“Seldom in receipt of the kind of plaudits some other arrangers seem swamped in, Holman has quietly put together an awesome body of work, and recent records find him in peerless form. …. A View From The Side [1997] is replete with frighteningly elaborate scores dispatched with the utmost elegance: to cite a mere two examples, sample the almost fantastical interplay of the sections on 'I Didn't Ask" or the rich, sobering treatment of 'The Peacocks', a concerto for Bob Efford's bass clarinet. Brilliant Corners [1998] is no less of an achievement and, considering the difficulty of arranging Monk tunes for big band, these ten charts seem like the work of a magician: has anyone dared score the title-piece in such a way? Here is one of the genuine masters doing his greatest work.”
Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.
“Holman internalized Monk long ago. He has had Monk pieces in his band's book since the 1970s and included "I Mean You" in his 1988 JVC album Bill Holman Band. In preparing for this compact disc, he sought out Monk's recordings to identify the pieces he wanted to arrange, but once those decisions were made, he cut off contact with Monk."
"I wanted to do it my way," Holman says, "so I decided to leave the area."
Holman says that his writing for the Monk pieces is more like the work he has been doing the past few years for orchestras in Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries.
"I'd always had that American big band thing in the back of my head when I was writing for my band," he says. "I didn't feel that the traffic in this country would bear too much 'out' stuff, that Americans like big bands to sound like big bands. This has abrupt changes in texture and mood, operating outside of the typical dance band vocabulary."....
"It's great to do things like that because jazz bands were locked into that four-part harmony for so many decades that to get away from it completely is freedom. Some of the guys in the band are still trying to figure out how these things fit into the harmonic scheme. Well, a lot of times, there isn't any harmonic scheme."
My conclusion is that Willis Leonard Holman is a wonder. Monk should have stuck around for this one.”
Doug Ramsey, booklet notes to Brilliant Corners The Bill Holman Band Plays The Music of Thelonious Monk [JVC 2066-2]
The following piece featured in Gary’s Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century [2004] and was originally published in Village Voice 17 February 1998. It is used with the author’s permission.
“A Holman arrangement is distinguished by several hallmarks, chief among them his ability to keep several balls in the air at the same time. Something is always happening….. A typical Holman moment is an epiphany of sorts, as if contemplation of the melody at hand spurred an unexpected juxtaposition, idea, or joke.”
“Bill Holman, who may be the premiere living jazz orchestrator and is surely a contender, is back, at 70, in rare form. One of the best records of 1997 was A View from the Side, and whatever 1998 brings, few albums can top Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk. Holman always keeps busy in Los Angeles and Europe, but records released under his name are so infrequent that they support a long-standing cult without confirming his reputation as a major figure in the development of big band music. Brilliant Corners may not change that, but it provides standards for an idiom that too often waffles in amateurish unoriginality and is sure to keep you searching for more of the same.
The work of all great arrangers raises the question of where the line is drawn between composition and orchestration. Several of the best, from Gil Evans to Nelson Riddle, were insignificant melodists who brought organizational genius to the melodies of others. Holman has composed several effective pieces—"Invention for Guitar and Trumpet," "The Big Street," "Far Down Below," "Concerto for Herd"—but he is never as inspired as when recasting a familiar tune. He is at bottom a variations man and a good theme frees his imagination, which exults in diverse effects, tempos, humor, melodic juxtapositions, and vigorous rhythms. The wonder of his Contemporary Concepts, written for Stan Kenton in 1955, is that he simultaneously reconfigured the big band for a world bereft of ballrooms while stressing the Count Basie dictum to pat your foot, in addition to transfiguring melodies like "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "What's New" and turning the intransigent "Stella by Starlight" into a concerto for Charlie Mariano that would have earned the alto saxophonist a footnote in jazz history all by itself.
Yet the concerto style is not Holman's forte, except in the Bartok sense of a concerto for orchestra. A Holman arrangement is distinguished by several hallmarks, chief among them his ability to keep several balls in the air at the same time. Something is always happening. It is a cliche to say that a bandleader makes a small group sound like a big band or a big band sound like a combo. Holman makes a big band sound enormous—given the luxury of 16 musicians, he seems to imply, "use them, all of them, all the time." Another hallmark is his distinctive use of counterpoint, which he never launches in a Bach-like fantasy, one melody bouncing off another, but in a kind of unison responsiveness, as though the melody under discussion suggested one or two related melodies that fit when played together. Why settle for a single tune when you have enough musicians to play several? Another hallmark is that the result is never cluttered and the secondary melodies often have a linear integrity to match the originals.
A typical Holman moment is an epiphany of sorts, as if contemplation of the melody at hand spurred an unexpected juxtaposition, idea, or joke. Brilliant Corners bubbles over with them. Indeed, Monk's title isn't a bad description of Holman's method. He keeps the big, colorful balls floating in front of your eyes, but you don't want to miss the action at the edges. A few Holman moments: Toward the close of "Thelonious," he harmonizes Monk's insistent one-note theme (actually, three notes, not that you'd notice) for unison flute and piano and you realize that the tune is Morse code—in any case, Monk code; in the middle of "'Round Midnight," he inserts a four-note riff from an introduction popularized by Miles Davis, but gives the first three staccato notes to the trumpets and the fourth to a wry trombone, conveying conversational whimsy even in this fleeting transition; "Rhythm-a-ning," a chart from 20 years ago and inspired by Basie's "Little Pony," begins with Monk's theme-how conventional!—but at the second eight bars is joined by a parallel figure and, after the chorus, the tempo crashes and the reeds invoke five seconds of Tadd Dameron's "Hot House." Holman is a fiend for Rorschach-test allusions. Elaborate variations on "Ruby, My Dear" include a bar of "Groovin' High," "Brilliant Corners" is spelled by a Charles Ives interlude, and a fleering reference to "Nardis" wafts by during one of the transitions in '"Round Midnight."
The endings of all 10 selections are pure Holman and utterly savory, none more so than the gearing up of drums to launch three thunderous blasts of brass in "Straight, No Chaser." On a few occasions he uses bent or sliding notes. The ultimate slurp is a tailgate trombone lick some six minutes into "Friday the 13th." Before you can wonder what it's doing there, the band is off on a full-throttle shout chorus, but the performance closes with solo soprano saxophone, which just happens to finish with a left-field slur. "Misterioso" is nothing but Holman moments. A bright two-note riff is immediately countered by a deep-blues bass figure to remind you what kind of piece this is. Then the melody hits and you have all three in the air—the riff, the bass line, the tune. Profligate with invention, Holman writes a completely different variation after each solo, though they all counter ominous blues voicings with unexpectedly cheerful riffs, including one that has the reed section competing with itself and another that amounts to a four-bar swing era interlude, right before a deep-blues bass solo. The other great blues, "Straight, No Chaser," is deconstructed from the top down, so that in the first few minutes the band plays not Monk's theme but a Holman variation based on the same rhythm; when a canonical transition two-thirds through finally triggers Monk's tune you feel you have earned its comfort, but before long Holman—whose chords are now waxing in heft and dissonance—can't resist pointing out that it reminds him of Til Eulenspiegel.
I haven't mentioned the soloists, and there are good ones —especially the saxophonists Lanny Morgan, Bill Perkins, and Pete Christlieb (whose "Rhythm-a-ning" cadenza pays homage to Wardell Gray). Solos in work like this invariably seem somewhat generic. Like a film or theater director, a bandleader exercises control over the performances when he chooses his cast. When big band soloists were innovators, they were as important as arrangements and sometimes more so. But as Basie pointed out when he regrouped in the early '50s, the writing lingers on after the soloists have gone. Holman has a crew of solid professionals up to every task he assigns, but the play is the thing and during the best of solos it is the orchestral backing, rhythmic change-ups, and Monk allusions (often fanciful or abstract) that excite your attention. Although " 'Round Midnight" was originally recorded by Cootie Williams's big band and Hall Overton successfully adapted Monk's own harmonies for an ensemble with seven winds, Monk is not often heard in orchestral arrangements (a notable exception is Ellington's 1962 "Monk's Dream"). The trick is to love Monk's music without attempting to replicate his style, which is matchless. Only Holman's "Bemsha Swing" disappoints, because his dated boogaloo beat pales next to Monk's geometric rhythms, and even here the secondary themes punch up the action to the point of near-euphoria. Elsewhere, the euphoria is fully realized—enhanced by JVC's audiophile mastering.” ….
"I used to think that writing a jazz arrangement was like a stream of consciousness, the same as a jazz solo. You just started playing and built on what you just played. Then you go on to the next thing and never repeat yourself. After a few years it finally dawned on me that the ear wants to hear something it recognizes, so I started concentrating on the shape of an entire piece, the form, and how it builds to a climax. As a writer, you also want to avoid getting to the climax too soon. If you do, you'll kill yourself trying to top it in the arrangement. And the result is monotony. Writing music and arranging never gets easy. I've had students ask me, 'How long does it take before it gets easy?' I tell them, 'Never'. As soon as you get to one point in your development, you're looking at the next level."
- Bill Holman
Gordon Jack is a frequent contributor to the Jazz Journaland a very generous friend in allowingJazzProfilesto re-publish his perceptive and well-researched writings on various topics about Jazz and its makers.
Gordon is the author of Fifties Jazz Talk An Oral Retrospectiveand he also developed the Gerry Mulligan discography in Raymond Horricks’ bookGerry Mulligan’s Ark.
The following article was published in the June 4, 2024 edition of Jazz Journal. Based in the UK Gordon uses English spelling.
One of the most accomplished arranger-composers to emerge during the nineteen-fifties, Bill Holman was born in Orange County, Los Angeles on 21 May 1927. Andre Previn once observed that “Holman was a first rate saxophonist but his true instrument is the orchestra and he plays it with musicianship, honesty and brilliance”.
Beginning on clarinet he soon switched to the tenor after hearing Lester Young with Count Basie. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946 and then enrolled at the Westlake College of Music from 1948 to 1951 with the aid of the G.I. bill. He also studied counterpoint privately with Russ Garcia with particular reference to his book The Professional Arranger and Composer. He joined Charlie Barnet in 1950 in a band that included Eddie Wasserman, Dick Meldonian and Claude Williamson. It was his good friend Gene Roland who recommended him to Stan Kenton in late 1951. Holman had written a twelve-tone blues which he showed to Roland who said “I think this is what Stan is looking for”. By early 1952 there was a vacancy because Bob Cooper was leaving, so Holman took over on tenor and joined a writing team that included Gerry Mulligan, Bob Graettinger, Pete Rugolo, Johnny Richards and Shorty Rogers. Mulligan’s writing had a profound influence on Holman – “I loved his charts so much.” His arrangements often reflected Gerry’s contrapuntal approach prompting this comment from Mulligan “The first chart I took to a rehearsal was rejected by Stan but the next day Bill Holman brought in an arrangement that sounded more like me than I did!”
One of his earliest charts for the band was Invention For Guitar And Trumpet which appeared on New Concepts Of Artistry In Rhythm in 1952. It was also heard in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle starring Glenn Ford. Bill felt that by 1955 “Stan more or less turned the band over to AL Porcino and Mel Lewis and they set about getting the band to swing” which they certainly did on Contemporary Concepts that year. It featured his famous paraphrase of Stompin’ At The Savoy which has twelve bars in the A sections instead of eight and remained in the book for years. The album also included two of his own favourite charts – What’s New and Stella By Starlight. He had by now become chief arranger and continued to write off and on for Kenton until 1977.
When he left Kenton as a player he joined a thriving West Coast jazz scene recording on tenor and occasionally on baritone with Shelly Manne, Shorty Rogers, Stan Levey, Chet Baker, Med Flory, Art Pepper, Jimmy Rowles, Conte Candoli and many more. He co-led a group with Mel Lewis featuring Jack Sheldon and Jimmy Rowles that appeared at the Jazz Cellar in Los Angeles. He also provided iconic big band charts for Maynard Ferguson, Billy May, Gerry Mulligan, Woody Herman, Charlie Barnet, Les Brown, Harry James and Terry Gibbs. His own big band recorded The Fabulous Bill Holman (1957), In A Jazz Orbit (1958) with an Andre Previn sleeve-note and Great Big Band (1960). In the late fifties he was quoted saying “What I Like to capture is a real jazz spirit so that no matter how much is written down, the music should have all the feeling of improvisation”.
In 1960 he received his first Grammy nomination for Peggy Lee’s I’m Gonna Go Fishin’ and he went on to work with many other singers including Mel Torme’, Carmen McRae, Natalie Cole, Anita O’Day, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Jackie & Roy, Tony Bennett and Pearl Bailey. He arranged for Manhattan Transfer and the Fifth Dimension and from 1966 he contributed several notable charts to Buddy Rich’s big band including The Midnight Cowboy Medley from the 1970 Keep The Customer Satisfied LP/CD.
In 1975 he formed the Bill Holman Band, a sixteen-piece ensemble which rehearsed once a week for the next forty- five years at the Musicians’ Union Local 47 in Hollywood. I am indebted to my friend Steve Cerra from Santa Ana California who has provided an extensive list of musicians who have been involved over the years which includes Al Porcino, Charlie Mariano, Herb Geller, Carl Saunders, Lanny Morgan, Jeff Hamilton, Jack Sheldon, Pete Christlieb, Bill Perkins (Holman’s oldest friend), Bob Cooper and Frank Rosolino. In a 1999 interview Christlieb told me “There is nobody in the world who can shine Bill Holman’s shoes when it comes to writing for a big band”. The band regularly appeared at the annual festival organised by the Los Angeles Jazz Institute. It also recorded on five occasions: The Bill Holman Band (1987); A View From The Side (1995) which received a Grammy Award for the title track. The sleeve-note also includes tributes from Manny Albam, Bob Brookmeyer, Ralph Burns, Benny Carter, Quincy Jones, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mandel, Gerry Mulligan, Maria Schneider, Artie Shaw and Gerald Wilson; Brilliant Corners: The Music Of Thelonious Monk (1997) which received a Grammy Award for Straight No Chaser; Live (2005) and Homage (2007).
He frequently ran composing/arranging Master Classes throughout the US and Europe. In 2000 the Smithsonian Institute established the Bill Holman Collection housing scores and memorabilia. In 2010 the National Endowment for the Arts bestowed the NEA Jazz Masters Award on “Composer, arranger and tenor saxophonist Bill Holman”. A film Charting Jazz: The Mastery of Bill Holman is currently in production.
(Bill) Willis Leonard Holman died peacefully of natural causes at his home in the Hollywood Hills on 6 May 2024.
The following interview on Bill Holman’s “Working Methods, Personal Views and Influences” is from composer-arranger Bill Dobbins’ fine book Conversations with Bill Holman: Thoughts and Recollections of a Jazz Master.
Conversations with Bill Holman: Thoughts and Recollections of a Jazz Master is available through online sellers.
This excerpt from Bill Dobbins insightful interview offers details about how, from very humble beginnings, Bill Holman acquired the techniques, learned experiences and personal revelations and resources that helped develop him into one of the premier Big Band Jazz composer - arrangers.
“B.D. Could you talk about the roots of your musical language and some of the ways in which you have developed it through the years?
B. H. Well, I haven't had much musical education, so I just started writing what I heard from records and the radio. I didn't have much of a clue as to how other guys did what they did. I just heard, for example, that there was a difference between Fletcher Henderson and Eddie Sauter. But it was simply there to behold. I had no idea what Eddie Sauter was doing that was different from Fletcher Henderson, but I could hear that it came out differently. So I just copied what I heard as well as I could. Triar's another thing. I was never able to copy anything very well. I'd hear something I liked and say, "Oh! I'm going to do that." And it always came out different.
Both (Laugh.)
B. H. A lot of people call that originality. It could also be called a lack of chops.
Both (Laugh.)
B. H. I remember I had heard a piece that Manny Albam had written for Charlie Barnet's bebop band that featured tenor lead: four saxes with tenor on top. It really intrigued me, so I tried to do that. But it just never happened.
Four Brothers seemed pretty logical and made sense to me because it was just the sax section with close harmony. No surprises there. But the form of that piece is perfect. [Jimmy] Giuffre packed all that stuff into three minutes. Everybody got a chance to play, the band got a chance to cook, and he got a chance to lay out that melody. It's really a good example of form.
Talking about form, when I was studying with Russ [Garcia], I took a chart in that I thought was pretty good; and he said, "You've got enough material for ten charts here." My idea of a jazz chart was that you just start "blowing", and you blow and you blow and you blow. You don't repeat anything. I thought that was the way jazz solos were constructed at the time. I didn't realize that good jazz solos had form, too. So, I was just writing a stream of consciousness thing, and he tried his best to convince me that this was not hip. In other words, that I should pick out things, use them again, alter them a little, and do all the things that writers normally do, and that I know now. I wasn't quite buying it.
Both (Laugh.)
B. H. But somewhere along the line something clicked, and now form is one of my big concerns. Because if you don't have a convincing form, you're going to lose the audience; and if you lose the audience, what are you doing?
B. D. Sure. And I guess form relates, in a less technical sense, to the basic idea of storytelling, right?
B.H. Yeah.
B. D. If you're telling a story in a verbal language, you don't want to lose people with unnecessary details or by suddenly introducing a character that has no background in the story unless you intend to weave that character into the rest of the story.
B. H. Right. It's the same thing. I got the idea after a while. My Theme and Variations #2, for example, the form of that is good. I remember that there's a definite relationship between the introductory part and the out chorus.
B. D. Yeah, that's very clear.
B. H. And the whole idea of it was to build off of that original phrase.
B. D. Well, one of the things I like about all three of your theme and variations pieces is that they're entirely composed, and don't depend on improvised solos for their development. [Reference to Theme and Variations #3 was jointly commissioned in 2008 by Roland Paolucci and the Famous Jazz Orchestra (directed by Vaughn Wiester)].
B.H. Yeah.
B. D. And, as I got to know Ellington's music better, that was one of the things I appreciated more and more about Duke, too. He had the ability to write pieces in which the only improvising was the way the musicians interpreted the written solo lines he wrote especially for them. But, of course, he could also do what jazz writers normally do, which is to open things up for soloists to improvise. So I like to use those pieces of yours, and a few by Ellington and other favorite jazz composers of mine, to show my students different ways of creating solid pieces by simply developing a couple of thematic ideas in a creative and compelling manner without resorting to improvised solos as we are used to hearing in jazz pieces.
B.H. Uh Huh.
B.D. Coming back to your comments about your lack of formal music education, I think that some of the most creative people have been, for the most part, self-educated. I think it's a mistake to assume that the only education or learning that has value is what you get in a school. Gil Evans is another jazz writer who was basically self-taught. But he took advantage of a lot of the resources that are available to the general public, such as the public library's collection of recordings and scores.
Of course, Ellington and a lot of the other great jazz writers were also basically self-taught. But all of you, I think, got to the point fairly quickly where you were not just hearing things in a passive way. You notice things about a particular piece of music that you like, and that information goes into the mental file cabinet for further consideration. Then, it comes out later exactly as you intend or, as you described earlier, altered through your own perception as a personal interpretation of that earlier influence.
B.H. Yeah.
B.D. And, I think that some of the personal aspects of music can be lost if formal teaching becomes too standardized. The important thing is to present things in a manner that can be useful for someone who wants to create in a way that is connected to a tradition, but is also done in a personal way.
B. H. I shouldn't really say that I'm not educated. I'm not well-educated. I did study for that one year with Russ [Garcia], and I learned some valuable things from him. He tried to show me the biggest thing of all, which I ended up learning through the years, which was about form. But I was thinking in terms of education today, where kids have access to scores by many different writers and they know this guy's voicings and that guy's.
B. D. I see what you mean.
B. H. I think I would have been tempted to use them all. And I may have come out with a more polished product, but it might have come too easily. I think my way is to struggle along. You know, the first things I wrote for Kenton were all four-part block harmony; and, because of the size of the band, I guess, they sounded very impressive. Basie was using the same kind of harmony, yet the two things didn't sound at all alike.
B. D. Sure. But that's also the personality of the band, right?
B.H. Yeah.
B. D. Because I found it interesting that a lot of people thought that all those Ellington records that were arranged by Billy Byers and other writers were actually arranged by Ellington or Strayhorn. Of course, the band sounded the same, because Duke hired the musicians whose sound he wanted to be a part of the band's sound.
Both (Laugh.)
B. D. So, one way of listening to a record is to hear the sound of the band, the swing conception and the conception of the rhythm section, the various uses of vibrato, expressive devices and dynamics, and so on. And then, another way is to hear that, but to also hear what the musical content is, the technical content or the story.
B.H. Yeah. Anyway, I just struggled along with my primitive harmony for years, and gradually did this and did that, and enlarged the scope, and arrived where I am now. When I'm with a bunch of well-schooled musicians, then I feel unschooled, because they're often talking about things I don't know anything about. We may be thinking about the same things, but just in different terms. But when I say I'm not schooled, I'm afraid I'm slighting Russ, because there was that one year. And I did learn something. It's just that, I think back on his book, about how to use maracas and things like that. (Laughs.) But that book has been a mass seller. It's been all over the world and translated into different languages, and it's still selling. The last arranging book I had before that, they dealt with writing for three saxophones. (Laughs.)
B. D. Wow. Speaking about schooling, I've heard great music by writers who had a lot of schooling and by those who had little or none. In terms of jazz, I'm unschooled, because the university I went to didn't want to have anything to do with jazz. But that didn't keep me from trying to figure out the music on my own. So having been schooled in classical music but unschooled in jazz, I can see advantages and disadvantages in both situations.
Some of the most valuable learning I've experienced has been out of school, especially listening to recordings of music I was really passionate about, and trying to figure out what was going on there.
B. H. Uh huh.
B. D. Then I would try to find ways of using those things that sounded a little different from the source they came from. In terms of melody, for example, the basic melodic vocabulary of jazz is relatively simple. You can find recorded examples of dozens of writers or improvisers using the same basic licks. [A "lick" is a short melodic phrase or motif that has long been in the common practice playing and writing of jazz musicians. A high percentage of jazz licks go all the way back to Louis Armstrong and his contemporaries, and can even be found in the music of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries (with less syncopated rhythms).]
But it's how and where they use them, and how they develop them in a particular musical context, and what kind of story they can tell with them that makes their music sound different.
B.H. Yeah,
B.D. Just as one example I can remember that, before they had the Ellington Archive in the Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution, I occasionally took on the daunting task of trying to transcribe one of my favorite Ellington pieces. Later on, it was inspiring and humbling to have access to the original scores ten years or so after the fact. I photocopied many of the complete C score sheets in Ellington's hand, took them home, and discovered what I had managed to hear accurately and what I had misheard or missed entirely. That also relates to my own experience as a writer of hit and miss experiments, trying to get as close as I can to things that will communicate clearly to an audience.
B. H. Well, I'm too lazy to do that.
Both (Laugh)
B.H. I think that's one of my big problems; that, and the fact that I never thought of getting a mentor. I think a mentor could have helped me a lot, not only teaching me a lot about the business, but also teaching me how to make music. I'm so reticent that I don't make friends too easily unless people seek me out. So I've got a bunch of really aggressive friends.
Both (Laugh.)
B.H. So I think, "How did I wind up with all these people?" But they came to me.
Both (Laugh.)
B. D. Well, the interesting thing about all the books and scores that are so readily available today is that, in a way, its connected to the mass production and all pervasiveness of music. Just as you find a lot of young people with four thousand pieces on their I-Pod, but most of it's going in one ear and out the other, you could have hundreds of books and scores that just sit on the book shelves or stacked on top of the piano. What seems to be a difference maker is being a proactive type of person who, if they're really after something, won't sit around waiting for someone else to motivate them or give them some ready-made answers.
In a way, I feel like I really profited from being in college during the '60s, which was a time when jazz was still either discouraged or forbidden in most conservatories and music departments. So, along with a bunch of students that started at Kent State about the same year, I was involved in putting together the first ongoing big band there in opposition to most of the music faculty and the director of the music department. I think I probably went through a lot of the same experiences you did as far as jazz goes, just trying to figure it out for myself most of the time.
I remember that, when we finally were playing well enough that we decided to invite a guest soloist to play, the first person we invited was Clark Terry. Being around somebody like Clark, when we were all in our late teens and early twenties and really green in terms of the music, was like manna from heaven.
B. H. That sure was a great choice for that period in your life. Because Clark was so outgoing and forthcoming with all he knew and could do.
B. D. Yeah, Clark is a really special musician and human being. And throughout the lives of the many guys in that band who are still making music professionally, whenever any of us have made contact with Clark, he has always been enthusiastically supportive and encouraging. We had a very limited budget for the band and, when we invited Clark back for the next year, he said, "I'd love to come back again, but next time you have to let me bring Joe Williams along with me."
B.H. (Laughs.)
B. D. When I told him we would love to but we just didn't have a big enough budget for both of them, he just laughed and said, "Look, just pay me half of what you did this time and I'll get Joe to come, too."
B.H. Wow!
B. D. Yeah. So, when Joe came with Clark the next year, that was just after he had recorded an album with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra; and he sent us about half a dozen of those great charts that Thad and Brookmeyer wrote for those dates. Man, the guys in the band were as happy as if we'd just won the lottery.
B. H. I guess. Well, as I was saying, I needed somebody to tell me what being a musician is all about, your relationship with the music, how important the music is to you, and how you should approach it and think of it. I was just a dumb kid that learned to play the saxophone and saw some people in the movies that were playing saxophone. So I wanted to do that.
B.D. Yeah.
B.H. I had no idea about the value of music or the kind of people that made music, or anything besides just playing the horn.
B.D. Wow.
B. H. So, I could have used some advice in that end. You know, the more I get into it, the more seriously I take it.
B. D. Well, if everybody that started out the way you did had come as far as you have, it would surely be a much richer world.
B.H. Maybe.
B.D. No maybe about it. Getting back to our discussion about your working methods, could you talk a little about the origins of the arrangements for Prez Conference, the group that played all the saxophone harmonizations of Lester Young solos?
B. H. Well, it was [tenor saxophonist] Dave Pell's brainchild, you know. He was going to do what Supersax did. But, of course, he didn't realize that the tenor is much lower than the alto. So how are you going to put three other saxes underneath the tenor lead? I had to work around that, and there's some finagling, going to unison or thirds occasionally and then back to the four parts. But he dug up a lot of Prez solos and I found a few. And we did several albums, or at least two. I think Joe Williams was on the last one. Did he sing on the whole album?
B.D. No, some of the tunes had instrumental soloists. And there was another album that featured [Harry] "Sweets" Edison.
B. H. Yeah. Anyway, that was it. And we found some songs that Joe could sing that had Prez solos in them, and we did those along with the strictly instrumental tunes. I tend to think of it as a poor relation to Supersax.
B.D. Why is that?
B.H. I don't know. Because it wasn't first, I guess.
Both (Laugh.)
B.D. I think of it as just another side of the music. Because Parker's style was so rich, chromatic and chord based, while Prez played in a rhythmically simpler and more melodically basic style.
B. H. Well, it was ideal for me, because it's mostly pretty easy to harmonize. And I had been familiar with some of those things almost since childhood. And the ones I hadn't heard before I could relate to just as well. So it was fun for me but, as you may have gathered, Dave was not one of my favorites. He's Carl Saunders' uncle.
B.D. Really?
B. H. Yeah. (Laughs.) So every time Carl mentions Uncle Dave, he looks at me to see if I'm wincing.
B.D. What are some of the different ways in which an arrangement or composition has begun for you? How do the first ideas come up? Could you give some examples in relation to specific pieces?
B.H. This sounds like when the kids ask, "How do you get started?"
B.D. Exactly.
B.H. Well, you've already heard my routine on that. You just sit there.
Both (Laugh.)
B.H. Sometimes I just start writing nonsense on a staff. Sometimes I'll write curves, with no pitches, and then try to fill them in and see what that suggests. Mostly it has to do with getting the bare germ of an idea, and then making music out of it.
B.D. Sure.
B. H. Bill Cunliffe took my place up at Port Townsend a couple of weeks ago. I was supposed to do a class up there. Nancy got sick and I couldn't go. So I said, "They'll probably ask you how you get started." And I said, "Incidentally, how do you get started?" And he mentioned that he had taken the first three notes from some classical record that he liked. So he took those three notes and started with that. And pretty soon he had fleshed out a whole phrase.
B.D. Yeah.
B.H. I had never thought of that before.
B.D. So you don't usually start from an idea that's already in your head. You usually start from a more abstract point and then let things gradually become more concrete.
B.H. Yeah. Although, sometimes it's some abstract method that's been put in my head by hearing about someone else doing it.
B.D. Uh Huh.
B. H. You never know where those things are coming from.
B.D. Yeah.
B. H. Or sometimes I sit at the piano and noodle until I happen to hit on something that I like. Then I go back and say, "Well, if I use those two notes and then this one instead, it might make something." By this time I may be so into the mood of the piece, that I can just continue from those three notes. What I really like is when I'm doing something else, and something just pops into my head. I remember I had that experience with a piece on the Basie album. There's one tune that just goes... (sings a syncopated four-bar phrase). I made a blues out of that.
B. D. Oh, yeah. That one's called Ticker.
B. H. Yeah. It's just a scale up and down. I was riding in the car when that came to me, and I liked it. I thought to myself, "It's absurdly simple, but I'm going to use it because I like it."
B.D. Sure, why not. Some of the main ideas of some great pieces are absurdly simple, if you just take the germ idea. I remember one of the sketches on Saturday Night Live during the classic years in the '80s when John Belushi was one of the stars. Belushi is in costume as Beethoven, sitting at the keyboard of an early piano of that period. He's searching for an idea, and he plays... (Sings "dum...dum...dum...DUM!", the opening four notes of the Fifth Symphony, with short silences between each note.) Then he scowls and shakes his head from side to side as if to say, "No, no, no. That could never work."
Both (Laugh.)
B. D. That's just too simple! One of the things I try to convince my students of is that there's really no such thing as an idea that's too simple.
B.H. Yeah. When Nancy was in the hospital, they had a machine that was pumping her I.V. fluid. And when it ran out or malfunctioned in some way, there was a sound that went, (Sings a five note phrase) "do re sol, do re... do re sol, do re." And I thought, "That's got to be usable somehow." And I'm still determined I'm going to make a piece out of that. (Laughs.)
B. D. That's great. Anything is possible. Any idea can be used. It all depends on what you do with it. I remember hearing you talk about your arrangement of St. Thomas, Sonny’s Rollins tune. You mentioned that you had already worked out a fairly elaborate contrapuntal line to go with the melody. But then at one point you noticed a simple fanfare idea that had been going on in your head, and you just threw out the intricate counterpoint and the fanfare became one of the main ideas of the arrangement.
B. H. Yeah, I had devised some really clever counterpoint to the melody. I was imagining the chord progression going along as I was writing it, but imagining the chord progression was generating this other thing in my head. (Sings the fanfare motive from St. Thomas.) I finally realized that, and tossed out all that other stuff I had written. I always thought of that as a big triumph; that I was able to recognize what was happening and that I had the nerve to throw out my hard work. (Laughs.)
B. D. Yeah, what a revelation. I think Stravinsky said something to the effect that, if you want to be a writer, it's important to write something every day, even if what is written ends up in the wastebasket. It's all part of the process.
B.H. Uh Huh.
B. D. I guess it's just like practicing an instrument. Someone who's really on their game in relation to practicing an instrument feels the difference after missing just a day or two.
B. H. Yeah, I sure do. If I go for a couple of weeks and then sit down to write, it's like I'd never done it before. How do you do this? (Laughs.)
B.D. That experience with St. Thomas had a lot to do with the simple act of paying attention. I try to remind my students and myself that one of the most important life skills is learning to pay attention. And paying attention is the easiest thing in the world to do, except that I usually forget to do it. But when I do remember, I'm often amazed at what I become aware of. It can be really valuable.
B.H. Well, if you did it all the time you'd probably be insufferable.
