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

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

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Terence Blanchard Interview for Jazziz– 2020:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

How long did it take to write the score?

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

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

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

A very different ambiance than One Night in Miami.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did Kasi Lemmons present Harriet to you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is your process for opera and film similar or different?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[BREAK]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[BREAK]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIDEBAR

Title: Punchy Music

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TP: Do you remember when you first met Terence?

 

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

 

TP: Was it his personality?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TERRY:  Oh, all the time, yes.

 

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

 

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

 

TP: Really.

 

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

 

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

 

TERRY:  He would have gone on anyhow.

 

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

 

TERRY:  Yes, the band for Free and Easy.

 

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

 

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

 

[ETC.]

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

[PAUSE]

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TP: Have you paid attention to his film work?

 

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

 

TP: It takes on a life of its own.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TP: Does it have to do with detailing…

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TP: So more extended composition.

 

MARSALIS:  Exactly.

 

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

 

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

 

 

Terence Blanchard Blindfold Test – 1998:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

_________________________________________________________________

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

[-30-]

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh, definitely.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TP: Back to square two anyway.

 

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

 

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

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh, definitely.

 

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

 

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

 

TP: What did he say about him?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

BLANCHARD:  Oh, yes.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TP: Be more explicit about that.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

TP: Want to elaborate on that?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

***********

David Newman (Notes for Keep The Spirits Singing):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Newman (WKCR) – (2-27-96):

[MUSIC: “Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool”]

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

DN: Yes, it’s okay.  Just fire away.

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

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

TP: How old were you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

DN: Oh, yeah.

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

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

TP: At what high school?

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

TP: You’re about the same age, too.

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

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

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

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

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

TP: What records do you remember listening to?

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

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

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

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

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

TP: And the Sanctified Shouters, something like that?

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

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

DN: Very direct, that’s true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

TP: How was it different?  In what way?

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

TP: You mean in terms of his rhythmic phrasing…

DN: Yes.

TP: …or in terms of his harmonic concept?

DN: Exactly.

TP: Both of them.

DN: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DN: No, I don’t…

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

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

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

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

TP: Were you playing alto all along?

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

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

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

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

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

TP: Would you play Out in the park?

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

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

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

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

DN: What, the Harmolodics and…

TP: What did it sound like to you?

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

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

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

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

DN: We would play them woodshedding and in performances.

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

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

TP: Was he into Chu Berry also?

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

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

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

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

DN: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ETC.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HC:  Yes.

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

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

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

HC:  Oh yes.

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

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

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

HC:  Originally, Springdale. Springdale Baptist Church.

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

HC:  Yes, right there.

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

DN:  You mean right from the very beginning.

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

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

TP:  Unapropos.

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

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

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

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

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

DN:  Exactly.

TP:  Was that your experience, too, Hank?

HC:  yes.

TP:  Do you remember your first Bird record?

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

TP:  So you memorized your Bird solos also.

HC:  Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

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

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

TP:  Ornette as we know him today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TP:  Lunceford was from Memphis from originally.

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

TP:  You’re laughing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TP:  What were your personal experiences with Buster Smith?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TP:  And you’d play the whole show.

HC:  the whole show.

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

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

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

HC:  Really, really go out on the road?

TP:  Was that at that time, or after?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TP:  Did you get a solo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HC:  Yeah, and the Ellington things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DN:  What’s that?

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

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

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

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

TP:  Hank, the first time you met David?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[PAUSE]

TP:  Equipment from David Newman.

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

TP:  Why?

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

I have a Germeinhardt flute.

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

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

[PAUSE]

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

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

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

TP:  The writing started in high school for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HC:  Yes.

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

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

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

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

TP:  You have quite a memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[PAUSE]

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

[PAUSE]

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

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

TP:  You were almost his alter-ego.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HC:  Yes.

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

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

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

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

TP:  George Coleman played all the notes.

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

TP:  Your name is your sound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TP:  I need your equipment.

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

TP:  What is it about the Selmer alto?

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

[PAUSE]

TP:  Hank has some thoughts on Fathead.

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

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

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

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

[-30-]

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For the eminent composer and pianist Anthony Davis’ 73rd birthday, the transcript of a WKCR Musician Show from Aug. 11,1993

In honor of composer-pianist Anthony Davis’ 73rd birthday, I’m posting the transcript of a WKCR Musician Show that he did with me in 1993, in which he presented music that influenced him in formative years and also his original music, including a number of selections from the original production of his opera X Manhattan’s City Opera (as you may know, the Metropolitan Opera presented a new production this year), which maestro Davis commented on. We’d previously done a Sunday Jazz profiles show in 1989, where Mr. Davis discussed his body of recorded work up to that point in detail, but I haven’t had a chance to transcribe it.

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Anthony Davis, Musician Show (WKCR-Aug. 11, 1993):

[MUSIC: Anthony Davis, “Little Richard’s New Wave” – for Melissa Finley dance piece]

TP:   We have a wide array of music programmed – Ellington, Mingus, Monk, Cecil Taylor, a variety of operas, as well as your own music. The impact of Duke Ellington is quite evident in your small group and piano work. Have you been involved in Ellington’s from early on?

AD:   I think it started when I was a freshman at Yale. Actually, it first started with my meeting Leo Smith. Leo is a real Ellington junkie, became really interested and fascinated with Ellington’s music. I was totally a bebopper.

TP:   How do you mean?

AD:   When I was 18, I was completely…like most of the pianists today…I was a follower of Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, and I was really interested in Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. So I was always playing with changes and writing tunes with changes, etc. Leo sort of introduced me to a lot of earlier music as well as more current music — hearing more of Cecil Taylor, etc. Then also, at Yale, I was fortunate to be there at a time when Willie Ruff, who is still there, had what’s called the Conservatory Without Walls. They started this off with a concert with Ellington. Ellington came to Yale and did a series of concerts. Also…

TP:   Was one of them recorded as The Yale Concert?

AD:   I think so, yes. What was really interesting, they had an Ellington Fellowship program, so they brought Mingus and many other artists associated with Ellington came up to Yale and performed. Mingus’ concert was famous, because there was a bomb threat in the middle of it so we had to abandon the building, but Mingus still played through the whole thing!

I met Ellington at a party after one of the concert. I was I guess about 19, and I was across the room from him. He looked at me. Of course, in those days I had this huge Afro, which I lost only recently. But I had this huge, wild Afro in those days, and he looked across the room and he pointed at me and he said, “You must be a musician.”

TP:   To which you said?

AD:   “Yeah.” I wasn’t really sure that was my life’s calling at that point. But after Ellington came over and hugged me and said, “You must be a musician,” I figured, “I guess I’d better be.”

TP:   He anointed you.

AD:   That’s right.

TP:   Please forgive the silliness of the question. But for you as a musician at that place and time,  and wherever you were at aesthetically, what was the appeal of Ellington’s music, and what did you learn from it, if I can put it like that?

AD:   Well, I think it’s profound in the sense that what you learn from Ellington is the idea of structure, the idea of creating forms that embrace both improvisation and interpretation by the improviser, as well as compositional form. Every composition of his has a unique structure, and that’s what was so fascinating to me. As opposed to when I looked like bebop music and its sort of formalized structure of 32 bars or 16 bars or 12 bar forms, where Ellington was always unusual and did so much with even expanding upon those structures. So I began to look at… I was fascinated with his suites  and more of his extended compositions, and it influenced me a lot. I remember starting to write suites when I was in college. I wrote a series of suites. One was called “The Left Hand Of Darkness Suite.” Then I wrote another one called “Madagascar Suite,” because I found out some of my relatives were from Madagascar, so I did a suite of music from that. I began to create compositions that had that… In fact, a lot of the musicians at the time used to joke with me and call me “Mister Medley,” because I was always making all my tunes into extended pieces, linking them together and tying them together.

But that was a lot of the Ellington influence – the idea of creating longer forms, longer structures, and also the idea of looking at influences outside of music itself. The idea of drawing upon…whether it be a book or a story or something you see, etc.

TP:   Ellington was extremely visual and always seemed to have a story to tell for almost anything he’d write.

AD:   Oh, of course. If anyone knows anything about Ellington, he was a painter, and all these different colors of blue that he… I don’t know how many titles of his pieces are different shades of blue. But the idea of his fascination with color and light. And you can see that in his music, too.

So that was a profound influence on me. And the idea of Ellington being really a role model, a model of someone who achieved a perfect balance of composition and improvisation… He became an important musical model for me.

TP:   In a sense, he’s the source of the three other musicians we’ll prominently feature. Mingus, Monk, and Cecil Taylor all draw heavily on aspects of Ellington in their work.

AD:   That’s definitely true. Mingus played in Ellington’s orchestra for a short time. But I think you can hear in Mingus’ music the influence of Ellington and Strayhorn, too, in terms of his harmonic idiom. I also have to say that Art Tatum was a profound influence, too, in terms of developing his harmonic idiom. Of course, with Mingus again, the fascination with the extended forms, the idea of expanding song form and making it into larger compositions, larger structures. I always loved Mingus’ music. It was another profound influence for me.

TP:   Before we begin with the programming, it must be mentioned that although Anthony Davis doesn’t perform so often in the New York area, this month you’ll be involved in a number of performances, both your own and as a sideman with long-time music colleague Ray Anderson in a few weeks at the Yardbird Suite. You performed last Thursday outdoors at Lincoln Center with a small version of Episteme, with Warren Smith, Mark Feldman and Mark Dresser. But this Sunday, at the Brooklyn Museum, in the Inspiration Series, you’ll be presenting a suite of works, both Monk repertory and material inspired by Thelonious Monk.

AD:   Yes, I’ll be doing a solo piano recital and I’ll be doing some Monk compositions and arrangements of Monk compositions I’ve done, and I’ll be doing some of my own music as well. So I am looking forward to that. I guess my first influence in “jazz” was Thelonious Monk. Hearing him I guess in 1965 first inspired me to become an improviser to begin with. Before I heard his music I was strictly a classical pianist. Hearing Monk, I became more interested in improvisation and composition.

TP:    We’ll elaborate more when we get to the Monk segment. But let’s begin the Ellington segment with “The Clothed Woman” from 1947.

AD:   It’s one of my favorite Ellington compositions. It’s not known as much as some of the others. As a pianist, I was very impressed with how modern Ellington’s playing is here. You can hear the expanded harmonic vocabulary he had — even though within a blues structure, and then there’s a stride section in the middle. Within that, he was a visionary, far ahead of his time in what he was attempting in terms of harmony. So I was always very influenced by that, and you can hear I think some of where Cecil comes out of — and other musicians, too.

I first heard “The Clothed Woman” live, when he performed at Yale. He did a duo piano version with Willie “The Lion” Smith. I think the stride theme was inspired by Willie The Lion. If you hear the style of it, it’s really inspired by Willie the Lion’s playing.

[MUSIC: Ellington, “The Clothed Woman”-1947; Ellington, “Koko”-1940; Monk, “Brilliant Corners”-1956; Monk, “Crepuscule With Nellie”; Monk Big Band, “Little Rootie Tootie”]

[END OF SIDE 1]

AD:   …trombone. So you really get a clearer idea of the stride influence on Monk’s playing, how his left hand worked, using the open fist, and then the kind of motion that he always has in his left hand, the harmonic motion that is in Monk’s music. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to take another Monk solo and orchestrate.

TP:   A for-instance? I’m putting you on the spot.

AD:   Putting me on the spot. Well, “Crepuscule With Nellie” would be really interesting to orchestrate. It might have been interesting to do a ballad, since orchestrated solos had always been up tunes – it might have been really interesting to do one of his ballads. It might have been really hard to play, because a lot of it is very free in terms of the rhythmic…

TP: And he played it differently every time. You were thinking of a different version of “Crepuscule”…

AD:   The versions are always different.

TP:   He played it a lot, as a solo piece, in the middle of sets…

AD: Yes, he could embellish it the way that he wanted. That’s some of the freedom in doing a solo thing. But I think it would be great to… There are different ways of orchestrating something like that. It would be a real challenge.

“Brilliant Corners” is an incredible composition. Again, the structure of it is interesting, and the way he uses the double time…the bridge is in double time. With Sonny Rollins, Ernie Henry and Max Roach, it’s one of the classic recordings.

TP:   The solos have a sense of inevitability to them, but completely personal to the improvisers.

AD:   That’s the thing. The best improvisers playing Monk are people who have their own strong voice, like Coltrane or Johnny Griffin or Sonny Rollins, and later Charlie Rouse, too, who is so linked to Monk – his ideas were so melded to Monk’s. To me, it’s just a brilliant performance by everyone on that. That’s one of the records I grew up with, too. I was doing a Monk concert several years ago at one of the tribute concerts they did up here at Columbia, and we were rehearsing with Steve Lacy and Charlie Rouse, Richard Davis was on bass, Blackwell was playing and Ben Riley was playing – they were alternating. We were just sitting down, what Monk tunes we knew, etc. It was fascinating for me, because of course Charlie and Steve Lacy know very close to exactly all the things Monk was doing, and I had a looser interpretation – I’d listened to Monk and a lot of it I learned from records. I was doing “Pannonica.” I’d listened to the record, and I remember Oscar Pettiford’s bassline. I said, “Well, Oscar played this bassline here” and they said, “Well, he played the wrong changes.” [LAUGHS] That was very funny for me, being a younger musician at the time, and having learned a lot from the records.

TP:   Some musicians today say that in playing Monk you almost have to do it right down to the fingering, that Monk’s music is so complete, it’s a world unto itself.

AD:   It definitely is.

TP:   Is Monk a life-long project? How far away from his style can you in interpreting Monk?

AD:    I think that’s a challenge. You could… There are plenty of people now who are trying to play the music pretty close to exactly what Monk did. I think one of the challenges is to invest your own personality into it, and to take it and explore playing Monk in your own way. An example is Monk playing Ellington, or hearing him play Fats Waller or something like that. It’s exciting for me to approach what I sort of investigate with my own ideas, too.

TP:   Can you speak a bit to the connection between Monk and Ellington, particularly in terms of piano style? Even Ellington commented on it at a certain point.

AD: Well, they’re part of a tradition. I’m not sure Monk was directly influenced by Ellington as much as they shared common influences. If you look at Monk’s thing directly, it’s more like Fats Waller, Count Basie, that side of it. Also because there were composers, and there aren’t too many great composers in this music – but they are two of the great composers. I think the way they approached the instrument was really compositional, with the idea of clarity of idea. So you hear a lot of common ground there, I think. Both of them had a sense of also the resonance of the instrument, in the left hand what kind of open voicings can be used, whether it be a fifth in the left hand, etc. — and how to really make a piano sound in terms of the harmonics of the instrument. I think that comes a lot from Ellington’s playing in the big band, as Basie did, too. I think Monk took that another step into the small group. So you can hear, I think, a lot of Ellington’s approach to the instrument, as well as other pianists like Basie.

TP:   Now we’ll hear a set that features Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor doing variations on Billy Strayhorn’s “Take The A Train.” One is Mingus’ famous arrangement from Pre-Bird, in 1960, where he interpolates “Exactly Like You.” Then Cecil Taylor’s version from 1958.

[MUSIC: Mingus, “Take The A Train/Exactly Like You”-1960; Cecil Taylor, “Excursions On a Wobbly Rail”-1958; Mingus, “Open Letter To The Duke”}

TP:   Do you know the story behind “Open Letter To the Duke”?

AD:   I don’t know the story behind it. I like the musical structure of it, and also the fact… Actually I hadn’t heard that extended version before. I was always used to just the tenor solo and then into the head. It’s interesting, because it’s sort of through-composed; it goes from one style to another, and then it goes into the classic Mingus-Ellingtonian ballad style, ballad thing, which is really gorgeous – I always loved it. I love the way the piece sort of evolves, almost like a free association in terms of the form of the piece, rather than being to the standard ABA forms or AABA forms, etc. So I was always interested in it…one of Mingus’ pieces. You can see his indebtedness to Ellington, of course, and Strayhorn.

Mingus was a profound influence on my music, too. When I was in college, I had a band with George Lewis, among others. Gerry Hemingway was the drummer, and Wes Brown was the bass player, a guy named Hal Lewis was the alto saxophone player. We played our own music except for Mingus compositions. I transcribed a lot of Mingus pieces at the time. So we were playing “Peggy’s Blue Skylight.” I did “Meditations On Integration.” “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, then Blue Silk.”

TP:   The extended pieces.

AD:   Oh yeah. Well, they fascinated me. “Orange Was the Color” has such an interesting structure, like… It’s the weirdest way to write a 32-bar tune that anyone has come up with — 11-, 11- and 10-bar phrases. I find that a fascinating piece. A lot of his compositions of the period are sort of extended song forms. Even a piece like “Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love” I used to do.

TP:   That was recorded in 1974 or 1975, so it was composed right around the time.

AD:    I used to go to Manhattan to hear the group with Don Pullen and George Adams. Jack Walrath I guess was playing trumpet. I was always very impressed with that group. I always liked Don’s playing a lot.

TP: Let’s discuss Cecil Taylor’s performance on the harmonic extensions of “Take The A Train.”

AD:   That was a great group with Earl Griffiths on vibraphone. It’s interesting, because when I formed my own quartet with Jay Hoggard and Blackwell and Mark Helias, that was one of our models for inspiration. Everyone, of course, compared it to the MJQ, with another great composer, John Lewis, the musical director. That was an influence as well, but we were also very interested in other combinations. Bobby Hutcherson and McCoy Tyner did a quartet record. Also, the Cecil Taylor-Earl Griffiths combination.

I was fascinated, because as a pianist, I remember when I formed the group I had been tired of playing with horn players, frankly, the whole role of the function of instruments in that situation, with the piano in an accompanying role and the bass and the drums all fulfilling a particular function within that setting. I found playing with a vibraphone very liberating.  When I began to write music for that group, all the roles could be shared in different ways. A piece of mine like “Song For The Old World” and some other pieces we did were…a lot of the principle of it was all the instruments sharing different roles of what the group would be. Who’s sustaining the rhythm, and who was the melodic interest. It might be the bassist as the solo and we were playing rhythms and stuff. Blackwell, of course, was a big inspiration. He was a fantastic, great musician, and really open to playing with younger players.

TP:   It must have been amazing to have a chance to play with him regularly at that formative period.

AD:   It was very exciting to me, because he was my connection to Ornette Coleman’s music, and he’d played with Coltrane as well, and he brought so much. A lot of my music was created with him in mind. In “Song For the Old World,” for example, the parade rhythms he uses from New Orleans and stuff… We spent a lot of time together listening to…and developing my own ideas as a musician. Working with him and Mark Helias, we developed a real rapport as a trio. Then with Jay, of course, it went to another level.

TP:  Mark Helias remained in synch with him until Blackwell’s death. They linked up so well together.

AD:   Playing in that group was the beginning of it, I guess. We did some wonderful music.

TP:   In terms of your own piano playing, did Cecil Taylor have an impact?

AD:   Oh, definitely. I guess I was very interested in the virtuosity of Cecil, and also the fact that he really thinks of the instrument as an orchestra. That fascinated me. Using both hands. So many of the bebop-inspired pianists were… I was playing once in a club in New Haven, and Leo Smith came to hear me. I was then about 20 years old. He said, “Whatever happened to your left hand.” Basically I was playing bebop; I was playing all this stuff. I said, “I can play with my left hand; there’s no reason I can’t improvise with both hands.” So I began to really get interested in that. And listening a lot to stride pianists as well, from James P. Johnson and Willie the Lion and early Duke and Fats Waller. As a kid, I listened a lot to Art Tatum and Erroll Garner. But I became really interested in the idea of really playing with both hands, and the idea of liberating myself from what had been where the bass is playing and takes the lower register, and then the piano sort of providing chords in the left hand and playing in the right. Cecil was very liberating for me in that. So when I first came to New York, I began to play in a lot of groups as a sideman without bass, because I began to get the reputation for playing with my left hand. I played with Leroy Jenkins and other ensembles with, like, violin, piano and drums. So my first time playing in Europe was playing music like that.

I was very interested in that whole approach, and the physicality of it. I think Cecil is a real innovator. I hope that sometime they do a Lincoln Center concert of Cecil Taylor’s music, too. Somehow there are a lot of holes in what they present up there in terms of looking at our history, and someone like Cecil I think is very important to look at, too.

TP:   Staying on this theme, the Lincoln Center program is focused on creating a repertory out of the work of the artists you’ve mentioned, and they’re giving importance to idiomatic interpretation. But what you’re talking about sounds more like the notion of an idiomatic extension.

AD:   I think one of the interesting things about this music is, it’s not dead, it’s not something that’s in a museum. It’s something that continues to develop and continues to change. It’s very interesting to me to hear the music evolve. It’s not enough to just do a Monk… It’s beautiful that it happens. To me, Monk’s music and Ellington’s music are a pinnacle of music, in the development of 20th century music. I think it’s important to represent that and to play those things. But I think it’s also important to realize that there’s still an ongoing revolution in music.

TP:   Revolution or evolution?

AD:   I think revolution, too. Some people talk about evolving. But the way music changes is never gentle or sweet or nice. There’s always animosity and friction and everything else. So I think “revolution” is more…

TP:   So to borrow the term, music is in a state of “permanent revolution.”

AD:   Right. Perpetual revolution.

TP:   One thing to be said for what they do… You had a chance to see Monk and you had a chance to touch Ellington. But today’s musicians don’t have that chance. I think it’s important to have a chance to…

AD:   Oh, of course. I think that’s beautiful, that’s great. But I don’t want them to deny the idea that people can do something else with that…

TP:   Or that someone who doesn’t do that is not per se “legitimate” within that context, which I think is an attitude that…

AD:   Or to assume that people who decide not to do that haven’t checked that out already. A lot of us went through a whole period… I went through a period about the same age, when I was in my twenties, when that’s all I was interested in doing – playing in the style-of. Playing Bud Powell compositions and Richie Powell compositions and Thelonious Monk compositions, etc. But I realized that part of my purpose in being here was to develop my own music and develop my own direction, not just to be a laboratory for the past but also to try to produce something new. I don’t mean to sound immodest or anything. But I think the idea of his music is to…and what you get from Charlie Parker and what you get from Thelonious Monk is the courage to experiment and to explore new areas.

TP:   Now it’s time to hear some of Anthony Davis’ own music. Was The Life and Times Of Malcolm X your first opera?

AD:   Yes, it was. X was the first.

TP:   Had you written much for voice before, or was this new to you when you were doing it?

AD:   I’d written a couple of songs. That’s about it. I’d written a piece called “Beginning of Light of Time Passing.” Part of that I’d written. I’d also done an earlier song that I never play any more. But X was really my first chance to explore it. But I’d been thinking about the form of opera for a long time. I first thought about that in college. Basically, when I started at Yale, I was a philosophy major. My interest in opera came from reading Nietzsche, really. I read his essays on “Birth of Tragedy” and his essays on Wagner, and I was fascinated by it. I said, “What is this form, opera?” I’d never seen an opera. I only heard elements of it, and I was I think initially repulsed by the whole form. But it encouraged me to explore it.

Also, I took from “Birth of Tragedy” the idea of the combination of what he looked at as the Apollonian and Dionysian outlook on art as something that I could apply very easily to American music, particularly to Afro-American music, and to looking at… I felt that Nietzsche’s answer for this ideal music that combines these forms was actually Jazz or African-American music, and then I began to think of the idea of creating music theater that embodied…that allowed freedom for the improviser within a structure that…sort of the Apollonian idea of structure and form. So I was fascinated by the idea of opera before I ever heard an opera. So I thought of myself as preparing myself to write this opera, even back in college, and that’s when I started writing suites and listening to Ellington a lot and studying that musically. Also, in school I studied Wagner and Strauss and the whole operatic tradition — mostly the Germanic tradition, actually, through taking a Wagner class.

TP:   The fact of X’s existence got lost in the shuffle a bit last bit in the wake of all the hoopla about the movie. The production was 1986 or 1987?

AD:   The New York City Opera produced it in 1986, and it was done in American Theater Music Festival in 1985.

TP:   And it’s in the repertory.

AD:   Right. It’s going to be done again in Los Angeles, hopefully, in 1995, and maybe in Michigan before that. So I’m very excited about that. Now the recording is out, too. It’s interesting, because we preceded the movie about 6 or 7 years. I remember seeing Spike Lee in the audience opening night of X at City Opera, too.

TP: I don’t recollect him mentioning that.

AD:   No, he hasn’t mentioned that!

TP:   But his movie stands by itself, I think.

AD:    Oh, of course it does.

TP:   We’ll hear a selection that you say reflects the influence of Mingus on your music. But perhaps we’ll hear a number of selections right now of X and some other music you’ve spoken about. Coming up is “Ella’s Aria.”

AD:   “Ella’s Aria” – Ella is Malcolm Little’s half-sister. This is when Malcolm was taken from Michigan to Boston. It starts out with a kind of ostinato that begins “Come with me, child,” then it goes into “My side of town they call the hill,” which is the more overtly Mingus-inspired part. I can talk a little bit about that.

But the opening section is in 13/8. That’s my other obsession, is in rhythm. I’m very interested in exploring… I like repeating patterns and rhythms, and especially odd meters and odd rhythms. A lot of that came when I studied South Indian music at Wesleyan University, and I was very influenced by the whole theory of rhythm.

TP:   You’ve done whole compositional series that are based on rhythmic cells, so to speak.

AD:   Right. This one is very simple. It’s actually based on an earlier composition I’d done in 1974, which is from… A lot of times in my music I steal from myself. In this case, I had a piece called “The Left Hand of Darkness Suite,” which was based on an Ursula K. Leguin novel. This section of the ostinato comes from…and some of the music that’s underneath “Ella’s Aria” is from what I call “The Left Hand of Darkness Theme,” and this is that vamp. But I adapted it and it became part of the opera. Then it evolves into this kind of F-minor section, which is definitely… I mean, it’s one of Mingus’ favorite keys, too. The whole F-minor/D-flat major thing is to… There are millions of Mingus tunes like that.

TP:   As I recollect, the staging of the opera was very fluid with action transitions moving seamlessly from one part of the stage to another. Were you writing with the staging in mind?

AD:   I think the fluidity was what I had in mind. I think the staging sort of followed that. That was the only way to do it, really. But I thought of it in that way. But also musically, because it was very important to me. I was trying to make a musical statement first. A lot of times people are confused and talk about the political statements that are in X. But I think my first purpose was to make a musical statement. I think the musical statement is actually more threatening to people than my musical statement. I think what the idea was, was the idea that I could create a fluid piece of music that goes in and out of…let’s say the African-American tradition, from blues structures, etc., to Mingus-style ballad sections, etc. – but all within my own musical language. And then, go in and out to other kinds of structures and forms in the same way that a Wagner opera evolves. And using the same kind of structure in terms of motives and repeating and recurring textures. And really adapting the idea of Wagner but making into a strictly American idiom. I think it’s a revolutionary thing, because what it does, it implies also that…it puts into doubt what the tradition of opera is. What I was trying to create is a tradition of opera that is uniquely American, and particularly African-American. That’s more threatening, because it’s really a concept of music, not just a political concept of dealing with subject matter that deals with an African-American experience.

[MUSIC: “Ella’s Aria”; “The Pool Hall”]

TP:   We have to end on the segue, but we tried to be as accurate as possible for the “Pool Hall” scenes, sung by Thomas Young, who also played Elijah Muhammad in the opera. “Ella’s Aria” was sung by Hilda Harris. From X: the Life and Times of Malcolm X, An Opera In Three Acts, music by Anthony Davis and an incredible, poetic libretto by Thulani Davis.

AD:   That’s for sure.

TP:   Were you working in tandem with her? Was the music first? The libretto first?

AD: Mostly the libretto was first. Some of the music, as I said, I had some structures that I was referring to in the piece. First of all, the Overture is based on my piano piece, “Middle Passage.” So a lot of the material that unifies the structure of the whole opera is drawn from the solo piano piece. Then, as well, in the work the Mecca music, for example, was an adaptation from a work called “A Walk Through The Shadow” that I had done. Actually a lot of that was written first musically, and then set to words — but then we went back and forth. But mostly we worked with libretto first. I found that the easiest thing to do and most liberating because she could really create a complete idea with the words. Also, we’d worked so much together at the Public Theater doing poetry and music together. So I was very used to her language and the rhythm of her language was easy for me to deal with in terms of setting music. We worked with my brother Christopher, who did the story treatment. First of all, we laid out a structure, an idea of a structure, and then I had some ideas about thematically what areas I wanted to get to – certain kinds of arrival points in the opera. Then I wanted to explore…then I began to set some of the words to music.

This whole section you just heard was really the jazz section of the opera, which was from Boston. It shows Malcolm’s transformation from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red – to becoming the hustler. Thomas Young plays the role of Street, sort of an amalgam of different characters, who initiates Malcolm into the hustler’s life. So basically the whole thing is, starting with Ella, sort of middle-class statements about what Malcolm should be and what Black people are in Boston, etc. “My side of town we call the hill.” It could be the South Side or Harlem, wherever a Black community is. Then Street’s character challenging those ideas, saying, “Well, come on; you’re just working for the white man; you’re just doing this.” Then Malcolm slowly being won over.

TP:   The question, of course, is why she brings Malcolm to the pool hall.

AD: That’s another issue. Ella doesn’t even appear in the movie, for good reason probably. But…

TP:   But in the opera she brings him to the pool hall, and then Street sidles by and starts to take him under his wing.

AD:   Right. A whole other story. We all have dramatic license on these things. Malcolm himself took dramatic license in the autobiography.

What’s interesting for me is this idea of transformation of Malcolm. This is really the first transformation in the opera. We basically structured the opera in relation to these transformations. That was exciting for me, and it was exciting to do musically, because taking it from the ostinato, from “Ella’s Aria” to this F-minor section that’s sort of loosely based on the changes of “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” which is very funny. People don’t think, “You don’t know what love is until you’ve heard the meaning of the blues. So I had all these little byplays and jokes musically that I like to explore. Then going from that into when Street’s music comes in, really using blues structure. I guess my models were Cab Calloway, also looking at the zoot suit part (“you need a zoot suit, conk and cap”) of course was Fats Waller, the original rapper, if know “Your Feets’ Too Big” and those Waller-Andy Razaf things. So I was very interested in that.

Also in showing the music’s relation to history — the fact that the music reflects the historical development and creating a social ambiance, creating a sense of time and place.

TP:   This is very difficult music, and the singers make it seem effortless. Did you know who the singers would be when you were writing the music, or did they have to audition on the music and show their proclivity for it?

AD:   In Ella’s case, I had music for Ella…

TP:   For Hilda Harris?

AD:   Not necessarily. I knew about Hilda. Hilda was actually one of the first people I tried to get to do it, but she wasn’t available. I had a wonderful person, Mariana Simpson, for the opera production. In the case of Street’s music, it’s a very interesting story. Originally, Street was going to be a bass, and Avery Brook was the original Street when we did it in the workshop in the Philadelphia. But Avery was so magnetic as Street, he just blew Malcolm off the stage! So we decided that Avery should be Malcolm. So when we did a later workshop and then we did it in Philadelphia, at the American Music Theater Festival, Avery Brooks played Malcolm X.

In the meantime, I was auditioning for the role of Elijah Muhammad, and Thomas Young came by to sing, and he sang Gounod’s “Faust” or something. I said, “Wow, this guy is an amazing tenor; why isn’t he at the Met? What’s happening?” Which, there are obvious reasons, racism probably at the top of the list. But I was really impressed with him. Then he said to me, “I’m singing tonight in a club in your building.” In Manhattan Plaza, there used to be a club downstairs, the West Bank. So I said, “I’ll come to hear you.” I couldn’t believe this guy is going to sing a jazz gig. I invited people to come. The director came, and Cindy Aronson, and my brother, and some other people. He did this set of Ellington and Strayhorn, and I couldn’t believe it. He’s one of the greatest jazz singers I’ve ever heard. Period. Up there with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, you name it. Scat singing, everything – it was incredible. I said, “He has to be Street, too; we have to work it out so he’s Street, too.”

It worked out dramatically, because the idea of double-casting, of having that role of Street and Elijah Muhammad being the same person, making this connection between the antagonists in the opera, is consistent. Because one of the problems structurally in the opera is that Elijah Muhammad doesn’t show up until the second act. Now that avoided that problem, because all of a sudden we had the same person appearing as sort of this other father figure, the false father — the earlier false father and then the later false father. So it was an interesting structural decision to make. So he’s responsible for one transformation and then Elijah for the second.

So it worked out very well in terms of that – and Thomas was a brilliant actor, so he could pull that off. Also singing…it was a tour de force for him to be in the first half of the opera a great jazz singer and then in the second half to do his opera, the operatic, higher tessatura of opera singing. Even though in the jazz part, he did interpolate a high-D… I think people should know that he actually sings…that’s a glissando to a high-D, which is unheard-of in classical repertoire, let alone anything. He’s an amazing performer.

So I had to transpose Street. Originally Street’s music was in F-minor. I had to transpose it to C-minor. I said, “What key would you want to do it in?” I heard his voice and I said, “C-minor is a good key.” So I have this modulation that happens, and it goes into the other key. It worked out very well. But I decided to recast it in that key for him. So in that way, the music is really written for him. Then also the scat section; he put the scat section in there as well.

But he’s a phenomenal singer, and I’ve written other roles for him since.

TP:   Anthony has also written the operas Under The Double Moon and Tanya subsequent to X…

On the album of X you use a core of musicians you’ve worked with for many years under the title Episteme.

AD:   That’s from Greek. It means “knowledge” in Greek. It basically comes from Plato’s Republic. Being an old philosophy major, I was very interested in the idea of levels of knowledge, and episteme is one level of cognition. I used that as a title, because basically I was interested in having an ensemble that was for my experimental work, that could be any size from… I guess it refers to the Episteme concert, which was 3 pianos. So it’s gone from that to 10 pieces to an opera to…

TP:   What seems to have developed is a rotating pool of musicians who are familiar with your ideas and music, and so, given the exigencies of the life of a performer, there’s an ample pool to call.

AD:   Well, yes. And there are a lot of the musicians I’ve worked with over the years, like J.D. Parran, for example, and Pheeroan akLaff (the drummer), Mark Helias and Mark Dresser (bass players), Abdul Wadud. And then, there are some newer people like Art Baron, who is a fantastic trombone player who brought the whole experience of being in Ellington’s orchestra to it.

TP:   Herb Robertson is on trumpet, and also Warren Smith on drums and percussion. We’ll now hear another section of the opera, which is the end of the first act?

AD:   Yes, this concludes the first act. It’s “Malcolm’s Aria.” This is after he’s been arrested. He sings it in prison. He’s being interrogated by a policeman. If someone had seen the production, remember, he has his hands tied behind his back with a light focused on him. It begins with an improvisation with J.D. Parran and Gerry Hemingway playing vibraphone with a sort of pedal point improvisation that segues into Malcolm’s aria.

Malcolm is sung by Eugene Perry, a fabulous singer. In a way, I have the same relationship with singers that I have now with musicians – with Thomas, Eugene, Cindy Aronson, Hilda Harris I’ve worked with in a number of settings. It goes from opera to opera. Not just one opera, but it might be 3 different operas at different times. So in a way, I’m now working with them, writiing and conceiving my music for them vocally the way I would conceive something for J.D. Parran or something for Art Baron or something for Mark Feldman or John Purcell. What’s exciting to me, it’s the same process I would imagine Ellington went through where you have Johnny Hodges and you have Cootie Williams or you have Lawrence Brown, that you can create music that showcases their abilities. I do try to do that for the voice within my music as well as for the instruments.

[MUSIC: “Malcolm’s Aria”]

TP:   That was sung by Eugene Perry, the baritone who plays Malcolm X in the cast recording. Was he in the stage production as well?

AD:    He was the understudy actually at City Opera. He didn’t get to go on stage. In the new production they’re going to do in Los Angeles, he’s going to be the Malcolm. I’m very excited. He’s a fantastic singer. I worked with him as well in Under The Double Moon. He was Tarj, and then I created the role for him. We’ve worked a lot doing concerts, etc. He’s a great person and a really fine singer.

TP:   Coming up is a segment from Under The Double Moon. It’s the culmination of a long-standing compositional development, because you’ve been recording the music that comprises since the 1970s.

AD: Right. A lot of that music was based on my Wayang series of compositions, which were inspired by Balinese and Javanese music, particularly the gamelan music. I was interested in the idea of creating an opera or some kind of music theater work based on those compositions, and also with a science fiction theme. So I was interested in using science fiction with music, and the potential of that. I wanted to do something in my second opera completely different from X, because X was sort of this epic historical drama, more contemporary. I decided for my second opera to do something much more about fantasy and set in the distant future, in which the polemics of race are not so important, in a sense, but it’s still evident – it’s a multi-racial cast. In this opera, there are twins who have psychic powers. One is played by Ai-Lan Zhu, who is a wonderful soprano from Nanching, China, who played one of the twins. Eugene Perry played the other twin– he was Tarj. They’re being lured by a character named The Inspector who has come to their planet, which is called Undine, to recruit teenagers who have psychic powers, who can read minds, etc. They recruit them for a school that’s run by the Empress, who rules the 7 planets. But we don’t know quite for what purpose he wants the twins. Also, we discover that the twins find out where they have come from, who their real father, who turns out to be a transformed human who lives underwater, called the Gaxulta.

So basically, this enabled me to create my whole musical landscape of my own invention, and that was exciting. In a way, it allowed me to make my own rules. The music can make its own rules, and that’s very exciting.

In this scene, you’ll hear when the inspector finally convinces the twins to join him. It sort of starts out as kind of pseudo circus music I use that recurs in it. A lot of it is this kind of carny atmosphere, because the twins worked a carnival, and it’s now festival time in Undine, and at Festival time anyone is allowed to have sex with anyone else, so it’s sort of open-ended in that way. So the inspector is really intrigued by the festival. But he’s more interested in getting the twins on his side. This is Scene 2 of Act 2. Thomas Young is the Inspector, Ai-Lan Zhu is Xola, and Eugene Perry is Tarj. The libretto is by Deborah Atherton.

[MUSIC: from Under The Double Moon] – BEGINNING OF SIDE 4

AD:   …called “Middle Passage.” I’d done an earlier piano work, a solo piano piece that I wrote for Ursula Oppens, which was called “Middle Passage.” In this, I took the closing line from the poem, which is “voyage through death to life upon these shores.” So that’s the full title of the piece. Basically, it’s a setting of Robert Hayden’s poem for voices. What I’ve attempted to do was layer a lot of things, using, as I do a lot with repeating structures… As the poem is laid out visually on the page, you can see that he has italicized portions of the text, and sometimes I use that as repeating lines. Sometimes it’s the name of slave ships – Desire, Adventure, Tartar-N are all names of slave ships; the ironical names that slave ships have. Then the Middle Passage story culminates with the Amistad. The poem has a section about the whole Amistad incident. Of course, I’m planning to write my next opera, a big opera called Amistad, about the Amistad rebellion.

So this is a setting of the Robert Hayden poem and was done by the Chanticleer Men’s Choir.

[MUSIC: “Voyage Through Death To Life Upon These Shoes”– Nov.1991]

TP:   We’ll conclude with the first 7 minutes of a 14-minute suite for Monk that you recorded in 1978. That was a very fertile time for you. This is on Red Records. You were then recording for India Navigation, and I think for Sackville Records as well.

AD:   I made three recordings that summer. All these recordings were done I think within a month of each other. So I made three records. This is actually the first record I ever made. It was a solo piano record on Red. I was on the road with Leroy Jenkins at the time. We were doing a concert in Italy, and we had a day off in Milan, and they asked me to do this record. I was actually sleeping in the studio between takes, but I managed to make this record. During that time, I also did Song For the Old World for India Navigation, with Blackwell and Jay Hoggard and Mark Helias, and then I did Of Blues and Dreams with Leroy Jenkins, Abdul Wadud and Pheeroan. These were my first recordings. What happens in that case, you always have a backlog of material. I had material for days to record.

TP:   From what you’ve said, you were writing 7-8 years by this point

AD:   yes. The first group was Advent. It was named not for the Christian holiday but for the speakers.

[MUSIC: Anthony Davis, “Crepuscule: Suite for Monk”]

For Bassist Alan Silva’s 85th Birthday, A WKCR Interview in January 1994.

Bassist Alan Silva, a key figure in New York City’s experimental and free jazz communities during the 1960s and a stalwart figure in France since he relocated in the early 1970s, turns 85 today. I’m posting an interview that we did on WKCR in January 1994. A lot of information contained herein — although it’s not as detailed as the excellent 2002 interview with Dan Warburton contained in this link. (https://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/silva.html?fbclid=IwAR1P_g1OtnDhLnGQ2EQuO4LnN-8tMs3Upw2P93iDszcEulukhgv01ITWryI)

Also, here is a piece about Alan Silva’s mother, Irene Levy, that Stephen Haynes linked to today on Facebook. (https://patch.com/new-york/fortgreene/irene-levy-union-pioneer-and-long-time-fort-greene-reda52a8e546?fbclid=IwAR2KvRFj4g7PI9M2gxIjVoFBOOlex1lHYmnPDoCITO5CAbO8UgFV_aKvl6k)

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Alan Silva (WKCR):

[MUSIC: Cecil Taylor, Enter Evening (Alt. Take)]

Q:   You hadn’t heard that up to now.  What did you think?

AS:  Well, sometimes alternate takes are not as interesting as the original takes.  Sometimes you can have that problem, I think.  Blue Note put out some alternate takes.  But on this piece, I don’t think it’s necessary.  Sometimes alternate takes are something you don’t want to hear.

Q:   Sometimes it’s preparation for the proper way of doing it.

AS:  Yeah.  And that might be interesting from the point of view of historical, but some alternate takes are just like mistakes.  And they’re good for historians or people who are really interested in music.  But sometimes the final piece is the final piece.  It’s like going to Picasso’s garbage can and picking out old sketches.  I thought that’s what alternate takes really meant.  But I don’t see any significance in the piece.

Q:   I think a lot of listeners would be interested in hearing about your association with Cecil Taylor, and how and when it started. 

AS:  Well, Cecil and I… My impact on Cecil was probably from the point of view as a listener.  The first time I really had a chance to listen to Cecil Taylor was at the Newport Jazz Festival, where he was playing one of those afternoon discovery bands.  I was a very avid Jazz collector, myself as a student, and I went up to the Newport to hear, as usual — like a ritual to go up to Newport.  And that day they had Cecil Taylor, an afternoon concert.  And that’s when I really heard some very interesting music by Cecil.  I was only about 18 years old at that time.  And I think that record is out with Jazz Lab on one side and Cecil on the other side.

Q:   Around 1957 maybe?

AS:  I think so.  Like that.  1957.

Q:   Steve Lacy was playing?

AS:  Steve Lacy, Henry Grimes, I think Dennis Charles.  So from my point of view, when I heard the band, and live, I fell in love with the music… At that time I was very much studying trumpet with Donald Byrd.  And I sort of thought that was really a great band, too. I mean, they were on the same gig, in fact.  So that was my first encounter with the man’s music.

Q:   What did you think?

AS:  Well, I loved Monk’s music.  And I had one Cecil Taylor record done on Transition…

Q:   You were a real collector.

AS:  Oh, yes.  I’m a serious listener of the music.  All of the music, in fact, going all the way back.  So in the sense that I had those Transition copies… And at that point I said, “Well, this man is really an interesting musician.”  And I always liked the eccentric aspects of music-making, people like Red Nichols or Harry Partch.  I was always looking for the real eccentric aspects of music.  And I was a collector on those aspects.  So Cecil really interested me as something that really was emerging there.  I found his music as a young musician much more interesting than Ornette when he first came to New York.

Q:   Why is that?

AS:  Well, because I thought that… I had already heard Charles Mingus’ experimentations and Max Roach’s experimentations from the New York scene.  See, you have to realize I’m a New Yorker, raised in New York, and I had a lot of chance to really hear a lot of very interesting music in this town.

Q:   Tell us about the environment you were coming up as a young musician, a young listener and so forth.  And this will all take us to how you hooked up with Cecil Taylor…

AS:  I was raised in Harlem in the early 1950s.  I came from Bermuda to live in Harlem.  And at that time, in the early 1950s, my father, who’s an avid Jazz listener, Duke Ellington was his favorite… And I had a chance to be very associated with what was Bebop at that time, only at 5 or 6 or 7 years old.  I fell in love with music as a listening thing by radio, and listening to Charlie Parker and Classical Music, and I became very much interested in music ethnology, world music very early, listening to Folkways records and stuff like that.  And I really accepted Jazz, Afro-American music at this particular point as a very significant body of music.  So that took me into being a musician. 

     But I’m not basically… I’m like an artist.  I studied painting.  I studied at Art Students’ League. I studied at Hans Hoffman’s School of Fine Arts just before it closed.  I went to New School For Social Research and studied theories in music.  I studied with George Russell, the Lydian Chromatic Concept.  So in fact, living in New York was exposing to the amount of beautiful things that exist as a student.

Q:   No better place.

AS:  No better place to learn and no better place to experience.  So in a sense, Cecil I felt came out of that kind of experience, being raised in New York, too.  So I’m not one-sided, in the sense that my listening aspects are quite broad, from John Cage’s music to Harry Partch, to some American Indian music.

Q:   Well, let’s talk about you as a musician, then, and your development as a musician, and where you were at in 1957, when you heard Cecil Taylor at the Newport Jazz Festival.

AS:  Well, at that point, I was seriously thinking about becoming a painter.  And I still loved music, and I was still playing trumpet at that time, and I studied composition. 

Q:   How long had you been playing trumpet?

AS:  I had been studying trumpet maybe two years. 

Q:   Had you played anything before that?

AS:  I had played piano since I was six, and violin.  I was in music since the early parts of my life.

Q:   Through your parents?

AS:  Yeah, through my parents and through the church I was working with in Harlem.  So in fact, I was getting ready to prepare myself for a kind of artistic career.  I decided to study trumpet with Donald Byrd, because he was suggested to me.  I wanted to become a trumpet player.  I liked Miles and I liked Fats Navarro and people like that.  But in fact, this idea of playing the trumpet was something of a fantasy, actually.  I thought I was a good trumpet player.  I could read, and I thought I had good technical training, and I wanted to go into Classical, Classical trumpet playing, like at the Manhattan School of Music and New York College of Music.  So I began that search.  But I didn’t feel that Classical music was what I was really interested in.  And at that time, you couldn’t really study improvisation like you have today.  So I began to be interested in improvisation as a process. 

     But as I said before, these things about being fixed are not necessarily my idea of being an artist.  You understand what I mean?  Like, when I start playing trumpet, I might make a painting.  Do you see what I mean?  So I’m saying that you have to look at my development.

     When I decided to become a musician, that was about when I was…1961 or 1962.  But the preliminary aspects:  I was still painting, I was still drawing and painting and working on that aspect.  So when I met Cecil, I met him on those levels, as a collector and as having an interest in his music.

     The first I encountered Cecil on a personal level was when I was working for Whelan Drugstores.  I used to work on 8th Street and 6th Avenue…

Q:   Ah, yes.  Now it’s a Papaya King.

AS:  Exactly.  An all-night place.  Whelan Drugstores was a chain, and I worked there because my mother gave me a gig.  And this job was great.  I used to meet all the musicians and all the clubowners, who used to pass by at 4 o’clock in the morning and get hamburgers.  And that’s where I met Cecil…

Q:   Across the street from Nedick’s.

AS:  Exactly.  So Cecil was sitting there one day, having his hamburger and strawberry malted.  And I said to him, “My name is Alan Silva and I’m a bass player, and I’d like to meet you.”  So he said, “I’ve heard something about you from Bill Dixon.”

Q:   How had he heard about you from Bill Dixon?

AS:  Well, Bill Dixon is one of the persons I think that’s very much underrated in terms of the New York scene.  Bill and I go back to about 1960, when I had a band called the Free-Form Improvisational Ensemble.  The Free-Form Improvisational Ensemble was an experimental band based on totally free music.  We did a number of concerts at Town Hall, produced by Norman Seaman.  Norman Seaman had a new music series.  And Bill came to hear the concert, and he loved the band so much and what we were doing — and he invited us to participate in the October Revolution.

Q:   Give us a sense of what that band sounded like.

AS:  Well, this band… The problem is that there is no real document… The band was Burton Greene, a flute player, Mr. Winters, a drummer who was an electrical engineer, who was my best friend, and three bassists — one was a history of  science major who is a bassist… So it was like kind of an amateur art band.  Let’s look at it that way.  It wasn’t serious… We began rehearsing in the 1960’s every day…well, four rehearsals a week for three hours, and we recorded a lot of music. 

     The band was on a separate scene from themselves.  The band was a free band.  We started working on no writing, no compositions, what we called that.  I would say first that this band was trying to sound like a Contemporary Classical music piece that had the energy and had the sophistication, and compositions that were totally organized by the musicians.  I’ll say that we wanted to make the band sound as if it was reading music.  And that was our goal that we were trying to achieve…

Q:   And Bill Dixon heard you.

AS:  And Bill Dixon heard us at this time, and Bill asked us to join the October Revolution at one… We did one concert. And then Cecil asked me to play on October Revolution with the saxophone player…with John Coltrane, with Tony Williams playing drums.  That’s when I first entered…not actually entered, because I was actually trying to work on the Contemporary Music scene, not necessarily on the Jazz scene per se.

Q:   Who were some of your antecedents as far as playing bass?

AS:  Well, first of all, Mingus.  I studied sometimes with Charles Mingus. 

Q:   What was that like?

AS:  Well, Mingus was a great artist and a great bass player.  I learned how to be an individual. I think that one of the great things that Mingus taught me was get your sound, get something that’s really your personal sound.  And I think that training was unique, harmonically or the way you touch it, the way you pull it, the way… He was quite a bass player in the sense that he was totally committed to the technical development of a contemporary-sounding bass, slapping the bass… He turned me on to a lot of techniques that I was aware of in contemporary music.  Contemporary string playing, for instance.  I mean, Mingus was a cellist.  So we were all involved with the string instrument.  And I thought that Mingus was not trapped in some kind of a Jazz orientation.  Again, Mingus is a unique American artist, like a Charlie Parker, in a sense, on his instrument.

     One of the things you have to understand is that I was caught in between trying to make American music.  And I thought that Jazz or Afro-American music was the music.  I just felt as a composer that if I’m going to involve myself in American music, I have to involve myself here.  Because I felt a lot of the schools were too much on the European orientation, and I wanted to really penetrate what was…to try to create American music.  And I thought that improvisation was one of the key elements that American music needed to have.

Q:   We’re eventually going to get to Alan Silva meeting Cecil Taylor and hooking up with him, and so forth and so on.  But in this segment of the conversation, we’re talking about various within African-American music/Jazz who were influences.  You were studying with Mingus.  Were there other people?

AS:  I would say Paul Chambers.

Q:   A few words about him.

AS:  Yeah.  Paul, I mean, the bow.  Mingus had the bow, too.  But Paul really impressed me the way he handled the bow, in terms that he made it sing.  Paul had an incredible technique, intonation, speed, phrase, in time — his timing was impeccable.  And of course, like, the other one that’s fantastic, who sings with the bass…Slam Stewart.  These impressed me.  I mean, Slam Stewart was impressive.  I mean, to sing along with your instrument… I thought that was fantastic. 

     If you want to talk about contemporary bass playing, then you would have to say cats like Sam Jones, or the bass player that played with Miles later…

Q:   Ron Carter.

AS:  Ron Carter.  Now, this is… Or David Izenson, for that matter.  Who influenced me earlier was Henry Grimes.

     We all had Classical training.  I studied with Mr. Zimmerman, who was the top-notch bass teacher here in New York, with the New York Philharmonic, for several times.   But I was really interested in contemporary sounding bass playing, and that moved me into my own individual approach.  And I thought that Cecil’s music would be a good vehicle for the kind of work I wanted to do. 

     So if you want to place me as a sideman inside a system of searching for new ways of playing, yes, me and Cecil both agreed that we needed to develop new types of ways of playing.  And I think that comes simply because we loved the instrument.  I mean, if you like your instrument and you like sounds and you’re interested in sounds… In fact, I think that’s what makes, I think, a great African-American improviser.

Q:   Now, Cecil Taylor’s sound changed between 1962 and 1966 in a very distinctive way, from the documents that we can hear.  Talk a little about that, and the development of his sound.  Because it seems that he was, let’s say in ’62, searching for what starts to crystallize in the recordings around 1966.

AS:  Yes.  And if you have all the documents… I’m talking about Johnny Come Lately from that Transition record…

Q:   Or Wobbly Rail…

AS:  If you understand… If you have a good ear, and you’re really open, let’s say.  Because I think Cecil had a hard time convincing people that he was an Afro-American musician or a Jazz musician.  That was one of his hardest things, was to convince everybody.  European influence, blah-blah-blah, all this type of period… I mean, even the critics recognized he had an incredible technique, but they didn’t particularly like the music.  Do you understand what I mean?  It was like technique over music.  And I thought that that was not the real issue.  The issue is the music first, and then the technique… Cecil had that type of stuff 

     But the record he made that I think is still a fantastic solo is the one he did for Impulse, on Into The Hot, called Bubbles.  Now, this record, with Sunny Murray playing drums… It’s the most incredible rhythm section.  The swing is incredible.  This very poignant use of space and time, which he was learning from Monk… And what I loved about Monk’s music was his spacing, his idea of space, not cluttering the space up.  And I think that this record for me… I used to say to Cecil, “Cecil, if you kept on playing like that, you might have been a little more successful in terms of the stylistic problems,” you understand… We kid him about that sometimes.  Because obviously, he’s a very talented, very creative person — he’s got to keep moving.  But I felt that this… He swang.  The rhythm section was right on the button. I mean, it’s an incredible, poignant solo, very strong. 

     Then, of course, we started talking about Time, and changing rhythms and things like that.  And I think that’s what’s incredible about this period, of what we call Swing;  I mean, the idea of what Swing was. 

Q:   Talk about this new idea of swing at this time.

AS:  See, the bass players were the key elements.  I felt that bass players and drummers… Because that’s what happened when Ornette came to town with just bass and drums.  Now, Cecil was a piano player, and the role of the piano player… And I think that Cecil was trying to change that role.  But the bass players and the drummers, see, they had to deal with time and different types of elements.

     So when I first heard Sunny Murray, as a bass player, I said, “This is a real interesting way of playing drums and an interesting way of feeling time.”  And I had a very good understanding, because I knew about African rhythms, and I was very familiar with Chinese music.   So I heard all that when he played.  Now, this is the whole problem with people on Sunny.  Sunny is a world-class drummer and percussionist.  But since people have very little idea of how rhythm is put together, and even this whole idea of Swing… Kenny Clarke, for instance, who was the most fantastic drummer; I played with him in Paris… This idea of swing is really something that flows from the music itself.  And we have this problem now of what I call square rhythm, something very definite.  But I think that the Bebop…

Q:   Rather than circular.

AS:  Exactly.  Or multi… I call it now multi-layered, you understand.  What we try to do with those type of musicians is this multi-layer situation.  And I think even in Bebop, in a really good Bebop band (when I say really good Bebop, I’m saying cats like Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers), it’s an adventure.  And I think that when you have, like, Sunny Murray and myself and Cecil, there’s another adventure.  And we need to have a horn player…you understand…?

     So I’m saying when you look at the rhythm sections of that period, David Izenson and Moffett… I mean, there are so many varieties.  Or Max Roach and Curly Russell.  When we look at it in these ways, it’s not so fixed.  And I think that we experimented openly with time signatures and different types of time signatures.  So consequently, this was an open period, and it’s come together as a world music, a world-class music.  And most of the musicians of my period always had a very broad perspective about what was music.

Q:   [ETC.] Alan Silva lives in Paris a good chunk of the time, but he’s in New York now, working on a dance piece at the Dance Theatre Workshop… [ETC.] What we’re hearing now is an environmental piece of yours.  So I’d like to talk about (a) the music that’s coming over, and (b) the theatre piece.

AS:  The piece that’s coming over the airwaves at the moment  is kind of a piece to cool… My current work is how I can make sound an intricate part of the environment.  That’s in the sense that I’m trying to work now with this type of development.  The piece that I’m working on now with Mrs. Gibson, which is called Buried Oak, is a piece that’s mostly by Mrs. Gibson in the sense that she is a choreographer, and she has written a story or a piece of choreography that I am involved in writing the music to, in the sense that it is a combination of things about expatriatism, and at the same time, how Art can grow in this type of environment.  She’s the choreographer and I’m the composer. 

     I have written some of what I call computer-generated music.  I don’t particularly like this word.  I’ve been trying to search for  more feasible way to understand how does an improviser use a computer.  How I use it is simply: This is me, all of me, I might say.  I have generated the music simply by my own improvatorial concepts, which allows me to select different times, different instruments.  So this piece is based on that.  It’s all of me in the sense of being a composer and a player.  We’re going to hear a little bit of some of this piece now that we will perform at the Dance Theatre Workshop.

Q:   Is the piece computer-generated, or is it being performed by musicians?

AS:  No, this piece that you’re hearing is computer-generated.  I improvised into the computer, and I selected these sounds.

Q:   What sort of parameters are you using in terms of your  improvising program?

AS:  I like to sit at my synthesizer and organize structures on the synthesizer in terms of, like, I’m taking a solo.  I usually do that by organizing six different strata of solos.  Then I listen to…not playing against it, but trying to think of how I would play with this instrument.  And that’s how I begin to work on my computer-generated music.

Q:   It sounds sort of analogous to the idea of multi-layered rhythm.

AS:  Yes, exactly.  So I try to create something, and then I don’t hear that piece.  I try to memorize what I did, and then I sit at the computer and play another track for instance.

Q:   The first piece is cued.  Do they have titles?

AS:  No.  Track 1.

[MUSIC]

     This was a computer-generated piece I made about the summer of this year for a Florence premiere in June for Mrs. Maxwell.  It’s called Buried Oak.  Buried Oak‘s opening section now is an Ezra Pound poem, a translation of Chao Tsu, a Chinese 12th Century poet.  And this is the opening, we call the procession part of that piece.  [ETC.]

Q:   We were discussing the very turbulent years during the 1950’s and 1960’s when a new approach to music was being generated by a rather small but highly influential and accomplished group of musicians, many of them, and we’ve been discussing some further implications of what we were talking about off-mike.  In light of that, we’ve cued up one track from a number of documents that Alan Silva has recorded with Bill Dixon, whom you mentioned as having heard you with your ensemble in 1960.  Now, you’re both painters.

AS:  Exactly.  In relation to the current work that I’m doing with dancers, I think that Bill was, as a said before, my mentor in this area, with Judith Dunn, who was the principal dancer with Merce Cunningham during the Fifties.  We had a small trio, bass, trumpet and dance, and we premiered a piece at the Dance Theatre Workshop at that particular time, in the early Sixties, I think just before we did Unit Structures.  Me and Bill were working as a duo, trumpet and saxophone, among the Downtown Art Scene, I would say.  That’s with Aldo Tambellini, a very famous environmental video artist. 

     The idea that Judith had with Bill and I was to create three levels of improvatorial concepts in terms of visual and sound aspects.  And I think that because Bill and I were painters, this gave us a pretty much broad perspective of what Art was and what art movements were about.  I think Bill was very important in how we were going to use the dance as a score.  And I later went on to develop other dance or choreographic aspects.  Bill went to Bennington College with Judith to set up the Bennington College Improvised or Afro-American music, Black Studies programs during the Sixties, to develop a very interesting series of dances.  I worked with another one called Heidi Stonier(?).  She came to Paris, and we did a piece — one of Judith Dunn’s dance students.

     So I have three or four lines that I’m working on, as you can see.  I don’t like to be considered too much in one area.  I like to consider what I’m doing as artistic, in the artistic realm, and crossover — you might use that word.  The cultural aspect is very important, you see.

Q:   I’d like you to talk a little about the structures of Dixon’s in terms of your performance within them.

AS:  Me and Bill got along fairly well, and sometimes we had a lot of fights, simply because I refuse to do a lot of things over and over again, which he likes to do.  He’ll always say, “Well, why can’t you play that over and over?”  I say, “Look, I’m going to do that one time or twice.”  So now we have a clear idea that I would never play so many things over and over again. 

Q:   That means it has to be a rather special piece of his to have you in it.

AS:  Exactly.  So he knew exactly that if I’m going to hire Alan for a gig, then he’s got to have his way.  I was one of those bass players at a period where I had some ideas such as what improvatorial concepts were in relationship to performance, for instance.  In the United States during the Sixties, most composers had complete control of the piece.  They received royalties on the piece.  But not too many people who improvised on the piece ever received any royalties.  I was one of the first guys that started talking about, “Well, look, you didn’t write me anything here.  I can play what I want.”  So actually, who owns the composition?  So me and Bill used to discuss these types of interpretation…

Q:   And you’d have a fight once in a while.

AS:  Exactly.  I love him because… Well, he played trumpet, and I was an ex-trumpet player.  I mean, I learned a lot from him as a trumpet player about the way to play trumpet.  And when I heard him play, I knew that this really was a fantastic way of playing trumpet.  We just sort of blend very well, this trumpet and bass duo, which Cecil always thinks is one of Bill’s greatest moments, and I think so, too, myself… I thought the duo was a very strong duo.  And the trio with Judith was a very important musical event for the time, you understand.

     We’re now going to play something that Bill asked me to do at the Paris… One of those pieces comes from two events that he organized.

Q:   The recording is from 1980, on four records, Considerations One.  He writes, “Places and Things (1976) is one of the sections out of the longer work, entitled Autumn  Sequences, from a Paris diary.  It was composed for and performed for the Autumn Festival held in Paris at the end of September and the beginning of October 1976.

AS:  Right.  And what was fantastic about Bill in this period… I know the people who do the Autumn Festival in Paris.  He did a first concert that I think was twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes.  There were about 800 people in the room, a small room.  And the people who organized the Festival said, “Are you finished?”  He said, “Yes.  Tomorrow is another day.”  And I said, “Bill, we just played twenty minutes.  Do we have another set?”  “I don’t think so, Alan.  I think that will be it.”  And we went upstairs and had champagne.  I said, “Bill, that’s really lovely.  Okay.”  I knew that he was very determined to maintain that he was an artist and he had played.  And when the lady, who I know very well… She said, “Is he finished?”  I said, “We’re going to dinner.” 

     So his integrity I really respect.  And that Bill hasn’t received the tremendous amount of let’s say attention that he deserves… Because if you wanted to write a book about the Sixties, you have to deal with Bill Dixon, especially in New York.

[MUSIC: Places and Things (Bill Dixon, S. Horenstein, A. Silva), C. Taylor/Silva Tales, 8 Whisps]

Q:   [ETC.] I want to play Devil’s Advocate with you.  The music that you were involved in has been generalized and talked about as Free Jazz, or the New Thing, or the New Wave, and so forth and so on, and a number of either comments or accusations and so forth were thrown at the music.  So I’m going to start with a couple of them.  I’m going to throw them at you like I’m insulting you or something, and then I want you to respond.  First of all, the music has no chord sequence, there’s no structure, there’s no foundation.  Talk.

AS:  Talk!  Well, I think the problems when you have the clear structure, that question, no chords… Maybe we can look at the possibilities of the way people learn how to improvise maybe, and then we can figure out why this group decided to say “No chords,” or why did people seem to think that we were not playing chords.

     The problem here is that you have to study… If you were really serious about that question, and you say, “Well, how do people generate musical ideas?”… Well, yes, you could say they are chord-generated, or they are scale or melodically generated.  And I think the major issue here is not whether or not a person can play on chords.  The major issue is whether or not you can constructively construct a piece of music in space and time.  And since improvisation is part of that tradition, let’s say, that you’re able to  create something in the moment, then how do you begin to create?  So that means that when someone says, “Well, I don’t hear… You’re not playing 32-bar songs” or “you’re not playing a 12-bar blues,” it would assume that these were the only way in which music was created.  And I think that that’s quite limited, considering the fact that Nature is quite broad, and there’s many different ways in which creation can be executed.

     So my approach has always been to develop… Well, I consider it two ways.  I like to listen to Thelonious Monk.  I thought Thelonious Monk taught me more about how to improvise than, say, maybe Charlie Parker.  You understand what I mean?  I like the way Duke improvised.  Whether or not we have to learn chords, it’s just simply the fact is, “Do we play on chords?”  And I can tell you now from my current research that there are probably 50 or 60 million different ways in which you can organize any kind of scale  on any kind of chord.

     So the question is, do we play on chords.  It depends on the player.  So one player may be linear and one player may be vertical, and one may be even horizontal.  Some people say you need both of them.  I say, “Well, it depends.”  So I think the current issue even now in the Nineties is, do people play on chords or do they play on melody.  And I think the same issue was for Charlie Parker, and the same issue for Louis Armstrong, for that matter — or go back to the beginning of music.

Q:   Now, one distinction might be that in the case of Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong, they were creating something new, and there is a continuum from the idiomatic tradition out of which they evolved their playing style.  Does this continuum exist in the music of the Sixties?

AS:  Well, I think if you seriously look at the music of the Sixties, with an objective ear, you can start by listening to certain things like what John Coltrane, who was at that point a leading improviser in what we call “chord music”, you understand… I mean, if you really want something about chords…

Q:   Up and down.

AS:  Up and down!  I mean, he created the sheet of sound.  So I happened to be there a number of nights that Trane would be with Miles, taking something like maybe 25 choruses, where Miles would say, “Well, man, how much can you have more to say?”  So if we take Trane, I think Trane is a unique improviser in Afro-American music, because fundamentally he said, “Okay, I’ve learned that; now I’m going to move into this area.”  He did things like Sun Ship, and things like that.  And some people didn’t follow this road.  But I think he was fully equipped to handle any kind of musical situation. 

     But in fact, I think he was just like any normal musician who is continuing to grow.  And I think this issue is the issue of creativity, if you’re involved in music, and I think Trane or Ornette or Cecil are involved of the process of music.  Now, the public has nothing to do with that.  This is a professional thing.

Q:   And an artistic thing.

AS:  Yeah, it’s an artistic pursuit.  And this is defined by that very clearly.  If the audience doesn’t… Some people say, “Well, I liked Coltrane when he was doing the ballads, but I don’t particularly like Ascension,” for instance, I say, “Well, if you’re really involved in listening to an artist’s work, then you’re involved in his research as much as possible,” you see.

Q:   Another thing that was thrown at a lot of the musicians at this period was “They can’t play”…

AS:  Mmm!

Q:   …or “They’re jiving” or “they’re faking,” or “X, Y, Z, A, B and D can play, but…” — and so forth.

AS:  Yeah.  I think I’ve heard that…

Q:   A couple of hundred times.

AS:  Yeah, a couple of million times.  Let’s say Sunny Murray.  Can he swing?   Can he really play time?  Can he really play the Blues?  Or did Cecil ever play the Blues, or did Ornette… You see what I mean?  Consequently, there was not one document that sort of synched(?) it… But like I told you when I began (?) with Cecil… I mean, Cecil was there!  If you’re really serious about what he’s doing today, he’s doing what he’s doing! 

Q:   And going way beyond that.

AS:  Exactly, I mean, in fact.  So for me, in that particular part, yes… I am a well-trained musician.  I studied music.  And some musicians who came through New York, intuitively they were beautiful musicians, and it’s best that they didn’t go to school, because had they gone to school they might have messed up their creative energy to a certain degree.  And some musicians are autodidactic, or what we call orally trained, are just as acceptable — from my point of view.   Such a man who I worked with for a long time is Frank Wright.  Frank Wright played the saxophone like no other person ever played the saxophone.  And if I listen to Frank Wright, I hear something I never heard before.  And that would interest me.  If you’re not interested in that, then I’m sorry.  You can’t talk to me about that.  Because I am interested in the way the instrument sounds, and that’s what….

Q:   And a particular individual’s own sound, and the collision or meeting with the sounds of others.

AS:  Exactly.  And that’s what I think, that the new music again surged into individuality… I think the Free Jazz movement really expressed that, that the spirit of the individual is most important, not fundamentally that the musicality is important.  You see?

Q:   You’re living in Europe, and you’ve been there for many years, and improvisation is your mode of expression.  And in Europe there has developed over the last 25 years a rather substantial community of improvisers, drawing upon their own particular background, resources and so forth.  Have you been associated with those people?

AS:  Yes.

Q:   What are your feelings about it vis-a-vis the broader world of improvising?

AS:  I went to Europe in ’72, left the United States.  I was very aware of the developments of the European improvisation.  But at this time, in the Sixties, I was for Jazz, or improvisation on a world-wide scale.  I didn’t segment it in terms of, well, this was American music and this was European music.  I just thought if you wanted to improvise, then you’re part of this group, and those people who want to read music are part of this group.  I made it very clear.  And I remember, I made my first interview at a Swiss radio station, I said, “Well, 65 or 80 percent of the world’s musicians improvise,” so I don’t have the problem about Classical Music, you see.

     So I think when I’m looking at the source of the Europeans in the Sixties, we were more collectively identified with each other, you understand.  I don’t feel any animosity towards European improvisers in the Sixties, or in the later parts.  Some musicians later started to build a “European improvisational group,” trying to establish some uniqueness.  For me, I do not like nationalism, and I don’t like this at all.  I think that  Peter BrÖtzman plays the saxophone in a certain way, and when I pick up a record and I listen to it, it is not a European saxophone player, it is Peter BrÖtzman.  Because I believe individuality is the essential issue is the Free Jazz music, the voice thing.  So these people start to cornerize the market, like European Jazz is different than American Jazz, and I say, “Unh-uh.”  If the guy has got a sound, for me it’s a certain unit.

     Well, people say, “We’re working on something a little different than American musicians.”  I say, “Mmm.  What could be different?  You play the saxophone?  We play the saxophone.  You play the bass…”  That’s the only difference.  So I think that some people are defending European music not a very good ground for me as a musician, as a worldwide musician.  Because I am not trying to interest myself in… I am going to China, for instance, in May.  I am only interested in improvisation.  And as I said before, I am very clear about that.  Some people are not so clear.  German musicians are affected by American musicians.  As you know now, it’s a big struggle between Europe and America on artistic… [END OF SIDE 2] …product and stuff like this, and the European musicians are feeling affected by the loss of jobs in their own territory.  So it’s more economical.

     Now, if we want to talk about the source of the music, this is a problem of governmental involvement.  Now, we happen to be in America, which…

Q:   Or the involvement of the market.

AS:  For instance, yes.  But the American market is primarily a private industry, and in Europe it’s been a governmental issue.  So I think that the problems of European music… So getting back to the real difference between an American musician and a European musician… I don’t think there’s really a difference.  I can play with European musicians and I can play with American musicians.  This is my own personal thing.  But I know that there is a difference, and this difference I won’t…

     I will say culturally, yes.  Yes, there are some cultural roots in European music that’s different than the American for sure.  I’ve known that for years.  Like, say, drummers.   I mean, they had a hard time really swinging Bebop.  That was one of their hardest… I mean, they couldn’t produce a drummer in Europe for a number of years.  Bass players, too, until much later.  Saxophone players it was difficult, too.  Bebop was a difficult music for the Europeans to really grasp and to really articulate. 

     But a generation later, when we opened the music up to a wider scope, which Cecil did and myself, I thought this… We were all drawing upon a lot of different sources together.  Stockhausen, American Indians… You understand what I mean?  And these sources are available I think to all people.  And this is why I feel… As for myself, I played with the Globe Unity Orchestra, and I’ve played with Cecil Taylor’s Orchestra.  Cecil has done now a whole series of records…

Q:   Duos and trios with European improvisers.

AS:  Exactly.

Q:   Which are extraordinary.

AS:  Extraordinary pieces of music, and I think they will stand upon their own not because Cecil is Cecil, but just stand upon their own as sound documents.  And this is what… I’m very impressed always with Evan Parker.  I’m working now with Roger Turner and Johannes Bauer.  I’m always impressed with their way of handling the sounds.  And I love this.  For me, I have no problem with them.

Q:   We’re speaking with an individual who has generated one of the most distinctive sounds on the acoustic bass over the last thirty years, Alan Silva.  You were speaking of being a world musician, but I think you may even have extended that in the title for your orchestra, the Celestial Communications Orchestra.  The following pieces from a 1978 recording, Sun #3, Portrait For A Small Woman

     Now, your first orchestral record is a semi-legendary piece of work from 1970, in part because of, it has to be said, the horrible pressing! 

AS:  Oh, boy, yes! 

Q:   It’s hard to hear what was going on.

AS:  Right. 

Q:   And that’s I think three volumes on BYG.

AS:  Three volume set.  I think this was my first attempt in terms of recording… I mean, the tapes were fantastic, but I think everybody’s gotten some real bad pressings on that deal.

Q:   The tapes are still around?

AS:  Yes.

Q:   So they theoretically could still be issued.

AS:  Theoretically they could come out.  I’m hoping that Charley Records, or Affinity, who has the tapes, would like to release that album.  I want to hear it on CD.  I’m impressed by the digital process, and especially on this record, which is extremely dense, quite interesting as a sound document.

Q:   Well, 1969 and 1970 was a particularly unique time in Europe.

AS:  Right.

Q:   I know we keep digressing.  But that’s when a lot of musicians from the Midwest, the AACM and other places, settled in Paris, intermingled with European musicians… Talk about that period.  It was an incredible time.

AS:  This piece that I put together in fact was during Christmas, it was December 25th or 28th, something like that… I was on loan in Paris, from the New York scene to the Paris scene.  This particular exchange was I think engineered successfully by a producer there.  The tricky part about this album is that it would never have existed had it not been for one cancellation of a very famous musician, Stan Getz, who was supposed to do a Christmas concert at the ORTF.  Stan Getz could not come to the concert.  So one of my friends who worked in the radio said, “Alan, what could you do?”  And I said, “Well, why don’t we just put everybody that’s in Paris, and we could make a nice orchestra piece.”  That’s the real history of that album.  I mean, the Radio house would have never… The Director of the Radio house, who is Mr. Andre Francis, who really didn’t like Free Jazz at all, he was very, very conservative about his views…

     So the event took place.  And you have to remember that this was ’69, one year after the student revolution.  We had almost 4,000 people at this concert that couldn’t get in.  In fact, the French security forces had surrounded the Radio House, because there were 4,000 people outside and only 3,000 people inside.  If you have a chance to listen to the record, that’s why I put all the claps on the end, I think about five minutes of claps and stomping.  Because I was so impressed, I didn’t believe that this ever could… That’s why I did that as an historical piece.  I think the musicians that are on it, from the Art Ensemble to German and French musicians… It’s an important document of that period.

Q:   This 1978 recording that we will be hearing, however, talk about the genesis of this.  The featured soloist on the piece we’ll be hearing, Communications, which you described as “out,” is Jouk Minor, a baritone…

AS:  A baritone saxophonist.  My residency in France from 1972 all the way up until 1982 has generated a lot of musicians around my work.  I made an orchestra at that period, at different periods, that dealt with European musicians, based around my concepts of what I thought the music was.  These albums represent some of the people who actually studied music with me, and helped me to build my school.  These are the two or three primary players, who now are quite famous in the French Jazz scene, in a sense.  So this is some of the work that we had done together in this particular period on that album. 

     And I think this album represents a kind of retrospect of my work.

Q:   Up to 1978.

AS:  No, I wanted to put some music on line, orchestral ideas, that I didn’t do on my 1969 record.  You understand what I mean?  In the sense that it is some pieces that I conceptualized here, like Broadway, from the point of view of this music is not totally improvised.  There’s a lot of written music.  And this album was conceptualized as a possibility of anything I could do after that, you see.

[MUSIC: CCO, Communications, The Shout, Wright/Silva/Ali, Center Of The World (Pt.1)]

     The area between being a bass player, being a composer and bandleader, or being an orchestra leader and a composer during this period of the Seventies, when the last things that you hear are European pieces, and working with Frank Wright, the Center of the World Quartet, which I thought was one of the most successful of what I would call people- living-abroad bands… We were one of the most successful Americans-living-abroad bands in the Seventies that didn’t go back to America — let’s look at it that way.  From this resident group of musicians, there were two bands that were left, the Steve Lacy Sextet and the Frank Wright Quartet (or the Center of the World).  As you know, Steve Lacy and I have maintained ourselves abroad, and Bobby Few has… So Steve has continued world stature, using Paris as his base.  That band he created, the Sextet, as you know is quite well-known on the  world-wide scale. 

     But Center of the World broke up in the late Seventies.  Frank Wright went on to make other music with other bands.  I went into the educational business, making the Institute for Art Cultural Perception, and the orchestra became my vehicle, in the Seventies and the late Eighties, of my productions.  After that I didn’t do too many quartet albums.

[PAUSE]

     I’m currently working with two European musicians, an English drummer, Roger Turner, and Johannes Bauer, a trombonist from East Germany (which is now no longer the East) who comes from a very fine family of musicians, the Bauer family, which has Kenny Bauer, Conrad Bauer — I mean, this family is full of bass players and trombone players.  We decided to make a little trio, and the success of that has been… We did the Nickelsdorff Festival last year.  It’s not currently working that much, but we are now working on a CD which you will hear some tracks from at the present moment.

     And I’m working with a man named A.R. Penck and Frank Wolley.

Q:   A.R. Penck is another person who is dealing with a dual artistic or creative identity, and is best-known and probably best financially remunerated as a painter.

AS:  Exactly.  And as a sound document.  I like Ralph because Ralph worked with Frank Wright for a number of years, and I thought he did a number of festivals here in New York.  I thought he did the Sound [sic: Sound Unity] Festival one year; he sponsored something with Frank Wright and Peter Kowald, I think.  He’s done a number of Sound festivals in London.  He sponsors himself.

     I am currently involved with one of his projects, the trio, called the TTT.  Butch Morris, of course, has been with TTT for a number of years, along with Frank Wright.  I just joined the organization after the death of Frank Wright, so I decided to join that group.  And this record you will hear later today with Jeanne Lee, who has been  working with A.R. Penck…

[MUSIC: A.R. Penck/Silva; Bauer/Turner/Silva; Silva (environmental sound piece)]

AS:  The last piece is a computer-generated piece which is run with environmental sound of a piece I wrote for an art exposition in the town of Duren(?).  If you can hear the water mixing with the sound… It was done for an art exposition environmental sound piece.

     The one before that was my new trio, and we hear four short selections that will possibly be coming out in the near future.  Here I guess I’m exhibiting myself as a synthesizer player. 

     So those records have a whole different line of what I’m currently working on, synthesized music, I don’t play too much bass… I use bass inside the synthesizer.

[ETC.]

     I have always been interested in institution building.  And that means, consequently, that I believe in musicians’ control.  And my whole life has been devoted to actually trying to control my art.  I would say that Bill Dixon and myself, that’s the problems we might have in contemporary society.  See, people who like to control things…

Q:   The market.  Capital.

AS:  For instance.  Or the ability to be a producer.  Or the ability for some musicians to have some control over their existence.  And going further into actually building institutions that really reflect musicians’ attitudes, such as what I try to do at my school, the Institute for Art, Culture and Perception.  The most important thing is that musicians of my generation, what I feel was concerned with institution-building… I really respect the people from the AACM for the long work they  done in continuing that spirit.  We had the Jazz Composers Guild in New York, and we didn’t achieve the objectives set up by the organization.  But I am very respectful of the AACM for their continuing to try to be a musician-controlled institution.  And this what…

Q:   What you’re about.

AS:  What I’m about, actually. 

[ETC.]

[MUSIC: C. Taylor, Niggle Figgle]

     This was a fantastic concert.  I think we had just finished doing the two records, Unit Structures and Conquistador, and we came to Paris to do an art project.  And this piece I think is probably… Student Studies and Amplitude is really interesting; it’s a longer piece.  I like this piece because of the speed at which the energy is flowing.  But the other two pieces are very important pieces of Cecil in terms of space, time, energy release.  He never curated any pieces like this before, later… I think this band really understood space and time in a very deep sense, and that’s what I really remember about this piece.

In Honor of Bass Master Curtis Lundy’s 68th Birthday, the Transcript of our WKCR Musician Show, May 29, 1966

Curtis Lundy Musician Show (May 29, 1996):

[MUSIC: Pharaoh Sanders, “Africa” – Pharaoh-Lundy-Idris—1987; John Hicks Trio, “Pas de Trois” – Hicks-Lundy-Idris–1987 (I’ll Give you Something To Remember Me By]

TP:   You’re from Florida, the home state of the great bassist Sam Jones and many other musicians. Let’s talk about your origins in music.

CL:    I started really dealing seriously with music, I guess you could say… When I was in junior high school, I played snare drum at the time in the concert band.

TP:   This was in Miami?

CL:   This was in Miami. Southwest Miami. I don’t know how many of your listeners know anything about Miami, but Southwest Miami is… When Hurricane Andrew came through there, it was the part that was most devastated. I’m thankful that my family was all right through that experience. But that’s below the Coconut Grove area and places like that.

TP:   Is your family musical?

CL:   I guess you could say that…

TP:   We have to give your sister Carmen Lundy a plug; she’s beginning a week this evening at Sweet Basil, through Sunday. But where did it come from? Parents? Family? Natural inclination?

CL:   I think it came from my mother’s side of the family, with the deep gospel tradition that was in our family, and just the love of music of all kinds. I had a couple of aunts who played piano, and an uncle… Basically, all of my mother’s siblings knew something about music, just because of the love of music and the praise that they would give the Creator for giving them the life that they had.

TP:   Were you absorbing music through them?

CL:   Yes.

TP:   Were they giving you tips or lessons? Or just hearing the ebullience of it?

CL:   Just hearing it, and being in the environment almost on a daily basis. If not actually being in church, just being overwhelmed by my mother’s ability to be such a great singer and not go at it from a commercial point of view. That’s something that was striking to me also. But my grandfather also played a little guitar. My mother and most of my aunts had a singing group called the Apostolic Singers, and my grandfather would manage the group. They used to do concerts with people like the Staples Singers and people like that, when the Staples Singers were still singing exclusively gospel music. That experience, being around…

The accompanist for the group would change once in a while. I remember they had this one cat who was…I could tell that he was… I thought he was kind of from Mars at the time, because I was about 6 or 7 years old, and he was trained in the jazz and classical tradition. When he came to play with my mother and her group, I was like, “Wow, this cat is playing some different stuff!” I’ll never forget it. His name was George. I never knew his last name or anything. But he was bad. My mother and all of the other singers in the group really dug him because he played some different stuff. He would be like Hicks coming in and joining a gospel group. He was that kind of cat. I still remember that. He left that kind of impression on me.

TP:   Any records of jazz particularly that you heard as a youngster before taking up snare drum in that concert band? When did you first become aware of it?

CL:   I heard boogie-woogie piano music and some stride stuff, because my aunt would play some of that stuff. But actually, it was almost taboo to play that in my grandfather’s house. So whenever he wasn’t there, they would sneak and cut a few tunes…

TP:   Because it was the “devil’s music”?

CL:   So to speak, yes.

TP:   So you came up in a very intensely religious environment.

CL:   You could say that. Yeah, you could say that.

TP:   The Spirit was there.

CL:   The Spirit was there. But it was cool, because my people were realists, too. They would allow us to experience life on life’s terms, but at the same time they never let us lose the focus, which in my formative years proved to be very good for me, and later on in my life and to this very date has shown to be something that I can draw on as a reserve for my personal strength to move to whatever direction I’m trying to move in.

TP:   Let’s jump back to junior high school and the snare drum. What was the musical program like?

CL:   Actually, I had a great junior high school band director. His name was Mr. Valentine. He was on the same level as…you know, when cats out of Chicago talk about Captain Dyett and DuSable and all those schools like that… Well, Mr. Valentine was that level. He was a great musician, and his family…his father was also a great musician and composer and arranger. Mr. Valentine was the kind of cat that whatever… If somebody missed a note or missed a beat or anything on any instrument in the band, he could pick the instrument up and play what was supposed to happen. He would let them know in no uncertain terms, “don’t let it happen again or else somebody else is going to be sitting in your chair.”

TP:   What sort of music did he have you play?

CL:   We played symphonic music and we played march…a lot of Sousa stuff and things like that. We were one of those bands that would go those band competitions. The State of Florida is kind of famous for that.

What happened was, the turnover in the band… I joined the band when I was in 7th grade, I think. Every year, the new class would get a chance to audition for the band and to start preparing themself musically. What would happen, we would have to play some of the same music during the interim of those periods, because they had to get a chance to learn some of the music that we were already playing. I kind of got bored with doing all the time, so what I used to do was start improvising on the music…

TP:   Were you past the snare drum at this point?

CL:   No, I was still playing the snare drum. Because I dug the snare drum. Whenever I would improvise… We used to have a little crew, me and a couple of my partners, and each section would do something — what we would call “making it funky.” But Mr. Valentine was a disciplinarian. He didn’t go for that, to put it lightly. So I ended up getting kicked out of the band. But I think that was a good lesson for me — to show me that it takes discipline to deal with music, too. Even though I was a pretty good section player, he had to teach us a lesson about the discipline of music, and I’m glad that it happened, when I looked back at it, because later on in life I realized that was important for me.

TP:   What led you to the bass?

CL:   Well, after I got kicked out of the band, I think that next year… Christmas was coming up. All of my friends were getting little motorcycles and minibikes and stuff, so of course I wanted one, too. So my mother told me, “Forget about that; what’s your second choice?” I always loved music, and at the time Motown was really happening and all of that stuff was going on. I guess I had felt some kind of probably resentment toward the snare drum because I’d had a bad experience with that with the band. I always liked the rhythm section and I liked the bass, and I asked my mother for a bass. So she bought me an electric bass, and I just started learning how to play on my own, and learning all the tunes of the time…

TP:   What did you do? You listened to the records and the radio, and just listened to the basslines?

CL:   Yeah, I listened to James Jamerson. I listened to all the stuff that was happening then, in particular cats like James Jamerson, Bootsy, I really dug Willie Weeks. Cats like that. Cats who could really play the Fender, but also, as I found out later on, those same guys also knew something about the instrument and about the upright, so their approach to the electric bass was very rhythmic as opposed to playing a lot of notes. They really understood the function of the bass, and that was important to me.

TP:   Talk a bit more about that function of the bass that they understood. That seems to have been imbibed by you from the very beginning of your playing?

CL:  It was. I always felt that the bass…if you would look at the anatomy of the body, the bass is the heartbeat, along with the drums… But if I were to break it down, the drums are the heartbeat but the bass is what makes the blood flow through the veins. That’s the approach to the instrument that I enjoy. For me, listening to those kinds of bass players, I understood that the function of the bass was not to get in the way, but also to be tasteful and to accent the beat. That’s something that I always liked and I always try to do when I play, even to today. Because a lot of bass players sometimes, I think, get away from the function of the instrument — and that’s very important.

TP:   It’s an interesting point, jazz music being a music of personalities, and many bassists having personalities just as strong musicians…how to articulate that personality while remaining true to the function of the instrument. This perhaps is a question for later, but since we’re on it, how do you deal with that?

CL:   I allow myself to let the music dictate what I play, as opposed to forcing it. I’m the kind of person that if I find…if there’s a hole that needs to be filled, I try to fill it properly, but I also try not to overflow the glass, so to speak. It’s a very fine line between those two. But when you look at people like… I think one of my best examples (now in hindsight, I think about it) of someone who could do that would be Israel Crosby. He knew how to keep the glass full and not overflow. That was the approach that… I tried to steer myself in that direction.

TP:   It’s time to get to our first musical segment. We’ll keep in mind that in our narrative, Curtis has taken up the electric bass and he’s practicing to James Jamerson and Willie Weeks and Bootsy as a teenager in Miami.

This set will focus on music by Paul Chambers, one of your personal musical heroes. We’ll begin with a piece titled “Visitation” from a 1956 recording he led for the Jazz West label – the Paul Chambers Quartet with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Kenny Drew on piano, and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

[MUSIC: Paul Chambers 4, “Visitation”-1956; Sonny Clark Trio, “Two Bass Hit”-1957; PC, “Easy To Love”–1956 Jazz West; Sonny Clark Trio, “Tadd’s Delight”–1957–PC & Philly Joe]

TP:   What brought you to the acoustic bass?

CL:   I think around my 9th grade year, I would venture… Even though I was kicked out of the band, I used to go back into the band room, and I started seeing these instruments in there, this bass fiddle in there, with all this dust on it. I would just play around with it then. It wasn’t really in good shape. And for some reason, at the time, the orchestra part of music in my junior high school was not happening, I guess for the lack of people who were interested in playing string instruments or whatever. But the first time I ever heard the instrument, I really dug it. But I didn’t really get a chance to start dealing with it until I got to high school in tenth grade. I was playing football at the time…

TP: You were a defensive back, right?

CL:   Right. Actually, linebacker and defensive back. Something kept pulling me toward really dealing with the music. I guess the fact that for me, teaching myself how to play the electric bass and starting to learn how to deal with reading music and stuff like that… I started working a lot from the age of 14 on up. I started getting quite a lot of work, playing.

TP:   What sort of work?

CL:   At the time, Miami Beach was still the place to be, “the playground for the stars” and all that kind of stuff. I had put together a band that basically did top-40 stuff and different things, a lot of Donnie Hathaway stuff, things like that. We had a pretty good band, and we would get a lot of calls to work on Miami Beach. At that time, it was quite lucrative because the scene was still happening. I don’t think it was so much the money that motivated me, but just the fact that the art… For some reason, I related to the art of the music more than I did the financial expectations that some people look at.

TP:   You learned quickly. You started at 13; by 14 you’re…

CL:   Yes, I was working a lot.

TP:   So in high school, you’re on the football team, and in the school band…not in the school band, but instead working on various gigs…

CL:   Yes, I was working a lot playing the electric bass. But at the same time, after football season was over… There was a group in my high school called the Killian Singers. This group was basically a pop vocal music group that was based in our high school. My sister was part of that group, and some really good singers at that time. They asked me if I wanted to play the bass. I think at the same time, if you played football in Miami you also had to run track and you had to do that kind of stuff to stay in shape for football. So I was also running track, and I didn’t feel like lugging my electric bass to school every day to play with these singers, because to me, they were doing this kind of corny…what I felt at the time was corny pop music… I don’t want to call the titles off, but some things that really hit my main nerve — let’s put it like that. But still, once in a while, they’d come up with some hip stuff. I happened to look in the closet once again, and there was an upright bass in there. So I thought: Listen, maybe I’ll try to play this bass and learn how to do this. That’s when I first started really wanting to get serious about it.

After that, after my sister saw that I could pretty much get a tone on the instrument, she started playing a few records around the house. At the time, Freddie Hubbard… “Red Clay” and all that stuff was happening. That’s really some of the first stuff I started listening to, that kind of stuff, CTI stuff, things like that, until I started doing some investigating on my own.

TP:   Well, Ron Carter was on some of those dates.

CL:   Yeah, exactly. I heard that, and I said, “Yeah, I like that.” So I started really trying to get serious about the instrument then.

TP:    Did you study with someone?

CL:   No. I kind of taught myself for a little while, and actually I taught myself until I went to college. Then I hooked up with one of the greatest classical bassists that’s probably alive today, Lucas Drew, at the University of Miami. He was my teacher. I spent a lot of time with him. Not as much time as I could have. But I spent enough time with him to understand two or three different things that are really important: #1, that the instrument is an instrument of nobility, and that you need to take it very seriously; #2, the fact that he felt I had some natural inclinations toward the instrument; and #3, that he respected this music that we call jazz.

I’ll never forget one of the main statements he made to me. He was pushing me towards the classical vein and learning that music, and that was great. But for some reason I felt I needed to tell him that I wanted to be a jazz bassist. He said, “Well, all of the great bass players can do this.” That put me right in the place I needed to be.

TP:   That includes Paul Chambers, whose music we just heard. There are stories of his ability to go into a situation like that and read something down and play with great virtuosity…

CL:   Exactly.

TP:   Did you discover his music around this time? Is this when you started exploring records, and getting a bit further into it than the contemporary CTI albums?

CL:   Definitely. Around this same time I started… The first cat I really got into was Ray Brown. Then one day I got this Miles record with Paul, and I think for about 6 months straight I just listened to that.

TP:   Let’s talk about the stylistic dynamics and approach to the bass that have affected you and so many other bass players similarly.

CL:   Well, first of all, his tone is remarkable. His intonation is flawless. His ability, as you said, to go into any situation and not overshadow anybody in the same way, say, someone like Art Blakey could do. Be the ultimate sideman but also step to the forefront and demand attention from the listener, not just the musicians. That’s important to me. Today, I feel that a lot of musicians…this is just how I feel, so you can take it for what it’s worth… A lot of musicians play musicians for musicians, and they don’t play music for the people. That kind of bugs me. Because the music is for the people; it’s not for the musicians. Paul and the people of that generation played that way, to me. It’s a very formidable approach to the music, to have somebody know that it wasn’t the musicians that were important, but it was the listener, because without the listener, there is no music.

In terms of Paul’s prowess, there are so many things that, as you said, myself and other bass players have been able to get from him. The first thing is that, even if he never took a solo, he was a great bass player because of knowing his function in the rhythm section. He was just very special.

I look at music, and I guess life itself, in two categories. There are certain people who are gifted and then there’s people who are talented. Paul was one of those who was gifted. A lot of people search their whole life to do things the way that he did them on the instrument — and whatever instrument it is, not just the bass. He was gifted.

TP: He was 21 and 22 on the tracks we heard earlier, laying down timeless musical statements.

CL:   Exactly. I felt that if I would try to deal with that approach, I wouldn’t miss that far off the mark, and that’s what I try to do still to this day.

TP:   While attending the University of Miami, I gather that’s where you began to encounter a number of people who would be significant to you today. Was Bobby Watson there at the time?

CL:   Definitely. There was another cat who’s here on the scene, Benjamin Brown. When he came to New York, he was working with Dizzy a lot. Ben spent more time, very seriously, with Lucas Drew (the teacher I was talking about), and really got a lot of the things I should have gotten, and that today I’m still dealing with and working on. I really respect Ben a lot. He’s an excellent musician, a great bass player, and a good friend, too. He looked out for me. A few things that he could throw my way, he did at the time, when we were coming through. He kind of inspired me to let me know that a cat from way down in Miami could come to New York and make it. So he was an inspiration.

Also, Bobby, of course, was there. And there was a trumpet player who has since passed on, bless him. His name was Caesar Elie. He came to New York once or twice. He had a few personal problems. But he was a great trumpet player. By my taste, he was the best trumpet player I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s a shame that he won’t be heard any more. But he was everything that a lot of these cats out here would like to be. He was all of that. I met him, and Bobby and I had a band with him in it with another cat who’s down there now named John McMahon, who was a tenor player who sounded like Trane back then. Now he’s playing a lot of piano. There were a lot of cats who just were great musicians. I was fortunate enough that they felt I wanted to know the music and learn the music enough, and they gave me an opportunity to play.

TP:   In a certain, it seems you were really going against the grain. This is the mid-1970s, and fusion and disco are at its peak, and the electric side of the instrument…Jaco Pastorius, also from Miami…

CL:   Well, he’s from Fort Lauderdale, but he was there at the school. As a matter of fact, I studied with Jaco on the electric bass. I never stopped playing the electric bass. As a matter of fact, my first record date in New York was with Bobby, playing the electric bass on this Roulette record. I was scared to death, because it was the first time I got a chance to play with Billy Hart. I think Billy Higgins was also on the date. Roland Prince. It was a good date. That’s actually the first time I came to New York; I was still playing electric bass. But once I got here and I saw all these cats working on the upright exclusively, that was it for me. I was like, “Ok…”

TP:   By ‘against the grain’ I mean not so much playing the electric, but sticking with the idiom of jazz in the tradition. There must have been economic temptations, among others, to do otherwise. Or not?

CL:   Yes, there were. But at the same time, the band that I talked about that Bobby and I had (and my sister also) with this trumpet player who I mentioned, we played all of that stuff. At the time, it was kind of hard not to play “Mr. Magic” (know what I’m saying?) and all that kind of stuff. So we had to do that. But we also would go ahead and stretch out and play some things. We tried to make the musical mix somewhat also pleasing to the ear, but at the same time challenging to pay. To me, music also needs that challenge. I need that personally to keep driving me.

TP:   The subject of the next set of music will be Oscar Pettiford. We’ll hear tracks from the two small orchestra dates he recorded for United States in the mid-1950s.

CL:   After discovering Paul and being wiped out by him, I said, “Well, where did he get this from?” I started looking into it, and I found out that Oscar Pettiford was a source of his inspiration. So of course, I had to look into that. Sometimes, as a musician, when you find a cat who blows you away so much, you say, “Maybe let’s try to find somebody who can spoon-feed me a little bit.” I tried to do that with Oscar, and it was like, “Let me go somewhere else.”

But seriously, Oscar was once again a complete musician — an arranger, composer, and all those things. I wanted to investigate Paul’s inspiration, and I think I found it with Oscar. It was important for me to understand his function in the music, and during the timespan in which he lived, the importance of his life and what he gave to the music.

[MUSIC: OP, “The Gentle Art of Love”-1956; OP, “Tricotism”-1956, Lucky Thompson and Skeeter Best; OP, “Sunrise” (Gigi Gryce, arrangement)-1956–In Hifi]

CL:  As Dizzy I think said in these liner notes, at this time there were two geniuses of the bass (he felt) — that was OP and Blanton. Oscar for me really took the art of playing the instrument as if it was a horn to that level in terms of improvisation. Of course, Blanton was in the forefront of that, but Oscar really showed the capability of the bass as a solo instrument. That was important, if not for anything else, to show the bass players of that time, I think, to explore the instrument for all the musical qualities it offers, and I believe it was important for that to be heard. Also, by the same token, he was a great rhythm section player, and knew the function of the bass. That always impressed. There are bass players to this day who are wonderful soloists, but that’s the way they play — as if they are waiting for their solo. When I hear… No matter how good a bass player is able to play the instrument as a soloist, if he doesn’t play the function of the bass, I really… I have respect for him as a soloist but not as a bassist. Because that’s what the instrument is about.

TP:   In Miami at the time you were coming up, there was another bassist who is one of the great soloists and great composer and function player – that’s Israel Lopez, Cachao, in Latin music. Was that another element of your musical experience coming up in Miami?

CL:   Yes, it had to be. At that time, Latin music was starting to grow there, of course because of the influx of Cubans coming over. Being based in Miami, it was important to understand that type of music. I was fortunate, because at the time I had a steady gig that I think lasted two years at a place I think called Leisure Den, and at the time Cachao was working a block away. The drummer who was on the gig was this cat named Diego Abora(?—38:51), whose father played with Miles, and he was a very good drummer. He asked me one night on the break did I know Cachao. I said, “No, who is he?” He told me who he was. He said, “He’s working a block away.” So on the break we walked down to this club, which was a disco club, and there was this disco band playing. Latin disco band; they were playing some Latin stuff. Cachao was playing bass. The way they had the band set up, he was in the middle of the band, and he was burning, playing whatever he needed to play. But what really wiped is in the middle of one of these disco dance tunes he pulls out the bow, and takes this unbelievable solo. From then on I was a Cachao fanatic. Once again, he understood the function of the bass. Because right there, he was making people dance, which is another art that the music has moved away from but which I believe is important, too — to make people have that kind of feeling.

TP:   He’s also a master of tumbao as well as the strings – he works them simultaneously.

CL:   Yes. He did everything that I thought somebody could do with the bass that night. So from then on, on all of my breaks, I would go down and listen tohim. It proved to be a good experience for me, teaching me how to play that type of music also.

TP:   What brought you to New York?

CL:   Actually, the fact that I kept reading these record liner notes. I said to myself, after I’d made the decision that I wasn’t going to become a professional football player, that I was going to be a professional musician, New York was the place where all the great musicians were… My aspiration at the time was to play with the best musicians in the world, and they were in New York. After my sister came to New York and then Bobby came to New York, it was like everybody was leaving and I was the only one still there, so to speak. A lot of cats who I went to school with, like Hiram Bullock and Pat Metheny…these cats were coming to New York and making it. So I figured I could give it a try, too, and I came.

TP: What was step one?

CL:   Step one was learning that you have to have your own voice, and I think that’s something I learned from listening to Paul and Oscar, because even though I loved them, I still wanted to say something — or learn how to say something, which I’m still working on — that represented what Curtis Lundy was about and where he came from and what he stood for. That was step-1. I think I was able to start to approach that by just dealing with the sound of the instrument. At the time I  came to New York, I didn’t particularly like a lot of the stuff that I heard sound-wise. I liked what musicians were playing, and bass players in particular, but they didn’t get the sound of the bass that I thought was important. You have your exceptions, of course. But as a rule, I thought there was a void for that, and I tried in my own way to fill that void.

TP:   Step 2?

CL:   Step 2 was learning how to fit in any situation that was called for me musically, because at the time I came to New York, which was in the late 70s, the avant-garde music was still prevalent and even though I come from the swing tradition, I learned very quickly that you have to learn how to play all types of music here. I learned a lot from that experience, playing with people like Beaver Harris, the Reverend Frank Wright, people like that, who were a little bit to the left but their music still required discipline and knowledge of the instrument.

That was step 2, and I guess, if I can precede you here, step 3 was learning that life ain’t fair, heh-heh, that you have to take what’s given you and work it to your best ability to move forwards, to go to the next level.

TP:   Next we’ll hear from a musician who often expressed his view that life is not fair, and expressed many views in an impassioned and individualistic way — Charles Mingus. Your first exposure to Mingus’ music.

CL:   The first time I met Mingus, I was at a concert I think at Avery Fisher Hall. I think Bobby was playing with Art Blakey at the time, so I was allowed to come in and hang out with the cats. I saw Mingus, so I immediately ran up to him and asked him if he could show me anything about the bass. He said, “I don’t talk before I play.” Even though he said it in a demonstrative way, as only he could do, I felt good about him saying that to me, because it showed me how serious he was about the music. Then I heard him play some piano, and it showed me how musical this man was and how much he put towards learning about the shades and the colors of the music.

I think the first time that I heard Mingus was hearing “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” and I knew this was an important figure in the jazz community. I started following him then.

TP:   Mingus’ main inspiration compositionally was Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Blanton on the bass. So “Mood Indigo” from 1963.

[MUSIC: Mingus, “Mood Indigo” – 1963; Ellington–Blanton, “Jack the Bear:-1940; Ellington-Blanton, “Sophisticated Lady”-1940; Ellington-Ray Brown, “Pitter Panther Patter”-This One’s For Blanton]

TP:   On the next set you’ll be hearing a taste of Curtis, some different situations. But first, a few words about Ray Brown, who you credit as your first jazz bass influence, and Jimmy Blanton.

CL:   I think that Ray Brown’s approach to the instrument is formidable. His sense of timing for me is important, because it showed me how to play, first of all, within the trio setting. A lot of the time, I guess before that, I was listening to a lot of horn bands, but I got turned on to Ray Brown playing with Oscar Peterson, and I started wanting to know more about who Ray Brown was recently. Then I found this record with Duke and Ray playing this tribute to Blanton, and then I went further and found out who Jimmy Blanton was. Ray Brown is still, to this day, one of my biggest influences, I would say. As I said before, although I try not to sound like one person in particular, I think Ray Brown is an important ingredient for every bass player to have as a part of their total sound and total approach to the instrument.

TP:   Before we discuss Jimmy Blanton, I’d like to speak with you about playing the different functions. As an instance, how you might vary your approach within a trio as opposed to playing in a band with horns, for instance, just to start?

CL:   We can go a little further and talk about duo playing.

TP:   A big part of a New York bassist’s job.

CL:   Exactly. I believe that to really understand the function of the bass, you’ve got to go all the way back to that. I’ve been fortunate to play in those type of settings with people like John Hicks and other pianists on the scene — but mostly I like to work with John a lot. He and I have a musical rapport that works for me. Also, John is so knowledgeable about the music that I’m always learning and being challenged by playing his compositions. Also, he’ll always dig something up that I should know. That’s one of the reasons why I love John so much. Without being overbearing about it, he’s always teaching. He’s always teaching me in particular about the history of the music and what I should know, and also playing the way that he plays influences me to learn more about the whole spectrum of music that I should be aware of — and it’s important.

For the bass, learning how to play in a duo setting makes you a stronger player in other settings. Because there’s no drums, and you have to know where the time is all the time, and you have to keep that support there. That’s important. I always tell bass players, “As much as you can, just play duo,” because it teaches you how to be a supportive instrumentalist, but at the same time it shows you how to play within the harmony and the textures of the music to a point where it’s a full sound — and that’s very important.

TP:   Let’s talk about a trio — say with John Hicks and Idris Muhammad or Victor Lewis. Then what do you do differently?

CL:   I let the drummer be more concerned with the beat and I am concerned with the rhythm, as opposed to duo playing where I’m concerned with the beat and the rhythm.

TP:   That’s the nature of the dialogue with the drums that’s part of any rhythm section.

CL:   Exactly. So it frees me up to be more rhythmic, but at the same time to interplay with the drummer in terms of different types of motifs we can get into musically just from the bass and the drummer’s point of view. It’s challenging to go from that setting to the trio setting, because it loosens you up, but it also helps you to understand that function is still there to be a part-of.

TP: Moving away from Professor Lundy’s incisive lecture on bass function, let’s move to a few words about Jimmy Blanton and his pathbreaking approach to the bass.

CL: The first time I heard Blanton, I couldn’t believe that he was doing the stuff that he was doing on the bass, and when he was doing it. It was unheard-of on that instrument at that time for somebody to be playing it like that. I was talking to you earlier about the fact that I’d heard the Sun Ra interview on this station, and how Sun Ra was saying that somebody had told him about Jimmy Blanton, and he missed getting Jimmy Blanton to play with him by two days. I’m serious. He went to St. Louis, I think, to go and see Blanton, and Duke had just got him two days before Sun Ra got there. That was interesting to me.

But Blanton, once again, being the predecessor of Oscar Pettitord, showed the bass as a solo instrument. He also showed that there were no limitations to what could be done on the instrument if you really studied the instrument and approached it from that point of view.

TP:  And he was working without an amplifier.

CL:   Exactly. His sound, once again; his approach to the instrument; and his understanding of the function within the band.

TP:   How about Mingus’ bass playing?

CL:   Mingus, I believe, again, was heavily influenced by Jimmy Blanton. His approach to music, not just the bass but his approach to music, was important for me to understand as a bassist… At the time I was learning how to start writing music and really how to become a composer and arranger at the same time. He was important for me because he was doing all of these things, and out of all these people we’ve played besides Ray Brown, I could see Mingus. That was important for me. I could see him play.

TP;   What’s the value of seeing a musician play vis-a-vis just hearing him on a recording?

CL:   Because you get a chance to see… It’s like a baseball player or a football player or a basketball player. It’s one thing to talk about Dr. J and hear the legend of him, but you can watch him and see how he does it, and watch the nuances of the way he approaches his game. It was the same thing musically. I got a chance to see how Mingus approaches his game, how he approached the instrument, how he approached music as a whole. The same thing with Sam Jones, Ray Brown, Ron Carter, people like that. It’s an invaluable experience to watch these people do the things that you are aspiring to do as a musician, and be able to see them do it. It gives you a better insight on how you can also do it, and do it in your own way.

Walter Bishop once said to me that there’s three different levels that usually happens with a musician. Imitation, assimilation, and innovation. Most people deal with the first two. Very rarely do we come up with innovators. I feel that in particular Jimmy Blanton, Oscar Pettiford and Paul Chambers are the innovators on that instrument. There are others who I believe did things that are very formidable, such as Slam Stewart. Ray, and Ron also. But in terms of being an innovator on the instrument, I really would stick with those three.

TP:   What’s the nature of Oscar Pettiford’s and Paul Chambers’ innovations?

CL:   I think for the time that they played the instrument, and the timespan that the played the instrument, they took it to the next level. Because if you notice, in the Blanton style of playing, he really didn’t…I’m not saying he couldn’t… But at that time, and for the style of the music, the way he played the walking bassline was not really…the way that evolved into the way Oscar Pettiford played the walking bassline, and then how Paul played it… There were different choices of how to do that.

TP:   Are you speaking of the phrasing?

CL:   The choice of notes, the phrasing, and the types of music the played in the idiom…the context of the type of music they played in at that time.

TP:   Now it’s time to hear some recordings Curtis has played on over the years. We’ll begin with something you did with Betty Carter, with whom so many musicians have really received their polishing-up, so to speak. Her role has been similar to that of Art Blakey, Horace Silver and people like this over the years. I guess her band is where you met John Hicks. How did you come to that gig?

CL:   As I said before, I was playing with some guys who were playing, for lack of a better term, avant-garde and free music. Every chance I’d get in some of those bands, I would swing, and for some reason they seemed to like it. I guess the word got out. At the time, there were more jam sessions and open places for musicians to sit in. So the word got out, and I got a call one day… I was actually down to like my last, and I got a call one day from Jack Whittemore, who at the time was booking everybody. He had a stable of some of the greatest performers in this music. I got a call from Jack, and he said, “Curtis, Betty Carter is looking for a bass player and she’d like to hear you and see if you can play her music.” I was nervous. I went over to her house. John was there, and Kenny Washington was there, and we played a few charts. She took me to the side and said, “there are some things you need to work on, but I kind of like your sound, and I think I might be able to do something with you.”

TP:   What do you think the things were she thought she had to do with you at that point?

CL: Enhance my ability to really understand what it was to play behind a singer – number one. Help me to relax and learn how to enjoy the music. And make me practice.

[MUSIC: Betty Carter, “Tight”—Hicks-Curtis-Kenny, The Audience with BC-1979; 2 from Whatever Happened to Love-Khalid Moss, Curtis, Lewis]

TP:   You’re currently working with Betty Carter. You’re leaving town with her tomorrow, and you’ll be performing Monday in New York at the Pierre Hotel.

CL:   I enjoy every chance I get to work with Betty. It has seemed to work out over the years that once in a while she’s in between bass players, in between discovering some new cat, and she calls me because I think I understand her approach to the music and her concept of what she wants to do – and also the theater that’s involved. There’s a visual aspect. Betty was one of the first people who helped me to understand that the music still had to have drama and theater to it. That’s an important part of how you lean towards playing with her, in note choice and interplay with her.

TP:   We’ll speak a bit less and fit in more music as we wind down to 9 o’clock. We’ll hear more Paul Chambers. This is from Jan. 18, 1959 date by Jackie McLean, one of two sessions that comprise Jackie’s Bag – “Fidel.”

[MUSIC: Jackie McLean-D. Byrd-Sonny Clark-Paul-Philly, “Fidel”-1959; Tina Brooks-Blue Mitchell-Kenny Drew-Paul Chambers-A.T., Back To The Tracks-1960]

CL:   Partly the reason why I chose those two selections is to show Paul’s impeccable time and his sense of harmony in terms of note choice, just to show how… I made the comment before how some bass players play like they’re waiting for their solo. Paul never did that. He shows you how great a rhythm section player he is, and his sense of time is absolutely great. I always respected and admired that about him, just the fact that he was such a virtuoso on the instrument. But he understood, once again, the function. So that was special for me to hear him play like that, not just on those dates, but…

I often tell people, when you look at some of the major recordings of the early 50s going into the 60s, and if they’re classic recordings, a lot of times you look at the lineup, and Paul is playing bass.

TP:   For the last set, the tracks will feature two Florida-born bass players, Sam Jones and George Tucker.

CL:   First of all, George Tucker was a bass player that a lot of people kind of slept on, as far as I’m concerned. The first time I heard him, his sound impressed me and his ability to play great time and be a very supportive accompanist made an impression upon me. Of course, Sam Jones was one of the all-time great bass players as well. I didn’t realize George Tucker was from Florida until… I remember meeting his sister one time, and I asked where he was from, and she told me Palatka. When I was a kid, we used to go through Palatka on some of our church meetings going through Florida. I had the experience knowing one of the oldest men ever in America. I think his name was Pop Crosby. He was 116 years old, and he was from Palatka. So I had a connection with that city.

TP: He was 116 in the early 1960s?

CL:   Yes. He told me stories about slavery and the end of it and all that kind of stuff. He was a very heavy man, and it’s just a coincidence that George Tucker also was from Palatka.

Sam Jones, as I said, was one of the bass players who I had a chance to see when I came to New York. He was such a beautiful and warm person, which I think is a personality trait. A sense of feeling and family that people who come from the Sun have, and they’re able to share that with you.

TP:   a few words about his playing. Sam Jones was an almost universally admired bass player.

CL:   I think that’s because of the warmth that he exuded from the instrument and from his personality as well. He made you feel welcome when you were in his company. He was a beautiful person. I really cherish the times that I was able to be in his company. Of course his playing made me realize that the tradition that I wanted to play in was still alive as well.

TP:   A talented composer as well, and the track we’ll hear is I guess the first of his composition that got some recognition, with many to follow. It’s from the 1960 Cannonball Adderley album, Them Dirty Blues, and it’s called “Del Sasser.”

[MUSIC: Sam Jones-Adderleys-Timmons-Louis Hayes, “Del Sasser”; Stanley Turrentine 5-H. Parlan-G. Tucker-Al Harewood, “Summertime”-1961]

TP:   Apart from working as a busy bassist on the New York scene, you have another career as well, directing a choir.

CL:   The name of the choir is the ARC Gospel Choir, and I was fortunate enough to meet and be influenced musically and otherwise by a man named Mr. James Allen, who is the Executive Director of the Addicts Rehabilitation Center. I came to know him when I was going through a struggle in my life, and he helped me to understand that I could use music and my knowledge of music to be grateful for what the Creator has given me, first of all, but also to help others to see the light towards moving to higher planes of acknowledgment and understanding of how precious life is. Consequently, when he found out some of my musical abilities, he allowed me to start working on arrangements and working on directing the choir. I’ve been fortunate to have that as a kind of focal point for me right now in terms of understanding and working on harmonies and different things like that. So it’s been a blessing for me, and it’s very special.

Working with the choir has helped me to understand what my function can be as a leader also, because it’s a very challenging position to work with these people in particular, who are overcoming substance abuse, and are really getting in tune with themselves again. It’s very special.

[MUSIC: ARC Choir,“Jesus Wash”; Hicks-Curtis-Idris, “Hold It Down”]

R.I.P. Peter Brotzmann (1941-2023)

Peter Brotzmann (b.1941) died on Thursday. The tenor saxophonist, who also played clarinet and tarogato, was a key figure in the development of the European free improv scene during the 1960s and 70s, when he operated in parallel to creative fellow spirits like Peter Kowald, Alexander Von Schlippenbach, Han Bennink, Fred Van Hove, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Sven-Ake Johanssen (to name a short list), and continued to expand and refine his enormous sound and his range of associations until his final years. His Wikipedia page cites 134 albums as a leader or collaborator, and another 40 as a sideman Numerous other tributes trace the breadth of Brotzmann’s career and his impact on the evolution of the freedom principle. I’d say I witnessed 10 Brotzmann performances,  most memorably two inexorably dialogical sets — the first was a long evening with Kowald and Rashied Ali around 1986 in a venue I believe on East 6th Street; the last  was a thrilling encounter with Eric Revis and Nashiet Waits at the Vision Festival a while back.

Brotzmann was also an evocative visual artist and was extremely well-spoken, as is evident from his remarks in the three interviews that I had an opportunity to do with him. The first is a 90-minute interview that we did on WKCR when Brotzmann was playing in town with drummer Gregg Bendian. The second was conducted by phone for an obituary that I wrote for the Village Voice for Peter Kowald. The final piece was for Downbeat’s 70th anniversary issue in which various eminences discussed primary early influences. The transcripts appear below.

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Peter Brotzmann, WKCR, Afternoon Music, Nov. 17, 1992:

PB:    We started in Providence, Rhode Island, then to Boston, and then Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and we played in Madison and here.

TP:   What are the audiences like? In New York, we tend to be isolated from events west of the Hudson River. What was the reception to the music?

PB:   I would say I was surprised. It was, of course, in all the places a little different. But I would say we had a good and mostly well-informed audience. For me, the best thing always is to be in Chicago, which really was fantastic, I must say. But the whole thing until now was really very good.

TP:   Why Chicago?

PB:   I used to play there since more than ten years, I would say. I like the town. I have a lot of friends over there. Especially the atmosphere is different than New York, and it’s always nice, after staying a week in New York, to know that you can go to Chicago.

TP:   This particular group…you and Gregg have been playing together now for several years. How long has William Parker been part of the trio?

PB:   I personally know William about 8 years, something like that. He is a member of different groups. We’ve worked in Europe a lot of times together. So this is one side. I know Gregg for about four years. We’ve performed together here in the country, mostly, with Fred Hopkins, and we did in earlier times some with William, too.

TP:   The Peter Brotzmann-Gregg Bendian-William Parker Trio, reeds-percussion-bass, appear at Roulette on Friday, Nov. 20th, 9 p.m., at 228 West Broadway, at White, just below Canal.

We have some tapes that we’re not able to put on the air yet, but we shall do so shortly. Let’s begin with something from 1979, with Brotzmann, bassist Harry Miller, and drummer Louis Moholo. It’s for the FMP under whose auspices you’ve done at least 20 recordings.

PB:   No, it will be more. It will be double that, I would say.

GREGG:   Peter is FMP.

PB:   I mean, together with my old comrade Peter Kowald and our man in Berlin, Jost Gebers, we decided in 1968, I think it was…because nobody wanted our kind of music, we have to do our own label. So we tried to build up a kind of cooperative, which was working until the early 70s, then we had to decide to make another kind of construction…

TP:   What happened?

PB:   We had a whole bunch of European, mostly German musicians, in the cooperative, and there were too many people, and everybody wanted to decide, and nearly everybody was jealous on the other guy, and so on. A lot of trouble. So we had to decide, “ok, it has to work somehow,” and now there are not too many people left. One of them is Hans Reichel, the guitar player; Peter Kowald is the other one; myself. But the main man for all kinds of work is Jost Gebers, who put out last year or the year before this big Cecil Taylor edition with 10 CDs.

TP:   Also several single CDs of quintets, trios, solos – 13 or 14.

PB:   Yes. Cecil and him, they’re going very well together. Cecil has spent during the last 2-3 years a lot of time in Berlin. So the cooperation between him and FMP is really very good.

TP:   Wasn’t Cecil honorary artist in residence during the month that recording was made. Is FMP active in the cultural politics of Germany and Berlin?

PB:   We try. We try. I mean, years ago, I think we were able to get the first so-called “jazz musicians” in this kind of residence thing. I think the first one was John Tchicai. Others followed — Steve Lacy, Harry Miller, a bunch more. I can’t remember all of them. But politics is one thing and music another. And Jost is not a guy who shuts his mouth. He says what he thinks. So he got out of the committee. At the moment, the whole cultural situation in Berlin anyway is so confused that we don’t know how it can go on.

[MUSIC: Brotzmann-Miller-Moholo, from The Nearer the Bone, The Sweeter The Meat-FMP-b.clarinet- Aug. 27, 1979]

TP:   Now, hopefully we’ve solved our problem with the cassette machine, and we’ll hear something from a tape that this trio did when?

GREGG:   No. It’s something we did a while ago with Fred Hopkins at the Middle East in Boston. This was a concert we did, and we did a few with Fred… It was originally going to be William on bass, and then William couldn’t do it, so we got Fred, who did some wonderful stuff.

TP:   You did a concert a few years ago on Academy Street, I think, south of Houston, a small space in a bar-and-grill.

GREGG:   Right, that was one of them. A New York gig. I think this was a blues.

[MUSIC: Brotzmann-Hopkins-Bendian- Untitled Blues]

TP:   We’ll move now to some duets that you did in 1977 with the innovative Dutch percussionist-drummer-instrument inventor Han Bennink. There are recordings of you and he that go back to 1968.

PB:   We started to work together in 1967, and we did the first recording in 1968. Since that time, we worked together in the first ten years with piano player Fred Van Hove from Antwerp, Belgium. After the trio broke up, I went on with Han for another 5-6-7 years. So it was quite a long time to work together, yes.

TP:   When you first met, you and several other musicians of some world-renown – and other artists as well – come from the city of Wuppertal. You. The bassist Peter Kowald, who lived in New York for a while. Hans Reichel lives there. The Pina Bausch dance company has been based there for a long time. Are you originally from Wuppertal?

PB:   No. I was born not very far from there in a town called Remscheid. But when I left school, I went to study graphics and painting in Wuppertal, and I found a very lively music scene, which I already did know about when I still lived in Remscheid. You could find all kinds of music from American blues festival to Sidney Bechet. Later on, I had a lot of music around Wuppertal or in Wuppertal, like Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk. Quite close to Wuppertal we have two bigger cities, Dusseldorf and Cologne, which you can reach in half-an-hour on train. So as youngsters we were able to pick up a lot of different music. I saw Coltrane with Miles. I saw Eric Dolphy with Coltrane, and Adderley, Horace Silver a couple of times. So I got more and more interested… I always was since I was a kid. At the school I was running a kind of jazz club, when I was 13 or something.

TP:   What was your introduction to jazz?

PB:   I don’t know. My father was very into classical music, and I had to listen to that all day and night. So maybe it was just a reaction to jump somewhere else. I don’t know! Really, since I was very young I always was very interested in jazz music. I don’t know the exact reason.

TP:   When did you start playing saxophone and reed instruments?

PB:   Once, when I was 14, I think it was, I got the clarinet from the school band which was not used any more. So running that little jazz club, I started to play clarinet. That was a time of European Dixieland revival, Humphrey Littleton and all the English guys. I was lucky to find some semi-professional guys, and they all were older than I and studied at the famous Folkwang school in Essen. So I never had a teacher, but I learned a lot from them already. And after I moved to Wuppertal and studied, I met Peter Kowald. He was some years younger even. We set up some kind of trios, quartets, tried to find people who liked to do a little bit different stuff than the others did.

TP:   How so? What was your orientation when you and Kowald met?

PB:   We listened to Coltrane. Ornette Coleman was really a surprise – the first records to get. Eric Dolphy. I mean, when we grew up with it, we were very much in… That was the hardbop time then – Art Blakey, Bobby Timmons and this beautiful music. But I must say, through my painting and all these other activities, which I took more serious at that time, I got in contact with the other part of the art, let’s say. I listened to Stockhausen. I listened to the early pieces. I got in contract with other artists like Nam June Paik or Josef Beuys. We had in Wuppertal a good gallery scene, too. I mean, it was the first gallery in Europe which showed the whole Fluxus movement. So I got a lot of orientation and information from all kinds of directions. Paik… I was working for him, repairing his kind of installation and things for some weeks…

TP:   Fixing televisions?

PB:   No. It was still prepared pianos, record players, things – and the first TVs that showed up, yes. That was early 60s, middle 60s.

TP: Did a lot of your music evolve in conjunction with installations and performances?

PB:   I would say so. Because the other guys, Schlippenbach, Schoof, they still were in the post-bebop and hardbop business. Of course, when we played around the cities, they showed up from time to time and laughed themselves crazy. [LAUGHS] But it changed.  It changed. But then (to make it short) I met the first American guys. The first one, who was a very important influence, was Steve Lacy. Steve always said, “Peter, go ahead; go ahead with that stuff, and don’t listen to any other people. Just do it.” I met Carla Bley. Don Cherry was a very good influence and a very helpful man. So I got invited from Don Cherry to play in Paris a week with his band – at that time, Gato Barbieri, Aldo Romano, was Jean Jenny Clark? Karl Berger was there. So I had that chance, and coming back from that experience, the other people like Schlippenbach and Schoof, they started to accept me a little bit – so we worked together. And so on and so on.

The good thing was, at that time, the first connections to the Dutch guys, like Willem Breuker, Han Bennink — very important.

TP:   Were those again through concerts, where you traveled to Holland or they came to Germany? How would musicians encounter each other from around Europe?

PB:   That’s very easy always. We did know there is something happening there. We had good connections to the English group of Evan Parker, John Stevens, and a little bit later Derek Bailey. We took the little money we had and just went over for a week to London, or wherever something interesting was going on. I always had good connections through the painting to whatever happened in Amsterdam. I even had a little room there for a couple of years. So I got in touch with all the people and we started to work together, which was really a very lively scene at that time.

TP:   It seems it would have been an incredibly stimulating time – the interchange with musicians from across Europe, from different cultures, making music together.

PB:   For example, I had… There was a mood among European musicians, because the Americans got all the gigs, and we were sitting there doing nothing. So the mood was not so friendly sometimes. Even the intellectual field of discussion was a little bit aggressive. But I never had problems to work with American musicians, or I hope they hadn’t some with me. I think music is really a language. You can go everywhere and listen and find somebody to work with and to talk with.

TP:   Before we play some music, one more question about Wuppertal? What factors made it such a fertile ground for artistic expression?

PB:   I think it was just the fact that a couple of people lived there, quite active, organizing things, organizing concerts for other people. I mean, if the Chicago guys hadn’t stayed together in Chicago, not so much would have come out of this town in music. Not to compare, but a little situation like that wasWuppertal for a time, especially in the 60s-early 70s. A lot of other people moved over from Berlin or from the south. We had a bunch of people working there.

TP:   So it became a magnet for people of similar predisposition.

PB:    Yes. And as I said, for the other field of art, it was always very progressive, very avant-garde, and… It was interesting.

TP:   The piece was recorded at the Quartier Latin in Berlin, which was a prominent venue for many years.

PB:   Yes, it was really important until 1986 or so. Now it’s kind of a cabaret; the old Berlin style, out of the 20s. The whole thing is very reactionary at the moment.

TP:   In Berlin?

PB:   Yes. Everywhere. Europe. The German so-called “reunion” didn’t do these kinds of things no good, and I don’t know any matter it did good to at the moment. The whole cultural situation is very confused. Nobody feels responsible, and a lot of money goes to the eastern countries, or eastern part, and disappears – nobody knows where. It always was very heavy to survive, but at the moment it’s even worse.

[MUSIC: Brotzmann-Bennink, “Half A Hound Can’t Piss”-FMP O420-March 1977; PB-Bennink-Mangelsdorff-Van Hove, “Couscous de la Mauresque”-1971; “Two Birds and a Feather: To Bobby Few”-1975, Schuss-FMP 0230, PB-HB-FVH]

TP:   We heard music from dates recorded in 1971, 1975 and 1977, all on FMP. This is a piece you’ve also recorded solo, “Two Birds and A Feather: To Bobby Few.” The album cover has your distinctive graphics.

Was the group with Van Hove and Bennink one that you worked a fair amount around Europe?

PB:   I would say that one was one of the main important groups of improvised music at that years in Europe. We had really a very good understanding together. I think, as different as we three persons are, it fit very well together. So we worked together… I think the trio worked at least 12 years, and then after that I went on with Bennink in the duo for another 6 years, which is, for such a situation and such a group, really a very long time.

TP:   Any idea how many records the trio made?

PB: I never counted them, but it’s quite a lot. From 1968 to 1980-something, maybe 20.

TP:   Have you always played as broad a range of instrument… For example, on the 1971 album you’re playing only tenor saxophone, then around 1974-75 you’re listed on an array of instruments. Have you always been a multi-instrumentalist, or did it start in the 1970s?

PB:   When I started… It’s always a question of money. I was happy that I could get from somewhere an old tenor. In a way, tenor always was my favorite of the saxophones, because I was listening a lot to Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins for example – always my favorite. But I love instruments. I have at home not the whole family of saxophones, but quite a bit. Sometimes I prefer the tenor – most of the time, I would say. But I like the alto. I like the baritone. If the bass wasn’t so heavy around your neck, and if it wasn’t so difficult to travel with, I would use it much more often.

TP:   You’ve always had a huge sound, as did the two saxophonists you’ve mentioned – Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins… Albert Mangelsdorff was one of the first German jazz musicians to get international recognition, and he played extraordinarily well with the trio. Do you recollect how it came about?

PB:   I can’t remember. Of course, we’d met Albert through all the years. Albert is very open-minded, always. He always was listening to what the younger guys did, and he always was helpful, as he could be. We worked together earlier, all those European cats, in the very first Globe Unity Orchestras. So we became friends, more or less. I played with him two months ago at a festival in Germany in a trio – the drummer was Shannon Jackson. So we see each other from time to time.

TP:   I forgot to bring my Globe Unity records, which would have expanded our possibilities.

PB:   For my next birthday, we can do it. That’s the 6th of March.

TP:   Can you speak a bit about the formation and history of Globe Unity?

PB:   Yes. To make it short, Alex Schlippenbach after we came together…the Schlippenbach group — Schoof, Buschi Niebergall, Jacki Liebezeit – and my trio, which was at the time Sven-Åke Johansson and Peter Kowald… We worked out some certain concert situations together. We played even in a big group together. Alex always, composer that he is, he thought about some big things, and he got from the Berlin Jazz Days…when was that, in 1967 or 1966… He got he could do a piece for that. So we put our trios together, invited some guests, and that was the first beginning of Globe Unity. Then it died away for quite some years, because of the money situation for such a big orchestra. It’s really very difficult to survive. And I think in the early 70s we started to think about again… We had some possibilities in foreign countries – in France, at the bigger festivals. So yes, we could do it again. We could produce our records. I think that was for European improvised music quite an important thing.

TP:   Bringing it to the present-day, what’s the climate in Europe towards improvised music? Different attitudes in different countries? Similar everywhere? It seems many of the musicians we’ve been hearing have been moving in different directions.

PB:   Let’s talk about the work situation in Europe. Of course, it’s different in the different countries. Just before I came over here, I played a couple of gigs in England, and if you talk to the English comrades they just can complain because there is no work, or if there is little work, there is no money. So they have to look very urgently to play everywhere else, but not in their own country, which is really a drag.

Germany is getting a bit more difficult than it was to find gigs because of the German reunion, and of course, the general recession. The money is cut down. And they start, as you know, to cut it down not at the opera houses and not at the playhouses; they cut it down in the little things beside. What you have to do is travel around and find work wherever you can. If it is in Japan or if it is in Italy or in Korea, or wherever…even in the States… But the situation, you know better than I, is not the best for this kind of music.

TP:   Are younger musicians in Germany exploring this area?

PB:   I think that is a problem. As you might know, I am working with my son. He is a guitar player, has his own band, and comes out some kind of improvising Rock background…I don’t know how to call it. But I work with him from time to time, so I learned to know some other music, and some other musicians. But it’s really a pity. They are really very impatient.

TP:   Impatient? How so?

PB:   Because they want very fast success. So most of them, they right on went in a kind of easy-selling Rock situation, and that’s where they stay — and that’s where they get lost, of course. You need your time to develop things, and that’s what I like about my son’s attitude – that he really is working hard and doing it very carefully. But he is one of the very few.

TP:   You’ve been working the last 6-7 years with Bill Laswell, in different situations.

PB:   Yes. As I said before, you always find musicians, and it doesn’t depend what kind of music, direction of music it is. You just have to listen and develop a kind of relationship. I met Bill Laswell during a thing Derek Bailey was setting up in New York. We talked and we had some drinks together, and that worked out quite fine, and we talked about Sonny Sharrock. He mentioned him because he was at that time doing some recordings with him. I’d met Sonny in 1969 in Berlin; we had a session together. Then I didn’t hear from him. So we decided, “Ok, let’s do something together.” I always admired Sonny very much. We looked for a drummer, and there were some we talked about, but… I never had played before with Shannon Jackson, but I had heard his…

[END OF SIDE 2]

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Peter Brotzman on Peter Kowald (1-20-03):

TP: His personality was so strong, and it seemed he was able to make an impact on any scene he entered.  I wanted to see what you could tell me about him as a young man and your relationship with him, how you developed ideas within Germany in the ’60s and ’70s.  That’s the framework.

He told me that you knew him from your teens.  You’re three years older than he.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes, that’s right.  When I came to Wuppertal to study painting and graphics at the art school, I was looking for some people to play with, because I came from another town where I played in some kind of swing band, but I wanted to do something different. I was looking around, and some guys mentioned there’s a young man interested in new stuff.  But at that time, Kowald was playing the tuba in some kind of school band.  I convinced him to organize the bass.  So he did that, and started to learn the bass…

TP: Do you remember what year this was?

PETER BROTZMAN:  This must have been ’58.

TP: What town are you from?

PETER BROTZMAN:  I was born in a town called Remscheid, but in that year I came to Peter’s home town, Wuppertal. [March 6, 1941]

TP: Tell me about the art school in Wuppertal.  Are there particular traditions there?  One thing he told me is that you were an assistant to Nam June Paik, and that his philosophy and Fluxus had a great influence on you.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes, that’s right.  During my studies here in town, the art school was not really very important, but as good as the others, too… But we had a very important gallery here in town called Galerie Parnass.  You’ll find it mentioned in books about early Fluxus and early Nam June Paik.  And Nam June Paik was just living in Cologne, but he had his first bigger exhibitions… That was before the TV stuff.  It was quite out of the Cage tradition, with prepared pianos and toys and things like that.  Among others, I was assisting Paik for the whole exhibition here, and… Anyway, it was a very, very good time here.  We had the first exhibitions of Beuys here, and Stockhausen had just opened his electronic studio in Cologne, and he was running a little theater with his first wife, Mary Baumeister in Cologne.  Cologne is just…let’s say from the Bronx to Harlem, something like that.  It’s very close.

TP: So Wuppertal is sort of a sister city to Cologne.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yeah.  If you step into the train, you will be there in 30 minutes.  So there was happening quite a lot of information stuff for us young guys, and I was touring with Paik to some other exhibitions, to Amsterdam and other cities, and at the same time the Fluxus movement was quite important here in Europe, especially in Germany and Holland, and I was touring with these guys, like George Maciunas, and Emmett Williams, Dick Higgins, just as a young student, assisting and being on stage and doing whatever they told me to do.

TP: What impact did that have on transforming your ideas?

PETER BROTZMAN:  I did a lot of different things.  I was playing the music, I was a painter, I was confronted with all the other guys like Paik and Beuys and Fostell(?) and others.  That was the time of the hardbop, the time of Art Blakey and Bobby Timmons, Benny Golson, all this stuff I still love, but at that time we thought this music should develop in another direction.  Of course, we listened to the very early Ornette Coleman, or the Charlie Mingus, or the Eric Dolphy — very important.  At that time, all the great guys, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk with quartet or solo, you could hear them in the cities around our area.  So you got a lot of information about music… I’ve heard Coltrane a lot of times.  We organized here in town a Charles Mingus Sextet concert including Eric Dolphy and Jaki Byard.  Things like that.  So I got a lot of different information besides the normal jazz business.  So I thought music can be a little bit different from the hardbop, the Art Blakey or Horace Silver stuff, and we tried to find out what our kind of thing could be.

TP: Let me take you back to when he starts to make the transition from tuba to bass, four or five years before, and you’re 18 and he’s 15.  He said you were quite a mentor to him.  He was impressed by your self-confidence, things like this.  Can you talk to me about his evolution, his development as a musician?  Did he take to the bass well?  Was he a natural musician?

PETER BROTZMAN:  I think he started the bass without having a teacher.  What we did was seeing each other as often as we could during the week.  We had a little basement in a part of our town where we could play all day and night.  Night was not possible for him, because he had to go to school in the morning, and he still was living at his parents’ place, and he was really a nice kid, and drinking milk and being home at 10 o’clock in the evening.  So that’s the way it started.  But we worked whenever we could, in the afternoons or the evenings.

TP: What sort of things were you playing or workshopping on?

PETER BROTZMAN:  Of course, we tried to play some Coleman compositions, or Charlie Mingus.  But on the other hand, we started improvising, without nothing, just played our ass off, in a way, and with various drummers… The drummers were always kind of conservative, so if we went away from the usual beat business, they were always a little bit lost, so we had our difficulties finding the right guys.  But a couple of years later, we did, of course.  Through my painting, when I was 19 or 20, I had my first exhibitions, and I had connections to Holland which is just a two-hour ride from here to Amsterdam.  So our first international concerts came.  And Peter always was around because he was hanging around always at my place.  I always had a studio, some cheap place, some basement or some workshops or whatever that I could afford.  Then very early, I got married, and he was always hanging around in our place.  But until the bitter end his mother was always very angry about me, because she always told me, “Oh, you are not a good influence.”

TP: What they want him to do?

PETER BROTZMAN:  When he finished school, he started to study languages, Romantic languages and Greek.  Even in his very young years, he was a real specialist in modern Greek languages.

TP: He said that he married a Greek woman.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yeah, in the later years he did for a short time.  So he was very talented, and he got a translator for the court here in Wuppertal, and we… Of course, that was the time all the Greek guys came to work in Germany, and so we had a lot of Greek friends, Greek places with Greek music.  We even used to play in places like that from time to time.  And he was very talented.  His mother never forgot that I took her son to the wrong path, in a way.

TP: Were his parents from an academic background?

PETER BROTZMAN:  I don’t know.  Let me think.  His mother just was a very ordinary housewife, educating the three kids.  And his father during the war was flying an bomb airplane.

TP: He was in the Luftwaffe.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes, he was in the Air Force.  And later, after he was developing some plans for teaching deaf people…sign language.

TP: So he was an educator.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes.

TP: He came from a cultured background.

PETER BROTZMAN:  He came from an educated German middle-class, as we all do, more or less.

TP: Would that describe you as well?

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yeah.  My parents came after the war from the east, so real Prussian guys, and I got this kind of education.

TP: So there’s an element of your own rebellion involved in taking some of the artistic paths you took.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Not in my family.  Not as far as I know. I went completely out of the normal order.

TP: His term for it was that you were very influenced by black American step, and then there came a step that he called “a healthy way of killing our fathers,” which I thought encapsulated a lot of activity.

PETER BROTZMAN:  You must know, when the war was over Peter just was born and I was 4 years old.  Even until now, we never got answers for the question, “Why could it happen?  Why did you do that?”  So we had to look for our own answers, and we had to put our own questions.  I think Peter is right, we had… I mean, I had really…my father wasn’t talking to me until he died in ’70-something.  I was a fucking Communist, I was left-wing, I was in the circles of the RAF, and I did know all these people, and that was of course completely the opposite from that what my father was thinking, doing, and wanting me to do.  So we had our problems here in Germany with our fathers’ generation, yes, and that’s why the rebellion of our generation was so strong. I think the RAF thing couldn’t have happened in another European country.  It was Germany where it had to happen, because it really had to do with our fathers.  I mean, in Adenauer’s government we had still guys from kind of Nazi past.  We even had a Chancellor for a short time once who had a Nazi past.  I mean, what can you do as a young man?  You have to fight against that.  That’s why our early music was actually very violent stuff, much more violent than in other European countries.

TP: So you developed techniques to express those emotions in a very calculated way, it would seem.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes.

TP: That very hard blowing, that over-blowing, those overtones, that rawness that you bring out is all calibrated, very deliberately and not accidental in any way.

PETER BROTZMAN:  I think it had to do with the wish for freedom and justice, in a way.  And you had to work hard on it.  So we worked on the instruments.  I think both of us found a very special way to handle the horn or the bass, and… Yeah, it was a lot of… Of course, it didn’t happen accidentally.  It was necessary.

TP: I’ll read you another quote and then ask more chronology.  He said: When I grew up in the ’40s as a little boy and in the ’50s in Germany, it was very difficult to sing a German song, because everything had been used by Fascism and Hitler.  So we didn’t sing our songs.  It was very difficult.  I saw that every blues musician or every Jewish musician somehow related to his tradition in a positive way.  I used to have a Greek wife, and she loved her Greek songs, but I didn’t love my German songs.  Then I became a traveler somehow.  I was always interested in what the other cultures had to say, and so I took it all from there.  I became somehow a traveller from the beginning, but I didn’t ever use my own culture in my music.

PETER BROTZMAN:  That’s for sure.  Of course, we went to school.  Of course, we had to sing good old German folk songs.  But if you were able to think, it always was really very ridiculous.  So we didn’t do that. We didn’t want to have anything to do with this kind of German culture.  I mean, in my parents’ place, when I grew up, whenever my father was at home, I had to listen to… Because he loved music, but he loved, let’s say, the German classics — Mozart, Beethoven, some of the heavy Russians, too, and Wagner and Brahms and all that.  So in the night, I was sneaking downstairs to the radio, and I was listening… When I was a kid — really a kid — I was listening to Willis Conover and the Voice of America at 12 o’clock in the night.  So things like that.  Because we were looking really for something else, for something really different from our what they called German tradition.  And I think we still have to suffer from that kind of thing the war did to us.  That’s why the Germans are so difficult sometimes.

TP: So for you, Black music and Jazz was almost a signpost to find ways to grapple with these very real issues that you were dealing with, and when you heard Free Jazz it must have seemed like manna from heaven.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yeah.  I mean, when I was a kid at school still, I was opening up a kind of jazz club, playing Louis Armstrong records and Kid Ory, and King Oliver, and then Benny Goodman, and other blacks and whites, and Jewish music.  I went wherever I could go to listen to blues and jazz, whatever there was.  The only German guy I was reading was Bertholt Brecht, and otherwise I was interested in Sartre, in Camus and other French Existentialist shit.  And the music gave us, even at the time playing the Dixieland or the Swing music… I always was lucky to find some semiprofessional guys that could teach me a little bit.  It gave me on one side a kind of freedom, and on the other side a kind of group working.  I think still, for me, playing the music, playing jazz or improvised music, the main important thing — or one of the main important things — is working together.  That’s how it was in the very early years, and I think it’s still the same nowadays.

TP: Let me take you back to chronology.  He told me that around 1965 and 1966, Carla Bley came through, and I think in ’67 maybe she asked you to tour.  You had sat in, and maybe she came back and asked you to tour, and you said, “Only if you take my friend.”  So he went on a three-month tour of Europe with Carla Bley…

PETER BROTZMAN:  Let me tell you what happened.  In the ’60s we had a lot of jazz clubs around our area here.  Steve Lacy and Carla Bley and other guys showed up here quite frequently, and one day I think in 1966 I took my horn, my alto at that time, and went to a concert Carla did with Steve Lacy, Aldo Romano, and J.F. Jenny-Clark, the French bass player.  I just was sitting in.  It was really a wild night.  I didn’t expect to hear from them, but a year later, then, Carla wrote me a letter and called me, and she wanted me for a European tour.  So I said yes.  She was asking for some others, and I said, “Yeah, there is a bass player.”  So there was this quintet with Carla, Mike Mantler, Aldo Romano on the drums, and Kowald and myself.  We toured around Europe a little bit.  It was, I must say, a very badly organized tour.  It was really terrible.  And I am sure Carla didn’t like what we did in our very young years.  We just wanted to play… I recently heard a tape from a concert we did on the radio in Stockholm in 1967.  It sounds all right.  I still like Carla’s music.  So we tried to play the themes and the songs.  For us, of course, it was a great thing, because it was good for our reputation among all the other German guys here, like Schlippenbach and Manfred Schoof, the trumpet player.  Because whenever we showed up, they were leaving stage and were laughing about us, but when we came back from the Carla Bley tour, now they had to talk with us, and we started to play together actually.  Don Cherry at that time was living in the south of Sweden, and whenever he had to do something at the German radio station in the Black Forest with Joachim Ernst Berendt, he was passing by in Wuppertal, and he stayed a couple of nights or so.  That was very good help.  That’s why we had our connections to our American friends.  We started very early with that, and that was a very good thing for us.

TP: That’s around when Globe Unity started, too.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Well, this would around, let’s say, ’64, ’65, ’67, and then we started already, I think, the cooperation between the Alex Schlippenbach-Manfred Schoof Quintet and our trio.  We had met Sven Ake Johanssen in Brussels at that time, and convinced him to come to Wuppertal and stay, and so we had finally the right drummer.  So we started the cooperation between our trio and the Schoof quintet, and out of that situation more or less Globe Unity evolved.

TP: He says he was still playing contemporary music, Earle Brown and Feldman and Cage pieces, as a tubist.

PETER BROTZMAN:  He did that a couple of times.

TP: He was doing that and also free improvisation as well.  By the way, this may not be strictly apropos, but to what extent did things Stockhausen was doing at the time and other radical European music play into the way you filtered your concept.

PETER BROTZMAN:  I for myself was more interested in the things that came over from the U.S.  Cage for us was a very important influence, I think.

TP: Through Paik?

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yeah, Paik in his way.  I am still in contact with him.  He was a good teacher in my early years for me.  And Stockhausen in the early years, I still must say I liked him at that time.

TP: Here’s what Kowald said about Paik and you.  “Peter was a great painter and artist all the time.  He was much more advanced as an artist when he was in his early twenties than as a saxophone player.  But then he decided for the saxophone.  I think he discussed a lot with Paik about these questions, about what is Art today and what does it mean and what can we do in Art?  I remember Peter saying that Paik told him, ‘Now, don’t worry about anything.  You can do anything you want to do.  The space is completely open.  You can use any material.  You can use any ideas.  Anything is possible.  You can do what you want to do.”

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yeah, I don’t think Paik used so many words for it.  Of course, you must understand Kowald’s and my situation at the time.  Nobody liked us.  We had no musician fellows.  We had no audience.  Some really weird artists from somewhere from time to time.  But we were at that time not a part of the music scene here in Germany, for example, because everybody was laughing at us… But the more important it was for me to find a guy like Paik, and Paik came down to our basement a couple of times and listened to our playing, and he said, “Okay, Brotzman!  Go on.”  And I met Don Cherry at the time, and he said the same.  And a guy like Steve Lacy, because he saw that and he felt that, and he felt how we felt about it.  So Steve and Don and Paik, they all said, “Okay, Brotzman, go and do your thing.” That’s why I think we really have to thank them.  Because sometimes as a young man, young and foolish, you need a little kick in your ass and a little help.  That was really very, very important.  Yes, Paik didn’t have to open my eyes and my ears, but he really encouraged me just to go my way.  That’s what I learned.

TP: So the influence from Fluxus is less an influence of process than it is an attitude, it sounds like.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes, you can say so.

TP: May I ask a broader question in relating what you and he were doing to various other German artists emerging at the time, like Baselitz and Penck, Kiefer, other people who were approximately that age, or filmmakers like Fassbinder and Wenders and Herzog… It seems these developments are happening within a similar time frame and a similar cultural milieu.  Would you talk about what you do and what Peter Kowald was doing in relation to that revolution in the culture.  Or Pina Bausch, even more specifically to Wuppertal.

PETER BROTZMAN:  This came a little later.  But in our earlier times, the other artists…the theater scene was important.  The filmmakers like Fassbinder…I mean, he came a couple of times to Wuppertal — I met him here.  And other great directors like Peter Sadek and Luc Bondi(?)… It was a very lively scene around here.

TP: Why was it so lively in Wuppertal?  Because of the proximity to Cologne?

PETER BROTZMAN:  Because Wuppertal is a strange town.  It was always a wild town.  It was a wild town in the times between the war.  There were a lot of sects here, a lot of crazy people…

TP: In Weimar.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes, in that time.  It depends always, wherever you are, you need some people who are doing something together, and we had contacts to the theater people here, to some writers, to some filmmakers, and whatever.  So there was a bunch of people.  We had our nightly hangouts, and we met and discussed, and sometimes we did certain things together.  It’s a small town.  I mean, it always was about 350,000 people.  But it always was kind of very special.

TP: Did it have anything to do with politics?  Had it been a center of radical political activity earlier on?

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes.  Friedrich Engels is from Wuppertal.  He came a very wealthy industrial family here, but of course, you know about his comradeship with Mr. Marx.  In Wuppertal we had the first Communist cells.  It was quite a meeting place for all these kind of wild people.

TP: So Wuppertal has a radical tradition that goes back to the 19th century, politically and culturally.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes, you can say so.

TP: But let’s get back to this broader cultural milieu.  You say it developed later.  But I’d like to talk about the ’70s, when your styles become mature and you start to develop… The way he put it, he free-improvises and it’s based on no-form, but of course, the improvisation becomes sort of a composition in and of itself that he reiterates in a variety of contexts, so that that’s one thing he does.  This seems to start happening with you and he around ’69-’70-’71, which is when Fassbinder makes his first movies, and many of these artists I referred to start to establish their artistic voice in whatever medium it is.  So any speculations you have on what you and he were doing within the broader matrix of cultural activity.

PETER BROTZMAN:  It’s a bit difficult for me to see it in such a wider range. But I’ll tell you how it went on, in a way, because then it comes more to that point.  Peter’s part of the connection to other musicians in foreign countries was more or less the English scene, and my part was the connection to the Dutch scene, which came through my paintings and all that kind of stuff.  So I met Willem Breuker and Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg quite early, and Peter went to London to the guys from the Little Theater club — John Stevens, Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, young Evan Parker and a lot of others.

At that time, because of our Federalistic system here in Germany, we had a lot of radio stations, and especially 1-2-3 radio stations, one in the Black Forest, which Joachim Ernst Berendt was running; a small one in Bremen in the north; and the one responsible for our area here in Cologne.  They were very open to new music, and they gave us a lot of chances to work and to invite people from other countries.  So we had our meetings with all the guys from England, from Holland together, and from Scandinavia.  So it was a very lively scene in Germany at that time. Out of that, I think Peter then started to work a lot with the English guys.  I was setting up my trio with Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove and so on.

TP: So you started to move in different directions.

PETER BROTZMAN:  We started, yes.  We spent a lot of years together, and after that, of course, everybody was… Yeah, I think…

TP: What would be the main difference personality-wise between you and Peter Kowald, having been so close?  How do you think you differed as artists?

PETER BROTZMAN:  I don’t know.  Of course, I am quite different.  I think I always did know where I wanted to go.  Peter until his end was looking around, trying, finding out.  I never was so interested working with all the dance companies and dancers, or… I just was interested playing music, and I never was interested in working together with Pina Bausch and people like that.  I still think it’s difficult enough to play good music.  That’s enough for me.  But Peter was always looking around to open up… I don’t know exactly why, but I never needed that.  I was lucky with my connections to the guys in your country, to the guys in Japan… Wherever I went, I met people, but I just…

TP: Maybe the nature of the instruments are different.  A bass player is a social entity unto himself in an ensemble.

PETER BROTZMAN:  I think it always depends on the person behind it.  I played with a lot of really great bass players.  The last one, for example, who left us a couple of years ago, Fred Hopkins; I mean, he was a great bass player, but he just was a bass player, which was great enough.

TP: Was he very involved in performing with the Pina Bausch troupe?

PETER BROTZMAN:  I must say, I can’t say anything about that.  I just know that he worked a little bit with her from time to time, always some people from the company.  But I didn’t follow that.  In the last year when that happened, we anyway didn’t see each other very often because each of us had been on the road so much, and really we were working in different directions, in a way.

TP: So the period of the ’60s and ’70s is really the time you know.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes.  But what we shouldn’t forget to mention is that Peter always was great in bringing people together, organizing events or…

TP: This was something he did as a youngster?  Did he have those qualities early on?

PETER BROTZMAN:  He learned it together with me.  Because I organized my own record label, I organized concerts myself, I did all that — and he learned it. And after that, he was much better at doing these kinds of things because he was able to talk with local politicians or local guys with some money, and I never was able to do that.  But he was very good… So he was able to raise money from time to time, and he was organizing things.  For example, when we started the Globe Unity Orchestra again, it was mainly Peter’s thing that we all came together again.  The leader was Schlippenbach, but without Kowald, the whole thing never could have happened for such long years.  And he really was really good with these things, and you might have known it from the short time he was in New York… He was doing a lot with the little money he had, and so he was bringing really people together, and that was one of his great abilities.

TP: He seems to have been an exceptionally generous person.  William Parker was telling me about how he had a broken bass, and Peter Kowald took it to East Germany to a guy who fixed basses, and for $900 and a bunch of vodka, the guy fixed the bass, Peter brought it out of East Germany, put it on a Lufthansa flight in the care of a stewardess he knew, and the stewardess took it on a cab directly to William’s house.

PETER BROTZMAN:  Yes, but for us that was always… The hospitality.  Whoever needed a bed and was passing through… Musicians stayed for weeks, for months.  And whenever we could help, we did that.  We did that for each other, and we did it for others, too.  That was just going along with the music, I think.

TP: Within his peer group of bass players, what would you say are the qualities that distinguish his tonal personality, his musical voice?

PETER BROTZMAN:  The main thing for a jazz musician is to have a good feel and to hear if he is involved in the group he’s playing with.  He developed his own technique.  He learned a lot, of course, from some of his older friends, like Barre Phillips.  But all the stuff he had, he learned by himself, in a way, and you could feel it and you could hear it, like all the other good musicians.  I mean, I changed my bass player after a while, because I always… When I met, for example, William Parker… I met him, of course, through Kowald, but when I met William, I did know immediately that that was the bass player I wanted for my groups, or before I played with others here in Germany… I loved the few times I had a chance to play with Hopkins.  And Kowald had other qualities.  But it’s very hard to describe.

                             [-30-]

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

Peter Brotzmann (DB-70th, March 20, 2004):

For one name, it’s my Korean mentor, Nam June Paik. Paik today is famous for his big TV installations, but when I met him he was influenced by John Cage and the Fluxus movement. He was living near Cologne, and in 1963 he had his first exhibition in Western Europe at the Galerie Parnass, a very active gallery in Wuppertal, where I was an art student. I was one of the guys who helped him set up the thing over six-eight weeks. Though Paik was not a stage musician, his installations then were more or less music instruments. I was repairing them every day, and playing them at night and at the exhibition. We performed together on some Fluxus concerts. George Maciunas, who more or less founded the Fluxus movement, was living in Germany, and there was an American bass player named Ben Patterson who knew a lot about jazz but no longer played as a jazz musician. That was another experience that showed me there is another way of doing things than the 32-bar form with a bridge or the 12-bar blues. The system was different. It was more about the idea of how to perform things than the musical or theatrical result.

At the time I was a student of the fine arts—of painting and graphics. I had just met Peter Kowald, who still was a student, and we didn’t have many friends among the musicians—even guys we worked with later. We didn’t go the usual way, which at that time in Europe was hardbop. Art Blakey came through, and Horace Silver—all the great guys. But we wanted something else. So American influences came from the early Ornette, Charles Mingus, and Coltrane, whom I saw with Miles Davis and with Dolphy. But Paik, with all the difficulties he was facing at the time, was the one who told me, “Hey, Brotzmann, go ahead, do your own thing, don’t worry what the others think about it.” Later, we had encouragement from Steve Lacy and Don Cherry. Steve was one of the first, let’s say, avant-garde guys who showed up twice a year. Don was then living in the south of Sweden and passed by my place a couple of times when he was on the way to the radio stations in the south of Germany.

I had the luck to see Sidney Bechet play twice, and I saw Coleman Hawkins in his famous concert in Essen, quite close to my town, with Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford and Bud Powell. That’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen. Opposite to Evan Parker, I was more fond of Sonny Rollins, while Evan was a Coltrane fan. Of course, we all shocked when we first heard Albert Ayler. There was a jazz club in Heidelberg, where Karl Berger comes from, that allowed Kowald and me to play. Most of the customers were guys from the Army.  One time I was sitting at the intermission with a Black guy, and we talked a bit—he knew a lot about music. Maybe 18 months later, I saw the record sleeve for “My Name Is Albert  Ayler,” and I recognized the guy. It’s interesting—Ayler was more or less my age, and we developed on different continents, independent from each other, creating on the saxophone in quite different ways than the schoolteachers tell you to do. The saxophone is just a pipe with some holes, and for the pipe to make sound, the air inside it has to vibrate. When that feeling really gets out of the horn, that’s what I like.

Even if I hadn’t met Paik, my self-consciousness was big enough to go through all the shit and go my way.  But Paik’s example made him an important man for me.  I can say the same for sure about Steve Lacy, even if we didn’t play so much together. I think I was always too loud and heavy for Steve, which is understandable.

For Von Freeman’s 97th Birth Anniversary, a 1991 WKCR Interview with Von and pianist John

Von Freeman and John Young
November 20, 1991, WKCR

copyright © 1991, 1999, Ted Panken

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Q: Von Freeman and John Young were both born in 1922, and both went to DuSable High School. When did the two of you first meet?

VF: Well, I remember John from a long time ago. Let’s just put it that way. For a long time.

Q: Was it in school?

VF: Oh, I don’t know. I . . .

Q: Was it in a musical situation?

VF: Well, I knew about him long before I really knew him. I always admired his playing, way-way-way back.

JY: I remember, Von, when we first played together, when was it, 1971, at . . . What was the name of that place?

VF: The New Apartment Lounge?

JY: At the New Apartment Lounge, yes. The other piano player, Jodie Christian, couldn’t make it. So Von called me to work with him, and we’ve been working with each other on and off ever since that time.

Q: But you had known each other back in high school undoubtedly.

JY: Well, I knew him, but our paths didn’t cross. He had his family band, his brother on drums and another brother playing guitar, and he played tenor saxophone, and I think he had Chris [Anderson?] . . . Anyway, he was using other piano players at the time. I was working with a dude named Dick Davis.

Q: So this was in the 1940’s, after the War.

VF: After the War, uh-huh.

JY: Or the 1950’s, I think it was.

Q: Both of you studied under Walter Dyett, and I believe John Young was in one of the first classes at DuSable High School as well. Didn’t it open around that year?

JY: Well, I was in the second year. What happened was, in ’34 they attempted to extend the old Wendell Phillips High School. It was called the new Wendell Phillips High School. But then they decided not to tear down old Wendell Phillips; they decided to keep it, and changed the name to DuSable. So it started off in 1934 as the new Wendell Phillips High School. They had to go into that stone and change the name to DuSable.

Q: There were a number of very talented young piano players in your class at that time.

JY: Well, I was in there with Dorothy Donegan and a fellow named Dempsey Travis, who wrote that book (he was playing the piano then, at that time), and Marbetha Davis. Nat Cole had just graduated not too long before that. Nat Cole and somebody else, I can’t think of him. Those were the piano players. We used to do what they called the Hi-Jinx at DuSable High School.

Q: The Hi-Jinx was a show band type . . .

JY: Yeah, it was a show to raise money. It was a fundraiser. And I was in the Hi-Jinx with these dudes, as a matter of fact, Redd Foxx was in one of those Hi-Jinx, a tramp band. But that was one of our fundraisers.

Q: So there was really tremendous musical talent all concentrated in this one high school, and there continued to be for many, many years.

JY: That’s right. Captain Dyett was at the root of it all. He’d cuss us out and make us do better than we did the previous time. He’d throw us out of the band, and if we came back the next day and didn’t make that same mistake, he’d pretend like he didn’t notice that we came back. He’d let us stay. [Von laughs]

Q: John Young, how long had you been playing piano at the time you entered high school? Had you already developed your musicality?

JY: Yes. I had my first lesson when I was about eight, I think it was. I had a private teacher for about ten years. Two, because I had one lady for five and then a gentleman for the other five. The lady didn’t want me to play jazz; she said, “That old devil jazz.” She wanted me to be a classical artiste. But I’d been listening to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Basie, and I said, “Well, that’s me.”

Q: You could be an artiste of another sort. But this was all music that was really part of the Chicago scene when you were a youngster coming up.

JY: Yes, that’s right.

Q: I don’t know how much first-hand exposure you were able to get as a teen and pre-teen. But give us a little flavor of what things were like in Chicago when your consciousness about music was starting to emerge.

JY: Well, if you want to know what things were like in Chicago, I’d better let Von . . .

Q: Von Freeman, I’ve been neglecting you.

VF: No, it’s fine. John is doing fine. [John laughs] But I really don’t remember.

Q: You don’t remember?

VF: No, man. Listen . . .

JY: It’s just like “Stardust,” huh?

VF: Yeah, listen.

JY: “Oh, but that was long ago . . . “

VF: See, because things were so groovy then that you had a tendency not to even realize how good it was. For instance, John was talking about Art Tatum before; of course, anybody with any musical sense at all loved that man’s piano playing. And I was lucky to have the fellow who first told me about him playing in a group of mine. His name was Prentice McCarey. Prentice was just like John. He loved him. He was a great piano player himself. Every time Coleman Hawkins would come through town . . . And this was way back, before I went to the War, so it was in the ’30s. See, I lived over Prentice McCarey. I used to listen to him practice on the piano. He was playing a place called the Golden Lily on 55th Street with one of my idols, which of course was Coleman Hawkins. And later on, I happened to have acquired a job at this same club on 55th Street on the south side of Chicago, upstairs. And it was funny . . . We were playing there, and Prentice said to me, “Man, guess who I’m gonna bring by your club tonight?” Well, I couldn’t guess. I thought he meant Prez, because he knew I loved Lester — Lester Young. But it was Art Tatum.

I’ll never forget that night, because when we got through playing, he went somewhere and picked up Art, and brought Art back. Let’s see, we got off at about one; it must have been about 2 o’clock in the morning. And Art played for about four or five hours just on the piano. And the piano wasn’t that great; a couple of keys were broken. He just missed them all night long. And that’s one of the high evenings of my lifetime. I had just gotten married, I think I was 23 years old or something like that. I didn’t realize how great that was.

The reason why I brought that up is that’s the way Chicago was. It was so good and there were so many big people in town . . . Like 63rd Street was full of musicians, full of clubs. 64th Street, the great Pershing Lounge up there. They would bring everybody in . . .

Q: But in the ’30s, when you were a teenager . . .

VF: Oh, that’s when it started. That’s when all that got started, and it really lasted until just about to the end of the ’40s . It started really dying out around 1950.

Q: For instance, as teenagers, were you able to go, say, to the Grand Terrace and hear Earl Hines, or was that off-limits to you?

VF: No, I never went. I was too young for that.

JY: Well, they broadcast from there, so we . . .

VF: But we heard that, though.

JY: We heard it on the radio.

Q: And was this what you were trying to come in under? Was Earl Hines the band that you admired? Von, when you were a young saxophonist, who were some of your models?

VF: Well, one of the persons is still living. What’s his name, John? He plays at Andy’s a lot now. On Mondays. He plays clarinet and tenor . . . Sort of a red looking fellow. He was on there with Budd Johnson. Oh, his name is Franz Jackson.

But see, during that era, Earl was just one of the many bands. Like, Count Basie was out here and all those big bands. Because that was the big band era. And of course, Earl had one of the better bands, and it just happened that he was based in Chicago. But then when Earl left, King Kolax brought a band in (do you remember that, John?) for a while.

JY: Yeah.

VF: He was a great trumpet player around town. And of course, he had Bennie Green with him, Gene Ammons . . . In fact, Billy Eckstine took some guys out of his band. Gene Ammons was in the Kolax band.

It was so good, and there were so many different personalities coming in from around the country. Now when you look back, when there’s nobody coming in on the south side, hardly, you think about how good it really was. That’s the reason why it’s hard to remember, because you should have been writing down all that stuff, really, but you didn’t. You had a tendency to think to think it was going to last forever, and of course it didn’t.

[MUSIC: Von and Chico Freeman, “Mercy, Mercy Me”; Gene Ammons, “My Way”]

Q: John Young joined Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy as a pianist in the early 1940’s.

JY: That’s right.

Q: What was your progression from high school to the point where Andy Kirk was calling you to join his band?

JY: Andy Kirk was on the road and needed a piano player, so he called the Harry Gray, the President of the Musicians Union, to send him a piano player, and he recommended me for the gig. Harry Gray was the type of fellow that has a big voice and talks loud; he was one of those kind of guys that believes in talking loud on the phone to get his point over. He calls me up on the telephone, and he says: “Mister Young!” He scared me half to death because I was young; I was only 19 or 20 years old. “Young! We have a job for you. It’s with Andy Kirk. Can you make it?” Hey-hey! I didn’t know what to say, you know what I mean. I said, “Uh-unh-uh-unh . . . ” He said, “Well, I’ll call you back.” So he called me back . . . I had to talk about it with my mother because I wasn’t 21 years old yet, see. So I had to tell my mother about it, and beg her to let me go. So anyway, he called me back, and I said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Gray. I’ll make it.” So he said, “Yes, well, okay then, I’ll call Andy.” So that’s how I got with Andy Kirk.

Q: Were you familiar with the band from records before that?

JY: No. All this was completely new. Mary Lou Williams had left the band, and the piano player who replaced her had just recorded “The Boogie-Woogie Cocktail.” “The Boogie-Woogie Cocktail” was getting over. So I had to take the record home and learn it off the record. [sings theme] So I took it home and laid my ear on it, and got back and played it as close as I could to the way the record sounded.

Q: Were you working in Chicago after high school?

JY: Yes!

Q: What were you doing in the interim? Tell us a little about your activities, John Young.

JY: Well, after I left high school, a fellow called me up and he took me to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I worked with him. I forget his name. But my earliest recollection of working in Chicago was some striptease joints. So I enjoyed that.

VF: [laughs] Look out, John!

Q: Was it solo piano?

JY: No-no . . .

Q: Did they have a little band?

JY: No, no, they had a group. It was a striptease joint downtown on . . . I think it’s called Clark Street — at a striptease joint down there. And then I worked in a place called Calumet City. What they would do . . .

Q: The notorious Calumet City. [Von: loud laugh]

JY: They would hang some drapes, some see-through drapes in front of the band, because they didn’t want the customers to think that the musicians were too familiar with the striptease artists, you know what I mean? So we played . . . Some of these striptease artists had some very difficult music while they was out there taking clothes off. And you’d be mad, because they got you there, and you’re back there sweating, and all they’re doing is just walking, traipsing around and taking a piece off here and there. And you’re back there sweating, trying to play the “Rhapsody In Blue” while they’d be walking around. But that’s what they liked. That’s what the striptease person wanted. And they’d want you to play that music. So I did . . . [sings ‘Rhapsody In Blue’] . . . and they’d just walk around, taking a little piece off here and there.

So that was my first gig before I really made a living. You know, you always make gigs here and there. But the first gigs that I remember where I really made a living was them striptease joints.

Q: Were you playing a lot of blues then, too?

JY: Oh, yeah. Well, you had to play that.

Q: Just talk about the piano styles in Chicago that you’d have to be going through.

JY: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. You had to play a little boogie here and there, and a little . . . Anyway, you had to know a little bit about most styles. Play a little of what they called stride, and you had to play a little boogie, and you had to play a little oom-pah, oom-chunk, oom-chunk-chunk — “boom-chink,” you would call it. You had to do a little bit of everything in order to try to make a living at it — which is the same thing I’m doing now. In order to make a living, you’ve got know a little bit about all of this.

Q: Well, subsequently (and we’ll talk about this later), you played with quite a few singers.

JY: Yes.

Q: Von, what were your earliest gigs after high school? Or were you also working during high school, outside?

VF: Well, you know, it was just about the same.

Q: You worked in the same strip joints.

VF: Oh, yes! [John laughs] And in fact, one of the first groups that I worked with, I can’t quite remember this man’s name now, but he was the drummer. The only thing I can really remember about him was he sat so low. He sat like in a regular chair, and it made him look real low down on the drums. I said, “I wonder why this guy sits so low.” You could hardly see him behind his cymbals. And we were playing a taxi dance. Now, you’re probably too young to know what those were.

Q: Well, I’m certainly too young to have experienced them first-hand.

VF: Oh! Well, see, what you did was, you played two choruses of a song, and it was ten cents a dance. And I mean, two choruses of the melody.

Q: No more, no less!

VF: And the melody. And man, when I look back, I used to think that was a drag, but that helped me immensely. Because you had to learn these songs, and nobody wanted nothing but the melody. I don’t care how fast or how slow this tune was. You played the melody, two choruses, and of course that was the end of that particular dance. Now, that should really come back, because that would train a whole lot of musicians how to play the melody. And I was very young then, man. I was about 12 years old.

Q: Were you playing tenor then?

VF: Oh, C-melody.

Q: C-melody was your first instrument.

VF: Yeah, my first one. And that really went somewhere else, see, because that’s in the same key as the piano. But it was essential. And of course, I worked Calumet City for years, and I learned a lot out there! Like John said, you played a lot of hard music, and you essentially played the melody out there. You had to learn the melody to tunes.

And so right today, I try never to forget the melody. Because I’ve found out that the people don’t forget the melody. So no matter how carried away I get, I try to remember the melody. All this stuff that you learned early in your career, you come to find out most of the things . . . Like, I wasn’t that crazy about Walter Dyett’s teaching. He was . . .

Q: Too authoritarian?

VF: . . . a disciplinarian and whatnot. But see, as you go along, and especially when you start getting in those 60s and closer to 70, see, you learn . . . One lesson is that most of the people who patted you on the back all the time and said, “Blow!” didn’t really mean it. The folks that you really think about are the ones that said, “Hey, man, that doesn’t sound good” or “Hey, that’s wrong.” They don’t really mean that it’s wrong. It’s incorrect; let’s put it that way. But you learn and you look back, you say, “Hey, they were trying to help me.”

Q: Von, let me get back to your career. When did you graduate from C-melody to the tenor?

VF: Well, I was playing dances. See, there was a famous lady named Sadie Bruce, and she gave me my first job. I must have been about . . . My first local job on the south side of Chicago was in her dance room. Because see, I used to tap dance.

JY: Yeah?

VF: Yes. So she asked me one day, “Somebody told me that you play an instrument.” I said, “Well, yes, Mrs. Bruce, I do.” She said, “Well, have you got a little old band? Because I’m planning to start some socials in my basement.” I said, “Well, I don’t know whether we’re good enough to play for that.” She said, “Well, I heard you on one of these back porches; you sound pretty good to me.” We used to do a lot of back porch clowning and playing.

But the interesting thing about that was that I had James Craig with me. Now, you may have never heard of James Craig, but he’s the piano player on Gene Ammons’ “Red Top” that did that little thing that’s kind of got . . . When you play “Red Top,” you have to play that little thing that he put in that song. He was a very good pianist. I had a vibe player named Norris from out of DuSable, and then I had Marvin Cates on drums. And that was my little group. I guess I was about 15. And it was the first job I played on the south side of Chicago, although I had been working in Gary and working downtown in the strip places.

So you know, my history is similar to John’s and almost everybody around Chicago. Because most of the jobbing was done in strip places in Calumet City and Hammond . . .

Q: Did those gigs get set up through the union?

VF: No-no-no. In fact, the union didn’t know anything about it.

Q: So those were things to avoid . . .

VF: Well, you worked eight hours for ten dollars. The union would have had a fit.

JY: Yeah, they were strict about that.

VF: It was like . . . the mines, we used to call them. But you could earn a living.

JY: That’s right.

Q: And learn a lot of music.

VF: Oh, listen! Now, when I look back, what you learned was invaluable. Because you learned discipline. You’d sit there playing the melody of the songs all night long . . .

Q: And I guess ten dollars went a long way in 1937.

VF: Oh, man, you dig? And it helped my lung power a whole lot, too.

Q: Smoke-filled rooms and all.

VF: Listen, you learned how to put that air in that horn there. Piano players learned how to really get a touch.

Q: I know that later Captain Dyett would form bands of his students and join them in the union, and they’d play gigs around that town? Was he doing that when you were there?

VF: Well, that was the one band that he called . . . See, we were all out of school, our high school called DuSable, and he called his band the DuSableites. He kept it for a while. He started it about two years before I went into the service, and then I came out of the service, then went back into it and stayed until about ’46 — about two more years. So he had that group from about 1941 until maybe ’47 or ’48.

Q: The years after World War II, from 1945 and ’46, were thriving years musically in Chicago. Von Freeman, you and your brothers — George, the great guitar player, and Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, a drummer — had the house band at one of the most prestigious rooms in Chicago, the Pershing Ballroom. What were the circumstances behind that? And talk a bit about the geography of the Jazz scene in Chicago in that particular time and around that area.

VF: Oh, man, that’s when it was buzzing. From 31st Street all the way on up to let’s say 64th Street — well, 66th — Chicago was the place to be. John Young was at the Q Lounge, Dick Davis — everybody was in town and had a gig. It was right after the War, and the town was booming . . . They had a great promoter around town named McKie Fitzhugh. This guy came out of DuSable, and he was promoting. And he called me one day and he said, “Would you be interested in maybe getting your two brothers . . . ” See, because my brother George was very popular around that time.

Q: Had he been in Chicago during the war?

VF: Yes. You see, he didn’t go to the war; he was too young. He stayed around Chicago, man, and his name was buzzing. So he said, “Hey, why don’t you get together with your two brothers and get a piano player and a bass player? I’ve got an idea; I want to book a lot of names into the Pershing.”

Q: He likes to pick with a silver dollar, your brother.

VF: Right. That’s what he does now, yeah. So I said, “Okay, that will be fine.” So there was a fellow named Chris Anderson, a little blind pianist, and I had Leroy Jackson on bass (Leroy has since passed), and Alfred . . . What was Alfred’s last name, John? Do you remember Alfred?

JY: White.

VF: Alfred White. I was using two bassists at the time, concurrently, you know. So we went in, man, and that’s where I met Diz and Bird, Billie Holiday — everybody came down there.

Q: What sort of room was that? That was part of a complex of clubs . . .

VF: Oh, that was the ballroom itself. See, but the Pershing Lounge was beautiful, too. I played that later on. But at that time I was playing the ballroom.

Q: How was it set up? The national musicians would come in, and there would be dances?

VF: Yeah, dances. Dances Fridays and Saturdays.

Q: So people would be dancing to Bird, dancing to Diz . . .

VF: That’s right.

Q: Dancing to the people who would come in with you.

VF: Well, around that time things had changed a lot. They would stand around the bandstand, and there wasn’t that much dancing going on any more. And we used to play, man. I used to have a ball just playing with the stars, listening to them or whatever. I’m very lucky to have gotten chosen for that particular job.

Q: So who came through? We’re talking about the major stars in music at that time?

VF: Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge — you name them. He brought everybody to Chicago, man. And he was paying so nice for those times. What he’d do is, he’d bring them in, and they would come in with no music, no nothing, and you were expected to know the tunes. And I had this little genius at the piano who knew everybody’s tunes. So we were very fortunate. We were able to play behind them.

Q: You’re referring to Chris Anderson.

VF: Yes.

Q: Von said that you, John Young, were working at the Q Lounge during this time.

JY: The Quality Lounge.

Q: The Quality Lounge. A high-quality joint, was it?

JY: Ah-ha-ha . . .

Q: I see.

JY: I was only in two shootings.

VF: At least! [laughs]

Q: Where was it? Which street was it on?

JY: The Quality Lounge was on 43rd Street. So if you know anything about 43rd Street, you know it wasn’t on the uppity-uppity-uppity-up. The Quality Lounge, I was in there with a fellow named Dick Davis who played tenor saxophone. I was the piano player, the drummer’s name was Buddy Smith, Eddie Calhoun was on bass. And I was singing . . .

Q: Singing, too.

JY: But at that time I had laryngitis. When (?) asked me to sing, I suddenly developed a case of laryngitis. All three of them called it “lyingitis” — because it was a gitis that never left. But the Q was cool . . . Like I say, it was a relaxed joint. You could come in there with tennis shoes on if you wanted to. It wasn’t nothin’ uppity, you know. And it was on 43rd Street. We had a good time in there for a number of years, the Quality Lounge on 43rd Street. I lost my point . . .

Q: Oh, I was talking to you about working in Chicago in the late 1940’s and late ’50s. When did you start working with a lot of singers?

JY: Well, a piano player always has a hundred singers around, you know.

Q: But you later became an accompanist for some major singers.

JY: Well, I was with Nancy Wilson for a hot minute in the ’60s. See, John Levy, the booking agent, he was a bass player around Chicago, so he just about knew everybody that he thought would fit with this or that person. So he thought that I would be a perfect fit for Nancy Wilson. He didn’t know that I was really into jazz, and that I wanted to be a jazz piano player. I wanted to be out front. You know what I mean? I won’t say out front, but I wanted to receive some of the same recognition that soloists receive rather than accompanists. But anyway, he hooked me up with Nancy Wilson, and I stayed with Nancy for a short spell.

And I had to write him a letter to explain to him why I didn’t stay. He thought that I should have stayed with her, because he gone to the trouble of booking me with Nancy Wilson, he felt that we were a perfect match, some kind of match anyway — and Nancy had struggled with me to try to get me to play here things like she liked them. So he thought I was going to be with Nancy Wilson for life. And I explained to him that, no, that ain’t what I had in mind.

When the piano player is a singer’s right arm, as they say, there are certain limitations to what he can do and what he . . . I’ve seen piano players be accompanists for life with certain singers or performers, and they stay in a rut for a long time. There’s only so much you can do as an accompanist. When you get thrown out there where you have to play the melody or have to carry the load, you’re lost.

Q: Well, we can get back to that in a minute. But I’d like to return to someone Von was talking about: Chris Anderson, who had a great impact really on the piano players in Chicago.

VF: Oh, man, he’s unsung. When I first met him, I met him in a big arena that we used to play on the south side, on 63rd Street and King Drive. I forget who I had on piano this time, but whoever he was, wasn’t making it. Chris happened to be sitting there, and he walked up and whispered in my ear, “I think I could play that.” I kind of looked at him, because I’d had people at different times to do that, say things like “Hey, man, I think I can do it a little better than what so-and-so is doing; I think I’ll feed you a little more” and blah-blah-blah. I generally don’t even listen. But for some reason or another, I said, “Oh, really?” Because this cat didn’t know the tune. I had asked him if he knew it, and he said, “Yeah,” and then when I got to playing the tune, he didn’t really know the tune.

So meanwhile, I guess the piano player heard Chris, and he said, “Hey, man, if you can play it, play it.” So he played it. And I said, “Hey, man, what’s your name?” And I noticed he was a little short fellow, you know . . . I said, “Hey, man, you stay there. I’ll pay both of you.” I told the other guy, “I’ll pay you, man, not to play.” So that’s how we began.

Chris heard a lot of things, just naturally, that I was trying to hear. And he was a very nice person about his knowledge. So I’d ask him, “Chris, where did you go there?” And he’d say so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so. So I learned a lot from him. At the time, I had been using Ahmad Jamal. And then Ahmad . . . He had a guitar player, I forget where this fellow was from, I think from Pittsburgh, where Ahmad was from. [Ray Crawford] So Ahmad had told me that he was giving me a two-week notice, that he was going to form his own trio. He’d stayed with me, I think, about two years, and then he formed his own trio. And then he started hanging with Chris, too. And I really noticed a big difference in his playing after he had been around Chris. Almost anybody who had been around him, it kind of opened them up a little bit — because he was very advanced for those times. In fact, I still think he is.

Q: So do a lot of other musicians around New York.

VF: Mmm-hmm.

Q: But his influence seems to go through a couple of generations in Chicago.

VF: Yeah, well, I think . . .

Q: Was Andrew Hill checking out Chris? Herbie Hancock?

VF: Well, Andrew worked with me a long time, too, you know. But Andrew was more or less into bebop at that time. But Chris to me wasn’t a bebop player, he wasn’t a swing player, he didn’t play like Art Tatum. To me, he was . . .

JY: He had his own thing.

VF: Yeah, he had his own thing. He was a conglomeration of all of that. And he didn’t flaunt his knowledge or anything. Maybe being blind helped him a lot, I don’t know. But he could hear a lot of things that I had always heard, and that I think everybody eventually wanted to hear. He was advanced for that time. See, now I’m speaking about 40 years ago.

Q: I’d like to ask you about a couple of the other great musicians who were working around Chicago a lot at that time? I’d like to ask you both about Ike Day, and if you both came into contact with him, played with him?

VF: Well, we used to go around playing tenor and drum ensembles together. He was a great drummer. And he was one of the first guys I had heard with all that polyrhythm type of playing; you know, sock cymbal doing one thing, bass drum another, snare drum another. He was very even-handed. Like the things Elvin does a lot of? Well, Ike did those way back in the ’40s and the late ’30s.

Q: Did you know Ike well enough for him to tell you about the drummers he was paying attention to as a young drummer?

VF: I know he liked Chick Webb. He never really mentioned anyone to me other than Chick Webb. And he liked Bird’s drummer . . . .

Q: Oh, Max Roach.

VF: Yeah.

Q: And I know Max Roach liked Ike Day, because he’s said so publicly on a number of occasions.

VF: Right.

Q: He was also a very versatile drummer, is what I gather. He would play big- band, piano trio combos. He was a totally versatile drummer, with great ears, a great listening drummer and so forth. Does that jibe with your recollection?

VF: I never heard him play with a big band. But I know he played in the combos. He was with Jug a long time. There was another tenor player around Chicago named Tom Archia, and they were in a club for a long time — and he was the drummer.

Ike to me was well-rounded. He swung. And the triplets you hear people playing, that’s really part of Ike Day’s style. He did it all the time.

Q: It’s very valuable to know this, because there is only one recording of Ike Day I think that exists at all, and the drums are almost buried . . .

VF: Oh, with Gene Ammons?

Q: With Gene Ammons, a Chess date.

VF: Oh yeah, that’s the same band.

Q: John Young, what are your memories of Ike Day? Did you play with Ike Day? Did you work with him?

JY: I might have played one or two tunes with Ike, but I don’t remember playing very much with Ike. I liked his work.

Q: Who were the drummers you mostly used on your gigs in Chicago at that time?

JY: Well, a fellow named Phil Thomas. I used him more than I did anybody else. And I started off with a drummer named Larry Jackson. Larry Jackson, Phil Thomas, Vernell Fournier. Phil is the one I used most. Strong drummer. Oh, I’m sorry! I’m about to forget the one that I’m using now, and that’s George Hughes. George has worked around New York and a number of places with Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy Gillespie uses him. George Hughes is his name. He’s the last drummer that I’ve used to any extent, more than once. Some drummers you use on certain gigs, just for that one time — there’s a number of those. But the ones that I’ve used over a period of time have to be George Hughes, Phil Thomas, and somebody else and somebody else . . .

Q: Von, I’d like to ask you about Gene Ammons, who I know you were friends with. He came several years after you at DuSable High School.

VF: Oh, well, Jug, man . . . Of course, I called him Ams. But it’s really interesting. His mother taught me my first chorus. He had a beautiful mother. And she was like a classical pianist. There’s very few people who know that. And I used to go to Jug’s house, and we’d practice together, and things like that. He was always one of my favorites. In fact, my brother was in the band that . . . See, George played with Jug. Probably the last nine years of his life Jug formed a group, and George was in the group. One of Jug’s last hits was called “The Black Cat,” which my brother George wrote.

So Jug and I had . . . We were very close. During my formative years, when I came out of the service, Jug used to hire me in his place, because he was getting so popular. So when he’d work a club, and he’d have to go out of town, he’d always get me to take his place. And a lot of people say I play like Jug. Which I wish I did! But I don’t know, he’s just one of my favorites.

[MUSIC: “Lost In A Fog” and “No. 7”; John Young departs]

Q: On the last segment, Von, I was asking you about some of the great figures who were active in Chicago in the post-World War II era. I know you used to work with Sun Ra’s rehearsal bands and had some contact with Sun Ra in the late 1940s and 1950s.

VF: Oh yes!

Q: What was he into at that point? What was his music sounding like and what was he doing around Chicago at that time?

VF: Oh, his music was sounding beautiful. But you know, one of the things that’s really different about him, he had two different concepts altogether. See, he was playing all this new-sounding music and different-sounding music with his own group — and of course I was a part of that. And then, he was over at a famous club on the south side of Chicago, the Club De Lisa, and he was writing show music for that band, which was Red Saunders’ band.

Q: Tell us a little about that band, too. It was a major band at a major venue.

VF: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s the band that Sonny Cohn came out of. And of course, for those who don’t know Sonny Cohn, he was with Count Basie for years and years and years. A trumpeter, a great young trumpeter. And of course, Red Saunders was a premier drummer around Chicago for show bands, all . . .

Q: And he had that band for about 17-18 years.

VF: Well, actually I think it was about 27. And he was right there at the Club DeLisa. And all the younger drummers used to go around to see Red to learn how to play shows. Because that’s another art of drumming. You know, show drumming: how to catch the performers and catch the singers. Every time they move, the drummer does something. And he did it so tastefully.

Q: Of course, there’s a tradition of that in Chicago that really goes back to the silent movie days in the 1920s.

VF: It certainly does.

Q: The great black orchestras that performed at the different big movie theatres.

VF: That’s right.

Q: There was Erskine Tate and Doc Cooke and a couple of others.

VF: That’s right.

Q: A lot of great musicians got their real polish in those show bands.

VF: That’s very, very true.

Q: Do you remember hearing those bands as a little boy?

VF: Oh, surely. And then I ended up playing at the Regal Theatre in the pit for different things.

Q: Oh, when was that?

VF: Oh, that was way back. I was in high school.

Q: The Regal was perhaps the equivalent in Chicago to the Apollo in some ways. Is that accurate?

VF: Yes, it was. Of course, no place would be like the Apollo, naturally. But the Regal was Chicago’s Apollo, let’s put it that way.

Q: We’re juggling a number of different things at once. So let’s get back to what Sun Ra was doing.

VF: Well, Sun Ra . . .

Q: He was writing show music for Red Saunders at the Club De Lisa.

VF: And I found it very interesting that he could write this show music, which was essentially this do, du, do-du, do-du-do, and then his thing, where he had all these different voices going and his music was very complicated at the time. But it swung — in Sun Ra’s unique way. Because he had two great saxophone players with him. He had, of course, Pat Patrick, who is sort of ill these days around Chicago. And of course, he had John Gilmore. He kept great players in his group. And of course, I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot by being in his band.

Q: Now, when exactly were you in his band?

VF: I was in his band during let’s say ’48, ’49 . . .

Q: Was that a working band or a rehearsal band?

VF: Oh, yeah. He played.

Q: What type of gigs would he do?

VF: He played dances. He really did, yeah. And he had like his own ballroom. I can’t think of the name of the ballroom. It was on the east side of 63rd Street, and we played at this ballroom. And Sun Ra was never into whether there was anybody in the ballroom or not. He simply tried to play what he felt.

Q: Would that music be recognizable to people who know Sun Ra today? Did it . . . ?

VF: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Now, he went back in recent years, and was playing some of Fletcher Henderson’s type of music and whatnot. But he’s still playing with that unique Sun Ra thing.

Q: Well, he covers the whole spectrum, really.

VF: Yes, he does.

Q: He plays different things for different occasions.

VF: Yes, he does.

Q: Didn’t Red Holloway also work briefly with Sun Ra? Is that true or not?

VF: I know that Red took a band into the Club De Lisa for six months when Red Saunders took off. Because I was in that band, playing alto, and I know that Sun Ra was writing the show music at the time. But whether or not he ever played in one of Sun Ra’s original bands, I do not know. You’d have to ask Red.

Q: Who were some of the other people in that Sun Ra band from the late 1940’s?

VF: Well, Julian Priester for one.

Q: That early, in the late 1940’s?

VF: No, Julian came along later. But in the ’40s . . . I’m trying to think. Oh, man . . . See, he had different people, and I really can’t remember who was in those bands..

Q: Tell us a little bit about the Club De Lisa. They were famous for their breakfast dances . . .

VF: Yes.

Q: We played a selection before by your son dedicated to Andrew Hill, who was 15 years old when he made his first record with you.

VF: Oh, yes, Andrew is a beautiful pianist. Of course, his style has evolved. At that time he was more or less playing bebop, and as he got younger he went on into free-form and whatnot. But he did it honestly. He feels it. And I like what he’s doing.

Q: Von, we’re going to hear now something from a Groove Holmes’ 1967-’68 record The Groover, featuring your brother George on his composition, “The Walrus,” some variations on “Sweet Georgia Brown” . . .

VF: Well, I think that’s what that is. I’ll have to hear it. But that sounds right to me.

Q: We’ll make no commitments.

VF: Well, back during that era we all used to take standard tunes and then write little originals and whatnot.

[MUSIC: “The Walrus,” “How Deep Is The Ocean” (Von solo)]

Q: Von, you had said to me that “How Deep Is The Ocean” is one you particularly wanted to have presented on this show, that you were very proud of it.

VF: Oh, man, to me that’s one of my greatest moments. In fact, that is the greatest moment I have enjoyed recording. It just happened. The lady who has the label said, “Hey, why don’t you play something slow?” I said, “Oh, I don’t feel like.” But she’s so beautiful, she asked again, and she said, “Well, please play something.” So how can you refuse a lady? So just off the top of my head, she said, “We’re rolling,” and I didn’t even have any idea what I wanted to play — I just went into that tune. And that’s the way it happened. And to me it’s the greatest thing I have ever done on record. I really felt that I did the tune justice; you know, for the way I was feeling. As a rule, I don’t care much for my recordings.

Q: Do you do that during your performances, Von? Are you going to be doing any a cappella this week at Condon’s?

VF: Oh, you know, last night I played several tunes. Of course, I didn’t do it like I did on the album, but I have a tendency . . .

Q: You always do long cadenzas . . .

VF: Yeah. And I have a tendency sometimes just to cut the band and play for a chorus or two. I’ve always done that, though.

Q: Von, you’ve stated in print that Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young were really your two primary influences in terms of how to approach the saxophone, and you see your style as a melding of the two.

VF: That’s true.

Q: You mentioned hearing Coleman Hawkins in the 1930’s in Chicago. Did you study his records in the 1930’s? Did you study Prez’s records?

VF: Well, actually, yes. See, Hawk was a good friend of my father’s.

Q: How was that? Your father was a musician?

VF: No, not really. Actually he was a Chicago policeman. But he loved music, and he loved to hang around the guys, you know. So my Dad, he always kept a record collection from as far back as I can remember. So naturally, I had an affinity for music from right him, actually.

But Lester Young, see, used to come to the Regal Theatre all the time with Count Basie’s band, and all us little guys loved Lester, and we used to go and sit down in the front, you know, and try to play his solos. I had some of his earliest records, like “Every Tub” and all those, and I used to practice those. In fact, I got so I could play those note for note. And I could play Hawk’s “Body and Soul” note for note. So those two . . . Well, just like probably all the rest of the Chicago saxophone players. We were a conglomeration of Hawk and Prez.

Q: Gene Ammons, certainly.

VF: Oh yeah. Well, of course. And Dex and me — almost all of them.

Q: What was your first reaction to Charlie Parker when you heard his music the first time?

VF: Now, that takes me back. Because my Dad gave me the first music I ever heard of Charlie Parker. He gave me “The Hootie Blues.” He brought it, and he said, “Hi, hot-shot, you think you’re so hot because you got Lester Young down.” He says, “Try out this guy.” I said, “Oh, what’s this, Pop. Who did you bring . . . ?” Man, he put that thing on, and it knocked me out. Because see, to me Bird was playing Prez on alto — to me. And it was just more advanced. It’s like when I first heard Trane; I heard Prez and Bird. And I guess whoever follows, whoever the next saxophone player will be, it will be, you know, Prez and Bird and Trane and Getz and Zoot. All the good saxophone players have a tendency to be on the same line. Like just some of them followed; they play more Hawkins than Prez. But I hear lately most people are getting the two together. Because that makes what you’d almost call the perfect saxophone player. Because Hawk had so many things . . . He had all that power and drive, and Prez could float and just sail along. I would say Hawk just played straight up and down, and Prez played sideways. So if you get them, you’ve got the whole thing together.

And I think it didn’t take saxophone players too long to learn this, especially tenor saxophone players. I think I was with you on the program a few years back, and I was telling you about that tenor. That tenor presents a different type of problem for the simple reason that the ladies like the sound of the saxophone. And ladies are very dominant in your crowd. So you’ve got to learn how to play sweet, and for the men you got to learn how to holler — you can’t just sit up and play ballads all night. So there’s so much to get together on that tenor. And I like to always think of a trombone . . .

Q: In your playing?

VF: Yeah, man. Because a trombone sounds . . . Like, I call great trombone players like tenor saxophone players. You’ve got two of them here. Curtis Fuller, who did all those records with the Jazz Messengers, he just sounded like one of the real good tenor players. And the other cat who’s the Indian, what’s his name, who plays shells . . . ?

Q: You’re talking about Steve Turre.

VF: Yeah, Turre! Man, to me, man, those two cats when I hear them, I say, “Oh, man, if I could get a sound like that!” Because see, the tenor and the trombone, with Dickie Wells, remember him . . . ? All these cats had that haunting quality that saxophone players get. And as strange as it may sound, to me Miles sounds something like a tenor player. Although I always think that the trumpet is the dominant instrument, because who can do it better than a great trumpet player? Because you’ve got everything coming right out of the bell of that horn. When I hear Wynton play I think of a saxophone player. Now, that’s coming at it from a saxophone player’s view, of course.

[MUSIC: Coleman Hawkins: “The Man I Love,” “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams”; Lester Young, “These Foolish Things,” “I Got Rhythm”]

Q: “I Got Rhythm” is one of the basic bedrock tunes in all of Jazz.

VF: Man, listen. I can play a job playing “I Got Rhythm”! I’m telling you. Give me a few blues tunes and “I Got Rhythm” and I can make the gig. I’m telling you. Beautiful, man.

Q: “These Foolish Things” I can remember from my time living in Chicago as the most popular ballad in that town.

VF: Right.

Q: That may or may not be true . . .

VF: It still is!

Q: People in Chicago have long memories about the music.

VF: Well, see, just about all the tenor players made their name around there. You know, whether they were from Chicago or not, during the late ’30s and the ’40s and the early ’50s, all the great saxophonists were around Chicago playing. So you’d sort of feel like they’re from Chicago, although of course they’re not.

I talk on shows, dropping names here, dropping names there, but I’d just like to go on the record saying how much I’ve gotten from some of the current cats, cats who are still living. Like Benny Golson, man. Benny Golson wouldn’t even remember me. I was working at the Pershing Ballroom, or actually I’d moved up to the lounge, and Benny came by and jammed with me all morning, all morning at the Pershing Lounge — and I just fell in love with Benny Golson. Now, this is back in ’53 or ’54.

Q: He would have been on the road with one of the rhythm-and-nlues bands.

VF: I forget when he came to town, but it was just shortly before. . . Bird passed in ’55. It was about ’53 or ’54 or something like that.

Well, Benny Golson, and I remember the first time I heard Wayne Shorter. And then [John] Stubblefield used to be around Chicago; he used to come around to me a lot. And of course, Joe Lovano, I’ve been listening to him lately. Of course, Junior Cook wouldn’t remember the first time I played with him, down in Miami. I was traveling with the Al Smith Band, and ran into Junior Cook down in Miami, and he knocked me out. And of course Jimmy Heath I’ve always loved. Because Jimmy, man . . . Who plays more horn than Jimmy Heath? He’s beautiful. And Clifford Jordan has been around with me at different times. In fact, I came up here once and worked a gig with Clifford Jordan . . .

Q: That was at the Irving Plaza on 15th Street, with Chris Anderson and Victor Sproles on that date.

VF: Right! Surely! Yeah! And then of course, Sonny Rollins. I’ve always loved Sonny. And I ran into him once, I had a group I think in Holland or something, and he was on the concert, and they gave him a birthday party — and we hung out and talked for hours. Of course, Dewey Redman. I’ve always loved Dewey Redman, because he’s a beautiful cat. And young Branford Marsalis. I remember when we first cut this concept album, he was beautiful. And of course, Mike Brecker. I ran into him once at the Montreux Festival over in Europe, in Switzerland. And of course, Illinois Jacquet, I saw him recently at I think it was . . . Well, he had this big band at this thing in Holland.

So man, it’s . . . Of course, when you name names you always leave out some names. But these are some of the cats I’ve always probably copied a lot of things that they’ve done. And I’m glad to see that all these cats are still living.

Q: Von, one thing that has always impressed me and many people who have heard you is your proclivity for going inside and outside, but always remaining within the framework of the piece — the freedom of your playing in some ways.

VF: Well, it comes from my hobby, I guess. See, my hobby is music, and of course, I sit up all day and all night long sometimes, studying progressions. It’s just something that I like to do. I’m not trying to prove anything by it. I don’t even know whether it helps my playing or hurts it. But it gives me an outlet to experiment with things that I like, that I’m hearing inside. And I practice so much, even today I practice a couple of hours, three to four hours a day . . . In fact, I run my Mom, who I fortunately still have with me, I run her nuts sometimes. She says, “Man, put that horn down.” And I’m just trying to hear things. It’s just an inside thing, which I’m trying to hear things that please me.

And of course sometimes I do get carried away. I admit that. Sometimes I say, “Hey, come back!” Because I’m running sometimes progressions that I’ve been practicing and hearing, and sometimes I lose track of where the melody is and everything because I’m so extended out there. So it works both ways. And sometimes I’m rather pleased with what I do. But as a rule, I say, “Ah, let me discard that.”

So it’s just something to keep me interested in what I’m doing. And it’s more or less a personal thing.

[MUSIC: Von Freeman-Sam Jones, “Sweet and Lovely,” Von, “I Remember You.”]

Q: I know Sonny Stitt is someone you were close to and had tremendous respect for, along with Gene Ammons.

VF: Oh, I loved him, yeah. We played a lot together.

Q: One of the amazing saxophonists, maybe a little under-appreciated in New York more so than in the Midwest and the South.

VF: Well, I’ll tell you what had to happen with Sonny Stitt, man. You had to get on the bandstand and play with him to really appreciate him. See, Sonny Stitt was mean, man. Sonny Stitt could play so many different things. And he was just as mean on tenor as he was on alto. In fact, he had another style altogether on tenor. And he played baritone! He played it proficiently. The man was a great saxophone player.

Q: And a much more creative player than I think people commonly gave him credit for.

VF: Oh, man. The man could just play anything he wanted to play. Sonny to me was amazing. I loved him. And we used to play a lot around in Gary and Evanston and things like that when he’d come in town. Because he loved to battle, you know, and he loved to get you up on that stage and wear you out. And if you wasn’t together, brother, he would wear you out! But he was a beautiful cat.

Q: Well, Chicago is famous for the tenor battles . . .

VF: Oh, man! You got to have plenty of wind back in those days, I’m telling you.

Q: Your son started out as a trumpet player.

VF: Yes. Well, see, I played trumpet for about 25 years.

Q: You played it on gigs, too?

VF: Yeah. But I had retired the trumpet, and Chico went down to the basement and found it when he was very young. And I thought he was going to be a trumpet player. Well, I had an alto that I had retired down in the basement, too. See, in the era I came up, you played everything you could get your hands on, whether it was the harmonica, I don’t care what it was — you tried to play it. And I had a number of these strange instruments down in the basement. And they went down there and found them. Chico was about 10 and my other son, Markm about 9. And one day I heard all this noise coming out of the basement, and I said, “What is that?” And they were down there playing. Out of the two, I really felt Mark would be the one who could play. But Chico has got one thing that is very important. He has durability! — and stick-to- itiveness. So he stuck with it.

But he actually began playing trumpet, and went to school playing trumpet. In fact, he went to Northwestern playing trumpet. But he ended up on saxophone. And every time I hear him, he’s trying to grow.

Q: We’ll hear “Lord Riff and Me.”

VF: Well, that’s the moniker I was given back in high school . . .

Q: By Captain Dyett.

VF: Yes.

Q: It sounds like a compliment.

VF: Well, actually, see, the way my career began, I used to riff all the time. [sings a riff] I could play any riff you ever heard on a horn. I was good at riffing, see. I didn’t know too much about progressions or harmonics, but I could riff. And that’s where that came from.

You know, Chico did some real strange . . . Like, I’ve always played at the piano. And at the end of one of those albums he has me playing the piano.

Q: Would you like us to end with that?

VF: Yes. Because a lot of people don’t know that actually I play the piano. I like to say play at the piano.

Pete “LaRoca” Sims (1938-2012): A WKCR Musician Show from 1993 and a WKCR Out To Lunch Encounter From 1998

As part of my ongoing pandemic project to digitize and transcribe as many of my previously un-transcribed WKCR shows as possible during my tenure there from 1985 through 2008, here are the transcripts of two encounters with the great drummer Pete “LaRoca” Sims, who between 1957 and 1967, appeared on some of the most consequential recordings of the time, before a long hiatus — he earned a law degree and became a practicing lawyer — that ended during the early 1990s.

 

Pete LaRoca Sims (Musician Show, Nov. 2, 1993) (Side 1 &2); OTL (June 11, 1998):

[MUSIC: Sonny Rollins-Wilbur Ware-Pete LaRoca, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”-Live At The Village Vanguard-1957]

TP: Pete LaRoca Sims has been playing every Sunday night at Yardbird Suite with various musicians comprising a sextet. Most of the best-known selections from that date, with the exception of “Night in Tunisia” from the original album, featured Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones. Did Sonny spontaneously set up the other configuration?

PLR: I was called in, and did my part, and Elvin was there. It seemed to be that it had been preconceived. I didn’t get the impression that it was impromptu, but it may well have been.

TP: You said that this was your first gig out of the neighborhood.

PLR: That’s true. The first major jazz artist who I’d gotten a chance to work with. Previously, I had worked with my contemporaries. We had a dance band that did a good bit of work in and around the city, Harlem, the Bronx, etc. By something of a fluke, having sat in at a place in Brooklyn called Turbo Village, where Max Roach was working during the week… I sat in on a Monday night and I broke quite a few of his drumheads, and I called him up to apologize and offered to pay. He said, “That’s ok. Don’t worry about it. You might be interested to know that Sonny Rollins is looking for a drummer.” So needless to say, I called Sonny Rollins and was fortunate enough to get that job from which that record resulted.

TP: That led to a several-year relationship, on and off, with Sonny. You toured with him in Europe in 1959, which has been documented on a bootleg on the Dragon label.

PLR: There were just a few concerts actually. I don’t think there was another week’s work or anything of that sort anywhere, except that we did go to Europe for three weeks. All of it was quite enjoyable. There could have been more, for my money.

TP: On the Musician Show we create a virtual biography of the musician through the music they’ve listened to and the people they’ve played with. Since that was your first major gig, let’s talk about the events that led you to being on the bandstand – your history as a drummer and some of the experiences you had. How did drums enter your life? Banging on pots and pans as a kid?

PLR: Not quite pots and pans. But various parts of pieces of furniture around the house and things of that sort. I came from a very musical household, with a stepfather who played trumpet and an uncle who was something of an investor in jazz at the time and had a fine record collection that I pretty well exhausted, I think.

My first actual playing was in the New York school system, beginning in junior high school. It was a primarily symphonic orchestra that actually toured a little bit and went to I guess a couple of other junior high schools to play concerts. That continued through Music and Art here in New York, and City College, where I was in the orchestra, and a brief period at Manhattan School of Music, though I didn’t complete that.

TP: Any particular teachers you’d mention helping you a great deal, or was it from watching drummers on gigs?

PLR: Well, it was mainly from being around the music just about all the time, at least with regard to jazz. But since you mentioned teachers, there was one gentleman, David Greitzer, who was instrumental just in the way he spread his great joy in music and his love for the music in such a way as to enthuse the entire orchestra that he was teaching at junior high school. We all got kind of fired up. He had previously taught at Music & Art, as a matter of fact, and prepped us for the entrance exam there, and I think at least half our junior high school orchestra then went on to Music & Art, as a body just about.

Not too many other teachers. There was a Fred Albright who I was assigned briefly at Manhattan – a grand old man of drums he was when I came to him. Just working with him for a semester, doing exercises and things like that, was indeed quite memorable. But that’s the only part of formal training that I think leads to anything like the jazz work that I’ve been doing since.

TP: I take it you start working professionally, or least for money on local gigs, as a teenager? Or when did that start, and what was that like, and who were some of the people that you played with? And where?

PLR: We worked primarily dances, Friday and Saturday nights. One guy who might be known from that band…there are a couple… George Braith, who is a saxophonist, was in that band at one time…

TP: He plays together and he also plays that welded-together…

PLR: He designed his own horn. Braithophone I think he calls it. Barry Rogers, who became very well known as a trombonist in the Latin bands, was also in that band. Some other guys who I know still work in music, like Arthur Jenkins, a pianist; John Mayer, a pianist who I saw last week when he came into Sweet Basil. I don’t know remember all the guys. Phil Newsome… If you’re into Latin music and you were around during that period, you’d probably remember that period, you’d probably remember him. We all called him Cowbell Phil because he did that so well.

We were about 15-16-17 was about the time that… I guess it went on through the time that I went to Sonny. If that was 1957, then I was about 19 at that time. So I guess it continued until then. It was sort of broken up into two pieces. Hugo Dickens actually originated or established the band, and I came along and emphasized the Latin side, and we had a sort of dual situation going on where he was responsible for the swing side and I was responsible for the Latin. This was a time when I was primarily a timbale player. I didn’t play a set of drums at all. It was primarily standards. We did transcriptions from records, and got sheet music on for the Latin music, etc. We got a lot of work. It was a good band.

TP: You were also hanging out, I’d think, and checking out various drummers of the upper echelon…?

PLR: I think it was mostly records at that time. First off, I was playing a lot, so I wasn’t going around to listen a lot. Those were school years, and homework and things took over much of the rest of the time. I didn’t get really that close to traps until I think I was 17, and there was a band that was going to work in the Catskills to do a show. I said, “That’s great, but I don’t happen to have a set of traps.” They said, “We’ll get some for you.” I think the virtue that they found in me was that I could read music, and therefore I could probably cut the show – and indeed, that’s what actually happened. It was from that time I got familiar with a set of traps and then got some other work playing jazz type music, etc. But there really wasn’t a lot of it. I’m sure I played for 6 or 7 years before I ever seriously sat down to play a set of traps.

TP: The first track you’ve selected is an amazing solo album by Baby Dodds on Folkways. I take it you’d heard him through your stepfather’s collection…

PLR: my uncle’s collection, yes. At that time, it was a 10″ 78 that was just drums on both sides. In my experience, that was quite an anomaly. I haven’t come across that before or since. And I loved it. I loved his whole collection, but that was one thing that really struck me in particular. That was before I even played drums at all. That was before even junior high school.

TP: I believe you said that it sounded like a tap dancer.

PLR: I brought a tape of Baby Dodds playing a version of “Tea For Two,” with just him and a piano player who I can’t identify, unfortunately. But in that, it’s mainly drum solo, and what he plays in there is…you can hear – it sounds like a tap dancer dancing.

TP: Also, you’ve mentioned Tito Puente as your main influence on timbales. Were you going out to dances and hearing Tito Puente and so forth…

PLR: Yes, and Tito Rodriguez at that time was around and had a great band. I was mainly interested in timbales at the time, and that’s what I was doing. Puente was a great influence primarily in the way that he strung ideas together. The next idea that he would play would be built upon the last idea that he had played, and he constantly strung it out that way. Which was something that didn’t happen a lot in drums. Drums being a non-pitched instrument, we do different things. There are many familiar rhythms that are in the vernacular, both the Latin vernacular and the jazz vernacular. But that particular way of stringing ideas together was really unique with Puente, and I glommed onto it and have been using it ever since, without a doubt.

[MUSIC: Baby Dodds, “Spooky Drums”; Baby Dodds-Bechet, “Save It Pretty Mama”; Dodds-pianist, “Tea For Two”; Tito Puente, “El Rey Del Timbal”]

TP: Within the course of 15 minutes, we’ve outlined some of the sources of Pete La Roca Sims’ aesthetic on drums and timbales. You mentioned that Baby Dodds eschewed the sock cymbal, didn’t use it on these recordings. On timbales, that would also be the case. In both cases, we have drummers creating a broad dynamic range within a limited palette, so to speak.

PLR: Somewhat. Although I think the color…the metallic sound of the timbales actually adds color, so that you’ve got that to play with even though you don’t have something like the sock cymbal. And, as I was mentioning to you when we were off the air, Baby Dodds uses the press roll as a sort of…I don’t know whether he intended it as a substitute for the sock cymbal, but it does pretty much the same job of emphasizing the second and fourth beats, etc. – which I think is interesting.

TP: How much of an adjustment was it for you to operate on the trap drums? Did you pick it up quickly? Was it complicated?

PLR: As I said, the first thing I got a chance to do was a job in the Catskills, and it was an entire summer cutting a show. That will get you in shape. You’re playing for dancing and then you’re playing for dancers, including strippers, and you’re doing rim-shots and ka-boom-chas, as they said today, for comedians, etc. It’s a bit of everything, and quite a bit of experience.

TP: How long did you that?

PLR: Just the summer. It was the better part of 3 months.

TP: Pete Sims is leading a group Sunday nights at Yardbird Suite on Cooper Square. Also, in the last few years, we’ve had a chance to hear you with Mal Waldron’s group. It’s been exciting to see you developing a stronger presence on the jazz scene.

The first source you mentioned as far as jazz drums was Kenny Clarke.

PLR: It’s the question of time and how time is kept, etc. Kenny also I think de-emphasized the sock cymbal to some extent and instead put the emphasis on the ride cymbal. I think he was one of the first to truly do that. If you listen to Baby Dodds, the beat-by-beat emphasis is in the bass drum. Then, of course, there’s the press roll on the snare drum, emphasizing the off-beats. Klook, by putting it in the ride hand on the ride cymbal, I think sort of smoothed it out. Prior to that time, drummers and rhythm sections were playing pretty much like the Basie rhythm section wit the rhythm guitar and CHUNK-CHUNK, CHUNK-CHUNK, beat-by-beat. By putting it in the cymbal it just got smoother because of the bit of continuity of sound that a cymbal gives you. I loved it and adopted that immediately, and never did anything else.

TP: Did you ever see him in person?

PLR: I only saw him in person, as a matter of fact, the job with Sonny Rollins in Europe.

TP: There’s another bootleg recording from that period in which Kenny Clarke plays with Sonny, in a cathedral in Aix.

PLR: I haven’t heard it but I’d love to.

TP: We’ll hear a set of recordings featuring Kenny Clarke in the early 1950s. This one is from Kenny Clarke’s 2nd MJQ date from April 1952…

[MUSIC: MJQ, “True Blues”; Miles-Bags-Monk, “The Man I Love”-Take 2, 1954]

TP: I think that was my first Miles Davis album, and you mentioned it’s one that you listened to many times.

PLR: That and Miles Ahead were the two first Miles Davis albums that I had.

TP: You mentioned off-mike that your stepfather had played in bands with Monk before bebop, perhaps in the late 1930s, or around there.

PLR: Somewhere around there. I was mentioning that he was a difficult person to keep employed, because he wasn’t yet Thelonious Monk, bebop hadn’t yet quite happened, and the kind of shenanigans that he was into at the time were not appreciated by leaders of the dance bands that they were working in. The reason why you mentioned that particular take as having a little bit of hilarity to it is because of the lapse, the dropout in Monk’s solo, where Miles plays him a fanfare to get him going again.

TP: He plays “You’ve Got To Wake Up In The Morning.”

PLR: Right! [LAUGHS] There were a number of scenes like that, as I understand it, just from having listened to my stepfather talk about it

TP: You had a chance to play with many of the greats of the period, but you never had a chance to play with Monk.

PLR: Never had Monk and never Miles. I missed the opportunities. I had a lot of opportunities, so I can’t complain, but I sure would have liked to have had those guys, too.

TP: Among the trumpeters you’ve been using at Yardbird Suite are Jimmy Owens and Claudio Roditi; you’ve had Dave Liebman and David Sanchez; George Cables and Joanne Brackeen; other people as well…

PLR: Other people of like caliber.

TP: Next in the chronology will be Max Roach. You mentioned that the thing that most impressed you about Max apart from your overall appreciation was his working outside of 4/4 time, particularly the material in 3/4 that he explored in 1956. He did a recording for EmArcy that was all in that time signature.

PLR: Right. Plus, the main thing for me with Max is that he established so much of the bebop drum vernacular. He made it quite a bit looser, taking it away from just the timekeeping function that drums had pretty much before that, and dropping – as were called – “bombs,” which really has to do with punctuating what else is happening in the band, etc. And the way that it was done… First off, the front line, people like Bird and Diz and Miles, were playing new ideas that called for I think something new from the rhythm section, and Max was very much up to the job and did things that I think every drummer has borrowed a big portion of, if you play jazz.

TP: Were you able to check him out, observe him in the flesh early on? How important is it to see musicians in the flesh?

PLR: It makes a difference. I got to get good jobs working opposite some of these guys early on, so that I wasn’t so much going out and hanging out in the clubs just for the purpose of hanging out. If I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to work opposite them, I’m sure I would have been hanging out in the clubs. But as it happened, I was there. Yes, it’s important to see them in the sense that especially if you know the musician and there’s something that you really do want to borrow, a device you think you can use… Sometimes you have to see how it’s done; you can’t really tell it all by just listening. But I think the bulk of it was really from records. Jazz music was at that time the popular music… The dance music of that time was derived from jazz. The swing era was still going on. There were still big dance bands going around. So major stations here in New York, like certainly WNEW and I think maybe WOR, were having jazz just about 24 hours a day. There was a show on Sunday afternoon that had Frank Sinatra, for instance, for 4 to 6 hours or something like that. So to get to hear the music at that time was very easy. Today you have to seek it out a little bit and guys don’t play as often as you might like, so you have to get them when they’re there. But then it was really all over the place.

TP: The selection we’ll play to represent Max Roach is “Valse Hot,” from March 1956.

[MUSIC: Rollins-Brown-Roach, “Valse Hot”-1956]

TP: On the next session we’ll hear some sessions that Pete Sims played on as “Au Privave.”

[MUSIC: George Russell, “Au Privave”; Pete LaRoca, “Lazy Afternoon”-Basra; Sonny Trio-Grimes-LaRoca, “I’ve Told Every Little Star”-1959]

TP: I’d think the surname quandary of “LaRoca” and “Sims” is a constant source of confusion.

PLR: I’m afraid so. But I answer to both. It just doesn’t matter.

TP: In these next couple of sets, we’ll hear two drummers who meant a great deal to you when you started to be a professional jazz drummer, Philly Joe Jones and Arthur Taylor. A few words about what Philly Joe Jones meant to you, and his special niche on the drums.

PLR: Swing. Summed up quite neatly, it’s just plain swing. For my taste, no one ever swung like that before or since. It’s full-bodied, it’s full-out. No messin’ around. All of his cuts are crisp, and he knew quite a few of them. He obviously did some big band drumming, and he brings that over to Miles’ band, especially on “Two Bass Hit,” where along with Red Garland, who was also a big band piano player, it just makes for a dynamite rhythm section. I think that every drummer around was very much impressed by Philly when things were being made.

TP: Did you get to know Philly, watch him check him out in person?

PLR: Some. We were friends. Drummers never work in the same band, and I was working a lot. I didn’t work opposite Philly that I can remember. He was one guy that I had to go hang out in clubs in order to get to hear him. Of course, since I was working, that wasn’t a big deal because you sort of had entree to most of the clubs. But I had to go catch him. They were working at places like Café Bohemia, Birdland, etc. It was mainly just the propulsion, the non-stop, strong as it could possibly be form of swing that apparently Miles at the time was just lapping up, because song after song after song called for it, and the rhythm section that he had at the time – which of course included Paul Chambers – was giving it to him.

[MUSIC: Miles-Philly Joe, “Two Bass Hit,” – [END OF SIDE 2]“Gone, Gone, Gone”]Pete Sims, Out To Lunch, June 11, 1998:

[MUSIC: Pete LaRoca Sims, “Amanda’s Song”]

TP: That was Chick Corea’s “Amanda’s Song,” from Swing Time, featuring Dave Liebman and Lance Bryant on soprano saxophones, Ricky Ford on tenor sax, Jimmy Owens, trumpet, George cables, piano, Santi DeBriano, bass.

Many of you know Pete LaRoca Sims from his middle name – he appeared on many recordings of the late 1950s and into the 1960s as Pete LaRoca. His two leader CDs from then are both in print – Basra on Blue Note and Turkish Woman At the Bath, for Douglas, reissued by 32Jazz. There’s a 30-year hiatus between recordings, and Swing Time comes next. The band is part of a rotating group of top-shelf New York musicians who’ve been recording with Pete since 1993, and the current version is appearing this week at Sweet Basil – Joe Ford on soprano sax, Don Braden on tenor; Jimmy Owens on trumpet; Steve Kuhn on piano; Santi DiBriano, bass. There’s a variety of arrangements, all sparked by Pete’s unique and original and unpredictable drumming.

Let’s talk about the origin of this group. You were one of the most active and respected drummers in jazz. The business became a bit too much for you to deal with in some ways. You became a lawyer. And you began playing actively again – although I gather you never stopped – in the early 90s with this band.

PLR: I got a few too many strong requests to do Fusion, which I was not interested in doing, and it was happening that many of the main jazz stars were going that way. It seemed to be the trend at the time. At the same time I was trying to get work for the band that did Basra, and without very much success. The missing link that people usually overlook when they tell that story is that between the time when I was getting a lot of work as a jazz sideman and the time I went back to school, I drove a cab for five years. It was after five years of cab driving that I figured out, “Hey, something has got to change here,” and then went back to academics. Then in 1993, as you say, I got the good fortune to collect a bunch of guys, all great players, mainly resident in New York or just across the river in New Jersey. We did months of Sunday nights and Monday nights at various clubs, and sort of teased the book into good shape. Working one night a week you can’t keep a steady group, so that’s where the rotating roster of musicians came in. Fortunately for me, a lot of great musicians around New York know my book. So usually, if I’ve got to get a band together, it turns out to be a pretty good one, like now.

TP: Let’s talk about this band, and a few words about each of the players. Maybe the overriding theme can be what it take to play in a band led by Pete Sims?

PLR: I’ve been told by the guys that the book is difficult. That’s number one. There have been occasions when guys have come aboard and stumbled there at having to read. If you’re not familiar with the book, you’re going to have to read, and that has been a stumbling block for a few fellas. So the main thing is that they wish to and can play freely when we finally get to solos, and they can content with the monster book, is what it’s called.

With regard to these guys: Jimmy Owens and I are actually both Music & Art, though not at the same time, and he has a lot of orchestral experience, which is what you do at places like Music & Art. He brings a lot of lore. He didn’t have the 30 years off, so he’s been in a lot of great bands and he brings a lot of lore and experience with him, and it’s a pleasure to have him.

Santi DiBriano has been in the group off and on since 1993. He comes from a Latin background. Along the way, before I ever played drums, I was a timbale player. So there’s a certain relationship there with regard to things that happen in time.

Steve Kuhn is playing piano this time around. He and I go back. We were together in the first Coltrane group. We subsequently worked together with Art Farmer and Stan Getz. So we have a history. He also has symphonic training, orchestral training, and he brings that lore.

Joe Ford is the guy you get when you’ve absolutely got to swing. There’s got to be one guy who you know you’ll give it to him and he’s going to swing with it. Don Braden is a new fellow; this is his first time in the group. He’s doing famously, brings a different color, a different style, so to speak, as most good jazz players do, and fills it out for us. A great ensemble sound he brings also.

TP: The record has three originals by you, Dave Liebman has one, there’s the Chick Corea tune and some standards. Who arranged the “Four In One” that you played last night?

PLR: That’s Hall Overton’s, from the big band album with Monk. It’s a wild thing to do, with that 2-chorus ensemble of Monk’s piano solo orchestrated out. That’s why guys say it’s a hard book!

TP: You have a sheaf of Chick Corea compositions, which I know are manna for drummers.

PLR: They are – Chick himself being a drummer. And he was good enough, at a time that we were talking about material to arrange, he said, “I’ll send you some stuff,” and about a week later I got a 2″ thick package of tunes he hadn’t recorded, snippets he hadn’t finished working on… It’s just a gold mine, and the first thing that’s come out of it is “Amanda Song,” which is for a singer.

TP: You’re writing. On “Basra,” from 1965, there are three of your pieces. The next track we’ll play is an updated version of a song that appears on Basra. How far back does writing and band-leading go for you?

PLR: Well, in my mid-teens there was a fellow up in Harlem named Hugo Dickinson, who had a group. I was then at Music & Art, and I had heard about him. Somebody said he was looking for a drummer. He and I met, and it developed into a situation where we had a sort of dual leadership. Latin music, the Mambo and Cha-Cha-Cha were quite popular then, and sort of at the beginning of their popularity – this is that far back. So he was doing the jazz side, and I, then, being a timbale player, was doing the Latin side. That’s when I started bringing in arrangements for the band. Some were simply sheet music that you could buy in places like the Music Exchange. Others were transcriptions. We heard a nice arrangement and we liked it, so I’d take it off the record. And some were original compositions that I wrote for the band. It was a big band, a 13-piece band or something.

We got a lot of dance work. It was really a dance band. We got a lot of work, mainly in Harlem, but some places in the Bronx or Brooklyn – wherever the gig was. Hugo was quite good at getting jobs. It was enough to keep the band together. A lot of great musicians came out of that band. Barry Rogers, for instance, who went over to the Latin world later, started out… That was one of his first big hits. George Braith. John Mayer, who is now on the West Coast, a piano player. A lot of guys came out of that band.

TP: Talk about the transition from timbales to trap drums.

PLR: Actually I started as a kettle drummer at Music & Art, and actually earlier at Stitt Junior High School. The transition from that to timbales was not that great, in the sense that the technique is the same. They both use what drummers call matched-grip, meaning that each hand holds the stick in the same way, as opposed to military style where you have that rotating motion in the left hand. So that wasn’t a big hump at all.

But then I sort of shied away from playing jazz. Jazz ran through my house all my childhood. My Uncle, Kenneth Bright, was involved in Circle Records, which originally recorded the Jelly Roll Morton… They were six 12″-78 albums where he is a raconteur and tells stories and plays bits to exemplify what he’s talking about. That was first released by Circle, which is the company my uncle was involved in. He was enough involved in the jazz scene that he would throw a party, and Fats Waller would come by the house and play piano. I’m sure that Fats would go anywhere and play piano, but our house was one of the places that he went.

I loved it so much, and it looked quite complicated and quite different from matched grip, playing kettle drums and timbales, that I shied away from it for a very long. Finally… I remember it was my 17th summer, because I couldn’t drink legally, and some guys I didn’t know, but who knew my name and knew I could read, had a summer-long job in the Catskills – a show band. They wanted me to play the drums. I said, “Hey, I’d love to do it, but I don’t even happen to have drums. I play timbales.” They said, “We’ll get you some drums,” which they did. I had something like 10 weeks at a place called the Kentucky Club up in the Catskills, cutting shows and playing for dancers, etc. That was my first real experience playing traps. It wasn’t even really a jazz band.

TP: Sounds like a trial and error thing for you?

PLR: I knew about it.

TP: What were the biggest demands about going from clave to swing?

PLR: The first big problem is coordination. Because you’ve got all 4 limbs going. You’ll see a lot of young drummers sort of staring into the middle distance as they try to figure out, “Now, which comes next?” Ultimately, when you really start playing, when you know you’re playing reasonably well, is when that stuff becomes second nature and you stop thinking about it.

TP: Was there a drum sound in your mind’s ear when you start playing jazz on trapset? Were there drummers you’d absorbed and wanted to sound like in some way or other?

PLR: Plenty of drummers. Not a drum sound as such. But plenty of drummers. Baby Dodds was a first major influence. In my uncle’s huge jazz record collection, there was a 78 (and again, this is back there) of Baby Dodds, just Baby Dodds, playing solo drums on both sides.

TP: Incredible record.

PLR: Absolutely incredible! One of those that I wore out. A major influence. I find that he’s an influence still, having listened to that. It’s not straight bebop. Certainly it predates bebop. It was a guy really playing impressionistically in a very early style on a set of drums – a BIG set of drums with temple blocks and all kinds of things like that.

Other major influences? Max was a major influence, and what he did at the inception of bebop with Bird and Dizzy – that’s fundamental jazz vernacular for drums.

TP: You were up on all of this?

PLR: I had heard it all. My stepfather was a trumpeter, and he played jazz. Jazz was always going on in the house. And it was a time at which jazz was extremely popular. It was the foundation for the swing bands, the dance bands. That hadn’t quite died yet, although I think it really did take a turn to a different direction with Bird, because he with his wonderful contribution sort of turned the music into ear candy, ear music, and not so much dancing music. That’s when we started having not dance halls, but cabarets, nightclubs without even a dance floor, where people just came and listened to the music. Once again, when the people stopped dancing to jazz, we lost a lot of public. Because really and truly, people want to be the show. They don’t want to go and sit and watch somebody else – be a spectator. But nevertheless, with regard to the music, loving jazz as much as I do, I’m glad Bird did what he did!

Kenny Clarke was a major influence because of the way that he smoothed out, to my perception, the beat. Guys were putting a lot of emphasis in their hands on the second and fourth beat, along with the sock cymbal playing on the second and fourth beat. He kind of had the sock cymbal going but smoothed out that right hand. To me, that was a revelation, and I play like that today.

Philly Joe Jones for the musicality. He played bebop and he played it hard, but he always played something appropriate for what was happening in the band.

These are the guys. You learn from them. You learn things to do. I still find quite a bit of Philly in my own playing, because some of the things he did are just the best way and the easiest way to get from one place to another.

TP: Were you a kid who went out to hear these drummers? Were you listening on records?

PLR: Pretty much. It really started with my going out to hear Latin bands. As I was sort of coming of age and allowed to go out at night by myself, that’s the stage at which I was playing timbales. But when it switched over, actually I was playing quite a bit. So once I started playing jazz, which was the job at the Village Vanguard with Sonny Rollins when I was 19…once that happened, I was in clubs where there were usually two bands then. So I would be in one band I’d really hear these guys in the other band, which in many ways is the best way to hear them – it was really intense.

TP: So at the time of Night at the Village Vanguard you hadn’t had that much listening to jazz experience?

PLR: I hadn’t had that much playing jazz experience. I’d only played with my contemporaries in the neighborhood, the guys in Hugo’s band, when we were… After the summer in the Catskills. That gives me about two years of playing traps.

TP: Who were some of the hand drummers or Latin drummers you found particularly stimulating, who might enter the way you sound today?

PLR: Tito Puente as a great timbale player, and from whom I stole a concept that I still use today. I haven’t found a better one. The drums not having the advantage of harmony and melody, one way to sort of make your solo playing coherent is to take the last part of one musical idea, one rhythmic idea, and make it the first part of the next rhythmic idea. That comes from Tito Puente. And it works.

TP: Worked then. Works now. Anyone else?

PLR: Direct lifts? Not so much.

TP: I don’t mean direct lifts, but just general influences.

PLR: Everybody is an influence. Sure. You listen to everybody. In the rare case you listen to some guys for what not to do. But everybody is an influence. You let it all filter through.

TP: But when we cite the people you’ve played with, it’s a roster of pivotal figures in the development of jazz – Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, on and on. Let’s hear some music and talk about some of those people when we get back.

“Candu” was first recorded on Basra, Pete’s 1965 Blue Note recording. This version is on Swingtime…

[MUSIC: Pete LaRoca, “Candu”; Sonny Rollins-Pete, “Oleo”-Stockholm-1959]

TP: Let me read a list of some of the highlights of your c.v. between 1957 and 1964-65. Sonny Rollins. Tony Scott. The Slide Hampton Octet and I imagine other configurations – a significant band not so well known these days. John Coltrane’s first attempt to organize a quartet, which he eventually settled on later with results we know. Art Farmer. You played with Joe Henderson in your own band and other situations. Chick Corea became part of your working band for a while. An incredible roster, on the cutting edge of the time.

You referred to “missing link” in regard to someone before. Some people think of you as a kind of missing link because of your absence over 3 decades in the development of modern jazz drumming. A number of drummers have said this to me.

In any event, let’s talk about your experience with Sonny Rollins, who’s been known to be tough on drummers, though maybe not on you.

PLR: I didn’t find him to be tough on drummers and such. At the time, it seemed to me that he was not so much band-oriented. I’m coming out of symphonic background, and my first real work playing traps was in a show band, where you’re really expected to do certain things. Sonny really wanted to, at that time, follow his own nose, meaning he might change key in mid tune, he might change a tune in mid-tune. He would change the tempo in mid-tune. And he really just expected whoever was in the band to follow him, wherever he happened to go. If that’s what you mean… I didn’t think of it as being rough on drummers. He’s a very strong player, and when he set out to go from one place to another, it was kind of obvious what he was doing and not that difficult to follow along.

TP: Did this 1959 engagement end your association? He entered his hiatus following that.

PLR: There was really only the Vanguard, which was a one-week job, and I think the tour with him in Europe that included the Stockholm recording was 10 days-2 weeks, something like that. Other than that, there were really just a few concerts here and there. I think I might have had a half-dozen other nights playing with him at most over that whole two-year period.

TP: I’m sure the Vanguard gig opened eyes around New York. Did it open up work opportunities playing jazz for you?

PLR: I’m certain that it did. I think the next good job I got was for a longer period of time, with Tony Scott, who had a quartet at the time, a very nice quartet for a good period of that time, with Bill Evans and Jimmy Garrison. We worked for about 2 months solid at a place called the Showplace in Greenwich Village, which is no longer there. He had other people as well. It wasn’t all that.. It was just that two months with those two particular musicians. But it included a concert with Langston Hughes at Carnegie Hall for instance.

There was work. I was getting lots of work. Given the Sonny Rollins recording, which was Blue note, and the Jackie McLean recording…

TP: New Soil.

PLR: Yes, which was also Blue Note. I kind of fell into favor, as it were, with Alfred Lion of Blue Note, and he would often recommend me for records and the musicians would accept me. The same was true with Max Gordon at the Village Vanguard. He’d very often bring just a horn player to town and pick up a local rhythm section… Well, a local rhythm section in New York City, you’re not doing too bad. Max would often recommend me for some of those jobs. So I got to work a lot, and I think that’s how I got to play with so many fine musicians.

TP: Your experience playing with John Coltrane in 1959 and 1960.

PLR: Obviously a great experience. It was a great job in the sense that it started with 10 weeks on the same bandstand at the Jazz Gallery. Now, that’s unheard of today, but that’s… If you want to start a band, that’s a great way to go at it. We did 10 weeks, two weeks each opposite Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Chico Hamilton, Count Basie (the big band…it was really a great job) and Max Roach also. It was kind of fierce.

I think what had happened is that he had always intended, I think, to have the band that he ultimately ended up with. But all the guys he wanted weren’t available at the time that he got his opportunity to start. So I just had really the good fortune to get those first…it was probably 4 or 5 months, because we did those 10 weeks and then a tour around the Eastern Seaboard.

TP: What were the dynamics, the special demands of playing with John Coltrane.

PLR: A lot of energy. [LAUGHS] It’s kind of contrary, in a way, to my sort of natural bent. I’m not exactly a soft drummer. But I do like…or what I’ve developed into liking over time is to have my peaks of energy and then to come back down. Hopefully that allows a horn player to get his breath and think about it again; you don’t keep him at the top of his lungs constantly. But with John, that’s the way John played. He was always not so much necessarily at the top of his lungs, but certainly at the top of his energy. He never let that part come down. So it really was not natural, in a way, for me – but it sure was fun to do.

[END OF SIDE 1]

TP: …the material he recorded for Atlantic around that time, or was he looking for other things?

PLR: It started with the material from Atlantic, “Giant Steps,” etc. I think there might have been some earlier recordings for another label. “Equinox” I think preceded some of that music, the Atlantic period. “Mr. Syms,” I think, which people thought was me, but actually it was a barber of his in Philadelphia. During the period that I was there, he branched out into “My Favorite Things,” “Chasin’ The Trane”…

TP: He was playing “Chasin’ The Trane” in 1960, then.

PLR: He was playing the tune, yeah. And “Impressions,” that he did the long extended solo on. And “Inchworm.”

TP: So he was playing extended solos when you were playing with him.

PLR: Yes. Not so much a whole 20 minutes worth necessarily. But they were getting there. They were on their way to that. And he was getting to modal, as opposed to “Giant Steps.” In fact, we had a conversation about that. I really didn’t like the “Giant Steps” type stuff very much at all. Certainly for me, and I think for most drummers, our main device is harmonic rhythm. Meaning we go for the places where there are harmonic changes, where the chords sit down. In something like “Giant Steps,” the chords are just about note-for-note. So almost every drummer is going to play that the same way. BOOM TIT-TI-BOOM TIT-TI-BOOM TIT-TI-BOOM TI-BASH, BANG BANG. It’s going to happen every time.

TP: If they can.

PLR: Right. Well, ok, but it’s just a natural. And I’m not too partial to things where I sound like any other drummer! I just don’t like to do things that way. So the things where the harmonic rhythm was more disparate, more interesting, were the things that I preferred. I loved “Equinox.” I loved “Body and Soul,” his great arrangement of “Body and Soul” that I have since orchestrated to put into my own group, etc.

TP: Perfect segue. That arrangement of “Body and Soul” appears on Swingtime, and let’s get to it.

[MUSIC: Pete, “Body and Soul”; w/Chick-Gilmore-Booker, “Bliss”]

TP: I’m one of many people who initially thought it was either Chick Corea’s or John Gilmore’s recording, as I’ve seen both incarnations.

PLR: Interesting.

TP: Actually your entire output as a leader is currently in print – Basra for Blue Note, Turkish Women At The Baths, and most recently, Swingtime, which is the name of his current ensemble, which is performing this week at Sweet Basil.

When we were speaking before that set of music, Pete, you made a comment that you don’t like to do things the way other people do – it’s not your policy. Has that been an ongoing character trait – the principle of individualism.

PLR: I don’t know that it was a guiding light, but it turned out to be the turn that I took on a number of different occasions. I was asked recently by an interviewer, “What was the first influence that caused you to go out, outside?” I said, “Nobody ever asked me that before,” and it took me a few minutes to think. The one person who I came up with was Moondog, who is called a street drummer. He’s a very unusual character who I used to see around on the street both in Midtown and in Harlem. He’d be standing on the street wearing Army blankets, sandals, and carrying a long staff. And he happened to be a drummer, and wrote music – and I think he played the flute also.

TP: He has a record out recently.

PLR: It’s a reissue. He also did a concert at the YMHA that I went to, and he had a beautiful triangular drum, about 6 feet long, sat on the floor, and he straddled it. There was a head on one end and the other end open, and he played on the head with a maraca and on the wooden side with a clave – and played the most marvelous things. I think that kind of led my ear to know that things can be done differently and still be quite musical. Drums being what they are, a very repetitive instrument. We hold the beat down. We end up with the backbeat, which I’ve avoided like the plague because it’s just so repetitive and boring – though people love it. People are comfortable with it. It’s obvious. You can feel it. But I just tended toward those things that were more like Moondog, and you know, the great drummers who played things that were interesting, that you’d never heard before, and that made it exciting.

TP: I guess stretching out over 10 weeks with John Coltrane would have given you food for thought.

PLR: It really developed into following the lead from whoever was up front. That started with Sonny, though of course it was pertinent to Coltrane as well. I still do that. It’s not so much that I have a pattern in mind. That goes back to the issue of having to maintain coordination. If you’re really working at it, then there are certain things, licks that you would play that you’re going to be comfortable with and you know how to do. My approach I hope is different in the sense that I prefer to listen to what the soloist mainly is doing and do something that complements whatever it is that he’s into. How should I play the time behind a soloist who is playing that particular kind of phrase up front. That leads you. Because they’re always playing something different, so that leaves me to always be playing something different, and I always liked that combination.

TP: You also became involved in studying Indian music during the 60s, according to the liner notes.

PLR: Yes. Though it was more a general period of Eastern studies. I was also investigating yoga and Zen, etc., as many people were at the time – and Indian music, which was a big part of it.

TP: Did the rhythmic structures of Indian music have an effect on your concept of drumming?

PLR: Not very much. It came across as intensely beautiful but also intensely complex, and I couldn’t find a way to carry it along. Actually I’ve had a similar experience recently with Native American music. Many of the tunes that I’ve written are drawn from other folk musics, not necessarily jazz. I was looking for something that would be from the Native American vernacular. Once again, I love what I hear, but I haven’t found anything that I can take to make it swing. It’s been done. Jim Pepper did “Witchi-tai-to,” which was great. So I know there’s probably something out there, but I haven’t found it yet. It’s very difficult. They don’t use time in so regular a fashion. Some of the time, meter signs – if there were one – seem to be irregular. They’re not circular like a 3/4 or 4/4 even or 5/4. They seem to change, to my ear, in large part, based upon their language. In other words, they’re singing a phrase, and whatever music or rhythm they’re going to do takes the shape of that phrase, as if it were spoken. That’s the rhythm of the music. It doesn’t have to be circular. Nobody is going to improvise. It doesn’t need to be a recognizable pattern. I’ve found that in many folk musics. I may be mistaken, but I think in Greek folk music I’ve also heard that, where they use wild meter signs. But it seems to follow the spoken phrase, not necessarily conducive to something that you want to swing.

TP: You started off in Latin music, and much of the roots therein are Yoruba-Cuban music. Have you continued exploring those feels and does it inflect the way you play?

PLR: Not much directly. I would go a little further back than Yoruba-Cuban to just plain African. When I was a kid, I lived in Harlem, and I was going to Music & Art, which was then at 135th Street, and the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library was at 136th and Lenox Avenue. So these things were close by, and I spent a lot of time at the Schomburg Collection, listening to their records. That’s where I picked up the African elements of my playing. Then I got a chance to use them, of course, was I was playing timbales.

TP: When we break down Pete LaRoca’s influences, it sounds very complex, which it is, but there’s nothing daunting when you hear Pete LaRoca play. It’s endless swing, as the band’s apropos title, Swingtime, would indicate.

PLR: I wrote this for my daughter when she was 4 or 5, which is 25 or more years ago.

[MUSIC: Pete Sims, “Susan’s Waltz”]
[MUSIC: Miles, “Two Bass Hit”; Miles, “Gone”; Miles-PC-PJJ, “Billy Boy”]

TP: Next we’ll focus on Arthur Taylor, who you saw quite frequently during the late 50s.

PLR: Yes, late 50s-early 60s, and picked up a tip from him, actually, regarding the sock cymbal, which previously I had only seen played in only a rock-the-foot-heel-to-toe-and-back fashion. A.T. did it with just his toe, which bounced up and down, so to speak, on beat, and the heel never touched the pedal. That for me was a true find. It allowed a lot of flexibility as to how to use the sock cymbal. Or, perhaps what I should say is, it avoided the sort of locked-in motion of heel-to-toe, which is one of those things you can see drummers concentrating on getting it coordinated, and as long as you’re concentrating on getting it coordinated you’re not going to play anything that’s very loose. So it was a freeing-up device to learn from A.T. that, they, you can do it with just the toe, and there are then different things that involve balance and you get loose – for which I am forever grateful to A.T. It would be a pleasure to hear him play something.

[MUSIC: A.T.’s Delight, “Syeeda’s Song Flute”-1960]

TP: On the next segment we’ll hear a number of tracks from dates on which Pete LaRoca appeared. Alfred Lion called you fairly frequently. You played on several Joe Henderson records, including Page One, which debuted “Blue Bossa.” There are several Jackie McLean sides, Walter Davis, Jr., Sonny Clark…

PLR: Kenny Dorham.

TP: How did the relationship with Blue Note begin?

PLR: It was the Sonny Rollins date, which of course was the first thing I did. The next thing was Jackie’s New Soil, with “Minor Apprehension.” I guess Alfred was happy with the results, and I got into quite a few dates, including my date Basra.

[MUSIC: Art Farmer-PLR, “Tears”–Sing Me Softly Of the Blues; Jackie McLean, “Minor Apprehension”-1959; Joe Henderson-Andrew Hill, “Our Thing”-1963]

PLR: …when I was asked my name, and I said, “Peter,” I’d get a lot of “Ha,” etc., and I finally started making what I thought was a clever connection at the time – Peter meaning “rock” and LaRoca meaning “rock.” I sort of allowed myself to get stuck with it, and that’s how that name came about.

TP: It’s a catchy, recognizable name. You say “Pete LaRoca,” and it sticks in your mind.

PLR: The name has done its work well. People do not forget the name! If I had to choose, I did well with that one. Sims is my given name, and I’m just trying to be known as who I am without the 13-year-old cleverness…

TP: Sometimes the best inspirations…

PLR: Are when you’re 13 years old?

TP: This gentleman’s second question was: Where has he been since Night of the Cookers?

PLR: Right here, dealing with the vagaries of the jazz music business and the impossibility of getting the opportunity to work and be heard by people like your interested caller. I drove a cab for a while in order to survive. I’ve become a lawyer in order both to survive and to keep myself interested in life, etc. And now, at this particular juncture, I have this marvelous opportunity to have a band working and to indulge in music in a number of different ways again.

TP: Now we’ll get back to some other drummers, both from recordings with Thelonious. Roy Haynes is one of the masters in the pantheon; and also Frankie Dunlop.

PLR: Again, drummers don’t get to play with each other, so it’s only as a listener. With regard to Roy Haynes, I’ve always been fascinated by most particularly his left-hand technique, the very intricate and sometimes delicate things that he does on snare drum with his left hand, that I think are among the drumming marvels in jazz. The devices that he uses have a sort of military sound, which I think may be how he got his nickname “Sarge.”

Frankie Dunlap is a drummer I only heard in one context, and that was with Monk. I heard a number of other drummers with Monk, but there was something about Frankie Dunlap that has caused me to always think that he was just the ideal drummer for Monk. Monk was a little angular in his compositions and in his playing, and Frankie was a little angular in his drumming, and they seemed to go together quite well.

TP: It seems to me that your sense of the essential of being a drummer are boiled down into one word, which begins with an “s” and ends with a “g” – swing.

PLR: Yes.

TP: Talk about what comprises swing with a drummer. There are so many ways to do it. What’s that fine line? Is it something definable?

PLR: I personally would go back to Baby Dodds. I call it today CHANK-A-DANG. He wouldn’t have done that, I don’t think. But if you listen to his playing, that sense of TAK-A-TAK-A-TAK-A-TAK-A is there. CHANK-A-DANG is the same thing on a cymbal that has an extended sound, so it’s smoothed out a bit, as I’ve been talking about smoothing things out. To me, that’s the essence. I think that’s what Duke Ellington was talking about when he said “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” We didn’t have all the other versions and varieties and extensions of swing when he said that. So to me, CHANK-A-DANG is the heart of it. And there are then many questions as to on what part of the drums it’s actually done; one’s touch in doing it. The drums being such a forceful instrument, discretion in playing drums is always significant, and being able to play, for instance, soft and still keep the drive going. All of these things are the things that really, to me, comprise swing, and that’s what swing is about.

People have done other things, and other things are interesting. They are logically sound, or they may be commercially viable, or whatever the case may be. But they are not necessarily swing. A person can say that the absence of something is a form of that thing. That may be a nice, logical argument, like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” But it doesn’t come down to making that other thing, or that non-thing the thing itself, in my estimation, at least not when we’re talking about swing. There’s one thing. It’s CHANK-A-DANG. It goes right up the middle, and all the trimmings that you can add to it are great. But it never changes its own identity.

TP: During your younger days you played a lot for dancers on those Latin gigs, and I’m sure that imparted a whole sense of what sort of feeling to have on the drums, though that was on timbales at the time.

PLR: Yes. And I think everything I’ve done since that time has been in an effort to stay away from music for dancers because, though it may swing…

TP: It sounds a little contradictory, on the face of it, to say that.

PLR: It may. But a drummer has a function. In addition to the aesthetics of it, and the music of it, and the expression, a drummer has the function of setting down the time. And the closer you get to dancers, the more firmly you are locked into that function and the less you do anything else, to today where most of today’s popular dance music also derived from jazz is based on the hand-clap, or, as a drummer would call it, the backbeat. Well, you don’t need a drummer to clap hands. There’s a contradiction in terms there. Basically, that’s what it comes down to. It’s swing, and I don’t think there’s that much doubt about it, though people raise many questions as to what it is.

[MUSIC: Monk-Roy Haynes-Griffin, “In Walked Bud”-1958; Monk-Rouse-Dunlap, “Rhythm-A-Ning”]

TP: [re “Bliss”]

PLR: That album began with a cover. I was given the painting, Turkish Women At the Bath, by Ingres, and asked to write some music for it. I thought it was a little outrageous, but one doesn’t say no when somebody offers you a record date. So I did, and this set of songs resulted, and “Bliss” is one of those.

[Pete LaRoca,” “Bliss” and “Basra”]

Hamiet Bluiett (1940-2018): Two WKCR Interviews — Out to Lunch in 1993; a Musician Show in 1994

Here are the transcripts of a pair of WKCR interviews that it was my honor to conduct with the master baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett in 1993 and 1994 — the 1994 encounter was a Musician Show, where Bluiett played and talked about the music that influenced him. The July 21, 1993 show was intended to publicize a club appearance by the World Saxophone Quartet, which was about to welcome James Spaulding into the mix. Bluiett was with me from noon to 1:30; Spaulding came up for the second half, the transcript of which appears in a recent post.

 

Hamiet Bluiett, Out To Lunch, WKCR, July 21, 1993:

[MUSIC: WSQ, “Masai Warriors Dance” (by Bluiett), Metamorphosis, 1993]

TP: I’m pleased to welcome to WKCR the great baritone saxophonist, Hamiet Bluiett, who also plays various clarinets and other woodwinds, who is appearing with the World Saxophone Quartet and African Drums this week at Sweet Basil. Welcome.

HB: Ok, thank you.

TP: Three members of the World Saxophone Quartet have been working together now for 17 years. After Julius Hemphill left, Arthur Blythe held that chair for a few years; it’s now held by James Spaulding, who will join us later on. How does the presence of a new member affect what the band does, and the approach. How do you work someone in? And how was he chosen?

HB: So far, the band has been very fortunate in that…by having Julius… Then, when it was time for Julius to leave, we were able to get Arthur. Then Spaulding. Each one was a person that we had in mind for doing the particular chair. Because Arthur brought in a needed ingredient that was needed at the time, and James brings in another needed ingredient that’s needed at this time. The basis and the nucleus of it, we have it. So we’ve used quite a few people, and we have some more people in mind who we’re going to get to. In terms of the group now, Sam Rivers, Branford marsalis, John Stubblefield, John Purcell, Kidd Jordan, and I’m missing somebody… Julius, Spaulding, Arthur, and there’s two other saxophone players that I’m missing who have been… Henry Threadgill and Sam Rivers. These are people who at one time or another within our 17 year existence — besides myself, David Murray, and Oliver Lake — have appeared with the group in one kind of way or other. John Purcell is the only one who has covered everyone’s chair, including mine. He’s played all of the parts.

It’s a lot of people. But we have… Spaulding, because of the homespun blues and the other sort of ingredients, and the effervescence, brought another kind of thing, which is good.

TP: He also has a broad range on the flute, which I think fits in very well with African percussion and African melodies.

HB: It’s all of that. Everything. The whole bean. We don’t try to replace a person. We learned that from Duke. The music has to fit around whoever it is that you’re dealing with. So we’re constantly doing new things. At the club now, instead of having Mor Thiam and Mar Gue, with Chief Bey, we have Chief Bey, Okeryema Asante from Ghana, and Kahil el-Zabar from Chicago. So the configuration with the African drums now is something totally different from what it was before, but like I said, we don’t try to get another Mor Thiam because that won’t happen no way. It’s that singular.

TP: You’ve been associated with Okeryema Asante in a number of situations over the years, particularly on your most recent release on Tutu Records, If You Have To Ask – and isn’t he on your old Chiaroscuro recording?

HB: No, he’s not on that. Chief Bey has been with me all the time. He’s on Nali Kola with me. But on the Chiaroscuro, it’s Chief Bey, Ladji Kamara and Michael Carvin. That’s a little bit different setup.

TP: What was the impetus for World Saxophone Quartet to start bringing drums and the African drum ensemble into its orbit? You were solely a saxophone quartet for many years.

HB: Well, after Julius, who was basically a composer, then it was time for us to do something else. I had really grown tired of just a saxophone quartet configuration. Because… You can just reinvent some kind of way. For me, after so many years, it was time to do something else, and African drum was a good way to still bring out the saxophones, and in my mind, moving ahead to the next level of rhythm section, if you want to call it that. So we decided to go forward or go backwards, both at the same time.

TP: And the group does do both at the same time. There are numbers on which the four saxophones play together in ensemble or different solos, and pieces on which the rhythm comes in. Everyone in the WSQ has their own thriving solo career, and everyone is internationally known as a leader. How often does the group work in a given year?

HB: Well, it constantly changes every year. So far this year, we’ve gone on a European tour that last 28 days. We played in Atlanta, Georgia, with the drums. We’ve hit in Boston. We’re on our way to do a record date in Milano at the first of September with Spaulding. I can’t think of everything. It’s not a whole lot, but it does wind up being enough. After being together for so many years, being creative, you have to do a lot of other things just to come up with some different ideas. We have an LP in the can coming out now that will feature Fontella Bass and some totally different kind of stuff.

So the group is growing in other ways. The quartet is not just a quartet. The quartet is a whole…how can I put it…lifestyle, identity, base, umbrella. You understand? We’re planning to get to some things where we use piano, maybe piano…not necessarily piano choirs, but different configurations to go along with us to show the saxophone in a sort of different light as the nucleus of music, as opposed to being somebody else as the base.

TP: The members of the WSQ are all based in the New York area, but everybody is originally from the Midwest or the West Coast. Is there any way in which where you’re from affects the type of music that you play or the musical approach you’re talking about?

HB: Of course. Let me put it one kind of way. You’ve got the Mississippi River joining up with the Missouri River, and everybody that’s in the path of the river is going through that kind of trouble. People that live in Colorado are not bothered with that, or if you live in upstate New York. So the land that you’re in has a lot to do… For instance, me, I have a certain sort of accent when I talk that is Midwestern as opposed to Southern. So there’s a regional dialect that goes along with what you do. In the Midwest, the music a lot wilder, but not necessarily free, because there’s a lot of wide-open spaces. Whereas here, in New York, in the city, things are much more… Like, you’ve got [(?)208th Street(?)]. [(?)208th Street(?)] for me is a cornfield. If you take the same distance and go somewhere from my house, you… I’m in the middle of wide-open spaces. So the way of looking at a lot of things because of that… I’m trying to take everything to be verbal, and experience…

David Murray is from California. People are a lot cooler, a lot more laid-back. There’s a whole lot of other stuff. Now they’re going through some other kind of things, but… And plus, from Texas. Oliver is from St. Louis, from Mississippi. Stuff like that.

I know for me, I’m heavily blues-based. Spaulding is from Indianapolis, Naptown, heavy blues-based — so it’s a different kind of thing. As opposed to being East Coast. But then again, you’re all in one piece of land, so it’s all similar, too.

TP: Did you come up playing a lot of those type of blues gigs as a young musician?

HB: No.

TP: What were you doing as a young musician?

HB: Trying to learn how to play music.

TP: What instrument did you start on, and about how old were you?

HB: I started on piano when I was about 4, and learned how to basically read music and what I was looking at. I’m still being basic now. When the hands started going two different ways, I said, “No, this is not the instrument for me.” I tried to do trumpet. That didn’t happen. Then finally I wound up on clarinet in maybe about the fourth grade or something like that. I’ve been playing it ever since. But I wanted a saxophone. But the saxophone I wanted, that I saw, that made me excited, was a baritone saxophone.

TP: Why was that?

HB: I don’t know. I just looked at it and liked it.

TP: Were you big enough to play it?

HB: No. It was about my size at the time. But it was just that kind of excitement. Now, why? I don’t even care why, because I wound up with it. You understand? So that was just the instrument for me, regardless of what anybody say. So I saw it at that age. I don’t even remember the age now. I didn’t necessarily like the way the guys who played it, played it, because I thought the horn was too big to have such a small sound. I always thought the sound should be…it’s a bigger horn… I’m from marching band country, and I’m used to hearing sousaphone players hit as hard as any trumpet player on the planet, with enormous, fat…you know, fat-man sound, not no little sound — and big. And trombone players. The horns with the sounds getting bigger, according to the size of the instrument. With saxophones, the thing kind of went the other way. So I said, “There’s a problem here.” So that’s been one of the problems of trying to deal with it. Until I ran into Harry Carney. Then I said, “Oh! Ok. I was right.” But I said, “Oh, I got a lot of work.”

TP: Did you run into Harry Carney on a record or did you hear the Ellington band…

HB: I’m talking about in person.

TP: Where did you hear him? Do you remember when?

HB: 20-something. 25, maybe something like that. It was outside of Boston. I was in the Navy at the time, stationed in Boston at South Annex. So we’re talking about maybe 1965, 1964. I had heard the band before that. But what I mean by heard the band… I have a way of talking where words mean whatever I want them to mean. But what I meant, I HEARD the band, meaning it really got to me, I was in a club, and I was about as far from him as I am from here to you. For those who don’t know, we’re talking about 5 or 6 feet. But then the band was angled in another way, but I was right up on top of him. I was the first person that you got to. The band hit. And I sat there, petrified. It was a music thing, though, because I loved it, but I said “Whoa!” because it put so much distance in between what was going on and what wasn’t going on, that I said, “Whoa!” I said, “Damn, Duke’s got two bands; he’s got a big band and Harry Carney.” That’s what it sounded like. It sounded like his band and Harry Carney, who sounded like a whole band by himself. Everybody in the band had these tremendous sounds, but he was like…

Then I said, “Whoa, it’s the horn.” I mean, it’s him, but… So I started really thinking about the instrument. Instead of wondering, then I knew. So I said, “Ok, let me get to work on coming from another perspective. It’s a completely different instrument. Most people play it like it’s a tenor. They’re still running over it. And it can run, but it also goes through stuff. So it’s an altogether different instrument.

TP: When you got out Navy, is that when you started on music as your profession, your avocation?

HB: Chronologically, it was like ’66, January. I was supposed to come out four years earlier, but I got extended for the Vietnam draft. So instead of me coming out in September, everybody after a certain date had to… Which was cool, because I bought a car and the same instrument I’ve got now. Things were real cheap. I was a musician in Service. Actually, that’s why I went. Because I got tired of not playing.

TP: A fair number of musicians did that.

HB: Yeah, some of them. You had to volunteer to be in the Navy anyway, and I didn’t want to get drafted. Because that was coming at the time. It was one of those times when to keep from going into the draft, you could go your own way – but you still had to do some kind of service. And I was not in school or anything. So I said, well, rather than be in the foxhole… So I took an audition, and they said I was good enough to be in the band. As long as you get through basic service, then you’re a musician. So I was already set up to go that way, so I made it on through. Which worked out real good, since I had to do some kind of service at the time.

TP: What other music were you listening to at the time you were entering the service and coming out of it that was pleasing to your ear and that you wanted to be getting with?

HB: Well, I always was listening to what you call jazz. So if we’re talking about that time in the 60s, I was listening to John Coltrane and a lot of other people — at that particular time. I remember listening to a lot of those things when he was heavily criticized, and Miles was criticized for having him, and a lot of people that jump up and down now, praising his name, talked about him like a dog. I always heard something in his playing that satisfied me. Not necessarily technically, because I’m not into that sort of mindset. Something has to satisfy me inside of my body some kind of way. I heard Miles say that. It’s really kind of true.

TP: You’re both from the same part of the country.

HB: Yeah, we’re from the same part of the world. So we’ve got another kind of way of feeling it. My way of looking at music is sort of like spiritual decadence. It’s spiritual, but I can’t get away from whatever is going on. So they both seem to coexist without me being in control, since I don’t run the world, no way.

TP: But maybe you do run the baritone saxophone. Let’s hear a few examples from recent recordings by Hamiet Bluiett, and then we’ll be back for further conversation.

HB: This is called “Children At Play.” I wrote it for Mama Geri at a child development center at City College. My grand-daughter was going to this child development center, which you would call like a daycare…what they call them. But the concept was Afrocentric, and it was children from everywhere, but the sort of freedom that they had in being able to do what they did always inspired me. Because I watched the way they would play, and they don’t play military, like everybody got to step. They go! It all works out! Everybody is GO! But they weren’t destructive. They just took off and did what they had to do. So I looked at it a lot, and I said, “let me write a tune,” and I wrote a little tune for it.

TP: This features Fred Hopkins on bass and Michael Carvin on drums, with percussionist Okeryema Asante, who is appearing with WSQ this week. The CD is You Don’t Need To Know If You Have To Ask, and it’s on Tutu.

[MUSIC: Bluiett, “Children at Play”; “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”-You don’t Need To Know…]

TP: I think when the general public first became aware of Hamiet Bluiett was via stints with Charles Mingus during the early 1970s. Where did Mingus hear you? What circumstances led you to Mingus?

HB: It was between Paul Jeffreys and Roy Brooks. Because Mingus’ love of Ellington… He had a big band at the time, and he needed a baritone saxophonist. He was having a problem finding anybody with a sound, and he was starting to even write some tunes. So fortunately, I had been playing with Sam Rivers, Olatunji and some other people… I got here in 1969. I hooked up with Mingus I think in 1972. By then, most of the musicians knew me and I knew most of them.

So I started in with the big band. Jon Faddis was in it; he was real young. A lot of guys. Real good band. Then later on, I came back and played with him… I might have been in the big band in 1971, but I came and started really working with him in 1972. That’s what it was. Yeah, something like that.

Mingus was like, for me… At the time I came in with Mingus, he was always being talked about real bad, being crazy and all that other stuff. So I had to go through all that, which was a problem, because it’s hard to work with somebody when everybody else has a paranoia or fear about him. Even though you may not feel that way, after you get through fighting it for a while, then it succumbs to you. I’ve seen people walk to him and do some horrible things, like put their finger in his mouth. Just a whole bunch of crazy, stupid type stuff. He would tell musicians things that he wanted to do, and they wouldn’t understand what he was saying. I think because they didn’t want to hear it. To me, he was ahead of where the cats were talking about. But whatever kind of problems he had with them before I got there, I can’t even speak about. You know what I mean?

And I had been sort of weaned on Mingus’ music, because my cousin turned me on to him years ago, and I went to “Better Get It In Your Soul” and a whole lot of stuff. I listened to his tone poems. I was one of them kind of musicians, coming up as a kid, that went to the music store and would browse and get all the stuff they was about to throw away and give away and whatever, and take them home and play it — and I found a lot of interesting music that way. Mingus’ music, as far as I’m concerned…or his direction of music… More guys are writing off of it now by opening things up, and things of that nature, the way he dealt with the paper and all that kind of stuff, than probably any musician. Which is why, after he’s dead, he’s getting all these accolades. Because that’s really true. A lot of cats are off of Miles, and everybody has their regimen. But Mingus has a whole lot, especially in the avant-garde type feeling things of this nature, and people who do a multi-media and all those kinds of things. Mingus’ music is extremely powerful as a progenitor, and one of the people who set up that whole idiom.

Now, therefore, saying all that, that means you’re working with somebody who got a lot of problems because they’re trying to do things that people don’t know what you’re trying to tell them and they can’t hear it no way. And you kind of hear, though, what they’re talking about, where he would take 2 or 3 melodies and play it at the same time. He would take two tunes and play them at the same time. So now, when we decide to run one line against another line, it makes much more sense because he’s already done that. A lot of people have. But it’s just the timing of it.

So it was like a blessing, in a way, and a curse. Because I needed someone to helpme get out and be known other than someone playing… See, with the baritone sax it’s an enormous problem, because all people want you to do is be in a supporting role – like the grandfather. “Go get your old Chevrolet and I’ll have a sports car.” Stuff like that. Or “Oh, Daddy, go back home; you don’t need to be out now.” So the baritone saxophone sort of is relegated to that role. It’s not a Billy Dee Williams, if you want to put a type of instrument… The women are looking for something different. Everybody’s listening for something different. So I beg to differ with all that. I know better. So the horn needed to be put out, and I wanted it put out in another way, and I didn’t see any sense in trying to go over the past music. It’s already been done.

The thing that I learned about… I’ve put all the musicians together at one time that I felt greatly, which was a lot of them! And one thing I’ve come out with is that they all did what they want to do and they all were original. So I said, “I need to do what I want to do, and be original.” So I want to emulate them, instead of imitating their notes and trying to steal their styles. I took it in that direction.

TP: a lot of musicians with that type of mindset were coming to New York in the mid 1970s, and you hooked up with three of them, and it became the World Saxophone Quartet. Can you tell me a bit about…

HB: How that got started?

TP: How that got started, and your early encounters with Oliver Lake, David Murray…

HB: Well, see, I knew Oliver Lake from St. Louis. I also knew Julius Hemphill. Because we started a group called the Black Artists Group. At the time period when I came out of the Service, everybody was playing piano, basses and drums and organs and all this. Being a baritone, again, I wanted to play every day. So we got hooked up in St. Louis, and this is going into… After I came out of the Service in 1966. So from 1966 into 1969, I’m talking about two-and-a-half years. I said, “I want to play.” So we got hooked up with this organization, and we started playing every day, regardless to who showed up. So that means you might not have nobody but one saxophone, two saxophones, three people, four people, and most of them were like instruments and drums. Bobo was part of it and all that. We did that a lot. Then if the drummer didn’t show up, we started playing by ourself.

This brought about another kind of music. I didn’t have a bass to adhere to, nor did I have a piano. Mingus and the cats…Gerry Mulligan and all them, had already broke the group down (Max and everybody) to drums and bass. We stripped away the bass, and just had drums alone. People would do this… Max had done his solos with Clifford Brown. But it’s not for an album. It’s just for part of a texture. We’re talking about this is the whole unit. So now we’ve got a different kind of configuration. We started doing that, and I found out that for the way I was hearing, I heard more. Because something of the old fashion of playing with a piano…I had never been… I can do it but it’s not my expertise. I don’t call it that way. That’s not where I really thrive. Then, if the drummer didn’t show up, we would play anyway. So we worked up… It’s a different kind of thing. Some people try to act like it isn’t. But it is. It’s totally different. Every situation has a different…it opens up to different mysteries and different beauties.

Then, later, when I came to New York… I was the first one out of the bunch to come. I came in 1969. The Art Ensemble went to France earlier, and I said “later – let me go to New York.” I said, “If I go to Europe, I’ve got to come back anyway. If I go to Chicago, I’ve got to go to New York.” So I kept looking at the equation. I still had to come back Dexter came back. Everybody comes back. I said, “Let me just go to New York.” So that’s what I did. I talked to Oliver Nelson. I asked him. He said, “What do you want to do?” He said, “Wait a minute. Before you answer. If you want to make money, get all your doubles and triples, bassoon, oboe, all the saxophones, all the flutes, all the clarinets, get all your horns together and go to California.” I said, “I want to play.” He said, “Ok, go to New York.” That was basically it. I went here.

TP: You knew Oliver Nelson also from St. Louis?

HB: Yes, he was from St. Louis also. So I asked him for some advice on what to do, to give me some sort of perspective. He gave me a perspective of what was happening on the two coasts. New York is about playing. I said, “Ok, good.” It’s more like a creative mecca. It really is.

TP: What was your impression of the scene when you got here?

HB: It was horrible, I felt. It had highs and lows. Uptown, the Club Barron was still here, going down bad. Count Basie’s, going down. Minton’s, going down. They were still in existence, but just a shadow of their grandeur, you understand, if you take it back to the players. I had come to New York to visit in the 60s, and just a shadow of THAT. Yeah, it was kind of bad, man.

Downtown, the only thing…. The Five Spot was going down. The Vanguard made it on through everything. Boomer’s was up and down. The scene was bad. Dexter and all the cats were going to Europe, Johnny Griffin, everybody. So I came in on a downward arc…

TP: But during this time, new musicians were coming, revitalizing the scene, finding new places to play.

HB: They were coming all along. But the thing about it, we started to come in and do some music in a different kind of way at the same time. Because there was this big split here between the so-called “straight-ahead” and the so-called “avant-garde.” It was real out at the time I got here. Which actually made it better, because it was wide-open spaces. I told you — 203rd Street for me is a cornfield. It was wide-open, so it made it much better for us.

After I played with Mingus and got out of the band, I sat around for a year and didn’t do nothin’. Then I said, “No, I want to start playing every day again.” Some of the cats were coming around, like Bobo and all of them; I think the Art Ensemble had come back from Europe. So we’re getting to about 1975 now. They worked at the Five Spot, which had revived itself and was on the Lower East Side. I said, “Ok, it’s time to go back.” That blended in to David Murray coming to town. Then the so-called “Loft scene,” which they gave a name to, hit. Because we were playing in lofts a lot, and that built a whole nother venue.

Now, the beauty, to me, of that music was it was a… I used to call it like trench warfare or front-line. Sometimes we would have rehearsals and concerts on the same day. Henry Threadgill, a lot of cats would do some massive and sometimes very intricate stuff right on the spot, and have to do it one time and one time only. That to me was very thrilling and very exciting. So people started coming from out of nowhere and everywhere to see this creativity happening in front of their face, because it’s very exciting. It’s very exciting when you see music go down like that. You’re watching it and it’s going down as you’re watching. You know it’s only for you, and that’s your flower. You can take it with you forever, because it won’t happen no more.

So this was going on a lot. Rashied Ali had his place, which I think now is what, Greene Street?

TP: 77 Greene Street.

HB: There was a lot of activity. Sam Rivers opened up a place, Joe Lee Wilson, the Tin Palace. So the whole scene was being revived…

TP: And it was all within 6-10 blocks of each other.

HB: George Coleman was coming out, finally getting a chance to get some work and get his recognition. So things were happening from a lot of different directions at one time. Eddie Jefferson was around a lot. There was a lot of stuff. Of course, Art Blakey and people like that never quit. They kept coming right on through.

TP: So within this ferment of activity, how does this lead to the saxophone quartet idea.

HB: Ok. During that time when these loft things were jumping off, Julius was here, I was here, Oliver was here, and David Murray. Ed Kidd Jordan came up from New Orleans on a sabbatical because he wanted to hit! He came in the middle of it, the summer of 1976, and it was the bicentennial summer. We were hittin’! We were going all the way through the summer, all the way through August. August had been a down month with nothing happening in the music. So now, quite naturally… You have all these festivals now; that’s totally changed.

[END OF SIDE 1]

…which the Dirty Dozen came out of. After they heard us, they formed their group. They wanted to do something different in the music. So they wanted for him to either come and get Sun Ra or Ornette. Luckiiy for us, neither one of them was formulated. So after coming and playing with us, he said, “Why don’t the four of you guys come down to New Orleans and hit with me?” So we went down, and we started this group that we called the New York Saxophone Quartet and played with a rhythm section. The place was packed, including Wynton and Branford, Donald Harrison, all these guys was like little kids. All of them were there, and old people up to 80 years. Mainly a 90% black audience, but with a lot of children, babies, old people all at one time. We started playing, and the kids started running through the audience like a wagon train. You know how they circle? So they had an aisle on both sides, and in the front and in the back, and the kids just started running. It was the coolest thing ever, because none of the parents acted like a fool and told them to stop. And none of the kids got hurt. And they ran and ran, and the people just sat there and dug the concert, liked what was happening, let us know that it was really going on, and the kids were energized, which is the way that they do — music makes them run.

So I said, “Whoa, look at this.” I went away and I said, “Look, we got something like this; we ought to keep this together.” I really can’t take credit for putting it together. But it was born that way.

TP: You have to grab the idea when it comes to you.

HB: Well, it worked so well, and we had been doing it anyway. So then we went and played in a club called Lu and Charlie’s on the same weekend, still in New Orleans. The first concert we did was with a bass and a drum — London Branch on bass and Alvin Fielder on drums. Then we went and played in a club. Then we got to New York, and someone approached us about playing in the Tin Palace, and so we did that. We called ourselves by this time the Real New York Saxophone Quartet, because we heard about a group… We didn’t even know there was a New York Saxophone Quartet, to be truthful. So we changed it to… Wait, the letter for that came later, after the writeup when we played at the Tin Palace. But the reaction to that was still real good. So we’re seeing how these people are frozen in their seat, and watching and looking and liking what we do. We never tried to get a job; all the jobs kept coming to us.

Then we were at Oliver Lake’s house one day, doing something. We were rehearsing, getting ready to go to the Tin Palace, and they called from Moers, Germany. Some group decided not to show up, and they needed a group. We were in the house rehearsing. They say, “Yo, what about the World Saxophone Quartet?” They say, “Ok, good, we’ll take them.” So we worked for them and we did a slight tour. It just kept growing and growing and growing. The four of us got together. It’s almost as if the spirits are saying “Stay together.” So it kind of worked like that.

TP: We’ll hear some of Bluiett’s music from another very recent release, recorded last October on Soul Note, titled Sankofa, Rear Guard, which I’ll bet refers to your remarks about the position of the baritone player in the band.

HB: Yes, it’s got something to do with it. It’s got to do with a lot of things, really. The avant-garde is the one that’s supposed to be in front, and my position is like to be actually behind, so as to push everything. Also sankofa is a way of looking back. So I am constantly going ahead, but I am also now collecting from what I’ve done. So I want to enjoy some of the things I’ve done as opposed to run away and not keep them. That means melodies in music, harmonies, time… There’s a lot of things I’m talking about anything.

TP: Ted Dunbar is on guitar, Clint Houston on bass, and Ben Riley on drums. Why this particular group; how did it hook up?

HB: I wanted to play with a guitar for a while, and I wanted a guitar player that was very knowledgeable and steeped in the blues — and Ted’s from Texas, so that’s no problem. Whenever you just quit thinking, he’s already into the blues. Clint Houston is a virtuoso on bass. So he and Ted can chase each other with these chord changes and things. Ben Riley because Ben never ceases to swing. That’s the thing, and the music should do that. Right? So it was time for me to get a rhythm section that when I say “let’s go,” they go. So it was that kind of idea. Then that’s the kind of support that I thought the instrument needed, because all these guys are such great musicians that they would be able to do whatever needs to be done. You get a lot when you get people of that caliber.

[MUSIC: Bluiett, “Nuttin’ Special”;
[MUSIC: WSQ, “The Holy Men” by Bluiett, from Metamorphosis; James Spaulding, “Song of Courage”]

********

Hamiet Bluiett, Musician Show, WKCR, Feb. 9, 1994:

[WSQ: “Nuttin’ Special”-1992, Sankofa: Rear Guard]

TP: What were your thoughts in organizing the music we’ll hear this evening.

HB: Let’s go back to the beginning. You talked to me some months ago about doing this show, and I think I spoke about, “What about baritone saxophone?” Then in the last couple of weeks,we’ve narrowed it down to about 100…

TP: We have about a 48-hour show. We can hole up with potato chips and coffee.

HB: [LAUGHS[ Yes, we have a 48-hour show. Hopefully tonight, what will happen is, you’ll get a chance to see the baritone saxophone from my perspective, with Harry Carney being the boss of the horn for me – chronologically as well as everything. But not everything. Then these other people, some that are main influences. During the time, when I was coming up trying to listen to the baritone sax, there was not much available. So I had to hunt. You could find a lot of tenor, trumpet, things of that nature.

TP: What sort of things were you listening to then anyway?

HB: Anything I could get my hands hold of. There was a lot of stuff with Gerry Mulligan during that time period for me, because of Columbia records, and I was living in the Midwest, in a small town outside of St. Louis, Missouri. So I’d have to go look for Gene Ammons or other… I mean, they could be found; I’m not saying that. But not as readily as I could do the Columbia Record Club or whatever.

TP: How about the jukeboxes?

HB: The jukeboxes were nice. They had things… “Tempus Fugit” was on the jukebox. Miles on that Cannonball recording, Something Else — that whole thing was on the jukebox. A lot of things with Gene Ammons, with Nat Adderley and people like that. Eddie Harris had a hit…

TP: “Exodus”?

HB: Right. Or something like that… “Exodus,” right, he had a hit with that – you’re right. Art Blakey’s “Moanin’” and Bobby Timmons’ songs. A lot of those things were jukebox hits. So I had a chance to hear a lot of music, now that I’m thinking about it.

TP: There were a lot of instrumentals in Rhythm-and-Blues at the time a specific saxophone sound.

HB: That’s true. There’s always been specific sounds to certain eras; whatever is most prominent, everybody jumps on it, shows them where they’ve got to go.

TP: When you started playing, what sort of gigs were you doing? Who were some of the first people you aligned yourself with, or the type of music you started playing?

HB: When I first tried to play in terms of being on a bandstand or whatever, I was playing what you would call rhythm-and-blues, and doing a horrible job at it on the clarinet, and was glad that the people didn’t shoot me within the 9 months or so when I was working on this instrument. So I started out playing rhythm and blues on clarinet, believe it or not, and playing with what we called hillbilly bands at the time, or different, when I went to the baritone… So it was on one end of the block, which was about a half-a-mile block – that was just a rhythm-and-blues band. On the other end was this hillbilly band. I played with both of them, with the baritone sax, which I wanted to play since I was 10 years old.

TP: What made you want to play it?

HB: I just looked at the horn and liked it. It was as simple as that.

TP: Because of the heft of it?

HB: Everything. I just looked at one and that was it. No other horn affected me like that. I left the trumpet and all that stuff, and got kind of excited. But when I saw a baritone, I almost went, you know, OUT. I said, “Whoa!” It put an indelible impression. I never forgot the instrument. It was years later before I saw another or become close to it, other than seeing one from a distance, in the movies or something.

TP: When did you seriously begin to start playing jazz, improvising? In your teens, a local situation, or after you’d moved on to other things?

HB: Well, it’s kind of what you call, what you call… I’ve been trying to do improvising all along. But I guess maybe by the time I was 18, 17 – sort of late on the track, if you look at it in terms of how things can be done now. But it was hard for me to get any of that kind of knowledge, or even be steered in that direction. So it took me a while trying to do things the so-called correct way, but fighting these internal feelings while doing it.

TP: How so? What were you fighting?

HB: I could play things, but emotionally I would be off. Something’s supposed to be cool, and here I am getting ready to jump and run. So emotionally, I’m in the wrong spot. I’ll give you an example. I took an exam to get…it’s like an audition to get a scholarship on clarinet. I played some classical composition, I don’t remember right now. Anyway, when I played it, I got all carried away and I felt real good, and I was just, you know what I mean, BURNING, I thought. When I got through the guy said, “That was sort of rambunctious of you.” So I had gone the wrong direction in terms of the whole temperament of the music. I said, “Wait a minute – but I felt it; so therefore, if I felt it, I’m not going to let it be wrong.” But I was wrong. So I said: “Wait a minute; that’s the end of that.”

So it taught me a lesson in terms of… I had the wrong temperament. So I waited all those years to try… Even trying to play jazz, it’s the same sort of problem – for me – to be put in the same sort of structure. The horn doesn’t let me do that. It doesn’t let me flow the same as a violin or a piano. I’ve got more sonic blast and going through stuff… It’s a different picture, you understand, in my head or how I see the instrument or feel it coming through my body. So… For a long time. Let’s put it that way.

TP: You stated that Harry Carney is the king of the baritone sax for you, and it begins really, in a lot of ways, with Harry Carney. When did you discover him, and when did you first hear him (a) on record and (b) in the flesh?

HB: Well, I’d been hearing him all my life. My mother was a Duke Ellington fan, a big fan, and my father was a Count Basie big fan. So all my life I’ve been hearing all this music. It’s not a thing… I don’t even remember. I can sort of remember a first time for Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman and some other people, but for him I really don’t. Because chronologically the age…like Louis Armstrong, I don’t remember not…

TP: Not hearing him. Part 2: You’ve mentioned there’s a big difference between listening to recorded music and hearing music in person. You said it was so striking, you even stopped listening to records for a long time.

HB: Well, music has a thing where it does something to the wavelengths of even what’s in the air, the room you’re in. So a lot of stuff is changed up. So it’s another kind of feeling. It can be eerie, you can like it, not like it – but it puts a whole nother thing on you. I found that to be missing. Also what I found to be missing… Maybe that’s it. The feeling of the person to really be missing in what I was listening for at the time. I found that the volumes would be… Some guys will have a large tone; the record made them seem smaller. Etcetera. Or singers or whoever.

TP: I believe you also mentioned hearing the Ellington band in the flesh and the impression that it made on you.

HB: Oh yeah. When I heard it in the flesh, then that was a different matter. I’d heard it before, but it was from a distance. This time I was in a small club outside of…in the Cape area, outside of Boston. I was sitting as far from Harry Carney like from me to you, so we’re talking 4-5 feet, 6 at the moment, but on the side of the band. Duke was on the other side of the band. So it was Duke on one side, Harry on the other, and everybody else was in the middle. The band sounded like two bands – it was a big band and Harry Carney. His sound was equal to the sound of the whole band, including the drums, Duke and everybody else. That froze me in place. In one way it was terrifying, but not as a musician. I don’t mean the term like the icepick murder is coming after you. I mean, it’s like WHOA – overwhelming. Maybe that was the word. Everybody had been soloing all night. Paul Gonsalves and the rest of the people. The band was superlative. I mean, it was BAD. So I’m sitting there, and the guys are playing their instruments, and this guy came out toward the end of the night, took a solo, played ONE NOTE – the whole place stopped. Nobody moved. The waiter. Everybody. BRRMMM… He went down, hit that bottom note, pop, and held that, and that was the end of it. Everybody started back to doing what they were doing. That was very impressive to me. Not only was it the note, it was just that it froze everybody.

I had that same experience happen, and they were all with Duke Ellington people. The next time it happened was with Jimmy Hamilton… No, the third time. The next time was Cat Anderson. Cat Anderson playing with Mingus. We did a tour in Europe. It was Mingus with Joe Gardner playing trumpet, I was on baritone, Roy Brooks on drums, and John Foster on piano. Cat Anderson. He did it. He played a note that was so soft and you could still hear it. It froze the place.

Jimmy Hamilton. We were in the Northsea, on a rooftop, playing with the Clarinet Summit and John Carter, and I was taking David Murray’s place on bass clarinet. He took a solo and did the same thing. Now, here’s people doing three different things, but both of them where everybody stopped at one time. Nobody moved. No waiters or nothing. And when they stopped playing and ended the solo, we were back to reality.

TP: One quality about Harry Carney that I think is applicable to your work is his role in the Ellington saxophone section in terms of defining the sound of the section. You’ve of course been the anchor of the World Saxophone Quartet since its inception almost 20 years ago. The first selection showcases the Ellington sax section. It comes from a 1946 recording on Musicraft. The saxophone-woodwinds section is Jimmy Hamilton, Russell Procope. Johnny Hodges, Al Sears and Harry Carney. This one is “Jam-a-Ditty”.

[MUSIC: Ellington-“Jam-A-Ditty”-1946; Ellington, “Sophisticated Lady”-1957; Ellington, “Work Song”-1944, Carnegie Hall]

TP: Harry Carney was featured towards the beginning of “Work Song,” but that really was a showcase for the trombone of Joe Nanton.

HB: I know, but it still shows an important function of how the instrument was used, and I wanted that to be highlighted as well. Harry Carney did more section work than he did soloing. That’s the other thing about up to when it came in to see how well the horn was incorporated in the harmonies. Because a lot of times, to me, it seems as if it was more melody than harmony in terms of the placement of the parts.

TP: He also played a fair amount of bass clarinet and also clarinet in the Ellington band.

HB: But the reason I’m focusing on baritone is because he seemed… I think maybe he started playing in 1919, so he’s one of the first people to even play it consistently. So that automatically gave him first place, for doing it longer than anybody. It kind of set the definitive tone of that particular idiom of dealing with the instrument – because they’re all idioms of their own.

TP: In the middle was one of probably thousands of versions of “Sophisticated Lady” featuring Harry Carney, one night in Carrolltown, PA., in June 1957. He showcased his circular breathing technique in particular.

The next baritone player in the pantheon is Basie’s baritonist of the 30s, Jack Washington.

HB: I didn’t learn about Jack until later, at least I was grown – 20-something. Then when I started going back and doing a lot of investigation and having to get my hands… Maybe I wasn’t quite that old. But it was somewhere in there, when I was in school or something. I got a chance to start investigating older Basie things that I’d heard but I didn’t realize who was on them. I’d heard a lot of Basie from a child, but didn’t know who was doing what at the time.

TP: What qualities make Jack Washington a special player for you?

HB: Sound. Execution. Another sort of pre-bop, if you want to call it, in terms of the years, sort of… Another way of getting around the instrument. He was just an excellent musician. It’s kind of hard for me to do the labeling, even though I did it a little bit.

TP: He recorded very few solos on Basie’s commercial recordings, but a number of airchecks feature his very strong soloing, and we’ll hear two such from 1938 — “Yeah, Man” from the Fletcher Henderson book, from Oct. 1938, with first solo by JackWashington, followed by Buck Clayton and Lester Young; then “Indiana” from September 1938, with solo order of Buck Clayton, Jack Washington, Dickie Wells, Basie, and Lester Young plays a clarinet solo.

[MUSIC: Basie, “Yeah, Man”-Oct. 1938; “Indiana”-Sept. 1938]

TP: We’ll now hear music by Gerry Mulligan.

HB: Like I told you, I heard a lot of Mulligan. It was easier for me to get. I heard Harry Carney, Charlie Fowlkes, and now we’ll get to Mulligan. Then Pepper Adams, who was on a lot of things by Gene Ammons and a lot of things that were available to me.

[END OF SIDE 1]

HB: …I liked it. I had a very strong attraction. I didn’t start playing it until I was about 19. And I never heard anyone play it that I liked until I got to Harry Carney. It was something about the sound that never satisfied me. Because I come from drum-and-bugle corps country, where trumpets had big sounds, trombones had bigger sounds, and sousaphones had bigger sounds than that. So it didn’t make sense to me why this biggest saxophone had a smaller sound than the smaller ones. I couldn’t understand it. It was kind of weird. And everybody I heard until Harry Carney sort of was like that. If it wasn’t real small, they were playing it like a tenor, so the sound was trimmed down to be more sleek. That’s just the particular instrument that I heard doing everything that I needed to hear it do. I hear more than just saxophone in terms of playing. I also think graphically and a lot of other stuff. Like the kind of sounds you get in electronics and whale noises and all that. I hear all those kind of things, and I see those possibilities in the instrument.

I’ve taken a little bit from everybody. The thing I noticed about Mulligan is that he plays the baritone saxophone very akin to the way Lester Young played tenor. It’s in that sort of vein. That’s still playing the baritone like a tenor.

TP: How is that so? As opposed to playing it with emphasis on the properties of the baritone?

HB: Well, who are you imitating? If you’re imitating Lester Young, who played tenor, then you’re playing the horn like a tenor, whether you’re playing trumpet or whatever it is. Because he got another thing out of the instrument. It’s sort of that approach, but it’s a different instrument. It’s like once-removed from there. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, because that within itself is great. You’ve got to be a genius to be able to do that. I don’t hear it that way. So that always kind of disturbed me. It took me up until maybe a few years ago to realize what it was that I personally didn’t care for, to be able to put a name to it and say this is basically what it is. And the way that the instrument is treated most of the time being a support. Maybe the closest thing we can get to would be a Clydesdale.

TP: Although these days, I have to say, there are some people that size who can move.

HB: I’m talking about even a way of movement. See, that’s what I mean. You have to move like a big person as opposed to try to be a big person moving like a small one. There is a difference. You can just see people. One comes along who is 6’5″ or whatever and big, as opposed to somebody walking down the street who’s 5’0″. They move totally different. They don’t move the same way. That just doesn’t work. So I’ll see the instruments that way, too. I don’t try to move like a tenor. That’s very rapid.

TP: How about when you play clarinet? How do you try to move then?

HB: That’s why I don’t play clarinet no more! I had to quit playing clarinet unless I play the low instruments. I found out… It took me a long time to find out that what was happening with me was my concept of pitch was lowering. So I really hear bass clef. I’m talking about personal notes that are inside of me, come from the bass clef and go up. But they have to be there. So when I was playing instruments that didn’t give me that, I had problems with it.

TP: The Gerry Mulligan session comes from a pianoless session from 1957, with Mulligan and Paul Desmond on the front line, with bassist Joe Benjamin and drummer Dave Bailey.

[MUSIC: Mulligan-Desmond, “Line For Lyons”-1957; Mulligan-Bob Brookmeyer, “That Old Feeling”-1956 (Crow-Bailey)]

[MUSIC: Bluiett, “Diane” – Sankofa-Rear Guard]

TP: A few words about your experiences with Mingus.

HB: I first joined the big band in 1972. He’d always been looking for a baritone player with a sound, so I was able to fill that void for him. It was an incredible experience, because there was no other vehicle for me to be like that anyway. No one else was using the horn. If they were using it, they were using it only in big ensembles. So I started out with the big band, then worked down to the sextet, then wound up with a quintet. I was in and out a couple of times.

TP: How did he find out about you?

HB: I’m not sure if it was Paul Jeffrey or Roy Brooks. At the time I was playing with Roy Brooks’ Artistic Truth as well as dealing with Paul Jeffrey, and both of them were with Mingus. I’m not sure which one. Plus I was playing with Sam Rivers’ Big Band, so along with me came Bob Stewart, Joe Gardner…that I can remember. And some more people. We’ve all… There wasn’t that much to do doing that time period, basically. There was a lot happening, but not many things; just a lot going on among a few.

TP: Did Mingus express strong preferences in how he wanted his solos shaped?

HB: no, the only thing he ever said to anybody was “The solo belongs to you, but the melody and all that stuff belongs to me.” So he wanted you to play whatever you had on the paper, exactly like he said he wanted it, and do whatever it had to be, then when it came time to solo that was your problem. The only thing he expressed maybe in the time we were together was try to get used to the New York long solos.

TP: What do you mean by “New York long solos”?

HB: Well, the horn players in New York, by the time they get to New York, by the time they get to New York, they’re not playing… They want to PLAY, really play. So guys take what I call long solos. They’re long for me. I don’t say necessarily for them. But maybe that’s the nature of the instrument I’m playing. Which makes me like beg away and do something else, and cool it for a second or something. But that’s why I just said New York long solos. You hear more of that here than any other place. It’s not bad. I’m not saying that. Except for me. It makes me put out more effort.

TP: The next baritone player is Leo Parker, who you greatly appreciate.

HB: Yeah, because Leo did some other things on the instrument. I thought he made the horn romp and really jump. He had an effervescent quality in his playing. He swung real hard, so that endeared him to me. But I didn’t really get to him until later, actually. I’d already been with Mulligan, Pepper Adams and maybe a lot of other people, whoever they are, in different bands, or Stan Kenton or Maynard Ferguson, Basie, whoever was around at the time. But it took me a while. And I was shocked when I saw this material and how good he was. But it did a lot in terms of saying, “Yeah, ok, I need all of it” – that this was part of it, too.

TP: This piece is Leo Parker in a sextet situation circa 1961 called Let me Tell You About It. Bill Swindell on tenor saxophone, John Burks, trumpet, Yusef Salim, piano, Stan Conover, bass and Purnell Rice on drums along with Leo Parker on baritone sax.

[MUSIC: Leo Parker, “Blue Leo”; “Goin’ To Minton’s”-Leo Parker-Fats Navarro, Jan. 1947]

TP: That leaping solo by Leo Parker really illustrated your remark about his making the horn jump and dance.

HB: Yeah, make it dance, that’s right. That was Pepper. We’re trying to run through this thing now. I’m basically trying to go through the people who were most influential in those formative years of listening to and being…

TP: one of the strongest and most respected baritone players from the beginning of his recorded career in the mid-1950s was Pepper Adams, who I know had a big effect on you.

HB: Oh yeah, I used to listen to Pepper over and over and over and OVER, on whatever recording I could, and I heard things that Gene Ammons had done that he was on also. So you know, he was rough company and taking care of business, so I had a lot of respect for his prowess on the instrument. Hard core.

TP: This one comes from a 1969 release on Prestige called Encounter, where Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims share the front line on baritone and tenor, with a Detroit-based rhythm section of Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones, playing Thad Jones’ “Elusive.”

[MUSIC: Pepper Adams, “Elusive”; “I’ve Just Seen Her”-Encounter-1969]

TP: the next baritone player to step up will be Serge Chaloff.

HB: I don’t remember when I heard these, but I guess I was in my teenage years…maybe. I only got a chance to hear one record; maybe later on I heard another one. I was very impressed when I heard it. To me, he had sort of taken the so-called bop style; he played it more like an alto as opposed to a baritone, the way I heard it, because of his fleetness and the way that he ran over the instrument. Plus with a great sound from what I can remember. That was very impressive to me also at the time. I was thirsty for hearing anything. It was hard. I was going on this baritone sax search, I guess you would call it, without even calling it that at the time. By the time I heard it, he’d already passed.

[MUSIC: Serge Chaloff, “I’ve got The World On A String”-March 1956, Sonny Clark, Leroy Vinnegar and Philly Joe Jones; Basie-Charlie Fowlkes, “Counterblock”-1959]

TP: You mentioned that you listened a lot to Basie recordings with Charlie Fowlkes…

HB: I also got a chance to hear the band in person to hear how crackerjack he was on precision on playing parts, and had the sort of sound to do what it did to the ensemble. This was a great lesson for me, too, because that’s the definitive big band I guess you would call it kind of playing… That’s the definitive way of doing it. That’s the reason for bringing it in, because I didn’t want to omit the people who have played this instrument so many years, whether they’ve been featured as soloists or not. Because some of them have taken support role type jobs, and this is a master of that particular discipline.

TP: It’s hard to find a solo by Charlie Fowlkes in the Basie discography. Folks who know the discography better than I do call us at the station for Charlie Fowlkes solo flights.

We’ll take you to the hour with a track featuring baritone saxophonist Charles Davis, who is also well known for his tenor playing and alto playing, out of Chicago, who played with Sun Ra and did some two-baritone features with Pat Patrick on some of mid-50s recordings. Bluiett’s choice is from a Kenny Dorham recording for Time from 1960 with Steve Kuhn, Jimmy Garrison and Buddy Enlow.

HB: Charles I know personally. I met him after I moved to New York, and had only heard a few things up until that time. But when I talked to him, he spoke highly and most favorably of Leo Parker. That seemed to be his biggest influence, I guess, from being around New York and seeing him play a lot. I didn’t get that opportunity. But listening to Leo Parker, I can hear the extension of the influence that is in his playing. But he seemed to have given up baritone and moved on to tenor. But I think his lines and things seem to be better suited for that particular instrument anyway, the particular voice that he comes up with. But I like some of the things that I’ve heard in the past, and this is the record I used to listen to quite a bit because of the tenderness and character, which is something special, to me, to listen to.

[K.D.-Charles Davis, “Monk’s Mood”]

TP: Up to 1958-1959, Charles Davis had played extensively with Sun Ra in Chicago, and was paired off not infrequently with Pat Patrick. Were you aware of those two-baritone Sun Ra recordings when they were happening, or did you discover them later?

HB: I think I discovered them later. Because Sun Ra’s stuff is so extensive, I just heard what I heard. By the time I met Charles, I think he was in New York. This was what era?

TP: 1956. A lot of the Saturn LPs didn’t include personnel, but now the Evidence label has released 15 CDs thus far in an ongoing reissue project of the Saturn with complete discographies. The piece we’ll hear is “Reflections in Blue” from Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth.

[Sun Ra, “Reflections in Blue”-1956, Art Hoyle-Charles Davis-Pat Patrick, John Gilmore; “Pleasure”-Pat Patrick]

HB: Let’s make a comment on the telephone call we got. Tell them what it was.

TP: One caller, who said he’s a pianist who had played and jammed with Gerry Mulligan and Serge Chaloff suggested I convey to Hamiet his suggestion that he listen to Ernie Caceres, whom he favored for his dark, woody tone on the baritone because he has a unique sound.

HB: I’m glad his name is mentioned, because his name was overlooked, as will be many other people in a 3-hour segment. We have enough material to do a whole spotlight, like the 40-some hour showcase…

TP: Apart from that, the purpose of this show is for the musician to present a personal statement about things they’ve heard and been influenced by. We’ll hear now the baritone sound of another extraordinary multi-reed player, Nick Brignola, who on the release we’ll hear I think plays 10 different instrument — soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, clarinet, alto clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, alto flute and piccolo. This is from Time, a drummerless date with Kenny Barron on piano and Dave Holland on bass.

HB: I think everything you said was true, so let’s just go and listen t o it.

[MUSIC: Nick Brignola-Barron-Holland, “Speak Low”; Cecil Payne, “Slide Hampton”-1972; Sahib Shihab, “”-Jazz Sahib-1957]

HB: I left quite a few people out, but ones I like: Danny Bank for the hundreds of records I listened to him on in different configurations, like a lot of things with Oliver Nelson. Tony Scott, who is known more for clarinet, but I heard him…he used to play baritone for a while – it was real wild. That affected me, too. I was trying to get to “Cuber Libre,” which I couldn’t, and stuff I heard do Jay Cameron do with Slide Hampton when Slide had his octet.

TP: “Cuber Libre” is a Ronnie Cuber release from the mid 70s.

HB: Yes. Howard Johnson. Gary Smulyan is one of the newer, younger… John Surman. So there’s quite a few other people. The horn seems to have taken on another kind of significance that it didn’t have in the past. There’s more people soloing on it now maybe than was in the past, and not just playing support roles.

TP: I think Hamiet Bluiett is one person who’s raised a lot of people’s consciousness about the baritone sax with his own recordings over the last 20 years and with the WSQ.

Coming up, something by Charles Tyler, who played baritone and alto with great proficiency.

HB: He was a formidable baritone saxophonist. I thought he was more original on that instrument than he was on alto. Original in his style and the way he approached the horn, and the things that he did. Immense sound. Sound for days. That’s the thing I remember, and the amount of power, and what he brought to the instrument. I was sad to hear of his passing and stuff of that nature. But I’m glad that these few things are left.

TP: You recorded a solo baritone album around the time this one was done for India Navigation. This recital by Charles Tyler was recorded at WBAI, and issued by the Adelphi Jazz Line.

[MUSIC: Charles Tyler, “From St. Louis To Kansas City By Way of Chicago”-60 Minute Man]

TP: We’ll conclude a track featuring the musicians Bluiett will be performing with at the Village Vanguard next week, who are Ted Dunbar, guitar; Clint Houston, bass; and Ben Riley on drums. They play on a 1992 Soul Note recording, titled Sankofa: Rear Guard.

When we were discussing the show, you said it wasn’t just baritone players who influenced you. You mentioned Gene Ammons, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and John Coltrane as great influences on the way you play and why you play the way the way you play. A few words about those non-baritone players in your conception of the horn.

HB: I was influenced by a lot of different people. Count Basie for the way he drove the band. Duke Ellington for the kind of colors that he used. Some vocalists. I listen more to the musicians than anything else. Lockjaw because of the uncanny way in which he played saxophone. No one outplayed him, I thought. No one. He had a band with Johnny Griffin, and it was just awesome. He just kept raising the ante, every tune. And Griffin… It was just awesome. It was unbelievable.

John Coltrane for the sort of spirituality in the way he played. I could dig into the music and stay into it like an hour or so at a time. It really would be focused all that length. It was overwhelming to see to see the band take the whole audience and everybody with them at the same time. And his harmonic sensibility. Just everything about him. It was amazing.

I’ve always liked people with big sounds, big wind and big-throated. Not that I didn’t like the others, but I just favored those in comparison.

Gene Ammons for the kind of knockout punch that he had. His first note, that was it. After that, everything was gravy, but the first note would always just kill. Everybody else that even existed before he got there for his first note, that was like ho-hum.

I was always amazed at the abilities of these people to just command — demand and command so much with an instrument.

Like I said, for Carney, Harry Carney… I heard a lot of these people at different times. I’m going back more to listening to them in person. Because the records provided one thing, but the in-person feeling of what I heard was more important to me. The Basie band – the whole band. And hear the band with Ella and hear her sing, it would be just as powerful or more powerful than a whole big band, when they would do the things where she was scatting and the band would come in with the riffs. It’s just unbelievable. A lot of gospel music, listening to that kind of thing. The blues. Quite a bit. The more I think about it, the more I start digging up.

This first piece is called “John.” It’s dedicated to John Coltrane. It has a simple melody. And it was going through the era of Coltrane…it’s sort of a modal period. It conjures him up in my brain.

[MUSIC: Hamiet Bluiett 4, “John”]

A WKCR Interview with Bobby Hutcherson from 1999

Here’s another of my newly-digitized interviews from my WKCR years — with vibraphone immortal Bobby Hutcherson (January 27, 1941 – August 15, 2016), who was playing at Iridium that week with an all-star band of thirty-somethings. It’s a remarkably candid interview — no filter.

 

Bobby Hutcherson, Out To Lunch, WKCR, Feb. 25, 1999:

[MUSIC: Bobby Hutcherson, “Pomponio”]

TP: “Pomponio” is from Skyline, Bobby Hutcherson’s new release on Verve. It features Kenny Garrett, Geri Allen, Christian McBride and Al Foster, a band that six months ago or so did a week at Birdland in preparation for this date. This week Bobby is in residence at Iridium through Sunday with a quintet. He’s playing this music with Kenny Garrett, Renee Rosnes, Peter Washington and Billy Drummond.

Skyline is your first release on Verve, though you’ve done some guest appearance on Verve albums in recent years. There are strong liner notes by Stanley Crouch that position you firmly in the vibraphone pantheon and explain why you hold the status that you do. But probably because of space considerations, he didn’t go into some of your biographical particulars. So if you don’t mind…

BH: Sure.

TP: One point he makes is that the vibraphone is an instrument whose vocabulary was very much invented in jazz, and in the jazz lineage. It wasn’t that common when you were coming up. Why was it the vibraphone for you? What circumstances led you to it, and what qualities attracted you?

BH: As I was growing up, first… My mom was bedridden for the first four years of my life, so I was always… As a toddler, instead of going out and playing, I was always inside the house, listening to a lot of stuff. I had an older brother who passed away, but he was a schoolmate with Dexter Gordon. They went to Jefferson High School.

TP: They had the famous bandmaster, Samuel Browne?

BH: Yes. Dexter was in the marching band and my brother was a cheerleader at the school. After school they’d come over to the house and they would play records. I’m a young toddler… I have an older sister, and my sister started singing, and she used to sing… This is before I even started playing. She was singing in her trio, and in her trio was Sonny Clark. One time she gave a concert, I remember, in Pasadena, where I grew up, at John Muir High School, and playing bass was Oscar Pettiford. I remember Oscar Pettiford walking up to me before I was playing and saying, “don’t you want my autograph?” — and I said, “Yes, I do.” I didn’t even know who it was! I was still young. Then later on, my sister started dating Eric Dolphy, and Eric Dolphy was a good friend of the family’s — again, before I started playing. Then later, she started going out with Billy Mitchell, who was playing tenor saxophone in Count Basie’s Orchestra.

TP: Jazz is a family experience for you.

BH: It was a family experience. There was always a piano in the house, and I used to sit around and play piano for my own enjoyment. Then one day when I guess I was 13 years old, I was walking down the street in Pasadena. It was summertime. I walked past a record store. This is when they used to play the music, so that when you walked by outside, on the speakers you could hear what record was being played. It was the Giants of Jazz with Miles and Milt and Monk, Kenny Clarke and Percy Heath — and “Bemsha Swing” was on. I just turned right around, and walked right in, got the record, and went home and wore it out. I said, “this is how I’m walking; this DAY.” I said, “This is what I want to do.”

Well, I had grown up with Herbie Lewis. We were in the same grade, going to Washington Junior High School. All the schools that Jackie Robinson went to. As kids, you either tried to be in sports and do what Jackie Robinson was doing, because when you walked in the gym, here was all his records; or you tried to get into music. Herbie said, “If you get some vibes, you can play in my trio, and we can play school dances.” I said, “Oh, great.”

I worked for my dad, who was a bricklayer, and saved my money that summer, and I bought a set of vibes. At the end of the summer, I got the set of vibes. I went and showed Herbie, “Hey, I got a set of vibes.” Herbie says, “Great – because we’ve got a concert in two weeks.” I said, “Wait a minute. I don’t know anything about the keyboard.” He said, “don’t worry; we’ll play around three songs.” I said, “Three songs? How can I do this?” We’re playing a concert. Bobby Troup was the emcee.

We took a black felt pencil. He said, “Here’s what we’ll do. Since you don’t know what the bars are, we’ll take a number for the next bar that you hit.” Well, if we’re doing three songs, it got like 318, 319, starting from #1, and it had all these numbers all over the vibes. But we practiced so much, I got pretty good, looking for which note to hit next, looking for the number on the bars. Well, came the night of this concert, the first time I’m going to play, and the stage manager and he says to us, “Ok, kids, it’s time for you to go on. Oh, by the way, Bobby, I saw some marks all over your bars, so I took a nice wet towel and I wiped everything off — I know you’re glad I did that.” He says, “Now, you kids go out there and have a great time.” I said, “Oh, no. You didn’t.” He said, “Yes, I did.”

So we went out, and all my family, my mom and dad, they’re sitting out there, ready to be all proud for me, and the kids going to school… I hit about the first three notes, and then after that they started throwing rotten fruit at me. At that point, I realized, “You’re going to have to study; you’re going to have to know what you’re doing.”

TP: It’s not paint by the numbers.

BH: no, you can’t play the numbers. But I still keep the numbers… No. [LAUGHS] But that’s how it all started.

TP: Well, you obviously weren’t discouraged.

BH: No. We used to have these jam sessions at my house as I was growing up, with Herbie, myself… And there was a young man named Terry Trotter who used to come over all the time. Terry became Margaret Whiting’s pianist. Charles Lloyd used to come over all the time. H.B. Barnum, who did all the arranging for Aretha Franklin, he used to come over and he would play tenor saxophone, alto, trumpet, he would play a little vibes, he would play some drums. Everybody in Pasadena would come and park their cars in front of the garage, and we’d open up the doors and we’d play all afternoon. It became like a school. After school, go over to Bobby’s house and listen to the music. There would be all these musicians… Walter Benton used to come over. An awful lot of musicians would come over and play. That happened until…oh gosh, until someone set my garage on fire, and all the instruments burned up.

TP: That happened during high school?

BH: Yeah. I think somebody really didn’t like…

TP: Resorted to drastic measures.

BH: Somebody burnt my garage down. You know what was the thing? All the instruments were in there, the vibes, the bass, drums and piano. I remember… I looked out the door the evening when the fire started, and I remember seeing the fire and trying to call the Fire Department, and the telephone line is burning down. I remember running out to the garage and thinking, “Maybe I can pull my vibraphone out.” And the door was too small! I got the small end out, and I got the big end into the door and I’m trying to get it out the door, and this big wall of flames just came and said, “Get out the way; you can’t do it.” The vibes, the drums, Herbie’s bass, the piano – everything burned up in the fire.

TP: Then what happened?

BH: Whoo, how about me telling my father that the garage burned down? He was at a party that night. He came back, he and my mom, and I said, “Dad, the garage has burned down.” He says, “don’t worry. Did you lose everything?” I said, “Yeah.” He just held me. I thought he was going to be really upset and be mad, but he just held me. He says, “That’s ok. I have insurance. So we’ll go through the things in the fire and find every nut and bolt that’s in there, and we’ll claim it. We’ll get you another set of vibes, we’ll get Herbie another bass…”

TP: Several things are coming out here. One is that you were in an incredibly supportive environment, both in the community (except for the people who burned down the garage) with your parents and fellow musicians, and that music was in the air, almost as though you couldn’t help but absorb the essence.

BH: Yes. I think that fire instigated us to play all the more. As I think back… I haven’t talked about that fire too much. Sometimes I push that back in my mind, because it was real traumatic. Some of the kids were really… I always felt it was some of the kids at school who had done it. I felt that because of what we were doing… Everybody was coming over and listening to the music, and it was like…

TP: It was a positive thing, some people felt excluded…

BH: Yeah.

TP: It seems that Los Angeles… Should I play some more music, and then we resume a little later.

BH: Sure.

TP: We’ll hear “Tres Palabras” from Skyline, on which you play marimba.

[MUSIC: Bobby Hutcherson, “Tres Palabras”; Bobby-Abbey Lincoln-Marc Cary, “Another World”]

TP: We were speaking about your early years. One quality about Bobby Hutcherson’s improvising that grabs me every time is the total honesty, spontaneity and transparency. People often hold back on the radio, but Bobby was discussing a very traumatic event of his youth – the fire that burned down his garage and destroyed his instrument. We’ll put the fire behind us…

BH: Put the fire behind us.

TP: Let’s talk about your path towards becoming a professional musician, getting on the road, and coming to New York City, where you participated in so much history on numerous dates for Blue Note.

BH: What happened was, going back to my sister going out with Billy Mitchell… Billy Mitchell and Al Gray had just left the Count Basie Orchestra and formed their own sextet. After I’d started playing, Billy asked could I join the group, and play 4 mallets, and comp and solo, and take the place of Gene Keys, and go up to San Francisco and work opposite Charlie Mingus. I had never played 4 mallets before, but I said, “Of course I can – yes.” In the group was Doug Watkins, and Doug took me under his wing and showed me things to do. He was wonderful. I really loved Doug Watkins.

Anyway, we played two weeks at the Jazz Workshop, and then came back to Los Angeles. Billy came back here to New York, and Al and Doug stayed in Los Angeles. A couple of days later I got a call from Billy Mitchell, and Billy said, “How would you like to come to New York and open at Birdland? We will play opposite Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.” I was also in college at the time. I asked my mom. She said, “I want you to graduate from college; it’s very important.” I said, “Mom, I’ve got a chance to go to New York and play at Birdland.” She said, “Oh! Well, forget college. Go on to New York.” She said, “I have this dream that you’re going to go to New York – go ahead.”

So we drove here in Doug Watkins’ car, the car he was killed in when he went back out to California – in his black Peugeot. We drove here. We started out with a steak dinner, and by the time we got to the Lincoln Tunnel we didn’t have enough money to pay to get through. We were eating potato chips when we came through…

TP: Sounds like the old days of travel…

BH: I remember in part of the trip, Doug’s windshield wipers stopped working, and we were in a snowstorm in New Mexico. He had to reach around, put his arm around and work the windshield wipers to keep the snow off as he was driving. It was bitter cold! Oh, gosh…

TP: The vibraphone, the bass, everything is in the car.

BH: Yeah. We come to New York, and we open at Birdland. First thing is, that afternoon I’m setting up, and Pee Wee Marquette was… I’d heard him on records, but I didn’t know he was a midget. Pee Wee Marquette saw me setting up, I was just by myself. So he walks up to me and blows a big puff of smoke in my face, and he says, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m Bobby Hutcherson.” “What are you doing here?” “I’m going to play vibes with Al Gray and Billy Mitchell.” He says, “We don’t need you. Pack up your vibes and go.” I said, “Oh, Lord, is this what I heard about what New York is?” He said, “You heard me. Go.” I just waited for him to walk back out the door, and I kept setting up.

That night… In those days you heard that Pee Wee could make or break you. So it went like this. “Ladies and gentlemen, from the Jazz Corner of the World, Birdland, the Al Gray-Billy Mitchell Sextet, blah-blah, and with Bubba Hutchkins on vibes.” I said, “Oh, no!” Every night he would do this. But we had two weeks there. So on pay night, everybody would go over to the Alvin Hotel, which was across the street (it’s a parking lot now, I think). I’m in Al Gray’s room, and there’s a knock on the door, and I open the door, and a big puff of cigar smoke arrives. There’s Pee Wee. He says, “Say, Papa, you got something for me?” I said, “I don’t have anything for you, the way you’ve been announcing my name all week.” Al Gray says, “give him five dollars.” I said, “I’m not giving him a thing.” Al goes, “Give him five dollars.” So I gave him five dollars.

So the next week goes like this. “Ladies and gentlemen, from the Jazz Corner of the World, Birdland, 52nd and Broadway, the Al Gray-Billy Mitchell Sextet with Billy Mitchell, Al Gray, and Bobby Hutcherson on vibes” – because I gave him that five dollars. So everything started to change right there.

We went on from there and worked the Apollo Theater. Besides playing the regular show, we played the talent night where they had to drop this cheese-cloth, and they’d throw all the rotten fruit at the entertainers who would come out. I had heard about that. That was unbelievable! I’d never seen people get fruit thrown at them. This was unbelievable. And the people were screaming, going crazy.

I think the next gig, we went on to Chicago, the Sutherland Lounge, and we worked opposite Redd Foxx. They would not let me in the club while Redd Foxx performed, because I would go crazy. It got to the point where I didn’t have to hear the joke. All I had to do was hear the sound of his voice, and I would be on the floor.

Anyway, after about a year-and-a-half, the group disbanded. I didn’t really know that many musicians. So I started driving a taxi.

TP: So they worked steadily, around the country, touring for 18 months, and then you move to New York.

BH: Yes.

TP: Quick question before we resume the narrative. There aren’t that many stylistic antecedents for a vibraphone player, but a few great ones. You heard Milt Jackson first, there’s Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo, some others. Who were your models? All vibraphonists, or other instrumentalists as well?

BH: I’m going to tell you…I think I’ve told Tommy this. I really started listening to Tommy Flanagan. I think Tommy Flanagan… Tommy, if you’re listening, I love you. I just want you to know that I started listening to you to try to find another avenue, another way to come through the instrument.

TP: If you can, is it possible to describe the sound you were trying to achieve…

BH: I wasn’t really sure. I was just trying different things. I was just trying to be a part of. It was a situation, as I said, where I’m driving a cab. Herbie Lewis had moved to New York and he’s playing bass with the Jazztet. Grachan Moncur was in the Jazztet. So I started going over to their house and playing jam sessions as I was driving a cab. Now Grachan says to me, “I want Jackie McLean to hear you.” Jackie comes and says, “Oh, I like this.” He says, “I just met a new drummer in Boston; his name is Tony Williams. I’m going to bring him down, and we’re going to play at this club, the Coronet.” It was Grachan, Tony, Jackie, and Eddie Khan. We came in there. Everybody had heard about all these young kids playing at the Coronet Club in Brooklyn with Jackie. Alfred Lion, the owner of Blue Note Records, came in and says, “I want to record this; Jackie, I’ve got to record this.” After being at the studio, at Rudy’s studio, Alfred Lion came up to me after the first song that we recorded, and he walked up to me and said, “Bobby, how would you like to sign a record contract?” I said, “Whoa! Am I in the right place and the right time.”

[END OF SIDE 1]

TP: Jackie McLean was incorporating the sounds and ideas that you and Grachan Moncur were working with to get into what he calls “the big room” area of improvising.

BH: Yes.

TP: Had you been workshopping a lot of new ideas, experimental ideas in Los Angeles?

BH: You know how you can have your own personality, but if you get with someone else, another personality seems to come out of you and someone else… Well, that’s what started to happen. It got all of us together… We would be so silly — and be serious at the same time. But silly. I mean, we used to have comic books in our back pockets as we would come to rehearsals. So it would be really serious, but at the same time we’d be looking real serious, we’d be like, “this is the most ridiculous…”

What happened, besides doing those records then with Jackie, Grachan did a record with the same group – Evolution. In fact, this next cut you’re going to play, “The Coaster,” Grachan replaced Jackie with Lee Morgan, and Lee Morgan really played different on the original recording of Evolution and on “The Coaster.” I guess that’s really why when I did this last record with Verve, I wanted to remember those days.

[Bobby Hutcherson, “The Coaster” – from Skyline; “Little B’s Poem”-Components]

BH: Not a bad group.

TP: That recording featured four pieces by you and four by Joe Chambers; another album, Dialogue, comprised entirely compositions by Joe Chambers and Andrew Hill. It’s interesting that these Blue Note recordings became a forum for the ideas of other composers.

BH: The Dialogue album was my first album for Blue Note, and it was at a point where I wasn’t writing. All I was doing was working with other people. I was just trying to complete the circle. I didn’t really understand the situation, that in order to complete the circle (or complete the sphere), playing, and playing with other people, practicing, working on soloing…theories and stuff like that… You really start to complete the circle of music, or the sphere of music, by writing. Because then you’re really writing in your diary. This is what happened to me; this is how I feel today; this is the recipe for what happened today; this is the recipe for how this day went for me. Along with the routines that I went through to try to enrich my life.

TP: Did the recordings you did for Blue Note during the period when you were living in New York… Because then you moved back to California and formed a working quintet with Harold Land which was amply documented. Does it reflect the work that you were doing in New York as well? The performance situations, the gigs. Or do the albums more reflect a for-the-studio situation?

BH: I think it really reflected what was going on in New York. When I first came to New York, I’ll say a lot of my writing on the first album had to do with my still ties with Pasadena. This greenery, the relaxation type situations. Joe Chambers coming, as we met each other and started doing things together, it became a situation of looking into the sculpture of new things developing along with the renaissance that was going on, and the new people going on, and along with the fight for the Black people in the country. It was very common for me in those days to get in a cab and I’d be going to a rehearsal, and I’d be coming from 165th Street and Woodcrest, where I was living in the Bronx, and come past 125th Street and come past the Lenox Hotel, and Malcolm X would be on the steps in front giving a speech, and thousands of people would be standing there. The cab would stop at the red light, and even though I only had another 15-20 minutes to get where I was going, I’d tell the cab driver, I have to get out here; I’ve got to go listen to Malcolm X for a moment. I’d go over and listen and then get back in another cab, and then go on to rehearsal. It was a situation of that cabaret card, that police card that you had to have, which stopped an awful lot of musicians from working in nightclubs, and all the people playing in lofts in those days where you could hear all this writing. Everybody was writing music.

TP: So the recordings you did with Sam Rivers or Andrew Hill or Freddie Hubbard also reflected gigs that were happening at the time.

BH: Yes, a lot of it. Then, at the same time, I renewed acquaintances with Eric Dolphy, who was back here at the time, and we started rehearsing and doing things. I started doing gigs, playing here, at Brooklyn College, or we would go to Pittsburgh…Crawford’s Grill, on the Hill in Pittsburgh and play…

TP: Playing the type of music that was on Iron Man and Out To Lunch?

BH: Exactly. Going to Washington, D.C., and playing the Bohemian Caverns.

TP: Then you returned to the West Coast and formed a well-regarded group with Harold Land, who I guess you knew from your younger days in Los Angeles.

BH: Yes.

TP: Can you speak a bit about that band and your musical production during the 70s? I hear it as you blending the experimentation of the 60s with a look back to the fundamentals you’d come up with.

BH: When I went back to the West Coast… I got busted for some grass here. They took my hack license, my taxi license away; they took my cabaret card away – and scared me half to death. I decided to go back to the West Coast for a second and just regroup. So I went back and started working with Harold Land, and then I started getting calls: “Bobby, are you going to come back?” I said, “Yeah, I’m going to come back again and play.” The Slugs thing was starting to happen…no, it wasn’t starting; it had BEEN happening – but I wanted to come back. I always loved playing in Slugs. So I told Harold… There were some things happening over in Europe. I said, “Let’s form a group, come back to New York; I’ll call Joe Chambers and we’ll get a group together and we’ll start playing some music.”

At that time, it seems to me as though we stopped playing linear type things, and started playing a lot of intervals of 4ths and 5ths and 2nds, and tunes that went into that category. That was a change. That caused… Different combinations cause different things to happen. So that was a change in the sound, because of…solo-wise… A lot of the solos were constructed in 2nds and 5ths and 4ths and neighboring tones. I don’t want to get too technical. But that’s what started happening, and started the sound to change.

TP: With Woody Shaw there’s another evolution…

BH: Woody, yeah. Woody was playing different intervals. Woody was playing a lot of 6-intervals. Woody was playing more pentatonic scales. Our group was using pentatonic scales, but using different intervals, and Woody was using more of the pentatonic scales with a lot of the major VI in his. I didn’t use too much of the major VI.

TP: That was a very fruitful partnership, and you did a lot of records, though not all of them are around these days.

BH: Yeah. I used to go over to Woody’s house all the time, and we would start talking about what we were working on. Woody was always talking about the pentatonic scale that he was working on. It’s funny how all of a sudden there’s a style of playing that starts blossoming out of that.

TP: You’ve been at the center of several transitions. Then around 1980 or so, it seems you begin to go out as a solo voice with groups that elaborate your conception, and the co-led groups fade away. It seems for the last 15-20 years, it’s been Bobby Hutcherson’s sound. Is that more or less accurate?

BH: I went through another transition of the theories that I was working on. For a while, I started working on a lot of piling chords together, right next to each other, so it would be like a cluster, and it would become really hard to figure out what was the scale. I used to think a lot of times when I used to work with Eric Dolphy… He would say: “Now, Bobby, on this tune, this scale in this tune doesn’t end until it runs for 2 octaves, and every note is different.” I said, “Oh my goodness, what…” It was really different.

TP: You seem to have incorporated everything you learned, but also stepping back into the tradition in a personally meaningful way.

BH: Yes. It’s like taking some things, throwing them away, bringing them back. It’s just like sitting there and making something. I might say, “Ok, I want to make an old-fashioned apple pie. Do I get these new modern ingredients?” No. You have to use just some plain old apples and some sugar…

TP: Food is always the best metaphor.

BH: [LAUGHS] If that’s what you want, that’s what you’re going to have to put in there. It’s a great reservoir, if you can look and say, “Ok, on this I have to do this; and on this one, I’m going to try this.” To reach back and say, “Ok, this time…” Situations like not only that, but to say, “On this one, I have to play behind the beat; on this one I have to play on top of the beat.” If you want this situation to happen, you have to go from playing on top of the beat and slide into playing behind the beat, to get this feeling. And to think about those things as you’re playing is… It’s tough!

TP: Are you thinking about that consciously now, or is it a more organic thing?

BH: Exactly. You want it to be like it’s just a natural thing to happen, instead of it being a technical, mechanical situation. You want it to be just part of breathing. It’s almost a situation of there is no tempo. There is only feeling. There is only action and reaction. There is only You.

TP: On that note, let’s Bobby Hutcherson play “I Only Have Eyes For You” from his new Verve release, Skyline.

[MUSIC: Bobby Hutcherson, “I Only Have Eyes For You”]

TP: This Verve recording is one of the first in some time where you’ve had a decent budget and preparation time. A few ideas about your intents and purposes in putting it together.

BH: A lot of thought about each person. A lot of thought about music is not the image; it’s the reflection – and the images are the people involved and the love and friendship for them.

TP: We’ll conclude with a track from 30 years ago that you spoke off mic. You talked about trying to transcribe it some years later, and being in a totally different head space. This is it. It’s called “Visions,” originally from the 1968 date Spiral, which came out about ten years later, with Harold Land, Stanley Cowell, Reggie Johnson, Joe Chambers.

[MUSIC: Bobby Hutcherson, “Visions”]