During the time I was a disc
jockey at KJAZ- FM (off and on a period of about 12 years), I had the chance
to interview or "chat" with many musicians, on air. I felt that
some of the subject matter, while maybe 'too heavy ' to expound upon on
air, would be more appropriate in bookform for private consumption. I decided
to contact some of these musicians to set up private sessions where the
conversation could be recorded. As a result I assembled a manuscript that
has remained unpublished for over twenty-five years. These conversations
took place in the mid to late seventies. Here are some excerpts from those
conversations.
-Vern Thompson
"When I first started
recording, I was just interested in playing the music that I wanted to
play, regardless of what people wanted to hear. I wanted to do those tunes,
and I had been warned that usually when you record, you do half the record
date for yourself and half the record date for the record company. So for
the record company, I wrote Watermelon Man and a couple of other tunes...
blues and those kinds of things. Those are always for the record companies."
- Herbie Hancock
"That's when I hit it,
in 1959... I had done everything I could have done. I made money, I was
a studio musician, (in Europe) and that was sickening, really sickening.
I got a lot of experience playing different types of music. I mean the
music differed from light classical to very heavy, it included piano and
heavy music... So I came over here in order to learn, because I knew there
was a lot of heavy shit here."
- Joe Zawinul
"See I'm not interested
in appealing to the larger masses of people, because what the White man
shows us is that he will do anything to make money. Now after he's kicked
you in your ass for three hundred years, then you gonna turn around and
say, 'I will do anything to make money because I have some noble purpose'.
But that's not the way it goes down, because finally one sees there's only
so much time in life from minute to minute.The quality of life, values
that go down to doin' that, that's the issue....I understand about the
relative strengths of people , and I don't think people have to be anything.
They can be nothin' if they want to be."
- Cecil Taylor
V.T. "Why don't you
play vibes without the motor on?"
" No! A couple of jobs I turned down because of this too. Like the
one with George Shearing many years ago. He didn't like the vibrato at
the time, and it's not an instrument without it. First of all it's too
mechanical itself... like second to the drums, which are really non-musical.
It's very mechanical, so this is how I created the style. The slow vibrato."
- Milt Jackson
"There are techniques
like Monk's - I can hear his technique underneath his creation. Somebody
brought a record by Monk to one of the schools I went to, and played it
for this concert pianist teacher and she said, 'That man knows nothing
about classical playing, that discipline of fingers, and playing all over
the piano.' She said , 'But he's got something else that a lot of classical
people wish they had, and don't know how to get.' "
- Wayne Shorter
"...The greatest of all
of them Duke Ellington!....I'm not talking about them hits. I'm talking
about 'Harlem Airshaft', 'Mainstem', 'Jack the Bear'... Now my proposition
is like he is the greatest genius that America has ever produced. And he
happened to be Black... Ellington gave what he called sacred services all
over the world, but when his home church in his native Washington was asked
could Ellington be allowed to give his work there, they said, 'No, we can't
have that kind of music'. "
- Cecil Taylor
"I didn't have it so
bad when I went to New York, 'cause first of all I went there with Horace
Silver, and I had established a bit of a reputation by playing with Eric
Dolphy... Eric had such an influence on me, my whole scope changed when
I played with him. How I approached my instrument, how I might write something.
How I even thought about music... his music was grounded in basics. All
Eric did was superimpose some of his ideas on basic ideas. That's how one
finds himself in music... Sometimes you've got to break some rules, you
got to make things fit."
- Woody Shaw Jr.
"As I came into New York,
I got there when I was nineteen years old, and I came there with Al Grey
and Billy Mitchell, who had just left Count Basie, who had formed a group
with Doug Watkins just before he died... We came in and we were working
at Birdland which was the jazz corner of the world at that time. We were
working opposite Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers... I was lucky enough
to come into town and be working... But , later things started going bad,
and at the start of the next year, after the group that I was with broke
up, on New Years my wife came down with the measles, we had just had a
baby and he caught the measles. And so all of us had the measles. And I
got into a situation where all of a sudden nobody knew I was in town. I
wasn't working... I used to call everybody collect and ask them if they
had food. And I'd go around with a sack and collect food. I'd call a guy
up and say, 'Hey you got any potatoes, do you have some milk?' I'd call
another guy, 'Can you let me have a couple of cans of tuna?'...This went
on for a long time... Then I started working in a grocery store, stocking
shelves and boxing food... And then I got a cab driving license and started
driving a cab in New York for about a year."
- Bobby Hutcherson
"I mean people got shot,
people got killed, people got hung up on the corner. And that shit was
wild... Machine gun fire everywhere... So consequently, I used to duck
bullets... When the Russians came, they used to sit on top of the tanks
across the hill, on the other side of the forest and they'd be practicing
on kids running and shit... And you gotta survive, man. You gotta get the
milk from there, and you gotta get a couple of eggs from these people...
There's a certain know how. And that only comes from people having to constantly
be able to do in order to survive. So generation by generation that shit
develops... The way I grew up, with bombs everyday and nothing to eat,
man, and dead people in the street, everything decaying and disease...
At night when all the Russians came with wagon trains, brought the ammunition
through, my cousin and me, we stole a horse. They were all sleeping those
cats, the Russian soldiers. They were driving in the evening and it was
curfew always. We went out there hungry like a motherfucker, stole a horse...
we put it in the stable.The next morning it turned out I wanted to sit
on top of it... The horse broke down. It was blind and everything from
grenades - hair falling out -so, bam, we shot it, you know, and ate it.
My aunts they seasoned it up real good."
- Joe Zawinul
"Cecil Taylor knows,
I know Cecil Taylor knows! Structure and everything. Because Trane was
telling me about Cecil a long time ago ; he said, 'I went to hear Cecil
over here at Birdland one night. I heard Cecil play... and he was playing
chord changes.' "
- Wayne Shorter
"It follows that... in
order to go to one of those so-called great colleges in America, where
supposedly your mind is helped, you have to have money. But if you're even
lucky enough to get into those colleges, what you find is that there are
all kinds of discriminatory practices going on there. So what does that
leave; It leaves most Black people with the option of going to work for
twelve or fourteen hours a day. And the quality of the work there is mostly
physical, it's mostly draining. And given the fact that in this society
there's nothing that really stimulates the thought process to make people
understand what Western artists think like, abstractly as art, how's a
man who spent most of his energy lifting shit or working in some kind of
plant, how is he going to get involved with the more developed, exasperating,
formalistic conceptions that might be happening with Milford Graves, Sonny
Murray or Cecil Taylor?...Since none of your Black radio stations, for
the most part, play any music much past Miles Davis, how are Black people
supposed to know? ...In the first place, the Black people who have money
have never gone out and talked about Black artistry, Black genius... If
you look at the kind of shit that, say a writer like Langston Hughes had
to go through, you ain't findin' no Black community supporting him."
- Cecil Taylor
"There are over a hundred
and twenty Black composers that are writing classical instrumental music,
and there's not one that has his music in a subscription series in any
of the two thousand concert orchestras in America. (Circa 1976) I went
to Baltimore to see how they have been surviving as composers. I found
that most of them are professors or teachers at some college. That's how
they survive to make their bread and butter... The problem for Black people
in America is that there are so many non-Black people that have already
had there creativity used for the standards of this country. But a Black
person is left out of participating in the cultural standards of his own
birthright because of past influences from other people's culture... And,
obviously, Black composers of what they call 'serious' music are not even
in the competition of being a composer in civilization terms. That's why
I became a performer because I could never get anyone to perform the things
I wrote."
- Ornette Coleman
"I played the Black Expo
with Quincy and them and there was Isaac Hayes. The Black Expo in America
with no jazz music! I was awful disappointed. I went out there and played
background in about sixty pieces or something with Roberta Flack singing.
That's ok too, but there's Frank Foster sittin' in the reed section and
people of very high stature. They could go to Europe and play for ten thousand
people... when Burt Bacharach writes in Esquire or Life magazine that he
listened to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to get his inspiration to
write music, and others like that... they don't care. They still will accept
Burt Bacharach and not accept Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy Gillespie would still
have to play on Burt Bacharach's show, instead of Burt Bacharach playing
on Dizzy Gillespie's show! "
- Jimmy Heath
"... It was already in
the fifties, when I heard Charlie Parker, and that really messed me up.
One night I was at a friend's house and I heard him (Parker), and it shook
me up because I thought I was bad; all of us, I mean Austria is full of
great musicians, truly excellent musicians... they got something else.
I don't want to sound patriotic or something, but there is a reason why
Beethoven, Mozart, and all those people, Brahms, Bruckner, and a thousand
others of the great old masters lived there. Like in Catalan, in Spain,
there is something there and nobody can put his finger on it."
- Joe Zawinul
"...During the time I
was with Bird, Miles, Blakey, Mingus, whoever I was with, I didn't read.
I had tremendous ears. I could hear things maybe once or twice and play
it. And that was a very well known, well kept secret in New York... that
I didn' t read... Bird never wrote out much music. He wrote out chord symbols
which I could play. The music he wrote out would be for Miles, the other
horn part... Even when I needed money I couldn't accept gigs with singers.
I remember one summer about four singers called me Sarah (Vaughn), Carmen,
Dakota Staton and Terry Thornton. And I turned down all the gigs. Why?
'Cause I knew I couldn't read their music."
- Walter Bishop Jr.
"Not only did they not
give me any (royalties), but a lawyer that I had asked to write to record
companies, that I recorded for, Prestige, World Pacific and Impulse - I
hadn't been getting any notices, he wrote to these companies and Prestige
sent him a statement, and it had on there a five-hundred dollar charge
against my account for re-packaging the album. So he wrote back to them
and told them that was against the law, and they couldn't do that, and
they wrote back and said yeah they were sorry, it was a mistake. If he
hadn't written to them, man, I would have never known the difference. I
would have paid the money"
- Gil Evans
"...The music has a function
and all the time the function is not realized by the musician. In this
world of commerciality, that can be very standard. But that should not
be the standard. The potential of music is much greater. We're lucky in
one respect, in that we have our history which is in the music. What I
mean by that is we go back many thousands of years ancestrally, and this
music is the one stream that has been most important in preserving these
traditions. That's why when I went to Africa I was able to play with local
musicians with no difficulty, because it wasn't about notes and the 'right'
chords, but it was about the right kind of spirit. When we were in Iran,
Max (Roach) did the same thing with a Persian drummer...."
- Stanley Cowell
"...The thing about it
is that it is much more beautiful when you do it naturally. In other words,
the person that can't read or write music but can play incredibly, that's
the really basic results of music, expressing it. A person that having
spent a lot of time trying to feel secure in making mistakes in front of
you, when you listen to him he doesn't sound like anything."
- Ornette Coleman
V.T. You don't feel that
there is such a thing as a wrong note?
"No there isn't.
But in order for that idea to be manifested as truth, the musician has
to be completely in tune and completely open to interpret anything that
happens musically in the context of everything that happened before. It
has to do with interpretation. Just the way you look at any given note
at any given time: If you look at it as relating to something before, you
can find a relationship and you can use it."
- Herbie Hancock
"...when Clifford Brown
was quite young, he was around seventeen. I had a group and we went to
Wilmington, Delaware, and I had a trumpeter by the name of Bill Massey
who was very, very good. He and Trane had been in the Navy together...
He's a cousin of known trumpeter Cal Massey... nobody had heard of Clifford
Brown. And he just came up with his head kind of bowed, as he was a very
humble person, one of the most humble musicians I've ever met. And he asked
if he could play. We didn't expect anything 'cause Bill was there and Bill
was tough. But Clifford sat in and it was amazing. He was the most professional
musician that I've ever met. He was already an old man as far as experience
is concerned, when he was seventeen. He was already that proficient and
mature... like Trane, Miles, all of them, they practiced to achieve this
kind of stature that they achieved later on; but when they first started
playing, they weren't as good at seventeen as Clifford Brown. Not Trane
or Miles."
- Jimmy Heath
"I used to work with
Al Grey and Billy Mitchell down in this club called the Half Note, and
Gary Burton used to come down before he worked with George Shearing, and
he used to watch me play with four mallets, and sit there all the time.
And he started copping some of my voicings, and before long Gary Burton
was known for his four mallet work. (Laughter) Just to let you know what's
happening."
- Bobby Hutcherson
"If you go back to Medieval
European music, it's probably very close to African music, the same scales.
The rhythm patterns were different, and not as complex. They didn't deal
in layers of sound like Africans did. At that time it was simply one melody
line. Also, a lot of their dances, later stylized in Europe, came from
Africa. The things that Bach wrote, fugues and inventions around that whole
idea, can be traced back to when the Africans came over to Spain. And the
first school of keyboard music is in Spain in the fifteenth century."
- Stanley Cowell
"There is no way in the
world I would have been able to play with him (Coltrane) if he had been
my instructor, in the strict sense of the word instructor, somebody showing
you something. He showed me in another way, through playing. He never pinpointed
anything, like do this and voice this way. You have to hear it. We heard
things together. That's why sometimes, like a telepathic thing, I could
tell where he was going."
- McCoy Tyner
"...I talked to Trane
about two months before he died; he sat down and we actually had a long
talk, 'cause we were close. And he told me that he was sorry for some of
the things he had done in an experimental stage in those last couple of
years... I think he felt that some of the experiments weren't that beneficial...
This is the understanding I got from what he was telling me. "
- Milt Jackson
"He said, (Jackie McLean)
'I'm gonna go up to Boston and get this young cat who's been playing with
me on drums, you won't believe it when you hear him.' The drummer was Tony
Williams. Tony had just come into town and had just turned seventeen. I'm
now twenty... I said, 'Wow he's a little cat.' Tony was a funny cat, he
used to come to rehearsals bringing comic books; he was still reading Flash
Gordon."
- Bobby Hutcherson
"...I met Louis Armstrong
only once and after we talked for a while he said, 'Hey we gotta make an
album', and he said, 'Go see my manager'. So I went and I saw his manager
and he says, 'You know, Louis is a very friendly man, and he gets a few
drinks and he says things he don't mean'... So we never got together."
- Gil Evans
"I remember an instance
where Fats Navarro and Miles, Lucky Thompson and Dexter Gordon and Kenny
Clarke and Percy Heath, my brother, played at a place here in New York
called Bop City years ago, and Miles sounded like a baby next to Fats Navarro."
- Jimmy Heath
"A funny thing used to
happen, I used to come out of the lobby of the hotel where I was staying
and Bird would be getting a shoeshine outside. And he would be rapping
with the shoeshine boy a mile-a-minute. And I would be saying, 'I wonder
what instrument does he play?' You dig. He didn't play nothin' , he shined
shoes. He was a human being and Bird could relate to human beings on all
levels. So consequently his music related to people on all levels..."
- Walter Bishop Jr.
V.T. Have you ever considered
playing electric piano?
"No I haven't. I had to
play it one time. I'll never forget - on a job, the piano was so bad. This
was a long time ago. It was just a small job over in Jamaica, New York,
and the piano was so bad that I told the man to go home and get his electric
piano. So, you know the piano must have been in bad shape! (Laughter)"
- McCoy Tyner
"It's a business all
right, (music) it's a business. That's really a drag too 'cause music should
really be supported from outside sources. It's an artform and it should
remain an artform, not that it shouldn't have its entertaining aspects,
'cause there's a place for that too. But it shouldn't be a contest between
artistry and entertainment. Each one has its own value and each one should
have its own monetary benefits. I shouldn't have to bow down to Simon and
Garfunkel or the Beatles. In other words, they shouldn't necessarily be
making that much more money than I am."
- Herbie Hancock
"On all the records I've
done, I've been the sole instigator in putting it together. But, I haven't
been the sole instigator in reaping the rewards. Well, look, I've been
told that I sell on the average of not less than five thousand records
per month. But, I don't get paid on that level... it's the same old corruption,
man. Somebody is enjoying the rewards that didn't have anything to do with
the creation of the product."
- Ornette Coleman
"...And one of the things
that people don't understand is that once a musician or a poet, a dancer,
an artist, makes the commitment to art, then by the very nature of that
commitment he or she is out of the normal purview of Black people. Because
one of the things that has gone down (the cultural genocide) is that Black
people don't think of themselves as artists. I mean, that cat who ran Motown
(Berry Gordy), I'm sure the farthest thing from his mind was, if you said
to him that, 'You have great poets working for you'... just think of all
those people that he had there... Smokey Robinson, you dig."
- Cecil Taylor
"...I went to a special
high school in Detroit, Cass Tech, where during the middle of the fifties
most of the musicians came out of that school. Paul Chambers, Doug Watkins.
So many guys came out of there. I had been in New York before most of them.
I was in New York when I was eighteen... During the time I was in high
school, I met Miles and Dizzy and I played with Lionel Hampton... And,
of course, I know Thad Jones and Elvin and Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan,
Barry Harris, Milt Jackson, Sonny Stitt, Wardell Gray, and I played with
Charlie Parker when I was still in high school. So, when I got to New York,
I started working with Thelonious Monk, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Clarke, Oscar
Pettiford. Then I started going to Manhattan School of Music while I was
still in the service. I got out and I finished about two years of college
and came back to Wayne University for a year. I was working around Detroit
with Elvin (Jones), Kenny Burrell, and Billy Mitchell, Dexter Gordon and
all these type people, and Miles. Then I came back to New York and started
working with Kenny Clarke, made some records with Cannonball (Adderley),
and I worked with the Jazz Messengers. I left there when Clifford Brown
died. I started working with Max Roach and Sonny Rollins. After that, I
used to take Miles' band when he had Coltrane, Red Garland, Philly Joe
Jones and Paul Chambers. I was working a place called the 'Bohemia', and
I recorded with Jackie McLean and George Wallington, Arthur Taylor and
Paul Chambers. Then after that, I went to Europe and I took my own band
over there with Bobby Jaspar, Art Taylor, Walter Davis, and Doug Watkins.
I've worked with damn near everybody in my life."
- Donald Byrd
"...But you see, what
is European music? I can show you very easily where the 'Rite Of Spring',
(Stravinsky), that so-called revolutionary piece, where the only thing
that Stravinsky really did was to find the instrumental, the Western equivalent
of sonority in timbre to co-opt a Balinesian idea. Listen to the music
from Gamelan, listen to it closely , and then go back and listen to 'Rite
Of Spring'. Understand that the Gamelan Orchestra played in 1892 in Paris...
in 1892 the Gamelan Orchestra made their first appearance in Paris; it
completely changed Debussy's conception of organizing composition, 'cause
he was a Wagnerian and he began to write in a way, to perceive music in
terms of blocks. And, as you know, Stravinsky was influenced by Debussy.
He simply found the Western equivalent in terms of timbre and sonority
and placed them in Western music. Then he turned back on the European music
itself. He then became a Classicist after 1920."
- Cecil Taylor
"Like Einstein, man,
he had a sensitivity for how that shit works. And that's the same with
music. Music aint nothin' but sensitivity. I mean, I couldn't write a piece
of music just from my head. My mind doesn't even operate like that. But
I can sit down, man, and write a whole symphony at the piano... Friedrich
Gulda, a great concert pianist, he told me something. We talked for many,
many years. He told me that when the European-African trade started, there
was a lot of Black influence in old Classical music. In the true Classical
music it's been dead for at least 150-200 years. When that European-African
trade thing stopped, the rhythm stopped, the music became dead, and that's
the truth. And in Classical music, the rhythm left and became too lily
White, because in Beethoven's day, man. Them suckers were hittin' it. It
was the other day, I was in the airplane with Wayne (Shorter), we listened
to Mozart's symphony he wrote when he was eighteen years old. That shit
was swinging so hard..."
- Joe Zawinul
"Black artists have to
deal primarily with White people, 'cause Black people do not build coliseums,
any concert halls, any art galleries for Black artists. They can be talking
about Black shit all they want, but when it comes down to it, they don't
provide any arena for the reception of Black art. And until they start
addressing themselves to this, then they don't have any right to ask anything
of no Black artist. That's what I meant about those Black poets and Black
thinkers in the sixties who were full of shit, because at the same time
they were talking about all this Blackness, they were writin' for White
people right along, and I know it. But, you see the problem is that Black
people don't even read."
- Cecil Taylor
"It's odd that Charlie
Parker, during his lifetime, couldn't receive proper promotion. Now that
he's dead, he's gotten much better publicity."
- Walter Bishop Jr.
"...the best things in
the world are not for everybody. I mean, today everybody wants to talk
about , 'Picasso, yeah man, a bad cat.' But when Picasso was really at
his best, man, nobody appreciated him. And that's the same with all the
great masters. It takes years for any event to be understood. It takes
at least twenty years."
- Joe Zawinul
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Vern
Thompson presently resides in Richmond, CA. You can reach him for correspondence,
interviews and/or to purchase the CDs "Convergence",
"Sea of Dreams" and "Passions
Of The Heart" at:
P.O.
Box 20833
El Sobrante, CA
94820-0833
(510)223-8891.
E-Mail vtho@aol.com
The
price for shipping and handling is $16.00 per copy. MONEY ORDER OR CASHIER
CHECK ONLY.
You can also order CDs from
CD Baby.
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