"John Scofield: It's Magic" by Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the John Scofield piece in that series. It was published on September 3, 1998 so add 20+ years to any math in the article.

“John Scofield picked up a guitar in 1962 at the age of 11; it was a role waiting to be filled.

Playing electric guitar was about to become a major macho pose, like throwing a touchdown pass or hitting a home run. It was something little boys mimed in the air without a prop. "Look at me, ma, I'm Jimi Hendrix." It proved how masculine you were, that you could distort and feed back and if your father made enough money you could destroy a guitar or two. Burn it. Guitar players took names like Slash.

It was also more than a pose. The guitar would soon overtake the saxophone as the major instrumental voice of our times. Guitar heroes were coming of age, coming out of the woodwork thanks to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and on and on. To say nothing of Elvis. It was the pose of coming of age. Like firing a Kalashnikov.

Except for Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, with Jim Hall and Jimmy Raney on the sidelines, the jazz guitar was still just part of the rhythm section. In the classics, Segovia was something of a curiosity. If you didn't play rock, forget it. You were a 90 pound weakling.

The young Scofield was knocked out by early Beatles and Ricky Nelson. He watched Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio on television and plugged into the folk phase. There were no teachers in tiny Wilton, Connecticut, where he was growing up, so he taught himself. He listened to Delta blues, the so-called "hippy jazz" of Charles Lloyd and early fusion guitarist Larry Coryell. He played with rhythm and blues bands in high school.

At the turn of the decade, Sco's quartet performed for a packed house in the New Morning in Paris after 40 one-nighters in 15 countries in 44 days. At the same time he celebrated - paraphrasing Ronald Reagan - the 10th anniversary of his 29th birthday. It was a good time to take stock.

John Scofield has become arguably the most influential jazz guitarist. Better known, a bigger draw, the guitar megastar Pat Metheny still told me that as far as he's concerned "Sco is the main man." Metheny's main man is a...MAN!

Scofield learned to be at home with difficult articulation in non-guitar key signatures. Expanding Johnny Smith's sweet monotony, he combined John Coltrane's harmonic advances with the textural innovations of Jimi Hendrix.

Not the least of it, he had also learned how to play 40 concerts in 44 days without drugs (he even stopped smoking cigarettes). There's a lot of strength under the surface of this good-natured, soft spoken family man with the high forehead and ready smile. He makes it sound simple:

"Psyching yourself up with dope is dumb. I did that long enough. It doesn't work. Your timing has to be perfect. You want to get a little numb, but not so numb that the music stops flowing out of you. You're always tuning yourself. It's too much work, you find that you think about nothing else and it screws up your body too. It's not practical and you pay too much. So now I just try and keep cool."

If you get stoned too early you come down too fast - too late and it doesn't hit in time. Cool is the operative word here.

Graduating from Boston's Berklee College of Music in the early '70s, he played with Chet Baker, Gary Burton and Charles Mingus; with McCoy Tyner and Dr. John. He was basically a bebopper, "something of a purist." But then Miles Davis "turned me around, said I was bluesy and got me into wah-wah pedals, back-beats and heavy electronics."

His reputation took a quantum leap in the early '80s when he became a collaborator more than a sideman for three years with Davis, who admitted to building tunes from Scofield's improvisations. Rather than feeling ripped off, Sco was flattered.

After he left the band, however, the trumpeter began to bad-mouth the guitarist in the press. He said, in effect, the Sco was too cool; he said he played behind the beat. He said it and said it and said it - though implying it was not really Sco's fault, poor boy. He's white.”

"Dave Holland: The Power Behind the Throne" by Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Dave Holland piece in that series. It was published on January 28, 1999 so add 20+ years to any math in the article.

“Bass players hold the secret power behind the throne. They control the one absolutely essential element, a role not exactly obvious to everybody. This pleases them a great deal.

Playing bass requires a peculiar personality. You can generalize about it with less danger than most generalizations. Despite the occasional grandstander, they are team players who flourish in the background. Bassists are less competitive than other instrumentalists.

Listeners go to the bathroom during a bass solo. And there has to be some masochism somewhere in anybody willing to lug that coffin around. They are not looking for glory; they know, if you don't, that they already have it. Constructing their central bridge between melody, harmony and rhythm, they are by necessity involved with totality. They control the music.

Dave Holland controls it with more intelligence, power, variety and modesty than most. If you're absolutely forced to pick a "best," he'd be a prime candidate. He has made a living in all sorts of contexts including Bach, Trad jazz in his native Britain (he now lives in upstate New York), Eurojazz and M-BASE avant-garde music in New York City. Everything, everywhere, with everybody.

He took a great deal of pride in his years with Miles Davis. A few years after Miles died, he went on the road with the Miles Davis Tribute Band - Herbie Hancock, Wallace Roney, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams. I asked him what he thought about Miles's "Doo-Bop," an unfinished album completed after the trumpeter's death. It is an example of a new style being called by an unstylistic name - in this case "new jazz swing." It is rap combined with a chord here and there, horns and jazz feeling. Industry spokesmen predicted it would become a "contemporary expression of the jazz idiom" and "give birth to a new generation of progressive jazz musicians." (It did not. Never mind.)

"I'm not a good person to ask about Miles," Holland replied. "Because every time he played his horn, even only one note, magic happened for me. It didn't matter what was under or over it."

Holland's voice resonates like the weathered wood instrument he plays. His verbal cadence swings, punctuated by frequent smiles. He is accustomed to thinking in terms of the bottom of things. So many smart superstructures have rested on his roots: "Whatever you call this music and whatever it is, it's still basically only a variation, a logical extension of the kind of funk James Brown initiated. Music keeps changing. Each generation has to redefine the elements of rhythmic feeling. Things have got to change and we have got to be prepared to recognize those changes."

This reveals a striking capacity for acceptance for someone who once led a band - John Blake, violin, Fareed Haque, guitar, and Mino Cinelu, percussion - which was, on the surface anyway, diametrically opposed to the music we were discussing. They played soft, hypnotic music based on a variety of traditional elements which, Holland says, "stressed the feminine aspect. A certain gentleness, an unaggresive approach which did not go out and punch people in the face and provoke hysteria. I like there to be some calm in the room."

He stopped and then emphasized, a bassist all the way: "It's very important that you do not make me out to be the leader of this group. I put the four people together to begin with, but we were the sum total of our directions. Our strength was diversity, we brought multidimensional diversity to the music. We were all in it together."

Although Miles's "New Jazz Swing" was anything but calm and diverse, Holland considers rap creative when well done and rich and at its best. He tries to "separate the here and now from something that will still be relevant in 50 years." He tends to give optimism the benefit of the doubt:

"Take a Manhattan sidewalk. New York is a concrete city. Yet wherever you find a crack in the concrete, something grows out of it. Maybe it's only weeds, but that sign of nature's urge to create is an expression of life force amidst the barrenness of modern existence."

"Steam also comes out of the cracks in the concrete," I said.

He laughed, and looked at me bemused, as if to say, "if that's the way you choose to look at life," and replied: "That's true. But I think there will always be the need to express nature's positive force. There has never been more or less need, always the same amount. We're battling a lot of negative things at the moment - incredible materialism, for example. There is no lack of obstacles. But we've always had those obstacles.

"I'm an optimist. Because in a way, the more critical things become, the more creativity strives to be expressed. Light can shine brightest in the darkest moments. I don't think we have to worry. A lot of people wish the music was still like it was in the '50s. There's no way that can be. A renewal may not take the form we expect. As artists, we have to be sure to keep an open mind."

Remembering Lord Buckley referring to something "straining the limits of our practiced credulity," I said: "There's a difference between keeping an open mind and liking something just because it's new. People are afraid of being left behind. They feel threatened. If I don't like this music, does that mean I'm losing touch? Does it interest me really, or do I just want to make sure I'm still 'with it?' An 'open' mind can be an empty mind."

"As far as I'm concerned," Holland replied, "an instrument creating sound in a natural unamplified way is going to be more meaningful than a sampled or synthesized sound. But I still play bass-guitar. I played it on a tour with Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny. A composition can be structured for an electric instrument. I played it the last year and a half I was with Miles. It was my first instrument, I started on bass guitar.

"But the sound of an acoustic bass hits me very emotionally. My fingers resonating the strings and the wood responding to that is something very special to me. I like nature, and I like natural things. That's a personal point of view. But you have to try and transcend that. I'm not necessarily critical of that other thing. I may just prefer this particular thing. As long as it's done artistically, that's my only criterion. You have to perceive the intention of the music. Music performs many different functions.

"The relevance of any given musical situation means taking the creative flows of the individual musicians and putting them together in a way that makes sense. One thing I learned from Miles is that when a piece is finished it is only the beginning. Every night we would add another chapter. Songs kept evolving to incredible places. These are the kinds of places I'm looking for. I don't really care what they're called."”

"JACKIE McLEAN: Sugar Free Saxophone" by Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Gerry Mulligan piece in that series. It was published on September 24, 1998 so add 20+ years to any math in the article.

“PARIS - Jackie McLean was looking for the common tone, to be able to move between all 12 tonal centers with total freedom and under complete control. The listener should know nothing about this. In order for this to work, the force must be emotional not technical.

One night, during his two weeks at the Magnetic Terrace here in Paris, he felt he got pretty close to something he's been searching for for a long time. But those breakthroughs come and go and maybe don't really come at all and after a few days had passed he was no longer so sure. Anyway he's still playing and trying.

McLean is among the few remaining evergreens with enough will and force to motivate themselves night after night despite age, a demanding métier, prejudice, tangents and contrary trends. His alto-saxophone style combines the solid texture of Sonny Rollins's tenor and the fluidity of Bud Powell's piano - shorthand, but true enough as far as it goes. His angular-phrased tough, seductive, sound is as unmistakably recognizable as anybody active today. He calls it "sugar free."

Which may or may not have Freudian implications because he grew up on Sugar Hill, once a noble corner in Harlem which then soured into drugs and shoot-outs. "The streets were clean when I was a kid there," he said, at once proud and sour about it.

"Duke Ellington, Nat Cole and Don Redman lived in the neighborhood. People cared about our neighborhood."

McLean, who was born in 1932, heard Charlie Parker at the age of 14 and "the first time that name came out of my mouth I knew at that moment I was going to be a musician." Five years later, he joined Miles Davis.

Looking back, he wondered: "How did I do it that fast?" He was fast and furious in his early 20s. "When I was strung out on dope my horn was in the pawn shop most of the time and I was a most confused and troublesome young man. I was constantly on the street, in jail, or in a hospital kicking a habit.

"The New York police had snatched my cabaret card and I couldn't work the clubs any more except with [Charles] Mingus who used to hire me under an assumed name. [He can be heard already moving between tonal centers on Mingus's record 'Pithecanthropus Erectus' in the '50s.] The thing that saved my life was a Jackie McLean Fan Club started in 1958 by a guy named Jim Harrison. I didn't have a big name or anything but he collected dues and he'd rent a hall once a month and present me in concert."

McLean played the saxophonist - four years at $95 a week - in the first Living Theater production of the "The Connection," an off-Broadway milestone which cast a new perspective on the nature of make-believe.

The junkie hustling the audience in the lobby turned out to be an actor, the hostile woman in the mezzanine was part of the cast. Some of the actors were addicts, but you weren't sure who. Actors playing characters on stage never looked the same again. "I fell in love with theater then and there," McLean said. "Even my saxophone playing became a lot more theatrical after that."

Remembering how lean and mean he looked in those days, like an early James Dean, and seeing him turn 60 with a girth approaching the late Sydney Greenstreet, it was astonishing how the lust to take risks can be, if anything, greater 35 years later. There has never been and there certainly was not now anything approaching fat or phlegmatic about this man's head.

The following is a story about the old days told without punctuation during a run to a pharmacy to buy a cornucopia of homeopathic medicines (similar runs were once made for cough syrup or a lot worse):

"Sonny Rollins and me were sitting in this club and suddenly the door opened and it's Sonny Stitt and he said 'okay I've been waiting for this,' and he had an alto under one arm and a tenor under another and it was like 'High Noon' or something and he said 'you're both hot stuff from New York and you both think you can play well I'll take on both of you up on the killing stand come on get up there on the killing post both of you.'"

Those were tough and competitive times and survival was day-to-day. Stitt did not survive, while McLean and Rollins were still picking up steam, combining honed intelligence with renewed energy at an age when most men are well into retirement.

It may or may not be coincidence, but both had strong wives who managed their careers. McLean said his wife Dolly "stood up when other women would have crumpled, or killed me. For years, she was the one who worked day jobs to keep us and our three kids together. I really owe her."

Both McLean and Rollins also paced themselves by retiring from full-time playing for years during their middle age. Rollins periodically left for such places as India, upstate New York and the Brooklyn Bridge [sic, it was the Williamsburg Bridge] which connects Manhattan and Brooklyn] to meditate. McLean joined the faculty of the highly rated Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford in Connecticut in 1970, and he became chairman of its African-American music department.

The department was established, he had a National Endowment for the Arts grant for his chair and he could afford to bring in guest lecturers when he was away. So he "came back on the scene for real. My original mission is still the same. I intend to try and continue to be significant on the instrument.

Not just 'Jackie McLean, oh I remember him.' But to be at the forefront of the horn. I'm ready to kick the doors down."”

"SONNY ROLLINS : Saxophone Colossus" by Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Sonny Rollins piece in that series. It was published on July 30, 1998 so add 20+ years to any math in the article. 

Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus

“PERUGIA, Italy - Sonny Rollins held or, it sometimes seemed, was held by a press conference during the Umbria Jazz Festival. No fan of the conferential format, he had obviously resolved to be patient with impertinent questions.

Asked how he feels about the growing number of jazz festivals, he answered with the evident: ''They are putting a lot of musicians to work. This is a good thing.''

Rollins was one of the monsters, a quick-witted player with big ears and sturdy roots. More than a spinner of tales, he was an inventor of improvisational language. His robust sound is an immediately recognizable franchise. History, however, has at least temporarily passed him by. You can sense an underlying bitterness along with his considerable intelligence and deep-felt spirituality (he studied in India and Japan for three years).

He adjusted his dark glasses, reflected for a beat, and added: ''We try and make it easier for our children so they won't have to pay the dues we did. This may hurt them in the long run. It has occurred to me that maybe young people are not suffering enough. Don't get me wrong, I'm just saying you reap what you sow. There are so many distractions - Internet, video games, CD-ROM, TV. It's become easier to escape responsibility. As you may have guessed, I'm an anti-technology person.'' He drained a glass of water and said: ''So shoot me.''

He lives with his wife on an isolated farm in upstate New York. Most days he retires to his studio to practice, compose and meditate while she handles the business and the necessities of life. He limits his appearances; this concert in Perugia was rather an event. He and his wife remained mostly in their hotel room, though, relying on room service. From what he said and the way he said it, it would seem that he is more concerned with being in touch with himself than with contemporary music or events.

''Too self-critical'' to listen to his own albums, in recent years he hasn't listened to much music by others either: ''There's so much music in my mind, there's no room for more. I'm trying to create my own music.''

Asked about whether he often thinks about death, the 65-year-old ''Saxophone Colossus'' said he believes in reincarnation. He is trying to live a better life this time around. ''Death is easy,'' he said. ''Living is hard.''

While on the subject, he cited the fabled 1950s quartet with Max Roach, Clifford Brown and Richie Powell (Bud's brother) and said he had been ''terribly shattered'' when Richie Powell and Brown were killed in a car crash. He has summoned Brown's spirit for inspiration ever since. In high school he rehearsed with Thelonious Monk after class, and he played with Miles Davis while still in his teens. He summons their spirits too.

''I think about these people all the time. Since I was blessed to have played with them, and since I am one of the few players from that era remaining, I feel a responsibility to keep my music on as high a level as possible in their honor. So I have an added burden. I must represent them as well as myself.''

''Every now and then,'' he said, he dreams about John Coltrane, which is interesting because, while not exactly competitors, they were rivals. Saxophonists felt somehow obliged to make a choice between them, to sound like one or the other; like the choice between Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young in the '30s.

Folklore has it that Lester ''defeated'' Hawkins in a cutting contest during a jam session in Kansas City. True or not, after that Lester became the prime influence on the following generations (Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Branford Marsalis). One of the few successors to have successfully tamed and knit Hawkins's full tone, breathy vibrato and songlike phrases into bebop, Rollins suffered a similar ''defeat'' after recording the classic ''Tenor Madness'' with Coltrane in 1956 (their only track together). Of course all of this is oversimplified. But still.

Trane's ''sheets of sound'' were more modern, free-wheeling and seductive. Rollins continued to develop, restructure and recapitulate themes - very 19th century and very hard to do, like some sort of improvised sonata form. At the same time, as his luck would have it, there was a general decline of melody in popular music. Rock songs were often mere riffs; Miles Davis pared melodies down to three or four notes; melody played no part whatsoever in rap. Sound-bit listeners did not have the patience to wait for melody to recapitulate.

And somewhere along the line, Rollins lost his consistency. Now he'll do what Sonny Rollins used to do, but often overdo it. His melodic fragments can be more fragmented then melodic. Still capable of producing goose-bumps, he can no longer be relied on for it. On stage in Umbria, for example, he took the audience on a tour of Calypso hell in the eye of a hurricane of self-parody on his hit ''St. Thomas'' before reaching full prime-time stride on ''Long Ago And Far Away.''

Meanwhile, back at the conference. Instead of replying ''none of your business,'' he decided to deal with a question about his political preferences; about Bob Dole passing up the opportunity to address the NAACP:

''The problem is beyond racism. It's consumerism. We are destroying our planet to acquire more material goods. Racism is part of this - more goods for me, less for you. And as a black person, racism affects me personally. But consumerism affects my descendents and the entire planet.

''Politicians are only concerned with immediate growth and profit. I don't think I'll vote this year. This business about the lesser of two evils is out of date. I don't want to vote for the evil of two lessers. I'll make my contribution with music. I think it is possible for jazz to reach people on a deeper level than entertainment. We should work to make it more than merely diversionary.''

He finally snapped in response to a question about O.J. Simpson: ''What does that have to do with anything?''

"ROY HAYNES : No Beats to Waste" - Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Roy Haynes piece in that series. It was published on October 29, 1998 so add 20+ years to any math in the article. 

Roy Haynes: No Beats to Waste

"Stan Getz liked my beat, he loved to play with Roy Haynes," says Roy Haynes, who likes the sound of his Third Person.

Positive subjective judgments sound more objective from that perspective. In his case, the sound itself implies stature. Lester Young told him: "You should be called the Royal of Haynes." Roy Haynes is the only drummer to have played with (not all at the same time) Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

Others also tend to refer to him with both names, running them together, syncopated - Royhaynes, accent on the "Ro." It sounds like him. Dorothy Donegan says he's getting to look more like Count Basie drummer Jo Jones every day. Which means to say royal, clean, crispy.

His discreet, flexible tatoo controls the time and space and the dynamic of whatever formation he's part of. He's compact, energy-packed, confident. He chooses his shots. He's a warrior, the battle plan is his: "Remember Town Hall a few years ago? You were there. I put Michel Petrucciani in the pocket. I'm known for putting cats in the pocket. That's what I do." (The "pocket" is the place where the pool-ball of tempo should be shot.)

It started in 1944 at the age of 18 with Frankie Newton and Sabby Lewis in his hometown Boston. His style eventually became so pervasively subversive that, without being known as a leader, or even a "star," he is behind certain key elements common to an eclectic list of people including Art Pepper, Sarah Vaughan, Chick Corea, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy and Gary Burton (Larry Coryell, Steve Swallow and Roy Haynes were the rhythm section for Burton's mid-'60s groundbreaking jazz-rock fusion efforts). From 1961 to 1965, he was Elvin Jones's principal substitute with the John Coltrane Quartet.

Trane described his time as "spreading, permeating." Leaving Charlie Parker to form his own band, Max Roach advised his boss: "Hire Roy Haynes."

The British critic Brian Priestly wrote: "Roy manages to be intelligently insistent and provocative in accompaniment without overpowering the soloist." Jazz Hot magazine put him on its cover when he arrived in Paris in 1954 with Sarah Vaughan. (Roy Haynes was impressed with a culture interested in the drummer, not the star.) "Roy Haynes should be immortalized," said Sonny Rollins. "I can dig his statue somewhere, like the one of Sydney Bechet in Antibes."

Although universally acknowledged as a prime mover by soloists, leaders, critics and other drummers, the general public has never truly appreciated his stature. When I asked him why he thought that was, he looked at me with astonishment: "You think I'm not appreciated? Man, you must be getting out of touch, living here in Paris.

"I was giving a lecture for a workshop in Massachusetts and when they announced 'Roy Haynes,' the kids shouted - kids are so hip these days - they shouted 'Yeah yeah yeah' and cheered and applauded. They just went crazy. I got a standing ovation for just standing there. I hadn't even played yet. It just happened. Boom!"

After hearing him in Chicago one night, a reporter from Down Beat magazine said he didn't know he could play like that. Haynes did not consider this a compliment: "You know, I'd been doing it for a long time. And he wanted to know where I'd learned it. Man, a lot of drummers copped my important stuff. I was there first."

He had the distinct impression that the reporter was surprised he could do an Elvin Jones impersonation so well. But Roy Haynes knew for a fact that Elvin had been listening to him play that way back in the '50s, before anybody else was doing whatever you call it - "spreading the rhythm," "suggesting the beat," "elastic," "melodic," "permeating."

This is the way the most advanced drummers like Jeff (Tain) Watts (with the Marsalis brothers) and Jack DeJohnette play now. Any credit withheld from him is not the drummers' fault, they all admit their debt to Roy Haynes. But it's been going on so long and it just got to him this time. He couldn't resist telling the reporter: "I think you should talk to Elvin about that."

"I'm an uncrowned king," he says, head held high. "I don't have to win any polls to know that." He does not win many. "I'm cool, I know. I've been to the mountaintop."

Along the way, he began to dress like royalty - custom-made suits, Italian shoes, sharp hats. Esquire magazine put him on their best-dressed list. Along with Miles Davis, one of only two African Americans, and only two jazzmen. The New York Times referred to him as "the dapper drummer." he started to suspect that he was better known for his clothes than his drumming. It got to be a "mixed blessing, still is. If I have a hole in my sock, some girl will say: 'Hey, I thought you were supposed to be well dressed.'

"I have a 10-speed bike, quite a few grand-children, and two Doberman pinschers. I have an original 1974 Malcolm Bricklin car. You know, he was De Lorean's buddy. I win prizes with it. I live in Freeport on the south shore of Long Island, not far from where Guy Lombardo used to live. I don't work a lot. I don't have to. I've made myself comfortable. It's good for the mind to play music, but now people are asking me to back up singers and do all-star tours with a whole bunch of horn players. That stuff is not good for the mind. I need time to think and dream. I'm a dreamer.

"Some agent called and asked me to lead a sort of Art Blakey ghost band, he even suggested I get some of the guys from the Jazz Messengers. His point is it would make a lot of money, and he does have a point. But why should I do that? It doesn't mean anything. This cat has got to be joking. Man, I played with Bird, with Trane, I played with Billie Holiday. Art Blakey used to admire me.

My career is catching up with me. I call my own shots. I only play on Roy Haynes dates. I'm the leader. I do what I want to do when I want to do it. When I play, it has to mean something. Let it float like a balloon. I'm talking about jazz. Other people did it, but Roy Haynes did it and did it and did it.

"I don't like to pin compliments on myself, but..." Yes he does: "...But I'm one of the last innovators from the '40s who's still out there saying something new. I couldn't really be myself with Trane or Getz because my job was to accompany them. They came first, that was my role. And it was cool. They didn't need a drummer juggling between his right and left feet and hands getting in their way. But my kids are grown up, my mortgage is paid and now I don't have to worry about making anybody sound good but myself.

"I have a good band now. Young guys, they play the way I like. Anybody else wants me to play with them, it has to be somebody I respect, somebody who wants to take risks like I do. Guys like Pat Metheny" on "Question And Answer," with Dave Holland, bass, Geffen Records. Dig it. This is my religion. It's what I believe in. I don't waste beats. Roy Haynes has no beats to waste."”

Dave Frishberg Obituary by Gordon Jack

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Gordon Jack is a frequent contributor to the Jazz Journal and a very generous friend in allowing JazzProfiles to 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 Retrospective and he also developed the Gerry Mulligan discography in Raymond Horricks’ book Gerry Mulligan’s Ark.

The following article was published in the November 23, 2021 edition of Jazz Journal. 

For more information and subscriptions please visit www.jazzjournal.co.uk

“Long before he became recognised as a high quality song-writer, Dave Frishberg had served time in the fast-lane of the jazz world accompanying Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day, Ben Webster, Gene Krupa, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. He celebrated those days with his 1992 recording of I Want To Be A Sideman which opens with a satirical nod to In The Mood. Rosemary Clooney with Count Basie and Susannah McCorkle both covered it a little later.

He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on 23 March 1933 and during the war years he listened to recordings by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Count Basie and Bing Crosby. Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson became very influential too but his horizons were really expanded when he first heard Charlie Parker’s Ornithology. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, he served two years in the military before moving to New York in 1957. He began working at a local radio station (WNEW) writing continuity material for $65 a week. Tiring of his day-job he joined Kai Winding’s four-trombone group which played “slick, smooth arrangements” mostly by Winding. In the early sixties Blossom Dearie introduced him to Bob Dorough which resulted in a life-long friendship. Their first collaboration was I’m Hip with Dave’s lyrics (which came first) and Dorough’s music.

In 1962 he wrote Peel Me A Grape. He was working with Dick Haymes’s wife the glamorous Fran Jeffries at the time who wanted something new along the lines of Whatever Lola Wants. She thought Dave’s original was cute but she declined to use it. Anita O’Day liked it and she introduced it on her album with Cal Tjader. It has been recorded more than 80 times and possibly the most famous version is by Diana Krall who gave it her seal of approval in 1992. The title actually comes from a Mae West quote in her 1933 film I’m No Angel. From 1962 to 1964 he worked with Gene Krupa’s quartet at the Metropole and on one disastrous occasion the great Benny Goodman sat in. Turning to Dave he said “Sweet Lorraine in G”. Benny started in F and things went downhill pretty fast after that. He had a happier time with Ben Webster who told him he was one of the few pianists “who could emulate Ellington’s time-feel”. 

In the early sixties he began a ten year engagement as one of the house-pianists at the Half Note – “the hippest place in town”. He worked there with Webster, Roy Eldridge, Richie Kamuca and Jimmy Rushing along with the Al Cohn and Zoot Sims team who frequently held court at the club. Frishberg said at the time “if you were a piano player doing jazz work in New York in those years, you couldn’t ask for a more nourishing, more rewarding experience than to play with Al and Zoot.”

In1971 he moved to Los Angeles to work on an NBC television show titled The Funny Side hosted by Gene Kelly. He was also invited by Bob Dorough to provide new material for an ABC educational series called Schoolhouse Rock. Dave wrote several themes for the show including the ever popular I’m Just A Bill sung by Jack Sheldon. The latter might be the most well known of all his compositions because it was frequently heard on the show which ran from 1973 to 1984 and 1993 to 1996. He wrote jingles and worked on shows like Charlie’s Angels and Mary Tyler Moore Survives The Seventies as well as finding time to travel with Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. As a composer of memorable themes these were particularly productive years. His love of baseball was reflected in titles like Van Lingle Mungo, The Sports Page, Play Ball, Dodger Blue and Matty. He had issues of Baseball Magazine dating back to 1911 and in 1984 he became a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). He once said “the older I get, the more I’m convinced that everything really used to be better” and that outlook was revealed in nostalgic themes like Sweet Kentucky Ham, One Horse Town and The Dear Departed Past – each a deeply felt hymn to the past. His own favourite was one of his lesser known songs You Are There, which was a collaboration with Johnny Mandel. His albums Dave Frishberg Songbook Volume 1 (1981), Dave Frishberg Songbook Volume 2 (1982), Live At Vine Street (1984) and Can’t Take You Nowhere (1986) were all nominated for Grammy Awards.

After battling illness for several years Dave Frishberg died at a hospital in Portland, Oregon on 17 November 2021. He is survived by his wife April Magnusson and two sons.”

"Max Roach From Hip Hop to Bebop" - Mike Zwerin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The late Paris-based jazz musician and International Herald Tribune writer Mike Zwerin posted a 41-week series entitled Sons of Miles to Culturekiosque Jazznet. In this series, Zwerin looks back at Miles Davis and the leading jazz musicians he influenced in a series of interviews and personal reminiscences. Here is the Max piece in that series. It was published on January 14, 1999 so add 20+ years to any math in the article. 

Max Roach From Hip Hop to Bebop

“On July 14, 1988, Professor Max Roach, who has been called the Duke Ellington of the drums, stopped by his office during a lunch break while conducting his summer Jazz Studies Program for the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He found a telephone message from a certain Dr. Hope in Chicago.

Roach did not know anybody named Hope in Chicago. He had been negotiating to appear at the Chicago Jazz Festival and he thought that it must have been something to do with that. But Dr. Hope said: "Professor Roach, you have been awarded a $372,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. All we need is your Social security number."

"I'm still in a state of shock," Roach said a month later in his upper West Side apartment overlooking Central Park. "I didn't even apply. There was no warning. They don't tell you why they chose you. And they won't say who was on the committee."

The John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation awarded 31 fellowships that year. The smallest was $150,000. Roach's figure was close to the biggest. Former recipients included the composer Milton Babbitt, choreographer Merce Cunningham, poet John Ashbery and writer Irving Howe.

The award is paid over five years and passed on the recipient's heirs should he or she die before the period is over. No reports or projects are required. Nominees, according to the foundation brochure, should "meet rigorous standards of excellence in their work, well beyond professional competence, even if such work is in its earliest stages. They must show great promise for future work. Although committee evaluation has to be based on achievement, the fellowship is not intended to be a reward but rather to foster new accomplishment... to provide hitherto unavailable opportunities."

An extraordinarily fit 64, Roach had been creating his own opportunities with remarkable resourcefulness. Building on the innovations of Kenny Clarke, he became the measure of excellence for bebop drumming. He worked with Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and co-led a legendary quartet with the trumpeter Clifford Brown.

He rendered obsolete the old joke about a jazz quartet being "three musicians and a drummer." The critic Rafi Zabor wrote: "Over no other instrument has the influence of one man been as decisive as Roach's over drums for the past 30-odd years."

Roach explains the philosophy behind it: "I always resented the role of a drummer as nothing more than a subservient figure. The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of the instrument."

In recent years he had worked solo, in duo, with his quartet, with a "double quartet" (four strings added) and with his percussion ensemble, M'Boom, and he wrote for and performed with multimedia projects.

Since he had already managed to do all this within, or despite, the capitalist system, you could wonder what kind of five-year plan he had for the additional $75,000 a year.

He explained by way of a brief biography: "My family moved from South Carolina to Bed-Stuy [the Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto in Brooklyn] in 1928. Although the crash came a year later, and although the people were poor and disenfranchised, they had a lot of pride. Nobody was slick, everybody was honest. People went to church.

"I used to take musical instruments home from elementary school. There were some music teachers there - we all learned instruments. A lot of us got started in public schools. Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, for example. But now there are no more music teachers in public elementary schools. It's like (Senator) Moynihan said, 'benign neglect.' Just let it rot and fester.

"I'd like to use some of the MacArthur prestige and money to at least begin some of the statistical research necessary to present a plan to the city fathers to build a kind of cultural complex in Bed-Stuy. I'd like to build what I call an 'oasis.' It should be a pleasure to look at and to be in. I'd like to give something back to that community. Also, I'd like to have the time to work on my autobiography."

Roach is many things besides a great drummer: Civil, civic-minded, generous, healthy, intelligent, literate are appropriate adjectives. He said: "I've been through the whole mill. I've done everything everybody else did. I don't know if it was my parents prayers or what, but I gave up everything a long time ago. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I'm trying to take care of myself in my old age."

There was an ironic twist to the last sentence because in no way could he be described as old. There was also a hint of an unconscious plea not to be considered corny because he does not smoke or drink. You wondered if there wasn't somebody somewhere who wanted to make a film about a jazz giant who has not died some sort of tragic early death? He just came into a great deal of money - that might grab a producer somewhere.

After Roach had taught full time in Amherst from 1973 to 1979, Bruce Lundvall, president of CBS Records, who had just signed Dexter Gordon and Freddie Hubbard, called Roach and told him, "The water looks pretty good in New York now." So Roach went there and recorded two albums for CBS, both of which, unfortunately, "fell flat on their faces."

But he was weary of only relating to students, no matter how talented; he wanted to deal with his professional peers and they were in New York. He became an "adjunct professor" and proceeded to horrify the sort of people who hold on to the past for dear life when he recorded duos with the avant-garde musicians Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton.

"You used to play with Charlie Parker. How can you work with those guys?" he was asked by those who should know better.

"I answered this way," Roach said. "A person like an Anthony Braxton is more like Charlie Parker than a person who plays like Charlie Parker. Bird was creative and different and looked inside himself. He knew what Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter and the rest of them had laid down. That was the foundation. Bird built on that foundation.

"Now you have people like Phil Woods who preserve the tradition. And then there are people who push forward, who perpetuate the continuum by trying out things. Cecil Taylor is more like Art Tatum than a guy who plays like Tatum. It may not always come off, but that's what creativity's about. Anyway, by now people accept me for what I am."

In 1985, Roach won an Obie award for his music written for three Sam Shepard plays revived at New York's La Mama theater. After that Roach collaborated with the choreographer Alvin Ailey on "Survivors," a tribute to Winnie and Nelson Mandela.

Roach was preparing to record with the son of an old friend from Bed-Stuy, a young rapper by the name of Fab V Freddie. Roach considered rap "what took place after they removed the cultural enrichment programs from all the Bed-Stuys of the country." Through rap he began to putter with electronics, and he has bought a computer. He wanted to call the record "From Hip-Hop to Bebop."

Or was it the other way around? It can be hard to keep track of Max Roach and that's not only his charm but his great strength.”