Covering the festival from its inception in 1958 to 1977 the date of its publication, Dizzy, Duke, The Count and Me: The Story of the Monterey Jazz Festival by Jimmy Lyons and Ira Kamin is a wonderful collection of articles, vignettes and remembrances about one of of the great cultural events in the USA - the annual celebration of American Contemporary Music in one of the country’s most beautiful settings.
Accompanying the writings are a collection of drawings by the renown illustrator David Stone Martin who designed many of the iconic album covers for the Clef Norgan and Verve LPs in the 1950s, as we as, many photographs by Tom Copi, Jim Marshall, Veryl Oakland and a host of others.
The Foreword is by Dizzy Gillespie, the Preface is by co-author Ira Kamin and the lead-in articles is by Ralph J. Gleason, the San Francisco based columnist and critic and one of the founders of the Festival.
Foreword
“One of the great shining examples of the kind of association I have with Jimmy Lyons is the fact that contract-wise, our contracts never seem to catch up. I just assume that I'm playing the Monterey Jazz Festival. It's assumed that I'm going to be at Monterey every year.
Now sometimes that gets a little out of hand, such as last year, when I had the chance to play a theatre with Sarah Vaughan.
Now, I love Jimmy Lyons, but oh my God, Sarah Vaughan!
Monterey has a special meaning for me, because I understand that the people expect to see me there. My face is a part of the Monterey Jazz Festival just like that chair that they have. And at the end of the concert every year I start wondering what they are going to do next year? Because you can't top yourself all the time.
But over the years, the Monterey Jazz Festival has overextended itself—musically, I mean. Each year seems to be getting a little better. Sometimes it drops. Well, it can't be the same thing all the time. But it is the one festival where the musicians really feel a part of the festival itself.
At other festivals, you have a spot, you play the spot, you go wherever your spot is. But the Monterey Jazz Festival is unique in that the musicians feel they're part of what's happening, and that lends itself to a very high degree of creativity.
And the coup de grace was the hiring of John Lewis as musical director.”
John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie - October, 1977
Preface
“There have been twenty Monterey Jazz Festivals, held every late September, in Monterey, California, since 1958.
It's Jimmy Lyons' Festival. He founded it and every year, with the help of his musical director, John Lewis, he puts the shows together.
I spent a few dozen hours with Jimmy Lyons over a couple of warm summer months, putting together this book about Lyons and the Festival.
He lives on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco in a small apartment with his wife, Laurel. He sits at a table by a window, smokes Camel cigarettes, bites the backs of both thumbnails and talks in the most listenable voice — he used to be a deejay, the first GI voice in Berlin — about the people who've passed his way the sixty years he's been on this earth.
The first part of this book is Jimmy Lyons' account of the Festival and parts of his life that led to the Festival. The second part is a more specific, chronological overview of the Festival's first twenty years.
I would like to express my special thanks to Dizzy Gillespie for doing the Foreword. When I talked to him about the book he was in the middle of a long road trip. He had an abscessed tooth and the insides of his face were hurting from that crazy way he has of playing the trumpet. He was incredibly gracious to all of us who wanted some of his time.
I would also like to thank Hal Silverman, Laurel Lyons, Tim Ware, Elaine Ratner, Ernie Beyl, Jean (Mrs. Ralph) Gleason, The Monterey Jazz Festival staff and Board of Directors, and of course Jimmy Lyons, for their great help and patience in putting this book together.”
Ira Kamin - Mill Valley, May 1978
Why a Jazz Festival?
by Ralph Gleason
“The Monterey Jazz Festival — or any real festival, jazz or otherwise — can't be just a collection of concerts. It must be a thing unto itself, an entity beyond the individual performances, beyond the individual programs and greater than the sum of these.
The point of a festival is to be festive. To give and to receive joy and to present — in a jazz festival, at any rate — a wide diversification of styles and types of this music in as festive and benign a surrounding as possible.
To be successful as a festival, the grounds, the concerts, the musicians, the patrons and the atmosphere all have to jell together to be something more than one can find elsewhere. And this, of course, is what has happened these years at Monterey.
To be a true festival, there must be something for those who are not hard core jazz fans and who make this their sole jazz experience for the year. This, too, Monterey has provided.
The unusual combinations of music, the special events, the virtuoso performances, but above all, the opportunity to see and to hear great artists in a great setting — that is the festival.
Seeing musicians as people has always been an attraction. "People out front don't know of the battle you wage backstage," Jon Hendricks wrote in his lyrics to Count Basie's "Blues Back Stage." At Monterey and at any true festival of music, the concert hall setting is avoided and the musicians make up part of the audience, walking through the grounds, rehearsing in the mornings and early evenings, themselves digging the festival. Charles Mingus was rehearsing well into the evening concert the night before his historic appearance in 1964 and latecomers lingered by the doors to hear him.
Nor all the great music has always been on stage. There have been those delicious moments observed only by the people who came early or who stayed late and wandered around, such as the afternoon pianist Ralph Sutton rehearsed with Jimmy Rushing, the year that Ben Webster sat in on piano until Earl Hines arrived or the time Ben Webster was shooting pictures of the festival orchestra's saxophone section playing an arrangement of Ben's own solo on "Cottontail." These are the bonuses that make the festival worth more than anyone could dream of.
Of course, there's the opportunity to learn by listening to great artists from great eras in their own styles and settings. But that is only part of it. There are the once-in-a-lifetime performances.
Who could ever forget—who saw and heard ir—the "Evolution of the Blues" with Jon Hendricks preaching and Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Miller singing and Miriam Makeba and Odetta and Pony Poindexter and the children gathered onstage in a semi-circle around Jon?
Who could ever forget — who saw and heard it— Lambert-Hendricks-Bavan, dressed in monk's hoods and robes, singing in the cold night air behind Carmen McRae and Louis Armstrong in Dave and Iola Brubeck's "The Real Ambassadors." Or Lawrence Brown stepping forward to play "Poor Butterfly" or Duke Ellington's "Rockin in Rhythm" or Bunny Briggs dancing "David Danced Before the Lord with All His Might" or Dizzy and Big Mama Willie Mae Thornton or Annie Ross, Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert and Joe Williams ending the show singing with Count Basie?
Right from the very first night, when the unknown trumpet player sat in with Dizzy, Monterey has been this way and that's what makes a festival and that's why a festival is almost a necessity in this era of restraint and inhibition. For one weekend, anything goes and the results have been some of the greatest moments in jazz history.
The festival is for the musicians and the festival is for the patrons — both. Each one digs the other and they both dig the digging. A festival is to have fun, to be festive, to give and receive love. And love, like jazz, is a four letter word and surrounded these days with Inhibitions and taboos. But at Monterey, for this one weekend, we are all free to love and jazz is free to be our music.
A festival is to have fun. You aren't supposed to like or dislike anything. You don't have to listen and you can come and go as you please. It's nor a posh concert hall where silence must be preserved and it is only a tribute to the quality of the music and the musicians that silence has been granted (not preserved or enforced) during some of the great performances.
Nowhere in this country is there such a homogeneous gathering of people as at these festivals. Pass through those gates and leave behind all the traumas and the psychodramas that inhibit the rest of the year. Glory in the music, in the people, in the place. Jazz is what you call it, everyone's his own expert (as is really true in every art form when you get down to it) and you pick your own likes and dislikes.
A jazz festival should be the best possible combination of enjoyments one can devise. Organization and improvisation, lyricism, strength, euphoria and the blues, individuals and groups, the scream, the cry and the whisper. It should all be there for you.
A festival, like music, is to be experienced. It is interesting, but not essential, to know things about the music and about the musicians. The music is enough by itself; so is the setting; so, too, are the people there. All together they make up one of the best things about living around here, even if it only happens once a year.”
Reprinted from Monterey Jazz Festival Program, 1966
“DID RALPH GLEASON REALLY leave us forty years ago? It certainly doesn't feel that way. Even today, you will find Gleason's name on the masthead of each issue of Rolling Stone, the magazine he helped launch back in 1967. His trademark trench coat hangs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, almost as if Gleason just stopped by a moment ago to check out the scene. The Monterey Jazz Festival, a bright idea Gleason had back in 1958, continues to thrive even as other music events and venues come and go. Every day, a music fan somewhere reads his liner notes to some classic album, whether Miles Davis's Bitches Brew or Frank Sinatra's No One Cares or Simon & Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. …
Yet Ralph Gleason will always be remembered, first and foremost, as a jazz writer. Jazz was his first love and, like many early attachments, remained the most passionate. And that sense of intimate attachment comes across again and again in these pages. …
You can call him a music critic, but he might be better described as an evangelist for cutting-edge artistry and social change. He praised the greatest artists, and usually before most of the public even knew who they were. Readers looked to him for guidance whenever anything new or controversial emerged —whether Elvis Presley's rock 'n' roll or John Coltrane's modal music, Bob Dylan's protest songs or Lenny Bruce's edgy comedy routines. Gleason knew all of these individuals, and was one of the very few cultural critics of his day who was equally at home in conversation with Duke Ellington, Joan Baez, Hunter Thompson, or Miles Davis.”
- Ted Gioia
Horace Silver APRIL 16,1961
“Pianist Horace Silver did more than anyone to create the hard bop sound that came to the forefront of the jazz world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This music attracted audiences with its more soulful variant on modern jazz. Listeners could hear elements of gospel, funk, R & B, and Latin music in the work of Silver and the other leaders of the hard bop idiom. These artists never completely abandoned the experimentalism that had characterized jazz during the bebop era, but Silver & company also wanted fans to tap their toes and snap their fingers to the beat. Even as jazz lost much of its mainstream audience during the Cold War years, Silver could still attract a sizable following and generate radio airplay with his hard-grooving melodies.
Silver first came to prominence in 1950 as a member of Stan Getz's band, but a short while later he left to launch the Jazz Messengers, one of the defining hard bop bands of the period. While with this group, Silver enjoyed his first hit, "The Preacher." Alfred Lion, owner of Blue Note Records, had argued against releasing the track, but Silver insisted. "He may not have liked it," Silver later recounted in his autobiography, "but he made a lot of money from it." Silver never had another disagreement with the label over song choices, and soon other artists recording for Blue Note were imitating the Silver sound.
In 1956, Silver left the Jazz Messengers —which continued to thrive under the leadership of drummer Art Blakey—and began recording with a new quintet under his own name. Even as jazz styles evolved, with avant-garde and rock-oriented approaches capturing the attention of cutting-edge fans and critics, Silver enjoyed a string of successes, perhaps most notably his Song for My Father album (1964), which incorporated aspects of Cape Verdean music that the pianist had learned from his father. During this same period, Silver's band proved to be a Horace Silver training ground for future star jazz bandleaders, including Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, and Michael Brecker.
Silver was 32 years old at the time of his conversation with Ralph Gleason. He still had many of his best-known works ahead of him— now classic albums such as Song for My Father (1964), The Cape Verdean Blues (1965), and The ]ody Grind (1966). This interview is one of the best sources of information about Silver's priorities as a composer and bandleader during the heyday of the hard bop movement.”
RJG: What are your own favorites of the tunes you have written?
HS: I don't know, to tell you the truth, Ralph. It's kind of a hard question to answer —I try to write a varied type of thing. I know that I'm noted by the public for writing these bluesy-type tunes I guess are the most popular, most accepted out of the things I do. "Soulville," "Home Cooking," "Juicy Lucy," "Senior Blues," "Doodlin,"' "Sister Sadie," those things, but I don't limit myself to these things, this is a part of me, a very large part of me, but there's another part of me, too, which probably the real strict Horace Silver fan would dig, but the average person that might buy my records goes for the other part of me. I'm very strongly influenced by Latin rhythms as you probably know, I dig Latin rhythms, I think they swing. The Latin music itself doesn't carry a whole lot of depth to it, harmonically and everything like that, but the rhythms are something else, you can get into all kinds of stuff with Latin rhythms. And I like to write in that vein and ballad-wise I strive to do something a little different. My ballads so far haven't seemed to have caught on too much, but I'm not giving up because I think that I'm doing something a little different as far as ballads are concerned. I'm not speaking of radically different, but I'm just speaking of originality as far as ballads are concerned. I've always thought of it in this way. As far as writing is concerned I admire Monk, and the few things, of course Bud [Powell] hasn't written as much as Monk but I mean I admire these two guys pianistically as well as their writing, but the things that Bud wrote I like very much and Monk also — naturally Duke, that goes without saying—and John Lewis also. But outside of these guys I hear so many jazz ballads that seem trite to me—and have no particular style to them and I've strived to get a different style in my ballad writing than the regular run-of-the-mill stuff, jazz ballads, and I think I've done this. Hasn't seemed to get across too much to the people, as the bluesy things I do.
RJG: Of the ballads, which one do you dig the most?
HS: I can't say.
RJG: There was no thing that you had a particular soft spot for?
HS: Well I like "Cheryl." Of course, I wrote that for somebody that I was very fond of, and it has a sentimental thing with me. I like "Melancholy Mood." "You Happened My Way," I like that one, I like "Peace." Incidentally, Blue Mitchell just recorded "Peace" with strings. Benny Golson wrote the arrangement of it.
RJG: How did you happen to write that song? How did that come about?
HS: "Peace"? I don't know, I just sat down and tried to write a ballad and it came about—when I say I sat down, I don't have any particular idea in mind, I just tried to search for something pretty. In a ballad, it should be beautiful but also I try to search for a pretty chord pattern in most of my writing, I mean aside from the blues things I do and maybe up-tempo blues, slow blues, medium blues, or "I Got Rhythm"-type tunes, the easy blowing-type things, but I mean getting away from those things with the ballads or with maybe some of the Latin things or some other type of things that I write I try to find a different chord sequence, and interesting chord sequences. The only way I can sort of explain it is like, say you're walking down a road from one point to another like from where are we now, in Oakland?
RJG: Berkeley.
H S: We are going from Berkeley to San Francisco — well you can take the main route and this way, straight, right over the bridge, into S.F. and then you can deviate this way and twist around that way and still come out at the same point, and that's what I try to do.
RJG: When you're writing a ballad, do you start with any phrase or idea or little run or chord changes that you happen to be thinking about at the moment, or do you just sort of start it and—?
HS: Just start from scratch. I don't have anything in mind usually-well, this is true of mostly everything I write, when I sit down to do something I have nothing in mind. The only thing I might have in mind is that I'd like to try to write a new ballad and I'll try to do this, but I have no melody in mind to start off with or no chords in mind to start off with. That's true of mostly everything I write, with a few exceptions, like, say, "Juicy Lucy," that was based on the chord changes to "Confirmation," which I like to play on those chord changes, so I just thought I'd try to write a line on those changes. I've done that on a few things, but most of the things that I write have some original set of chord changes and original melody. I don't have anything in mind when I sit down. I just stumble around until I luck up on something. Sometimes it comes all at one sitting, but most times it comes a little at a time.
RJG: I should think that the tunes that you write should then be fun for you to play too, because they would fall into your natural conception, wouldn't they?
HS: Yeah, they are. They're easiest for me to play.
RJG: Well, they're an extension of you in a very real sense, aren't they?
HS; Yeah, I get a big kick out of writing, because a]] of those tunes that any composer, the tunes they write are sort of like having children, sort of like your kids and you listen to other people. It gives you a big thrill when somebody else records or even plays one of your tunes, the fact that they play it means that they like it, and that pleases you. Plus you get a kick out of their conception of the tune, and I'm always anxious to hear some of my tunes done by somebody else to dig what kind of conception they put to it.
RJG: Has any particular version of one of your tunes by someone else knocked you out more than another?
HS: I like George Shearing's "Senor Blues." He's doing "The Outlaw," now too, incidentally.
RJG: Oh, he is?
HS: He recorded it, too. He told me, should be out pretty soon. I'm very anxious to hear something that JJ. [Johnson] wrote. This is not my composition, but JJ. wrote a tune and recorded it with his last group before they broke up; it had Clifford Jordan, Freddie Hub-bard, and he calls the tune "In Walked Horace," and I'm dying to hear that thing. I wish Columbia would hurry up and release it
RJG: I wonder what he did. That's going to be you.
HS: Well JJ., I love everything he does, he's long been one of my, rather, I've been one of his admirers. I admired his playing and his writing for a long time.
RJG: This is going to be "In Walked Horace" as J.J. sees it. I notice more and more musicians today perform an increasing percentage of their repertoire from their own works. Now, is this just a natural thing or is this on purpose? Does this fall logically out of what you're doing? Is it more fun to do these than to take songs and do them?
HS: Well, with me, I can only speak for myself, it really, it comes easier to me to be frank. I like standards, we do a few standards, but we do "Round About Midnight," which is Monk's thing, that's a jazz standard. We do "I'll Remember April,” and "Darn That Dream," we do a few standards, but with the standards I would like to be able to do something very, very different with them — I mean we could just blow 'em like a lot of people do, I mean, a good solo is a good solo, a good feeling is a good feeling. But I would like to arrange it in a manner that had something different about it, and a lot of times it's much easier for me to write something myself than to do this. It comes easier to me than to write an arrangement on a standard because I feel that sometimes I write an arrangement, although it might be a good arrangement, it's not that much different. So I've done a few arrangements on the standards like "My One and Only Love," I thought that came off pretty well but on the whole I find that the originals flow better with me, they come easier to me. And I feel that they have much more originality to them.
RJG: What is the thing about your own playing in the group and the whole music scene that's the most kicks to you?
HS: On the nights that we're really popping, when we really get together as a unit, really swinging, that's the most kicks. I mean this group I have now is a pretty good group, musically. On the stand and off the stand we get along well together and we have a lot of fun playing and we've been together long enough to maintain some sort of a level every night, but there are special nights when we really hit that stride, get that peak thing going where you just swing all night long and you get the dynamics right, and the level is right, the acoustics in the club are right, and the audience is with you, and that's a heck of a feeling when you get that happening.
RJG; Easier to play then?
HS; Yeah, much easier. The ideas just flow out, everything flows. It's like you're sailing in space, floating.
RJG: That's an interesting sort of free form thing that happens then, isn't it?
HS: Yeah, the tighter a rhythm section is and the tighter a whole group is, when you, 'course a group can be tight but when you really hit that stride, on those certain nights when everything is cooking, the rhythm section is cohesive, everything is smooth, the horns are really wailing and I don't know, it's hard to put into words but everything seems to flow, it's like you're sailing, floating around in space, there's not no real effort to anything. It's when the rhythm is flowing your ideas seem to flow too, just everything comes out so much easier than ordinarily.
RJG: It's almost as if you couldn't do anything wrong?
HS: Yeah.
RJG: Be hard to go against it?
HS: That's right.
RJG: That's fascinating. Those are the real kicks?
HS: Yeah, really.
RJG: How often does that happen?
HS: Well that's hard to say. Doesn't happen every night, though, I'll tell you that.
RJG: Be a groove if it did.
HS: But when you do, when that happens and everything comes off like that, it gives you a heck of a sensation, it's almost like being high. It's a natural high!
RJG: Better than being high?
HS: Yeah, really—because you're elated.
RJG: Is it hard to stop then?
HS: Stop playing or stop the groove?
RJG: Stop playing.
HS: No, everything just seems to come naturally, everything just flows.
RJG: What I mean is, like all of a sudden it's 2 o'clock—?
HS: Oh yeah, well I know what you mean, sometimes you don't want to stop.
RJG: Do you guys rehearse much?
HS: Yeah, we do quite a bit of rehearsing. We do all our rehearsing out of town, because in New York one fellow lives in Brooklyn, one lives in the Bronx, and they're all spread out, and it's hard to get together. So, whenever we go out on the road we usually stay at the same hotel and we go down to the club during the day and rehearse. We had couple of rehearsals while we were in Los Angeles and we're going to have another one this week. Because I've written some new material which, we're playing some of it now and I've got some more of it to write out this week, and we're going to rehearse it and do some of it because we're planning on a new album,
RJG: Well, now when you write out new things for the group how much is actually written?
HS; There's usually an introduction that's written out and the melody, and if there's any interludes or an out chorus and an ending, that's it. I never write down drum parts. I don't think I've ever written a drum part for any of the drummers I've had. Because, I'd rather have them just cop it from listening, comes more natural, I think writing out drum parts kind of makes things a little stiff
RJG: For instance, if you work out a tune, you take this intro and the melody and your interludes and your chorus, which is a skeleton for your final performance, and you do it in rehearsal several times, do things fall into place that you hadn't written out that are worked out in your rehearsal that you 're then going to keep?
HS: Sometimes, it depends. I usually have everything in my mind, what I want to do. I know when I write it out what I want to be happening with the tune. But sometimes when we get to the rehearsal and rehearse it, I change things around or something might happen spontaneously that I say, yeah, keep that in or throw that out or something.
RJG: Do you try to think in terms of the guys that are working with you?
HS: Yeah, I do. I try to write in terms of the guys I have with me. On the whole I do, I'll say that. To be completely honest, most times when I sit down I think of the guys that are with me and I try to write something easy for them to play, but that has depth. This is a twofold thing because it's good for them, it's easy for them to play. The chord changes are easy, but they're saying something, that's the hard part. Simplicity is very hard, you know, being simple without being corny. To write a simple melody, easy for them to play, easy chord changes for them to play, and yet have it be saying something and have some depth to it, something that's going to be a good piece of music, that's very hard and this is what I have in mind I'll say 90 percent of the time, but sometimes I get tired of that, I don't know, sometimes I just say to myself, what the heck, this one's for me, I'm just going to do whatever I feel like doing here. If it's hard to play it's just hard to play, that's all. I'm going to write it anyway.
RJG: Who are your favorite composers?
HS: Monk is one, Duke Ellington of course, John Lewis. Bud, he hasn't written as much as these other fellows have, but I like the things Bud wrote. Let's see, J.J., I like his stuff, Miles, of course, I like Sonny Rollins tunes—well I'm sure there's some more but I can't think of them right now, those are the things that come to my mind first of all.
RJG; How about classical composers?
HS: Well, I haven't had that much classical training, to be honest, Ralph. I like classics, but I only studied them for a very short time. I had a good classical teacher. 'Course I've gone through a series of bad teachers back home in Connecticut on piano as I did on tenor. I was taught the wrong way on both instruments and I had to undo all that wrong training and start all over again on both instruments, but when I finally got a hold of a good classical teacher I did study with him for about a year, maybe a little more than a year, and then he died and I stopped taking lessons for awhile. This teacher I had was a very excellent teacher and he did more for me than the rest of the teachers, he undid all the wrong that was taught me and he had me doing the right things. He taught me the correct fingering, the correct way to hold my hands and all that. He had me doing the Hanon exercises and the Czerny exercises which the other teachers didn't even give me, scales, minor, major, and all these different scales, he really was a good teacher, but at that time I was playing a little jazz at that time, my first jazz influence on the piano was boogie-woogie and then from there I went on into Teddy Wilson and started to listen to Tatum and then Bud and Monk and different things like that.
But I was interested in harmony at that time and I could play a few little standard tunes on the piano and I knew a few chords but I didn't know too much and what used to bug me about these classical lessons is I'd practice these things like mad and I'd get them down and, I'd have a few pages per week and finally I'd get the whole thing down well and then he'd tell me I'd have to go over it again and do the whole thing for my next lesson, and what would happen, I didn't know no harmony, and I'd get in the middle of one of these things and I'd get hung up, get lost, and I'd have to stop and go back to the beginning and start all over again whereas I realize now, if this guy had taught me harmony and I'd really known what I was playing harmonically, maybe I'd have been able to fake where I goofed off at and continue, but I didn't know any harmony. It used to bug me because I played boogie-woogie at that time, and if I messed up playing boogie-woogie I could fake my way out and keep going but when I'd get into this classical things and I'd get lost I'd have to stop and start all over again and it used to bug me and sort of took my interest away from it for a while, because I wanted to know what I was doing.
I don't believe in being over analytical but I was kind of analytical, specially in those days because I learned more from phonograph records, I think, than anything else because back in Connecticut, I'm from Norwalk, very few jazz musicians around there and maybe one or two good ones at that, and the record shops hardly carried any good jazz records, I had to go into New York to pick up some records and when I'd go into New York to pick up some records I'd be so thrilled to get these records, I'd go to maybe 10 record shops and buy one record from each place, whatever I could find and I thought I could learn from, I'd bring these things home and I'd put them on the little old-fashioned wind-up phonograph, slow them down and I'd figure out the chords from the record, and I'd try to analyze these things, where the piano player played. I'd listen to it and hear it and try to find it on the piano. Then I'd try to break it down and I said, now, what is this he played, let me analyze this, what do they call this chord, and I learned a lot like that.
RJG: Well, sure, with the blues thing, if you got hung up in the middle of the boogie-woogie thing you know the pattern on which it was based, you could go and do any darn thing and come out alright.
HS: That's right.
RJG: How are your hands, have you had any more trouble with your hands?
HS: No, my hands have been doing very well, thanks to my doctor, I have a wonderful doctor. He's a chiropractic doctor and a physiotherapist, and I have a lot of faith in chiropractic doctors, specially this one anyway, a lot of people put him down, but this doctor's a very wonderful doctor and aside from being my doctor he's my friend too. He's from New Haven, Connecticut. His name is Dr. Dwight Hamilton. He's about 71 years old and he was born on the same day I was and we're both Virgos, September 2nd's our birthday, and he's a friend of mine as well as my doctor. I've learned a lot from him about health. I've become very health-conscious through him and reading health literature and I had this, they thought it was arthritis at first, in my right hand, but it turned out to be a thing called tendonitis. It's a sprained tendon and I had an overacid condition which was keeping it from getting well. I had about three times as much acid in my system than I was supposed to have and he got rid of that for me, and it took about eight months of treatments, little by little, to get rid of the thing, but I'm completely straight with it now, my hand is fine and I try to keep this acid thing down. But I have nothing but praise for him. He's a very wonderful person and for a man of his age a very studious man. I admire him so much, because I look at him at his age, he's so agile. He looks like he's about 49, and he's 71. Climbs the stairs two at a time. Rides downtown on his bike every morning for the paper and all of that and he's one doctor that's really interested in his patients, which most doctors today are not. They don't take an interest really, but he takes time with you and he's always studying something, he studies hypnosis, he studies graphoanalysis. He's a heck of a guy, a very interesting guy.
RjG: What things do you have now in your mind that you want to do in the next few years, what challenges are you setting yourself?
HS: I'll tell you, the things that I have record-wise, we have to do two albums a year, record-wise, what I have planned for this year is the things that we're rehearsing now. I've planned for a live date in a club in New York, I don't know which club, but some club in New York, we're going to record a live session, and secondly, a trio album which I haven't done in quite a few years, that's what I have planned for this year. And after that, maybe something with a big band or semi-big band or strings, I don't know exactly, something maybe a little different. Also I have something else in my mind for this year. I have been thinking in terms of trying to reach more people, a bigger audience with my music. I've been asking the booking agency to try to get us jobs in places that we haven't been before. We have no trouble playing all the major cities and all of that, but I'd like to get to some of these places that we've never played before. I mean foreign countries, we've been abroad, but there are some of the countries we haven't played before. Some of the smaller cities that we haven't played before, like Kansas City, we've never been, I think we're going to go there, and Milwaukee, Minneapolis, little places like that. Even if it means taking a little less money, I'd like to get to some of these places and present my music to a wider audience.
RJG: Well, you got a lot to experiment with there. If you want to get around to those smaller places. Because most of them don't get jazz groups,
HS: That's true. Rochester, New York, that's one, they have a club up there now. 'Fact, I think Jon Hendricks' brother is part owner in the club.
RJG: Jimmy?
HS: Yeah.
RJG: Well, crazy, I look forward to hearing the trio album.
HS: Well, it's my continual aim to try to improve my playing and my writing. I stay pretty busy, especially in New York because I never realized before I became a leader what work is involved in it. A lot of people probably don't realize, certainly the side men don't realize because it's a heck of a lot of responsibility. Aside from trying to keep up my instrument and trying to do the writing, arranging, there's so much business details to be taken care of, you have to get your contracts in the office and publicity and all kinds of things, taxes, and it never stops. I'm always running around, never having enough time to complete anything. When I get back to New York now, I'll have been away for about three and a half weeks, and my mailbox will be bulging with stuff to attend to.”
Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews is available directly from Yale University Press and you can locate order information by going here.
Pianist Bill Evans [1929-1980], who went on to become a world- renown Jazz musician, gave very few lengthy interviews early in his career. He was by nature, shy and retiring and just finding his way in the music when he talked at length with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason in 1960.
Given it’s rarity for the time, it is a shame that, outside of the newspaper readership, it went largely unrecognized until 2016 when it appeared as part of Toby Gleason’s efforts to get his father’s interviews published collectively in book form.
You can find the interview with Bill in Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews which is available directly from Yale University Press. Order information is available here.
Bill Evans
FEBRUARY 5, 1960
“Just 11 months before his conversation with Ralph Gleason, Bill Evans had made music history as part of the famous Miles Davis band that recorded Kind of Blue — often lauded as the greatest album in the history of jazz. Evans played a key role in shaping the aesthetic vision behind this seminal album, and one could hardly imagine Davis achieving its distinctive sound without this pianist's presence in the band. Yet even before the Kind of Blue session, Evans had left the Davis combo to strike out on his own.
At this stage in his career, Evans had gained recognition among jazz insiders as one of the most provocative pianists on the scene, but his name recognition among the general public was almost nil. Yet he was about to embark upon a period of extraordinary creativity. His trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian redefined the role of the rhythm section in jazz. LaFaro's death in a car accident on July 6, 1961, put an end to this remarkable band, but the albums the trio made before his passing rank among Evans's finest works. His subsequent 1960s albums include Undercurrent, a collaboration with guitarist Jim Hall, Conversations with Myself, a Grammy-winning project that was one of the first jazz albums to experiment with overdubbing, and Alone, a solo piano project that would earn another Grammy for Evans.
In the liner notes for the latter project, Evans remarked on the irony that he made his living as a public performer, but his most cherished moments of music making came when he was simply playing without an audience.
Gleason shows in this interview his skill in penetrating through Evans's shy demeanor and getting the artist to open up about his music and aspirations.
Ralph J. Gleason RJG: Have you ever explored the reasons why you're in jazz?
Bill Evans BE: I don't know. I never thought about it that much. In fact, like I said to someone the other night, Lord knows why we're doing this because there's so many rough spots on the road. It was not like an ambition where you sit down and say, "Well, I'm going to be a jazz musician and then I'll buy a book of hot licks." I can remember when I was in college, my theory teacher said, "Why in the world are you going into jazz? I can't understand it." I said, "I don't know," but I just knew I was going to and I could have gone the other way.
RJG: What attracted you first?
BE: Well, there was a stock [arrangement] of "The Lambeth Walk" that I picked up when I was about nine. And "The Big Apple." And then, some records started knocking me out when I was 12 or 13, typical things like "Well Git It." I didn't hear too much jazz then, but fortunately there were a couple of very hip people, young guys in my hometown (one very tragically met an early death) and they turned me on to a lot of things like Fatha Hines and stuff like that. Also, what Bird and Diz were doing then, that was kind of a revelation when I finally got with that. It was a funny thing, but the first couple of things I heard, I don't know whether it affected you the same way, but I didn't really know what was happening, it was really a flash.
RJG: After Hines, did any other piano player strike you with any particular force?
BE: I just listened to more or less what you might call the jazz mind wherever I could hear it, in any horns or in arrangements of music . . . musical thinking, let's say. After that I liked Nat Cole very much, and when I finally heard Bud Powell on Dexter Gordon's sides he knocked me out because he had much more of a feeling of form in his soul. He would really bring it to a conclusion and go into the next thing and he had a feeling ... I don't know, but I really liked him more than anybody, I guess. Then just everybody I heard I would listen to. A whole mess of musicians, local musicians, just anybody, wherever you go, because by that time I was going to all the clubs and sessions in different cities. I was near New Orleans when I went to college so I spent a lot of time around the French Quarter and there was a real mixture of all kinds of odd influences there. There's modern musicians and then going all the way back.
RJG: When you were still in school, was there any indication that you might not go into jazz?
BE: I don't think so. I started to realize that I was going strong in that direction I think maybe when I was about 15. J started to get interested in learning about how it's built, the theory of music and so on, so that I could begin to make my own lines. I don't think there was any doubt in my mind when I graduated from college. I was 20 then and I really knew that I wanted to go out there. But that doesn't mean that I didn't have a real strong interest, participating interest, in some other kinds of music like classical music, or whatever you want to call it, 'cause I have and I've spent a lot of time with it since then. In fact, I learnt an awful lot from that kind of music.
RJG; You used a very interesting expression a moment ago, Bill, the jazz mind. How would you describe the jazz mind?
BE; I don't know, lemme think a minute. There's a particular attitude, I think, sort of an instantaneous response or something like that. It's just sort of a direct thing, and this immediately imposes, I think, a closed area within which you have to work, an area in which you develop the facility, you know. It's just like if you pick up a ball and you know how to throw, you don't have to think about throwing it. In jazz it would all have a certain similarity because it has to be within a certain area of facility and knowledge, and that's the difference because your feeling sends out sort of a motivation and that has to be answered without so much figuring and tearing apart. There has to be a real facility to answer that motivation.
RJG: Would this indicate, then, that the more you were to apply deliberate thinking to writing something in jazz, deliberate planned thinking and rewriting and so forth, the more you would dilute the thing that you were producing?
BE: I wouldn't say dilute, because that would be a qualitative thing. I don't think it affects the quality, but it affects the character, and when you write, I think the character of the work is different. It can't be the same. So the jazz mind, to me, would be the player, it would have to be the player, it could never be the writer. The writer could write jazz by learning from the players and then composing. Then the form and the texture and so on would have a different character and would be maybe much more perfect in its structure because the guy would have time to ... I think George Russell does wonderful work like that because he really absorbs, I think, the feeling of what everybody is doing and yet he's strictly a composer and he composes things that sound as if they could be improvised almost. It always has to depend on the jazz player, though, because I think if the jazz player vanished and then the composer started to go off on his own, he would end up again with a cerebral kind of thing. The only thing that gives the thing roots is the essential thing that he hears in the jazz players.
RJG: What about the things, for instance, that Gunther [Schuller] and John [Lewis] and Andre Hodeir have been doing?
BE: I don't know anything about Andre Hodeir. I've heard some of the things that John Lewis did and I've played some of the things that Gunther's done. I hardly know what to say about that. I just performed a piece of Gunther's that he wrote for the Modern Jazz Quartet. I performed it with the Baltimore Symphony not long ago and I really didn't get a great deal of musical satisfaction out of playing the thing. I didn't really feel that I was playing something that I believed in that much and yet there's maybe nobody I respect more than Gunther Schuller as a musician. But as a participant it wasn't that satisfying to me. I could listen to it and know there's so much there I don't know about and I know that Gunther hears everything he writes because it all sounds musical to me, but I don't know how it relates to jazz playing that much. I think I might if I studied his pieces more. I really haven't studied them. As far as contributing to the language or something like that, he may have a way of developing ideas which could be of use in jazz or something like that, I don't know.
RJG: Has it ever struck you that there's a possibility of exclusion or a possibility of a barrier between the sort of thing that John and Gunther are working towards, and the sort of music that Miles [Davis] represents?
BE: Yeah, there's some kind of a big difference there. Miles seems to be always moving towards more simplicity. Now I don't know whether that will be the way he goes, 'cause he's always changing and he may just start changing and go the other way. But it seems the opposite so far with Gunther, at least. I mean he's dealing with real complex, compositional techniques and instrumentation and sounds and form and everything. There's quite a difference there because no jazz group could simulate a composition of Gunther Schuller's in any way.
I think Charles Edward Smith hates to bring this into any jazz discussion, but there are sociological implications, I think, in jazz playing and the philosophy that's behind it. I think any group effort takes on a different significance from an individual effort because there's a lot of different factors involved and that might be one big difference. I mean there's nothing more degrading to me than to think of 70 or 80 musicians who have become almost machines serving this one thing. It's a respectful thing, it's a wonderful testimony to people that they'll go this far to serve somebody's mind, but somehow it bothers me. I think if they're going to do that they should also be making music on their own. Like myself. Maybe that's why I went into jazz, because I love both and I love to play both, but somehow you have got to have your own identity as well, in an expressive way, even if it's on a much lower level, or inferior level. It's you. That may be the big difference and maybe that's the change that's happening,
RJG: Is it a problem to perform in both of those frameworks, one after another?
BE: Not if you're trained for it, it's just like anything else. If you have the ability or facility to do it, you can do it. It's just the difference between talking to one person and then turning your head and talking to another person. It's the same thing; you just change your attitude or your feeling. Maybe not too many people have the time or the opportunity to develop a fair degree of ability in both.
RJG: How did it come about that you worked with Miles?
BE: It was just another one of those things that all fits together, you know. He said he heard me a few times in the last couple of years before I worked with him. I guess Red [Garland] had wanted to leave or something; anyhow, I was around, worked a weekend in Philadelphia with him and then he asked me to stay.
RJG: Had you any inkling that something like that might be in the wind or did it come as a surprise to you?
BE: It came as a complete surprise. In fact, things were going very slow up till then. I'd been in New York about five years and different little things would happen, but actually not too much. I'd wanted to get a trio going for about three years and I just couldn't. I didn't try too hard because I don't believe in pushing too much, but I talked to a few people and presented it to a couple of booking offices and everything and nothing happened at all. Then I went with Miles and I think that's helped tremendously to get this thing going.
RJG: When you work a weekend with a. group and then the leader says stay with the group, what is it like? Do you rehearse? How do you fit in?
BE: Well, in this case I was a fan of Miles' band so I was familiar with a lot of the things that they did and as it turned out we never did have a rehearsal, ever. But I knew most of the things they were doing. I learned the rest on the job and Miles would show me little things that I didn't know, and so on. Actually, I was pretty frightened, you know. This was the band that I idolized and I had them way up out here someplace.
RJG: How long were you with the group altogether?
BE: About eight months.
RJG: Does Miles, as a leader or as a fellow player, structure the thought of the people that are with him? Does he discuss the music at all?
BE: No, we very seldom talked ... in fact, I don't think we ever talked in this way about music. We got together on some tunes a couple of times just before a date, or on a date or something, but not, ... he was never in any way analytical or philosophical and anything. I never thought about things this way 'til I was about 21.
RJG: Is it more emotionally rewarding when you're in a club with people close to you or on a stage at a concert?
BE: I think it was most rewarding to me when we recorded, maybe, because the piano was that much better. We had some terrifically bad pianos in clubs. It was, I think, one of the reasons I left, even. We had some ridiculous pianos. The thing about working in a club is you're playing so much that it takes that nervous edge off. You just can't be on edge that much so pretty soon you forget about that and you just do your work and it begins to have a more solid kind of performance feeling. It might not always be at such a high level, but at least it has a sort of solid thing and then the highs come every once in a while.
RJG: What are they like?
BE: It just happens, I think. You're playing and then all of a sudden you know that something special is happening. You never know. I remember one night Miles was playing the blues and he sounded like he was a little distant or something and it played all the way through. I thought to myself while he was playing, "I hope you don't stop playing with this feeling," and he finished up with about four bars of the most beautiful, just about the most beautiful idea I think I've ever heard. That was it. You know, the whole solo was nothing, and I was afraid he was going to go out with it, but he didn't, he capped it with this one thing, and that was it.
Coltrane is just impossible, he's always got a million things going, you never know what he's going to do.
RJG: It's curious how he alternately excites an audience to a great pitch or leaves them absolutely cold. There seems to be no middle ground for him.
BE: I don't know what his personal playing problems are in that respect, but I'm sure that when it's happening for the audience, it's probably happening for him, too. It's really hard to get up there and do it all the time, it's a killing schedule. No concert artist in history would even . . . they'd have a nightmare about a schedule like jazz players have. It's something.
RJG: Does the audience reaction to your performance, either emotional or vocal, have any effect on what you do?
BE: Sure, you can't help it, really. It's a two-way thing. I would hate to think that if there was no response that I wouldn't feel like playing or something like that, because that's not true. But response is a great thing, the audience can definitely inspire you. Some concerts I've played have been surprising that way because sometimes you think nothing is happening and then you get this tremendous response. It's as if the people are giving a lot more than you, it makes you feel ashamed sometimes, you know, but that's the way it is. Sure, an audience has a lot to do with it, at least the consciousness of an audience, because you're communicating with somebody. When I'm playing I like to feel that I'm enjoying what I'm doing, and the trouble with me lately is that I'm not enjoying it too much. I still have to be the foremost authority about my own playing, but I hope that if I relate to people, then my music, what I'm doing, will relate to people and they'll respond, or like it or be moved in some way. There's another thing, too; there are certain kinds of music which do not move people to express themselves out loud. There are certain kinds of, say, religious music, where people are moved inside and they may never express it outwardly, so you can't always depend on just noise as meaning a response.
RJG: A number of fans and some musicians that I know seem to have a definite spiritual feeling about jazz music.
BE: I think it's there, without a doubt, just because it represents a person, and that's part of a person.
RJG: Would you say that there are certain types of jazz music that are in a sense religious?
BE: I think so, sure, definitely. Maybe the difference is that jazz doesn't single out any particular part of our character that much, or make so much of any particular part, but just sort of speaks in everyday language and represents the whole person. Naturally there's going to be a spiritual side and practical side and maybe some humor.
RJG: Do you think it's possible for a musician to play jazz part-time or does it require a total commitment artistically?
BE: Well, no, I don't think so. It just depends. I mean, if you get satisfaction from something, why shouldn't you do it even if you only do it a little bit? The only thing is, if you are really going to try to make your living at it, or you want to be in some way meaningful in the profession, it just requires a great amount of time because there is no shortcut to the tremendous amount of experience necessary in just learning your instrument and learning music. Because it's a skill, it's not an intellectual thing at all. It's intellectual only in the sense that you use your mind to learn the skill, but it's not intellectual in conception. That's why it takes practice. You can think about a golf swing, but eventually you have to swing that club without thinking about it. That's just the way it is. But I'd say, no, everybody ought to enjoy it as much as they can. If they want to be part-time, why not? I think a lot of people could have that fun.
RJG: Yet in order to really make a contribution, it requires at least the investment of the time.
BE: It requires an awful lot of things and it ends up the most important thing is the intangible, which is your whole person, and that's the hard part. I don't know, maybe I do everything for music. I live my life for music, in a way. It's almost as if it's made me want to be a good person just for the sake of music.
RJG: Has it been a source of satisfaction to play jazz on your own, with your own group and your own scene?
BE: I think it will be, more and more. It has been, except that I'm so dissatisfied so far with what I've been doing. But it takes time, I'm sure it's what I want to do. I'd much rather be in this situation. I figure if I weren't playing with my own group or something like that, I would certainly have rather stayed with Miles, because that was a great experience.
RJG: Is the piano your main instrument? Do you play other instruments?
BE: I play the flute, but I haven't played it much lately. I played it pretty good by the time I got out of the army. And I tried violin when I was a kid, but I couldn't make it, I couldn't stand the sound I got. I tried it for about five years, just couldn't stand it. But I wouldn't say I play anything besides piano.
RJG: Do you practice much?
BE: Well, I guess. . . let's say till I was 28 I did an awful lot of practicing — I call it practicing, somebody else wouldn't. At least I spent a lot of time at the keyboard and thought about different things and played a lot of music, read through a lot of literature and so on. But this last year or so I haven't done nearly as much, I don't know why, maybe I'm getting old. I haven't done as much . . .
RJG: Who would you say has been the most important musician in your life?
BE: Oh, probably Bach. I don't know, because he was kind of a late comer in my life, but I suppose . . .
RJG: What about the most important influence in your playing?
BE: I suppose Bud Powell, but, like I say, there's really so many. It's more a process of developing, a thinking process that you feel strongly, and being able to do it. But I think probably Bud Powell.
RJG: What pianists today interest you?
BE: Well, there are some guys that I really love to listen to. I might not approach them as a student, but just as a listener, you know. For instance, I like to listen to Sonny Clark, I like to listen to Tommy Flanagan or Red Garland, and I don't know how many others I could mention. Probably anybody that can play I enjoy listening to. There may not be that much in what they're doing that I could learn from. I might learn from Lennie Tristano, who I wouldn't enjoy listening to that much, so there's a difference there. I love to listen to John Lewis play. He's one of my very favorite pianists.
RJG: How about Ahmad Jamal?
BE: Yeah, I enjoy listening to him very much. I've heard some criticism of Ahmad Jamal, that he's a cocktail pianist and everything. The environment that has given Ahmad his background is a real world and his music is just as real as anybody's as far as I'm concerned, much more real than some who feel that they're really arty because I think they're just pretending and he's not. It's a real thing he's doing.
RJG: The only pianist you mentioned you might learn from was Lennie. Are there any others?
BE: I'm sure I could learn from Monk, but his personality is so strong that it seems to me he is the only person that can do what he does. I wouldn't want to imitate his idiosyncrasies because I couldn't, he's lived his unique life. Still, I think there's quite a few musical things I could learn from him. I've played quite a few of his songs or tunes or whatever you want to call them, and I have an idea of the way his mind runs. What he does with them is so much him that it's even getting to the point where there are some songs I don't want to play anything but the melody on because I feel that it's, you know, that's it... some ballads I hardly want to mess with. I might put a couple of things in, but basically I just like to play the melody.
RJG: Do you find it interesting or surprising or curious that you yourself are now an influence on other pianists?
BE: If that's true I'd be surprised and I guess I'd be flattered, but I don't know how true it is. Just a couple of times some people have mentioned to me that they've heard some people trying to do some things that I might have done, but I don't know if that's true. I never really felt that original, to tell you the truth. At least if there's any originality, it's only maybe in the fact that I've worked with the materials in my own way, but I don't think the materials are that different.
RJG: Do kids come up to you and talk to you about taking up jazz music?
BE: Yeah, sure, every once in a while.
RJG: What do you tell them?
BE: Well, I usually just tell 'em that I don't teach, but I would be happy to get together with them if they want to talk sometime. So we usually get together once and I tell 'em the way I believe, which is that if you're going to do it, you're going to do it. And maybe if they want to, if they really lack some theoretical knowledge, I'll suggest that they go to a conservatory because it's very well organized there. I think you get a much broader and better and thorough musical training in a conservatory than you would get from any so-called jazz teacher. I'm talking about a good school. Then how you apply musical principles to jazz, depending on your experience and how much you participate, is up to you and how your life goes and everything. There's no way to teach, so that's the way it usually ends up.
That was the question up at Lenox last year. I finally tried to teach. I've been avoiding teaching all my life. There's a lot of participation. The students play nine hours a week in small ensembles and, I think, almost nine hours a week in large ensembles, and there's all kinds of discussions constantly, sessions, everybody's talking about jazz. They get private lessons, but it's more sort of just being with somebody who's a professional and you can work out some things. It's more like that. It's a very intensive jazz experience, and I think they will feel the fruits of it for years. I will, too, because it was very stimulating for rne, too. I don't know whether I'm going to teach again because I felt if I teach a specific thing, then I'm teaching style and if I don't teach a specific thing, all I can say is, you got it, and then what am I there for?
So I tried somehow to get in the crack there. I really don't know how well I did. What's left is to teach musical principles. Either I would teach the mechanics of the piano, which I tried to give a little to everybody because most people lack that, or I'd teach musical principles, which takes a much longer time and then I would say, go to the conservatory. Or else I'd teach specifics, which are style, and I don't want to teach that, and then most people resisted that up there. But you can't circumvent everything, which is what some people want to do. There was really a great amount of talent. It was almost scary. There was so much talk about originality — too much, you know, it was fear almost, it was a fear of doing anything that was the same as anything else. I never really strive for that kind of originality - avoiding anything anybody's done — because that's the only way I've learned, in a way.
RJG: This striving for originality at all costs, which goes all through jazz, particularly at the moment for the younger guys, do you think this leads to a certain unnaturalness?
BE: It could, yeah, I think so, I don't know. The thing that I look for as the most essential ingredient in my music, to quote a composition teacher I once had, is "melodic impulse." This melodic impulse I think is the most essential ingredient, and that comes from a mass experience, an experience of — there is where it gets social again — all music, all players, everybody, all of your experiences and all of your relationships with people and things. Now if you're striving for originality by cutting yourself off from all these things, I don't see how it can have a real strength or have a real quality of communication or meaning for other people. Take someone like Coltrane, as opposed to Cecil Taylor. Coltrane has set his mind to the task of progressing with allegiance to the tradition, and whatever he does will fit over what is heard by the greatest amount of good musicians. I don't know whether this is true, but it seems as if Cecil Taylor would ignore that allegiance, you know, and just go off. Well, there's a difference in philosophies there, but one is, in a way, a much more socially responsible philosophy, to me. To relate to other people as much as possible. I guess that's my attitude about it. To sort of find this melodic impulse by working in tradition or working within a language that I've learned, to hear through experience or something like that.
RJG: Has it been rewarding to you, then, to go back to men from the 1930s?
BE: I haven't really done that consciously. I don't seem to have a real impulse to do that because I really played with a lot of those musicians. I've been working professionally with good musicians since I was 14. I was lucky when I started. I played with musicians much better than myself. Good musicians in my hometown have been an influence, men very capable of having made the so-called big time, or maybe developed into much greater musicians than they are. Anyhow, they helped me a lot.
RJG: How about guys who are still playing today successfully, like Ben Webster and Harry Edison?
BE: Well, I've worked with Ben Webster and worked with Harry Edison and they're great, I love 'em, but they were more of an influence on me about 15 years ago ... 10 to 15 years ago. Ten years ago I worked with Harry Edison. I worked with Buck Johnson and a whole mess of good musicians like that around New Orleans, a lot of good musicians. I've really had personal contact with influences like that. I feel like if I wanted to be a Dixieland pianist I could be one. I've had a little experience there. I know that I'm far from being a good Dixieland pianist because there are such subtleties in every style that you don't realize until you get into it. I'm not that interested in developing those subtleties.
RJG: Have you ever gone back and played old records?
BE: Not too much. I've played a lot of older styles because we had to play a lot of Dixieland around New Orleans and I played a lot of Dixieland in New Jersey on jobs, for that matter. In a way I guess I've played almost everything that you could play as a professional musician. I've played with polka bands and the whole works, bar mitzvahs, society bands in New York, I've played with some of the best society jobs in New York and worked with some of the best men and learned all that repertoire, played all the mambos, cha-chas, peabodies . . . but that music isn't too much of a challenge. It's a challenge for a certain type of feeling, but there's not too much of a musical challenge there.
RJG: You were at Lenox the summer Ornette [Coleman] was there. What is your reaction to him?
BE: I enjoy him. I tried to play with Ornette one day at Lenox and it wasn't really successful for a number of reasons. I enjoy listening to it, but I don't know how much I could fit in or anything like that. I don't hear anything wrong in his conception, I think he's very natural. I don't think he's trying to be far-out. I think maybe Don Cherry might be reaching farther away from himself than Ornette is, but it's alright because he's got a steadying influence there in Ornette. The rest of the group now is perfect. Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden, I don't think any one of those guys could be replaced or changed without really hurting the group. But I don't hear anything unnatural in Ornette's playing.
RJG: The tendency to always be looking for something new in jazz is one of the criticisms that Ornette has inadvertently acquired.
BE : I don't understand that business. There are so many motivations, there's jealousy, and there's fear. I know there's a lot of musicians that are probably just afraid. They are saying, well, if this is it, I know I'm far from it, so they may be afraid. Anyhow, no one person is that much of an influence. I mean Dizzy and Bird and so on played a composite of people. It wasn't just like one person came along and then everybody copied them or something, not at all. Ornette plays some old-time licks, you listen to him. In fact, I was sitting with Percy Heath the other night down there listening to him. He played something that sounded like about 1910, but maybe in a different place and with a different key. He's definitely right out of everything, only he's moved to put these things in different places. Somebody was telling me Ornette was playing with somebody and every time this guy would hit a change Ornette would play something and it would scare this guy so he said to Ornette, "What are you playing that for? Can't you hear what I'm playing?" And Ornette said, "I was surprised because it was what he was playing that was making me hear what I was hearing." But he hears that way. He probably has terrifically sensitive ears and hears all these separate things and it just fits in there.
RJG: Do you have an active interest in other arts?
BE: I've never really been able to appreciate visual art very much. I probably would like a calendar picture as well as a Rembrandt. Especially, in modern art, I really don't know what's happening. I sort of see something but, I don't know, I don't respond too much. I don't really get a strong feeling. There's nothing that even begins to approach music as far as my own responses are concerned. I used to do a lot of reading, just fun reading, when I was younger and then when I went through certain growing-up problems. I read a lot of philosophy, psychology, and religion because I was going through those problems. I was looking for an answer which was not there and when I realized it wasn't there I sort of lost interest.
RJG: You mean the answer is in music, not in books of philosophies?
BE: Well, it is for me. But even before I did it, I responded to music much more than anything else. I don't know what it is.
RJG: Do you think some people are just made that way?
BE: Well, I would say it's more my own limitation. I'm limited to music. I think almost everybody responds to music very strongly at some level, which you can see easily enough, but maybe I just closed my mind to other things or something. I think lately it's opening up a little more because I actually begin to appreciate painting a little more. I just sort of walked with my eyes in one direction for quite a while.
RJG: I'm sure you've had the experience of people liking something that you did that you weren't satisfied with or that their response was out of proportion to your own.
BE: Yeah, it makes you wonder a little bit, but like I said before, you have to be your own authority. I don't think the people are wrong either. As a professional musician and as a practitioner in the art, you're going to produce even when you're not satisfied with what you're producing, but you're still producing at a certain level. There might be this much difference to the listener and to you it's a tremendous amount of difference because you're always hoping to take another step. I used to sometimes feel like I should put people down or something because I'd say I know it's no good, but I don't think that's true anymore.
RJG: How about the reverse of it, when you do something with which you are almost thoroughly satisfied. Does that always get through?
BE: It doesn't seem to happen all the time, but I think one of the reasons is that sometimes the feeling that I enjoy most is a quiet feeling and it might just evoke a quiet response, like I was talking about before. But I think when things are really happening, it will communicate.
RJG: Dizzy said one time that there were only four or five times in his entire life that he had been thoroughly satisfied with what he played.
BE: I don't think that's unusual, though, among musicians because I know Coltrane said he hardly likes anything he's ever recorded. I think he might like one thing. I know I have a hard time mentioning maybe three. I guess that's what you have to be satisfied with. I've heard artists, musicians, people in general talk about this a lot. I was tremendously unhappy with my first record. I don't know if I can explain how unhappy I was, but after about a year I began to tolerate it and now I think it was pretty good. It was as good as I could do at that time, in fact, maybe better. The same way with my second one. I was pretty unhappy with that at first, but I grew out of that quicker than the first and now I've just made another one which I'm almost happy with, and I think this is a bad sign.
RJG: You think you're weakening?
BE: Yeah, I really do, getting much more tolerant about myself.
RJG: What do you want to do with your music now? Do you have a definite concept of what you want to accomplish?
BE: No, I don't. That bothers me a little bit sometimes and then sometimes I'm glad because I feel, well, then I can go in any direction. Lately I've been more satisfied I think, and more sure that what I'm doing is exactly what I want to do. I don't know where the heck I want to go and sometimes I feel I almost could be a disappointment to people.
RJG: Do you feel a responsibility to them, then?
BE: I do, yeah. I feel a responsibility. I don't know how. Somehow to be ... to do good work, I suppose that's it. It's pretty hard because I'm really a lazy person. If I hadn't been interested in music I couldn't have forced myself to do it all, I just couldn't. I've never been able to force myself to do things. It's hard for me to teach because I can't tell a person to be interested, or you have to go out and play jobs for 10 years and live fully for music. How are you going to do that? Because I wanted to do it, that's the only reason I ever did it.
