of course, Rahsaan. So I got records like The Inflated Tear, and listened to Rahn Burton, who was an influence. But Herbie Hancock made a real deep impression on me because of the beauty of the ideas that were coming out. It seemed to be really just beautiful harmonies. Then I heard McCoy Tyner, and I said, “Wow!” I had never heard anything like that. I said, “there’s somebody else besides Herbie Hancock.” I heard McCoy Tyner on a record called African Village, and I heard that technique and that soloing and that fire. I was listening to Harold Mabern live, and I got a chance to study a little bit with Harold. Barry Harris. Chris Anderson. Roland Hanna. And my good friends were Cedar Walton, who I also studied with, and Hugh Lawson… I was with a lot of guys.

I heard Bill Evans and I liked that a lot, but the point where I heard Bill Evans was really with his trio. As I went back and started doing research, I heard some early things on Riverside with Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers, and it was like Bill Evans, the bebop pianist. I met him at the Vanguard, and he was a very-very nice cat. But what I liked about Bill Evans was the way that he could comp behind bass players. He was very sensitive to the more fragile elements of the music. He would lay out a constant carpet where you could just blend and do your thing without really being directed in any way. He would be directing, but at the same time he would leave it wide-open, and that really impressed me.

I was around Mary Lou Williams for quite a number of years, from when I was 18 years old until she passed, and she showed me a lot of things about what not to do. When you were doing it wrong, she’d just say, “No, that’s not good, that’s not right, that’s corny, that’s not happening. Do it like this. Move over. Let me show you how it’s done. Then I watched her play, and got a chance to see the real-real true feeling of a true original. She was effortless, but the things that were coming out were marvelous. The whole thing was about feeling. That was a great opportunity. I’ve had a lot of great people around me. The list goes on and on.

TP: I’d think for a curious, talented musician growing up in New York at that time, the opportunities for learning would have been endless.

RUIZ: Well, it wasn’t easy. I had a lot of fun while I was doing it, and I still do have a lot of fun — because I think that’s the whole idea, to have fun and let other people enjoy what you’re enjoying. But there were a lot of humbling moments, times when you had to get up there and didn’t know a song or maybe you weren’t ready to do a certain thing, and you were out there in front of everybody. I was lucky because I was given the encouragement to go out there and keep playing. If I was playing something that wasn’t cool, they would tell me to stroll, just cool out for a minute and listen, come in when it was appropriate. But it was always an atmosphere of encouragement. So I was very fortunate in that sense.

This band I have at Sweet Basil, we’re kickin’ it real hard in there. People are coming in, the place has been packed already a couple of nights. They’re dancing in the chairs and stuff and eating and drinking, and everybody’s smiling and having a good time.

[MUSIC: HR, “Shades of Thelonious,” “Round Midnight”]

TP: You mentioned a lot of pianists among your influence, but you didn’t mention Monk, who was close to Mary Lou Williams for many years.

RUIZ: Well, I never had the pleasure of meeting Thelonious Monk, but I did see him at a concert for one of George Wein’s festivals. He had been off for a little while, and he had come back on the scene, and I made I sure I got a chance to hear him — and it was fantastic. So the impression he made on me is in these songs, especially “Shades of Thelonious”… I tried to capture the feeling of how I feel about the flavors that Monk uses when he composes and when he plays. It’s a distinct flavor, and it doesn’t really make sense to try to analyze it too much, because it’s the sound that he produces… It’s so slick and yet it’s so correct at the same time. It’s a pleasure to play the compositions. That’s probably why I didn’t mention him. I can’t mention everybody at the same time, because there’s so many people. You have people like Carlos McKinney and Johnny O’Neal and Benny Green and Brad Mehldau. There are so many guys who have made an impression on me pianistically. Monty Alexander. Horace Parlan. But primarily it’s been Eddie Palmieri, Charlie Palmieri. Chick Corea, who is a genius. And anybody who can play. Anybody who can really play and make me want to go home and try it out. Because what I do is I hear something, and I go home and try it out and see if I can put it int my little tool chest, so when I go out to do my job, I can have more variations of different things I can do to try to get the job done..

TP: A contemporary of Monk’s was Tito Puente, who passed earlier this year and whom we heard playing mallets on “Round Midnight.” Hilton said at a certain point during his solo, “you’re never going to hear that again; not that way!

RUIZ: Because that’s the real way to play the vibes. Tito was a vibist in the sense that he played the vibes and got the full sound out of the instrument, not the approach that I would approach the vibes as a piano player. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, with guys playing like the piano on the vibes. But to get your own sound, a recognizable, beautiful sound, and to make it sound like bubbles… That calls for percussion, people who have studied the instrument and know to move around and get that particular sound.

Tito was so great as a person, so great as a musician. One of the greatest things about Tito Puente was that with all the things he had done — he had been there with Monk, he had been there with Charlie Parker, he had been there with John Coltrane, he had seen all of that live playing, back-to-back sets, all the guys respected him — he always was trying to keep everything real and keep the real flavor of what we call jazz music, and without losing the roots of his native Puerto Rico, and from New York and Spanish Harlem. The volumes and volumes and volumes of tunes, great dancing tunes, great arrangements, great vocalists, and that he would come out and get a band like these guys here, the Tito Puente Latin Jazz All-Stars. James Moody was in there for a while, Paquito d’Rivera, Mario Rivera, Dave Valentin, Charlie Sepulveda, Giovanni Hidalgo. He surrounded himself with only the very best musicians, and he knew what he wanted to do at all times. He was always prepared. He always had a bag of music with him. He was ready for any situation. But he allowed us to grow and flourish in our own way. He made a way for all of us to carry on, because all he wanted was for us to respect the music and keep playing the music. Anybody who ever saw him, or you just put on one of those records, and you can feel the flavor of the thing. It’s kicking. It’s hard. It’s coming hard. It’s really great. It’s a magnificent thing he’s left us.

Tito Puente and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, I must say, are the two individuals who really made me kind of look and say, “Entertainment, show business…”

TP: Is not incompatible with the art of music.

RUIZ: Right. Making people feel really good, and putting on a great show and still playing some valid, beautiful music — that’s what it’s all about.

TP: In the ’60s, you were playing with Ismail Rivera, in Latin Soul bands… There was a huge Latin movement in New York in the ’50s and ’60s, Latin bands playing all over. A lot of musicians paid their rent on gigs and dances with Latin bands.

RUIZ: Sure. It was great. I got a chance to see Barry Rogers and Jose Rodriguez and Lewis Kahn and Johnny Rodriguez and Ray Barretto. The St. George Hotel would have 14 bands going all night.

TP: The one in Brooklyn? Just take the 2, go up in the hotel…

RUIZ: You got it. You go in there, you can buy a ticket, and all of a sudden you’ve got the TNT, you got the Lebron(?) Brothers, you got the Meditations, you got Eddie Palmieri, you got Pete Aconda, Johnny Pacheco, there’s like constant dancing and constant grooving, constant partying. We’d all get back on the subway early in the morning, and go to school or whatever.

TP: Or not.

RUIZ: Well, I did. I went to school. I didn’t want to get up a lot or mornings. But I made it there. I didn’t even want to be there a lot of times.

TP: Where did you go to high school?

RUIZ: I went to Power Memorial. [Kareem was a senior when he got there] It’s not there any more. That was a tough school.

TP: So you to go Power Memorial, and you’re playing music the whole time and keeping up an academic course-load. It sounds like you grew up pretty young.

RUIZ: Well, academically… I’ve been around the world ten times. I’ve been almost everywhere by now, traveling constantly. I can thank the Creator for that. So I’ve been able to see things that in my education I saw in books, and actually touch things and be standing in the places of true history of this planet. So that’s basically my education, because when I got out of high school…

TP: You went right to work, didn’t you.

RUIZ: Yeah, I just went right to work. I started working with Clark Terry. That’s the first time I went on the road, was with the Clark Terry Quartet, with Major Holley on bass… No, it was Louis Smith that first time on bass, then Major Holley came in, and then Victor Sproles. Then with the big band, the quartet, the quintet and everything. Then in ’72, Jackie McLean took me to France, to a festival at Chateau Vallon, and that was really out of sight. Then Rahsaan took me out for a few times. I went out with George Coleman and with Tito. It’s been a great thing. I recommend everybody to really travel at least a little bit. Take a cruise, take a plane somewhere. Really get the flavor of other… But for people who haven’t extensively traveled that much, it’s really worth it to get out. Because you hear the music, you taste the food, you meet the people, you smell the air, you see the cars and vehicles, you see the architecture. You never know what you might run upon.

TP: As a kid and through your life, did jazz and Latin music seem like part of a big continuum to you? How was it alike? How was it different?

RUIZ: It was all mixed up. Because I listened to WABC radio in my early youth. That involved Four Seasons and the Beatles and Little Stevie Wonder, Beach Boys, like everything. That was the music that I listened too. I would listen to things like “A Summer Place,” which I still think is one of the most beautiful things that’s ever been written. Then I used to go to the Cheetah and I used to listen to the bands there — the first Cheetah, which was basically Rhythm-and-Blues, Rock-and-Roll. I listened to some Hard Rock from Jimi Hendrix, Canned Heat, Led Zeppelin, Traffic — a lot of that music. Classical Music. I listened to everything.

But when I started listening to Bebop music, ,I was captivated by the sound of it, and the way it made me feel. Because I’m coming from a Latin-Puerto Rican-New York, all the way in there background. When I heard the Bebop, I said, “Wow, this stuff really is swinging.” I could really feel it. Like I said before, I used to go to Slugs and listen to Lee Morgan. I heard a lot of the guys live, and a lot of the ladies, too.

The most important thing you can do is to go out and listen to everything. Listen to everything! And especially for young children… I as a parent make sure that my daughter has listened to everything. She likes rap music, she likes all kinds of stuff. But she heard the music. I allowed her to make that choice, and I exposed her to that. I didn’t try to hold her back from anything like that. I think that a lot of kids would like Bebop music and they would like a lot of the things that we enjoy as adults. But because it’s not given to them in the volume of other music that’s out there, constantly being pumped out, pumped out, the peer pressure and everything like that… I’m not saying that the Rap is not happening, because those guys really know what they’re doing, and they are masters of that style. But there’s a whole lot of other things that can incorporated into that, and a lot of times kids don’t really get a chance to hear bebop music and the jazz music. But that’s so very important that this music be exposed to everyone, so that everyone can make their own choice and their own decisions, say “I like this and I don’t like that.” I like Flamenco or I like Opera, I like Bebop and I like creative music. But if it feels good, I can’t knock it.

[MUSIC: HR-G. Coleman, “Strange”; HR-David Sanchez, “Sonny’s Mood”]

TP: I’ll repeat your comment about George Coleman, “he spells all the big words,” referring to his ability to make art out of polysyllabic harmonic language.

RUIZ: He cleaned that solo out. He got in all the corners of it. George Coleman, pound for pound… There are a lot of great saxophonists out there, but in terms of consistency, I don’t think I’ve ever played anyone who was more consistent than George Coleman. In that style. Because you have Jimmy Heath, who’s very consistent, James Moody, a lot of guys. But George has a certain polish, a certain flair that you can almost taste the music. I was listening to that solo, and I could almost see Amsterdam, the time we spent in Amsterdam, and in Paris and in London, and just the visual things of all our travels. We had so much fun. Billy Higgins was the drummer, and Herbie Lewis and Ray Drummond on two different tours. On one tour we did nine weeks in Europe, and we had fun all the way down the line. We never knew what we were going to play. Playing everything through all the keys, at different tempos. Billy Higgins is right there, knows just what to do and his volume was just perfect for a piano player, because he’s so intense but he keeps the dynamic level… I’m glad to see that George is doing good and he’s in good health. I’m looking in the future for people like that to get much more recognition for their artistic endeavors.

TP: Have you played much or at all with Craig Handy and Ryan Kisor before?

RUIZ: Well, I’ve never played with Ryan before. The first time was at rehearsal on opening night. But he came in and read the music and everything. He’s a very cool cat. We’re getting to know each other and he’s taking care of business. I’m very happy to have him there. I’ve never had the chance or enough work… I’ve been working almost constantly, thank God. I’ve been able to put my daughter through college and buy a home. But the bands are always different. I try to keep as many people together as I can. But since I can’t keep everybody on salary, it’s hard to maintain that one unit. The longest-lasting edition was probably the Andy Gonzalez-Steve Berrios-Giovanni Hidalgo rhythm section. We made a lot of records together. But these guys are great. Craig Handy is a great saxophonist, a great person. They come to play and they come to make the people feel good, and we don’t really have any attitude problems. Everyone gets a chance to write, everyone gets a chance to be featured. We’re out there making people feel good! That’s what we’re happy to do.

Renato is from Panama so he has that Latin flavor. He’s a very strong conguero. Then Marlon Simon. Every night I get up there, it’s good for me, because I’m used to playing at that level anyway. I’m used to pushing through the envelope into the next envelope, so to speak. I’ve never allowed anything to stop me — as long as, God willing, I can stay healthy — to just keep going for trying to make it better, and try to listen and be supportive, but just keep going for that music and try to make it better. It gets strenuous. At the level we play, it’s a very physical gig. We play ballads and we play a lot of pretty things. But I know people come out and they want to hear fire, and they want to hear something really to make them rock and feel really good. I have to look at the room, I have to see what kind of audience they are. If it seems like it’s a Count Basie type of audience, we have to play something for them. If you see an Ellingtonian… How can you tell if an audience is Ellingtonian or Basieites?

TP: You have an intuition after 35 years playing for people.

RUIZ: They’ve just got a look about them!

TP: What’s the difference between a Basieite audience and an Ellingtonian audience?

RUIZ: I would say that the Ellingtonian audience would be a sophisticated audience of people who really are digging the full classical picture, with the swing, with everything, with the spirituals… To me, that’s like the big picture. And then the Basie group of people are people who probably are into that and know about that, but it’s just straight swing, how hard can they swing you, how hard can they make you move, how good can you feel listening to an orchestra. I’ve heard the Basie band live. It’s just too much. Basie was more into constantly creating that swing for people to dance and to enjoy. Duke was doing that, but also recording different kinds… I haven’t heard as much music as you have. Probably very few people have heard as much music as you have. But we’re speaking hypothetical…

TP: Your sets are fluid from night to night. You might play anything on any given night, is what you’re saying.

RUIZ: Well, I have to look at the room. I have to see the age level. I might play the Flintstones.

TP: And you have to have a band that can handle that, and with these guys you do.

RUIZ: They have to handle all those kinds of things. Because the music that we call jazz is a whole lot of things. But basically, it’s to give somebody a good feeling that you know you’re contributing positive vibrations to your fellow neighbors. It’s an honest thing, where they really like it, or they may not like you, or maybe they’ll like you later… They don’t have to like you. But you’re making them feel good. So therefore, you’re accomplishing something, and you really can say that you’re doing something on this planet; you’re making people feel good.

TP: You were talking about your guiding imperative always being to push the envelope, push through into the next level, and that’s been a palpable part of what you do. You played in the ’70s and ’80s with Arthur Blythe, and Sam Rivers was part of your ensembles in the ’80s…

RUIZ: Marion Brown. I did a tour with Marion. Did a record in Paris called Back To Paris. Marion played “Body and Soul,” played all over “Body and Soul,” and he wrote some originals there. I made two albums with Marion Brown. I played a little bit with Archie Shepp. So many great musicians.

[HR-Sam, “Bluz”; HR (solo), “Soul Eyes”]

[-30-]

*_*_*_*_

Hilton Ruiz for Enchantment (7-30-01):
TP: Talk about selecting the arc of the CD, selecting the repertoire.

RUIZ: I just want it to be record that people can enjoy, and I want it to be accessible to listeners from all different walks of life. Not necessarily a specialized group of jazz listeners… If people want to use the record for just fun listening, that’s what I’m going for. The selections all have very pretty melodies. All I’m trying to do is get to the listeners so they can feel good and have it be accessible to a full range of musicians, from classical on.

TP: That said, you deal with a lot of different styles and approaches. I don’t think it’s so easy to pare down and make material that is as involved as some of these pieces sound as simple as it does.

RUIZ: Well, I think it’s the compositions themselves. They lend themselves to the ear. They’re pretty compositions, even though some of them might be a little complex or angular. But basically, you can hum all the melodies on the record. I didn’t want to make it complicated. I wanted to make it straightforward and honest as to what it is. I guess as the person listens to it, then they make their own decision.

TP: “Seven Steps To Heaven” must go back to Miles Davis. Your association?

RUIZ: I heard it when I was a teenager. The melody just stuck in my mind immediately. It’s very catchy. I tried to make the improvisation concise. I didn’t want to play a whole lot of choruses. I played two choruses and they took it out. It’s kind of an introduction to the album that gets you going and gets the juices flowing.

TP: How much do you pre-plan the arc of the arrangements? Do you carefully work out the whole structure beforehand? Is it more extemporaneous once you get in the studio? Talk about doing a record vis-a-vis a live performance.

RUIZ: It calls for more rehearsing and trying to put everything in a package that is concise and yet has the freedom to be expressive at the same time. Basically, when we get in the studio, I don’t have an idea of what kind of arrangement I want. But a lot of these songs, when they were written, were basically arranged at that time. So the only thing in terms of arranging would be the choice of instruments that you’re going to use in the performance, or to include an interlude here or a vamp there or a tag here. But going back to “Seven Steps To Heaven,” the arrangement is all laid out. It’s already there.

TP: There you play a Bud Powell, bebop style. You play in different styles in different tunes. Does that happen in the heat of the moment, or are you also thinking of your improvisational approach beforehand?

RUIZ: Not really. I practice every day and I try to work out different ways to enhance my improvisations. But it happens when it happens. That’s the nature of jazz. You really don’t know what’s going to happen in your solo. There are patterns and things that a lot of us use to the point across. But you really don’t know exactly what’s going to happen until you make that tape, then that’s what have to live with, or decide whether you want to try another one. But since it’s a group with quartet and a lot of percussion, it’s not overly arranged. I like to let the percussion be part of the harmonic structure because the drums have their own harmony, which adds overtones to the rest of the diatonic harmony that the keyboard and the regular 12-tone tuned instruments. So there’s a certain degree of space that has to be left there, so that the drums and conga and bongos will have an audible space in this particular quartet. Now, if I’m doing a big band arrangement, it’s a whole different story. That calls for putting the right horns in the right place and things like that. But basically we just have the one horn as a guest, who was Chico Freeman. I had the music written for him and he rehearsed it. Some of it he saw on the spot.

I like to leave a spontaneous element in recording. If you go in there and record something you’ve practiced a million times, and you know exactly how it’s going to go, that’s fine. But to me, that comes down under the heading of maybe… I wouldn’t put it in the category of being a jazz performance, because one of the main elements of jazz is the improvisation.

Basically, to break it all down, if you can play the melodies clearly and make them pretty so people can understand the melody and hear the song, then the improvisation is the other part of it. But the song is also very important that a person can recognize the melody of the song. And those beautiful melodies are what I wanted to emphasize.

TP: Is “Enchantment” your composition?

RUIZ: It’s an original, about five years old. It was recorded on an album called Primitive Passions by Dave Valentin, and it was featured on that album. I’ve never recorded it on any of my albums. It’s a very pretty song. That’s why we chose it to be the title. It’s kind of a Latin-Bossa Nova type thing, a cross between Brazilian and Caribbean flavors. It has the flavor of East Coast Latin Jazz and it also… This one wasn’t necessarily like a Cha-Cha or a Mambo, which is pretty strictly Caribbean. It has no parameters. It has an element of Brazilian music, of South America and Caribbean music.

“I’ll Call You Later” is a straight-up blues. It’s pretty straightforward. We play the melody, which is a bebop-flavored melody. Chico takes a great solo. It’s one of those tracks you listen to for enjoyment, just bounce. Chico got a very good sound here.

TP: All the tunes were just right for him. You’re on records of his going back to the ’70s?

RUIZ: I was on one of his first albums, called Beyond the Rain. Chico used to come listen to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The last couple of years I was playing with Rahsaan, Chico got the gig with Elvin Jones, who had one of the groups I’d go listen to a lot since I was teenager. I always enjoyed listening to the Elvin Jones groups. Chico was in this particular group with Pat LaBarbera, and he had a certain spiritual quality about his playing that transcended the ordinary… As a listener, I was captivated, and he took me to a listening level that was spiritual. That’s how I felt. In a positive sense.

There was a band called the Leaders around ’84, in which I was the original pianist. Don Cherry was the original trumpeter on the first tour.

TP: You’ve played in so many situations. It’s hard to think of a musical environment you haven’t covered — from New York piano function things, which go from Latin Jazz, Boogaloo, Bebop, Blues, Avant-Garde. And you touch on everything in this record. It all seems very comfortable to you. Anything to say about the panorama of styles and approaches that you seem able to access very naturally.

RUIZ: I listened to a lot of records. I love the music very much, and the music was a really big part of my life in terms of enjoyment, and listening and buying records. I really got a good groove just putting on records and listening to different artists — Mongo Santamaria, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins. They played so good that to me it was an enjoyable thing. It was like a daily thing. I’d get up in the morning and I’d want to go buy a new record or try something out, play the piano along with the records. Then I started getting gigs with great musicians; a lot of them were on the records I had at home. All of a sudden, I found myself in the bands of these people who I used to listen to on record. Since I had the love for it, and I did a lot of research, I learned how to play the right voicings and how to be an accompanist. I was so proud and so happy to be there… It wasn’t about money or anything like that. It was about just being able to be up there and play that music, and to get the recognition that I was at a level where I was able to play with these great musicians. So day by day, the days added up and months and years; thirty years later I look back, and I’m on over a hundred albums. [May 29, 1952]

TP: You started gigging in ’70 or so? Or before that, in high school?

RUIZ: I started gigging in the late ’60s. The first gigs were with Joe Newman from the Basie band, Frank Foster, Clark Terry. The first time I went on the road was with Clark Terry. I was 18 years old. Then Jackie McLean was my first European tour. I was 20 then. Then I went with Rahsaan Roland Kirk for almost five years.

TP: Rahsaan had a huge impact on the way you think about music.

RUIZ: Definitely. Because all the different things that I enjoyed were part of his program, part of the show, part of the experience. He played music of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. Real down-home blues, as they’re called. He was into the Classical music. He was into the Great composers. Music from all over the world — from the Orient, from Africa, from the Middle East. Every night we had to play all these different types of musical flavors. So I had to do more research. I used to go to the record store. He used to come to my apartment in New York, and we would go to the record store, and he would buy 15-20 records, and he would buy me one or two records every time. He’d say, “Hey, you need this one, and take this one, and listen to this song and listen to this song.” Next thing you know, I would either be playing those songs on the gig or I was able to play in the style that was required to get it to swing in its own style. In other words I had to learn how to play some boogie-woogie and stride piano and things like that.

TP: And make it breathe. Be idiomatic..

RUIZ: Yeah, and do it for real. Make it sound right. But that comes from within. If you love something a lot and you have the talent, then you get to it.

TP: “Sweet Cherry Pie” is a beautiful groove tune.

RUIZ: I wrote it about seven years ago. It became a hit on an album by the trombonist J.P. Torres. That tune kind of speaks for itself. You can dance to it, you can listen to it, you can drive your car to it, ride a bicycle, jog, whatever. It’s steady motion; it keeps moving and grooving.

TP: It seems like it would be hard for someone under 35 to write that. You don’t hear a lot of younger people dancing to it any more…

RUIZ: You should go to the Salsa clubs. You’ll find that beat danced to all the time. It’s basically a Cha-Cha.

TP: Are you still playing those clubs?

RUIZ: Yes, occasionally. I do a special here, a special there. I’m guest soloist with a band or a singer. Actually at this point, I’m getting much more to my own research again. I’m going back to sheet music and repertoire, and looking at music I’ve seen before for a second time to see if I’ve missed anything, just to take another reevaluation of what music is after playing it for thirty years. Now that I’ve gotten all this experience, reevaluating from how I looked at it when I didn’t know what a chord was, when I didn’t know what improvisation was, didn’t know what a vamp was, didn’t know what changes were. Music is so vast and so great that you need to always keep going forward but always research the past, too. You can find things that are very useful and devices that maybe aren’t used any more that are really hip! That’s the way I progress, by going back to the…

TP: How long have you been going back to it?

RUIZ: Well, I’ve studied the Schillinger System, I studied the George Russell system, and I’m classically trained. So I’ve always had that thing in terms of musical theory. But being trained as a classical pianist, I was basically taking pieces that took me three or four months to learn, and I learned them bar-by-bar, note-by-note, hands separated and put the hands together on the keyboard. That’s how I learned. But now that I’ve been into advanced harmony… I’ve always been doing it, but now I do it differently, because I have more vocabulary. I want to go back and take a look at things again, knowing… As an example: Given a piece of sheet music thirty years ago, I’d have looked at it and played it by the notes. But I wouldn’t necessarily know that there was a set of chord changes under it that could be used for improvisation. I didn’t know the possibilities that much. I would play the song and that was it. If I had an arrangement I had to play with a band, I would play what was called for on the arrangement, and that was it. Now I go back and take that same piece of music, and I can say, “Oh, look what he used here; he used a G7-flat IX, and look at this, and, oh, this is something we used…” So I can recognize things better now because of the experience and because of everything… You learn more about the terminology and the theoretical part. I’m involved in teaching. So when I do a clinic or a seminar or something like that, you have to find different ways to reach the student. The more you research things and the more you learn different ways to communicate, the better off you are.

“Gemini” is by Jimmy Heath. I played with him a couple of times. I went on a nice European tour with a band called New York All-Stars that Jimmy led, with Jimmy and Percy Heath, Jimmy Owens, Slide Hampton and Jimmy Cobb. We played at Nice, the Hague and Northsea Jazz Festival. And on and off throughout the years, I’ve played different gigs — club dates and things like that. I never was part of the Heath Brothers Band, because Stanley Cowell is the resident pianist there. Jimmy Heath is one of the guys I looked up to and who I could go to with questions and would straighten me out. Jimmy Heath is very knowledgeable, in addition to being a great player. I like the melody and the feeling. It also happens to be my sign. I guess if something appeals to me, I might play it differently. When you’re improvising and thinking about different things, that’s where the story comes out — how you’re feeling. He did the tune with the Cannonball Adderley Sextet and done big band arrangements of it. I’m playing it pretty much straight-up the way that he wrote it.

TP: “Black Narcissus” solo is an interesting choice.

RUIZ: Years and years ago, around 1970, I had a big with Joe Henderson. I only worked with Joe once, but it’s in a lot of places as part of my resume that I worked with him. Which I did, but it was just one gig. There was a period where I was a substitute pianist for a lot of great piano players like Stanley Cowell and Harold Mabern, so many great pianists who sometimes had two or three gigs at the same time and needed somebody to come in there. I was recommended to Joe Henderson, and I went to his house in Brooklyn to rehearse for the gig. We sat at the piano, and he played this tune for me and was showing me exactly how it goes and how it should be played. This was one of the tunes he was going to play on the gig; it was part of his repertoire at that time. He was playing it a lot at the time. I learned it directly from the composer, so I know I got it right. There are certain little parts that have to be played as he wrote them in order for it to be, if you will, authentic.

TP: You recorded “Shades of Thelonious” a few years ago on one of your RCA records.

RUIZ: Doin’ it Right, I think. I did a trio version. I just added the horn and basically played it straight up just like it was. That’s another one of those tunes that just goes straight down. But the melody itself gives my interpretation of a part of the Thelonious Monk flavor, using those flatted fifths and devices like that, that kind of identify with Monk and Ellington, guys who could use those intervals and yet make sense, make something very pretty out of it.

I heard Monk once at Avery Fisher Hall during the festival, when he played a piano solo. Hearing people like him or Miles Davis just once is like watching a great World Series game. If you were THERE, it’s something you can say to your kids!

TP: Growing up in New York, and particularly growing up where you did in Manhattan, put you in a position that not too many young musicians would have in being able to directly experience the music played by the greatest masters of the music. Or that music being in the air. Even Jazzmobile and things like that. You would have soaked up this sensibility. I don’t know too many people who project more of a New York attitude than you.

RUIZ: I grew up in Midtown Manhattan, right by the old Madison Square Garden. I was one block from Broadway, and the Musicians Union was two blocks down the street. I saw the guys going back and forth to the union, all the entertainers, and the vibe and the people and all this stuff that in general was going on right outside, looking out the window. There was always something going on.

I was lucky, because we grew up in the age of television. People say that television isn’t good for people, but it’s only the way you use it. For me, television was a great thing, because I got to see Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and people like this on TV. That was part of what influenced me, too. I was 7-8-9-10 years old, and I would see these great performers through the medium of television. Now that we have the Internet, it’s showing its value again; that cathode ray tube monitor is one of the greatest communication devices that can be used. If it’s used correctly, it’s marvelous, because you can see and hear.

TP: On the radio you asked me if I could guess the changes of “Shades of Thelonious,” and I couldn’t get it.

RUIZ: “Shades of Thelonious” is basically “You’ve Changed.” Not exactly, but you can play “You’ve Changed” to it, because the bridge goes to the same place that “You’ve Changed” goes to — to the fourth of the chord.

TP: I can say it references “You’ve Changed.”

RUIZ: It’s close enough that it won’t be arguable. Anybody who knows anything about “You’ve Changed” knows that if you play the melody of “You’ve Changed” on top of the chords as that tune is going by, you’ll pretty much have the melody. Although there are places where I use some alternate chords that might clash with the melody. But that happens all the time. That’s the nature of improvisation. You might put a slick chord in there, and it might not be directly associated with the melody note, but as you pass into the next chord it moves into the original tonality, so it’s okay.

TP: Then you do “My Little Brown Book” by Billy Strayhorn. Did you listen to a lot of Ellington when you were younger?

RUIZ: Yes. That’s one of the first things I heard. I heard “Diminuendo and Crescendo In Blue” with that long solo by Paul Gonsalves, then I heard Charlie, Parker, and that was it for saxophones. I said, “Wow, I really like that.”

TP: Did saxophones influence the way you think as a pianist?

RUIZ: Yes. Because I was listening to saxophone players when I did my early jazz studies. I was into saxophone players. I have a collection of great saxophone players, and through those saxophone players I was introduced to the great pianists. One of the first records I had that was just piano, that really had the impact on me like a horn was those Oscar Peterson Trio records with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. Then I could really focus on the piano. But through listening to John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, I got to hear Al Haig and Tommy Flanagan and McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Cedar Walton, Walter Davis, Jr., Walter Bishop, Bill Evans. These great pianists all appeared on these albums. That’s how I had a chance to relate to how the piano works with the horns. So when I started working, I had somewhat of a working knowledge of how to be an accompanist. I’ve always been able to be an accompanist for the last thirty years, in addition to having my own gigs as a leader. Because I’ve led bands for that long, too. but listening to these piano players really showed me conceptually what to do and what not to do. What not to do is just as important as what you do.

TP: That being said, you take “My Little Brown Book” as a solo.

RUIZ: In the sequencing we tried different combinations. We put all the tunes in different order and listened to it, and changed the order and listened to it again, and changed the order and listened to it again, and changed it again and listened again. The way I put it together is tonally logical. In other words, I put the two solo pieces together that kind of blended harmonically one into the other, so as you listen to the end of a track, you’re left with a certain feeling, then what comes next to it has to do with what you heard before.

TP: Each tune goes into the other goes into the other. It’s a smooth experience.

RUIZ: Exactly. So by putting two solo pieces together, and then another two… I didn’t want to put three or four together. Because there’s people who like the solos, but now they’re ready to hear some drums! I wanted everything to be just long enough that it would be satisfying, and then give you a little bit more satisfaction, and then go to the next take.

TP: Is “My Little Brown Book” a song that’s been part of your repertoire for a while?

RUIZ: Yes, I’ve played it for a while. I’ve played it with different bands. It’s played by some of the more knowledgeable musicians, people who are into the finer points of Ellingtonia. But it’s such a beautiful melody… I play tunes because I like them. I also play them because I’m required to on certain projects. Sometimes I’m exposed to tunes that I like more than others. So I tend to play the things that I enjoy the most, because that enjoyment comes out and is reflected into the audience. People can notice I’m enjoying it, and it seems to make them enjoy it more. I’ve always loved those beautiful melodies. I’ve listened to all kinds of advanced music and I’ve listened to today’s music. I watch the latest things that are coming out, and I watch what’s happening on the music channels. I keep abreast of everything. But a beautiful melody is everlasting.

TP: How about “Silhouette”?

RUIZ: “Silhouette” was done on the spot. That’s totally improvised. That’s something that came in my head and I composed it right there, on the spot, that take and that was it. It’s imagining a silhouette. You see children playing on a hill, jumping rope or whatever, and you see the sun behind it, and you get the beautiful silhouette of what’s going on against that orange sky.

TP: It’s an impressionistic improvisation. “Goodbye” you made a feature for Lisle Atkinson’s arco work.

RUIZ: Lisle is such a great virtuoso, I wanted to have a tune that would feature his artistry. So I listened to the tune and thought about letting the bass play the melody in the first part, and then I’d come in on the bridge. I listened to a version by Frank Sinatra on an album called Only The Lonely. I don’t remember the first time I heard the tune, but one of the times I was playing at a place called Defemio’s, and my friend Hugh Lawson came. It was after the gig, and the musicians were just hanging out, sitting up in the club, and Hugh went up to the piano and started playing the song. I fell in love with it right away. Then I heard it done by other artists. But the Frank Sinatra version was important because I was able to listen to the lyric. Guys tend to play tunes in their own style that they embellish and so on. Whenever I do something where I need to get the lyrics right, I’ll go to a Frank Sinatra album, because he had a great articulation with lyrics. He did it right! He’s so enjoyable to listen to, plus I love Frank Sinatra’s voice. Then I put the bass up front to give it another kind of interpretation.

A lot of times when you hear the trio, you’re hearing the piano primarily, but in a well-integrated trio the bass can play the melody sometimes, and even the drums can play the melodies if they lend themselves to the drums. The drums have only four or five tuned pitches, but they can get other kinds of. sounds. I’ve always been conscious of the drums and leaving space for the drums to be part of the tonality.

TP: Does that come from your background in Latin music?

RUIZ: Well, yeah. But also by playing a lot with people like Billy Higgins, and also Ed Blackwell, Roy Brooks, and all these great drummers. When they’re conscious of the tonalities, it can make it sound that much better. When you have a drummer who is conscious of the melody and conscious of chord changes, and plays accordingly, and uses the drums as another melodic instrument, as well as percussion, just like I use the piano as a melodic instrument with percussion, then you can get these beautiful overtones to happen. It can really enhance the whole performance with the right drummer who’s playing the right stuff.

TP: On this date with Marlon Simon on traps, how much leeway did you give him? Did you sketch out the tempos and beats you wanted him to play?

RUIZ: Yes. Any hits that had to be made or any figures that had to be played by everybody together, breaks and so on, I would write out for him. Otherwise, play time. Play your stuff. Play what you play. If we all have to come in somewhere, then I would write it out and make it easier for him. Because you can do them by ear, too. Simple arrangements, basically if the guy is on top of his game, he can pick it up right away.

TP: Have you been playing with Marlon for a while?

RUIZ: Four or five years now. Marlon has a couple of CDs out under his own name. He’s very knowledgeable about Latin rhythms, but he’s been around people like Mickey Roker, and he’s done the research. He has a natural swing. Of course, he’s not going to sound the same as a person who has grown up in the United States, because that has something to do with the way you play. But since I am basically dealing with the two idioms, the African and Latin American rhythms, they all come from the same place anyway; they’re all African rhythms to begin with, but went in different directions. He takes care of the business and he’s reliable. He’s growing. The more he plays, the better he gets. I think it’s important, in a sense, to try to have the same personnel — if it’s working — for as long as you can, because that’s where things really start grooving, when people get to know each other musically, and what we can do and things like that. It’s hard when you’ve got to change the drummer or bass player every six months or so. If you get somebody who’s really good it’s going to be okay, but that collaboration of the same people working together on the same thing for a while I think really is what catapults the music forward. If you can have a working band, the same people for a while… When you get to work, you know the repertoire, you know the repertoire, you know what you’re going to play, you know how everybody else plays basically, and you know the breaks and everything else, so now you can focus on creating something and trying to come up with something fresh.

TP: Is that the case with this group?

RUIZ: Yes. Well, Chico is always like that. It’s always forward motion with him. He’s always searching and looking. He’s a leader. Lisle Atkinson is one of those really swinging bass players. He’s played with just about everybody, with all the great singers and saxophone players, and he’s also played with symphonies, and he has a bass choir. He’s a virtuoso. What it is that you want, he can go after it.

TP: How about Renato Thoms? He’s from Panama.

RUIZ: He’s from Panama, and he has played with Eddie Palmieri. He’s on a few records now with notable artists. He came up one night to play as a replacement for Richie Flores, who got busy. He gave me his card and said, “I’ve got your records and I know some of your music.” He sounded real good when he sat in with us. So opportunity arose, and I gave him a call and he came in and he’s been there ever since. I don’t change anything, as long as everything is happening and it’s okay. If a guy doesn’t give me exactly what I want right away, I won’t make a change that fast, because I’ll see if an adjustment can be made. I went through the same thing. I went into places where everybody was more advanced than I was or had more experience, so I’m tolerant of those things. But if a guy really comes to play and it sounds good and the people enjoy it, that’s mainly what I’m concerned with. Little idiosyncracies and things like that will happen. But it all works out if we have time to play together long enough.

“Home Cooking” is one of my hits, if you want to call it that. It was on my first RCA-Novus record, Something Grand. That tune wound up in a movie when I did a cameo with the band in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanor. It’s a popular tune. Every time I play it, the audience really digs it. So it became a mainstay in the program.

“The Business Ain’t Nothin’ But The Blues” is by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, from his flute album, I Talk With The Spirits. I wanted to end it with a blues. But it’s a happy blues. The idea of the blues is to play something happy that sounds good to take the blues away. Chico got some nice Chicago blues in there. So we just close out with the blues, but a happy blues, a taste of real life.

TP: Let’s talk about the here-and-now. Talk about your last six month and how you project the next six months.

RUIZ: The highlights of the last six months: I was a judge for the All-American Jazz Piano competition. I got to hear a lot of young players. that was very nice, very exciting. I went to Miami and the JVC Festival in Miami, out there on the beach in South Beach, Miami. Then I went to Brazil, and played a concert at the Festival Internationale in Londrina. I spent about five days there, and played two concerts. After I came back I played Saratoga, JVC, and I’m going to be up at Newport in August and at the Detroit Jazz Festival.

TP: At this stage of your career… You’ve been visible and well-known on the jazz landscape for 25 years. Are you equally well-received around the world? Do Latin audiences like you for certain things and other audiences for other things? Do you separate the two components of your personality or are they always converging and coming together?

RUIZ: They’re always converging and coming together. I’ve been blessed that the sound that comes out when I play the piano is really what people like. They like to watch me play, they like to listen to what I’m playing. I get the same response anywhere I go. I can be truthful about this. The audiences really enjoy it. They ask for encores…

TP: You communicate.

RUIZ: It doesn’t make any difference in the age group or the ethnic group.

TP: Well, you were growing up in two cultures, in Puerto Rican culture and the intense mixture of New York. How did growing up in New York affect your approach to music?

RUIZ: The beginning was in Carnegie Hall, studying with George Armstrong. But before that I had studied Puerto Rican folkloric piano music with Santiago Messorana. Then when I studied with Mr. Armstrong, that was Bartok and Bach and Haydn and Mozart. So my background, I’m playing in church for different ceremonies and I’m playing in the assembly room for the school. they did Oklahoma when I was 9 years old, and I played the piano for that. Then there singers who somehow heard that I could play piano, and I wound up making a couple of doowop records. Very simple but they wanted me to do it. I guess it was about the sound. It sounded good. People basically said, “this guy sounds good; I want this guy.” Some people who do certain things musically may not have the expertise in certain instrumental areas, so they rely only on the sound of the instrumentalist. “Oh, that guy is playing what I need. I don’t know what it is, but that’s what I want.” So I was always lucky that people liked what I play and they would call me up and give me work. I’ve been very fortunate and blessed that I’ve been able to work constantly. I’ve had two or three months off, but it never more than that. I was always right back to work again.

TP: You seem to have figured out how to be pragmatic and inspired at the same time.

RUIZ: I try to be realistic about it. The more things that I have to do, the more I realize that I have to do more work at home to be prepared, even now with the new technology. I’ve got my computer and my keyboard and my music-writing software, and reading manuals and things like that. It’s not affecting my performance, because I play the piano every day. I’ll take a tune every day and play it through all the keys. So I make sure that I’m prepared. I may know a song, but the singer might sing it in a different key. I don’t want to be on the spot and be scuffling. Playing it through all the keys might take half-an-hour or so to do it, but it’s a goal that I’ve set for myself. I used to practice tunes just in one key, but it’s been a while now that if I play a tune, I want to play it in all the keys. I’m doing my writing now on the computer. I just changed over from pencil and paper to now I can put my scores in the computer, and I can change things and print them out.

So technologically, I’ve moved up into the 21st century. But I still have feeling and flavor. I’ve just gotten into this in the last ten years, where musicians like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and Joe Sample and George Duke and Joe Zawinul were doing these things very long ago. But for at least twenty years I didn’t play anything but acoustic piano. If I played an electric keyboard, it’s because there was no piano in the club. But now, I’m keeping myself up with the new technology in case I have to do something, like a movie score or if I have to do something on Broadway or have to do something that requires me to use this equipment. But I think it’s good that I spent all those years on the acoustic piano. And I won’t make the mistake of going to keyboards and leaving the acoustic piano, because then when you go back to play a gig on the acoustic piano, you find that you might not have the same edge you had when you were playing it every day. I’ve seen that happen to musicians. They were really burning, then they went to the electric keyboards, and when they went back it wasn’t quite as fiery . I think that has to do with just playing on wood without a speaker, when you have to produce the note. That physical thing, that energy is coming from the human body, and that’s all you’ve got. There’s no electricity and no nothing. But I’ve got my keyboard setup and I’m computer-literate now, so I’ve moved up into the 21st century.

Tito Puente was one of the greatest experiences I had musically. I played on about five albums, and I was able to arrange. He showed me a lot of stuff, how to open up my scope as far as arranging is concerned, and he also brought me back to my roots in playing the Latin music. We were very close and became very good friends . He really liked what I was doing and gave me the opportunity to expand. I owe him a lot, and I’m happy that I had a chance to be around such a great person. Hopefully, I’m going to keep growing and playing better and doing my thing.

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

Hilton Ruiz Musician Show (WKCR, Oct. 26, 1994):

[MUSIC: Hilton, “Praise,” “El Camino,” “Something Grand,” “Slip-Slidin’ Blues,” “Sonny’s Mood,” Hilton-Puente, “Tritone,” “Eddie Palmieri, “Adoracion,” Puente, “Oye Mi Guaguanco”]

TP: Hilton is playing Friday and Saturday night at Birdland with the Hilton Ruiz Quintet, on Monday at the Blue Note with the quartet, and as part of Tito Puente’s Golden Men of Latin Jazz at the Beacon Theater on November 5.

You’ve been playing with Tito Puente for a while. Has his music been part of your life since your early years.

HILTON: Well, sure. It’s been a part of my life and all of our lives – or anybody who really knows anything about music, especially Latin music, knows the name Tito Puente. He’s been around for many, many years, and he’s made a lot of great contributions to the music as far as dance music is concerned, and also the marriage between American Jazz and Latin music. He’s number one. I always keep saying the same thing. There’s nobody like Tito Puente.

TP: As a young musician, how would his music be part of your learning process? He’s so versatile. He did straight big band records, Afro-Cuban records…anything he did was a strong representation of that style.

HILTON: I think it’s a question of experience. The man has so much experience, and he works all the time in different situations – with Celia Cruz, the big band, also he has the Latin Jazz Ensemble, and he has his own giant orchestra, and now the Latin Jazz Golden All Stars which is going on its third years now. So Tito was always a household name. It was a name that was always being heard in the community. Machito, Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez – these were names that were constantly being…

TP: Were you raised in a musical household? Were your parents musical or taught you to play an instrument? Or was it a gift that was discovered and developed from outside?

HILTON: It was a gift. I’m happy and fortunate. I thank the Creator for giving me such a wonderful gift. My parents picked up on it and gave me all the support that I needed. They bought me my first piano and bought my music books for me and paid for my piano lessons. So they backed me up 100%.

TP: What was your initial training?

HILTON: My first teacher was Santiago Mesorana. He was a bass player from Mayaguez, and he came to New York and he had an apartment around 125th Street and Broadway, right up the street. When I was 5 years old, I began studies with him, and I studied Eslava method of solfeo, sight-singing method for about 6 months before he put me on the keyboard. As soon as I started playing the piano keyboard, pianoforte, the first music I played was “La Borinqueña,” traditional folkloric Puerto Rican music, the national anthem of Puerto Rico. Things by Raphael Hernandez, things called aguinaldo, Christmas songs, real traditional Puerto Rican piano literature. That’s really where I started at. I did that for about two years, and then I went to Carnegie Hall and I studied with George Armstrong for about 4 years, and there I was exposed to Bartok and Mendelsohn and Josef Haydn and Mozart and what-have-you. I was 8 and 9. I played my first two recitals at Little Carnegie, which is now called Weill Hall, when I was 8 and 9. I finished there about 12 years old – about four years.

After that, I went to study accordion for a while. I was an accordionist for a couple of years at the Biviano School of Music, which used to be at 48th Street – Joe Biviano. Then I started playing with school bands and guys in school… They played conga and had small ensembles, they need a piano player, and they found out I could play, and that’s how I started working.

TP: You were simultaneously playing classical music and music on little neighborhood type of gigs as you’re just describing.

HILTON: Exactly. That’s how it all started. Then I got a good break. I had played with a small band called Ray Jay and the Eastsiders, which was a very popular recording on the Lower East Side. The very first recording I ever made was with that band. It was called “Roly Poly” and it was on the Cotique record label. I was 14 or 15 when I made that record.

Then I got a gig with ralph Robles, and I spent about a year with Ralph Robles. Then I got another gig (which was really the highlight for me of my Latin career at that point) with Ismael Rivera, El Sonero Major. I stayed with him for about a year, and I really learned a lot there. Watching him, accompanying and playing that music was one of the highlights of my late teens.

TP: When and how did jazz start to enter the picture, and improvising within that area?

HILTON: Well, all along that time, from about the age of 13, I started listening to jazz and hearing it a lot. Then, when I heard Eddie Palmieri and we were on a simultaneous concert… We would play at a place like the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn where there would be 13 or 14 bands, and Eddie Palmieri was always one of the headliners, along with TNT, Lebron Brothers, people like that – Ray Barretto. I got to see Eddie on a lot of gigs live. That really influenced me quite a bit, because I found that Eddie was the bridge between the harmonic complexities of jazz and the rhythmic disciplines of Latin music.

TP: Some people in their development start trying to play like certain musicians who they admire, while others just play the music and the demands of the music create their style. How did it work for you?

HILTON: For me, it was listening to records and playing along with records. The first people who I really listened to were Rahsaan Roland Kirk… Before I became a member of the band, I was a staunch Rahsaan Roland Kirk fan. Also Herbie Hancock; I played along with Herbie Hancock records. McCoy Tyner. Thelonious Monk. Miles Davis. Dexter Gordon. Jackie McLean. Lee Morgan. Art Blakey. Each album had a leader, but the leader also had a choice selection of fantastic side personnel, and each of those became leaders. I went out and bought their records. In turn, they had a great selection of fabulous personnel, and I went out and bought their records.

TP: Mary Lou Williams is cued up. I know she had a big impact on your development.

HILTON: Mary Lou was like my aunt. There was a piano named Mark Dimond who was playing with some of the big Latin bands, dance bands — salsa bands, if you will — of the time. Markolino, we used to call him. We were pretty good friends from the neighborhood. We used to go to parties together and hang out on different sets. He gave me a card, a small card, because I told him “I want to learn something about jazz and improvisation and chords, and I need some harmony tutoring and things like that.” He said, “Look, there’s a lady called Mary Lou Williams; I’m going to give you her card; give her a call.” So I called her up and she answered the phone, and she said, “come on over here and let me listen to you, and I’ll tell you what we can do.” When she heard me play she said, “Whoa, that sounds really corny; you’re not doing it right.” So she actually showed me what NOT to do without hampering what I already had.

Then she recognized that I had a lot of talent, so she told me, “I’ll teach you, but I’ll teach you free of charge.” So I became her student. I never had to pay anything. All I had to do was go there, and she would cook lunch, we would talk. We would talk about the music. We would talk about Art Tatum, we would talk about the sessions with Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. Then I started collaborating on some different things with her. I became a copyist. I copied some music for her for different concerts, and I also did some of the groundwork for the Cecil Taylor and Mary Lou concert – when she was writing that music, I was there, and I really got a chance to find out about that. She showed me quite a bit about arranging, boogie–woogie, stride piano, the correct way to do things, what to do, what not to do. She was a real great musical coach, a wonderful friend, and a tremendous intellect in the sense of being an eclectic musician who… No matter what style of jazz you wanted to talk about, Mary Lou was into it and could perform it and play it. She was also an innovator, in the sense that she made some of the ‘avant-garde’ (to use a term) new music. She wrote new music in the 30s; I mean, some way-out stuff that nobody had done. She was at the vanguard of that. So definitely one of the most important composers in American history.

TP: And obviously a real bridge figure for you towards the continuum of jazz, probably somewhat like Eddie Palmieri was in bridging Latin music and jazz for you.

HILTON: Definitely. Because Mary Lou was jazz. That was to me the epitome. Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Mary Lou Williams, Jackie McLean – these were the original people who really fashioned the art form, and I was fortunate enough to be around them for quite a bit, and they liked me a lot, and they showed me quite a bit. I have to thank them all because they’re the ones who really started me on my career.

[MUSIC: Mary Lou Williams, “Perdido”-1953,Vogue; Ellington, “Caravan”; Dizzy BB, “Algo Bueno” and “Manteca”; Mario Bauza, “Night In Tunisia”-arranger, Michael Mossman, Messidor, 944 Columbus]

TP: You were very enthusiastic about Mario Bauza’s arrangement of “Night In Tunisia.”

HILTON: Everything that Mario Bauza did was beautiful. But I was particularly impressed by the stamina and the great fortitude that he showed in his later years before he passed away. He kept on driving, and driving hard, and driving that band, and he was picking up the best young musicians. He was a wonderful man to know, to be around, and he was a very important figure in our music.

TP: When did you first encounter him?

HILTON: I believe I first met him at the house of Mario Rivera, a fantastic saxophonist who is also one of the members of the Golden Latin Jazz All Stars of Tito Puente. I met him there, and he used to come down and hear me with the quartet. He actually tried to hire me a couple of times, but unfortunately I was working with my own band. I was touring, and I was going out of the country, so I couldn’t make the gig. But Marcus Persiani, who is one of my colleagues, is doing a fantastic job there on the piano. Mario Bauza is one of the pillars, one of the foundations of the music, and anybody who knew him, knew how warm and what kind of character he had. He was a very strict disciplinarian in terms of his music, but he was also a lot of fun to be around, and always telling jokes and making you feel good and happy.

TP: It may seem elementary to some of the listeners, but talk a bit about his relationship with Dizzy Gillespie, and how Dizzy included Latin rhythms into jazz.

HILTON: I believe it was in the band of Chick Webb that Mario Bauza was lead trumpet, and he got Dizzy Gillespie the gig. As the story goes (and you know how stories go), Dizzy was a little too modern at that time for everybody. Dizzy was ahead of his time. But upon the recommendation of Mario Bauza, he got to be in that section, and then the rest is history – the collaborations with Bird, Machito, all of that. Mario Bauza was at the forefront of all that, at that time, along with Tito Puente and these great bandleaders, Duke Ellington… All these people were breaking ground in terms of using the Afro-Caribbean rhythms to enhance their compositions.

TP: I guess that goes back to New Orleans and the compositions of Jelly Roll Morton, who talked about the “Spanish Tinge” and the Caribbean contribution to American music and American culture.

HILTON: Exactly. The people from the Caribbean islands traveled to different parts of the country, and they all set up different schools of music. So that’s definitely true for New Orleans. And you can hear that when you go to New Orleans; you can hear that in the music. New Orleans to me is a place of let’s say pure jazz. To use a word like uncut, a word like untampered-with. I’ve been there many times. I heard the Preservation Hall Band there. I was very impressed to see how the musicians of New Orleans could play their own musical heritage along with the music of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton and that music… But also how they could switch immediately and play bebop, and then turn around and play rhythm-and-blues. The versatility of the New Orleans is what always stuck out in my mind, along with the cuisine. There’s nowhere in the world that you can eat red beans and rice. Not rice-and-beans, but beans and rice – it has a special taste. You have to really taste it for yourself to really know what it’s about. It’s some of the best food that you can ever palette, is the food of New Orleans.

TP: In the indigenous rhythms of New Orleans there’s a real flavor of the Afro-Caribbean feel that entered the U.S. through that port.

HILTON: Well, the drums are there. A very important person who made that connection was Eddie Blackwell. The rhythms go different places, and different people play them differently, but they all come from the same source, which is basically the Afro-Caribbean drum. As I said before, you have different schools of playing. But each different one has its own different flavor and its own individual character, and that’s what makes it to beautiful.

TP: Juan Tizol, who composed “Caravan,” represented another strand of that tradition. He came from a family of classical musicians and was very much a “legitimate” musician in the Ellington band. That blend of the classical training with the drums, the rhythms in the culture, give the music a lot of its dynamic.

HILTON: That’s what it’s all about. To this day, a lot of the things that we’re all playing come out of the great classical music, and a lot of the great jazz players and Latin Jazz players, whatever you want to call it, also have a good deal of classical background. That’s what enables us to execute the passages that we do musically. At least I can speak for myself. I’m very thankful that I had the classical training. Because when I go to play something fast or something that’s a little difficult, I can flow through it because of the fact that I put in all those hours of classical training when I was a little kid. As a child, I did a lot of practicing, a lot of technique, a lot of scales, a lot of arpeggios – things like that. Duke Ellington was classical music. I don’t think there should be a separation between the European classical music and the music of Duke Ellington. It’s just that you can call it African-American Great Classical music, or Afro-Cuban. Or Puerto Rican folkloric great piano music, which is almost like ragtime music. You have to play it as it is. It’s all written already for you with the beat, with the feeling and everything. But in order to execute that music, you have to have good command of the instrument, and that’s where the classical training comes in.

TP: We’ll hear a set of music by Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

HILTON: I was with Rahsaan for five years. I started in November 1973 at the Village Vanguard. I auditioned I believe on a Thursday night. I came down and I was immediately hired, probably because I knew his music and I loved his music so much that when I got onto the bandstand I was familiar with the style. I was always a fiery player, and he liked that in me. He saw that I was young, and he knew I needed guidance and that I had a long way to go, but I had the correct feeling and the right attitude. So he hired me, and we immediately began traveling. We went to Europe a number of times, and we went to Australia, all over the South, all over the West Coast, Canada – constantly on the road. We would come every New Year’s Eve at the Village Vanguard. We never missed it. So I played every New Year’s Eve for five years at the Village Vanguard with Rahsaan, and I made six records with Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

To me he was the greatest individual musician that I know apart from all of the great musicians I played with. Because given all the handicaps that he had – being blind and later on when he had his health problems and he had a stroke and he played the saxophone with one hand, and recorded difficult compositions that most people with two hands would have a problem playing…he was able to do that with just one hand. And he played the three horns at the same time; he played tenor saxophone, the manzello, the stritch (the soprano). He would put a flute in his nose sometimes — three saxophones and a flute. Also he would play non-stop without taking a breath for half-an-hour flawlessly. The musical sets would go anywhere from Fats Waller to Charlie Parker to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, to original compositions. Then he would play his classical etudes and fugues by himself on the bandstand. He was a mind. He was a spokesman for the people. Everyone loved him, regardless of where we were, what country, or the ethnic backgrounds – it made no difference. He was able to transcend all of those musical barriers and bring the beautiful feeling of music to people at a very high level.

[MUSIC: Rahsaan, “My Delight”-1961-Wyands, Art Davis, Charlie Persip; “Many Blessings”-Inflated Tear; “Serenade To A Cuckoo”]

TP: The next set will focus on recent recordings by collaborators, associates and, I’d imagine, inspirations – Mario Rivera and Jerry Gonzalez. The Mario Rivera material comes from El Comendante: the Merengue Jazz. It’s on Groovin’ High Records, a Swiss division of Polygram.

HILTON: This is a very hot, wonderful record. As far as I know, it’s Mario’s first record as a leader. It’s been a long time coming. But it’s a very important record, because Mario has been working with this concept of merengue and jazz together for at least over 25 years. We were playing this kid of music together since 1970 in a band he had called Salsa Refugees. We had sessions going on which Mario was the leader of, along with Jerry and Andy Gonzales – a place called the New Rican Village. People like Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Dizzy, Dave Valentin, Milton Cardona, Papo Vasquez, Jorge Dalto, all the great Latin Jazz players and great jazz players would come to hear this concept.

The important thing between the merengue and the jazz is that they fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. There is no division between the two. The merengue swings in the same form as jazz does. In other words, the bassline is like a BOOM BOOM, BOOM BOOM, BOOM BOOM, BOOM, and it gets more advanced and complicated as time goes along. But they are natural; they go together naturally. So when we hear this record, you’ll be able to hear the contribution that Mario has made to this music, which is the merengue with straight-ahead bebop jazz.

TP: Not to mention his exceptional instrumentalism and versatility on a range of wind instruments.

HILTON: He’s a very complete musician. He spent years with Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente, he was in Dizzy Gillespie’s band, also the United Nations Orchestra, he’s been there with Eddie Palmieri on many albums. He’s on a great number of very important records, and he’s one of the masters of the music, and unheralded and very deserving of wider recognition.

TP: The two tracks we’ll hear co-feature Mario Rivera and George Coleman, with Hilton Ruiz on piano, Ed Cherry on guitar…

[MUSIC: Mario Rivera, “Pretty Blues” and “Have You Met Miss Jones”; Fort Apache, “Viva Cepeda”-Crossroads: Elegua]

TP: You mentioned that next year will mark your 25th year working with Jerry Gonzalez.

HILTON: Yes, in 1995 it will be 25 years of a great association with a great musician, Jerry – and also his brother Andy Gonzalez. They were very instrumental in bringing the new musicians into a context where they were able to express themselves and be heard, and they provided a springboard for a lot of the great players like Paquito D’Rivera and a lot of the Cuban musicians who came over from Cuba. They didn’t know really what was going on. They were in a new place. They had all this music that they wanted to play and all these things they wanted to say, and Andy and Jerry were kind of a beacon for all of us – the ones who came from other places and all of us who were here at the time. They have played with Dizzy Gillespie and with Eddie Palmieri. You name it. Andy Gonzalez is the busiest Latin bass player around. We used to have a lot of sessions in the house. We used to go to their house and play all night long, because they had a place with a piano where it was apart from the rest of the house, and we could play as loud as we wanted to and create without any problem. There were people there like Milton Cardona and Nicky Marrero and Charlie Santiago and Papo Vazquez, Dave Valentin – the same group of musicians who were instrumental in starting this generation of the Latin Jazz movement.

I’m very happy and proud to say that I was a part of the beginning of that, because I was really the original Bebop Latin Jazz pianist, and I was 10 years ahead of all the other Latin Jazz pianists at a time… There was a time when I was really out there by myself, doing what I was doing, which was playing straight-ahead bebop to a Latin beat. So I was a very important part of that organization. We’re still making strides. We’re still experimenting. We’re still trying to move the music forward, keeping it danceable for people who want to dance and listenable for those who want to listen and make love to it and play sports to it…

TP: Everything that people do to music.

HILTON: Everything that people do to music, right?

TP: You mentioned the new generation of Latin Jazz musicians. How would you say that this group of players differentiates from the group that came before it?

HILTON: We were the originals. The Tito Puente-Dizzy Gillespie-Machito generation, they played a certain kind of way. But when it came to playing the bebop tunes, bebop standards, the music of Freddie Hubbard, the music of Wayne Shorter, the music of Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, and playing that to a Latin beat with our own identity, we were the ones who created that particular wing of the art form. It’s the work that we did. Then, ten years later, everybody came over and just kind of got on the wave, and a lot of guys made some fantastic careers out of it. It’s for all of us to enjoy. But we’re the ones who really started this movement.

TP: Some of the influences you just mentioned, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, will be part of this next set. One of Herbie Hancock’s records that I think just about everyone interested in Latin Jazz at the time listened to was Inventions and Dimensions, done with Willie Bobo and Johnny Rodriguez on percussion and Paul Chambers on bass. It’s basically five improvisations done in the studio in 1963. Do you recall the impact this album had on you when you heard it?

HILTON: It’s hard to explain, because I had Herbie Hancock records from the beginning, from Taking Off, to “Blind Man, Blind Man,” to The Prisoner, Fat Albert Rotunda, Mwandishi… I was a staunch Herbie Hancock aficionado. I really love Herbie Hancock’s sound and his concept, his harmonic concept, also his arranging. This particular record with the Latin percussion, again, it’s pure jazz. It’s pure improvisation. It’s not watered down. That’s what impressed me so much about it. Herbie Hancock is one of the most prolific musical geniuses of our time. I mean, he can deal with whatever musical style you want to deal with. He’s a harmonic genius, a great entertainer, a composer… A very heavy brother.

[MUSIC: Herbie Hancock, “A Jump Ahead”-Inventions and Dimensions, 1963; McCoy Tyner, “The High Priest”; Monk-Jon Hendricks, “In Walked Bud”; Bud Powell-Sonny Stitt, “Strike Up The Band”-1950]

HILTON: Bud Powell, as everyone knows, is the fountain and the foundation of bebop jazz piano. The group with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Max Roach or Percy Heath, is the beginnings of the modern post-bop era in this music, and Bud Powell, overall, is the father of all the bebop pianists – people like Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, you name it. All the great bebop pianists owe a debt to Bud Powell, because he’s the one who really was able to capture the SPIRIT of what bebop was all about on the piano.

TP: Thelonious Monk mentored Bud Powell, took him around when Bud was young and introduced him to people, and indeed, Bud Powell recorded “Off Minor” on his first recording session. Was Monk very influential on you when you were coming up?

HILTON: Yes, very much. When I heard Thelonious Monk, to me it was a whole new way of playing the piano – the voicings, the intelligence that he showed in his compositions was truly a separate entity all by itself. There is only one Thelonious Monk. Duke Ellington is really the fountain for a lot of that – Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Randy Weston, a lot of the great pianists and also arrangers owe tribute to Ellington. Because Duke Ellington was playing that kind of style before Thelonious Monk and everybody else. So that’s really coming out of Duke Ellington pianistically.

TP: I guess we could extrapolate to the New York stride pianists of the 1920s who Ellington emulated, like James P. Johnson and Willie the Lion Smith. That speaks to the continuum of jazz and the streams of music that comprise it, and I think Hilton Ruiz exemplifies that in his approach. A few words about McCoy Tyner.

HILTON: McCoy Tyner is one of a kind of pianists and composers in terms of fire, creativity, excitement, sheer prowess on the instrument. McCoy Tyner has no peers. Nobody has that kind of energy. Nobody has that kind of command of, if you will, the modal or the employing of patterns and things to enhance compositions. McCoy Tyner can play a composition, and change it, modernize it, and enhance it at the same time. He can also play it straight if called for. He’s a great accompanist. He played behind Johnny Hartman. He played behind John Coltrane. He played with the Jazz Messengers. A direct line, in my opinion, from Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell.

TP: We’ll now play two grand virtuosos of the piano, Cecil Taylor and Art Tatum. You mentioned earlier having worked on the concert that Mary Lou Williams did with Cecil Taylor in 1977.

HILTON: Yes. I was there when she was writing the music. Before they had their first rehearsal Mary Lou was making a loit of sketches along the lines of what they were going to play, and I was able to be there while she was doing that. Cecil Taylor, in my opinion, is, one of the, if not the most influential of the avant-garde (if you will) pianists, but he has roots in boogie-woogie, because he was an early boogie-woogie pianist. A lot of people don’t know that. If you listen to a recording called Coltrane Time, he also was an accompanist behind John Coltrane. Cecil Taylor was coming straight out of classical music, but he was able to add a certain new kind of feeling, a new kind of sound, a new approach to playing, a new approach to technique of the piano, that before his entry into the music there was never anything like that known – not in its particular form. A true innovator. A true stylist. And set apart from everyone else, his own individual style.

[MUSIC: CT, “Jitney 2”-Silent Tongues; Art Tatum, “The Shout”]

HILTON: I think we can all agree, all of us who play piano and all of us who play all the other instruments, that there has never been a pianist like Art Tatum. So it’s only fitting that he should be at the top of all these selections that we have been playing. Because that’s the state of the art, and nobody has been able to do it since, and I seriously doubt if anybody is going to be able to do it in its completeness as far as Art Tatum was able to do it. He was a super-super-magnificent musician, and uncanny sense of rhythm, perception, time, intuition, repertoire, harmony, stride piano, boogie-woogie, blues – you name it. And exciting from front to back.

TP: If there was a unifying theme for this show, what would it be?

HILTON: Well, just call it Latin Jazz. I’m Puerto Rican and my heritage is from Puerto Rico, and the music that we started with was from the Afro-Caribbean pool, if you will, of music, and then I tried to show the relationship between the African-American jazz and the Afro-Cuban or Afro-Latino jazz, and to show the amalgamation or the marriage between the two styles. To make one last statement, it’s really the same music with kind of different dresses on. It’s coming from the same place. It’s coming from the same soul and the same heart. It’s for everybody to enjoy. It’s our music, so please support it. Come out to the clubs, bring your friends, and let’s have fun.

TP: During the first 35 minutes we played a lot of Hilton’s music, but one album we did not get to was your first for Telarc, which is a group of original mambos, composed both by you and other members of the band, Manhattan Mambo, which is an all-star group of Latin Jazz improvisers. (Charlie Sepulveda, David Sanchez, Papo Vazquez, Andy Gonzalez, Hilton, Ignacio Berro, Steve Berrios, Joe Gonzalez and Giovanni Hidalgo.

[MUSIC: Hilton, “Michael’s Mambo”]