QUOTATIONS Discussions - Pittsburgh Jazz Network2024-03-28T09:44:37Zhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/group/Quotations/forum?feed=yes&xn_auth=no"No One Could Tell You How To Play"tag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2018-11-15:1992552:Topic:4406772018-11-15T03:55:36.113ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<div class="_xlr"><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_5beceac778f883e07845398"><br></br><br></br>By Jerry Granelli<br></br><br></br>"I was born in 1940 so I remember when the Tenderloin had music and when Market Street had all those clubs. My dad was a drummer, not a professional musician but he just loved the instrument.<span> </span><span class="text_exposed_show"><br></br><br></br>I remember Jimbo's Bop City but I also remember Bimbo's 365 Club. The Italian Village, just all these night clubs. I grew…</span></div>
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<div class="_xlr"><div id="id_5beceac778f883e07845398" class="text_exposed_root text_exposed"><br/><br/>By Jerry Granelli<br/><br/>"I was born in 1940 so I remember when the Tenderloin had music and when Market Street had all those clubs. My dad was a drummer, not a professional musician but he just loved the instrument.<span> </span><span class="text_exposed_show"><br/><br/>I remember Jimbo's Bop City but I also remember Bimbo's 365 Club. The Italian Village, just all these night clubs. I grew up in those nightclubs.<span> </span><br/><br/><a href="https://www.facebook.com/julian.priester?__tn__=%2CdK%2AF-R&eid=ARCTazKBWbL7zEWmbNoGKHlM8by_3zVhcP-GoN7-88sVYmyo75T3FL2z8PqCME_gTQuyr8IRkUaRFm6s">Julian Priester</a><span> </span>once said, "you would start playing on a Friday Night and you wouldn't stop till Monday Night. That was the goal. Jimbo's Bop City was the Mecca with Ronnie's Soulville and "The Plantation."<br/><br/>Jimbo's started at two in the morning. At it's purest form it was a place where you could go and play because you weren't getting paid. No one could tell you how to play. It was a melting pot of what became jazz music.<span> </span><br/><br/>It was the education system, it was harsh and there was a pecking order. You knew where you stood. When I first went to Bop City I stood around till 6 in the morning and I would play with the Dregs of humanity. Because that's basically the level I was playing at.<span> </span><br/><br/>I went to places like the Coo Coo Clun" and I would get a couple of beats in and someone would just take the sticks away. That was harsh but I didn't give up. At it's corrupted form it was just like anything else. I prefer to remember it for what it produced and it was community. It was a real sense of community.<span> </span><br/><br/>Dick Berk and I were in High School together along with another great drummer Eddie<span> </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/eyla.moore?__tn__=%2CdK%2AF-R&eid=ARAb_BGRP792TWqJok-SXJTe_8Ytyhs4H0OEqMsRhbg6ddE5f9DSFNCzkfS-6grIf3ENFzVgzK-bu6jj">Moore</a>. There was only one guy that was going to get to play. We were rooting for each other. Trying to cut each other's throat and trying to support each other too."</span></div>
<span class="fbPhotoTagList" id="fbPhotoSnowliftTagList"><span class="fcg">— with<span> </span><span id="fbPhotosPhotoTaglistShort"><span class="fbPhotoTagListTag tagItem"><a class="taggee" href="https://www.facebook.com/haji.ahkba">Haji Ahkba</a></span>,<span> </span><span class="fbPhotoTagListTag tagItem"><a class="taggee" href="https://www.facebook.com/michael.spoerke" id="js_63j">Michael Spoerke</a></span>,<span> </span><span class="fbPhotoTagListTag tagItem"><a class="taggee" href="https://www.facebook.com/antoinehervejazz">Antoine Hervé</a></span>and<span> </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=823600474383152&set=pob.1062920601&type=3&theater#">39 others</a></span>.</span></span><br />
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<div class="_4p3v" id="fbPhotoSnowliftViews"></div> Ellis Marsalis Interview - 2002: Part Sixtag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2017-01-15:1992552:Topic:3991122017-01-15T06:21:33.465ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Ellis Marsalis (#3):</strong></span></p>
<p>TP: As I understand it, it would sound like your two cornerstones were Bud Powell and Oscar Peterson.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Actually, not Bud so much. I got to Bud later. But Oscar Peterson was the first major influence on piano. See, the thing about it is, I was primarily a band piano player. I didn’t study piano the way Oscar and Bud studied piano, so I came into it playing piano in a jazz group…</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Ellis Marsalis (#3):</strong></span></p>
<p>TP: As I understand it, it would sound like your two cornerstones were Bud Powell and Oscar Peterson.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Actually, not Bud so much. I got to Bud later. But Oscar Peterson was the first major influence on piano. See, the thing about it is, I was primarily a band piano player. I didn’t study piano the way Oscar and Bud studied piano, so I came into it playing piano in a jazz group and sort of filling in the blanks. So I didn’t really develop that pianistic philosophy that people develop when the study the instrument, like a Keith Jarrett did, he had all these recitals… You learn to play the piano with the objectives that go along with the history of that instrument.</p>
<p>TP: With you, it had more to do with the function of playing in bands and combos. Did you play piano in rhythm-and-blues bands also, or is that something you did more as a tenor player?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: It was more as a tenor player. By the time I got out of college, looking back at it, the scene here was changing a lot. This was in the mid-’50s, and I started practicing and working on learning some pieces… At that time, Clifford and Max was a great influence on us. Because I was then playing with Edward Blackwell and either Peter Badie or Richard Payne on bass, and Nathaniel Perrilat. But we never really succeeded in getting a trumpet player to round out the group. So a lot of times we would play those pieces just quartet-wise. But it was still essentially like a band thing, because that’s where I was concentrating my energies.</p>
<p>TP: When did that band with Ed Blackwell begin?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: It’s really hard to say. Because it evolved more than it began. Edward was a cat who always was interested in playing. He might call me up and say, “Why don’t you come over?” There was a tenor player named Clarence Thomas, who later became known as Luqman. He would go over to Edward’s house, and then I’d go over, when I first started trying to put the piano together, and we’d play things and work on stuff. We didn’t have a bass player. Eventually, Harold Battiste started writing some original pieces, and we just would get whatever bass player we could find and started playing some of that material.</p>
<p>TP: This is while you’re at Dillard.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: And after.</p>
<p>TP: So it begins around ’52-’53, like that.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. ’52-’53 was sort of the beginning of the end when it came to the rhythm-and-blues thing with me. When I look back at it, I realize that the whole rhythm-and-blues concept was changing entirely, and I was not a part of the people who were doing it. In the earlier years, in the 1940s, see, the rhythm-and-blues catered primarily not only to the singer, but there was a lot of blues being played. Big Joe Turner was singing blues, Louis Jordan was singing blues, Wynonie Harris… There was a lot of blues singing going on. So if you were playing in one of those bands, essentially your function was to deal with that in playing blues. You’d learn a lot of shuffles if you were a piano player or guitar player or drummer in the rhythm section. There’d be a lot of shuffles going on, and you had to learn that. If you were a saxophone player, usually that’s who would play the solos. And if you played the backgrounds, they were usually riffs… It was a rather simplistic kind of thing. Everything about it was primarily functional. It wasn’t a band thing, like a string quartet gets together.</p>
<p>TP: Or a bebop combo.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, even with those. The bebop combos got together pretty much the same way. You had to go out and find somebody who could play the music. You see, there was no training ground officially where you could learn to play the instrument that emanated from a specific tradition, and that there were formal instructions involved — which is the reason why I mentioned the string quartet. So this is basically how that whole thing went. And if you were playing rhythm-and-blues, you were playing rhythm-and-blues because you had a gig. Pure and simple. Otherwise than that…</p>
<p>TP: There would be no reason to play it.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. And there was virtually no real opportunity for you to learn it, unless you were actually playing. The other performance-oriented situation was in the church, and sometimes in the earlier years, if you were playing in the church, it was advisable to conceal the fact that you might be playing elsewhere. I didn’t have that problem, because I didn’t play in the church. But for the most part, a study of that period of time in terms of jazz, is a lot more about the communal aspect of the way the musicians lived than it is about any formal study.</p>
<p>TP: Are you saying that as a general principle, or are you saying that about New Orleans?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I’m saying it about New Orleans because I’m from here, and when I talk to other people, essentially it was the same thing where they were. In other words, there were lots and lots of people who studied music, but there were very little opportunities to really study jazz music.</p>
<p>TP: Unless you were in New York or Chicago…</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Even if you were in New York or Chicago. I mean, you didn’t do that. I mean, if you were Herbie Hancock, you were playing classical music. Herbie played with the Chicago Symphony when he was 11 years old. Or if you could study with Walter Dyett or Major Clark Smith before then. But if you talk to, for example, Benny Goodman and Milt Hinton, they both went to the same classical music teacher. Because the Judge was a violinist. He switched to bass because he couldn’t get no work.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Ellis Marsalis (WKCR–Out To Lunch) – (8-5-95):</strong></span></p>
<p>[MUSIC: Ellis/Branford/Tain/Hurst, “L’il Boy Man” (1994); E. Marsalis/R. Brown/B. Higgins, “Swinging At The Haven” (1992)]</p>
<p>TP: I’d like to start from the beginnings, your musical background. I gather your family had a place in New Orleans which was a gathering place for musicians, where musicians played, or is this incorrect?</p>
<p>EM: No. It makes for wonderful mythology, but it’s really not true! My father was in business. He had a motel. And I succeeded in convincing him (this was after I had gotten out of the Service; I had spent a couple of years in the Marines) to allow me to take the house that we had been living in, and turn it into a club. Because I had fantasized that operating a club wasn’t really that difficult. You know, so that I could have the band and play. Well, I found out that none of that was true, that either you’re going to play music or you’re going to operate a club. You’re not really going to do both of those and do either of those well. So I was in business about six months.</p>
<p>TP: Ooh!</p>
<p>EM: [LAUGHS] And from that came the last selection, “Swinging At The Haven.” The Music Haven was the name of the club. Harold Battiste, who is currently one of my colleagues at the University of New Orleans, had been instrumental in developing AFO Records. One of their initial jazz projects was to record some of the local musicians, of which I was one, doing some of our own music, and playing jazz as opposed to some of the other things that the label was recording. They had had a very big success with a recording of Barbara George singing “I Know,” and there were a few other R&B type things that they were doing. So Harold thought for posterity we should really record these people. And that boxed set from 1956 to 1966 is the result of Harold Battiste. Now Harold is slowly reissuing a lot of things on CD. But it’s still the same old shoestring operation, so he’s got to piecemeal it here and there. But it’s coming along.</p>
<p>TP: Did you start playing the piano very young? And how did you go about it? Was it lessons, or through the family? What was your path into the music?</p>
<p>EM: Well, I started playing the clarinet when I was about 11. In fact, it was around the same time that I met Alvin. We were in elementary school. I started to play tenor saxophone in high school, somewhere around a sophomore, I think, in high school, because the tenor saxophone was the rage instrument for reed players in rhythm-and-blues, and we were playing a lot of rhythm-and-blues in those days.</p>
<p>TP: What years are we talking about?</p>
<p>EM: 1948, 1949, around that time. But I was always interested in jazz. I had had the chance to hear the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band in 1949 in the spring, the one where he was doing “Things To Come” and “That’s Earl, Brother” and “52nd Street Theme,” I mean, that screaming, brand-new Bebop that was coming on the scene. And man, that whole experience really just took me out.</p>
<p>TP: They came through New Orleans.</p>
<p>EM: Yeah, they came through New Orleans. And it was really… I can’t really describe it. I had a chance to talk with Diz about that. But it was really a tremendous experience. Because I knew when I heard that band that this was really what I wanted to do. Man, that was it, what those guys were doing on that stage. I was about 14 or 15 then. I had started piano lessons, but I was not that serious about it. I just liked to play. But I was mostly concentrating on tenor saxophone. So when I got out of high school and decided to go to college, I decided to be a music major.</p>
<p>I had been studying with a really great piano teacher. Of course, studying piano at that time either meant that you were learning from a mentor in the church that you went to or you were learning from someone who was either in your family, or a friend of the family that would teach you the tradition of the music according to earlier styles, Stride or what have — or you just studied with a piano teacher, and the piano teachers was basically just teaching European music, formal approaches to European music. The other two I didn’t have. I wasn’t playing in the church, which is to my regret, and I didn’t know anybody who was really playing piano from a traditional jazz point of view. So I gravitated towards the two areas that were closest to me, Rhythm-and-Blues, tenor saxophone playing, and Jazz.</p>
<p>There was not as much of a line drawn… Well, what I mean is, the difference between Jazz and Rhythm-and-Blues was extremely narrow at that time, because most of the same people that was playing, Sonny Stitt… Charlie Parker had been with Jay McShann’s band. I don’t know, but I think Monk somehow avoided all of that. I don’t know if there’s any record of Monk ever playing in that idiom. Maybe so.</p>
<p>TP: I think he traveled with some traveling preachers in the Carolinas in his teens, but after that I don’t think so.</p>
<p>EM: Yeah. But for the most part, that’s what I gravitated towards. And the solos at that time were basically influenced by religious music and secular music, which were sort of like opposite sides of the same coin. I was living in what was then a racially segregated society, so it became inclusive. The experience was all-inclusive in terms of economics, in terms of social interaction, in terms of education. All of that was basically within the American-African community. So we would play music that was reflected… We sort of bounced off of each other.</p>
<p>And the newer recordings of… Well, the recordings of the new music, which would be called Bebop, was coming out at least on a monthly basis, and they were all like 78 records. So you would go the record store, and there was sort of like a phone chain. There was a lady in the record store, I can’t think of her name, but anyway, she would call a couple of people; you know, I’ve got a new record in by Charlie Parker or Miles or whoever it was. And we would, in turn, call people and say, “Hey, there’s some new stuff in,” and we’d go down to the record shop. It was a place called the Bop Shop, and we would go down and listen to it and buy it, and then start working on the solos.</p>
<p>That was an integral part of the learning process. It was not within the context of the system. The schools were not amenable to that at all. So…</p>
<p>TP: Was there any jazz in your high school band at all, or was it all marching band and brass orchestra type music?</p>
<p>EM: It was mostly marching band, John Philip Souza marches, (?)Ed Bagley(?) marches. And there was a group in one high school that I went to that was what you call a swing band. Now, the swing band played those stock arrangements. There was stock arrangements, like “9:20 Special” and Harry James’ “Back-Beat Boogie” and most of that. But there was nowhere to really get at the whole idea of soloing. Because unless you could figure it out for yourself, there was nobody there to do it. And even the swing bands were sort of tolerated. It wasn’t something that the music teachers looked upon with great favor.</p>
<p>However, New Orleans was a little different (I have to say a little different, because I don’t know about the rest of the country) in that there were several music teachers who were jazz players in previous generations. Some of the older guys were teachers. So if you happened to be fortunate to get one of those… It reminds me of what Eddie Harris used to tell me about Walter Dyett, and a lot of people talked about him in Chicago. And there was another band teacher in Chicago that Milt Hinton used to talk about…</p>
<p>TP: Clark Smith, Major Smith, who had the Chicago Defender band.</p>
<p>EM: Yes. So as time went on, we began to get less and less of the kinds of fundamentals that produced the level of musicianship that was being produced at that time, especially within the context of a jazz idiom. Invariably what would happen, you would begin to get people who would study the more formal approaches to European music, and then try and figure out how to make those application, people like Phineas Newborn — and Charles Lloyd, too. When I met Charles Lloyd, Charles was at USC. I think he was a freshman at USC, and I was in the Marine Corps.</p>
<p>But that was basically what I had done, was to kind of piecemeal some things, and become a music major at Dillard University. Which was very standard.</p>
<p>TP: Describe the music scene in New Orleans when you were a teenager, and going into college. Were you doing little gigs when you were playing the saxophone and clarinet in high school, for instance? And what kind of gigs would they be?</p>
<p>EM: Oh, yeah, we were still playing some dances. The YWCA was one of the places that we would play dances. And different schools. We would go to a lot of different high schools and just play dances with the local R&B pieces, “Blues For The Red Bar,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Roy Brown’s piece, Joe Liggins’ stuff, all of the people who was doing the dance music of the day. What Jazz there was going on, I didn’t know anything about at all. Especially the Trad, especially traditional jazz, I didn’t know anything about that.</p>
<p>TP: You weren’t involved in the Second Line in any way as a kid?</p>
<p>EM: Not as a kid, no. I didn’t know anything about that. So eventually, what I would start to do in the high school was play those rhythm-and-blues solos. Because I could hear those. Also it was an interesting thing, if you could play the dance music of the day, then you could get the attention of some girls, you see! Because I was too small for football, too slow for track, too slow for basketball — and there was no future in that in those days anyway. So when I realized that I could learn these solos, then I said, “Oh, okay, this will work!” So I started concentrating on some of that. Eventually, I would get real serious about jazz, and then found out that nobody wanted to hear that! But by then, you’re stuck, like a habit.</p>
<p>TP: Who were the pianists whose solos you were emulating once you started getting more serious about Jazz and more advanced?</p>
<p>EM: Actually, you know, it’s funny. I never did transcribe any solos at all. I listened to Oscar Peterson a lot. But for some reason, I never did really try to play those. I’m not sure what it was. I mean, I would always try and play whatever I heard. But the transcription was not something that I was doing on piano.</p>
<p>Now, when I first started trying to play the solos on saxophone, I remember there was a recording of Charlie Parker, “Parker’s Mood,” and I tried to play all the solos on there on tenor saxophone, John Lewis’s solo on piano and Charlie Parker’s solo — but there was a lot of Charlie Parker’s solo that I couldn’t get! All of those recordings were really short then. You know, this was long before Trane started making those LP’s. In fact, they didn’t even have LP’s at the time!</p>
<p>So I started essentially like that. Eventually, when I was old enough to go to the local nightclubs…</p>
<p>TP: Who was playing in the nightclubs then?</p>
<p>EM: Well, most of the local musicians.</p>
<p>TP: Name some names.</p>
<p>EM: There was one club called the Dew Drop Inn which was sort of the anchor club, if you will, in the American-African community. Lee Allen would play there; he would eventually make all of those recordings with Fats Domino. A lot of times that scene was more a matter of a show. That is, the club-owner would put together a band. He’d get a bass player, then a piano player and a drummer, and maybe get a singer. There was one female named Bea Booker who used to sing there, and there were some other singers, but I never did work with them at the time. I think Anna Laurie and Paul Gayton, and I think Dave Bartholomew used to play (he was a trumpet player).</p>
<p>But by the time I came on the scene, some of those people were no longer working in that establishment. And then a lot of us started to work there. When I say “us,” I mean a lot of younger guys who would comprise the sidemen in the band, being the piano player or what have you. We would play behind the strip dancers, local singers. Every now and then somebody may come from out of town. But a lot of times when they did, they would get the better players — of which I was not one!</p>
<p>TP: Who were considered to be the better players?</p>
<p>EM: Wow, let me think. There was a drummer there named Earl Palmer, who is now on the West Coast.</p>
<p>TP: He played with Ray Charles for many years.</p>
<p>EM: Who, Earl?</p>
<p>TP: Oh, I’m incorrect. Excuse me.</p>
<p>EM: No, not Ray. The drummer from New Orleans who did play with Ray Charles… Edward Blackwell did for a very brief period of time. But Wilbur Hogan played with Ray Charles’ band. In fact, that was the very first time that I ever heard Ray Charles, was at the club, the Dew Drop Inn. They had a jam session, and I was playing saxophone at the time, and a local trumpet player named Raynell(?) Richards, who was in his band… Ray was playing piano, and I mean, this guy was burnin’! And I knew just about all of the piano players who could play. I knew who they were. And I asked the trumpet player, “Who is that?” He said, “Oh, that’s this guy, Ray Charles.” I said, “Where is he from?” “Oh, he’s out of Florida.”</p>
<p>But basically, it would be a matter of choice among some of the singers as to who they liked. There were some piano players who were better suited for some songs, and they would also make a lot of gigs with some of those people. And I wasn’t really making a lot of gigs, because I was still in school. I remember there was a group in New Orleans that was called the Johnson Brothers, which was Raymond Johnson and Plas Johnson. Plas left to go to California, and Raymond asked me to join the band — and my father said no! So that opportunity passed me by. And by me being in school over an extended period of time, I was always maybe just playing on the weekends or whenever I could.</p>
<p>TP: Two of the musicians you’re best known for having worked with regularly in those early years are Alvin Batiste and Edward Blackwell, and according to the books, Ornette Coleman came through New Orleans for a while and you were going through musical adventures with him. Can you talk about that?</p>
<p>EM: I didn’t know Ornette in New Orleans. I didn’t know that at all. Melvin Lastie I think knew Ornette. I didn’t meet Ornette until 1956, when I went out to California and Harold Battiste. The three of us went out there. I had just graduated, and was really not doing much of anything. Actually, it was the summer of 1955, really. So I decided, “Well, I’m going out to California.” Basically, that was when I met Ornette, because Ornette had sent for Blackwell to come back out and start trying to do some work with him.</p>
<p>TP: Tell me about the young Ed Blackwell. Were you involved with him in any way as a youngster, or did that start a little later, too?</p>
<p>EM: Well, no, he was a little older than I was. I met Ed Blackwell basically the same way I was telling you about the other situation. Whenever he couldn’t get the better piano players, he’d call me up! I remember the first time I went over to his house, he was living Uptown in New Orleans on Danille(?) Street. He was living with his sister I think. And he had his drum set out. And it was the most melodic set of drums I’d ever heard, but then at that time I hadn’t heard that much anyway. He was the first drummer that I ever heard play a drum solo on a ballad, and it made perfect sense!</p>
<p>There was a saxophone player, I think his name was Clarence Thomas. He was up in New York; I think he was going by the name of Luqman. But anyway, the three of us was at Edward’s house one day, and we were playing. It was the first time that I had ever been over there. And it was a captivating moment for me, because we started to play with some degree of consistency… I have to say some degree of consistency, because there was not that much employment around for what we were trying to do. So we would play whenever we could.</p>
<p>There were two guys in the city of New Orleans named Al Smith and Clarence Davis. They used to rent the spaces, and then hire jazz groups. And they’d hire us, too, to play. Clarence Davis had been a drummer with Dave Bartholomew’s band, and Al Smith was really trying to play the drums. So they had something like Al and Beau Productions, I guess you would call it, and they would rent spaces on holidays, you know, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, which was one way of hedging your bet. And we would go out and play, and people would come out. That was some of the few times that we really had a job as a whole quintet.</p>
<p>TP: Let’s hear the reconfigured American Jazz Quintet at the Ed Blackwell Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, which was hooked up by Rob Gibson from Jazz at Lincoln Center. The proceedings were documented on Black Saint Records, FroM Bad To Badder. We’ll hear a trio track on that featuring Ellis Marsalis, Richard Payne and Ed Blackwell, a composition called “Nostalgia Suite.” Any comments?</p>
<p>EM: Actually, I’m not sure what that is right now. When we did it, I think “Nostalgia Suite” was a fancy name for what we used to call medleys!</p>
<p>[MUSIC: “Nostalgia Suite” (1987); AJQ, “Chatterbox” (1956); EM/Branford/Wynton/J. Black, “Nostalgic Impressions” (1982)]</p>
<p>TP: Was the bassist on “Chatterbox” William Swanson or Richard Payne? I don’t have it right before me.</p>
<p>EM: I’m not altogether sure. Swanson came in town with the Billy Williams band, and we started just jamming. Because he liked to play with us. It was just about that time… When I say “that time,” I mean, it was somewhere close to December. Because we went into the studio and did this just before I went in the Service, and Swanson was still in town at the time, and Harold used him on a couple of selections. But I’m not sure exactly which ones right now.</p>
<p>TP: Blackwell was the drummer, though, and we can hear, just from the evidence in that, that his sound was all there back in 1956.</p>
<p>EM: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>[ETCETERA]</p>
<p>TP: On our last conversational segment, we took you out to the West Coast. What was your Army experience like? Was it a time when you were able to do a lot of playing? Were you in the Army as a musician or were you in the line?</p>
<p>EM: Well, I was in the Marine Corps, which first of all meant that I had to do the basic training. It was between conflicts, that is, I went in just after Korea had ceased, and it was before Vietnam. So I wasn’t involved in combat. Most of the time that I spent on the West Coast was really due to the fact that I was in the Marines at the time. I did go out earlier at the time that I went out with Harold and Edward, but I only stayed a couple of months, and then I came back home. Because at that time, the military was still conscripting and I had gotten the notification to report to the draft board. In fact, I’ve often thought about how it was a lot like Caesar said, everybody should go home to be taxed. Well, you had to go home to be drafted into the Service!</p>
<p>I volunteered for the draft, which is what that was called, and they sent me back to California. So I ended up doing basic training at MRCD in San Diego, and was sent to the air base at El Toro, which is in Santa Ana. So I was able to drive into Los Angeles quite frequently.</p>
<p>TP: Moving up in a totally disjointed way here, we heard James Black, and I’d like you to talk about some of the musicians you worked with after returning from the Service in the early Sixties in New Orleans, like James Black and Nat Perillat.</p>
<p>EM: Well, when I got out of the Service, I went back to New Orleans, and Edward Blackwell was playing a trio gig at a place called the Jazz Room in the French Quarter. I went to hear him play one night, and the piano player… On the night that I went, the piano player got into a dispute of some sort with the owner, and he came back to the bandstand after the break was over and started the song, played his solo, and got up when the bass player started playing a solo — and left! And the bass player and Edward Blackwell were playing, and it took a minute before they realized that he wasn’t coming back! So to make a long story short, the owner asked me did I want a gig. I had just got out the Service, and I said, “Yeah, definitely.” So that was how I got on that gig. I stayed on it for about six months, and it ended up going the way that the other piano player went, except I got fired instead! [LAUGHS]</p>
<p>But for the most part, that first band was with a bass player named Otis Duvirgney(?) and Edward Blackwell. Durvirgney(?) was an interesting bass player. He was sort of like a self-taught bass player. I mean, he had the strongest groove — swing you to death. But it was difficult to record, because his technique…the notes weren’t really true, and the microphones would pick up a lot of that. But it was a great feeling to play with Otis. Eventually I think he left and moved over to the Coast, around Biloxi, and we started working with another bass player named Peter Beatty, Chuck Beatty, who had played some time with Lionel Hampton’s band and different groups.</p>
<p>We tried to get Nat Perillat on the gig so we’d have a quartet, and we succeeded in doing that for the most part. It was always hard to get club-owners to go beyond a trio, because with the trio being a complete band, they couldn’t see justifying the expense. So we were able to get Nat on the gig for the most part… In fact, now that I remember it, I think Nat outlasted me on that job.</p>
<p>TP: Talk a little bit about his sound and style and approach to music.</p>
<p>EM: Nat didn’t have a big tenor sound. It wasn’t thin either. But he wasn’t a tenor player in the tradition of what has become known as the Texas tenor, like Arnett Cobb and a lot of those saxophone players that came out of Texas. But Nat was a diligent musician that practiced for extensive periods of time. His facility was flawless. In fact, one of the best examples of Nat Perillat is on that album that we made in 1963 (which is on From 1956 to 1966) where he played on “Yesterdays.” I mean, he played a solo on “Yesterdays” that sounded as good as anything anybody’s playing now. He and Alvin were both practice practitioners extraordinaire. I mean, it was nothing for them to practice seven-eight-nine hours a day, every day.</p>
<p>I was never that kind of a practicer. I mean, I could practice long enough to get some things that I needed together. But my discipline wasn’t substantial to practice that amount of hours!</p>
<p>TP: You were creating a lot of original music at that time as well, and the music was quite substantial, as evidenced by the recent release Whistle Stop where you recapitulate a lot of compositions from thirty years ago that sound totally fresh and contemporary.</p>
<p>EM: Well, a lot of that was James Black, too. Because James…! He had a genius about music that didn’t pervade his whole life; but musically James had a concept which was unique, to say the least. I’m really sorry that he didn’t pull a lot of other things together which would have permitted him to have document his music, and wrote and recorded even more.</p>
<p>TP: Talk a little bit about the particulars of his sound that made him so distinctive.</p>
<p>EM: Well, James was also a guy who could sit down and play a paradiddle for a solid hour on a snare drum to get his technique flawless. And his cymbal sound… He had a clean attack, the definition of his cymbal. See, when we talk about definition, a lot of times you hear guys going, DING-TING-A-DING, TING-A-DING. Well, if the definition isn’t there, you usually get that TINKATENGADDDDD…you just get a hint at that whole thing. Because each stroke, each attack and release on that cymbal has not been developed with the particular technique that is needed for it to be clear. And James was a master at all facets of playing each one of the drums, whether it’s floor tom, mounted tom, bass drum, ride cymbals, sock cymbals. He had studied it to that extent, and was meticulous about it.</p>
<p>Edward Blackwell, for example, was more of a Max Roach drummer. And when I say a Max Roach drummer, his major influence was Max in terms of the way he set up his phrases, his early ideas. Eventually, Edward would evolve into being his own person, playing some of the music of Ornette Coleman and also studying some music of West Africa, which came as a result of some jobs that he played with Randy Weston — because he played with Randy, I think, a lot, and had been over in Rabat in Morocco. So he had a lot of those influences. And he was a true percussionist in the absolute sense of the word.</p>
<p>Whereas James Black, he had played solo trumpet in the concert band in the university, he played guitar, he could play piano, he could write — I mean, he was a more comprehensive musician. But drums was… I remember Harold Battiste made a statement which was appropriate about James Black. He said whenever he thought about James Black, he never thought of him as a drummer; he just thought that drums was one other thing that James could do. It was, for the most part, his instrument of choice. He had the best time sense of anybody that I ever played with.</p>
<p>TP: Did you mutually influence each other’s ideas and writing?</p>
<p>EM: Oh, I’m sure that occurred. I know he used to tell me about various… In fact, this tune “After” was influenced by at least one chord I got from him. Because he used to tell me about things that he got from me playing piano. But it’s very hard to talk about your influence on somebody else, because that has to come from them. I mean, sometimes you can listen to it and you can say “Oh yeah.” But then you’d have to be really aware of where you are, because your things also came from being influenced by somebody else, so you can’t always be sure if that person is influenced by you or by the person who influenced you! It never comes at you, usually, in an absolute way. It usually comes somewhat almost like a point of view. So that when you hear it, if they don’t say, “Well, you know, I took this right here that I got from you and then I did this with it,” sometimes you won’t even notice it.</p>
<p>[MUSIC: EM w/Branford… “A Moment Alone” (1994); Marsalis/ Black/Perillat, “Monkey Puzzle” (1963)]</p>
<p>TP: While “A Moment Alone” was playing, you said you liked the way your son played on that particular track, and indeed, on this recording he plays all of the music with great subtlety, nuance, swing and a great sound as well.</p>
<p>EM: Branford has an unusual gift, that is, to be able to play in any idiom. I mean, it doesn’t matter what it is. I have a tape of him doing I think it was the Jacques Ibert(?) with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra! And he plays, as you know, the latest Funk licks and Hip-Hop, and he’s got two or three albums that I hope will be released where he did a live concert with he and Jeff Watts and Bob Hurst as a trio, Jazz recordings that is really out there! So it doesn’t really make much difference to him what the music situation is.</p>
<p>And the most difficult thing I think there is in any kind of music is to really be able to play slow. That is… I mean, a lot of people are impressed with virtuosity and speed and agility. But believe me, to be lyrical and play slow is very difficult. And to some extent, I think that there are people for whom that’s a gift. Even if it’s a gift, you still have to work about it.</p>
<p>TP: Well, I don’t think we can allow you to speak about one of your sons without mentioning the other three that I know of that play music. So I’m sorry to do this, but a few words about the qualities of each of your very strong and individual sons.</p>
<p>EM: Well, the thing of it is that all four of them are really great musicians. They bring different things in their personalities to the music.</p>
<p>Wynton is likewise comfortable in any idiom. He chooses not to be involved in some Pop idioms, which doesn’t mean that he couldn’t do it — it just means that that’s what he chooses not to do. His contributions to the history of the trumpet, as far as European music is concerned, is already documented. There’s any number of recordings that you could get to hear that.</p>
<p>Delfeayo is kind of a late bloomer performance-wise, because he spent a lot of time with production. And he’s been playing with Elvin Jones lately, which means that the more that he begins to play in a setting like that, the better he will get at it. And he’s a real good writer. His album Pontius Pilate’s Decision was very well crafted and well constructed in terms of arranging.</p>
<p>Jason is probably the most amazing. I think Jason probably has more natural talent than all of us combined. It’s going to be enjoyable to watch him develop, because he chose the most unlikely instrument for his ability; his ability to hear pitch as accurately as he hears it. And then to choose the drums… Of course, that is the instrument of choice now. I have no way of knowing what he will do at some future time, see. But he has a very strong interest in percussion, and he says that he wants to write for percussion. He’s got a stack of original songs that he’s written for his own band even now. But he’s one of those kinds of people that will not be confined to the arbitrary lines of music that are drawn up.</p>
<p>See, we’re moving more and more towards a real concept of what is called world music. World music can mean a lot of different things. But I think that with technology being what it is today and what it promises to be in the future, being exposed to as many different kinds of instruments, instrument concepts, performers, cultures and all of that, we can begin to find these other influences being a standard part of various composers. There are some composers that I have had an opportunity to hear… I can’t even remember the name of it. There was a clarinet conference at the Virginia Commonwealth University. I was on the faculty there for three years. And the last year that I was there, there was a clarinet conference in which some new music, that is, music say since 1980, was being performed for various combinations — piano trio, piano-clarinet-violin. And some of the composers’ techniques for clarinet were right out of the jazz book, but they were all written in the context of the piece itself, and all of the players were totally European-trained and European performers…I mean, the music was European. So it wasn’t a case of getting a jazz player to come to do it. And it’s coming to be more and more a part of the compositional techniques of various composers. I’m not sure if it would even be limited to American composers, even though it’s largely American music that they’re drawing from.</p>
<p>TP: We’ve been speaking with Ellis Marsalis, and he has to meet his car, so we have to say so long. There are many other things we could discuss. His teaching activities in New Orleans over the last twenty-five years, and the many musicians who highlight today’s stages around the world who began under his tutelage. We could talk about his ideas about the distinctive New Orleanian quality of music, but he’s grimacing, so I’m glad we didn’t time to ask him that. And many, many other things, but he has to catch his car. We’ll send Mr. Marsalis off with a selection from the most release, Joe Cool’s Blues, which seems to have been co-marketed with the producers of Peanuts.</p>
<p>EM: You know, it’s difficult to talk about this project because it didn’t all come under one roof. I was in New Orleans, and I think Delfeayo produced it, and Delfeayo asked me to come into the studio and record some of the Peanuts music. I worked on it, and we recorded it. A pianist who works with Delfeayo, Victor Atkins, was asked to do some arrangements. and one of the arrangements that he did was on “Little Birdie.” Well, we had laid a track down for “Little Birdie” from which the arrangements by way of Victor, and the vocalist, Germaine Bazile, came in later and sang that. Eventually, when I did hear the whole thing, Wynton’s group, the things that they were playing, I heard later on. Some of it came from the show that the Peanuts characters did on the Wright Brothers! It was such a potpourri of things until it didn’t seem like a project to me. Because I was sort of like one of the chessmen in the game! So I never really got a whole feeling of this… For example, when I did the recording with Wynton on Standards, Volume 3, The Resolution of Romance, that was a complete project that went from beginning to fruition with everybody that was involved. But this was piecemealed in such a way that I didn’t get a real holistic feel of it.</p>
<p>TP: Nonetheless, I don’t think the listeners will really be able to tell that…</p>
<p>EM: Nor do they care!</p>
<p>TP: We also haven’t had a chance to talk about your brief career as a football coach.</p>
<p>EM: Where did you hear about that?</p>
<p>TP: Your son told us about that about a year-and-a-half ago. He said they almost won the game also.</p>
<p>EM: [LAUGHS] Believe me, it would definitely take some time to go into that.<br/> [-30-]</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Ellis & Jason Marsalis (WKCR, 1-16-97):</strong></span></p>
<p>TP: Ellis Marsalis, have you performed in New York with Bill Huntington before?</p>
<p>EM: I performed with him, but it wasn’t in a club scene. It was in a university. I can’t remember exactly what the event was. I can’t remember what university even.</p>
<p>TP: You’ve been playing with him for a long time, though.</p>
<p>EM: Well, I usually think of it in terms of, I’ve been playing with Bill for as long as the State of Louisiana’s laws would permit me to do so — since 1964.</p>
<p>TP: So it must be very nice to come here and play with someone who breathes alongside you, as it were.</p>
<p>EM: Yeah, it is. It’s quite interesting, because the latest musical endeavors have always been with younger people. I think there’s a positive side to that, but there’s a difference in terms of… I remember I was listening to Frank Morgan play, and at the end of his performance I said to him, “Man, I had almost forgotten what that sounded like.” Because most of the guys that I had been playing with were youngsters. And it doesn’t take anything away from them. It’s just that there’s something about age… I guess in a way it’s sort of like vintage wine. There’s something about the age and the seasoning of a player that’s just different from the talent and the exuberance of a younger player.</p>
<p>TP: In a certain way perhaps, the frequency with which you play with younger players has to do with your considerable reputation as a teacher of the music and someone who communicates its fundamentals to young musicians. I’m sure this must have been the case with you, Jason, coming up. I recollect seeing you play in the Jazz Heritage Festival when you were 12 years old; I don’t remember exactly which year. How old were you when the drums became your overriding interest.</p>
<p>JM: Well, it depends. When you say overriding, I guess age 13 was about when that happened. But the first instrument I played was not the drums, but the violin. How exactly did I get started on that? Was that your idea?</p>
<p>EM: Well, it was a Saturday afternoon program at a public school about six or seven blocks away from the house. This was part of the Suzuki program. They had 35 violins, and the first 35 people could get a violin for their kid for the cost of the insurance, which was 10 bucks a year. I said, “Wow, I can’t beat that deal!” So I made sure I was one of the first 35 people. Jason probably was 6, 5, somewhere around that age, which is sort of typical of when younger players start in that Suzuki program. He stayed with the violin until we went to Richmond, Virginia, for three years — I was on the faculty at the Virginia Commonwealth. When we came back in 1989, that was the end of the violin.</p>
<p>EM: Richmond was the reason for that, though.</p>
<p>TP: You couldn’t find a good teacher there?</p>
<p>JM: Oh, no-no. There were good teachers in Richmond, Virginia. That was not the problem. What happened was, is I had always played in student orchestras in New Orleans for a long time, and when I got to Richmond, Virginia, it was the same kind of thing except in Richmond they called it the Sinfonietta, the Junior Youth Orchestra, the Youth Orchestra or whatever. Well, in sixth grade, I believe it was… I was in sixth grade in school, about 12 years old, and I was in the Junior Youth Orchestra at this point, and this was the first orchestra I played with that had a percussion section. It had a percussion section with a timpani and snare drum. I had never played with an orchestra that had a section like that. When I first got there, I was upset. I was like, “They have a percussion section? Why am I over there? This isn’t fair!” [LAUGHS] Then a year later, when I got back to New Orleans I said, “No, I want to pursue percussion a little bit further. Violin is nice, but that’s not really what I want to do.”</p>
<p>TP: How long had the drums been part of what you were doing? I gather you’d been playing drums all along.</p>
<p>JM: Yes. I had started drums at age 6, a year after the violin. I used to sit in on gigs with my father, played just off and on. It wasn’t really an everyday sort of thing. That didn’t really start until I was 12 or 12, when I became more serious about the drums and it became a more ongoing thing.</p>
<p>TP: Was it something you were just picking up by yourself? What kind of instruction did you have when you were 6-7-8 years old?</p>
<p>JM: The first drum lessons I had were from James Black. I was about 7 years old. I was a kid.</p>
<p>TP: That’s quite a teacher.</p>
<p>JM: Oh, definitely. I was fortunate enough to study under him.</p>
<p>TP: The last time I interviewed your father he made an interesting comparison between two of the drummers he was involved with, James Black and Ed Blackwell. Encapsulate the style of James Black and what made him so special as a drummer.</p>
<p>JM: Well, the thing about James Black is that he was more than a drummer. He was a musician. To my knowledge, he played trumpet and guitar besides drums. Also he was a great composer. He had written a lot of great, challenging music. I mean, he had written music that involves odd meters, which is something a lot of drummers do. I notice drummers always write tunes in 5/4 meters, 7/4 meters, and he was a drummer that did that. James Black also I guess you could say always was looking forward. He had a knowledge of the history of the music, but he was always one to look forward from what was happening in the music at the time. Whether it was happening in the ’60s or ’70s, he was always looking forward.</p>
<p>TP: There was a real flow to his music also.</p>
<p>JM: Oh yes.</p>
<p>TP: It would be in an odd meter, but you wouldn’t necessarily hear that first off.</p>
<p>JM: Oh, no. [LAUGHS] Not the way it was being played.</p>
<p>TP: Ellis, what was your first contact with James Black as far back as you can recollect, and what were the circumstances when you began playing together?</p>
<p>EM: James was a few years younger than I was. I had really been introduced to drum concepts in a small group setting by Edward Blackwell, who was really a Max Roach style drummer. It was through Edward that I first began to hear drums. By “hear drums” what I mean is that Edward would play solos very musically. See, you can play drum solos that are rudimental, which is almost like marches, and you just have a little signal at the end of your rudimental playing, and everybody comes back in. But Blackwell, following the path of Max Roach, would play in the form of the songs and play phrases that were like horns. So I had to learn to hear those kind of phrases. Blackwell was the very first person that I heard do that.</p>
<p>In 1960 Blackwell moved to New York, and we didn’t have anybody who was going to step in the shoes of Edward Blackwell! There were a few drummers at home. Nathaniel Perillat, the saxophonist, and I tried a couple of guys, and they were okay. Then Nat Perillat told me about this kid, James Black, who was at the time I think a student at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Nat had been going up there playing jobs, and he said, “Man, we ought to try this guy.” So we tried James. At first it was that typical energy kind of thing. but as James began to settle in with the group, especially whenever we got a chance to play quartet, the whole jazz scenario became like his world. Because all he really needed was an avenue to express the abilities that he had. So he was able to write, because he knew whatever it was he wrote, there were some musicians who could play it.</p>
<p>We had different assorted engagements. Because there was really not a scene, so to speak, in New Orleans for Modern Jazz. We did a stint at the Playboy Club for a while, and we lost that job because… See, we were hired to accompany all of the Black artists, singers that were coming into the Playboy Club, and because of segregation, when they stopped coming we didn’t have a job. That lasted about three months. Then we would play wherever we could, a club here, a club there, about two or three months here, a couple of jobs there. Finally, we sort of went in different directions. Because the ’60s were a little different. James left I think to go with Lionel Hampton. He came to New York and played, I think, with Horace Silver for a while, joined Lionel Hampton, he recorded with Yusef Lateef.</p>
<p>TP: Live at Pep’s, I think.</p>
<p>EM: Yes, and there’s also an album called Psychomosis, Psycho-something that I think he’s on. In fact, Yusef recorded the “Magnolia Triangle.”</p>
<p>Eventually James came back to New Orleans, and we started to play again wherever we could. We played off and on together I guess until just about the time I left to go to Richmond.</p>
<p>TP: Jason, when did you begin studying individual drummers in terms of styles and the different approaches they took, the different voices of trap drummers — and who were they?</p>
<p>JM: Very good question. That didn’t start until I’d just moved back to New Orleans, like Eighth or Ninth Grade. That’s when I started looking at individual drummers. I had always heard drummers. I’d heard Philly Joe Jones, Max Roach, Art Blakey, but I hadn’t really studied them. Around this time I started studying them, and the first drummer I started studying was Jeff “Tain” Watts. His style with all the polyrhythms he’d be playing and just his powerful sort of style attracted me. He was the first drummer that I really emulated, copy solos and so on. A lot of my earlier playing was really influenced by him.</p>
<p>Then after a while I wanted to branch out and deal with the history, like Max Roach, Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones, like I mentioned earlier. I decided that I wanted to investigate what these drummers were playing, and I did that for a while.</p>
<p>Then after a while I started investigating drummers like Ed Blackwell. My Dad would drop me off to school and whatever, and on the way we’d listen to the jazz radio. There would be some mornings when Ed Blackwell’s drumming would be on the radio, and I’d think, “Man, this is interesting; I’ve never really checked him out; I’m going to have to investigate his playing.” But the unfortunate thing is, a month later, the next thing I know, he was dead.</p>
<p>TP: What were the qualities of Blackwell’s style that were so appealing to you and struck you so singularly?</p>
<p>JM: Well, the first recordings that I started really getting into that he wason was the music of Ornette Coleman. What I thought was so interesting was his sound. It was a really clear sound. Also it had an African quality to it that’s kind of hard to explain. That’s one of the things that my older brother Wynton was always telling me about. He said, “Man, check Ed Blackwell out. He has that African sound in him.”</p>
<p>TP: Let’s explore that a bit. How would you define that aspect of his sound?</p>
<p>JM: Well, Ed Blackwell, from what I know, was really into African music and the African drums. Pretty recently I’ve been listening to some African percussion, a percussion group from New Guinea. The rhythms of that music are interesting enough, but there’s a quality about the sound, a very pure, very natural kind of sound, and that’s sort of how Blackwell sounded — it was very pure, very natural, very deep. I think the way that he would play syncopations was a little different, too, the way he would play on the downbeat. But that natural, pure sound in his playing was what was really interesting.</p>
<p>TP: Who are some of the other drummers you’ve gone into and analyzed in depth?</p>
<p>JM: Another drummer, also by the recommendation of Wynton Marsalis, was a drummer who played with Thelonious Monk by the name of Frankie Dunlop. When I started getting into him, one of the first things that attracted me was his getting into the beat, so to speak. Most drummers usually have a set way that they play, a routine way of playing. But Frankie Dunlop’s playing was not like that. He was always playing around with the beats. You’re almost not really sure where the beat is almost. It’s like someone who plays a trick on, so to speak, like someone who’s joking with you. You’re not really totally sure where the beat would be. His drumming has that playful quality to it.</p>
<p>TP: I’d like to take Ellis Marsalis back a bit, and talk about pianists who had an impact on you back in the 1950s when you were starting to formulate your sense of how your piano style should be, and the ensemble sound as well.</p>
<p>EM: Well, there was Oscar Peterson, Oscar Peterson and Oscar Peterson.</p>
<p>TP: That was it.</p>
<p>EM: Actually, around 1950, Peterson had been in America for I think a year. He was touring with Jazz at the Philharmonic, and they came to New Orleans. At that time he was functioning in a duo format with Ray Brown. I went to hear them, and it fractured me, so to speak. I had a recording called Stratford Up On Avon with the Oscar Peterson Trio, a vinyl recording, and I just wore it out. First of all, I had never heard anybody play with that type of agility, in that format. I had heard Art Tatum play, but Art Tatum was a wizard. I mean, everybody understood where Art Tatum was coming from who listened. But Oscar Peterson was a trio player who utilized that medium. First of all, I never heard anybody play as fast as that in that format. I just loved it. In fact, I was so enthralled with Pete, it was years before I went back to listening to Bud Powell and really trying to get to that!</p>
<p>There were lots of influences. In a way, in the Jazz arena, a pianist sometimes is not always a pianist. It just depends. Oscar was definitely a pianist of the first magnitude. But when I always thought of Thelonious Monk, for instance, as the piano being a vehicle for his music, and his writing was equally as important if not more important than his piano playing. I mean, it’s as though his piano playing existed to play his music. Monk apparently could do a lot of different things. I’ve heard him play Stride, but when he plays Stride it doesn’t sound like Willie the Lion and James P. — it sounds like Monk playing Stride. And Duke Ellington, who was a wonderful pianist, but somehow it didn’t matter, because what Duke was about was so much bigger than whether he was a piano player. John Lewis was the same situation. I love John’s playing, its subtleties, but with him also what he did as a composer was bigger than just the fact that he was a good piano player.</p>
<p>Also, there were the band players. When I say “band players,” what I mean is there were the players like Richie Powell with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, the different piano players that Miles Davis’s band had, the different piano players in Art Blakey’s ensembles. There are a lot of recordings of musicians that at the time I thought were bands, but they weren’t; they were just recordings where somebody was a leader, and would go out and find some gigs from that recording. There were a lot of piano players like that. Wynton Kelly was one, and Red Garland was another one.</p>
<p>Tommy Flanagan was one of the better of those. But see, Tommy was also bigger than that. Tommy spent a lot of years with Ella Fitzgerald, and accompanying a vocalist is a very special thing. Accompaniment is the most difficult thing to teach. I’ve been teaching for better than twenty years, and I’ve devised methods lately of dealing with the concept of accompaniment. Usually my piano students, when they get to a certain level, they have to bring a singer into their lesson, and we work on pieces where they are accompanying the singer. That’s the only way to really do that. In a setting where a lesson is occurring, we could talk about it all day. There are a few things about accompaniment everybody should know. First of all, you should definitely show that you know the song in and out. If you’re accompanying the vocalist, you’d better know the words. Also, you’d better be prepared to learn how to breathe with that instrument. Even though it’s not a wind instrument, the concept of playing is directly connected to the concept of breathing, and you have to understand that each singer… It’s also true for instrumentalists, but I dwell a little bit more on singers from the accompaniment side, because singers are working with something that’s a little different. The interplay with a soloist is not quite the same. A singer is trying to deliver a message through the sound-word. So the enhancement of that is what is expected from the pianist. I would say, get a recording by Hank Jones, who by the way I think is the consummate concept of a pianist, I mean, a total pianist… Believe me, this doesn’t take anything away from anybody else. But from an academician who is trying to create Jazz programs, I’d say Hank Jones would be my model of the consummate pianist. Hank Jones recorded a duo album with Abbey Lincoln recently. Every student of recording and accompaniment, that recording should be under your pillow, on your CD, wherever you go. And there are others.</p>
<p>TP: Could you comment on the piano trio concept of Ahmad Jamal? Did that have an impact on you in the 1950’s. I know that Jason also works with the Marcus Roberts Trio, and the first person I thought of when I heard you play (not many people can make me think of this) is Vernell Fournier, a fellow New Orleanian. Jason is deferring to his father, so Ellis Marsalis first.</p>
<p>EM: I don’t know if that’s correct, because you addressed it in terms of drumming…</p>
<p>TP: Well, drumming and the piano trio concept.</p>
<p>EM: I’ve gotten to know Ahmad, but I’ve never been able to sit down with him and talk about it. But based upon what I have heard… Ahmad influenced me in ways which I would not consider very complimentary to me or Ahmad. When he did “Poinciana,” it was one of those songs that we all had to play as a trio. So what happened is that I listened to “Poinciana” and learned it (in the wrong key, I might add, which is neither here nor there for the listening audience), and it was sort of like emulating Ahmad Jamal, not appreciating the real subtleties of what he was doing. How many different kinds of grooves he was playing. How he would use those vamps in ways… A vamp is a consistent pattern that’s played which allows you to play something over that, kind of a static groove, if you will. It would be years before I would really listen to Ahmad in ways that one needs to listen in order to get the real message. Without having spoken to him about it, I think maybe that hit he had probably threw a lot of us off.</p>
<p>Now, Miles thought so much of Ahmad Jamal that Miles recorded a lot of Ahmad Jamal’s solos, just played them right out. I think some of the younger drummers and piano players are now beginning to discover Ahmad. “We ain’t never heard about that!” They are now beginning to discover Ahmad.</p>
<p>TP: One thing about “Poinciana” is that the beat Vernell Fournier is from a vernacular New Orleans rhythm which is now known as the “Poinciana Beat.”</p>
<p>JM: Well, it’s really some second-line.</p>
<p>TP: There you go.</p>
<p>JM: When I first heard that beat, I didn’t know Vernell was from New Orleans, and I was kind of suspicious. I said, “Man, this sounds like some Second Line.” But then when I found out he was from New Orleans, I said, “Oh, okay, that solves everything.” But that’s really the influence of the New Orleans music, the traditional music of New Orleans, be it brass band music or whatever. That’s really where that beat comes from.</p>
<p>Now, as far as Ahmad Jamal’s trio, it’s interesting, because I’m working with Marcus, and that’s someone Marcus listens to a lot. When you listen to the Gershwin For Lovers record, you can really hear a lot of the influence of Ahmad Jamal. One thing Miles Davis said about him was that he liked the fact Ahmad would let the music breathe. Ahmad used a lot of space in his playing, and that’s one of the things I found interesting about his music as well. He didn’t necessarily have to razzle-dazzle and play all kinds of fancy stuff. He would let the music breathe.</p>
<p>Not only that, but my Dad mentioned students… Down in the New Orleans area, every young musician was into Ahmad Jamal! I don’t know of any young musicians who are not into Ahmad Jamal. All of them just loved Ahmad Jamal records. It was really a big thing. But I think a lot of young pianists and drummers these days are especially influenced by Ahmad Jamal.</p>
<p>TP: And extrapolating, Vernell Fournier.</p>
<p>JM: Right.</p>
<p>TP: One thing about Vernell Fournier and Idris Muhammad, who credited Ellis with bringing him to a Jazz concert for the first time… Idris said he got his unique concept of the bass drum his assimilation of Second Line rhythms. But both are masters of drum timbres and the sounds of the different components of the trap set in combination.</p>
<p>JM: That’s a kind of complex thing there! Well, there’s something about the bass drum that New Orleans drummers have always played differently than drummers from anywhere else. Whether it’s Funk drums, a drummer like Zigaboo Modaliste from the Meters, or whether it’s the traditional Jazz drummers, there’s always something about the bass drum, the way the bass drum grooves that’s always different. I think one thing is the emphasis that the drummers put on the beat-four. That’s one of the things I’d say that’s different.</p>
<p>But as far as different timbres, so to speak, there are so many nuances to that, especially listening to a drummer like Vernell Fournier. One of the things I like about his playing is his brush sound, which was subtle as well as powerful. Even playing sticks it was sort of the same thing.</p>
<p>TP: Have you had a second line experience for yourself, in one form or another?</p>
<p>JM: I’ve had a few.</p>
<p>TP: Talk about that a bit.</p>
<p>JM: I’ve done a few performances, Second Line gigs I guess you would say, playing with brass bands. I’ve played snare drum a few times with some brass bands, and I marched in the Mardi Gras parade once playing snare drums. So I have played snare drum in a brass band on a few occasions. There’s also one interesting experience in New Orleans, which can only happen in New Orleans, that a brass band will be just playing in your neighborhood down the street, you’re in your house, then you hear this band playing, and there’s all these people just following them around, and marching in second line along with them. That’s something that happens, like, whenever.</p>
<p>EM: That’s an African tradition. If a group, especially those who live in the bush, go through a village in a ceremony, the people from the village, some of them will just join right in and follow the ceremony. That’s the common pleasure that exists today. There are what they call social and pleasure clubs, and every now and then what they will do is get a brass band and stage a parade. Which doesn’t specifically have anything to do with Mardi Gras. They will just stage a parade, and they will march in the area where their club functions. They just get permits, and they march down the street, and people in the various neighborhoods just jump right out in the street and start what they call the Second Line.</p>
<p>For people who don’t really understand what that means: See, the Second Line goes all the way back to the days when people who passed away was interred in a grave-site that was always within walking distance of the community that they lived in. So they would get a band to go out and play some religious music, “Flee As A Bird,” “Just A Little While To Stay Here”…</p>
<p>JM: “A Closer Walk With Thee.”</p>
<p>EM: Yeah, “A Closer Walk With Thee.” After the body is interred, at what is considered to be, as they would say, a respectable distance from the grave-site, you would hear a trumpet player. He would say DO-DIT-DAH-DIT, like that, which was sort of a signal to the other musicians that they were going to start. Then usually what would happen, they would start to play something like “Didn’t He Ramble.” Now, without going off into religion and philosophy, the Christian concept of rejoicing when one passes on, that’s part of that. The person has lived a life and is now passed on, and the celebration belongs to the people who are alive. So they would start to play something like “Didn’t He Ramble.” What would happen, the members of the bereaved’s family would be right behind the band. The Second Line would be those who had no real kinship, but just came out and joined the celebration, following behind the family, which would be considered the First Line.</p>
<p>Now the tradition, in a somewhat modified sense, is still going pretty strong in New Orleans, except that now grave-sites are not within walking distance, and you may find a band playing and you may not. But in other kinds of ceremony, you will find… There’s a lot of brass bands. Whoever is going to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, when you get off that airplane, there will be a brass band at that airport to meet you.</p>
<p>TP: Speaking of brass bands, Jason, have you been studying and analyzing the older New Orleans drummers such as Baby Dodds?</p>
<p>JM: Oh, yes.</p>
<p>TP: Talk about that, and the importance of that concept of playing to a contemporary drummer performing contemporary music.</p>
<p>JM: It’s good you should mention Baby Dodds, because he’s someone I’ve just started to investigate. Baby Dodds’ playing is much different than playing now. One thing that’s different is, for example, he didn’t play like drummers play on brushes, time on brushes and time on the ride cymbal. He didn’t play like that at all. I have a recording that Dr. Michael White gave me to record where he’s playing an early form of the drum set, like snare drum, bass drum, two toms, and he’d have woodblocks and cowbells and so forth; the basis of his set was the snare drum and the bass drum, while the other drums were used for decoration. In the brass bands, the basic setup of the drums was you’d have a snare drummer and a bass drummer — two different drummers. In his setup, the snare and the bass drum was the main thing happening; the other drums and stuff was just decoration. That was just some stuff he’d use for fill-ins and so forth. So how he used his setup is one of the things that’s different about him.</p>
<p>TP: How do you incorporate that concept, if you do, into what you do in the here and now.</p>
<p>JM: A very good question. Well, there are certain things that Baby Dodds played that can be used in the music today. But the music played back then is so much different than the music being played now. It just was a different time, a different era back then.</p>
<p>TP: Ellis Marsalis, you said in an earlier interview that you weren’t particularly involved in Second Line experiences, but you were playing saxophone and playing a lot of Rhythm-and-Blues type of saxophone? Do you think your experience as a saxophonist had a substantial impact on the way you approach the piano?</p>
<p>EM: Definitely! In fact, Edward Blackwell told me once that I was not a piano player; I was a transposed saxophonist to piano. It took me a while to figure out what he meant. See, I had studied piano, but I had not really approached the piano like Phineas Newborn, Oscar and people like that. And when I started to play in bands, especially with Blackwell and Nat, and we would do things from Clifford Brown and Max Roach and Miles, the pianistic approach for me was sort of like patchwork. For one thing, I also realized later on that the concept of accompaniment, or comping as it’s called, was still in a state of evolution. When you listen to what Bud Powell was doing in earlier years, that kind of accompaniment was nothing close to what was occurring when Miles had Tony, Ron and Herbie. That rhythm section defined a peak in terms of accompaniment, solos, every aspect of it.</p>
<p>TP: People are still dealing with the implications of that rhythm section.</p>
<p>EM: Oh, they’re going to be dealing with that for a long time. I mean, that was a major breakthrough. It was like Isaac Newton’s theory. That was something that was a major breakthrough, and it’s around, and it will be around. Physicists come and go. Newton’s concept stays! That rhythm section virtually defined the small group approach to rhythm section playing and accompaniment. It was a similar kind of thing that was beginning to evolve. Wynton Kelly was playing with Miles, and his approach was a lot more closely associated with Paul Chambers and what Jimmy Cobb or Philly Joe Jones was doing.</p>
<p>The historical significance of the Jazz musicians, the contributions have come to us in patchwork, because we’ve never had an institution, a Jazz institution that was a part of the culture. If you go to Brazil, you’ve got a Samba Club, lots of Samba Clubs. In Trinidad, there are steel pan bands, lots of them. It’s in the fabric of the culture. Jazz has never been in the fabric of American culture. So everything that came about, came about as a result of so much patchwork. That’s why people from New Orleans were unique to that. That was a lot closer to the Caribbean experience. You talk to some of the guys from Detroit. I mean, there’s a lot of musicians! P.C. came from there, Doug Watkins, Ron Carter, Bob Hurst… [END OF SIDE A]</p>
<p>…of the dance, you see, and the dance came about by way of what the American-African brought to that whole experience. If you were to come to New Orleans tomorrow and there was a brass band down the street, and you would see guys in the Second Line, what you would see is guys doing a strut. Now, it’s not a military band. In fact, if you ever go to see what we call SWAC (Southwest Athletic Conference), the Universities of Texas Southern, Jackson State, Southern University, Florida A&M, all those historical Black colleges, you’ll see those marching bands at halftime — they don’t march like soldiers.</p>
<p>TP: The most advanced trap drummers can be conceived of as analogous to African dancers because in African dance the interdependence of motion of each limb in conjunction with each other is the principle of the dance, and I guess a trap drummer is trying to make the rhythm from each limb, the extension of himself or herself, their own personal dance.</p>
<p>EM: Well, in the African dance, the difference is going to be in the age. There are some dances which are primarily for males, older people. And there’s also some dances and music and rhythms that are primarily for females. Mainly today we talk about those things which are traditionally done in the bush country. You get into Lagos and those cities, then you’re looking at skyscrapers and cars and traffic jams, all the things that happen everywhere.</p>
<p>TP: [ETC. ON MUSIC] A few words about “Cochise.”</p>
<p>EM: That’s a piece Alvin wrote based on the chord structure of “Cherokee.” We made a recording of this as youngsters. I don’t know if it will ever be released. It was so fast, it was ridiculous. Talk about youthful energy and arrogance borderlining on stupidity to play like that! Anyway, it’s a very difficult piece because it reflects the highest level of virtuosity. Alvin wrote that, and we used to play it, because in those times were going through that young period when you’re feeling your oats. Like, everything was about how fast can play — that kind of thing. Forget about the music. How fast can you play? [LAUGHS] I think “Cochise” was one of the pieces we used in that manner.</p>
<p>[MUSIC: B/E/J Marsalis & B. Hurst, “Cochise” (1994); E. Marsalis-E. Harris, “Homecoming” (1985); E. Marsalis/ Perillat/J. Black, “Swinging at the Haven” (1962)]</p>
<p>TP: A few words about the project with Eddie Harris, the great saxophonist and musical thinker who died last year.</p>
<p>EM: Eddie was an enigma. It’s very hard to really put him into a category. As a musician he was extremely well prepared for practically anything. He evidently had some rather inventive qualities, too. I remember hearing Eddie play with a machine that had a tape loop, and he would play a Blues, he’d play a chorus, and he would put a solo on it, then it would play back, then he would record another one against that, those two would play back and he would record another one. I’ve heard him go up to six different tracks on that machine. And there came a time when he didn’t travel on that machine very much. I’ve heard him play trumpet by putting a saxophone mouthpiece on the end of the trumpet in the place of a conventional trumpet mouthpiece, and play that. [LAUGHS] And done of these were gimmicky. It was not a gimmick. He actually figured out how to make this work.</p>
<p>TP: He was someone who was tremendously concerned with the permutations of sounds in motion, in many ways.</p>
<p>EM: Well, Eddie Harris covered a lot of bases. He had a unique approach to playing jazz, especially those wide intervals that he played, and he was very comfortable in the Pop idiom where there was quality music being played there. He and Les McCann did several wonderful projects together.</p>
<p>TP: What was the genesis of your duo recording? Had you known him for a number of years? Was it something that just got set up by circumstance?</p>
<p>EM: It was a combination of both things. Eddie used to book himself a lot. He happened to call a club called Tyler’s in New Orleans, which is no longer there. I happened to be working there that night, and during the break the owner says, “Hey, man, I’ve got Eddie Harris on the phone. How about a duo with you and Eddie?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” I think I’d played with Eddie before at another club in New Orleans, so I knew him. Anyway, he came in, and we did the duo at this particular club, Tyler’s.</p>
<p>As I remember, maybe David Torkanowsky set the session up. We went in to Dallas, Texas, to do it. I’m not sure of all the particulars, but I think David’s the one who set it up. Now, “Homecoming” was a piece I was surprised was even on the album, let alone the title. I’d written the piece, and as I was walking out the door to catch the plane, it was laying on my desk, so I said, “Well, I’m not going to do this, but I’ll just take it with me and get Eddie to look at it.” So I almost didn’t take it to the studio, and we ended up recording it!</p>
<p>But it was always fun to record or work with Eddie, because Eddie was a funny, funny cat. He had a wonderful sense of humor. I remember once he told the audience, “I have decided to make a career change, and I am going to be a Rock-and-Roll singer. I have all of the qualifications necessary — no voice and nerve.” He was always making witticisms like that.</p>
<p>TP: Jason Marsalis, what is it that makes your father an educator who is able to produce musicians of the quality of those who’ve come from under his tutelage?</p>
<p>JM: Bright students perhaps! [LAUGHS] That’s a very good question. Hmm. I don’t know…</p>
<p>TP: Not to put you on the spot or anything.</p>
<p>JM: It’s interesting, because a lot of people ask me what has my father taught me. Now, I’ve learned from him in different ways, but not necessarily in the concept of teacher-student. It’s moreso father-and-son than teacher-and-student. As far as teacher goes, he’s always found good teachers for me when it comes to studying percussion, whether it was classical percussion or studying drums or whatever. He’s always found good teachers for me in that aspect. But as far as his qualities as a teacher, it’s hard to tell.</p>
<p>I think one of the things with him teaching at the New Orleans Center of Creative Arts in New Orleans at that particular time… One good way of explaining it is maybe it was one of those things that was the right place at the right time, the way the whole school jelled. It was a great faculty… Just the people who came together at that time. The students that were there.. There was just something about that particular time. I mean, I was a baby then!</p>
<p>As far as him being a teacher, one thing is that teaching wasn’t what he was set out to do at first. Playing was really the first thing. In fact, me and my older brother Delfayo had a debate about that, whether my father was a teacher or a player. Delfeayo was, “He’s a player!” and I was, “No, he’s a teacher!”</p>
<p>TP: There are some strong personalities in the family, in case people out there don’t know it.</p>
<p>JM: There sure are.</p>
<p>EM: This is probably very difficult for Jason to answer, because he was the only musician who went to that school that I didn’t teach, because I wasn’t there at that time. But the thing about it was that… A lot of what he said, too, was correct. First of all, the time in America was such that the magnet school concept was prevalent. A lady named Shirley Trusty, who is now Shirley Trusty Corey(?), was very instrumental in getting a grant that ultimately helped to create the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. As a result, we were able… When I say “we,” I mean the whole faculty, because there were four disciplines… Let’s see, it was five disciplines eventually. I started out with music, dance, theater and visual arts, and then creative writing was added later.</p>
<p>When we started out, our mission was to give students the opportunity to explore the creative area so that they could make career decisions relating to the arts. It wasn’t the objective to crank out a bunch of Jazz musicians or Classical musicians or anything! It was really to try to help students to understand what this was all about and make decisions in high school. Those who needed to go further, went further, and left and attended Juilliard… Branford left and went to Southern University and eventually to Berklee. Donald Harrison went to Berklee. Later on, Harry Connick, Jr., went to Loyola University for a semester, and later attended Manhattan School of Music. And there were any number of people who went into Classical music and conservatories.</p>
<p>What we tried to do, and had the opportunity to do mainly because this was a magnet school, the students who came to the school could use their electives to choose which discipline to be in. So we had a model school. We had 100 percent opportunities to present what we wanted to present the way we wanted to present it. We had virtually no support from the Board of Education. There was no budgeting for anything like what we were doing. The Federal Government was fast disappearing from those concepts. But for the most part, we were able to get students at a young enough age… We had a grant, which was very important to our program. It was only $8 an hour. That was it! But most of the guys in the Symphony Orchestra would agree to teach for the grant and a couple of dollars above that. That meant that the students got very good instrumental instruction from people in the orchestra. And it didn’t matter… See, we didn’t really deal as much with the concept of Jazz and Classical music as a separate thing. If a person wanted to concentrate on Classical music, obviously that’s what they did, and they spent as much time as it took for them to get into a major institution. If the student said, “Well, I want to be a Jazz player,” he got the fundamentals from studying what would be Classical music –but major scales and triads are not necessarily Classical music; they’re just the fundamentals.</p>
<p>TP: That word “fundamentals” is perhaps the key to your gift as a teacher, that you seem to have the ability to break down almost any body of work into its fundamentals and are able to communicate them in a very practical way to students, and I think the proof is in the pudding.</p>
<p>[-30-]</p> Ellis Marsalis Interview - 2002: Part Fivetag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2017-01-15:1992552:Topic:3993392017-01-15T06:14:34.758ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Ellis Marsalis (7-01-02):</strong></span></p>
<p>TP: Virginia Commonwealth was your first university position?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Correct.</p>
<p>TP: What was the situation when you arrived there, and what did you do?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: There’s different layers to that. First of all, there’s the idea of moving to another state at that time in my life, and a lot of pressures that it brought on my wife. That’s one situation. Then not…</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Ellis Marsalis (7-01-02):</strong></span></p>
<p>TP: Virginia Commonwealth was your first university position?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Correct.</p>
<p>TP: What was the situation when you arrived there, and what did you do?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: There’s different layers to that. First of all, there’s the idea of moving to another state at that time in my life, and a lot of pressures that it brought on my wife. That’s one situation. Then not only was it beginning a job, but a university job in a program that was rather young. They had a jazz program when I got there, but it was not totally defined in any strict way. The band director, Doug Richards, was probably the best jazz band director that I had ever seen; he could really get a tremendous amount out of a jazz band. But there wasn’t anybody there who really wanted to actually head a program. In other words, we had a whole lot of soldiers and no real chiefs. The faculty was a very able faculty across the board. There were 44 people on that faculty, most of whom were in classical music, but it was not an antagonistic situation. So there were things I had to get used to.</p>
<p>But it’s one of those things that the more I did it, the more I found out that it wasn’t that much different than teaching at NOCCA. The reason for that is that when you teach in a typical high school, there’s an adversarial situation between the administration, the teachers, and the students which is built in. And the laws of any given state do not permit you to treat the students as really the way they are. They’re really like young adults who have intelligent. But the various state laws don’t permit you to function with them like that.</p>
<p>TP: As young adults.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. So teaching in the average high school, they have virtually no real responsibility that’s allowed. All the classes are like herds. you go in one herd to Class A, and then to the math class, and then to the history class, and then at some point you go home.</p>
<p>Now, at the university, there’s a lot less pressure from that end, because the students decide what they take and what they don’t take. So it creates a different kind of pressure, if you will. Because students who go into high school are going mostly because they either need it as a means to get somewhere else or because it’s mandated by the state after a certain age. At the university, when a student chooses to go to a university, they do so because they think that it’s going to affect their lives in some way. So the way that we taught at NOCCA, it was very much like a college, even though it wasn’t a college, because the students that we would retain were students who had shown a determination towards performance at a professional level.</p>
<p>TP: Did they tend to sort themselves out? How did you ascertain that they were ready for that?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, it isn’t a case of them being ready for it at all. It’s a case of them making a decision based upon what was asked of them, whether or not they wanted to pursue that particular discipline as a career. There were five disciplines at this school. Then what they had to do was to look at it and make that decision. And encouragement for professionalism was always there. At the average high school, band directors would never tell students in the band that they could be professionals, unless that person was a pro himself and would sort of pick somebody and put him in a group with them and say, “Look, if you want to, you could probably do this.” Because in most cases, teachers who teach in high schools… I remember something that the chairman of the music department told me at Virginia Commonwealth, which I really thought was tacky. He said, “Most of the people on this faculty are failures.” I said, “What do you mean, they’re failures?” He said, “Well, they really want to do what you do, but they don’t really have it, so they teach instead.” I said, “Damn, man, that’s a little bit jive.”</p>
<p>TP: I’ve heard a lot of musicians say, for instance, who went to Berklee, that they were taught by someone who couldn’t play, etc.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, a lot of times, people are hired on that basis. The reason for the preponderance of an emphasis on certification by way of academic credentials is that it creates the means by which people can hire someone, and as a result, blame it on somebody else if it doesn’t work out. Because if you have a Ph.D and whatever, that’s the justification to pay you X amount of dollars and give you certain… I think my wife was telling me, or somebody, that the corporations are beginning to look differently at MBAs, saying an MBA is nothing, that hiring people on the basis of that is not the thing to do. The school system here just got rid of the second superintendent in a row, and it’s decided that the procedure they’re going to go through is not to go and look for some superstar somewhere, but to actually go within the university community to see if they can get someone to be the superintendent of the public schools in the city that they function.</p>
<p>TP: So someone who knows New Orleans to deal with the New Orleans schools.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, that could be what their mindset is, but believe me, nothing could be further from the truth. Like I said before, man, there’s a lot of things about the law which nobody really deals with, which just doesn’t permit you to do certain things in the schools. And the kids know the law.</p>
<p>TP: I’m getting away from the college, and I want get back to it. But it seems the subtext to what you’re saying about what you were able to accomplish at NOCCA is that you were able to do it precisely because it was a magnet school.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Precisely. It was a magnet school, and we had a principal who came from the theater as a background [Tom Tews]. Consequently, his philosophy was, it’s much easier to get forgiveness than permission. So we would do a lot of things that were good for the students, and if necessary, tell the school board people later.</p>
<p>TP: I think I’m restating we talked about last week, but you developed a lot of your ideas about what was good for the students through your experience as a working jazz musician and an improviser.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Precisely.</p>
<p>TP: I had asked you to boil down your educational philosophy as though I were an arts administrator, and you said, “Learn the fundamentals of melody, harmony and rhythm, and do it through drill.” Can you boil down what it was you learned as a professional jazz musician and improviser that gave you the sense of what your students needed to know?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I think I discovered the relationship between the Blues and the American Canon, the music canon, and how it related to… How can I put this? Learning how to play Blues became like learning arithmetic. Before you can get to algebra, calculus and trigonometry, you must have mastered the fundamentals of arithmetic. The Blues is like arithmetic. It’s the simplest approach to learning improvisation. And that’s one of the things I learned about Blues.</p>
<p>TP: And why is it the simplest approach to learning about improvisation?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Because you don’t have a lot to deal with. Like, 12 measures is equivalent to one chorus. It’s a repetitive situation, chorus after chorus after chorus. And the students can be given relatively few notes. I would write out 12 measures of chords that would turn out, when played, to be a blues. I was doing two or three different things at the same time. One, I was presenting them with a visible manifestation of the form of blues in one chorus. Two, I was using chord symbols to represent in a vertical manner the sounds that they were going to deal with in a linear manner. See, after a while, this thing gets to be complex. The next thing is getting them to a point where they could deal with music that’s in motion. When you start to play and you count off the Blues, they begin to understand that you have to be at Measure 1-2-3-4, in a certain time frame, so you become sensitized to the flow of the rhythm.</p>
<p>TP: Of the knowledge you had accumulated up to this time, what percentage of it was vernacular and functional, and what percentage of it came from your academic training?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: None of it came from my academic training to speak of. First of all, I did not go to a music school. The university that I went to had an ample music department, which was sort of typical. It was sort of like, “Okay, this is a university, we need to have music, so we’ll just put something there.</p>
<p>TP: Didn’t Dillard have a very good art department in the ’30s and ’40s?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, in the ’30s and the ’40s, there were people there who had the beginnings of what could have evolved into a great music program — or a great anything. See, when you start to talk about the ’30s and the ’40s, you’re talking about a completely different America. What happened after the Second World War had a tremendous amount of effect on shaping what we’re going through right now. I don’t care if you want to talk about Enron and WorldCom and them, or whether you want to talk about those young guys who’s out there playing a million notes a second in the name of Jazz, or the rappers who, when all else fails, curse. It doesn’t matter. What happened at the end of the Second World War set the stage for the American culture that we see today. Now, what was going on before that was the beginning of something that sort of was just left behind.</p>
<p>TP: What sort of things?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: There were things that were common among universities. For example, at one time, university presidents could help shape public policy. Nowadays, university presidents are about fundraising. Then, we’re talking about a predominantly black university, and there were several of those, and they were producing very good students. For example, Tuskegee had George Washington Carver, who was doing miracles with the soil in Alabama and actually created crop rotation. People like Charles (?), who at Howard helped to develop plasma, which saved the lives of a whole lot of guys in the Second World War.</p>
<p>What I’m saying is that the seeds that were planted during those days could have evolved in a lot of different directions. Now, it’s for another generation at another time to go back and begin to ford all of that stuff out. It’s sort of like looking at why the Roman Empire collapsed.</p>
<p>Anyway, in reference to what you were talking about as far as college is concerned, one of the first revelations that I had after I got there… I ended up meeting with the Chairman, and the Chairman said, “I was just looking over the applications that came in for the Fall, and I don’t see any jazz students’ names on these applications. So what are you going to do about that?”</p>
<p>Well, that was a shock to me. Because I had never been in a situation where I was under the gun for the RR — Recruitment and Retention. See, that’s one of the things that you have to face when you’re going into a university — Recruitment and Retention. Then I was forced to begin to say, “Now, who actually is the jazz student?” We would take the big band and go straight up I-95 in Virginia, and go to these different towns and these different high schools, and we’d leave there and go up into Maryland, where the high school similar to NOCCA, the arts high school… Antonio Hart came from one of them. Then we’d leave there, and go on up to Philly, and go into that high school where Chris McBride and Joey DeFrancesco, some of them came from.</p>
<p>But eventually, what I started to realize was that most of the students we ran into, especially the trombone players, the good straight-up musicians, not necessarily people who were well-versed in jazz, but the good musicians — they were all talking engineering. And the ones with the 1400s on the SAT, none of them were talking about going into the music. And it wasn’t that I blamed them! It’s just that I had never really thought about jazz studies. Because in a high school, like at NOCCA, we were there for students to explore the possibilities of a career in one of five disciplines, whereas once you get to college, the students who come to a college are there to make decisions that will affect, if not the rest of their lives, at least a sizable chunk of them. And whether it does or doesn’t, the motivation for going to a university is based on, “Hey, I’m trying to make a decision that’s going to help me to get a job here, doing this or that.” Jazz was not viewed as economically viable in terms of university students, period. Now, there’s always exceptions. But you can’t run a program off of exceptions. That’s one of the things I learned real quick.</p>
<p>TP: Well, Chris McBride and Joey DeFrancesco went right into the fray. They didn’t go to college, or at least not into that sort of program.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: That’s right. Well, those are exceptions. That’s why I said I wasn’t talking about exceptions. There are people who do that now. There are even people, man, who are leaving high school and going into the pros. In fact, they’re not the first ones anyhow. Moses Malone did that. I think essentially, if you can stay, that does… Because even if you go all the way through college, that doesn’t mean you’re going to stay.</p>
<p>TP: That’s right. You can go backwards in college.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: [LAUGHS] Yeah.</p>
<p>TP: So you were faced for the first time with having to recruit a band. It brought your job description to a different plane than it had been before.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah, I had go to out and try to find some students.</p>
<p>TP: And I guess in competition with other programs, too. You had to be like a coach.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, you’re always in competition with other programs. Everybody is. With the exception of whatever those programs are that just automatically get a huge body of people that they just have to say, “Well, we don’t want any more.” I don’t know if Engineering is like that. It may not be. I was talking to a friend of mine who knows a professor at UCLA who teaches composition. I had one lesson with this guy. I forgot his name, but anyway, he was telling him that at one time, of his composition students at UCLA, he would get maybe 4 or 5 or 6 who were interested in film scoring. See, all of them are now. Every single one of them. And when you think in terms of what has been happening lately, there is much more of a pronounced emphasis on John Williams, on Howard (?), on even one or two of the Newman family, of which there’s been an abundance in the film scoring world! So television and movies play an important role in the decisions that people are making, and I think ultimately, the universities haven’t really figured out some of that. I’m sure some institutions have. But when it comes down to it… I was reading where Harvard University had a course called (?) that they just got rid of, because there wasn’t anybody taking it. One of the things that was an assist when I got to UNO is that there were a lot of courses which had been approved through committee, and there was nobody teaching it. So those numbers were there, and see, a lot of times, man, if you know what they are, you can go and take the number and develop a course without having to go totally through committee. Because going through committee can sometimes be a hassle.</p>
<p>TP: So you’d do an end run.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: It’s kind of like an end run, yeah.</p>
<p>TP: But at VCU, a number of musicians went through who are making an impact now.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, there’s only three that I know. Clarence Penn, Alvester Garnett and Loston Harris.</p>
<p>Victor was teaching math in high school in New Orleans. He’d been in my group. I used to tell him, “Vic, if you really want to teach, I don’t see anything wrong with that, but to me it doesn’t make any sense to be teaching at these schools. You ain’t got no benefits, man. They could fire you tomorrow! And you have no recourse whatsoever. So if you really want to teach, you ought to teach in public school. At least you’ll get some benefits!” And when I left to come to VCU, he told me he’d thought about that, and he said, “Man, look, I don’t want to be sorry one day looking back and saying ‘I should have.'” So he split and came up there to work on his Masters. He really did it in a year, but they wouldn’t let him finish in a year. They made him come back and register for a recital. Eventually, he started to utilize his saxophone skills in different ways. He went up to New York and was doing sub work in some of the Broadway type shows. I think at that time “Ain’t Misbehavin'” was running and a couple of other ones. I remember he told me that when he went up to New York, somebody up there was talking to him at an audition, and the guy said, “Hey, man, do you know how to read?” And he said at first he got insulted! “Man, what is this?” He said after he was around New York for a while, he found out why he was asked that. [LAUGHS] A lot of the musicians up there couldn’t read!</p>
<p>TP: What would you say you brought to the faculty at VCU that hadn’t been there before? Did you bring a new attitude, a new way of teaching?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I don’t think so. Because I wasn’t there long enough.</p>
<p>TP: Three years, right?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I was there for three years. And I’m not sure to what extent that would have been a possibility to do. Because I came in without the benefit of the kind of experience… Just to give you an example, there’s a guy at Virginia Commonwealth, a trombone player named Tony Garcia. He edits the “Jazz Educational Journal,” which is the official organ of IAJE. He sent me an email and asked me if I would be able to come up as part of a program that they are doing, and he outlined some of the things that he was able to do. This is over the period of one year. It’s fantastic. Because what this guy was able to do is nothing short of miraculous. Well, for one thing, he was instrumental in getting somebody (I don’t know the guy personally) to give 2 million bucks to the jazz program at VCU. No jazz program has ever gotten that kind of money. Not in a state institution. I was the recipient of a million dollar chair. But when it came down to it, nothing like that. What it takes to be able to do that is the kind of press-the-flesh…</p>
<p>TP: You need to have very solid political skills to pull off something like that.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: That’s right. There’s just an awful lot of things, man, that he was able to hook up.</p>
<p>TP: The question has more to do with philosophy: Looking back, what would you have done that you didn’t?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: One of the first things that I realized about Virginia Commonwealth was that being in Richmond meant… There was no music tradition in Richmond. There was one little small space — I never went to that space — where some of the guys would play. There was another space that was like a restaurant, but it was bigger. And every now and then, they would bring somebody in. But for the most part, the benefits of being in a city that had a history of music, where students who were coming out of high school as well as those who were coming out of the city of Richmond to go to VCU, would have been able either to participate in or just be a spectator of.</p>
<p>When I go to work on Friday nights at Snug Harbor, there’s a live band that’s playing right across the street. On the corner from there, there’s a place Cafe Brazil, with live music. Across the street from Cafe Brazil, there’s live music. Now, we’re not even talking about what might be happening on Bourbon Street. Then there’s all of these other different places in the area. On North Rampart Street, there’s three spaces within two blocks of each other, one called Funky Butt, the other one called Donna’s Bar & Grill, which specializes in brass bands, and then a blues joint which the owner of Funky Butt owns.\</p>
<p>Richmond didn’t have that. So when I looked at that, I started to realize that getting some people to come to Richmond, especially during the ’80s, to study Jazz, was seemingly very difficult. So I decided that if I was going to stay here, I needed to find a niche, something I can, which would really not only justify being here, but make it a positive musical experience for most of the students. So I was thinking of concentrating on developing rhythm sections — the piano, bass and drums. That would mean getting people to come here and trying to specialize in that area.</p>
<p>TP: Thus Clarence Penn and Alvester Garnett.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. Now, Alvester I met while he was still in high school. He came to VCU the following year. So I was there I think a year while he was there.</p>
<p>TP: I want to step back to your comments about what happened after World War II. Is what you’re saying, in one sense, that the focus on core curricular values started to deteriorate at this time and it had a deleterious effect on the culture? You made a very strong statement. The tone of voice is strong. The words are strong. It seems what happened is an important issue to you.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I need to be more speculative here than direct, because it’s very difficult to be as close to that and be accurate historically. What I’m beginning to realize is that we tend to be judgmental about things which are different from the way we grew up.</p>
<p>Anyway, the thing that happened after World War Two was television, for one thing. And for the first time, here we have an invention which goes right into people’s homes, and within five years, which would put it right around 1950, there were about 10 million sets in the country. Now, what television managed to do was twofold, at least. One was to instantly let you know whatever was going on in almost any other part of the world that the networks chose to broadcast. Unlike, for example, “War Of The Worlds” on the radio with Orson Welles in 1939. I mean, there were people out there in fields in the Midwest with guns waiting to go to war with the Martians. And America, before World War Two, was not that much different, even going back to the past century. I mean, there just was not that much of a difference in terms of the way the country was going on. But as soon as World War Two came in, things like plastics were invented… I wish I knew all of them different inventions. I remember we got our very first refrigerator in 1941. Before that, it was the icebox.</p>
<p>TP: In New Orleans, that was an important thing.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, it was an important thing everywhere. Because what it meant was that you could now keep food one or two days longer than you could otherwise. So many things started to happen.</p>
<p>I think what happened with jazz is that jazz moved closer toward the musical objectives that have been prevalent primarily in European Classical Music. What I mean is this. During the time of Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and Kid Ory, all of these earlier guys, they played music for the sheer entertainment of people. They played dances, and when they played the blues, it was for people to dance to. They had cutting contests, but the cutting contest was music played at the level of the audience themselves. For example, what they would do, they would have these flatbed trucks, and two bands would come. [The ballyhoo.] Whoever won that one, that’s where the people would go to dance. By the time World War Two came (and I’m using World War Two more as a marker than the cause of anything), you had musicians coming out of the Swing Era with the dance bands, like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and various people… The top level of people was one thing, but then there were all of the disciples, if you will, like Sonny Stitt and various other people. So the emphasis started to be placed on the soloist. The elements of the music carried over was related directly to the band.</p>
<p>TP: Max Roach used to say that had something to do with the tax the Federal government started putting on dance…</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I know what you’re talking about. That was in Dizzy’s book. During the war, the government put a war tax of 10% on all venues that had a show. Now, shows could be anything from juggling to dancing girls… For example, the Cotton Club, where Duke played. Now, I don’t think the Cotton Club uptown was going on during the war years, because Owney Madden had gone to jail by then. But anyway, 52nd Street had a lot of these little bitty clubs, and they would put a combo in there. So with the combo, not having a show, the guys, especially the soldiers and sailors passing through… Ultimately, what you begin to get were bands that played for people who were sitting around the bar.</p>
<p>TP: Minton’s wasn’t unlike that either.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Actually, Minton’s looked like a toilet almost. There wasn’t nothing happening when I went to Minton’s in the ’50s. It was in August and there were some bands there, but it was just a big old space. I think there was a piano in there. But it was like a lot of joints I’d seen in New Orleans.</p>
<p>Anyway, most of those places were like hustles. That’s what I called them. A hustle is when a guy opens up a club, because he either likes people or he’s fortunate to have someone leave him a piece of property, or whatever, and you didn’t really need anything other than connections to get a license and sell some booze. Because at that time, I don’t know if anybody was dealing with food in these places anyway! But Prohibition had gone by the wayside by 1933, when Roosevelt came in, so you’re looking at the development of the urban community on all fronts. At the end of the war, you start to see the suburban community come into effect. They’re building all of these post World War II houses in these little towns, and selling it, and the veterans is coming back, man, $500 to get you a house… [LAUGHS]</p>
<p>All of this played out in terms of signalling exactly what was going to be happening in America, and the music was no different. Monk came out of the dance bands, too. But when Monk started to play Monk, Monk was expressing Monk via his musicality and his intellect.</p>
<p>TP: [rambling question on the way Monk, Bird, Powell were educated vis-a-vis contemporary musicians]</p>
<p>MARSALIS: You’re looking in terms of trying to get an analogy between they learned and the way musicians learn today. For one thing, it’s hard to really nail it down. For example, on the back of a vinyl album, Willie The Lion Smith made the statement that a lot of people don’t understand how important it is to develop the left hand through learning the music of J.S. Bach. James P. Johnson was very good classically; he was accompanist for a soprano at that time named Sister Rita Jones. Fats Waller was one heck of an organist. So there had been all along people studying and learning European music. Except as we get later and later into the century, we begin to find that schools primarily utilize European music as a discipline criteria to reinforce the attitudes, in some cases cultural, in some cases blatantly racist, and exclude anything else than European concert music in terms of teaching — you develop orchestra, choruses, choirs. Everything you do centers around practicing and playing European concert music.</p>
<p>So jazz and any folkish music was on the outside. The bluegrass players were like fiddlers. Some of them used to have a joke that said, “He was a great fiddle player, but he went to college and learned to become a violinist.” So the folk music aspect was kind of forsaken. And jazz really was a folk music. But the difference between jazz and other types of folk music was that jazz became grist for the mill of composers, even Ravel. I think we are now beginning to get some composers looking at bluegrass. Copland did to an extent, but it was all surface with Copland — “Billy The Kid” or “Appalachian Spring” you can hear that influence slightly. But jazz sort of became a more formal statement of Americana through the development of the instrumentalist. And when I say “the development,” what I mean is that the process of improvisation was something that was an intellectual development, and it occurred over a period of time with a considerable amount of musicians honing in on it, and it became separate from dance music. Lester Young came to maturity with a lot of the stuff that he did in the Basie band, which was a dance band. Woody’s band was a dance band. Stan Kenton’s band was a dance band. All of those bands were dance bands. So the soloists had kind of a minor role. In the early days, Billie Holiday used to complain about the fact that she had to go up there and sing just half-a-chorus and go back and sit down. All the rest of those bands, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Bob Eberle…</p>
<p>TP: Jimmie Lunceford.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Definitely. Lunceford was a straight-up show band. What I’m saying is that basically the bands were really like dance bands. Sometimes in colleges they would refer to them as “swing bands.” When I was in high school they had what they called a swing band. You could go buy arrangements. There would be stuff like “9:20 Special” or you could get the stuff that Harry James was doing. You couldn’t get no Duke Ellington, but you might get an arrangement somebody made for a standard band of something that Duke did. But for the most part, that’s the way it turned out to be.</p>
<p>TP: One thing a lot of people who passed through the bands note is that they themselves were a training school, like a functional conservatory, in terms of standards upheld and information being passed on.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: In some cases you would find that. But for the most part, there were several differences just in terms of who was doing what. For example, jazz had always been a music that you either already had to know how to play, or you had to have a significant skill on the instrument in order to get it, and you just about learned everything on the job, because there wasn’t any place else for you to get it. And there were a lot of kids learning because their daddy was a player or some other relative. I saw that among musicians in New Orleans who were younger than me. Clyde Kerr. The French brothers, Bob French and George French, the sons of Albert French, who played with Papa Celestin. Sammy Alcorn, whose daddy, Alvin Alcorn, was a trumpet player. But invariably, it was always second-class.</p>
<p>TP: Jazz was second-class.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes. It wasn’t like nowadays. When I read the stuff that was done at Lincoln Center, they have status with the other aspects of Lincoln Center now. There’s a big building going up, which they have a part of. We’re speaking about a whole different thing.</p>
<p>TP: It occurs to me when you say that many of the principles you espouse or the way you teach, in terms of how they got filtered through Wynton, are very much responsible for why Lincoln Center is in the position that it’s in, or what Victor Goines is doing at Juilliard. So again, what your first principles are would seem to be very significant in the intellectual history of jazz at this moment because of the way they’ve been transmitted and filtered through other people. Maybe you think I’m wrong or overexaggerating, but I don’t think so. When I hear him speak and hear you speak, I hear a lot of similar thought processes. His own mind, certainly, but similar thought processes, similar metaphors. This piece is about you as an educator, but I’m trying to pinpoint what it is about your first principles, the principles you bring to conveying information and the way you’re able to do it that has stuck. The proof is very much in the pudding here. We have these facts, these institutions. This is a tangible change from 1987. And in 1987, when the Lincoln Center Jazz program started happening, it was a very tangible change from 1974.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I think that the whole process is somewhat like America as a nation. We’re still in the process of evolution. We’re still evolving. And I think the same thing is the case for the music. I think if you would look at the formal aspects of European music, for example, at some point there was a peak which was reached by way of the composer. And, to some extent, not only by the composer, but the performer. I mean, Beethoven never heard his music on a Hamburg Steinway. He would have no idea what that sounded like! But it didn’t prevent him from writing the kind of music that makes stars out of people who do play on Hamburg Steinways.</p>
<p>So what we’re looking at is a multifaceted kind of thing. The guy who invented the saxophone, his invention was too late for the European Masters, as they called them. And the Rhapsody that Debussy wrote… He didn’t even like the saxophone. Some woman gave him a check for about $500 for a piece, and he delayed as long as he could, and the woman aggravated him to a point to where he finally wrote this rhapsody for saxophone. Now, there were other French composers who probably didn’t feel the same way about the saxophone. Probably Ravel, because he wrote saxophone into “Bolero” which played a rather prominent part. But the thing is, you can’t overlook that also.</p>
<p>So whatever it is that I managed to do didn’t really come by way of a philosophy. Mostly it came by way of a reaction.</p>
<p>TP: The music and the circumstances were telling you what to do at any given moment, and you were responding.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes. And I would begin to do, I imagine, since I haven’t really studied, something similar to what Thomas Edison was doing. I heard a story that his assistant said they had done about 150-200 experiments, and none of the lightbulbs worked. Finally he said, “Man, we ought to give up on this, because this thing ain’t workin’! We ain’t makin’ no progress at all.” And Edison supposedly said, “On the contrary, we know 150 ways that do not work.” We don’t always think in terms of going to what doesn’t work. That was one of the things that I started to learn. For example, I remember one of my colleagues who was teaching instrumental music, he said, “Man, these kids need to learn 25 tunes a semester.” Well, what are they going to play on those 25 tunes? Because his expertise in terms of improvisation was really not that strong. So he didn’t understand that you do practice improvisation, that you do actually do that. But basically, I didn’t have a philosophy per se.</p>
<p>TP: But you had first principles.<br/> MARSALIS: What do you mean?</p>
<p>TP: You had a set of aesthetic values that governed your responses to these situations, and you had a culture and a milieu from which you emerged to face these situations.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. That’s true.</p>
<p>TP: This is all I’m saying, and it’s one reason why I’m so interesting in hearing you address the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, and how you perceive those times vis-a-vis today.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Essentially, the situation in the ’40s and a large portion of the ’50s was based on the entertainment side of music. So jazz did not enjoy an acceptance in any academic sense. And it’s not that people didn’t study. I think I told you about this book that’s coming out on Yvonne Bush. People went to school, and they studied, and the better teachers you had, probably you were most fortunate to have learned whatever you learned. But when it came down to it, how to apply it was sometimes tied directly to employment opportunity. I remember listening to stories… See, I had a chance to work with Cab Calloway. I also had a chance to work with the Judge, Milt Hinton, and I knew Dizzy also. The Judge would tell me how, during the break between shows somewhere they were playing, Dizzy would say, “Come up on the roof, man,” and he and Dizzy would get together on the stuff Dizzy was working on, and he’d tell him what to play. Cab told me how… This is a little ancillary story. They were doing a live broadcast for NBC Radio, and while they were going through the broadcast, Cab got hit in the back of the head with a spitball…</p>
<p>TP: And it wasn’t Dizzy.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No, it wasn’t.</p>
<p>TP: It might have been Jonah Jones.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: It was.</p>
<p>TP: Then they had the knife fight…</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah. Then Dizzy stuck him in the rear with the knife. But Cab told me, “Man, the next time I saw Dizzy, Dizzy came through with this arrangement, man, and said, ‘I’m going to try this arrangement; listen to this.'” So they played it, and Cab said, ‘Man, what is that?'” Dizzy said, “Man, this is the new stuff; this is what’s happening.” There were all of these people, like Gil Fuller, who was doing some of the writing, and Tadd Dameron. To some extent, some of these people were also teachers. For example, John Lewis was a teacher at CCNY. I think Ron, too.</p>
<p>See, I have several ideas that I have yet to be able to implement. First of all, I think that the drumset is the most important instrument in the jazz band. That’s the first thing. I’ll tell you an example. I was doing a workshop in North Carolina with the jazz band at a university called Shaw. It was a pretty good sounding band. So after they finished playing, I asked the guys in the band, “Can you guys hear the drummer?” See, a lot of times what happens, nobody takes the time to find out whether or not some of these people in the band can really hear from one end to the next, and unless they’re experienced players, they don’t know to tell the band instructor, “Hey, man, I can’t really hear what this guy is doing over there.” So I asked them, could they hear the drummer, and they said, “Yeah, we can hear.” So I said, “Let me ask you something. When you listen to the drummer, tell me what you hear.” Do you hear [SOFT ARTICULATED BEATS] or do you hear [UNDIFFERENTIATED BUZZ]?” They said, “Yeah, that’s what we hear [LATTER].”</p>
<p>So I knew what was wrong with that. And these were all very serious players. I’ve done some workshops where guys come in with marching band sticks broke in half, no tips, paper on them. They’re not even serious. So I asked the drummer, “Hey, man, what size sticks are you using?” He said, “I’m using 7A.” He said, “Well, 7A, man, is a combo stick. If you’re going to play and kick and a big band, you need at least a 5A, and if you’re going to play with a 5A, when you practice, you need to practice with a 3A, so that you build up to that.” See, these are some things that I found out later on.</p>
<p>TP: Very practical. To help them succeed.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Oh yeah.</p>
<p>TP: So you take for granted that they are going to have the fundamentals down through drill. It’s as though the process of learning music is like learning a trade or an artisanal skill, and then it becomes art through all the permutations to which those skills are applied.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, you can get into a lot of trouble, man, trying to figure out at what point it becomes art. That becomes a lot more philosophical than it does realistic. I mean, I listen to cats talk about “the art of hip-hop.”</p>
<p>TP: But I’m talking about the art of Charlie Parker.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah, I know. But, see, that’s where the argument comes from. Who gets the right to use that word?</p>
<p>TP: The word “art.” Do I have the right to use it.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, everybody has the right to use it.</p>
<p>TP: But you know what I’m saying.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah. But it at some point it may become art, and it may not. See, that’s the thing. We don’t really know to what extent it will or won’t become art.</p>
<p>TP: But you’re not concerned about that when you’re teaching, then.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No. See, what I’m concerned about is whether these guys can put one foot in front of the other. Because it becomes very difficult to start dealing with philosophy. I think I might have told the story about the guitar player who was doing… When you get students like that, they have not had enough experience dealing with anything of a philosophical nature to start trying to preach “art” in that sense. In most cases, you get to be lucky if they can play their instrument. And if they can play their instrument, we just go from there.</p>
<p>TP: Let me take you to University of New Orleans, so I have the chronology. You stayed at VCU for three years, and then for a variety of reasons, I’m sure, you move back to New Orleans.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, for one reason. The chancellor came and he made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse.</p>
<p>TP: But I guess he didn’t have to hold a gun to your head to get you back to New Orleans.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Oh, no! I still thought that New Orleans was the best place to develop a jazz program. I think that New Orleans today is still the best learning town in the world!</p>
<p>TP: Why is that?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Because of the various places that exist to ply your trade, to practice. There are so many different spaces here to play in, so many different kinds of places. You could play a brass band, you can play in trad bands, you can play in a traditional jazz band, you can play Ska. There’s all of this stuff.</p>
<p>TP: You can play in Latin bands now.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: That’s right! The people who come from other places to come to New Orleans, they don’t have to concern themselves nearly as much about property. At one point, guys were going around Soho…well, they weren’t even calling it Soho then…</p>
<p>TP: You could rent a cold water flat cheap.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah, you could get a loft, man. Now that’s all gone. New York becomes one of those places that if you go there, you’d better have a gig when you go there, and when the gig runs out, you’d better be ready to go back somewhere else.</p>
<p>TP: So you’re saying that in New Orleans you can learn music on a major league level without having to shell out $2000 a month for a railroad flat.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes.</p>
<p>TP: Very practical. What was the program like at UNO when you got there?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: There was no program.</p>
<p>TP: So you actually had to start the program and get it off the ground.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: There was one guy on the faculty named Charles Blancq. In fact, he’s got a son who I think is living in New York now, who was at one time teaching at Queens, named Kevin Blancq. A good little trumpet player and arranger. Anyway, I knew Charles for years, even when he was a music student at LSU, the club that I had, and all the rest of that… Anyway, the Chancellor asked me to come back to New Orleans, we finally came to terms, and I agreed and went back. I did one more year at VCU, for the seniors before they left. So Charles Blancq and I put together a curriculum over the telephone, and that enabled Charles to go to the committee at UNO to get the courses certified for a degree. Because it was a liberal arts degree. They were all basic courses. Because as a freshman going into this university, a good portion of what you took in the first 17 hours was like English, Earth Science, history, just the fundamentals — not music. You got so many hours for playing in a combo. It was maybe three or four years before we really got a big band.</p>
<p>TP: Around ’94 or so?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I forget the year. Maybe even later. But what I’m saying is that this is where we went to. Ultimately, we had a series of meetings where we tweaked this or changed that, or tweaked that and changed this, or reorganized that… We knocked it down from 132 hours to 128 hours to graduate. All the while, putting a major emphasis on performance. We had to develop ways for evaluation. Like, when we listened to the guys play, what were we listening to? A lot of things that we started out with and ultimately changed were concepts we got from the existing wing of the music department, which was the Classical Department. We eventually got permission to do recital hours with just the jazz students. Also, we were able to get the jury… Most times what you would get would be the faculty for a particular instrument, and the private teacher would come in, and they would talk about the student, and the student would play whatever they were working on. So we had meetings about that. We said, “Man, this doesn’t really make a lot of sense. What we really need to do is go and listen to the students in the context of what they’re playing, hear them in the combo that they play with. Because that’s really where they function.” So we were able to change that.</p>
<p>TP: Is University of New Orleans part of the State University of Louisiana?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. But basically, those are some of the things we were able to do.</p>
<p>TP: You retired last August.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes.</p>
<p>TP: Who are some of the students who came through University of New Orleans?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: There’s a guy in New York right now named David Morgan, a piano player. He was the first graduate from our program. There’s a saxophone player who came at the same time he did named Bryce Winston. There’s a couple piano players — a guy named Josh Paxton, who works down here, and finished in the graduate program. There’s some people who came and didn’t really stay. Nicholas Payton came and stayed a semester. Irvin Mayfield stayed a couple of years.</p>
<p>TP: Was Peter Martin involved?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No. Peter was teaching, doing adjunct teaching over there.</p>
<p>TP: Why should people go to school to study jazz?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, I don’t necessarily think they should. That’s not a statement that I would make. I think if they really need… Well, let me put it another way. As I mentioned to you earlier about the concept of being in a state of evolution, there may be a time in the future when going to school to study jazz would be maybe the same thing as going to school to study engineering. Maybe. But as it stands right now, jazz as we know it is such a highly individualistic art, until, if you get a good private instructor and you’re around in a situation… I’ll have to say that this excludes pianists.</p>
<p>TP: Why?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Because you can play by yourself. You can do the Keith Jarrett thing. But if you are around people who are well enough versed in the style of music that you’re trying to play, then you really don’t need it. You’ll do better with private instruction and just going out and playing.</p>
<p>TP: Why should people continue to play jazz?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: There’s no real reason why anybody should continue to play jazz. Aside from whatever personal reasons that they bring to it, that the music speaks to you. Now, I think more and more that the study of jazz, across the board, whether it be as a musician or as a lay person, can help you to better understand America and its relationship to the citizenry as a whole.</p>
<p>TP: Why is that?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Because the music itself reflects the whole of the citizenry, moreso than any other music. In other words, you can listen to and develop an appreciation for the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, but that don’t have nothin’ to do with America! Neither does any of the other musics developed in that canon. But if you listen to “West End Blues” by Louis Armstrong, and really get to appreciate what was going on in there, you begin to understand what was going on in the early part of the century in America, and you begin to connect that to the numerous blues players that were wandering across the country during the time when the Depression was on and nobody had any money. You can connect it in Chicago, where all these blues players were. That’s basically what I’m saying.</p>
<p>TP: But how does that pertain to the here-and-now? It’s an interesting situation. You have all these skilled jazz players of many different generations, and as far as the broader culture is concerned, even with Lincoln Center and the various institutional stronghold in the universities, it’s just a blip on the consciousness of popular culture. As an educator and thinker and the father of four extremely accomplished musicians, what do you think playing jazz offers to young people of today?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I think in some ways we can look at jazz as a form of glue that keeps American culture centered and provides avenues for research, whether it be formal research or whether it just be chasing down the name of somebody you find and enjoy and seeing what else that person has done. In the kind of world that we live in now, people do not necessarily even have to have a skill to become rich and famous as a pop artist. So consequently, a disciplined approach to anything becomes something that’s very much needed in this country. As I mentioned to you, jazz is the only music that started as a folk music and evolved as a folk music. Most of the other music that started as folk music, especially the music in the European tradition, started as folk music, stayed folk music, but became an influence on composers — so the composer became the filter. For which you heard various… “Hungarian Dance #3,” and all the stuff Bartok ripped off from them gypsies. Well, I won’t say “ripped off.” But their music was a predominant influence. But in America, jazz remains a folk music that evolved as a folk music. And even though you might hear Charlie Parker with Strings, if you were to take that recording and bleep out Charlie Parker, what do you have? You have some whole note-half note violin players sawing away, and a Mitch Miller solo on oboe.</p>
<p>But for the most part… One of the things that has not yet become a staple is the quintet. When I say a staple, what I mean is as a course of study, as a recognized ensemble. For example, if you study classical music, there are several ensembles. String quartet is one. The symphony orchestra is another. Then there are various others, brass quintets, brass quartets… Invariably, there are combinations that are not necessarily that standard. But in jazz, it’s the quintet, the tenor saxophone, the trumpet and the rhythm section. There’s more recordings made with that combination that have yet to really be studied in that context, where you look at it and say, “Okay, this is an ensemble that’s representative of a jazz ensemble of this period.” Whereas if you go earlier to traditional jazz, especially when it’s New Orleans, what you get is the sextet, with the trombone, cornet and clarinet. Which was a big influence on Duke. On “Mood Indigo” that Duke Ellington did, he flipped everything upside-down. He took the trombone and made the trombone higher, then he took the clarinet and put the clarinet on the bottom, and the trumpet was playing the melody with a mute.</p>
<p>I hear some younger kids today, some kids who play with Jason, and as young as Jason is, he even recognizes that some of these don’t have really any idea about their instrument — about the tenor saxophone. At one time, there used to be this person who was a tenor saxophone player, and he was recognized as a tenor saxophone player. Nowadays, some of these guys play the tenor, and there’s no particular reference to that instrument in any particular fashion in terms of what they play. That is, when you listen to them, you don’t get the feeling, “Well, man, I think he may have listened to Ben Webster” or he might have listened to Gene Ammons or Sonny Rollins or Chu Berry — some of the more well-known tenor saxophone players.</p>
<p>TP: So that link to the broader narrative thread that runs through the music ceases to exist.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, it’s like writers. You read a writer and think, “Has he ever read Hemingway? Has he ever read Faulkner? Has he ever read Mark Twain?” I think what is beginning to happen… I clipped an article out of the paper by a local writer who was talking about two people who were at a university in the State of Louisiana in education, and the chairman of the department used to like to take them on junkets to different places — South America, China — talking about education techniques. As soon as they get a couple of miles away from the university, they were minority kids in dire need of (?) an education techniques, and there was no observation of that at all. So eventually, this guy and his wife… This guy got to be dean of the school, of the education department, and he and his wife took a year and they went to the furthest corner of Louisiana, near the Arkansas line, and for a ithey taught in an elementary school in a rural parish which is extremely poor, and they wrote a book… I don’t know if they did it together or he did. He taught fourth grade and his wife taught the third graders. In this book, they talked about the instance that LETA(?), which is what they call the standardized tests in Louisiana… They actually said that it was fraudulent. I’d never seen anybody say so strongly that this is fraudulent. I mean, I’ve always thought that.<br/> But when you think in terms of young musicians and jazz musicians, you realize… Like the guitar student I had. They don’t really know that there is something to know about what it is that they’re doing. I was working once with a student on “Summertime,” and I said, “Have you ever heard the original rendition of ‘Summertime’?” He said, “Yeah, man, I got that recording by Miles.” And I had to explain to him about this aria in an opera called “Porgy and Bess” that was written by George Gershwin.</p>
<p>This is one of the dilemmas that we have. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that this is a very young country. I often think of America the way that I would about a 10-year-old kid whose folks died and left him this candy store, and he had nobody to guide him or nothing. So he just goes into this candy store and, like, proceeds to be a 10-year-old kid. And ultimately, he has to learn every time he gets a bellyache, if he’s not unfortunate enough to get diabetes and die before then, that there’s something to know when you got this place. It’s not just, “Oh, great, this is mine.”</p>
<p>I think that invariably, the sources of information, as they descend, becomes filtered to a point where there’s very little meaningful information that gets through in terms of any discipline. And unless it’s popular enough, it doesn’t get through at all. Just to hear some young guys come up to me in school and say, “Hey, man, what do you think of Hip-Hop and Jazz?” I cannot think of more of an oxymoron than Hip-Hop and Jazz. And there are people who defend that.</p>
<p>* * * *</p> Ellis Marsalis Interview - 2002: Part Fourtag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2017-01-15:1992552:Topic:3993372017-01-15T06:10:23.957ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<p>TP: …among black musicians was the notion of having your own sound, above and beyond just about anything else, in many ways.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Essentially, that was one of the things that contributed to the fact of whether you were going to work or not.</p>
<p>TP: So again, it’s economic.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, that was one of the factors. It wasn’t just the only one. But the thing is, there was no uniformity. You go up to Eastman. They’ve got a great music department at the…</p>
<p>TP: …among black musicians was the notion of having your own sound, above and beyond just about anything else, in many ways.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Essentially, that was one of the things that contributed to the fact of whether you were going to work or not.</p>
<p>TP: So again, it’s economic.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, that was one of the factors. It wasn’t just the only one. But the thing is, there was no uniformity. You go up to Eastman. They’ve got a great music department at the Eastman Conservatory. Look at the cats in that band. I mean, there’s a conservatory approach to jazz. All the saxophone players got the same sound. And they can all play! And you listen to these guys playing a solo, and you can’t tell which one is what! There is no individuality, man.</p>
<p>And having your own sound has as much to do with… I remember Jug told me, Gene Ammons told me… See, Gene Ammons went to school under Walter Dyett. Gene Ammons said, man, “When I went to study in the band, the first thing the dude did was gave me the mouthpiece, and I had to play that for a month. Then I got to the neck, and I had to play that for another month or so. Then finally, I got the horn.”</p>
<p>TP: Von Freeman told me the same thing.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah! He said by that time, what you do is develop a sound. In some cases, it’s not so much my sound as much as it is a sound. Because when you start to play jazz especially, you hear differently than what happens when you study classical music. And even with Classical music, there are people who have individual sounds with that, even though you’d have to be really attuned to hear them.</p>
<p>TP: Well, connoisseurs can tell Michelangelo Benedetti from Pollini, or Dinu Lupatti from…</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Michelangelo Benedetti was one of my favorites, especially for French music.</p>
<p>But for the most part, I think that’s one of the things that sometimes people misconstrue when they say “my sound.” Everybody’s got a sound. Because once you learn how to play that instrument, whatever comes out of it is going to be your sound anyway.</p>
<p>TP: I’m trying to circle around to an ending. How, within your pedagogy, did you give students that imperative of developing your own sound? Is that just implicit within what you give them?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Essentially it is. Because I never had them for that long. That’s the one thing you’ve got to realize about teaching in a high school.</p>
<p>TP: But now I’m talking about college, too.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, college is totally different. See, the thing about college and universities, you get students in clumps. If you’re teaching an improvisation class, you get all of the students that’s taking that at that time. Now, they’re studying their instrument with somebody else. You see? And if you happen to have a combo that you’re teaching, there are some things you can pass on to them in that context. That’s teaching a combo. But that individual approach is not there nearly as much. Because by the time you get to the university, you have to spend a lot of time, hopefully, in dealing with refining what’s there.</p>
<p>TP: But do you use the same principles in dealing with your university students as you did with your students at NOCCA? Is what you did at NOCCA the building block for the Ellis Marsalis way of teaching?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes, definitely.</p>
<p>TP: Let’s say I’m some administrator giving you a grant. How would you boil down your principles for me? The one or two minute synopsis.<br/> MARSALIS: Basically, it’s important to learn the three elements of music — rhythm, harmony and melody, not necessarily in that order. And you apply that to each piece that you play.</p>
<p>TP: Since you only took ten seconds to answer: How are you going to go about giving it to them? Through drill?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes.</p>
<p>TP: It’s all drill.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes. You can really study two songs a semester, and teach everything that you need to teach in that given semester.</p>
<p>TP: What two songs would those be?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Any two songs that have to do with the form. Like a 32-measure form, AABA… It doesn’t matter. Because all of them are going to have rhythm, harmony and melody. It’s a busy-word(?) concept to give somebody 25 songs to learn. I was telling my colleague that. He said, “Man, they ought to learn 25 songs at a minimum.” I said, “But what are they going to play on those songs?” You take one song and say, “Okay, here is the verse, here is the melody, this is what the harmony is.” Now, the first thing you’ve got to do is learn how to play each of those component parts. And it takes time to do that. Now, you multiply that by ten, and what time do you have? You don’t have no time. You’re scuffling, trying to make some arbitrary deadline.</p>
<p>TP: So you really are like Walter Dyett and Samuel Browne in a lot of ways.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I hope so. [LAUGHS]</p>
<p>TP: You really are. I’m glad I’m not imposing some rigid thesis on you. One final question. What do you think of the state of things in jazz now? We’re talking about some negatives, like maybe lack of individuality among young musicians, but overall, what’s your sense of the state of things as opposed to 15 years ago, when you started at Virginia Commonwealth, or 28 years ago, when you started at NOCCA?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, those are very short periods of time. I think that jazz ultimately will become a major part of the cornerstone of American music. I just heard a trio… This was a classical group. I think all of them went to Juilliard, and they were playing a piece by one of their contemporaries, who is a violinist, who has been playing with a Rock band, and is now composing music, and has been playing violin with Ornette Coleman. It was piano, cello and either violin or viola. When they started to play his piece, I could hear “Lonely Woman,” man, in the beginning theme of it. That’s the direction that the music is going in. And the people who are going to make the biggest contributions towards it are the same as it was in Europe as composers.</p>
<p>TP: When you say “that’s the direction,” do you mean Ornette Coleman or do you mean the hybrid?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: The hybrid. That’s it. It’s going to be like this violin player, the bluegrass player… He’s written a composition that’s very interesting, too.</p>
<p>TP: A young guy?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Not too young. He’s younger than me. Top of the list. Top line. The representative of that. Well, anyway, I’ll think of it.</p>
<p>TP: Another aspect of the hybrid is all the musicians internationally who are coming here with substantial idiomatic knowledge of jazz and bringing their own cultural information to the table. I’m thinking particularly of musicians from all over the Caribbean and South America. And it seems to me that the rhythmic template of jazz, things that were maybe esoteric 10-15 years ago, are no longer esoteric. Do you perceive this internationalization of the music, that it’s incorporating more information at this point?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Of course. That’s the way that is. That’s why we get terms like “globalization.” I don’t think music is the only representation of that. I think whatever you see is happening in terms of economics, in terms of the market, in terms of trade… There was a big thing in the paper here yesterday, they’re trying to make a deal between France and New Orleans to build a super-port. So it’s all-inclusive. That’s what I’m saying. It’s not really a separate thing.</p>
<p>TP: So the world is smaller, people can transcend the particularities of their locale, and you can get anywhere in a day, that sort of thing?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: That’s right.</p> Ellis Marsalis Interview - 2002: Part Threetag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2017-01-15:1992552:Topic:3992562017-01-15T06:08:04.611ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<p>TP: Some nuts and bolts questions. Are you still teaching, or are you now retired from any institutional affiliation?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No, I retired August 10th, 2001 from the University of New Orleans.</p>
<p>TP: So you’re retired for a year. Are you still teaching in any capacity?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No.</p>
<p>TP: So your artistic focus is on being a piano player.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I’m focusing on my retirement.</p>
<p>TP: How are you spending it?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well,…</p>
<p>TP: Some nuts and bolts questions. Are you still teaching, or are you now retired from any institutional affiliation?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No, I retired August 10th, 2001 from the University of New Orleans.</p>
<p>TP: So you’re retired for a year. Are you still teaching in any capacity?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No.</p>
<p>TP: So your artistic focus is on being a piano player.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I’m focusing on my retirement.</p>
<p>TP: How are you spending it?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, first getting used to it. I started putting some unfinished portions of things into my computer, which is something that I’ve been slowly learning about doing. Because the program can be very difficult. But I’ve got some gigs. I usually play every Friday night at a local club called Snug Harbor.</p>
<p>TP: That’s the top club in New Orleans, isn’t it?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. And I go out occasionally. This summer we have a couple of grandchildren who are staying with us, going to some summer camps. So I’ll be here doing that; my wife and I will be taking care of that.</p>
<p>TP: When did you begin to teach? How long have you been teaching? What were the circumstances? Was it the NOCCA experience in the mid-’70s?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, not really. When I graduated from Dillard University.</p>
<p>TP: So way before the 1970s, then.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes. I didn’t really want to teach, but eventually I went into the military and got out, and got married, and the gig situation in New Orleans, which was never that great anyway, changed tremendously, and as a result, I figured I might as well try to use the degree I’ve got. So I started to teach in 1963.</p>
<p>TP: In what situation?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: It’s hard to really describe. Because I went in to be like a music teacher, and they never had a band in there at the school. What happened, I ended up with two or three science classes and some general music classes, with one period to develop a band. So I stayed there for a year, and I said, “Well, I know I need the money, but I’m not going to cripple people because I need the money.” And I didn’t know nothin’ about no science! So I left there, and I started teaching in a small Louisiana town, Browbridge. I was band director there for a couple of years.</p>
<p>TP: Is that when you started to develop a pedagogy?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes, I would say. Definitely.</p>
<p>TP: By 1964, you’re an established musician in New Orleans, such as the scene was, and you’d been playing professionally for a little less than 15 years.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Wait. When are you talking about?</p>
<p>TP: Let me see if my chronology for you is correct. You’re born in ’34. You go to Dillard when, about ’51 to ’55. You go in the Army in either late ’55 or early ’56?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No, I was in the Marine Corps in ’56.</p>
<p>TP: You spend a lot of that time in California, and it seems that your military service wasn’t so arduous as to prevent you from playing music.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, basically, that became my job.</p>
<p>TP: So you’re another one of the people who got to play music as part of their Service duties.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right.</p>
<p>TP: And you get back to New Orleans around ’58 or ’59, and you start to have your children, and because the economic situation in New Orleans was what it is, you start to teach. And in the mid-’60s, you’re teaching in that high school in Browbridge.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. ’64 to ’66.</p>
<p>TP: In one of my earlier conversations with you, you spoke about how you learned, about your formative process, that you started playing clarinet when you were 11, started playing tenor saxophone in high school, did a lot of rhythm-and-blues gigs, and you were studying the piano, and that when you got out of high school you decided to be a music major, that Dizzy Gillespie turned you on, a bunch of things turned you on. You said: “I had been studying with a really great piano teacher. Of course, studying piano at that time either meant that you were learning from a mentor in the church that you went to, or you were learning from someone who was either in your family or was a friend of the family that would teach you the tradition of the music according to earlier styles, or you studied with a piano teacher who basically was teaching formal approaches to European music.” You said that you weren’t playing in the church, which was to your regret, and you didn’t know anyone who was really playing piano from a traditional jazz point of view, and you gravitated to the two areas that were closest to you, being Rhythm-and-Blues and Jazz, and I guess some European tradition — which you’re not saying here — with that piano teacher.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I didn’t really study with her long enough to develop a repertoire. I studied with her maybe about a year or so, and then I started at the university. And I couldn’t put it together to continue studying with her. Her name was Jean Coston Maloney. You see, I couldn’t put that together, because if I had thought about it and had figured it out, I could have continued studying with her. But I said, “Well, I can’t study with her and be a music major over here at the same time.” I said, “When I graduate, I’m going to go back and start studying with her.” Of course, by that time she had left town.</p>
<p>TP: Would you say you had a good music curriculum at the high school that you attended?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No. There was no music curriculum. There was none at all. There was the marching band and the concert band.</p>
<p>TP: What was the level of instruction that you received in that band? How was learning done?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, that school was in transition at the time, and in fact, it closed my sophomore year. And the band director, who had really been great, left the year before I got there, and went off to Southern University to direct bands there. So what we did was sort of limp along. The last part of the year, we didn’t have a band teacher at all. We just did it ourselves. So I didn’t learn much about music at all in high school.</p>
<p>TP: I see. Because I’ve talked to a few of your contemporaries from New Orleans, like Clyde Kerr, and I gather his house was a focal point for a lot of like-minded musicians.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes. That was true with Clyde. Clyde, Sr., was a music teacher also.</p>
<p>TP: Were there any teachers in New Orleans who were equivalent to the great black high school teachers of segregation days — such as Walter Dyett or Samuel Browne or the woman at Cass Tech in Detroit — in inspiring musicians of your generation?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: If I had to pick somebody, it would be Yvonne Bush. There’s a book coming out which is going to be very interesting, and she’s featured in that book. In fact, the guy who wrote the book, Al Kennedy, had in his first printing of it a chronology of all of the people that she influenced. It was one of those pullouts. Now, I don’t know if Scarecrow is going to keep that. I mean, it may make it and it may not. But Yvonne Bush is one of the people that I would tend to think was close to what you’re talking about. She was a trombone player, and I think she had spent some time playing with the Sweethearts of Rhythm during their later days.</p>
<p>Anyway, Clyde Kerr… There was also a younger guy named Alvin Thomas who helped a couple of guys. But he died young. He was younger than me. He was still in high school when I was doing my (?). He was also one of the students of Yvonne Bush.</p>
<p>TP: But in the process of learning the vocabulary of jazz and the tools that you would need to be effective, how did it operate before you went to college? Was it totally informal, like you and Alvin Batiste would get together and take down solos from records? I know a lot of people from your generation were very homegrown, but then, other people had substantial formal instruction. And given the subject of this article, I’m interested in how you accumulated and processed vocabulary.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: In a kind of shotgun approach. Some here, a piece over there, a little bit here, a little bit there. Because once I decided that I was going to be a piano player, one of the things that I didn’t know was the dimensions involved. That is, if you are a tenor saxophone player, you play the tenor saxophone, but you may have studied the chronology of saxophone players who played your instrument, so you get a pretty good understanding of who came before you. But when you’re a piano player, the significance of being a piano player is that you wear several different hats. There’s solo piano, which Art Tatum scared everybody to death with that. Then there’s the trio piano playing, the stuff that Oscar did and various other people who played. Then there’s playing piano in a rhythm section, which is one of the things that you end up learning to do because of working conditions. Usually, all of the piano players at some point end up playing in a rhythm section. And the accompaniment role, in some cases, if you happen to be in a group with a singer. And it’s all different. And there was nobody there to tell me that, so I just learned it as well as I could.</p>
<p>TP: You made a comment in my second radio session with you that accompaniment is the most difficult thing to teach.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: It really is. It shouldn’t be. But the reason why it’s so difficult to teach is because music programs are not structured in a way that the vocalist and the other instrumentalists are taught in a complementary manner. By “complementary” I mean this. If a person says, “Well, I’m interested in playing jazz piano,” unless you have a singer who is interested in singing jazz in accordance with the tradition in the same sense that that piano player understands their role, you don’t have a thing! You see?</p>
<p>Most of the metaphors that I used when I was teaching was through athletics. I would tell the students various things, especially when Jordan was still playing. I would try to get them to focus on learning melodies to a song, make sure you know what that melody is. If there are words to that song, at least learn the first verse to it, so that you see how those words connect with that melody. The harmony is a part of that. Learn that harmony the way that the guy wrote it, so when you hear the alterations from other people, you have a reference point. Know the rhythm so that you understand what category the piece falls in. It may be a Rhumba or a Congo or a Bossa-Nova, or it may be a ballad, or it may be up-tempo. I used to use Michael Jordan. I said, “When you look at him, what you see is somebody who has developed every facet of the game, whether it’s his defensive play, or his ability to shoot around the perimeter, or it’s the various ways in which people develop moving the ball around, the free-throw shooting…” Like, all of the aspects that go into the whole of the person.</p>
<p>Music teachers rarely teach like that. The reason that music teachers rarely teach like that is because you have too many people involved, and they only hired one music teacher, and that music teacher is expected to teach a band well enough to go out on a halftime football show. So it can become very difficult to try to deal with subtleties when it’s just you and 100-and-some students.</p>
<p>TP: How did you deal with that when you were at Browbridge?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I didn’t deal with that. I had a concert band which I dealt with, and then the football season. I had somebody who could do the little halftime steps and all that, and teach the band that, and go out and do the halftime football show. Basically, that’s it.</p>
<p>TP: At Browbridge.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right.<br/> TP: And at that point, would you say that by the age 30, you had developed pretty much the pedagogy — given, of course, the various refinements and elaborations over time — that you continued to teach? Or did it springboard you into developing that pedagogy?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: See, it’s hard to answer that, because I didn’t pursue teaching sort of like in a straight line. Like someone who wants to be a doctor. You may end up being a surgeon or internal medicine or a podiatrist. But you still go in a straight line. But see, I wasn’t really that interested in teaching, and when I left Browbridge, I came back and started playing in the Playboy Club, and I stayed there until such time as… I mean, the job in and of itself was not really going anywhere. It was a good job, playing six nights a week. But I wasn’t satisfied with it.</p>
<p>TP: Not artistically satisfied.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, not really, man. It was a jazz gig. It wasn’t like you had to play something other than that. But even if you’re playing jazz, if what you are playing isn’t really saying anything… And then, it really wasn’t my group, so to speak. So even though I was playing every night, there was little or no chance to do anything with them or with anybody else. Because the city at that time had just moved away from legal segregation — maybe two years earlier, in 1966. So it was a city in transition, and there were still a lot of older clubs and older musicians playing, and a lot of younger guys coming in who were bringing a different brand of funk to what they were doing. There was virtually no jazz — as we consider it — to speak of. And there wouldn’t really be any straight-ahead stuff until, oh, much later.</p>
<p>TP: Let me step back to Dillard and address the way the curriculum you received there affected the musician you became.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, what about it?</p>
<p>TP: Let me put the question to you this way. Do you feel you received a solid music education at Dillard?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Not really. It was a small school, a private school, and the emphasis was on the nursing school, which had a very good reputation, and also on education. Because heretofore, teaching and education degrees were areas that college-minded Black students could go into and get a job as a schoolteacher. So the idea of performance was ludicrous. At the time, I didn’t really know that was the way people were thinking who were administering the school! So what we got was really the basis of European music, and in some cases, taught by people in a kind of slapdash way. Not everybody. It just depended on who you got. It was modeled, so to speak, kind of after a poor man’s conservatory — which most of them are.</p>
<p>TP: You mean most of the black colleges during segregation?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, most of them were anyway, even the ones that weren’t Black. The thing is, your primary customer… For example, even at the University of New Orleans today, the primary customer is one who is going to be in music education. So consequently, what you get is all of the rules that are set up in such a way that resemble a mini-conservatory. So many hours on your major instrument, so many hours on the minor instruments, all those kinds of things that they expect band directors to do. And for the most part, courses in theory. In a lot of cases, you have an abundance of theory classes and almost no practical.</p>
<p>TP: Whereas people like Yvonne Busch and Walter Dyett and Samuel Browne were extremely practically-oriented and performance-oriented.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I imagine so. But it’s kind of hard to tell. I used to talk with Eddie Harris about Walter Dyett, because Eddie studied under him. And I talked a little bit with Joe Williams about the Colonel, from Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago. He went under a guy who had been a Colonel, I think, in the Army.</p>
<p>TP: The guy at Wendell Phillips was Major Clark N. Smith, then Dyett succeeded him, then Dyett went to DuSable when the school was founded in 1935.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes, it must have been the Major.</p>
<p>TP: He had the Chicago Defender Boys Band, which Lionel Hampton came out of. I think he was a no-nonsense Marine, like you!</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Also the school in Detroit, Cass Tech, where Donald Byrd… A lot of those cats went to Cass Tech. See, we didn’t really have schools like that.</p>
<p>TP: Oh, I’d been under the impression that one of the black high schools in New Orleans had a good music program. I guess I was under the wrong impression.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: How long ago?</p>
<p>TP: I was thinking the late ’40s and ’50s, but my memory may be incorrect.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, when people say that so-and-so had a good music program, you don’t ever know what that means! I had a guy that told me he was going into the studio down here, and he was trying to get some musicians, and he heard that St. Augustine High School had these great musicians and this great music program, and he got some of them kids in the studio. I knew what he was trying to do, and I didn’t call him on it, but he was trying to get over cheap. But anyway, he got those kids in there, and they didn’t know jack! They’re not being taught any of that. They’re a marching band, and their reputation is that. But a lot of times, people don’t really know. They look at these situations, and they’re not involved in music, and go, “Oh, this is a great program.”</p>
<p>TP: One thing that occurs to me is that in thinking of people like Dyett and Samuel Browne and these high school music programs through which talented young black musicians emerged and were prepared to become skilled jazz musicians in the period when segregation was operative, there was a certain type of pedagogy and a certain type of attitude and a certain type of world view that was conveyed that helped these musicians function. Looking at you from the outside, I see your work as very much in a continuum of that, granted, of course, that you were doing it in a different time. So I’m fishing here to see if this sort of attitude stuck to you and informed your perspective on your own teaching.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, by the time that I started to teach music in high school at the New Orleans Center of Creative Arts, which was a different school… There was no marching band. There was no band. There was no core curriculum of math or science or any of that. This was an arts high school that students went to, using their elective from the home school. You could not graduate from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts with a diploma that was recognized as anything. In other words, you had to go to the regular certified high school that taught math and science and English and history, and then half-a-day, you would study your discipline. Now, a discipline at NOCCA could be dance, theater, music, visual arts, or creative writing. And we had a faculty of artists. So the curriculum was designed by the artists for young people who would anticipate becoming professional musicians, dancers, singers, whatever. That was the greatest faculty that I was ever on. There was only three of us. That faculty was fantastic. I learned as much as the students did.</p>
<p>TP: Was that you, Alvin Batiste and Kidd Jordan?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No-no, not at all. Alvin was teaching at Southern.</p>
<p>TP: He wasn’t teaching there at all.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: No. Alvin was the artist-in-residence, I think, for the Orleans Parish School system. So when that school opened, Alvin called me, and told me that they were opening up the school, and that it would probably be good for me. By that time, I had already gone and started taking courses at Loyola Graduate School, and wasn’t interested even in interviewing for the job. Because I had developed a plan, a modus operandi, which took me to graduate school, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to veer away from that plan. But I did go and interview, and eventually they hired me.</p>
<p>So I was able to function on a great faculty. It was Bert Braud, who was also an instrumental music teacher, and also a vocal teacher, Lorraine Alfaro. One of the things that we didn’t really do was to emphasize or make a distinction between European music and jazz. All the students had to study. All the students had private instruction.</p>
<p>TP: I gather you had a grant, and members of the Symphony were teaching for the amount of the grant.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, not always. They would take the grant, and sometimes the students would have to supplement the grant. But it wasn’t a lot of money for the level of instruction. The grant was about 8 bucks, and the symphony people at that time were teaching for $12 for the students. But it was a marvelous opportunity for them.</p>
<p>TP: Would you say, then, that your pedagogy developed through the imperatives of setting up a curriculum for NOCCA?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: That’s right.</p>
<p>TP: So you get your first class or your early classes, and what do you present them with?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: When I first started there, I hadn’t a clue as to how I was going to approach this. But invariably, I just started with teaching students a lot of blues. Then I’m trying to pick standards that I knew related to a particular instrument. For example, I knew that just about all of the trumpet players should be expected to play “I Can’t Get Started With You” and tenor saxophone players would be expected to play “Body and Soul.”</p>
<p>TP: You broke down those tunes and they had to show…</p>
<p>MARSALIS: They had to play them.</p>
<p>TP: Did you give them recordings to listen to, or first principles that they should follow?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: If I had them. Yeah, I would do that if I had them. We eventually hustled up some money and bought some recordings. Also, we bought some old Collins speaker. They might still be in use, man! Clyde Kerr was using the same speakers, and doing…kind of piecemealing what we could do. But I was very big on the practical side of playing.</p>
<p>TP: How do you mean the practical side?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: That’s it. Play.</p>
<p>TP: When did you ascertain that a student was moving in the right direction? Was that through your knowledge as a working jazz musician? I’m thinking about criteria, the right thing and the wrong thing.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, the right thing and the wrong thing is easy. Because one of the things they had to do was be able to play scales. Either you understood and played the right ones, or you didn’t. And if you did, I’d work on the concept of improvisation, which is not something that’s suitable for everybody’s personality. But there are ways in which you can get people to improvise if they are susceptible to that process. When I say susceptible, what I mean is that some people are just not comfortable with the process of improvisation. If it’s not written on a page or instructions that come from on high or whatever, they are just not comfortable improvising.</p>
<p>TP: So when you found someone who you determined had talent… I assume that given the type of students who were coming in, you were able to take very individual approaches with each of them.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah, but not because of who was coming in. Mostly because of the way it was structured. Because we just got public school students, period. Whoever came to audition. We didn’t know who was talented and who wasn’t.</p>
<p>TP: I did a piece earlier this year on Harry Connick that was a cover story in “Jazziz,” and I talked to Branford about him. He said this: [ETC.] “…if you walk in the room, my father says, ‘okay, why are you here?’ Virtually every other teacher would say, ‘Turn to page 13. Okay, that’s great. Come back next week and give me another $100.’ My father is like, ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I’m here for you to teach me.’ ‘What do you want to learn? I don’t know.’ ‘Come back when you’ve figured it out.’</p>
<p>MARSALIS: [LAUGHS]</p>
<p>TP: I said, “What do you think Harry wanted to learn?” He said, “I don’t think Harry knew, and that’s what my father wanted to get to — what is it you want to learn?” He says he doesn’t know what you taught him, he and Wynton would rough him up and go outside, but he assumes you would do studies on the blues because that’s what you made piano players deal with first, blues and rhythm.</p>
<p>It seems that so many people who have studied with you are able to access the maximum of potential from themselves, and I’m interested in your philosophy of dealing with people, particularly at that very sensitive time in their lives, when things can go in so many different directions.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, I don’t know that I had even developed a philosophy. See, the thing that I remembered, that I fell back on, is that when I was in elementary school, in the early elementary school, first through sixth grade, that [things were done by drill] ….[END OF SIDE]…. We had English classes, we had math class, and in all of those classes, one of the key components was drill. So when I started teaching at NOCCA, I began to use that aspect. Because it stuck with me. You just drill on something and you drill on it until they get it. And it wouldn’t matter…</p>
<p>See, this is another thing. It wasn’t so much about whether somebody was into jazz or classical. The drilling aspect had to do with whatever the subject matter was at the point that you were teaching. Because I was also responsible for teaching Classical students, not just what we call jazz students, and I had to develop a sight-singing class which everybody had to take. The biggest part of that that I used was drill — drilling on intervals, drilling on individual notes, drilling in all of that. Basically, you concern yourself a lot with whether or not somebody wants to be a certain thing. Like, I would ask students, “Give me an example of a model or somebody that if you could be like that, if you could sing like that or play like that…who would it be like?” And you would use that sort of as a guide of trying to figure out how they were thinking.</p>
<p>But I think what Branford was talking about was usually private teaching. Because you can’t do that in a school! Now, one of the things that we used to do also was make students responsible. You see, one of the major problems with public school education today is that, from what I can see, students are never responsible for anything. You don’t have to be responsible. I just read in the paper the other day where this woman in a town, she and 12 other people just resigned, plus the principal, because they wanted her to change the grade. The parents were calling up all hours of the night… What it was is that she gave an assignment, and 23 of the students cut-and-pasted their way over the end of that, and turned the papers in, and she could see what they had done. So she gave them all zero, and got in a lot of trouble because of that. Because nobody wants the students to be responsible.</p>
<p>But that was one of the things we had that was in our favor. We had a principal at NOCCA whose discipline was theater. His name was Dr. Tom Tews. The only thing he asked us to do was, “Just tell me what you’re doing,” because he didn’t want to be blind-sided by somebody coming up to him saying that the faculty is doing something he didn’t know nothing about! But we had unlimited opportunities to restructure what we were doing curriculum-wise, and change it around to meet the needs of the students that we had — just to do a lot of things that were flexible. But we would make students responsible, even when the parents would come in hollering and screaming. And I think that’s basically what the problem is right now. They’re not allowed to be responsible. Then they get out in the world, and there it is! But that’s a whole other story.<br/> TP: It would seem that a magnet arts school, where you have motivated students, would be well suited…</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, that’s a myth, see. The whole idea of having very motivated students comes either after they get there and discover that there’s something they can develop if the platform is suitable for their individuality. Otherwise, the motivated students usually get turned-off at school. Because schools do not emphasize individuality. And when people become motivated, they become motivated as an individual.</p>
<p>TP: Do you emphasize individuality?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Oh, we had to. That’s the only way an arts school can work. You cannot herd an art school and have it really work effectively.</p>
<p>TP: Donald Harrison told me that Kidd Jordan would call him at 8 in the morning to make sure he’d done what he was supposed to, that he’d take extra time and so on. Did you take a role with students outside of the school?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Not a lot. Well, I had a lot of other responsibilities. If it was something that I could help them with and it took some extra time, I’d find that.</p>
<p>TP: Let’s get through NOCCA, and start talking about… You started teaching at the University of New Orleans when?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: 1989.</p>
<p>TP: So the timeline is, you’re at NOCCA from 1974 to what year?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: ’86.</p>
<p>TP: Then you go to Virginia Commonwealth.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right.</p>
<p>TP: That’s where Victor Goines and Clarence Penn and various others come under you, then you get a faculty position at the University of New Orleans.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes, but that’s not really so much true for Victor Goines. See, Victor was a kid that I knew along with my kids when he was still in high school. He didn’t go to NOCCA. For a while, he was at Loyola. Before he graduated from Loyola University, he started to study privately with me. And eventually, I just put him in my band. Because I had a quartet. The band went on a Southeast Asian tour in the month June of 1986, before I left to go to Virginia Commonwealth. Because see, Victor was teaching math at St. Augustine High School. After I left, he decided that he wanted to come up and go to graduate school! That’s what he did. But to tell you the truth, while I was at Virginia Commonwealth, I never had any classes that Victor was in.</p>
<p>TP: So there are three different categories. There’s the New Orleans public schools, the Catholic schools, and there’s private tutelage. So musicians in New Orleans coming up would go through any combination of these routes.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes. There was also the total practicum, like the kids who went to the junior high school and learned some basics, and then put a band together and went out on the street, and opened up their cases, and started playing for the tourists.</p>
<p>TP: Which is something that’s distinct to New Orleans.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, a lot of places, they’ll put you in jail if you play on the street. You can’t just play on the street. But in New Orleans, that’s a different town. They may have some restrictions by now. But man, a lot of people were playing on the street, some who now have careers!</p>
<p>TP: Kidd Jordan disapproved of the effects of that. He said it sort of stifled the urge to learn or expand or explore. In a broader sense, how do you see the impact of the vernacular aspect New Orleans music and the Caribbean tinge of New Orleans culture on the way musicians develop and evolve and think?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, for the most part, I think it’s all economic-driven. I mean, those people who call themselves music teachers in public schools… It’s economically driven. If there were no jobs out there, they would not subject themselves to four and five years of college training to get a degree not to work. And these kids get an early start, especially from some of these junior high schools with these brass bands. Now, I don’t think that it’s anathema to learning at all. I think kids get turned off by adults very early in life. It’s not the music that’s causing them to do that. It’s the mere fact that there’s nothing going on in the schools. If there was something going on in the school, they wouldn’t quit. Or if there was something happening musically, they wouldn’t want to… For example, Terence Blanchard was going to John F. Kennedy High School. A marvelous band instructor over there. I mean, this guy was great — the concert band. Well, he played in that concert band while he was a student at NOCCA, because there was something going on over there.</p>
<p>Branford went to de la Salle, and the music program over there was okay. But Branford was talking at one point about going and being a lawyer or something. Which was all right with me. I didn’t care. But it didn’t appear to me that he was doing what he needed to do to be at the school. So we came to the mutual agreement that he ought to leave that school and go to the one of the public schools, and then just attend NOCCA and study the music for the remainder of his high school time.</p>
<p>TP: So to you, the cultural thing in New Orleans where the younger musicians play and the oral tradition aspect is a very positive thing.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Of course.</p>
<p>TP: Could you elaborate a little on why it’s a positive thing?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, mostly it’s positive because, first of all, it’s economically driven, and the kids who do it generally need whatever monies they can come up with. It also promotes a certain amount of teamwork, because it means that these kids have to organize themselves into a functioning unit with virtually no adult supervision at all. That’s another thing. And that skill is a very useful skill for anybody or any group of people to learn early enough in life. The next thing is, they begin to understand a friendly relationship with the general public. When you go out there on the street and open up your case, there are things that you can get to learn. You learn what people will put money in the case to hear you play, and probably they don’t want to particularly put their money in… In other words, if you’re out there and you have a group, and your group was playing some Bach chorales with a brass ensemble, the amount of money that you get is going to determine whether you keep playing that. Now, if you keep playing “When The Saints Go Marching In” and people start putting money in the box… I mean, it don’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out! So these kids go out there immediately playing “When The Saints Go Marching In” or some other piece like that. Now, it’s anybody’s guess to assume that at some point they will have wanted to play some chorales of J.S. Bach. We don’t really know. And a lot of people say, “well, if they wouldn’t have been doing that, then they would be learning this over here.” We don’t really know that.</p>
<p>There have been numerous times… There was a wonderful band teacher who passed on, named Donald Richardson. Donald Richardson had a junior high school, and he was totally devoted to his kids, and when they would graduate from that junior high school, if they went to a high school and that high school didn’t have a challenging band, the horns were in the case, the case went under the bed, and they went and did something else. So we can’t make the assumption that kids have this undying need to learn certain kinds of music.</p>
<p>TP: What kinds of music?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Any kind. Anything that would be considered by the people who make those statements as challenging.</p>
<p>TP: There’s a quote in an article I saw on the Web from Jason Marsalis that instead of telling a musician everything, you tell them just enough so they’ll discover certain things on their own.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes, I think jazz is really about the art of discovery. And I don’t mean discovery in terms of guesswork. What I mean is that give a person a certain amount of information, and you have to make sure that that information is communicated. Then from that point, they have to begin to make decisions about that information. And like I said earlier, not everybody has the personality to improvise.</p>
<p>TP: What sort of personality do you need to improvise?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: All you really need is the spirit of adventure, and it’s applied to what your understanding is of the music that is being presented to you. Because it’s very easy, man. I did a workshop, and I can’t remember where it was, but it was a guy who had a band; there was a whole room-full of students in there, and it was just me and this little raggedy piano. And I developed a way where I could give a kid maybe five notes, and play some little things on piano. If you just play those five notes any way you want to play them, you can’t go wrong — except if you don’t play at all. This one kid was playing vibraphone, and I said, “I want you to try it.” Oh, no. He was real shy. And his fellow students started to encourage him. So finally, he decided that he’d try it, that he’d play, and I backed him up as he played. And about ten minutes, man, we couldn’t shut him up! He wanted to play the rest of the workshop! Now, I don’t know that he had an opportunity to do that before. He didn’t act like he did. But he didn’t even want to try. So you don’t really know.<br/> TP: So half the battle is breaking down the resistance to trying.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, if it’s in the personality. There was a young man who was a trumpet player, and he came into the class. And I could not communicate with him what it took for him to experiment in improvisation. It didn’t appear to be in his personality to want to do that. I mean, he tried and he wanted to do it. He went on eventually, man, to become a principal trumpeter in the symphony orchestra. So the musicality was already there.</p>
<p>TP: Let me get back to what Branford said you do with piano players, and what you said you did initially in NOCCA, which was deal with the blues. Now, there’s no established pedagogy for the blues, certainly not when you were beginning 27 years ago. How did you organize your principles of teaching the blues?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: See, what I had to do… It reminds me of dealing with a kid with Play-Dough. What you do is, you give him the play-dough, and you say, “Here, take this and make something out of it.” I would write out some notes which, when played, would be 12 measures of the blues. So they could do two things. One, get the sound of the notes in their ear; the other is to reposition their fingers in such a way that they would play when they would practice. Their fingers would get used to those positions. I have one exercise where it was just the left hand, another exercise where it was both hands, another exercise where it was the left hand with some different chords. But it was all based on the blues. And there again, it’s just a matter of drill.<br/> TP: A matter of drill and then their personality accepts it or it doesn’t.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah. Well, with the piano players it could be a little different. Because with the piano players you’ve given them notes which basically outline a whole form. It’s a different thing with a piano player. The piano player still has to do the same thing from an improvisatory standpoint. But what you do is, you give them all of the notes in the beginning.</p>
<p>TP: Would you say that your experience as an improviser informs your teaching and the way you relate to students?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah, definitely. First of all, it helps me to understand a lot better what it is that I’m trying to get them to do. Because if I can’t improvise myself, there’s no way that I’m going to be able to teach them. But see, what causes one to be able to teach, and somebody else to be a great improviser and maybe not be able to teach, is that they don’t necessarily do respective thinking about what they are doing so that they can convert it and create a language to communicate that. Because all of teaching centers around a language. How could you teach Medicine if you don’t have a name for the principles. It’s the same thing.</p>
<p>And a lot of times, the problem… Well, I don’t know if it’s the problem or not. There is not a codified language for jazz. There are some things, the blues… But “blues” is a general term. It’s not by any means as specific as, say, the heart would be if a doctor studies medicine. That’s very specific! But what I’m saying is that we have to have enough terminology so it can communicate what the essence is in terms of studying jazz improvisation.</p>
<p>TP: In one of these things I saw on the Web, the writer describes you asking a trumpeter if he knows “Caravan,” the student replies that he has the sheet music, and you say that “the sheet is always secondary — always.” Does jazz continue to be an oral music in any manner? And how do you deal with that quality within the prerequisites of teaching within an institution and a curriculum?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, the thing about jazz being an oral music is that if you don’t have the oral component of the music, what you will have done is taken away the natural ingredients of it. It’s sort of like the difference between preserves and fresh fruit. See? Like, if you could walk up to a tree and there are some apples on that tree, you can pick an apple, and you can eat that apple. Now, there are people who learn how to make preserves, and in most cases, they always taste the same. And you can get it whenever you need it. But the apple on the tree is only going to be there for so long. Like the solo. I mean, if somebody plays a great solo, if you’re not there when they do it, then you won’t hear it. If it’s a recording, you hear sort of a replication of it. Which would be like the preserves. Which is why the term “preservation” comes into play.</p>
<p>TP: That’s a very interesting metaphor.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: But that’s basically what it is. And any student has to develop an understanding of what a solo really is. Solos are not unlike a novel — or a short story. You have a beginning, you have a developmental section; you have a point or a peak; and then ultimately you have a climax or an ending. Solos are like that.</p>
<p>TP: To what extent do you give students vocabulary from other players as part of their repertoire? A process a lot of people do, maybe you did this yourself with Oscar Peterson or Bud Powell, is the imitation of solos and an understanding of how master artists organized vocabulary in different periods. Is that important to your curriculum and pedagogy?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yes, but I don’t like to academize it. See, students spend so much time with academic descriptions of things, until they begin to try to put everything in that category, and they begin to lose the ability to hear certain subtleties. I mean, it’s bad enough you’re listening to a recording, which can sometimes take the essence away from what was going on. It reminds of something I read that Earl “Fatha” Hines said. Somebody was talking about the recordings of Art Tatum, and Fatha Hines said, “Man, forget the recordings thing; you’ve got to have been there!” That’s a whole other level of experience in that music. Students have to learn, the ones who are really going to pursue it, that the concept of a solo is in the development of it, and the more references that you have to draw from, the better possibilities you have of a solo.</p>
<p>TP: To extrapolate on that Fatha Hines quote, “You have to have been there,” it’s becoming increasingly hard for younger musicians to be there in terms of at least of expressing the older vocabulary as expressed by the people who created that vocabulary. Is there any contradiction in there?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: How could it be a contradiction?</p>
<p>TP: It could be a contradiction, because if someone is dealing with getting the sound of Jelly Roll Morton together, such as Eric Reed, who dealt with it functionally in the LCJO, he wasn’t there to witness it, but he dealt with it in a real-time situation. One thing that’s often noted by younger musicians is at once the increasing options of vocabulary available to them and the increasing distance from the people who created that vocabulary.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: I know what you’re saying. Well, the point is this. There again, I use metaphors in athletics. The same could be said of Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson. Those who were there when Magic was doing what he was doing, got the experience that those who were not there didn’t get. Now, it doesn’t mean that those who were watching Kobe Bryant cannot appreciate the game, the style of play, which essentially was a part of the same thing that Magic was doing. But I think what happens with music is that it becomes so academic. When I say “academic,” it becomes like the analyzation of a solo in which somebody starts talking about the technical parts of it, and the scale, and how he used this scale and that scale and another scale — and that’s not what the person who was doing the solo was thinking about at all. I’ve also used as a metaphor that it would be like if somebody asked a student to do a book report, and when they got ready to do the book report, they’d stand up and say, “Well, the person who wrote the book led off with two prepositions, three nouns, two adjectives, followed by a period,” and go through that whole thing. Now, if you want to analyze the sentence structure, that may be true. But I doubt very seriously if that’s what the person who wrote the story was thinking about. And it’s a similar kind of thing with music.</p>
<p>So when Fatha Hines said that you had to have been there, I mean, that’s one of those things that sort of vibrated sympathy. Obviously, he couldn’t have been where Tatum was, but it expressed something that makes you realize that whatever analysis you apply to this music is inadequate in terms of what actually was going down.</p>
<p>TP: How important is it for students to know about the milieu in which the music was going down?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: It’s important totally. There again, it’s the same thing with athletics. I mean, the average kid, when he comes into the NBA today, he knows about the City Game! They know about the City Game. Kareem knew about the city game. All of them!</p>
<p>TP: Well, Kareem was part of the City Game!</p>
<p>MARSALIS: So what I’m saying essentially is that what a lot of students don’t get, in some cases, is the academic complement. I think if you can get an academic complement, so that the experience becomes total…</p>
<p>TP: But the way I mean the question is: Is it important for a kid who is marching in brass bands and is then going on to further musical education to understand, let’s say, the historical origins of brass bands, how marching bands might relate even to customs in Africa, as you once described on a radio show we did. Is that sort of well-rounded knowledge essential to a contemporary aspiring jazz musician?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Yeah. I was listening to one of those guys in a brass band doing an interview. And one of the first things he said when a young guy came into the band… He said, “The first thing you’ve got to understand is that this is part of a tradition, but when you come here, you don’t come here with no strange attitude.” And he wasn’t talking about music to him. What he was talking about are those things that are peripheral, those things that put some meaning into that.</p>
<p>I remember Wynton made a statement to me one time, and he was waiting for me to rebut him. He started talking about bebop. He said, “man, bebop brought a negative element into the music.” And I said, “Yeah, you’re right. It did.” And that’s a generation that I was a part of. And the reason why that occurred had as much to do with the recording industry as it did with anything else. Because in the recording industry, technology advanced to a point where people could begin to play longer and longer and longer. When you go back and listen to Charlie Parker…</p>
<p>TP: Three minutes.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, maybe five.</p>
<p>TP: He has the famous quote, “If you can’t say all you have to say in two choruses, you’re practicing.”</p>
<p>MARSALIS: That’s right. So essentially, what happened is that another negative element… Well, actually, I don’t necessarily consider that a negative element. When they started to emphasize the whole drug scene. Well, that has to do with something else. I mean, whoever controls the press decides what’s going to get in it. And if anybody was paying attention, the amount of jazz musicians interested in drugs wouldn’t even register 0.000-whatever. So that element I didn’t consider.</p>
<p>TP: I think in bebop it was a pretty consequential element. I’ve been doing articles on people like Jimmy Heath, who had that experience. I spoke to Frank Wess on Friday for a piece, and he said one reason music today is better than it was then is that the musicians then dissipated themselves in an almost commonplace manner, and today that isn’t the case. I think that’s a fact about at least a lot of the musicians of the time, for better or for worse.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, it’s not so much that that’s not a true statement. But I don’t know that that could be proven. I’ll tell you the reason why I say that. First of all, there are peripheral factors involved. When I say “peripheral,” let’s take, for example, the first fifty years, from 1900 to about 1950-ish. The total economy of the jazz musician was gangsters. There was no other economy. Now, that managed to produce a lot of fantastic players in spite of the fact that that was the situation.</p>
<p>Now, as great as some of the young players are today, the democratic process that goes on with the schools teaching jazz and some clubs coming along, and… Like where I work. It’s a nice club! The situation is conducive now to make jazz a respectable area to function in. In reality, it has lost a lot of its individuality as a result of that. Because when you mainstream something… Everything has a good and bad side.</p>
<p>TP: It’s a dialectic.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Right. But when you go back and you start listening to all them tenor players, man, from Chu Berry on, and people who were lesser lights, like Eddie Lockjaw Davis, and…</p>
<p>TP: To some, he is not a lesser light.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Well, when I say “lesser light”…<br/> TP: I know what you mean.</p>
<p>MARSALIS: Believe me, man, Jaws was a personal friend of mine. I loved Jaws and I worked with Jaws. I listened to Jaws play some introductions, man, on his own… [LAUGHS]</p>
<p>TP: I’ve heard people from every sphere of music talk of him, like how did he get those sounds with the fingerings he used?</p>
<p>MARSALIS: The only reason why I said “lesser light” is because Lockjaw Davis never forgot that he was in show business. He could never have been a John Coltrane attitude-wise. He was never that. So that level of dedication was not going to be there. And it was the same thing like a Charlie Parker, who spent an enormous amount of time practicing, trying to figure all of this stuff out. Jaws was a product of the times! He was going to be representative among the players who was there. He was the straw boss of Basie until he couldn’t… He and Basie philosophically fell out. But what I’m saying was by no means saying a lesser light…</p>
<p>But when iet comes down to it, when you listen to these kids, you hear them and you say, “Oh, man…” My youngest son, Jason, is very responsible for some of these younger kids, and he’s almost like a senior to some of them. The reason why is because Jason has learned the importance of researching the older guys, so he can tell a young drummer about Dodds! About Baby Dodds! See, he’s already researched that. He can also tell them about, “Look, when you’re getting ready to present a solo, this is what you do.” He did a session just recently with Curtis Fuller, who was in New Orleans during Jazzfest. When Curtis got ready to play a ballad, the producer was saying, “Look, this is just with piano, bass and trombone.” And Jason immediately knew what the problem was. He didn’t say nothing. So when they started playing, Jason got behind the drums and started sweeping. So this guy said, “Yeah, man, that’s hip. Not too many young guys can even play brushes at all.” But see, he knows that. And he knows about people not knowing the technique of playing brushes. And he also understands when it started, and the whole ball of wax.</p>
<p>So I’m saying all of that to say that it is necessary that young kids understand and learn all of these things, because otherwise it becomes kind of like a guitar player, a kid who came to NOCCA when I was teaching there. He was a senior, and usually we didn’t take seniors, because it was too late. I said, “Look I’ll take you, and whatever I can do for you in a year, I’ll do. Play the electric guitar.” I put some records on to let him hear that. I put George Benson on, and the recording George Benson made of “Paraphernalia” with Miles. When the record was over, I said, “Well, what did you think?” He looked real bewildered. He said, “I don’t know, man. All I ever thought there was to Benson was ‘Breezing.'” So consequently, what you get is a bunch of kids who just don’t know! Because there’s been nobody there to say, “Hey, man, if you’re playing tenor saxophone…”</p> Ellis Marsalis Interview - 2002: Part Twotag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2017-01-15:1992552:Topic:3991082017-01-15T06:01:28.504ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<p>With his utilitarian bent, Marsalis is a lineal descendent of such mid-century African-American teacher-autocrats as Walter Dyett from DuSable High School in Chicago and Samuel Browne from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, whose programs produced dozens of outstanding jazz musicians from Marsalis’ generation. Eschewing the authoritarian methods by which they kept students in line (Dyett was legendary for the accuracy with which he hurled his conductor’s baton at erring students),…</p>
<p>With his utilitarian bent, Marsalis is a lineal descendent of such mid-century African-American teacher-autocrats as Walter Dyett from DuSable High School in Chicago and Samuel Browne from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, whose programs produced dozens of outstanding jazz musicians from Marsalis’ generation. Eschewing the authoritarian methods by which they kept students in line (Dyett was legendary for the accuracy with which he hurled his conductor’s baton at erring students), Marsalis won hearts and minds by treating his charges as young adults with minds of their own, as individuals accountable for their actions and decisions.</p>
<p>“Ellis encourages and motivates his students, but he’s also direct and won’t pamper you,” says Victor Goines, Director of Jazz Studies at Juilliard School of Music. A 41-year-old New Orleans native, Goines studied privately with Marsalis in the ’70s, apprenticed with his combo in the ’80s, and has played saxophone and clarinet in the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra from 1989 until the present. “With me, he could be painfully truthful, but also compassionate to my needs as a young man. If it sounded bad, he didn’t pull punches. He was for real.”</p>
<p>Goines borrowed a number of Marsalis’ dicta in creating the jazz program at Juilliard, beginning with the notion that working musicians are the most effective teachers. “Ellis brought to the classroom experiences from the oral tradition he’d learned as a performer, as opposed to learning the theory of education in the classroom and trying to go out and play after the fact,” Goines says. “He believes that working with small ensembles is important because of the freedom for improvisation. Students need to have perspective on the music’s history. They need to be able to function in different idioms, and to always realize that you’re not preparing for the gig you’re doing now, but the unknown gig to come. Ellis puts you in situations that you have to work your way out of. He always told me that to try to get to something great, you have to be willing to take chances, to make a fool of yourself. He said that you shouldn’t get on a bandstand with someone you wouldn’t get in a foxhole with; if everyone isn’t working toward a common goal, it’s a waste of time. He even teaches you to take care of the business aspects. He covered all the aspects of what it takes to be a professional musician.”</p>
<p>“I was shocked as a kid the first time I went to his school, and heard his students call him ‘Ellis,'” says Branford Marsalis. “That just didn’t happen in the South in the ’60s and ’70s. Later I understood how hip that was. My pops was just having a dialogue with the students, to the degree of almost demystifying education. He points the finger and forces you to think for yourself. He twists standard American colloquialisms so that they make more sense to him. He’d always say, ‘You know, son, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him thirsty.’ That’s brilliant! Once he told a student to listen to a piece of music. The student said, ‘I don’t want to.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Man, I know what I like.’ My father said, ‘No, son, you don’t know what you like; you like what you know.’ I thought about it, and realized that in order to say that you know what you like, you have to know a helluva lot. What he was getting at is that you should study the music for your own sake, not just because he tells you to. If you don’t, you’re putting yourself behind the 8-ball.”</p>
<p>“My father’s first principle is, ‘You don’t know unless you know,'” says Wynton Marsalis. “Don’t assume anything without first-hand experience. Don’t get chord changes out of the book; get them off the record. He always gets you to question what you know. He stresses that there’s no right or wrong way to hear. He’d guide you in a direction, but he wouldn’t tell you what to do. He gave you the opportunity to figure out your own thing.”</p>
<p>For a teacher to give students that much rope demands not only self-confidence, but tremendous faith in human nature. An unflinchingly realistic man devoid of illusions, Marsalis is explicitly not religious. To trace the source of such fundamental trust is therefore an intriguing endeavor.</p>
<p>“My father believes in jazz — real jazz,” Wynton Marsalis declares. “He never believed that jazz was White or Black. He believes it’s a universal expression, a thing that brings whoever addresses it into contact with their greater self. He doesn’t suffer from cultural intimidation. He’s very clear and uncompromising that you have to face jazz — or J.S. Bach — on its own terms, not change the music or put it on a lower level so you can feel comfortable in your relationship to it. If you practice and learn what you have to — and have the ability — you can play it. If you don’t, you can’t.</p>
<p>“The foundation of how I teach — what I think and know — comes from watching him. Long before we even had Jazz at Lincoln Center, when I was 19 and 20, I did workshops and went in the schools, because I saw my father doing it. The way to conduct a workshop, to present material, to pick tunes to play, to use analogies to make something clear, the importance of teaching form, the central position of the rhythm section in the band — all these concepts come from him.”</p>
<p>For all the inherent optimism implied by his lifelong struggle to communicate jazz values, Ellis Marsalis is not exactly sanguine about the present state of things. “The schools are teaching jazz with a conservatory approach, nice clubs are cropping up, and jazz is now a respectable area to function in,” he says. “But mainstreaming it removed a lot of individuality. Listen to the saxophone players in the conservatories that have good jazz departments. All of them can play! But when they solo, you can’t tell them apart.”</p>
<p>What case, then, would Marsalis make for talented musicians to study jazz in school?</p>
<p>“I don’t necessarily think they should,” he responds. “Jazz is a highly individualistic art. You’ll do better with a good private instructor and being around people who are well versed in the style of music you’re trying to play. Actually, there’s no real reason why anybody should continue to play jazz at all, aside from the music speaking to you. But more and more, I think that the study of jazz, across the board, can help a musician or lay person better understand America, because the music reflects the whole of the citizenry so completely. In some ways, jazz is a form of glue that keeps American culture centered. We live in a world where people do not necessarily even have to have a skill to become rich and famous as a pop artist. So a disciplined approach to anything is something this country very much needs.</p>
<p>“I often think of America as a 10-year-old kid whose folks died and left him a candy store, with nobody to guide him. He goes into this candy store and proceeds to be a 10-year-old kid. If he’s not unfortunate enough to get diabetes and die, he’ll ultimately learn, after he gets a bellyache, that there’s something to know when you got this place. It’s not just, ‘Oh, great, this is mine.'”</p>
<p>No longer teaching in any capacity, Marsalis is focusing on his retirement, making decisions about his future involvement in education. He works most Fridays at the prestigious Snug Harbor club in a trio with youngest son, drummer Jason, and leaves town for occasional jobs. In the autumn he’ll release a self-produced trio CD on ELM, his own label, and will go in the studio to record several CDs worth of material. In his manner, he’ll continue to do what he can to help that 10-year-old grow up.</p>
<p>“My father never preached,” says Branford Marsalis. “And he never wasted any time trumpeting his strengths. He was always interested in addressing and eradicating his weaknesses. That’s something I believe in. The great thing he passed on to us was to always go for something you like, because it’s about expanding, not finding your little place in the box and staying there.”</p> Ellis Marsalis Interview - 2002: Part Onetag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2017-01-15:1992552:Topic:3991032017-01-15T05:58:19.997ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<div class="entry-meta">November 14, 2013 · 11:45 pm</div>
<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/for-ellis-marsalis-79th-birthday-a-jazziz-feature-from-2002/" rel="bookmark">For Ellis Marsalis’ 79th Birthday, a Jazziz Feature from 2002</a></h2>
<p>For Ellis Marsalis’ 79th birthday, I’m posting a feature piece that I wrote about him for <em>Jazziz</em> circa 2002, the interviews that I conducted for that piece, and a pair of WKCR interviews from the ’90s, on…</p>
<div class="entry-meta">November 14, 2013 · 11:45 pm</div>
<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/for-ellis-marsalis-79th-birthday-a-jazziz-feature-from-2002/" rel="bookmark">For Ellis Marsalis’ 79th Birthday, a Jazziz Feature from 2002</a></h2>
<p>For Ellis Marsalis’ 79th birthday, I’m posting a feature piece that I wrote about him for <em>Jazziz</em> circa 2002, the interviews that I conducted for that piece, and a pair of WKCR interviews from the ’90s, on one of which he joined me at the studio with Jason Marsalis.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>By Ted Panken:</p>
<p><em>“Jazz is about the art of discovery. Not discovery in terms of guesswork. You give a person a certain amount of information, and make sure that information is communicated. From that point, they begin to make decisions about that information. All you really need is the spirit of adventure, applied to the music that is being presented to you.”</em><br/> — Ellis Marsalis, June 2002.</p>
<p>Widely known as the paterfamilias of a musical dynasty, Ellis Louis Marsalis, Jr. retired in August 2001 after a phenomenally productive 37-year teaching career on the high school and university levels. Ironically, the 67-year-old pianist, a professional improviser for half-a-century, never intended to make education his life’s work. Early tangents began to surface while the New Orleans native attended Dillard University between 1951 and 1955, moonlighting as a journeyman tenor saxophonist on local gigs with blues singers like Big Joe Turner and playing piano behind Big Maybelle and other singers at an Uptown boite called the Dew Drop Inn. Other possibilities arose during these years as he worked on and recorded original music with a peer group that included drummer Edward Blackwell and clarinetist Alvin Batiste, and later with saxophonist Nat Perrillat and drummer-composer James Black.</p>
<p>After earning his Music Education degree from Dillard, Marsalis enlisted in the Marine Corps (stationed in Southern California, he spent off-hours in 1956 woodshedding with Blackwell and Ornette Coleman), was discharged, and returned to New Orleans where, in quick succession, he married Dolores Ferdinand, and fathered his famous sons Branford, in 1960, and Wynton, in 1961. With a young family to support, Marsalis today recalls that “the gig situation in New Orleans, which was never great anyway, had changed tremendously, with virtually no jazz — as we consider it — to speak of. I figured I might as well try to use my degree.”</p>
<p>From 1964 until his retirement, Marsalis dual-tracked as a performer-educator. He took a position as band director at a high school in a small Louisiana town, serving until 1966. From 1974 to 1986 he taught and designed a curriculum at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a multi-disciplinary arts magnet high school that students attended on elective from their home school. Marsalis’ pupils included his four sons — saxophonist Branford, trumpeter Wynton, trombonist Delfeayo, and drummer Jason – as well as Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Kent Jordan, Reginald Veal and Harry Connick, Jr. In 1986 he left New Orleans to head the jazz program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He returned in 1989 to create the jazz program at the University of New Orleans, remaining there until his retirement.</p>
<p>The beginning of Marsalis’ teaching career coincided with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished Jim Crow laws that had stood for decades. Living under statutory segregation, he had accumulated and processed the vocabulary of jazz “in a sort of shotgun approach — a piece here, a little there,” and could draw upon no codified pedagogy to teach it. At Dillard, he recalls, “We got the basis of European music, taught in a slapdash way, depending on who was teaching. The rules of the music department were modeled to be a kind of mini-conservatory, focusing on the things band directors are expected to do, with an abundance of courses in theory and almost no practical. So there was virtually no sound, formal training ground that emanated from a specific black tradition where you could learn to play jazz on the instrument. You learned just about everything on the job, because there wasn’t any place else for you to get it. Jazz was always second-class.”</p>
<p>Jazz continues to be but a blip on the collective consciousness of popular culture, but the idiom’s stature has evolved tremendously since Ellis Marsalis was a young man. Under the artistic directorship of Wynton Marsalis at Jazz at Lincoln Center, jazz enjoys equal institutional pride of place with classical music and opera at America’s equivalent of the French Ministry of Culture. Furthermore, dozens of universities offer degrees in jazz performance. Marsalis is one of a national cohort of pioneer improviser-educators (others include Donald Byrd, Jimmy Heath, William Fielder, and New Orleans colleagues Alvin Batiste and Kidd Jordan) who revolutionized the way jazz is taught, and his curricular first principles are seminal in the recent intellectual history of jazz education.</p>
<p>At NOCCA, Marsalis relied on those first principles while cobbling together a pragmatic, homegrown pedagogy designed to teach the building blocks of jazz and improvisation so that, as Wynton Marsalis puts it, “people can go out and get a gig, whatever kind of gig they can play.” “Whatever it is that I managed to do didn’t really come by way of a philosophy,” the elder Marsalis notes. “Mostly it happened by reaction. I heard a story about Thomas Edison. His assistant said they had done 150 experiments. None of the lightbulbs worked. He said, ‘Man, we ought to give up on this, because we’re making no progress at all.’ Edison supposedly responded, ‘On the contrary, we know 150 ways that do not work.’ We don’t always think about going to the things that don’t work as a path to finding what does.”</p>
<p>Like a painter in medieval Europe who required apprentices to mix paints and prepare canvases before allowing them to wield a brush, or a master bata drummer breaking down the beats for an initiate, Marsalis taught with artisanal focus, forcing students to learn the skills of their trade before they can think about expressing their personalities through the medium. “You can get into a lot of trouble trying to figure out at what point it becomes art,” he reflects. “That becomes more philosophical than realistic. I’m concerned about whether these guys can put one foot in front of the other.”</p>
<p>Asked how he would synopsize his method to a grant-bearing arts administrator, Marsalis responds: “Basically, it’s important to learn the three elements of music — rhythm, harmony, and melody, not necessarily in that order. We didn’t distinguish between European music and jazz. All the students at NOCCA had private instruction. New students learn two songs a semester. You apply those component parts to each piece, drilling on intervals, on individual notes, on the correct scales. Then, if your personality is suited to it, you work on the concept of improvisation.”</p>
<p>Marsalis began his work at NOCCA by focusing on the blues. “Learning how to play blues is like mastering the fundamentals of arithmetic before moving to algebra, trigonometry, and calculus,” he says. “It’s the simplest approach to learning improvisation. I would write out 12 measures of chords that, when played, turned out to be a blues. They got the sound of the notes in their ear, and got their fingers used to the positions. They got a tangible manifestation of the form of blues in one chorus. The chord symbols represented vertically sounds they would deal with in a linear manner. And they’d be sensitized to the rhythmic flow, to deal with music in motion.”</p>
<p>Ear training is crucial. Marsalis insists students internalize the fundamental building blocks so that transcription and memorization of classic repertoire will become a more organic process. “Without the oral component of music, you take away its natural ingredients,” he says, lifting an analogy from his bottomless well of metaphors. “It’s like the difference between preserves and fresh fruit. Preserves tend to taste the same; you can get them whenever you want. But the apple on the tree will be there only so long. In the same way, a solo only exists in the moment. The students who really pursue this have to learn that the concept of a solo is not unlike a novel or short story, with a beginning, a developmental section, a peak, and ultimately a climax or ending. The more references you can draw on, the more possibilities you have.</p>
<p>“Too much academic description can make a student lose the ability to hear certain subtleties. Someone might analyze a solo by discussing its technical components, for instance, that so-and-so used this scale and that scale and another scale – but the person who did the solo wasn’t thinking about that at all! It’s bad enough you’re listening to a recording, which can remove the essence of what was actually going on. There’s a story that somebody was talking to Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines about the recordings of Art Tatum, and Fatha Hines said, ‘Man, forget the recordings; you got to have been there!’ It makes you realize that whatever analysis you apply to this music is inadequate in terms of what was actually going down.”</p> Mary Lou Williams: Into the Sun by Marian McPartland — 8/27/1964tag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2016-05-05:1992552:Topic:3830672016-05-05T02:45:55.401ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<p><span class="sub"><br></br></span> <strong><span class="footer">An Exclusive Online Extra</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span class="footer"><span class="text">Her early records are collectors’ items. Her writing and playing have become part of the pattern of jazz history. She has transcended the difficulties experienced by women in the music field and through several decades has held a position of eminence as one of jazz’s most original and creative pianists. She speaks softly: “Anything you…</span></span></strong></p>
<p><span class="sub"><br/></span> <strong><span class="footer">An Exclusive Online Extra</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span class="footer"><span class="text">Her early records are collectors’ items. Her writing and playing have become part of the pattern of jazz history. She has transcended the difficulties experienced by women in the music field and through several decades has held a position of eminence as one of jazz’s most original and creative pianists. She speaks softly: “Anything you are shows up in your music—jazz is whatever you are playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.”</span></span></strong></p>
<p>Her voice has the ring of authority, and well it may, for Mary Lou Williams’ career, dating back to her childhood in Pittsburgh, Pa., and her Kansas City days with the Andy Kirk Orchestra, has always been one of consistent musical integrity.</p>
<p>Mary Lou’s playing is real. Earthy. Running through all the emotions, it speaks volumes, for there is much in its creator that comes out in the music, a part of herself she cannot help revealing, so that at times one has the feeling almost of intruding on her thoughts, of hearing secrets not meant to be shared, of being able to probe the recesses of her mind. Sometimes Mary Lou’s mood is dark, brooding—like a pearl diver, she searches along the depths of the lower register of the piano and then, as if triumphant at a sudden discovery, she shifts to the treble, launching into a series of light, pulsating, chordal figures.</p>
<p>She possesses a natural ability to generate a swinging feeling—an infallible time sense—an original harmonic concept, a way of voicing chords that is only hers. She doesn’t veer far from the blues. Whatever her mood, whatever the tempo, she weaves a pattern, a design, faint at first, like a rubbed drawing, but then appearing more strongly, until it breaks into a kaleidoscope of color.</p>
<p>Mary Lou has found the way to put her emotions, thoughts, and feelings to good use. They come out powerfully, and sometimes prayerfully, for the spiritual side of the blues is always strong in her work. Yet there is a mysterious air, an enigmatic, slightly feline quality about her, which contrasts strangely with her direct, down-to-earth way of speaking.</p>
<p>One senses the inner fires, the inner tensions, and though she keeps her voice low, at times there is in it a note of bitterness. She has none of the typical trappings of show business. She seems almost indifferent to her appearance, her hair brushed casually, her dress plain and unassuming, her only jewelry a gold cross on a chain. But Mary Lou Williams is not a plain woman; with her high cheek bones, reminiscent of the Mayans, she is beautiful. When she becomes involved in her music, her face will set in masklike concentration, her eyes closed, giving an impression of stillness, of being lost to the world, even though her foot is tapping and her strong hands are moving swiftly and surely over the keys. Then suddenly she opens her eyes and smiles, and her face lights up and reflects her spirit, her gaiety, and her lively sense of humor.</p>
<p>A religious woman, Miss Williams was introduced to Roman Catholicism several years ago, along with Dizzy Gillespie’s wife, Lorraine (the Gillespies have long been her staunch friends), and it has evidently given her new strength and courage and a fresh purpose. Mary Lou is ready to do battle with the specters of the past. Strong in her faith, strong in her beliefs, a woman with a cause, a crusader, she rails against the injustices of a materialistic world and deplores musicians who talk against each other more than they help each other. Yet she seems to have had difficulty finding herself, too. In a sense, she is like a child who dreams of a good and perfect world and cannot quite tolerate the fact that it isn’t that way.</p>
<p>At the Hickory House, where she has been ensconced for the last several months, the room casts a haze over her intricately voiced harmonies and, at times, blurs the impact of her changes in dynamics and clouds the clarity of her attack. But there are choice seats around the bar close to the piano where one can almost shut out the noise of the room and concentrate on Mary Lou and her trio. She sits at the piano with a certain dignity, playing with pride and a sureness of touch. Here is a natural showmanship, complete involvement with the music that speaks for her. But still one must listen closely to get the message.</p>
<p>“Anything you are shows up in your music …”</p>
<p>Here is a woman who is conscientious, introspective, sensitive, a woman who, with her quiet manner and at times almost brusque, noncommittal way of speaking, has been misunderstood, thought to be lacking in warmth and compassion. The reverse is true. She feels keenly the various factions, contradictions, inequalities of the music business, wants to help people, to give of herself. A woman vulnerable. A woman hurt so many times she tends to withdraw from, and be suspicious of, others, unless she knows them well. She has an uncanny way of stripping them of any facade, of cutting through the deceit and shallowness of the sycophants. In many ways she is still confused, still searching, still figuring things out for herself, and in this she has been helped a great deal by her friend, the Reverend Anthony Woods</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><span class="sub"><span class="text">“She has the beauty of being simple without any affectation—simplicity with her is a very deep thing,” Father Woods said. “I have heard her discuss the esthetics of music with great penetration. She seems to have an understanding of what is good, of what is beautiful. She thinks that jazz is becoming superficial, that it’s losing its spiritual feeling. She seems to be aware of a great deal of falsity and affectation, that people are not telling the truth, not saying what they really mean. In her uncomplicated way, she can’t understand how anybody can’t be sincere.</span></span></p>
<p>“To me, she is one of the greatest persons I have ever met—really a very great soul. She has exquisite taste, and where there is goodness, she gravitates to it naturally. But she is an emotional thinker, a disorganized thinker, and sometimes she has to sort out her ideas, and that’s where I come in. She’s simple and direct, primitive in a very good sense, and not spoiled by the sophistication around her. I don’t believe that Mary is capable of producing anything except what is good.”</p>
<p>Mary Lou has little business ability and scant knowledge of how to correlate, to direct, her ideas and plans. But her dreams and wishes for the betterment of musicians are logical and sound, and now some of them are just beginning to come true.</p>
<p>Several years ago, she started a thrift shop, the proceeds from which go into her Bel Canto Foundation, which she established to help needy musicians. Now more and more people have begun to hear about it and are giving her gifts of clothing and other donations. Besides these activities, much of Mary Lou’s time is taken up with writing and arranging, plus her daily attendance at mass and care of her sister’s little boy, who usually has the run of her apartment.</p>
<p>Being so busy does not seem to faze her, but it has been a long time since she has “come out” to play in public. She has made a few sporadic appearances in the last few years—twice at New York City’s Wells’ Supper Club and once each at the Embers and the Composer (where I worked opposite her), plus the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. These engagements have been of short duration and have not been too satisfying to her. She seems to feel the pressures of a musician’s life keenly, to become disillusioned, and then, as she expresses it, “goes back in”—back to her other world, to her apartment, to write, teach, and pray.</p>
<p>During her long stays at home, Mary Lou’s talent certainly has not been lying fallow. She has composed a poignant minor blues she calls “Dirge Blues,” which she wrote at the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. She is skillful in creating a mood—the feeling of this piece is tragic and gloomy. In its simplicity, it is very touching. She has put out an extended-play record on her own label, Mary records, consisting of three tunes, arranged for 16 voices and her trio: “Summertime,” “The Devil,” and “St. Martin de Porres.” The last tune, with a lyric by Father Woods, achieves an airy, ethereal quality by its voice blending. She has made a single, also on her own label, of “My Blue Heaven.” She makes this warhorse like new again, with a light, witty, Latin-based treatment. Obviously she has lost none of her powers of inventiveness. One has only to listen to her recordings of years ago, “Froggy Bottom,” “Roll ’Em,” and “Cloudy,” to realize how her style has evolved with the years and how she has kept her playing and her thinking contemporary.</p>
<p>She composed one of the first (if not the first) jazz waltzes—“Mary’s Waltz”—many years ago, yet she has never got the proper credit or recognition for this or for any of her several innovations that have been brought to the fore later by other musicians. Her importance, her influence, cannot be denied. She has written many beautiful tunes that are seldom heard, seldom recorded.</p>
<p>It has been said of Mary Lou Williams that she plays in cliches, but she has so much to offer of her own that I feel that her occasional use of cliché is more tongue-in-cheek commentary than lack of inventiveness. She has been labeled by some a fanatic. To others, she is only an extremely dedicated musician. Yet perhaps there is something of the fanatic in her, as seen in her constant search for musicians with whom she can be compatible—in a way, she reminds one of a mother with her children, alternately scolding or praising them, trying to teach them, trying to instill her beliefs in them, expecting great things of them. Yet it is said too that she is a hard taskmistress, demanding and intolerant.</p>
<p><span class="sub"><br/></span> <span class="text">“Anything you are shows up in your music…”</span></p>
<p>Her feelings about the new freedom in jazz cannot quite be concealed, though she tries to be noncommittal.</p>
<p>“I just haven’t got it figured out,” she said. “To each his own, I guess, but if I can’t hear chords…some sort of melody…well, if they think they’re giving out a good sound, that’s their business. Maybe they think we’re squares? Or else it’s some sort of protest? Take a guy like Coltrane: He knows what he’s doing. But these people without a knowledge of music, it’s like—well, it’s a very neurotic world. People are nervous. Seems like everyone I know is nervous. It must be the pressures of the world. Musicians are very sensitive, and they really don’t know what to do about it. I don’t mean they’re nervous about playing, but in their lives. I try to act relaxed because that’s been my training, but I’m more nervous than anyone you ever knew—inside. Oh, I get mad, sometimes, but I expel it, get it out right away.”</p>
<p>When one is discussing Mary Lou with other musicians, her sense of time always prompts admiration.</p>
<p>“I’ve heard her a few times at the Hickory House, and I’m amazed at her rhythmic approach more than anything else,” said fellow pianist Billy Taylor. “She has the most consistent way of swinging; even with a rhythm section that isn’t quite hanging together, she can make it swing, and this is really remarkable. It seems that no matter what’s going on around her, she can get this thing going. When in doubt—swing! As a pianist, I naturally listen a lot to the rhythm section, and sometimes I’ll notice that they’re not together, and I’ll think to myself, ‘Come on!—let’s give her some support,’ but she’ll be making it anyway. Not as many jazz pianists have this ability as do other instrumentalists. I mean this rhythmic propulsion. She’s not like an Erroll Garner or an Oscar Peterson, who overpower the rhythm section. On the contrary, she plays so subtly she seems to be able to isolate herself and swing, though the others may not be. Considering all the psychological things that go into swinging, she’s even more remarkable. You could wake her up out of a dead sleep, and she’d start swinging without even thinking about it.</p>
<p>“Mary Lou is looking for perfection. On the rare occasions when she had this chemical thing going that can happen between three people, she’s been so excited by it that she wants it all the time. Swinging is so natural to her that she can’t understand why it isn’t necessarily natural to everybody all the time. She figures that they can do it, but they won’t; she thinks to herself, ‘Anybody I hire should be able to do this, so why don’t they?’ Most people associate the verb ‘to swing’ with the degree of loudness that they attain, but she refutes it—she’ll take something pianissimo and swing just as hard as if it were double forte. She’s one of the very few people I know that can do this, consistently swing in any context.”</p>
<p>“Anything you are shows up in your music…”</p>
<p>“She lives in a world all her own, a dream world, and she doesn’t want anything to spoil it,” said her longtime friend and admirer, Hickory House press agent Joe Morgan. “She inspires a great devotion in people—she has many followers, but there are just as many people who look at her askance because they cannot understand her high artistic level. She is so dedicated, and the fact that her standards are high makes her very hard to please. In her accompaniment she wants to hear certain changes behind her, certain lines, certain rhythms, and it’s difficult for a strongly individualistic bass player or drummer, with ideas of his own, to conform to her standards. But her motive, her burning desire is for creation. In a way, she’s like a little child with a doll house, setting up house in the piano, like a little girl on her own chair, not even thinking about what is going on around her. Sometimes she doesn’t hear what you’re saying—doesn’t even see you—because her mind is a million miles away. People don’t understand that if she doesn’t speak to them, she doesn’t mean to be rude…”</p>
<p>Mary Lou herself said, “When people tell me that I’m playing good, and I don’t think I am, I want to run away from them, not speak to them.”</p>
<p>Being so intensely self-critical, she has scant regard for musicians who, in her opinion, lack sufficient dedication to their instruments.</p>
<p>“So many musicians nowadays push too hard, spread themselves too thin, doing all kinds of things when they should be home practicing,” she said. “People who push that hard never really get anywhere, but if you know your instrument, well, you can lay back and let someone pick you out. If you’re doing too many things, there’s no chance for your creativeness to come through.</p>
<p>“When the rhythm section starts composing things on the stand, they’ll push me into composing. But if they are not together, you must let them walk, let them play by themselves, to find out where they are. Then when they’re really tight, you come in and play. But if they’re still not making it, then play another tune, play a ballad. When you hear me play chimes, it’s because the rhythm isn’t right, and you’ve got to bring a section together to let them hear themselves. But if, after this, they still don’t make it, then I’ll start cussing!</p>
<p>“Now that I’m out here, I’m beginning to like it. I haven’t been late for the job, and I haven’t wanted to leave, and that’s unusual for me. Sometimes in the past, I’ve got fed up, and I would walk out and say, ‘You better get yourself another piano player.’ But this time it’s fun for me. Sometimes I’m tired, but I haven’t had that feeling of wanting to give up.…I think this time that I’m out here to stay.”</p>
<p>It is almost as if she sees herself emerging from darkness into the sunlight, to bask in the warmth of feeling generated by friends, admirers and family. Gazing out over the piano, her pleasure in playing comes through clearly.</p>
<p align="right"><b>DB</b></p> ‘Bop Will Kill Business Unless It Kills Itself First’—Louis Armstrongtag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2016-05-05:1992552:Topic:3831702016-05-05T02:27:28.202ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<p><span class="sub">by Ernest Borneman — 4/7/1948<br></br></span> <strong><span class="footer">An Exclusive Online Extra</span></strong></p>
<p><span class="sub"><br></br></span> <span class="text">At the end of the International Jazz Festival, correspondent Ernest Borneman spent the night in Louis Armstrong’s room at the Negresco hotel in Nice, France, talking to Louis, Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Bigard, Big Sid Catlett and others about progress and tradition in jazz until the sun came up and it was time…</span></p>
<p><span class="sub">by Ernest Borneman — 4/7/1948<br/></span> <strong><span class="footer">An Exclusive Online Extra</span></strong></p>
<p><span class="sub"><br/></span> <span class="text">At the end of the International Jazz Festival, correspondent Ernest Borneman spent the night in Louis Armstrong’s room at the Negresco hotel in Nice, France, talking to Louis, Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Bigard, Big Sid Catlett and others about progress and tradition in jazz until the sun came up and it was time to catch the early morning plane for Paris. Others present were Velma Middleton, Louis’ featured singer, and Honey Johnson, Rex Stewart’s vocalist. Louis asked that some of the things said be considered “among friends.” These parts of the conversation have therefore been kept off the record. A transcript of the remaining passages, mainly those of argument between Louis, Bigard and Mezz, is given below because it seems to cover nearly all the points of opinion that have recently divided the old school of jazz from the novelty school. The interview might also be considered as a fitting reply to Stan Kenton’s statement that “Louis…plays without any scientific element” and that “all natural forms of inspiration in music have been exhausted.” The actual text of Mike Levin’s interview with Stan had, of course, not reached Louis yet at the time of the Nice festival, but some of Louis’ statements sound almost telepathic in view of their direct relationship to the questions that Stan raised simultaneously in New York.</span></p>
<p><b>Borneman</b>: Well, now that it’s all over, what do you think the verdict is going to be in the cold light of the morning after?</p>
<p><b>Mezzrow</b>: If it proves anything, it shows that jazz is the greatest diplomat of them all. Did you dig those young French cats playing like Joe Oliver? Man, that’s old Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Baby on woodblocks. And that’s thirty years later and in another country. If that’s not the great leveler, I don’t know what is.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: You mean Claude Luter? You must be kidding.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: What do you mean kidding? Those cats sound real good to me.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: They’re out of tune so bad it hurts your ears.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: What’s that you’re saying, man? Ain’t you never played out of tune?</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b> Sure, man, but I try to do better. I learned a few things all those years since I was a kid in New Orleans. And if you blow wrong you try to keep it to yourself.</p>
<p><b>Louis:</b> How about records? How about that thing you made with Duke, the one about the train?</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: “Happy Go Lucky Local?” I didn’t make that.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: No, the other one. “Daybreak Express.”</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: That was the trumpet, and maybe they just cut him off in the end.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: Yeah, maybe.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: And how about the one you made with the big band on “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue?” How about that clarinet?</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: That was half a tone off, but it sold all right.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: Yeah, but you were satisfied with it?</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: It sold all right. Them cats know that a guy got to blow the way he feels and sometimes he hits them wrong. That’s better than them young guys who won’t blow for fear they’ll be off.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: I’ll tell you why he hit it wrong that time, Barney. The guy was playing tenor at the time and then switched to clarinet and his embouchure knocked him out.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: Embouchure, huh! I was playing tenor too. I had two embouchures. For tenor on this side and for clarinet on that one, so what about that?</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: That’s not what we’re talking about. You’re always knocking somebody, pops. I say that little French band plays fine. I could take them youngsters up to the Savoy and bring the walls down with them any day.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: That’s because you can take any kind of outfit and blow everyone else out of the room.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: That’s a fine band, pops. That little cornet player sounds just like Mutt Carey to me, I can hear all them pretty little things Mutt used to do when that boy gets up and plays. That’s the real music, man.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: Real music! Who wants to play like those folds thirty years ago?</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: You see, pops, that’s the kind of talk that’s ruining the music. Everybody trying to do something new, no one trying to learn the fundamentals first. All them young cats playing them weird chords. And what happens? No one’s working.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: But Louis, you got to do something different, you got to move along with the times.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: I’m doing something different all the time, but I always think of them fine old cats way down in New Orleans—Joe and Bunk and Tio and Buddy Bolden—and when I play my music, that’s what I’m listening to. The way they phrased so pretty and always on the melody, and none of that out-of-the-world music, that pipe-dream music, that whole modern malice.</p>
<p><b>Borneman</b>: What do mean by that, Louis?</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: I mean all them young cats along the Street with their horns wrapped in a stocking and they say, “Pay me first, pops, then I’ll play a note for you,” and you know that’s not the way any good music ever got made. You got to like playing pretty things if you’re ever going to be any good blowing your horn. These young cats want to make money first and the hell with the music. And then they want to carve everyone else because they’re full of malice, and all they want to do is show you up, and any old way will do as long as it’s different from the way you played it before. So you get all them weird chords which don’t mean nothing, and first people get curious about it just because it’s new, but soon they get tired of it because it’s really no good and you got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to. So they’re all poor again and nobody is working, and that’s what that modern malice done for you.</p>
<p><span class="sub"><br/></span> <span class="text"><b>Mezz</b>: Because they’re full of frustration, full of neuroses, and then they blow their top ’cause they don’t know where to go from here. All they know is that they want to be different, but that’s not enough, you can’t be negative all the time, you got to be positive about it, you can’t just say all the time, “That’s old, that stinks, let’s do something new, let’s be different.” Different what way? Go where? You can’t take no for an answer all the time. You got to have a tradition. They lost it. Now they’re like babes in the wood, crying for mammy. Poor little guys, and one after the other blows his top. They ought to see a psychoanalyst before they start playing music. We made a blues about it for King Jazz, and we called it “The Blues and Freud.”</span></p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: But we’re in a new age now, man. It’s a nervous age, you got to bring it out in your music.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: When they’re down, you gotta help them up, not push them in still deeper.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: You can say that because you’re a genius. I’m just an average clarinet player.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: Now none of that, pops, you’re all right. You just got off the right track when you were playing with [name withheld]. All that soft-mike stuff that can’t cut naturally through the brass. You just remember the way the boys used to play way down on Rampart Street and you’ll kill the cats.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: You know who has the best band in America now? Kid Ory.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: Treason!</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: And I’ll tell you why. Because they got a full tone and they play in tune.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: And no mop-mops and be-bops.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: Because they play together, not every prima donna for herself. And not like them cats who got too big for their boots when somebody gave them a chance to lead a band and now they can’t play their instruments no longer. Look at [name withheld] starting off “West End blues” in the wrong key. He don’t remember his own solo no more. I remember every note I ever played in my life.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: But that’s what I was saying. It’s all so easy for you to talk because you’re an exception in everything. We others just got to keep scuffling, and if they want us to play bop, we gotta play bop. It don’t matter if we like it or not.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: No, that’s because I got some respect for old folks who played trumpet before me. I’m not trying to carve them and do something different. That’s the sure way to lose your style. They say to you, “I got to be different. I got to develop a style of my own.” And then all they do is try and not play like you do. That’s not the way to do anything right. That’s the sure way you’ll never get any style of your own. Like I was telling you about [name withheld]. He had a style once because he played like the old timers did on their horns, and all he tries now is to play solos and not back up a band or a singer.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: That’s because he was a leader, man, and he just got used to waving a stick.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: Jack was a leader too. You were a leader. I’ve been a leader for some time now, but don’t try and carve you when we play a passage together.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: That modern malice.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: You see, pops, it’s wonderful with the trumpet players because the trumpet is an instrument full of temptation. All the young cats want to kill papa, so they start forcing their tone. Did you listen to [name withheld] last night? He was trying to do my piece, make fun of me. But did you hear his tone? ’Nuff said.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: I won’t argue with that.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: I’ll tell you another. Remember Lunceford? Those first things he did, “White Heat Jazznocracy,” why, that was wonderful work on reeds. And then the trumpets came in and that was the end. They killed it stone dead every time.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: That was Steve.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: No, that wasn’t Steve. Steve was all right. It was [name withheld]. And I’ll tell you another one. You know [name withheld]? One day he told Braud I was playing 1918 trumpet and the hell with me. You know that was the wrong man to talk. Braud nearly killed him for it. Now they tell me he never said it, he loves me too much, but I know those cats. They want to play good trumpet, and they want to show off at the same time. But you can’t have it both ways. You can play good trumpet with a pretty tone and a fine melody or you can play them weird chords. You can’t do both at the same time and if you try, that’s when you get unhappy and hate everybody and then you blow your top.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: That’s right. I don’t go for those guys who get so high they can’t work and then come sucking around you looking for sympathy. Last night [name withheld] comes up to me and says he can’t send money home to his wife because the French won’t let him. So I say to him, “What were you doing when you were touring [name withheld] where they let you send money home? Who was buying all your drinks then?” That’s the way they talk and all the time you know they get high just because they’re fighting their horns.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: This cat comes up to me last night and says: “Louis, don’t you like me no more? You don’t ever talk to me.” I say, “Pops, don’t give me none of that Harlem jive,” and I leave him standing there. I don’t dig those cats.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: And [name withheld], how about [name withheld]?</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: Best white drummer I ever heard and can’t hold a job and that’s why he keeps knocking everybody in the business.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: That modern malice (laughs).</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: Pops, I’ll tell you what it’s all about. Just look at the Street today. Don’t let me tell you nothing. Just look at the Street. They’ve thrown out the bands and put in a lot of chicks taking their clothes off. That’s what the bop music has done for the business. And look at them young cats too proud to play their horns if you don’t pay them more than the old timers. ’Cause if they play for fun they aren’t king no more. So they’re not working but once in a while and then they play one note and nobody knows if it’s the right note or just one of them weird things where you can always make like that was just the note you were trying to hit. And that’s what they call science. Not play their horns the natural way. Not play the melody. And then they’re surprised they get thrown out and have strippers put in their place.</p>
<p><b>Bigard</b>: Well, I don’t know.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: Well, you oughta know, pops, you’ve been around long enough. Look at the legit composers always going back to folk tunes, the simple things, where it all comes from. So they’ll come back to us when all the shouting about bop and science is over, because they can’t make up their own tunes, and all they can do is embroider it so much you can’t see the design no more.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: But it won’t last.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: It can’t last. They always say, “Jazz is dead,” and then they always come back to jazz.</p>
<p><b>Enter Louis’ valet dragging a trunk</b>: We gotta pack, pops. (Draws the curtain.) It’s daylight, boys. We gotta be at the airport in a hour.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: Well, let’s scuffle.</p>
<p><b>Louis</b>: It’s always the same thing in all languages. You make a pretty tune and you play it well and you don’t have to worry about nothing. If you swing it, that’s fine, and if you don’t, well look at Lombardo and Sinatra and they’re still not going hungry. We’ll be around when the others will be forgotten.</p>
<p><b>Mezz</b>: They’ll be cleaning the streets of the city when we eat lobster at Negresco.</p>
<p align="right"><b>DB</b></p> Interview by Ted Panken on Ahmad Jamal's Birthday in 2011tag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2016-01-08:1992552:Topic:3751372016-01-08T22:57:31.250ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
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<h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/its-ahmad-jamals-81st-birthday/" rel="bookmark">It’s Ahmad Jamal’s 81st Birthday</a></h1>
<p>A few weeks ago,…</p>
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<h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/its-ahmad-jamals-81st-birthday/" rel="bookmark">It’s Ahmad Jamal’s 81st Birthday</a></h1>
<p>A few weeks ago, <a title="Ahmad Jamal-Montreux" href="http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tagesanzeiger.ch%2Fkultur%2Fpop-und-jazz%2FUSA-sperren-muslimischem-Musiker-die-Gage-fuer-Schweizer-Auftritt%2Fstory%2F10782999">the unfortunate news went semi-viral</a> that the U.S. government had blocked Ahmad Jamal, who turns 81 today, from receiving a $10,000 fee for a forthcoming performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, citing the bank transfer as “a donation to terrorism.” Apparently, he was being confused with <a title="Jamel Al-Badawi" href="http://www.amw.com/fugitives/brief.cfm?id=47534">Jamel al-Bedawi,</a> a Yemeni wanted in connection with the 2000 bombing of the <em>USS Cole</em>. It’s unclear whether the State Department or Department of Homeland Security has resolved the confusion</p>
<p>Jamal is, of course, a universal influence on the sound of hardcore mainstem jazz by dint of Miles Davis’ application of his strategies to his own rhythm section during the middle ’50s (Miles recorded much of the repertoire of Jamal’s early ’50s Three Strings trio with guitarist Ray Crawford and bassist Israel Crosby, and assigned pianists Red Garland and Bill Evans to head to his steady gig with Crosby and drummer Vernell Fournier at Chicago’s Pershing Ballroom on 64th and Cottage Grove for first-hand observations of what he wanted them to do), and the subsequent assimilation of his syntax by the likes of McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Kenny Barron, Cedar Walton, Mulgrew Miller, Marcus Roberts, <a title="Eric Reed picks a dozen Ahmad Jamal favorites" href="http://www.jazz.com/dozens/reed-picks-jamal">Eric Reed</a>, and Bill Charlap, all of whom cite him as a seminal early influence. He’s of course evolved with age, broadening his concept, extending the forms, playing with an imaginative oomph and unfettered imagination.</p>
<p>As Jim Macnie put it <a title="McNie on Jamal" href="http://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2010/DB201003/_art/DB201003.pdf">in a cover story that ran in <em><strong>DownBeat</strong></em> last March</a>, “All the signature Jamal elements are in place: the exquisite touch, the profound grace, the mercurial improv choices. Though they’ve been there for decades—certainly since he made his first big career splash with At The Pershing: But Not For Me, the 1958 powerhouse that rode the charts for more than two years—these days everything about his playing is a bit sharper, a touch more vivid, a smidge more fanciful.”</p>
<p>I had a chance to write my own Jamal profile for <strong><em>DownBeat</em></strong> in 2003, when Dreyfuss released the wonderful trio date <strong><em>In Search Of…Momentum</em></strong>. The piece incorporated a contemporaneous interview, but also drew heavily on Jamal’s remarks during a five-hour WKCR program in 1995 on which he presented his music and spoke about his life. I’ve posted the transcript of that encounter below, as well as interviews about Jamal with Harold Mabern, Herlin Riley, and Richard Davis</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Ahmad Jamal Profile (WKCR, 2-5-95):</strong></span></p>
<p>[MUSIC: “Poinciana” (1958); “Do Nothin’ Til You Hear From Me,” “Chelsea Bridge” (1994); “Acorn” (1992); “Foolish Ways” (1989); “Divertimento” (1989); “Blue Gardenia” (1992); “Never Let Me Go” (1994); “Rossiter Road” (1985); “Haitian Marketplace” (1964); “Night Mist Blues” (1961); “Music, Music, Music” (1961); “Too Late Now” (1961); “You Don’t Know What Love Is”; “Patterns,” “Dolphin Dance” (1970)]</p>
<p><strong>I’d like to speak with you about your early years in music and your years coming up in Pittsburgh as a young pianist. I gather you began playing piano very early, and had a facility for it that was quite immediately evident.</strong></p>
<p>AJ: Well, Pittsburgh is a very interesting town, Ted. You have a lot of players that are still there that are just as astonishing as the ones that have left. We had Billy Strayhorn there, and I sold papers to his family when I was a kid, which was an experience in itself. Erroll Garner, Dodo Marmarosa, who is long forgotten — we all went to the same high school. Mary Lou Williams, same high school.</p>
<p><strong>Which high school was that?</strong></p>
<p>AJ: Westinghouse.</p>
<p><strong>Was there a great band teacher at Westinghouse High School?</strong></p>
<p>AJ: There was. His name was Mr. Carl McVicker. I think he lived to be 96 or 97. I think he’s passed on now. But to use the over-used word that Sue Clark comments on quite often, the legendary McVicker. Yes, he was quite popular around there.</p>
<p><strong>What was his manner like?</strong></p>
<p>AJ: Well, it was his approach. He was quite innovative. He had four ensembles, the Beginners Orchestra, the Junior Orchestra and the Senior Orchestra, and then he started the K-Dets(?). It was unique, because this was the all-American Classical/Jazz band, and it was quite unusual for it to be in a high school at that time on such an organized basis. He started the K-Dets(?) maybe around 1946, which is quite early on. Now, of course, we have Berklee and all these institutions of higher learning that incorporate this music in their curriculum to say the least. But I think it was very innovative, very unique on his part to start a Jazz clinical society in 1946.</p>
<p><strong>I interrupted you when you were listing the musicians out of Pittsburgh.</strong></p>
<p>Well, it’s so many. You have Loren Maazel, you have Earl Wild, the exponent of Liszt, and Erroll Garner, as I mentioned before, Mary Lou Williams, Dodo Marmarosa, Kenny Clarke, Ray Brown, George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Phyllis Hyman, Dakota Staton, Roy Eldridge, Art Blakey — and it goes on and on.</p>
<p><strong>I’ve read that you first were put at a keyboard at the age of 3 or 4, and your ability became quickly apparent.</strong></p>
<p>Yeah, I took a long time to decide. I started playing at 3. Earl started playing at 3, too. It happens. It’s very rare, but it happens. I began with Mary Caldwell Dawson, one of the great teachers, when I was 7; I started studying with her at 7.</p>
<p><strong>Were your parents musical? Did they play? Was there always music in the household?</strong></p>
<p>Later on, much to my astonishment, I found out that my mother had approached the piano before we started coming — that was astonishing, because she never mentioned that to me. But the whole family has the ability to play the instrument, and some of us do. I have a first cousin who was down at the Blue Note the other night. She plays very well. She doesn’t play any more, but she plays very well. So there’s music throughout the entire family. And if they don’t play, they have a very thorough knowledge and insight into what music should be all about.</p>
<p><strong>What sort of music would you be listening to in the family? Were you listening to a wide range of music as a young guy?</strong></p>
<p>Well, I was a collector as a youngster. Ted. I used to send away for… You had to send away for records then. So I have a lot of collectors’ items. I have big band records that Erroll Garner was on that very few people know about. Guild was the label. He did some things with Boyd Raeburn and Georgie Auld. We had to send away for things like “Salt Peanuts” when Dizzy and Bird first came out on those. I was quite a collector, and so was my brother. We collected everything, the big bands, particularly the sounds of Jimmie Lunceford and Basie, all the bands who used to come to the Savoy. We had the Savoy Ballroom. That’s when I first saw Diz, when Hen Gates was his pianist. I don’t know if you remember the name Hen Gates. Joe Harris, who’s another Pittsburgher, was playing drums — he’s a marvelous drummer. So all those bands we went to see at the Savoy as well as the Stanley Theater, where I first saw Duke Ellington and Sonny Greer. Which was a picture in itself, because Sonny was behind many, many percussion instruments. “Ring Dem Bells” was one of the things Duke wrote for Sonny, I believe.</p>
<p><strong>Many people have commented that the sight of the big bands as a spectacle was almost as inspiring as the sounds that emanated from them.</strong></p>
<p>Well, that’s where I first heard Bud Powell, too. Bud was playing with Cootie Williams at the Stanley Theater.</p>
<p><strong>Speaking about Bud Powell, which pianists caught your ear early on?</strong></p>
<p>Well, some were fairly formidable, to say the least. I mean, there are some great players in the so-called Boogie-Woogie idiom, too. James P. Johnson and Albert Ammons, forget about it; they were just incredible. But the ones that I think I began to follow most widely were Art Tatum and Nat Cole, and of course, Erroll Garner was my biggest influence.</p>
<p><strong>How did you go about assimilating these influences?</strong></p>
<p>Well, you’re going to emulate. You have to emulate different people until you develop your own path or your own pattern. So you’re going to emulate all those great players, and see what they’re doing, analyze what they were doing. Then you go to your sessions… We had these historical sessions in Pittsburgh, which unfortunately are absent now for a lot of the younger players. So you take these things off a record, and you apply them in the jam sessions, and eventually, if you’re lucky, if you’re blessed, you’ll find your own approach to these things — which is not easily come by.</p>
<p><strong>Who were some of the players your age that participated in these sessions in Pittsburgh?</strong></p>
<p>A great trumpeter who is Stanley Turrentine’s brother, Tommy Turrentine. Tommy taught me my first flatted fifth chord. He’s a great musician, Tommy. In fact, I got Tommy a job with George Hudson’s band shortly thereafter, after I joined the band. Joe Kennedy, the great violinist, was one of the prominent figures in the jam sessions. There was the great guitarist Ray Crawford, who started out playing saxophone; he was one of the great saxophonists. Joe Harris. Ray Brown would come back, when he wasn’t on the road; he would come back and play, too. Leroy Brown, the famous Leroy Brown in Pittsburgh. Osie Taylor, a phenomenal saxophone player. Sam Johnson, the great Sam Johnson, a pianist. Cecil Brooks, who now has a son, Cecil Brooks, III. Cecil was one of the great figures around 471, where the sessions took place.</p>
<p><strong>Were these private sessions, or would people come from around the community and offer their input?</strong></p>
<p>Well, it was a private club of musicians. You had to be a member to get in. But we also let the general public in if they said and spoke the right words!</p>
<p><strong>Was this club affiliated with the union?</strong></p>
<p>Yes, it was our 471 local.</p>
<p><strong>Apart from that, were you out doing little or not so little gigs in the community for money as a teenager?</strong></p>
<p>Yes, I was working in just about every setting possible. I was working sometimes with Eddie Jefferson, who was a tap dancer then. He wasn’t singing at the time. I used to play for Eddie Jefferson on rare occasions. In fact, Eddie used to come down to the club and participate in jam sessions, too. And I was with all the big bands. I did a lot of big band work in Pittsburgh.</p>
<p><strong>Local big bands?</strong></p>
<p>Will Hitchcock, Joe Westray, Jerry Elliott.</p>
<p><strong>What type of chart would they be playing? Were local arrangers doing it, or were they working with stocks, or the popular charts of the day?</strong></p>
<p>50-50, Ted. We had some great writers within Pittsburgh, so we had some stock charts, but we also had our own writer that would write as well.</p>
<p><strong>I guess Billy Strayhorn had left a little before that time?</strong></p>
<p>[LAUGHING] Yes. We didn’t have Billy’s things! Duke had those. We had the stock arrangements of Billy’s by that time, I would suppose.</p>
<p>Then I had some very unusual settings where we would go. Carl Otter, who was a great musician around Pittsburgh, his father was a great pianist, and Carl was one of the saxophonists… We used to play jobs in Uniontown, just piano and tenor, no drums, no bass. Can you imagine that, just piano and tenor.</p>
<p><strong>Earl Hines in his autobiography mentions Wylie Avenue as the strip where he really picked up his information in the 1910’s and early Twenties. What was the Pittsburgh Jazz scene like when you were in there as far as the older musicians, and what part of town was it located in? Give us a sense of the ambiance in Pittsburgh.</strong></p>
<p>Wylie has been replaced with the new sports center, the coliseum, the sports dome, whatever they call it. It’s been replaced, and Wylie Avenue is no more, unfortunately. They should never have torn down Local 471. They should have kept the building (it’s a historical landmark), and moved it at least. But that was lost, which was a tremendous loss.</p>
<p>Wylie Avenue was the place where we all gathered, the places that were around there were the Washington Club, where I first met Art Tatum. I was 14 when Art came and played for us.</p>
<p><strong>What was that experience like?</strong></p>
<p>Well, it’s very difficult to describe an experience like that, [LAUGHS] a 14-year-old kid sitting and playing along with Art Tatum. Of course, he played last!</p>
<p><strong>Did he have any comments for you at that time?</strong></p>
<p>I don’t know. I was too in-awe to even get into that. His quotes were mentioned later on in some of my press releases. Someone found some quotes of his as a result of that, and put them in some subsequent press releases.</p>
<p>Then we had the Bamboolah Club, and we had Crawford’s Grill, which I’d imagine you’ve heard of. Crawford’s Grill was the definitive place for players. I, interesting enough, never worked Crawford’s Grill. Then, of course, the capital, the dome of the capital, the Musicians Club. To me that was the dome of the capital as far as music was concerned.</p>
<p><strong>So you came up in some very tough company in Pittsburgh, very high standards. How old were you when you began working regularly and taking home some money.</strong></p>
<p>Too young. I was 11 years old. That’s too young. I’d do algebra during intermission, between sets. That’s too young. I don’t recommend that.</p>
<p><strong>Can you give us some descriptive sense of what you sounded like at the age of 11 or 12, in 1941 or 1942?</strong></p>
<p>I sounded well enough… See, in my case, I had an aunt from North Carolina. That was when publishing was publishing, and she used to send me sheets and sheets and sheets of music that was written before I was born. So I sounded well enough during those years as a result of having all this great body of work that I drew from this sheet music, that I was working with guys 60 or 65 years old, and they were astounded because I knew all of these sounds. That’s how I got so much work, or enough work to start buying my clothes instead of relying on my Mom and Pop to do it.</p>
<p><strong>Were you improvising at that time? Were you functioning as an improvising Jazz pianist?</strong></p>
<p>Well, when I first started playing, I just played everything I heard, so I was improvising just like anyone else does who sits down, whether it’s Bach or Beethoven. They’re all improvisers, too. Improvisation is not confined to American Classical Jazz. Anybody who sits down and starts doing innovative things is an improviser. So I was doing it all my life. I started doing that at 7, started writing charts at 10, and was quite at home with, as I said before, guys 60 or 65 who had been doing it for a long time — because I had this great body of work that I was drawing from.</p>
<p><strong>You mentioned that you left Pittsburgh with the George Hudson Band.</strong></p>
<p>George made me leave my happy home. That’s where it started. George is also from Pittsburgh, but he transplanted to St. Louis, stayed in St. Louis, and is still there, if he’s still living. Out of that band came Clark Terry, a great number of musicians. Myself. Ernie Wilkins, a great writer who used to write charts on the bus. I can see Ernie right now writing charts on the bus. He was a phenomenal writer. He came out of that band, too. Bill Atkins, one of the great, unheralded first saxophonists, possibly the top first man in the world. Marshall Royal was another one, with Basie for many, many years, but Marshall was known — Bill wasn’t. So George produced a lot of great musicians.</p>
<p><strong>So you went out with him and wound up in Chicago, is how it went?</strong></p>
<p>George sent for me. He came through and heard me, I guess, at one of those historic jam sessions at the 471, and I got a call to come to Atlantic City. I was 17 then. I had my eighteenth birthday in Atlantic City. So I stayed in Atlantic City all summer, and there I met Johnny Hartman — because Johnny had just started. We worked for Billy Daniels, who was one of the so-called superstars at that time. Butterbeans and Susie. Ziggy Johnson had the chorus line; that’s another historic figure. We had Jimmy Smith, the xylophone player who used to tap-dance on the xylophone — incredible. He passed away in Chicago at the Pershing Hotel from tuberculosis. Oh, it’s a line of people that were there.</p>
<p>We stayed for an entire season in Atlantic City, at the Club Harlem, which is now no more. We would start at 8 o’clock at night, get out when the sun was coming up. Louis Armstrong came through one time, and that’s where I met the famous Sid Catlett. It was one of the thrills of my life, playing with Sid Catlett. We had great times there. Great times.</p>
<p><strong>It seems like by the time you’re 18 or 19 and getting to Chicago, you’d had as much experience as some people get in sixty years!</strong></p>
<p>Well, there are a few of us that have, I call it, embraced three eras of music. A few of us have done that. George Coleman, Thad Jones, Jamil Nasser, the late Phineas Newborn, Harold Mabern, and Miles Davis, as well as Gil Evans — because Gil was writing back then for Claude Thornhill. Musicians who have embraced three eras are very fortunate, and their whole approach is different, because we were youngsters when the big bands were in vogue, we were still young when Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker came along, and we’re still around in the so-called Electronic Age. So when you’re drawing from this great body of work, your approach is quite different.</p>
<p>[MUSIC: “Raincheck” (1960); “Prelude To A Kiss” (1976); “Squatty Roo” (1958); “Don’t You Know I Care?” (1994)]</p>
<p><strong>We were taking you from Pittsburgh to Chicago in our last conversational segment, and you were spending a season in Atlantic City with the George Hudson band. From then to Chicago, what happened?</strong></p>
<p>I left the band to go back to exploit with Joe Kennedy the possibilities of getting the Four Strings in gear and getting some work for the group that we had at the time. The group was Joe Kennedy, Ray Kennedy, myself and Edgar Willis at that time (Peepers) was playing bass, one of Mary Lou Williams’ favorite bassists. He passed away some time ago, two years ago. He was the bassist with Ray Charles for a while, after he went to California. So I left the band to go back to Pittsburgh, then we went back to Chicago with that group in 1948, called the Four Strings.</p>
<p><strong>Did you have a gig? Was it set up through a booking office or something?</strong></p>
<p>We couldn’t get any work. We had one job that came out of an office in Chicago, and that job was not in Chicago — it was in Dayton, Ohio or somewhere. So that group broke up because we couldn’t get work. Joe went back to teaching in Pittsburgh. Out of that group came the Three Strings, because what was left was the guitarist, bass and piano.</p>
<p><strong>Did that begin your concept of the orchestrational piano trio?</strong></p>
<p>Well, you know, before the formation of the trio, I worked with Israel Crosby for a while. He had a trio. I worked with him at Jack’s Back Door at 59th and State. I was doing maintenance work at Carson Pirie and Scott downtown for $32 a week, and I would work at Jack’s Back Door with Israel and Johnny Thompson. I’m the only living member of that group. That was another interesting combination, saxophone, piano and bass — no drums.</p>
<p><strong>Von Freeman cites Johnny Thompson as having been an influence in the 1930’s.</strong></p>
<p>Johnny was one of the great players. In Chicago, you know, that was the age of saxophone. Tom Archia went there, that’s where everyone went… That’s where Vernell was working. You couldn’t get Vernell, because Vernell was sought after all over the place. It took me a long time to get Vernell in the group. So I was working odd jobs. I couldn’t work every night anyway, because I hadn’t joined the union. I hadn’t put my transfer in, or some crazy rule. I worked with Von Freeman a bit. I worked with another saxophonist called Claude McLin, that people don’t know about. He was a great player, too. Gene Ammons was around; he was the big boss. And Tom Archia where Vernell was working.</p>
<p>So finally, I went into this steady job over the weekend with Israel — Israel Crosby, Johnny Thompson and myself.</p>
<p>Then I played solo at the Palm Tavern. Once in a while, Ike Day would come in and play for me. People don’t know Ike Day, except for a few like the late Buddy Rich and Papa Jo Jones, and people who are in that really essence of the core elite. Well, Ike Day was one of the great drummers who never left Chicago for very long. He used to help me in my single engagement at Jack’s Palm, the Palm Tavern. Unfortunately, he passed away in untimely fashion.</p>
<p>So I worked single, and I worked trio with Israel, then I formed my own group in 1951. That was quite some time after the Four Strings had disbanded, though. In the interim, I had gone out with a group called the Caldwells, and Ray Bryant and I were the graduates of that particular college, working for those three singers, the Caldwells. Ray and I were the pianists of record with the Caldwells. Then I went back to Chicago and formed my trio in ’51 after working around for three years.</p>
<p><strong>By this time the union had straightened out…</strong></p>
<p>Not really. A friend of mine, who was one of the great saxophone players, Eddie Johnson, heard me play, and he went to Harold Gray and said, “Look, I want him on my job,” and he’s got to get in the union. That’s how I got in the union. Harry Gray was the head of the union at that time. A very tough man. Very tough.</p>
<p><strong>I gather when you met Von Freeman, was working weekends at the Pershing Hotel, which you became identified with in the 1950’s. Describe the ambiance around the Pershing Ballroom a little bit, and also what was going on around the South Side’s booming Jazz community.</strong></p>
<p>Well, Von was at the Circle Lounge. He wasn’t at the Pershing when I met him. I worked with Von at the Circle Lounge at 63rd and Cottage Grove. The Pershing was at 64th and Cottage Grove. It was one of the more sophisticated places on the South Side, along with Harry’s Show Lounge, which was the last time I saw Nat King Cole. Nat came in and saw me there when I had a trio working in the front room. We had graduated from the back room up to the front room at Harry’s.</p>
<p>Then we had the Hi-Hat Club, where Lester used to come, and Vernell and Israel were the musicians of record; they accompanied everyone that came through there. That was quite a place, too, the Hi-Hat; I think it was on 63rd Street.</p>
<p>I went into the Pershing early-on, in 1951. I asked for a job in there and didn’t get it; they didn’t hire me. So I went somewhere else, and I came back in the Pershing later on, in 1958. But the whole atmosphere there, Eddie Harris and I would be walking down the street, and there were great things happening there. As I said before, Tom Archia, Willie Jones, and Willie Dixon.</p>
<p>Leonard Chess had just started his label. He started it with five artists. He started it with a little guy named Chuck Berry, some old masters by James Moody, some old masters by me, and Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. He had about five artists. So the whole thing was one of great historical interest. In fact, the place where he started is now a historical landmark in Chicago. He owned the Macombo, where Tom Archia held court every night with Vernell and Willie Jones. Leonard Chess owned that place. So the atmosphere was really something when it came to saxophone at that time. And of course, there were a great deal of venues to work, too, which are missing now.</p>
<p><strong>Chris Anderson, of course, was playing with Von Freeman then, and he’s cited by many people who heard him at that time as having a very advanced concept for that time, and he seems to have had an impact on a number of</strong></p>
<p>Chris has always been one of our favorites, along with Billy Wallace, who is a pianist that all the insiders know. Billy is now playing a single up in Seattle. But Chris had, and has always had a great harmonic concept, absolutely amazing, astounding. And I have to get out and steal a few chords from you, Chris, as I mentioned before. I haven’t seen Chris in a long time.</p>
<p>Of course, there was a bunch of greats around. Chris. Bill Lee (the bassist, Spike Lee’s father). Billy Wallace, who used to hold court quite often in Chicago.</p>
<p><strong>The tracks we have cued up were recorded in 1951 and early 1952 for the Okeh label, with the trio of you, Ray Crawford, and Eddie Calhoun. About three or four years after you cut these, Miles Davis then recorded most of these sides in his own way. He always was very outspoken about his debt to your concept. He had family in Chicago. Did you know him at that time. Do you recollect first meeting Miles Davis?</strong></p>
<p>I knew Vernon quite well, Vernon Davis. I met Vernon before I met Miles. Vernon probably is still in Chicago.</p>
<p>But everybody came to the Pershing. Billie Holiday came there with her chihuahua dog, Art Tatum used to come through there, Lena Horne — everyone came to the Pershing. Sammy Davis was there the night before he lost his eye. And I guess that’s where Miles first heard me. What happened, there’s a man named Cadillac Bob who built the place downstairs, beneath the lounge, and he used to bring artists such as Miles there. That’s where I first saw a teenager named Paul Chambers, and I was astounded that he was on the bandstand at his age. And Miles I think was introduced as a result of him working downstairs and coming up to the Pershing.</p>
<p><strong>Eddie Harris, in a show we did last year, said he used to play on your off-nights at the Pershing, and he’d double on piano, and Charles Stepney, who played vibes, would take over on piano and he would play saxophone. He also said that for a while Billie Holiday took a financial interest in a club that was based in one of the rooms at the Pershing that was called Budland.</strong></p>
<p>Yeah, Budland. That’s correct. That’s downstairs, that’s right. That’s the one that Cadillac Bob built. Later McKie Fitzhugh had a place down the street where John Coltrane used to work, and McCoy used to work on the spinet pianos there! I remember that, too! Terrible pianos.</p>
<p><strong>Describe the layout of the Pershing a little bit. I believe there were three venues located in that hotel, the dance hall, the upstairs lounge and the basement. Is that right?</strong></p>
<p>Well, they had the Pershing Ballroom, the ballroom where they had the dances. Those I never attended because I was busy working downstairs, but they did have fairly big names come in there. But I never went upstairs. C.B. Atkins was around. He was one of the husbands of Sarah Vaughn. C.B. used to come in and out of there, upstairs I guess in the ballroom, and he would tell me what was going on upstairs. But I never attended.</p>
<p>The Pershing was one big, massive, circular bar. The bar was the entire room. It was a big room. The stage was adequate. It was high. It was the place, at that time when we went in there, where everyone came. That was the place where everyone came. Downstairs was Budland, as you just reminded me, was the other venue. So there were three. There was Budland downstairs, and the Pershing Lounge, and upstairs the ballroom.</p>
<p><strong>I guess a few years before you came to Chicago, Earl Hines, whose geographic path you followed, owned a spot down there called El Grotto, and Joe Louis I believe had an interest in that place as well.</strong></p>
<p>Yes, I knew the El Grotto. Again, I didn’t go to the El Grotto much. But I do remember the El Grotto.</p>
<p><strong>Was Earl Hines someone who had an impact on you coming up? Were you very aware of him as a young pianist in Pittsburgh, his legacy and his presence in Pittsburgh?</strong></p>
<p>Oh, sure. Earl was a great, great player, and a great band, and great records. So you had to listen to Earl Hines. I was a collector of Earl Hines’ records.</p>
<p><strong>The big band that had played at the Grand Terrace.</strong></p>
<p>Sure.</p>
<p><strong>We’ll give Ahmad Jamal another break and hear these seminal sides from the early 1950’s on Okeh. I don’t know how many exactly we’ll hear, but we’ll begin with “Ahmad’s Blues,” one of Ahmad’s many famous compositions, recorded May 5, 1952 — Ray Crawford, on guitar, Eddie Calhoun on bass.</strong></p>
<p>[MUSIC: Jamal/Crawford/Calhoun, “Ahmad’s Blues”, “Surrey With the Fringe On Top”, “Billy Boy” (1951-1952); Jamal/Crawford/Crosby, “Autumn Leaves”; “New Rhumba” (1955)]</p>
<p><strong>I’d like to speak with you about bass players, because the bass plays such an essential role in your conception of the trio, and you’ve worked with such superb bass players. Eddie Calhoun, Richard Davis had one of his early gigs with you in Chicago, Israel Crosby, Jamil Nasser, and onward and forward. Would you discuss your ideas on what a bassist needs to do performing in your group?</strong></p>
<p>Well, the bass essentially, Ted, has to be an extension of your left hand, as Al McKibbon was in the case of George Shearing, and as Israel was and as Jamil was when he was working with me. So that’s what the role of a great bassist is as he or she relates to the pianist. And I’ve also sought those bassists who had sensitive ears, who had the ability to hear. Because I myself am drawing from a great body of work (having explained before that my aunt sent me sheets and sheets of music), so you have to have a man who has the ability to have this perception of what you’re doing when it comes to pulling these compositions of years and years ago, as well as the present things that we do.</p>
<p><strong>How much input do you have into the lines that the bass player comes up with, apart of course from being the pianist and the main soloist?</strong></p>
<p>AJ: Most of the bass lines I myself have done. The rare exception was the bass line that Israel played on “Autumn Leaves.” That was his bass line, which has been widely used. So most of the bass lines I have developed myself, because I have a thing for that. I love bass lines. So most of the things, 99 percent of the things, I write.</p>
<p><strong>You’ve mentioned that you worked with Israel Crosby before you even recorded, and then subsequently he joined your band…the year I have in my mind is 1954. I’d like you to say a few words about Israel Crosby for the audience, what made him so distinctive as a bass player, and your own personal relationship.</strong></p>
<p>AJ: Well, as I said before, I worked with Israel before he worked with me. I joined his trio with the late Johnny Thompson, and worked at Jack’s Back Door for maybe a year. It was a very interesting job. We played everything, all kinds of tunes. It was great.</p>
<p>It was a while before I could get Israel, because Israel was working a lot with Benny Goodman and Buster Bennett around Chicago, and it was difficult for me to get Vernell as well as Israel. So finally I got Israel into the group, and we stayed together for around eight years, Vernell, Israel and myself. First of all, the incredible thing about Israel is that he used a K-bass. He didn’t have a Tyrolean bass (I think that’s what James Cammack is using now; he just bought one) or a German bass or some of these fabulous instruments that you see various bassists with. He just had a K-bass. It was phenomenal how Israel could get this kind of action, this kind of sound, this kind of penetration out of a K-bass. But he did.</p>
<p>And of course, the remarkable thing about Israel is that he was a master of intonation. His intonation was flawless, just absolutely flawless. And a tremendous ear. Again, here’s a man that knew many, many, many compositions. He knew all the tunes. You couldn’t play a tune he didn’t know. He was just a phenomenal bassist in the fullest sense of the word.</p>
<p><strong>And I guess a very ingenious musician as well, because performing with you, the other musicians have to fill in a lot of space and come up with counterpoint and dialogue. In a show we did a few years ago, Junior Mance was commenting that Israel Crosby always came up with ingenious ideas that blended with the most perfect taste.</strong></p>
<p>Well, the classic line that Israel created (and Todd Coolman, who is another great bassist, and I often talk about it with him, has written these things down that Israel did) is his line on “But Not For Me.” That’s a classic Israel Crosby line, as well as the things he was doing on “Poinciana.”</p>
<p><strong>You mentioned how difficult it was to get Vernell Fournier into the group because he was so busy. I’d like again for you to say a few words about his very special qualities as your drummer for eight years, and then for a little bit after in the mid-Sixties.</strong></p>
<p>Here again, I’ve had three great drummers from New Orleans. The New Orleans atmosphere down there produces this type of talent. I had Vernell Fournier, and Herlin Riley, who left my group and went with Wynton Marsalis, and now Idris Muhammad. They all have that great New Orleans background, that great magic that only can come from New Orleans. They all have that approach to music. And when you visit New Orleans and you are down there, and you explore these beginnings and whence it comes, you realize what they have that many other drummers don’t have.</p>
<p><strong>That’s a tantalizing comment. Can we explore that a little bit? What is it about the New Orleans beat that’s so special to you?</strong></p>
<p>AJ: Well, historically I don’t know it as well as Idris does or Vernell does. But when you talk about New Orleans, you talk about the funerals that are conducted and the way they are conducted, where the drummers participate to a large extent, to say the least, and the French Quarter — and it goes on and on and on.</p>
<p>Vernell is one of the great brush players of all time. Tremendous approach to drums tonally, and one of the great innovators. What he’s done on “Poinciana,” if he could have copywritten that, he could build a bank. Many of the things you hear that drummers do, whether it’s Maurice White or whether it’s in some Rock groups, some of that stuff came from Mister Vernell Fournier. But it’s very difficult to keep from being plagiarized when you’re playing in the context that he played in. The thing that he did on “Poinciana,” for example, one of the most widely imitated rhythms in the world.</p>
<p><strong>In fact, it’s called the ‘Poinciana Beat,’ isn’t it, by drummers?</strong></p>
<p>Of course!</p>
<p><strong>Which brings up another aspect of your playing, which is the extensive use, and often within the same piece, of different time signatures and different rhythmic approaches to music.</strong></p>
<p>That’s the Pittsburgh influence. We have a little influence in Pittsburgh, too. We have some things that happened there as well. As I said before, I’m drawing from three eras of music. I have had more influences than pianists. Ben Webster was a big influence upon me. The big bands were a big influence upon me. So I think orchestrally. I’ve always thought orchestrally. That’s the way I approach my group, whether it’s a duo, a trio, a quintet or whatever it is — it’s my orchestra. And with an orchestra, you have to have, or at least I like to have a variety of things going, rhythmically and melodically and harmonically. It’s part of my training.</p>
<p><strong>Let me bring you back to the Ben Webster influence. He’s the only non-pianist you’ve mentioned so far…</strong></p>
<p>Well, Roy Eldridge influenced me, too, on trumpet. I play some of Roy’s things! Lucky Thompson influenced me. Don Byas was one of my biggest influences. It goes on and on and on. These things you incorporate, and they stay in the inner recesses of your mind, and they become a part of your conscious playing.</p>
<p><strong>Well, the trio became immensely popular at the time of the release of the album Live At The Pershing, although of course, you had established yourself prominently in Chicago by that time. Let’s talk about the events leading up to the immense popularity of your trio and of your concept, and the tremendous exposure the band now had. Of course, you were well-known to the musicians’ community, but now the broader public and international public came to know your work.</strong></p>
<p>Well, first of all, it’s almost impossible for an instrumentalist to have a breakthrough. It was no meteoric rise in our case. I had been recording for seven years, and the group I had was far too subtle to continue working in the various venues, because guitar and bass sometimes are lost in the bigger venues — so I went to drums as a result. It wasn’t an overnight thing. I mean, I had worked long and hard to try and get a group together, and I went in as artist-in-residence in Chicago. After working here in New York, I decided to go and stay at home. Home then was Chicago. So the thing that happened in Chicago was very, very rare. There’s only a few of us that have that kind of breakthrough who are instrumentalists. The singers get the hit records. We instrumentalists don’t. It doesn’t happen very often. Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Miles, Dave Brubeck, and then you begin to think who else. But there haven’t been too many hit records instrumentally. Ours stayed on the charts for eight weeks, which is very, very unusual.</p>
<p>[MUSIC: Jamal/Crosby/Fournier, “I’ll Take Romance/My Funny Valentine” (1961); (w/J. Nasser) “This Terrible Planet” (1965); “April In Paris” (1961); “Love For Sale” (1958), “All Of You” (1958); “Cherokee” (1958)]</p>
<p><strong>Tell me about your nightclub, the Alhambra. You said you had 43 employees. It was a very ambitious venture.</strong></p>
<p>43 too many. Yeah, it was quite a venture, and one I got away from. Interesting club. I had Jackie Cain and Roy Kral there as well.</p>
<p><strong>You had a non-alcohol policy, I gather.</strong></p>
<p>Yes. I had one of the great oud players (and one of the great bassists, too) while I was working for George Wein up in Hyannisport, at the other Birdland up there. I had Abdul-Malik. The late Abdul-Malik played an engagement there for me as well.</p>
<p><strong>We’ve covered a short space of time in your musical career. What have I not mentioned that you would like to express for the radio audience?</strong></p>
<p>Well, there are so many things to mention, Ted. But wWe didn’t mention the concert with Duke at Carnegie Hall, the 25th Anniversary of Charlie Parker with Strings. I think I’m the only one around from that concert that we did with Duke. Of course, I worked with Duke on a number of occasions, and shared the bill with him at Basin Street West also.</p>
<p><strong>Your new [1995] release is dedicated primarily to Ellington and Strayhorn. It’s called I Remember Duke, Hoagy and Strayhorn, and there are versions of “I’ve Got It Bad” and “In A Sentimental Mood,” “Don’t You Know I Care”, “do Nothing Til You Hear From Me”, “Chelsea Bridge”, and also “Prelude To A Kiss.” You mentioned earlier seeing the Ellington band at the Stanley Theater and seeing Sonny Greer for the first time. Do you remember your favorite recordings by the Ellington band of that era?</strong></p>
<p>“Cottontail” was one of my favorites. That’s a classic recording of Ben Webster’s.</p>
<p><strong>Did you get to see the band that had Jimmy Blanton in it in person?</strong></p>
<p>No, I never saw that band.</p>
<p><strong>When did you first start going out, by the way?</strong></p>
<p>My sister took me to the theaters when I was around 7.</p>
<p><strong>What are your early memories of seeing big bands?</strong></p>
<p>Quite impressed, you know. That’s when I first heard Cootie Williams. As I said, he had Bud Powell in the band then. And seeing Count Basie come into the Savoy, and seeing Diz. Very, very good for a young musician, to say the least.</p>
<p>But we have to also talk about some of the great bassists I’ve had. That’s one thing I didn’t expand upon. I’ve had some tremendous bassists. At the beginning with Tommy Sewell out of Pittsburgh, and then Eddie Calhoun, who passed away. After that, Israel. Jamil Nasser was with me for many, many years. He’s one of the bassists, coming here with one of the great players of all time, Phineas Newborn. Jamil came to New York with Phineas, so Jamil had a tremendous association with a great pianist. So he was with me for a number of years.</p>
<p>Not to speak about… I’ve had some great drummers. I had Wyatt Ruether. Papa Jo Jones also worked with me.</p>
<p>I had Richard Davis after he left Cozy Eccleston. That was the second job he had when he joined me. I had both the Pates, Johnny Pate and his son Donald Pate. It goes on and on. A great bassist, Mike Taylor, out of Pittsburgh. But I’ve had some tremendous players. But we’ll have to talk about that when I have time.</p>
<p><strong>One more question: On the relation between technique and improvising.</strong></p>
<p>AJ: Technique is extremely important. I’m amazed at some of the young players out here now. They have tremendous techniques. They are power technicians, and they’re doing tremendous things. But technique without the ability to tell the story is meaningless. You have to tell a story. Art Tatum had tremendous technique, incomparable technique. There are very few parallels to Art Tatum, or to a Phineas Newborn. But they also told a story.</p>
<p>Technique is something that is invaluable for any musician, and I respect it tremendously. But I also respect the ability to tell a story.</p>
<p>[MUSIC: Jamal/Coolman/Gordon Lane, “Dreamy” (1980); w/ Strings, “Bellows” (1989); “Tranquility” (1968); “Manhattan Reflections” (1968); “I Remember Hoagy” (1994); “Skylark” (1994); “Round Midnight” (1985)]</p>
<p>[-30-]</p>
<p>On various WKCR Musician Shows over the years, the following pianists presented these tracks by Ahmad Jamal:</p>
<p>Mulgrew Miller : “Dolphin Dance,” “Poinciana” (1971)</p>
<p>K. Barron: “Music, Music, Music,” “There is No Greater Love” [“<em><strong>Live At the Pershing</strong></em> was very influential. I remember I was laying in bed, getting ready to go to sleep, and I had the Jazz station on, and the tune they were playing was ‘Music, Music, Music.’ And again, it was ‘Who is that?’ It was just so hip. I think Ahmad is like the consummate trio player. There’s just so much space and so many ideas and he’s so creative in a trio setting. And his technique is…I mean, it’s unbelievable technique. His touch… So he has it all happening for him.”</p>
<p>Cedar Walton: “Haitian Marketplace”</p>
<p>James Williams: “Patterns”, (“Night Mist Blues”)</p>
<p>Cyrus Chestnut: “You Don’t Know What Love Is”</p>
<p>John Hicks: “Rossiter Road,” “Too Late Now,” “I’ll Take Romance/My Funny Valentine”</p>
<p>Junior Mance: “Raincheck,” “Poinciana</p>
<p>In a 2008 piece for the now dormant webzine <a href="http://www.jazz.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.jazz.com</a>, <a title="Eric Reed picks a dozen Ahmad Jamal favorites" href="http://www.jazz.com/dozens/reed-picks-jamal">pianist Eric Reed selected a dozen Jamal favorites</a>.</p>
<p>Here are interview excerpts in which several of Jamal’s contemporaries, bandmates, and fellow pianists remark upon his qualities.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Richard Davis:</strong></span></p>
<p>RD: But the first time I got a job which was more than local, in a sense, was a guy who lived in Chicago at the time, who had come from Pittsburgh — that was Ahmad Jamal. This must have been 1952.</p>
<p>Q: So it was in the early group before he started using a drummer? Was that in the guitar-bass phase of the group?</p>
<p>RD: Yeah. He had Eddie Calhoun…</p>
<p>Q: He had Ray Crawford on guitar?</p>
<p>RD: Yeah. Ray Crawford on guitar, and then there was another guy on the guitar — I can’t remember his name now either! Then there was Ahmad, and I was playing bass, of course. Ahmad had a tune which required me to play maraccas while I was playing the bass; I had to learn to do that with him, so he’d get this effect. And then Ray Crawford would thump on the strings and make it sound like a conga drum. It was a fantastic thing. And Ahmad had a sound and a concept that was just unbelievable. And of course, he attracted all of the guys coming in traveling to the club to hear him play, and it was always jam-packed. It was the first time I was with what you might call a consistent professional successful group.</p>
<p>Q: Was he working steadily with, like, several-week engagements at a time? And what clubs was he playing in Chicago?</p>
<p>RD: He would work at the Pershing Lounge, which was in the Pershing Hotel, oh, six weeks at a time, or more even.</p>
<p>Q: There were several levels to that club, weren’t there? There were like two or three different venues within that hotel…</p>
<p>RD: Well, the ballroom. See, the ballroom is where all the great traveling artists would come through. Like Lester Young; I remember seeing Lester Young. And several people would come. Charlie Parker… They’d all work in the ballroom. And the lounge was the place…I think that’s when first heard Eddie South, the violinist. I can’t remember all the groups that worked there, but I remember being there with Ahmad. And it was a classy kind of a joint. You know, there was a nice stage presentation, a lot of room on the stage, storage of the instruments — you know, it was very pleasant.</p>
<p>Q: Good piano.</p>
<p>RD: Good piano, yeah. It was a good thing for me to be with Ahmad. The one thing I’ll never forget him telling me at a rehearsal, he said, “Who is your favorite piano player?” And I said, “Oscar Peterson.” You know, who else? And he said, “You want to know who my favorite bass player is?” I said, “Tell me.” I thought he was going to say Ray Brown or somebody. He said, “You are.” I said, “Me?” He said, “Yeah, because you’re here with me.” I said, “God, what a lesson!” I was the number-one bass player for him because he was confronted me being with him. That was a real booster.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>Herlin Riley:</strong></span></p>
<p>TP: You went out on the road with him in ’82?</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: From ’82 to ’87.</p>
<p>TP: Go over how he heard about you.</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: Ahmad Jamal happened to be in New Orleans at a place called The Blue Room, which is the Fairmont Hotel. There was a trumpet player in the house band there named Omar Sharif — Emory Thompson was his Christian name — who Ahmad knew. Ahmad needed a drummer, because the guy who’d been playing drums with him left him in New Orleans, and he’d hired some guys in New Orleans who didn’t work out. Ahmad was going to Phoenix, and he asked Omar if he knew somebody who could do his gig, and Omar recommended me, and called me to tell me. Then I got a call from Ahmad about 7:30 in the morning. “May I speak to Herlin Riley?” “This is he.” “This is Ahmad Jamal. I understand you’re an excellent drummer, and I need someone to work with me in Phoenix. Can you do it?” Of course, I accepted, and I got some other guys to do my gigs around town. We went to Phoenix, we did a soundcheck, and we hit. We hit the same night. I was familiar with his music, but I hadn’t met him. So we played, and after the set he offered me the gig. I happily accepted.</p>
<p>TP: When we spoke for the liner note, you said the soundcheck was the rehearsal, and it was very easy to work with him. He sat down at the piano, started playing, and continued to play. He pointed to the bass player, who came in; he pointed to the conga player, who came in; he played the cycle of the song around and around 3-4-5 times, then pointed to you and brought you in. He didn’t tell you what to play; you just heard them, and found your pocket. Let’s talk about the dynamics of playing drums with him.</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: The things I said are still true. Playing with him was an enriching experience. Ahmad’s music is organic, and the fact that he can arrange it on the spot… Because everything is cued. The music has a structure it has a form, but he gives you hand signal to direct you inside of the form with the music. It tells you if you’re playing the top of the head section, the A-section or whatever, then he’ll give you another cue for the bridge, then he’ll give you another cue for the interlude. So if he wants you to repeat any of those three cycles, he can just give you the same cue to repeat it over and over. Then when he gives you the next cue to go to the next part of the tune, you go there. So the music is constantly being shaped and arranged on the spot, which makes it very organic and very rich.</p>
<p>Also, Ahmad Jamal can be very percussive in his playing, so we often had a lot of rhythmic and percussive interaction. We would play off of each other. He always does that. I’ve found myself very much at home playing with him. If I was to play with him now, it would be the same.</p>
<p>TP: He obviously has an affinity for New Orleans drummers.</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: I think one thing about New Orleans drummers is the fact that most of us grew up within the street band and parade band traditions, and the bass drum is very prevalent inside of that. It’s just like the music of the early ’20s. It comes from the bottom-up. New Orleans drummers play the drums from the bottom up, from the bass drum up, as opposed to a lot of other guys who perhaps play from the cymbals down. I think Ahmad is one that likes the groove. And when you hear most music that has a solid groove on it, it comes from the bottom up. He really likes playing grooves [vamps]. I think he just has an affinity for the nuances that New Orleans drummers bring him; that is, incorporating the bass drum inside of the grooves.</p>
<p>TP: So you think he just hears that sound as part of the orchestra in his head.</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: That’s what I think. He didn’t talk to me about it, but I just know from working with him that he likes the groove! When he stands up, he’ll watch you play, and kind of clap his hands and get inside the groove. It’s kind of unexplainable, but it’s something I’ve found I’ve been able to identify from working with him over the years.</p>
<p>TP: You said that in working with him, you dealt with rhythms you’d never faced or dealt with before. Can you be specific about the rhythmic signatures he likes to work with and the ways he works with them that are unique?</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: For instance, he would play sometimes a tune in 6/8, and we’d get into the 6/8 feeling, and inside that 6/8 feel he would impose a regular 4/4 meter over the top of that, so you’re playing two different meters at the same time. I had never experienced anybody who had that kind of rhythmic control, to really be able to go back and forth seamlessly between the two. Because it’s two different ways of thinking. But I could hear him doing that. It would be two different rhythms going on at the same time, and I had never experienced that. Also, I remembering playing a tune with him that Jack DeJohnette wrote called “Ebony,” and inside of the cycle of the tune there was a 3/8 bar. So you go 1 2 3 4, 1-2-3 1-2-3-4… It wasn’t music that was counted out to me like that. It was something that he played, and later on I came to understand what it was. But he just played it, and then I had to just kind of figure it out and play inside of it. Later, as I started working with him and he started introducing those kind of 3/8s and 7/8s and 5/8 kind of rhythms inside of the music, then I could see it from an academic standpoint. But when I first started working with Ahmad, it’s stuff that was just played, and you had to react and find your place inside of that. As opposed to actually knowing what it was, you had to instinctively know what it was and go with your instincts.</p>
<p>TP: And your instincts were sufficiently honed by playing in the range New Orleans contexts to be prepared.</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: Yes, being in New Orleans, I was prepared. I had a lot of experience I could call on. New Orleans is a small community, but there were a lot of things going on musically in the late ’70s and the early ’80s, a lot of styles of music. I got a chance to play in Latin bands, bands that were playing a lot of free jazz, and even got a chance to play in vaudeville, burlesque… I played for strippers, then later I played in “One Mo Time.”</p>
<p>TP: From what you say, it seems Ahmad Jamal has had a big influence on the rhythmic content of contemporary jazz. Whether it’s direct or indirect, a lot of things he’s done have filtered into the contemporary mainstream.</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: I would think so. But a lot of that stuff is unspoken, because Ahmad Jamal is not one of the most in-your-face jazz figures who is out here. He hasn’t had the same kind of recognition as people like Miles Davis or Dizzy or even Monk at this point. Most jazz musicians know who he is, but the general public, when you mention his name, they’re like, “Who?”</p>
<p>TP: Do you think he’s a little taken for granted by the jazz public?</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: I think the Jazz Establishment has shied away from him, especially early on in his career, especially the fact that he changed his name, became a Muslim at a time when it was very unfashionable. My personal feeling is that he’s had to endure some backlash from that.</p>
<p>TP: True, but he was quite successful in the ’50s… And he doesn’t want to take any stuff from anybody business-wise. But he was never the type of bandleader who would instruct you how to play your parts. It would be a general feel, and whoever you are becomes the interpretation of it.</p>
<p>HERLIN RILEY: Yes. I think that’s one of Ahmad’s great assets. He understands and he can hear musicians, and hear that musician’s voice for what it is. Either it’s something that he can work with or it’s something he can’t work with. If it’s something that he can work with, then he’ll let you really be yourself and let you speak your musical voice as it may be. Now, sometimes he gives you subtle directions in the music. He used to tell me, “Don’t fill in every time the phrase comes around; you don’t have to play a fill.” He’s always directing the volume and dynamics inside of the music. But really, he’s just shaping whatever is already there; whatever talent you already have, he knows how to shape it, but just let it grow and be better. But he doesn’t disturb it in trying to have you change your direction or change who you are musically speaking.</p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Harold Mabern:</span></strong></p>
<p>TP: You seem so well positioned to put Ahmad Jamal in perspective. You’ve heard play since when?</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: 1954 in Chicago. Frank Strozier and I graduated from high school together in 1954, and moved to Chicago. Booker Little graduated in ’55, and he followed us there. George Coleman came in ’55 or ’56. I hung out a lot with Booker and Frank, because they went to the conservatory, and we used to practice together at the YMCA. Booker Little was the one who turned us on to Ahmad Jamal. He’d gone out one night to hang out, and we asked him, “Where did you go last night?” He said he went to see Ahmad Jamal. We didn’t know who Ahmad was, but Booker knew, and he said that he’d heard one of the greatest pianists in his lifetime. Booker played a little piano, too; not solo, but he knew a lot about it, having been around Phineas Newborn. After that, the Pershing became our hangout night after night. But we also heard Ahmad at the Kit-Kat Club with Ray Crawford and Israel.</p>
<p>TP: You probably heard him with Ray Crawford and Israel Crosby first. Because I think Ray Crawford left in ’55, and the Pershing began in late ’55. Was what he was playing when you first heard him similar to what’s on the earlier recordings?</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: The way he sounds on records is the same as it sounded in person. There was no difference. It was all great.</p>
<p>TP: But usually, before an audience, people will stretch out, or it’s more experimental, or chance comes into the equation…</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: I see what you mean. Well, he stretched out then, but naturally not as much as he does now. Because he is constantly evolving. It’s that way with all of us; you get to the point where you take more chances, you don’t play it safe. But he did stretch out, but it was more of a format situation. Now he’s really stretching out. But at the time I’d heard him, I’d never heard that kind of approach before.</p>
<p>TP: Describe what was unique about his approach.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Well, I have to put Bill Lee into it, because he also told me about Ahmad. The fascinating thing to me — after being around Phineas, with the technical aspect; which was great, and is still great, with the touch and the sound — was the sound that Ahmad was getting then. After being around Bill Lee, I became attracted to his chords; I’d never heard chords played that way. That’s when Bill Lee told me about Chris Anderson, Billy Wallace and Ahmad Jamal. So then when I heard ahmad, it was the sound and the chordal approach. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Wow, how can that piano sound that way?” That’s the only I can exlpain it, is his overall sound. We’ve had a lot of great pianists, with great sounds and touches. But there’s something about his approach…the sound he got that was unbelievable.</p>
<p>TP: Did you see it as an extension of the great piano trios of the ’40s and early ’50s, like Nat Cole and George Shearing…</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Well, Nat Cole especially was one of his main influences, with the guitar and bass. But one of his main influences, as I’m sure he spoke about, was Errol Garner. They grew up together. If you match up any record by Erroll Garner and any record by Ahmad, from an orchestral standpoint, you say, “Wow, there it is right there.” But it was a lot like Nat Cole in the touch, the sensitivity of what he played, the chord voicings…</p>
<p>TP: And probably a more progressive conception of harmony.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Exactly.</p>
<p>TP: So he was incorporating bebop, Bud Powell’s language onto the trio as a logical extension.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Right, with Art Tatum touch… I call it Franz Liszt touch. I tell my students that it’s the touch that produces the sound. A lot of pianists might have equal technique, but it’s the touch and the sound they get out of it — like a Chopin touch or a Liszt touch. That’s the way Ahmad and Art Tatum are.</p>
<p>TP: Well, he played Liszt when he was 11.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: That’s exactly right. So all that produces the sound. I would say the format of Nat Cole and Erroll Garner formulated his overall concept. Then he just got beyond that and took it further, to the point where his stuff is so awesome… But it’s undescribable. You have to hear it, and then all you say is “Wow, gee-whiz…”</p>
<p>TP: Well, he has that amazing control.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Total control.</p>
<p>TP: In the ’50s, would he do things like work with different time signatures in one piece?</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: I didn’t see him do that myself until he got to New York City. Which was another thing I thought was hip. I said, “Wow, why didn’t I think of something like that?” But that made me think of something he said once, that everybody needs to be directed or have a director, even if you play by yourself — because you have to direct or conduct yourself. But that time thing, that thing with the hand signs, I’m pretty sure I saw him do that when he came to New York City. And naturally, his buddy, Monty Alexander, has taken that… See, he has a special relationship with all of his piano friend, and I consider him to be a friend as well as my mentor.</p>
<p>TP: He seems to have very warm relationships. As he puts it, he’s been grown-up since he was a kid, and he takes his responsibilities very seriously.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: To show that that’s true, I have a picture on my wall where Ahmad was playing one of these Elk type clubs, a junior lodge in Pittsburgh, and he was like a little kid sitting with all the older kids. So I can see that he’s been a responsible human being for a long time. People always said he used a lot of space; he’d rather call it discipline. To have that kind of discipline and patience… He has really done his homework</p>
<p>But again, the overall thing about him, besides his touch and control… I’ve always said that if Ahmad Jamal’s time was the brakes on a car, you would never have an accident. His time is impeccable. He will play a run and stop on a dime. And the way he is able to play in those different time signatures like 5/4 and 7/4… He is a master at that. It’s really unbelievable. He is not playing cliches. He is playing music. Mulgrew Miller said, “man, I have a hard time playing in 5/4.” But Ahmad can play with no problem in any of those weird time signatures. He’s what you call a super-duper genius in every sense of the word.</p>
<p>TP: So you actually were able to see the trio live from the beginning.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: As I said, I saw him with Ray Crawford and Israel at the Kit Kat Club, which was a real small club on 63rd Street. It was real small, and man, the people were packed in there like sardines. Then when they moved to the Pershing, naturally, that being a larger club, we were able to stretch out. We also started working there on Monday mornings with the MJT+3, and Israel Crosby would come to sit in with us on Mondays. That became our home away from home. Ahmad would work the night, we would the breakfast party on Monday mornings.</p>
<p>TP: That would be ’57-’58-’59, but you’d been seeing him since ’55. I guess his first drummer was Walter Perkins, and then Vernell. Was the trio extremely popular in Chicago?</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: All the piano players in Chicago, including Ahmad and Herbie, had their own individual sounds. But there were three groups in Chicago that had hit records — the Ahmad Jamal Trio, the Ramsey Lewis Trio and the MJT+3. We all had our different audiences…</p>
<p>TP: Herbie Hancock said that one thing that marked the Chicago pianists was that they were interested in reharmonization, parallel to and before Bill evans, and that Chris Anderson was responsible for a lot of it, and that Ahmad had his fingerprint on all of it. Did Chris have an impact on Ahmad?</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: I’m sure they did on each other. To tell the truth, I really can’t say for sure. They both have great love and respect for each other. Chris went to Wendell Phillips High School, because Nat Cole went there. Chris wanted to go there to be around Nat Cole. But I’m sure Ahmad had an effect on him, too. I always tell the story that Billy Wallace said, “I got this piano player, and I got this piano player; I almost got Ahmad.” When I tell that to Ahmad, he laughs. To this day, he said, “I almost got Ahmad.” In other words, he lets it be known that Ahmad is still the king.</p>
<p>TP: And you feel he started to stretch out once he left Chicago and moved to New York.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: When he left Chicago and moved to New York, that’s when he started to really stretch out. He had all these little basslines [SINGS REFRAIN]. You hear them and say, “Well, that reminds me of something McCoy Tyner…” Well, he influenced McCoy Tyner. We know how he influenced Miles and the whole group, to the point where Miles told all the piano players to say, “Play like Ahmad.” Which was fine with me. In fact, Miles used to make them… It was mandatory that when Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly left their gig, they all had to come to the Pershing. Ahmad was almost like an assignment. That’s where we met Miles and Cannonball. So when Ahmad got to New York, that’s when he really started opening up, and his stuff grew in all sorts of ways. Compositions so modern… I was talking to James Cammack, who played with us Monday night at Smoke, and we were talking about the different compositions and how many tunes Ahmad has in his book, and we were talking about “Bellows” and what a hip tune that is! That tune sounds like it was written a few minutes ago. I’d say he probably wrote it in the late ’70s or early ’80s when he was with 20th Century. That’s when he recorded Diana Ross’ “Touch Me In The Morning.” We both love pop music. Most pianists don’t fool with that. But Ahmad and I have never had a problem with putting music in a category. If it’s good… I always say that we bump heads, because he’ll record a tune that’s kind of off the beaten track, and it’s a tune I’ve been thinking of recording.</p>
<p>TP: Let’s touch on some of the dynamics of what happened when he started to stretch out. You talked about the extended basslines.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Right. The extended basslines, and then he did… Well, he could go from the basic II-V-I sound in his right hand to the modal sound, the things you hear McCoy doing. He just explores the whole piano. And in doing all that, he never loses his originality. Again, it’s because of what he plays, the way he plays it, and his touch. He can play a modal type line, but you always know it’s Ahmad, and it’s mainly because of the touch.</p>
<p>TP: Why do you think he has such an affinity for New Orleans drummers?</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: If I had to sum it up: The beat. When you think about that beat Vernell put on “Poinciana,” David Lee and Ed Blackwell played it… It tends to come from the marching band things. [street beats]</p>
<p>TP: But he’s from Pittsburgh, where Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey and Joe Harris are from, which is a different way of approaching time.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: True. But I think it’s that the New Orleans beat comes from the street and it swings. And once he heard what Vernell played on “Poinciana,” that opened the trio up to do other things that advanced his musical goals. It’s hard to explain it beyond that. You’ll know it when you hear it, and say, “Wow, what is that?”</p>
<p>TP: He did very radical things on albums like Extensions and Naked City Theme, with “Haitian Marketplace.” Let’s talk about his last 10-15 years, which seems a particularly fruitful period, primarily acoustic, a lot of recording, a lot of new compositions, framing his sound in many contexts — playing Ellington-Strayhorn repertoire, doing septets, live recordings, bringing in George Coleman and Donald Byrd and Stanley Turrentine, bringing in percussionists like Manolo Badrena, extracting a maximum of color. But how do you observe is progression since the latter ’80s?</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Not to be redundant or repetitive, but the way I see it is that he’s constantly evolving. He has never disappointed me. Never is a big word, but he has never disappointed me. Every time I go to hear him, I am always learning something. When I leave, I’m totally inspired. Todd Barkan told me that Cedar said that Ahmad Jamal gets his complete attention. When I go to hear Ahmad, I don’t want to go…even if it’s another musician… If you’re going to talk, go to another table. Because Ahmad is the kind of musician who, when they say, “Ladies and gentlemen, Ahmad Jamal,” before he even sits down, he’s hit three-chords that’s a masterpiece. Before he even sits on the stool, he’s played a three-chord masterpiece, then he throws up his hands to give a signal, and from that point on it’s… I don’t know anybody like him. It’s very hard to explain.</p>
<p>He’s really too deep for some people. A lot of musicians can’t handle it. As George Coleman said, a lot of piano players don’t come around because it’s too much piano to handle. They can’t handle it by themselves. But I’ve always been one to understand and appreciate genius.</p>
<p>TP: So he’s a total original.</p>
<p>HAROLD MABERN: Totally original. I can think of three other pianists who are original like that. One is Erroll Garner, one is Phineas Newborn, one is Thelonious Monk. Then there’s Ahmad Jamal. I’ve listened to them all, but what Ahmad has done and continues to do… The main thing is just his sound! I mean, it’s the sound, his knowledge of chords, his compositions, his touch, the way he orchestrates from the bottom of the piano to the top. Or the way he’ll play a ballad, where he keeps going back to the bridge and each time it’s totally different. He’s just a very special and blessed human being.</p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Tommy Flanagan:</span></strong></p>
<p>Ahmad Jamal’s concept is orchestral. He has a wide knowledge of the keyboard, and he uses all of the keyboard all of the time. He’s very rhythmic and very dynamic; that’s his trademark. But he has a well-defined trio style, as did Erroll Garner. Tatum had another kind of style. I guess he used his rhythm section just, hmm, to give pause between his notes. He had so much to play, he never could stop himself. But there is another style of playing, and Nat Cole certainly had a beautiful soft side to his trio playing. Bud Powell brought another dynamic into trio style playing. There are really a lot of models out there to listen to.</p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Mulgrew Miller:</span></strong></p>
<p>Ahmad Jamal is a very unique player. He’s sort of in a class by himself, because he was of no particular school, but yet all of the areas and eras of the music are represented in his playing, all of the Modern approaches and…you know, the whole history of the piano is there. Yet, he’s so individual and his style and his approach and his conception is so unique. He is so deserving of the highest merit in the tradition and history of jazz pianists. He keeps encompassing all of the innovations that come along. </p>