The Evolution of the Don Ellis Orchestra - Part 6 - "Times for Revolution" an interview with Pete Welding [From the Archives]

 © -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Regarding his own work in the late 1960s, Ellis said, "Music, like any art, hits you at an emotional level before you dissect it analytically. A lot of people relate to the 'sense of life' in our music. I just see it as a new way of swinging"

- Sean P. Fenlon, Doctoral Dissertation, Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University

The JazzProfiles feature on the evolution of the Don Ellis Orchestra continues with the interviews and essays that appeared in Downbeat  magazine in the 1960s and 1070.

Times for Revolution an interview with Don Ellis by Pete Welding appeared in the April 20, 1967 edition of Downbeat.

Much of the information in this article has appeared subsequently in other writings about Don but what is important to keep in mind about this interview is that it is a primary source. It’s not a secondary source regarding Don and his music written by a researcher, but rather, Don himself talking about what he attempting to do with his music in response to interview questions that were put directly to him by Pete Welding.

His ability to articulate his approach to big band Jazz cogently and coherently is as much a part of Don genius as the music himself, because it was imperative that it be taught to others in order for it to come into existence. Don knew that his conception was but one part of the equation; the execution of this concept formed the other half and he had to teach it to others before it could be realized.

“IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE the headquarters of a revolution. At first glance, in fact, there is little to distinguish it from its neighbor "antique" shops, job printers, and electronics stores that cluster on West Los Angeles' Melrose Ave.

It's a strange location for a jazz club.

Still, Bonesville is not only a busy, important club in its own right but, in its capacity as home base for the Don Ellis Orchestra, serves as a kind of operational and rallying center for the dissemination of the leader's ideas.

While there are no manifestoes tacked on the door, a revolution has been taking place—and none too quietly—within the club's walls for a number of months. In the last year and a half, trumpeter Fills, first at Ihe Club Havana and lately at Bonesville, has forged a totally new jazz orchestra, and what the band has been doing under his zealous guidance is, in a real sense, revolutionary.

What strikes one most forcibly upon seeing the band is the rhythm section— three drummers and three, sometimes four, bassists. The remainder of the group's instrumentation is relatively orthodox: four trumpets, three trombones, five reeds, and piano/organ.

When the band starts playing, however, the reason for the expanded rhythm section is evident. The music is rhythmically exciting to a degree unmatched by any other jazz orchestra. The bassists and drummers set up a fantastically complex, elaborate rhythmic counterpoint, over which the orchestra rides with tremendous power.

While there is superbly disciplined ensemble and section playing, plus excellent solo work from a number of the horn men, the orchestra's forte is most evidently its consummate execution of difficult time signatures and its effortless way with forceful, emotion-charged rhythmic polyphony of an intricacy and subtlety not heard in orchestral jazz before.

The power the band generates is almost physical.

Excitement is the orchestra's stock in trade, and the greater part of this, Ellis says, is attributable to the band's approach to rhythm. This is an outgrowth of his own long preoccupation with the subject, as he noted in an article in the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival program brochure :

"Rhythm was the main thing that attracted me to jazz: both in the excitement of swing and the complexity of the cross-rhythms. For many years now I have been trying to conceive of new ways to expand jazz rhythms. Alternation of 4's and 3*s was one of the first things that occurred to me, and then I tried experiments of 'stretching' the time by means of accclerandos and ritardandos. 'Free' rubato time (so common to the avant-garde today) also proved interesting, as did the possibility of having several tempos going at once.

"The next step was to attempt to play things in 7/4 and 9/4. Arif Mardin, the Turkish jazz composer, gave me a chart in 9, divided 2-2-2-3, that was based on a Turkish folk rhythm, and made me more aware of the fact that the odd-numbered meters, which at first seem so exotic and difficult to us, are really very natural and a part of the folk culture of much of the world….

"I reasoned that since it was possible to play in a meter such as a 9, divided 2-2-2-3, it should then be possible to play in meters of even longer length, and this led to the development of such meters as 3-3-2-2-2-1-2-2-2 (19). To arrive at this particular division of 19, I tried many different patterns, but this was the one that swung the most.

"The longest meter I have attempted to date is a piece in 85. But this isn't so far fetched as one might think at first, because at the department of ethnomusicology at UCLA I learned of one folk song with a 108-beat cycle."

Most of these experiments in rhythmic elaboration were conducted on his own through a tedious process of hit-and-miss investigation.

Ellis was feeling his way toward rhythmic sophistication; the process was considerably accelerated when he moved to the West Coast in 1962 to pursue graduate studies in UCLA's music department.

He met Hari Har Rao, an .Indian sitarist and former pupil of Ravi Shankar who was teaching in the university's ethnomusicology department. Ellis enrolled in Rao's class in Indian music, supplementing this with private studies with Rao.

Ellis recently recalled the meeting:

"It's been a continuing interest of mine to develop rhythmic ideas, but it wasn't until I got out here and started studying Indian music with Hari Har Rao that I truly realized that there's a whole other world of rhythm. I knew about rhythm and swing and time and different meters— I had even written that piece in 19/4 long before I had met Hari Har—but it wasn't until I met him that I realized how far advanced Indian musicians were rhythmically and how far behind we were in our culture. It's when you understand the subtleties in their music that you see how incredible it is."

Some time before he met Rao, when he was getting interested in rhythms, Ellis bought recordings of Indian music and listened to them. He found it all very nice, even exciting, he said, but it wasn't until he had met Rao that he realized that, even though he had been listening to the music, he had no idea what was going on.

"In fact," he said, "most of the time what I had thought was, say, a downbeat wasn't even close to it. I had no idea what they were really doing until I started studying it. I'll wager that there's no possible way for anyone who hasn't studied the music to understand it; it really takes conscious study. Not that you can't just listen to it and get something out of it, but you can't listen to it and even keep the basic beat unless you've studied it. The cycles are so much more complex."

Because rhythm is his main interest, Ellis went on, his all-consuming passion has become to develop himself as far as he can rhythmically and, as a sort of byproduct, to get these rhythms permeating throughout the whole popular culture ("it's already happening now," he said), getting people aware that there's more than 4/4 and 3/4 and that even within them there's a lot more that can be done with them in terms of rhythmic subtlety and sophistication.

"In the beginning," Ellis wrote for Monterey, "there used to be two arguments against playing jazz in these new rhythms and meters: 1) They are not natural. And my answer was: not natural to whom? They are natural to a great portion of the world's peoples. 2) You can do the same thing in 4/4. This is ridiculous; if one can't play comfortably in 5 and 7, for example, how can one hope to superimpose these correctly over 4/4? Also, superimposing any other meter over 4/4 is nor the same thing as playing in that meter exclusively."

Ellis’ formation, with Rao, of the Hindustani Jazz Sextet followed. It was an inevitable outgrowth of the two musicians' mutually interdependent interests. Ellis was by now totally engaged with the rhythms of the East, while Rao was interested in coming to a fuller understanding of jazz. It was a fruitful association. Ellis described his debt to Rao:

"He opened up undreamed-of new worlds of rhythm that he and his teacher, Ravi Shankar, had worked out. I learned exercises for developing the ability to superimpose complicated rhythm patterns one on the other, ways of counting to be able to always keep my place in a given cycle, no matter how long or involved.

"He showed me how to arrive at new rhythmic ideas, the proper ways of working these out and practicing them. It was a tremendously exciting and rewarding experience."

The Hindustani Jazz Sextet enjoyed considerable popular success wherever it played on the West Coast, the trumpeter recalled, though he also remarked that he and Rao were unable to interest a record company in the potential of the group. In the summer of 1963, Ellis decided to expand the sextet to orchestra size.

"I figured that with a bigger band," he said, "it would be easier to get the gospel spread as to the new rhythms, because we'd be exposing more of the musicians to it. Also, I've always loved the big-band sound—that was my original interest when I first started listening to jazz."

The band, which rehearsed weekly for about half a year, rehearsed on Wednesday mornings al the musicians union.

The instrumentation was that of the standard jazz orchestra, with only one bassist and one drummer. The first phase of the Ellis orchestra ended when, later that year, he went back east.

ATTENDING THE Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where he was a member of the Lukas Foss Ensemble, Ellis worked for a while with another rehearsal band, led by trumpeter Sam Noto, and also formed a small group for playing gigs in the Buffalo area.

To lend added rhythmic interest to this latter group's work, he employed two bassists and two drummers. Had he been able to find more qualified rhythm players in the area, he said, he would have added them to the section.

Experiencing some difficulty in getting from the drummers what he required of them, Ellis finally had to learn to play drums himself—"at least enough to demonstrate what I wanted them to do," he said.

Returning to Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, Ellis immediately set out to re-form the big band. His ideas for the generation of rhythmic complexity within the framework of a large orchestra had crystalized sufficiently for him to embark on the difficult task of recruiting a rhythm section considerably larger than the standard one.

He felt that the new rhythms, if they were to work in the big-band format, required at least three bassists and an equal number of percussionists. Finding the right men was not easy.

"I started auditioning rhythm-section men." he recalled, "and I was lucky at first, because I found two of my most important bassists, Ray Neapolitan and Chuck Domanico, right off. It was at a rehearsal of Paul Moer's band that I met Chuck and his best friend, Ray, who was also a bassist.

"They started making the early rehearsals with me—that is, without the rest of the band; we were just trying  to get the rhythm section set, since it is so crucial to the band's total conception.

"It's interesting—we went through almost every drummer who was in town and auditioned them, and we couldn't really find anyone who could play the rhythms. The guys would come in—and some of them were very big names—sit down, and we'd start, but after a bar they'd be completely lost, had no idea where they were. They were rather embarrassed.

"It was suggested to me by a young altoist. Tom Scott, that there was an organist in town who also played drums—a young guy, Steve Bohannon. Tom thought that he might be able to do the thing. So we had him come in, and he sat down and asked, 'Well, what's the subdivision? We told him whatever it was. I said, 'Oh, it's 19; it's divided 3-3-2-2-2-1-2-2-2.' He said okay, and I counted off the tempo, and he just played it, and he's never had any problem with whatever rhythm I would set up. He just plays it. I attribute that to the fact that he doesn't know that it's supposed to be hard. "So Steve came in and ever since then has been the foundation of the rhythm section."

Then there was the late Ross Pollock, a drummer who studied with Hari Har Rao. Both Bohannon and Pollock were still in high school at the time they started with the band. Pollock, Ellis said, in just the half-year he was with the band, "developed fantastically" but died in a tragic elevator accident while touring Europe with another group. "This was a great blow to all of us in the band, personally and professionally," Elis said. "Everyone was wondering what would happen to the band, because he was one of the powerhouses of the rhythm section.

"Luckily, however, we found a young guy, Alan Estes, who was a friend of Bohannon's. Al wasn't basically a set drummer; he was a mallet man, but he could play the rhythms. So he converted to the standard drum set and has been with us ever since."

With the major rhythm problems relatively solved, Ellis assembled the brass and reed sections and initialed full orchestra rehearsals at the union. The group rehearsed throughout the summer and underwent considerable personnel change.

"Guys would come in and go out," Ellis recalled. "This was a process of determining whether what we were doing was for them and whether they were for us. But now the personnel basically has settled; the nucleus of the band has been with me from the start."

In the band now are Glenn Stuart, Alan Weight, Ed Warren, Bob Harmon, trumpets; Dave Wells, Dave Sanchez, trombones; Terry Woodson, bass trombone; Ruben Leon, Joe Roccisano, Ira Schulman, Ron Starr, John Magruder, reeds; Dave Mackay or Roger Kellaway, piano, organ; Ray Neapolitan, Chuck Domanico, Bill Plummer, Frank DelaRosa, basses; and Steve Bohannon, Alan Estes, and Chino Valdes, drums.

From the weekly practice sessions at the union, the band moved to the Club Havana, on the Sunset Strip, in late September, 1965, playing there on Mondays until moving to Bonesville several months ago.

Of the men in the band, Ellis remarked, "A lot of the guys are school teachers. We have one lawyer. Some guys work days, and others are full-time musicians. This makes for a certain stability. In fact, I have more problems with the men who are full-lime musicians. One of our trombone players, for example, wasn't getting enough work around town, so he had to go on the road for a few months to get some money together. That sort of thing presents problems. That's why I've tried, as much as possible, to stick to guys who are doing studio work or something else that keeps them in town, whether teaching school or whatever."

This regular work over a long period gave the men sufficient opportunity to get the kinks out of playing unfamiliar meters, which were from the first the band's signal feature.

This process was to take some time, for there is a considerable difference between merely being able to play the unusual rhythms and playing them with crispness, authority, and naturalness.

"In teaching the band these new rhythms I have found that the hardest thing is to learn to tap one's foot unevenly," Ellis has noted. "Usually the 5's come most easily (pairing in a subdivision of 2-3 or 3-2), then the 7's and 9's follow—each one usually being progressively more difficult. Once one is used to patting one's feet unevenly, the longer, more complex patterns are relatively easy. ... I remember our delight when . . . after struggling like mad to feel comfortable in a fast 7 (divided 3-2-2), I brought in a chart in 32/3 /4 time (11) and the band played it at sight! That was a turning point because they realized that now they could count almost any rhythmic pattern at sight. The time barrier had been broken."

Recently Ellis recalled, "Just getting the band to play a chart in a 7 or something like that and feel natural in it—it took about a year for the band to settle into it. That happened just before we went to Monterey—that is, when the guys really felt secure in the rhythms."

THE BAND'S playing at the Monterey festival—its first engagement other than Monday nights at Bonesville—came as a revelation to everyone who heard it at the Sunday afternoon program of "new jazz." The group's great fluency in the projection of exciting rhythmic counterpoint was revealed in number after number, each played with verve, wit, impeccable drive, and a complete lack of self-consciousness. The difficult rhythms and meters sounded thoroughly natural.

The group repeated its success three weeks later at the Pacific Jazz Festival at Costa Mesa, Calif., 50 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Ellis arranged for the taping of the band's festival appearances and, through a firm he directs, Ellis Music Enterprises, produced and sold the albums to Pacific Jazz' parent label, Liberty records. Pacific Jazz says it plans to issue at least iwo LPs of the performance.

The recordings, Ellis hopes, will create a demand for the orchestra and the music he has been nurturing so lovingly these last 20 months of Monday nights.

With interest in the tonality and rhythms of Indian music increasing daily, Ellis said he feels that it is only a matter of time before the band is discovered and taken up by large segments of the public.

"I'd like nothing better than lo get people dancing to the new rhythms," he said. "I know it's going to happen, because the rock groups have already started using these rhythms. It's just a matter of time; il could happen almost overnight. If the thing starts catching on, everybody will be doing it. Even if it doesn't catch on right away, it will filter down little by little, so that in the next 10 to 20 years the whole scene will have changed rhythmically."

Ellis, perhaps characteristically, seems in no particular hurry to force acceptance of the orchestra.

He explained that he is not especially eager to embark on the usual grueling round of one-nighters, long bus trips, separation from family, and all the other inconveniences of road-band living.

Ellis has had enough of this, the result of his several years as sideman with the bands of Herb Pomeroy, Ray McKinley, Sam Donahue, Claude Thornhill, Charlie Barnel, Woody Herman, Lionel Hampton, and Maynard Eerguson, as well as with various small groups including George Russell's highly experimental sextet.

The idea! situation, Ellis opined, would be that in which the band played a certain number of concert-dances at select locations during the year, spending the bulk of the time working in Los Angeles-area clubs, with perhaps several weeks in Las Vegas, Nev.

An increased demand for the services of the orchestra would perhaps permit the leader more free time to pursue additional studies and to write for the band. Currently much of his time is taken up with teaching, fulfilling studio calls, and working several nights a week in a successful local Latin band.

It is evident that Ellis is a strong-willed person, well informed and highly articulate, with opinions on a variety of subjects, particularly music and the music business. If his ideas at first seem somewhat unconventional, conversation reveals that he has well-thought-out reasons to support all of them. His continued creativity and the existence of his orchestra is perhaps the best and most meaningful illustration of Ellis' ability to operate successfully in both idealistic and practical worlds.

His comments regarding his preoccupation with Indian music and its recent seepage into U.S. popular music are pertinent and appropriately well framed.

"I think it’s something that's in the air," he said of the growing interest in Eastern music. "With Hari Rao we were the first Western musicians ever to play with an Indian musician over an extended period of time. Of course, there have been situations in which Indian musicians were brought in to record and a jazz musician was thrown in with them, but no one knew what the other side was doing. But this was the first time that an Indian musician really wanted to learn what was happening in jazz and the jazz musicians really wanted to find out what was happening in Indian music-—and to see what could be dune by taking the best elements of both and putting them together.

"It's curious—we made recordings of the group [Hindustani Jazz Sextet] but could never get a record company interested. We played engagements all around Los Angeles and were always successful and well received; the group was quite in demand.

"Then—I don't know how it happened— but the Beatles picked up on the sound of the sitar, and all of a sudden it automatically became the thing to do. It then went directly to the pop field, which is now taking it on very big; strangely enough, it's now filtering back to the jazz field.

"It's funny how those things will happen— the jazz guys will sometimes innovate a thing, and everybody will ignore it. Then a pop group will take it, make it popular, and then all the jazz musicians will start doing it.

"But all the groups that have used the sound of India, so to speak, have taken the easy way out. Just lo have the sound of the sitar and the drones—immediately you associate it with Indian music…. But none of them have yet gone into what I think is the most valuable contribution that Indian music can make lo our culture and that's the rhythmic. None of them have gotten into that, probably because that's so difficult."

Another problem faced by the group's attempting to integrate the sound of Indian music and that of Western music, Ellis continued, is their incomplete understanding of the nature of Indian music; this has led some lo attempt lo try to incorporate an Indian melodic or rhythmic cycle bodily into a Western jazz or pop piece.

"I haven't taken, say, an Indian cycle and used it," Ellis said. "What I have done is to take the techniques that have been taught me for working rhythmically and asked: how can I get this to swing, how can we put it in a jazz context? I've done it that way, which is just another way of enriching the general jazz vocabulary by adding a new technique. But it's not a grafting on, whereby you merely take a specific Indian cycle or such and incorporate it bodily . . . that's what a lot of the other groups have done. They've taken one thing—say. the sound of drone and sitar—and put it in and have it play something that's entirely foreign to it."

Ellis went on to speak of the use of tonality in his orchestra and the debt to both Indian music and one innovating American composer:

"As far as tonality goes," he said, "the conscious influence has been Harry Partch, who's living out here now. Harry, of course, has set up a whole other system of musical intonation, and he was the one who really made me aware of just how abominable the equal-temperament system is.

"Now, jazz musicians and folk musicians always have found ways to get around equal temperament. You've doubtless heard a blues musician get on a blue note and just by sort of bending that note around, he'll get the whole club screaming—just by manipulating that one tone just very slightly. This is something that shows the great emotional power of tonality."

Comparing the "handful of scales" in Western music with the "literally thousands” in Indian music, Ellis remarked:

"We're really only touching the surface of melodic music. Western music developed in another sense—in the harmonic and formal areas—but I think it's time now to go back and start re-examining some of these things . . . like the basic problems of intonation, the system of tuning.

"For this reason I've developed a quarter-tone trumpet. It's funny—I can play some of the traditional blues licks with the aid of the fourth valve and get that same feeling but in quite a different way than guys have done before, having had to use their lips solely for the thing. Also, it gives me that much more of a chance to get at any pitch I want. With the aid of my lips and the extra valve, I'm that much closer. So that's opened up a whole new world for me too."

Ellis indicated some of the problems encountered in attempting to adapt the playing of microtones to large ensembles.

"In Indian music," he said, "they usually have only one melodic instrument and one drone, because the intonation has to be so fine . . . when you get into these microtones. It's hard enough to get guys to play in tune in a normal sense; the more people you have, the harder it is, because just one person out of tune throws the whole section out of tune. So, in a large orchestra you have to think not in terms of such minute quantities (at least right now) but in terms of a larger concept of tonality.

"However, I've written a piece that the band plays in a quarter-tone scale. I've worked it out so that the trumpets can do it by false-fingering; for the trombones, of course, there's no problem; the saxophones have to use their lips, but they don't play the notes that aren't near some note on their horns."

The band's arrangements, primarily by Ellis, are for the most part in the unusual time signatures that are its forte. "I've welcomed anything that's in our groove," Ellis explained, "and that's more or less what I tell an arranger who says he'd like to write something for the band. 'That's fine,’ I say. 'We'll take almost anything that's not in 3 or 4.'"

Arrangers from within the band include altoists Leon, Scott, and Roccisano, trombonist Myers, trumpeter Harmon, and pianist Mackay.

"A lot of the arrangements," Ellis explained, "are quite loose, so that I can bring in different sections at will. I can change them around while we're playing them. This isn't particularly new to jazz, however, because the older bands, when they didn't read music, did the same thing. So it's probably a departure from what has been conventional practice for the last 10 years or so but not necessarily radically new to jazz. As far as voicings and the like go, I have my own devices I have tried and used in the overall sound of the band, which I don't think you'll find in any other band."

Stan Kenton, an orchestral innovator in his own right, remarked recently lhat the next few years will see a renaissance of the big band—but a big band with a difference, not merely offering re-creations of what has gone before. Kenton said he felt that jazz was about to break out of its doldrums into a period of "new vitality injected by rhythmical innovations." "We're at the brink of an exciting new era," he said, "an era that will fuse many types of music we have previously heard separately."

When the new big-band ecumenism starts swelling, Ellis and his 20 disciples of the new rhythms and the new big-band gospel will be ready.”