MR: We are filming for the Hamilton College
Jazz Archive on the Hamilton campus today. It's a great pleasure for me to have saxophonist,
clarinetist, arranger, composer, and on the eve of receiving an honorary degree of Hamilton,
Bob Wilber. BW: Thank you, Monk, it's a pleasure to be
here. MR: It's a pleasure to speak to you. And last
night I was watching a video that you are in with a big band. And you were saying that
your first love was big band, but your career started just a tad late.
BW: Yeah, well I grew up, I was 70 in March so in the late '30s and early '40s of course
that was the big band era and the music was in the air, it was on the radio all the time,
and that was my first love, particularly on clarinet was certainly Benny Goodman, who
was truly the "King of Swing," I mean he just really was, it just wasn't a name.
MR: It just wasn't a platitude. BW: No. When they called Paul Whiteman the
"King of Jazz" in the '20s, that was a platitude. But Benny Goodman was the "King of Swing."
He was certainly my first great influence. MR: When you got to be old enough to start
gigging professionally then, it was more of a small ensemble opportunity?
BW: Yeah, sure. Yeah, when I actually was starting to get out there professionally playing,
we're talking about 1946, '47, '48, this is when the whole big band thing fell apart,
partially for economic reasons, and partially because you had a whole new generation of
young people coming up and it wasn't their thing. You know young people are always searching
for their thing. And by then we were having things like Bill Haley's Comets and the beginnings
of what became rock & roll I suppose. And economically it just wasn't feasible for these
bands to be traveling all over the country anymore.
MR: You also had the start of bop. BW: Yeah.
MR: Was there a particular reason that you were more attracted to the quote classic jazz
than bop? BW: Well I don't know quite how to answer
that. My first love was of course the big bands and by the early '40s I was fairly sophisticated
in my tastes. I loved Ellington, Goodman, Artie Shaw. I was realizing that there were
the "hot" swing bands and then there was more commercial bands. By that time I had listened
to Glenn Miller for a couple of years and he was a little too commercial for my taste.
I was quite bored with "In the Mood" by then. But my discovery of earlier jazz really was
because the big companies, Columbia and Victor, started re-issuing the old records of Louis
Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, the people of the '20s. So I went backwards
from the Swing Era to discover the roots. And I was always interested in history. And
so I wanted to know well how did this come about and where did it come from. And of course
it naturally led me back to the early movement. I remember listening to the re-issue of Armstrong's
"Hot Five." And at that time, to me the greatest trumpet player in the world was Harry James,
that was undoubtedly, hands down, no question about it. And I was totally puzzled by the
"Hot Five." It was so complex this music, with the trumpet and the clarinet and the
trombone with these interweaving lines you know. It took me a long time to understand
it. Big band music with the riffs and everything was much simpler. But the more I listened
to Louis I realized, this is where Harry James comes from, and this is the man. And once
I discovered that Louis Armstrong was the greatest, I never changed my opinion, he still
is the greatest. But I was intrigued by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I remember the
first record I got of them was "Groovin' High," and � what was the other side, I can't remember
� anyway, and "Salt Peanuts" came out at that time. A bunch of us in our gang, we thought
it was very clever. And the musicianship was obviously great. But it didn't have the soul
that we felt in the music of Armstrong and of Bechet, and Goodman too. It was clever
but it didn't hit us in our heart, it hit us in the head. We appreciated what they were
doing intellectually. MR: You felt that their music was kind of
introverted, more towards just for the musician? BW: I felt that. I remember the first time
that I heard Dizzy and Charlie on the street. It was during the war and these servicemen
were coming back from the service and they'd gone away remembering maybe Glenn Miller or
Benny Goodman and everything, and they were back in New York on 52nd Street and they were
raring to go you know. And they're sitting at the bar in this club where Charlie and
Dizzy were playing. And I remember the band playing "Groovin' High." [scats] And they're
not hearing a melody that they recognize and they weren't happy. They'd had a few beers
and they were getting angry. And there was a hostility going on. And Charlie and Dizzy
were standing there saying, "This is what we play, if you don't like it the hell with
you." And I felt this hostility and it was a new feeling to me in jazz. Because jazz
to me was where everybody in the joint was having a ball you know, the joint was jumping.
And it kind of upset me, although I realized they were great musicians, I felt this lack
of communication between the musicians and the audience.
MR: Too much intellectual, not enough soul perhaps.
BW: Yeah. And there was an aggression in their attitude toward the audience which was very
different. The idea of entertaining the audience, they were rebelling against that concept.
MR: Louis Armstrong certainly never rebelled against that.
BW: No he didn't. No not at all. He was a great entertainer. In fact his ability to
be a marvelous entertainer in a way sort of got in the way of musicians being able to
appreciate his music. So a lot of musicians of that era, the young musicians, they wouldn't
take Armstrong seriously you know, because they weren't acquainted with the groundbreaking
things he did in the '20s of course which was absolutely revolutionary. I mean Armstrong
really in a sense invented swing. He was the first jazz musician to realize how to swing
perfectly, every bar. Other musicians of his contemporaries and earlier musicians, Oliver,
they'd play a couple of phrases, that would be great. Then they'd play another phrase
it would be awkward you know. And Jelly Roll had some ragtime in his playing, but he was
a perfect swing player. He never played a phrase that didn't swing you know. To me,
he, Bechet and a few others, they invented swing. And their music was the basis for the
whole Swing Era of the '30s. MR: You came to the clarinet in a kind of
funny way. I had the advantage of listening to you just a little while ago.
BW: Oh yeah. Well I loved music as a kid but the reason I wanted to play something was
because I liked the idea of playing in the band. Of course in those days the football
team was the big thing and every Friday afternoon you had the football game. And if the football
team was playing out of town, you'd get to get out of class early and go on the bus to
the neighboring town and then you'd watch the whole game right from the sidelines there
and then during the half you'd get out there and play. It sounded great. So anyway I went
up to the music department and this was just when I had started school and I suppose I
must have been in seventh grade, my first year in junior high. And I said, "I want to
play in the band." And so the director said, "Well okay son, what would you like to play?"
I said, "I think maybe a trumpet would be great." And so he said, "Well you take this
horn and you borrow it over the weekend and bring it back Monday and try it out." So I
took the trumpet home and oh boy, and I fingered these valves and everything, and then I started
to blow into it. Nobody had told me you have to spit into a trumpet, I didn't know. So
I just blew so hard and nothing came out. So Monday I took the horn back and I said,
"No the trumpet, it's just not me." So the next weekend I said, "Let me try something
else." And he said, "Well how about a clarinet?" "Okay, swell." I took the clarinet home and
I started playing it as soon as I got home Friday afternoon. By Sunday afternoon I can
play "Row Row Row Your Boat" on the clarinet. [scats]. I said, "This is it, perfect." And
I never looked back. I'm still trying to play "Row Row Row Your Boat."
MR: At what point did you learn how to play over the break?
BW: Oh, well that took a little while. That took a little while. But at that point I already
loved Benny Goodman so I said Jez, maybe I could play like Benny. And I started, luckily
my teacher at high school, the band director, was also an excellent clarinetist. That was
his main instrument. He started me off with the standard exercises and books that any
classical clarinet starts on. He was a good teacher. At the same time I was listening
to jazz, I was discovering, besides Benny Goodman I was going back and discovering Johnny
Dodds, who played with Louis Armstrong, Frank Teshemacher, all these different players.
So when I was 14 I was ready to go on the clarinet. Luckily in my school in Scarsdale
High School outside New York, there was a group of young guys who were interested in
playing jazz and they were, most of them, maybe two or three years older. And I knew
about them and so I was really excited. The only way I could figure out how to get to
play with them was I knew that they were always looking for a place to have a jam session
you know. So I plucked up my courage and called one of these guys and said, "I know you guys
have been looking for a place to play, well my father said you can come over and play
Sunday afternoon at our house and we've got a good piano." And they said, "Oh great, great."
So of course they came over and they were jamming, and I came downstairs with my clarinet
you know, and � "Oh you play clarinet too, huh kid? Well come on, join us." So I played
with them, and I was in. I was "Kid Wilber." MR: Kid Wilber.
BW: Kid Wilber, yeah. MR: It's almost like inviting your friends
to play baseball because you have the ball. BW: That's is, it's the same thing. So that
started it. MR: Well what a better place to learn then
with your peers you know, and learn on the spot.
BW: Well of course in those days we had 52nd Street, which was this marvelous block between
5th and 6th Avenue, which had, at any given time there was at least four or five different
jazz clubs. They'd often change names and management and so forth, but it was great
place to hear music. We had Nick's in the Village where the group of players that associated
with Eddie Condon played, Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, Bobby Hackett, Brad Gowans,
the whole so-called Chicago style. There was a lot of live music happening and of course
the big bands were going great, all the major hotels had bands. Tommy Dorsey would be at
the Astor, Benny Goodman would be at the Manhattan Room, which hotel was that � Glenn Miller,
all the bands. And there was airshots, every evening there was airshots, 15 minutes from
here, 15 minutes from Chicago, 15 minutes, it was just in the air you know. So there
was plenty of opportunity to hear music. I started hanging out on 52nd Street. The first
time that my pal, Denny Strong, who was a drummer in a little group, went in there,
we had told our parents we were going up to White Plains to watch a movie, to go to a
movie you know, and instead of going to White Plains we took the train into town. And we
started out in the Village and then we took the subway up to 52nd Street and we were going
from club to club, and suddenly we looked at our watch, and oh my God, we've only got
ten minutes to make that one o'clock train at Grand Central back to Scarsdale. We ran
as fast as we could, of course we missed the train, so Denny says, "What are we going to
do, Bob?" I said, "Well let's go back to 52nd Street, what the heck." So we went back and
that was the most exciting experience, of walking into Kelly's Stable, where Coleman
Hawkins was playing, and it must have been by then 2:30, 3 in the morning. Practically
empty, just nobody there. Maybe a few people. And the waiter said, "Boys, where do you want
to sit?" "Oh, right up next to the bandstand." So we were sitting at a little table as close
as I am to you. The band was on playing away, and we looked around and there's Coleman Hawkins
coming down the aisle. And he gets on the stand, picks up his tenor, I remember one
of the guys in the band said, "What do you want to play, Hawk?" He said, "Body" one,
two. He started playing "Body and Soul." And here Denny and I were sitting there and it's
Coleman Hawkins, one of our idols, playing "Body and Soul." That was very exciting.
MR: I should say so. BW: Imagine. Yeah.
MR: Did your parents let you out again? BW: Well anyway, so of course we went back
to the station, I remember sleeping on one of those marble benches, and we woke up and
people were going in to work. We caught the first train out, 6:30 or quarter to 7, and
then we're out in Scarsdale. I go home and I take my shoes off and sneak into the house
and upstairs, and I go past my parent's room. "Is that you, son?" "Yeah, Dad, it's me, yeah."
"Well where have you been?" And I had to tell him you know. So by then they began to realize
that I was absolutely hooked on jazz totally. MR: Did your parents encourage you to have
a safety net? BW: Yeah. Well my father came from a small
town in Ohio and he went to college and went on to get a Master's degree and came to New
York and went into textbook publishing, and he was very successful at it. And of course
being in that field he knew all the professors in all the universities, and he really would
have liked me to have gone to one of the ivy league schools. So I guess when I was about
16 we began to go around and we were going around to the colleges and he'd introduce
me to the various professors and everything. By the age of 16 I was hooked on jazz, and
I said this is very nice, Dad, and Princeton is lovely, the campus and everything. But
I said this doesn't feel right for me. So he said, "Okay, well look, we'll go up to
Eastman School in Rochester." Because they handled all the Eastman textbooks. So we went
up there and met Howard Hanson, the principal and all, so finally I ended up going to Eastman
okay? I go there the first term and it's a very good school and everything but gosh I
missed jazz. There was nothing happening. And so I went home for Christmas. So my father
says, "Son, how's it going?" I said, "Well Dad you know it's a great school, it really
is, and I'm learning a lot" I said, "but I don't think I want to go back" after the first
term. He said, "Son, what do you want to do with your life? You want to be a musician.
What do you want to do?" I said, "Well Dad, you know that block in New York, 52nd Street,
between 5th and 6th Avenue, you know with all the clubs?" "Oh yeah I know that's what
you've been doing." I said, "Well Dad I just want to hang around and listen to all these
great musicians, maybe meet them, maybe get a chance to sit in and play with them." He
says, "Son you want to spend the rest of your life blowing your lungs out in smoky dives?"
I said, "Yeah, yeah that's what I want to do." Anyway I mean I must give him credit.
He could understand my passion for music because he was a piano player, he played for his own
amusement all his life. And he was a good musician. He had a good ear, he could fake
anything, and he had some knowledge of jazz. He loved Teddy Wilson's piano. He'd bought
some of the albums. And he took the whole family, I guess it was around 1942, to Cafe
Society to hear Teddy Wilson's band. And that was a great experience for a kid of 14. And
then the next great experience was he took the whole family to Carnegie Hall in 1943
for Duke Ellington's first concert, where they premiered "Black, Brown and Beige." And
so see these musicians come on stage in these beautiful gray tuxedos with burgundy cummerbunds,
and Duke comes on in tails and everything. And then he came on the second half, he'd
changed from black tails to white tails you know. And the instruments were so polished
and burnished. And the music, I mean it was so exciting. I remember one experience that
amused me, my grandmother was maybe 83 at the time. And she had been an organist in
my father's church all her life. And she appreciated music and she knew nothing about jazz at all.
But we're sitting there and Tricky Sam Nanton comes down front with his plunger, and he
does one of those ya-ya-ya solos. And my grandmother turns to me and says, "Bob, he's trying to
tell us something." I said, "You're so right, Gran, you're so right." She got the message.
She said this guy's saying something to us. MR: That's a great story. Now you managed
to get your own group together in high school, The Wildcats.
BW: Yeah. I was playing with these older fellas and then I gradually found out about other
musicians around the county. Eddie Fife was in Larchmont and up in Greenwich Connecticut
there was a piano player, Dick Wellstood, and the bass player, Charlie Traeger. And
out of this group we gradually had jam sessions to get together. We got a group together that,
we called ourselves The Wildcats. And we started playing around. And we all went down to Jimmy
Ryan's for one of their Sunday sessions. And we got friendly with Milt Gabler who was the
founder of Commodore Records, had the Commodore Music Shop. And we kept bugging Milt. We'd
go down there every Sunday, "Milt, hey may, we've got a little band, can't we get up and
just play one number?" "Oh don't bother us kid, come on, just sit down and listen to
music." Finally he says, "Okay you guys, I've got a little opening here, get up there and
play a little bit." So we got up there, and it was a sensation, the people loved it. And
he said, "You kids are all right." So he let us come back and play and then he said "you
know you kids are really something else, I'd like to record you for Commodore." So this
was a great opportunity. I remember we took about six hours to record four titles. I mean
we were so nervous. Now this is history, this is going back to the era when you still had
waxed disks you know. In 1947 you still had a waxed disk with that stylus that cut the
disk. And that red light went on and you had three minutes and that's it. If you made a
mistake you know, you spoil it. There's no splicing tapes together, none of that. So
we made four sides and then at that point is when I started studying with Sidney Bechet
of course. MR: There was a comment in one of the jazz
books that said that the first American revival group of consequence in the East, talking
about The Wildcats. BW: Yeah, yeah.
MR: Did you know you were doing revival at the time?
BW: Well in a sense we did because we were immersed in the music of King Oliver, Jelly
Roll Morton, Armstrong Hot Five, and we wanted to play in that style. We didn't want to imitate
their records. We wanted to play in their style but be creative at the same time. And
yeah, in a sense it was quite different from the traditional jazz that was happening around
New York at that time. I mean that was mostly centered around the Eddie Condon group and
Pee Wee Russell and those guys, who were doing their own thing but it was quite different
than what we were doing. So it was unique. MR: Is it possible to put into words what
was different about the Condon style and the style that you were emulating?
BW: It's very hard to describe the difference. The Condon style was a group of musicians
who were kids growing up in Chicago in the '20s, listening to King Oliver, Armstrong,
the Dodds brothers, and being totally knocked out and inspired by that music. And in their
own way playing something which they thought was like it but it turned out different. And
what we kids were doing, we were inspired by the records of the same musicians that
they had heard in person. We were inspired by the recordings and trying to emulate that
sound. So we thought of ourselves as the new Austin High gang.
MR: Did you at the time think it valuable to pick out certain clarinet solos and really
learn how to play them note for note? BW: Yeah. I appreciated Goodman, but he was
too far beyond, it was too difficult, it was more than I could possibly comprehend. But
Bechet, when I discovered Bechet, this was after I knew about Goodman, some of the things
he did were simpler and I was more able to learn the solos and try to develop my own
way of playing but in his style. What happened was the first time we went to the recording
studio to record for Commodore I walked in the studio and Milt Gabler looks at me and
I just had my clarinet and he says, "Where's your soprano man?" I said, "Oh no, oh no Milt,
I'm not ready on the soprano yet." "Oh no you're supposed to have your soprano, come
on, you're Sidney Bechet's student." He was really mad you know. But I just felt I wasn't
ready to tackle that soprano because Bechet was the master. So I started out on clarinet
and gradually developed the soprano. The same thing happened with the alto. I worshipped
Johnny Hodges you know, but it was years before I could bring myself to really tackle the
alto, because he was just too far beyond. MR: That's a pretty mature attitude I think,
at that young age, for someone who in your eyes probably was a pretty powerful record
man, and he's saying bring that horn, and you're going, I'm not ready to do that yet.
BW: That's right. MR: Yeah. It shows a great respect for the
music. BW: Well the same thing happened � remember
the famous Louis Armstrong 1947 Town Hall concert, a concert which was the basis for
the Louis Armstrong All Stars. In other words with Louis switching from the big band format
to a small band format. I was living with Sidney at the time in Brooklyn and so the
concert was one of those 5:30 starts at Town Hall on Saturday afternoon. So I said to Sid,
"I think I'll go in town and catch a movie this afternoon, so I'll see you backstage
at Town Hall around five o'clock." So I go to the movie and I go over to Town Hall, and
the promoter Ernie Anderson and Fred Robbins who was a big jazz disc jockey at the time,
they were running around saying, "Where's Bechet! Where's Bechet! Bob, you live with
him, where is he?" I said, "I don't know, he was coming over and meeting us backstage
here." "Well he's not here, we're planning the show, I mean what are we going to do?"
And Ernie says, "Look if he doesn't show, you've got to go on in his place." I said,
"Ernie, I'm not ready for that. This is a band with Armstrong, Hackett, Jack Teagarden,
Big Sid Catlett, Bob Haggart. I'm not ready for this yet. No I can't, I just can't. So
anyway the concert went ahead, and it was a big success, it was recorded, and the promoters,
they had to beg Joe Glaser to let them use Louis without his whole band. He was dead
set against it. "You want Louis Armstrong, you've got to take the whole band." "No we
just want Louis, just this one concert." Well anyway, Glaser saw the tremendous applause
and appreciation of Louis playing with the small band. Of course being a businessman,
he thought hmmm six musicians rather than fifteen" and so forth, and that's when he
put together the Armstrong All Stars, because of that one concert. But again I was not,
I felt I wasn't ready and of course I wasn't ready, so I think I did the right thing.
MR: How did Sidney Bechet feel about his own place in jazz history?
BW: Well at the time that I first got to know Sidney, his feeling was that the music has
passed him on, and that the young musicians weren't interested in his kind of music. He
was very flattered by my interest in his music, and he had this feeling of wanting to pass
on what he had learned and the music of New Orleans and everything. But his idea, in starting
this music school, which he started in early 1947 was to sort of have the school and a
few students and maybe play a few concerts around New York, but in a sense be in semi-retirement
really. So he had not the slightest idea of what was going to happen with his career when
he went to France in 1949. When he played that first concert in Paris he was an overnight
smash hit. He went on the plane with Charlie Parker, who was what all the French critics
were talking about � "Charlie Parker's coming to Paris, oh fantastic" you know. Well Charlie
went on first and Bechet went on the second half, and that was it. The French people I
mean they just took Bechet to their heart you know. And he came back after a week, he
couldn't believe it. He says oh it's fantastic. He started going back and of course he ended
up living there really for ten years, making records that sold in the millions.
MR: What did a lesson with Sidney Bechet consist of? Did you listen to recordings or just play
back and forth? BW: No, he never used recordings in lessons.
He would sit on this piano stool at this big upright piano and he had his horn there and
he had the keyboard. And I'd sit in the chair, like I am now, and I think the first thing
he talked about, he said "well let's take a song and I'll show you how you present it."
And he started playing "Rocking Chair" on the piano. He had a way of playing the piano,
it was a very basic technique, but it sounded like Bechet when he played the piano. It had
his personality you know. And he had this marvelous harmonic sense, where he heard sounds
and he heard inner voices and everything. But his whole thing was, you've got to tell
a story, that was it you know. You present the melody and you play it in such a way that
people say oh what a beautiful song that is. He says then you start to introduce variations.
But keep going back to the melody. Don't get too far away. And then you start developing
it and everything. And then you build it up and then at the end you come back to the melody
again and bring it right down. Tell a story. That was very important.
MR: Marvelous. Yeah. And pull the listener with you gradually.
BW: Yeah. And he'd explain about jazz rhythm, he says jazz rhythm, you've got that steady
beat going here, and then you introduce rhythms against the steady beat. That's what jazz
is. [scats] That's what you've got to do, that steady beat and then those rhythms against
it. He had a very strong idea about what he was doing. He considered himself an artist
from the earliest days. You know he went to France with Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated
Orchestra in 1919, not as a sideman in the band, he was a soloist. He only came out and
played solos. And he could be a difficult man to get along with because he was so much
better than most of the musicians that he ever played with, and he could get very angry
if they didn't live up to his standards you know.
MR: I think it's an interesting statement you just said that he considered himself an
artist from the beginning. BW: Oh yeah.
MR: Jazz wasn't necessarily recognized as an art form until much, much after that. But
he always had enough respect for his own ability. BW: Yeah, he felt it was a very special way
of playing music, and that experience of going to Europe in 1919 and playing in concert halls,
giving a Command Performance for the King in England, dressed in a tuxedo and everything,
it made a tremendous impression on him all the rest of his life. And he started in the
'30s, started writing classical pieces you know, and ballets and things, and he wanted
the music to be taken seriously. MR: Was he mostly self-taught?
BW: Yeah. Totally self-taught. He stole his brother's clarinet and started practicing
by himself. He says you know, "I didn't have any money to buy reeds" he says, "I'd make
my own reeds out of matchboxes." He carved them out of matchboxes you know. Yeah, he
left home when he was like � he started playing professionally at 10, left home when
he was 14. He never went home again until in 1940 I think it was when he started having
teeth trouble and his brother was a dentist. He was a wandering minstrel. He's gone all
over the world you know, and very temperamental, mercurial � he could love you, give you
the shirt off his back or hate you and watch out you know.
MR: Well were there years, as with every musician, of really paying some dues for you?
BW: Yeah. I think the early years were so exciting with the recognition, with The Wildcats,
and then I had my own band in Boston in 1947, '48, '49 at The Savoy Cafe, tremendously popular.
It was at the beginning of the Dixieland Revival, and the great interest among the college kids
all over the East Coast in Dixieland music, and the place was jammed every night. In 1950
George Wein started his first jazz venture which was to open up a club called Storyville,
and I had such a big name in Boston he asked me to perform in the first band. By then I'd
relinquished the leadership of the band at The Savoy because I felt that they were in
a rut and that they weren't going anywhere, and I wanted to develop. So the band I bought
in to Storyville was an entirely different style of band, but it featured Big Sid Catlett
on drums, who I'd met when I went to Nice in '48 and he was with the Armstrong All Stars,
and Wilbur and Sidney DeParis, trumpet and trombone, a marvelous pianist, Red Richards,
who died very recently, and I wanted to get more of a really smooth swing type beat rather
than a kind of a jerky, older type beat. I was learning, experimenting you know. So that
was a great experience. And then shortly after that I was curious with what Lennie Tristano
was doing with his music. It was so different than the bebop thing, which seemed to be developing
into just a formula, you know everything sounded just the same. And the Dixieland thing seemed
to be a formula. So I said there's something else here, so I started studying with Lennie
Tristano in the '50s, and Lee Konitz, both of them. And I finally kind of came to a parting
of the ways with Lennie because he didn't want to go back any further than Lester Young
and Roy Eldridge. I said, "Yeah but Lennie I mean Roy and Lester, they came from Louis,
you've got to go back to Louis." "No you don't have to go back to him." He wouldn't agree.
So then I went in the Army in '52. After the Army I formed a group with some of my old
friends from The Wildcats, and we thought this whole division of jazz into traditional
and modern was totally false, and it was bad, and there was elements in the old and elements
in the new, it should be put together. So we formed The Six and we played a combination
of traditional and bebop really, mixed together. The audience was just not ready for it at
all. But we were booked into Jimmy Ryan's, which was of course a traditional club, and
we'd play something like "Royal Garden Blues," but all these Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
licks. The audience didn't understand it. And then we were booked into the Cafe Bohemia
in Greenwich Village, which was the home of hard bop where Art Blakey and Clifford Brown
and Max Roach and those guys worked. And again we would play the same repertoire, but they
disliked it for different reasons. "What are they playing those old corny tunes for?" So
it was too early, it was too early to synthesize these musics.
MR: People kind of needed to have a compartment to put you in, in order to know how to listen
to it. BW: Yes. But that's been a problem all my
life because jazz fans do like to categorize. They feel by being able to put you into a
category, somehow it shows that they're knowledgeable about jazz.
MR: Have you had problems over the years with critics and writers who, if you're doing tributes
or I don't know if re-makes is the right word, but if you're doing classic jazz that the
critic can then say well this is pretty good but it's not as good as the original.
BW: Yeah. oh yeah. I mean I've had that problem. But one of the reasons I've done these tributes
and everything, I just want to somehow bring people's attention to this music. You've got
to know about this music and hear it. Another reason was economic because when I started
playing with a big band, using big bands, the only way you could get a promoter to book
you would be to play a tribute to Benny Goodman or a tribute to Duke Ellington. Just to have
Bob Wilber and his band, it's not going to draw people. So I did a lot of these tributes.
I suppose the most famous one I did was the re-creation of Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall
concert, the 1938 concert. We did it 50 years to the night from the original concert at
Carnegie Hall. It was note for note the same songs. We changed the order a little bit because
we felt it would make it better in terms of pace. We had the same sound set up, one hanging
mic and one mic on stage for Pug [Wilber] to use for vocals. It was totally sold out,
a big success. And that was one of the high points. Another high point was when we presented
the world premier of "The Queen Suite" at the Royal Festival Hall in Great Britain.
You know the story of "The Queen Suite" was that Duke met the Queen in 1957 when he was
touring England. And Duke was a sucker for anything to do with royalty and all, and he
just loved it, it was marvelous. So he goes home back to the United States and he's touring
around and he writes this work and he calls it "The Queen Suite" and he goes back to New
York, he goes into the studio and records it, and has one LP made and sent to the Queen.
And he says in his letter, "Henceforth this is only for your ears, Your Majesty." And
he never played the work in its entirety again. He would sometimes play one of the pieces,
"A Single Petal of the Rose," as a piano solo. So after he died, Norman Granz got ahold of
the tape and issued it on Pablo. So we had this idea of doing "The Queen Suite" and I
was able to put the earphones on and transcribe it from the recording.
MR: I was going to say, was the music � it was not still around.
BW: No, we had to transcribe it from the record. And we put this concert on at Royal Festival
Hall and again the promoter notified the Queen and she remembered the occasion and I think
was interested, and sent her daughter Princess Anne to the concert to represent the Queen.
So that was a wonderful occasion, and again, I love this music and I love to play it, but
I also love the idea of people recognizing that it's America's great contribution to
twentieth century music, and to recognize and appreciate Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington,
people like this, the way that people recognize and appreciate Bach and Beethoven and Brahms
and Mozart and so forth. MR: Do you think things seem to have more
value when they come from somewhere else, that they're more exotic or something? I mean
it's pretty clear that some countries in Europe value American jazz more than we do ourselves.
BW: I think America has always thought of culture � in quotes � as something which
comes from Europe and in America, which is a kind of a backward country and everything,
when one became established in one's community as a person of substance, a doctor or a lawyer
or something, and then you apply the trappings of substance, a beautiful house and a car
and culture, which means you support the opera, you support the ballet, and music � you
support the local symphony orchestra. Jazz doesn't fit into that category of culture.
Jazz is something, well first of all it was played in New Orleans in that red light district
and there's something not quite respectable about it. Europeans never had this hang-up
about jazz. To them jazz was something uniquely American and they loved it because it was
so unique. They never had that hang-up about it.
MR: When was the first time you heard a big band arrangement of your own performed?
BW: Hmmm. MR: And did it work?
BW: Let me see. I think it goes back to I think when I was in the Army in the 50s I
had a chance to experiment and write for the big band in the Army. And I never knew whether
it worked or not because it never sounded as good as I thought it was going to sound.
And maybe this was the musicianship involved you know. Then I used to take arrangements
in to The Tonight Show band, when my friend Yank Lawson was with the band. And when they
were taping the show there would be a period of five minutes say while they had to rewind
the tape or whatever, and to entertain the studio audience they would want the band to
play something. So they were always looking for material to play, so Yank says, "Write
some things and bring them in and the band will play it and you can get an ASCAP credit."
So I began to write things and it was pretty much a case of the guys sight reading. And
they began to sound a little better, because it was a good quality band you know. But it
wasn't until a couple of years ago that I really got a chance to do a whole CD of my
arrangements. And some of these arrangements I'd written 20 years ago and never really
had them played you know. MR: That must have been interesting to hear
them after all that time. BW: And the band was made up of a lot of great
players, but we had a three hour rehearsal on a Saturday morning, and a two hour concert
that afternoon. And the playing was so good that we could issue the CD with the numbers
played on the CD exactly as we did at the concert. And of course Pug sang some marvelous
songs on it. I had some of my Ellington transcriptions and Goodman transcriptions. Yeah, I felt good
about doing that. MR: You finally got to play with Benny Goodman
in the '50s? BW: Yeah, I played with Benny in the late
'50s when he was putting together a band to go out on the road and I just went up and
the word was out that Benny was auditioning up at this studio and I took my tenor and
went up and he liked my playing. So I did one tour and then I did another tour the next
year, and I got to know Benny and he seemed to like me. I never got the ray, the famous
Goodman ray. I didn't get much chance to play clarinet in the band I must say, it was mostly
tenor. But I developed a lifelong friendship with Benny and he used to call me and say,
"Hey kid, what are you doing this morning? Come on up and let's play some duets." So
I'd go up to his apartment and we'd play some Mozart clarinet duets and things. Interesting
man. One time he called me up and said, "I'm going into Basin Street and I want to do some
of the sextet things from the '40s but I don't have any arrangements on them, so come on
up and maybe you could write some transcriptions from the old records." So we were listening
to some of the 1940 stuff you know, with Cootie and Georgie Auld, and he's listening and he
says, "Gee I can't play that way anymore." And it was like suddenly he let his hair down
and said what was true � he knew he couldn't play the way he did then. Kind of sad.
MR: If you, for some strange reason, let's suppose I was a doctor and gave you some advice,
like you have to give up all your instruments except one. What would you choose?
BW: Jez I don't know. If my wife had any say she'd say give up everything but that straight
soprano. That's the one she loves. I'm loath to give up the clarinet because it's the most
difficult by far, but it's a great challenge to try to play that clarinet. But I suppose
that in the interest of my sanity, if I had only one I think I'd give them all up except
that straight soprano. MR: I think you're needed on that instrument
in these days. My own opinion is that there's an awful lot of contemporary jazz happening
out there where the soprano has come into favor as a hip sounding instrument.
BW: That's right. MR: But the music that surrounds it �
BW: Yeah, the concept is entirely different than anything I ever heard on the instrument.
And I mean I listened to Kenny G, how can you help but listen to Kenny G. Every time
you pick up a phone and you're put on hold, there's Kenny G. And it's just completely
foreign from the sound that I hear on the instrument. I appreciate Coltrane, what he
was trying to do with it, but to me that's not the sound that I like at all. I mean Bechet
got this soaring, singing quality in his playing. And while I don't use the same intense vibrato
that he does, because that's him that's not me, but the intense lyricism of his playing
just, nobody has really approached him at all. He's still the master, the most exciting
soprano player. MR: I brought a couple of short pieces of
music in, I thought maybe we could just see what your comments might be.
[audio interlude] I guess you've heard this before.
BW: Yeah. That, well I knew that record when I was still in high school listening to early
records, but I was called on to do the scoring for a picture about Bix Beiderbecke called
"Bix," and it was done by an Italian film company. And so Pug and I went to Rome, we
had conferences with Pupi Avati, who was the director and his brother Antonio, who was
kind of the business head of it. Pupi played clarinet in college and had his own Dixieland
band and it had always been his dream to make a movie about Bix. So it was a very exciting
project. So I assembled a band that included Italian musicians, Americans, and English,
and we spent a week in Rome recording the soundtrack. Well this was after many conferences
when we decided to pick out which songs to do. One of them was definitely going to be
"Singing the Blues." So the question was who would play the C melody solos like Trumbauer.
Well I chose myself to do it. So I actually borrowed a C melody saxophone from a student
of mine in Chipping Campden and I practiced on that thing, and I decided now I know why
the C melody saxophone died. It's an impossible instrument. It goes flat on the bottom, it
goes sharp on top, but I worked on it enough so that I could just play a few things, and
particularly that solo, to really give the feeling of Trumbauer, who was a great influence
in the '20s, not only on white saxophone players, but black saxophone players too. I mean Buddy
Tate thought very lovingly about the great Frankie Trumbauer.
MR: As did Lester Young. BW: Yeah, Lester Young too. Then after I did
the movie, I returned the horn to my student and said, "Thank you, Nick, and I hope I never
have to play the C melody saxophone again." MR: I saw the movie.
BW: Yeah? MR: Yeah. And I enjoyed the interaction that
they portrayed between Bix and Frank. BW: Yeah. The movie unfortunately got some
poor reviews and comments because it had so many flashbacks and flashforwards, that if
somebody didn't know about Bix's life it was very confusing you know. That was the problem.
But I think we did a pretty good job in recreating the sound of that music. I used Tom Fletcher
on cornet, who is a fellow, his father was Stu Fletcher, who was a trumpet player and
arranger with the Eddie Sauter band in the '30s. And Tom spent his whole life in another
profession, he was a storm window salesman in northern Michigan, which is a very lucrative
business in northern Michigan. Anyway, but he spent his whole life doing nothing but
emulating Beiderbecke. And he's got a feeling for Beiderbecke down so that he takes any
tune and it comes out like Bix would have played it, whether Bix ever played it or not.
So he was the only choice I could think of to play Beiderbecke's part. And there was
other musicians that knew the music and played it with a lot of love. Kenny Davern played
young Pee Wee Russell, and Leon Rappolo. And I had a piano player from England, Keith Nichols,
who emulated the curious style of white piano players in the '20s who played kind of a jerky
kind of a rhythm and they all sounded like they were speeding up, and they would stop
every once in a while and play some Debussey parallel ninth chords you know. And this was
before the generation of Joe Sullivan and Jess Stacey, who were emulating Earl Hines
and Fats and people like that. So he did that to a tee, it was perfect. And I played Don
Murray's clarinet parts too. And that was fun because Murray was very influential and
a good clarinet player, somebody who was a very important early influence on Benny Goodman.
MR: I wanted to try another one here for you. This is actually a two parter.
[audio interlude] And then a few years later �
[audio interlude] So much for the clarinet not supposed to have
a vibrato. BW: Well, two great classic records with Sidney
Bechet. And the first one of course "Cake Walking Babies," Sidney playing soprano. This
is one of two versions that was recorded with Armstrong and Bechet of "Cake Walking Babies."
To me, the two records are among the classic records of early jazz, and it showed Bechet
in 1924 fully in command of the resources of the soprano sax. Absolute command of the
instrument. And Armstrong not quite having found himself to the point that Bechet had,
but still formidable. Those two records are absolute classics. I love the song, it's an
interesting composition by Chris Smith, who was a New Orleans composer. I never tire of
listening to those records. An interesting story about that "Cake Walking Babies," when
Time and Life was doing their series of recordings, they asked me to do the album notes for the
Bechet reissues. And they actually sat down with me and we thought about what Bechet records
should be in the album you know. So I said well definitely one of the two "Cake Walking
Babies" has got to be in there. So I was writing these notes and I was listening to that record
and I said to myself I've been hearing that record since I was 15 or 16. It always sounded
like there's something wrong with it. It doesn't sound right, what is it? And so I said what
key are they playing in. I went over to the piano and I'm playing the record, and I said
they're playing in the key of G flat? Now who would be playing in G flat in those days,
I mean at that tempo and everything? Now wait a minute, what is Sidney playing? And I analyzed
his figures. I said he's not playing in G flat, he's playing in A flat. This thing has
been issued at the wrong speed. And I discovered that it probably was a flaw in the original
recording when maybe there was a power outage or whatever. And the whole thing was issued
originally, reissued, reissued, reissued, and nobody ever picked this up. So I pointed
this out to the people at Time and Life, and they said well we'll get our engineers on
this, and you say it's in A flat, okay, we'll make another master in A flat. So then I said
you know the vocalist on this was Alberta Hunter. She used a pseudonym because she was
under contract to another company, but it actually was Alberta Hunter. I said Alberta
Hunter is singing down in The Cookery in the Village. We'll take these two different takes,
take it down and play it for her and she'll tell us which is the right one. So we took
it to Alberta and set it up in the dressing room and we played the original one in G flat,
and then the new one in A flat. "Oh that's it, that's the one." And of course when you
speed up a record to make it a whole tone higher in pitch, you know how much it speeds
up the tempo. So it made what Bechet played on that even more incredible.
MR: That's a great discovery. BW: Yeah, it was. But you know what some of
the jazz critics said? They said, "You're tampering with a great record, you have no
right to do that. I mean the second one of course was a Bechet masterpiece from 1944,
four minutes of totally improvised blues, in which he tells his story, as he used to
say when he was teaching me. He starts out with a very simple Blues in the low register.
Each chorus he builds, he goes up, he goes up and up and up. He finally reaches one of
the highest notes on the clarinet, high E flat, a huge climax, and then he ends up down
in the low register again. He ties the whole piece together thematically by the phrase
that he uses on the last four bars of the twelve bar blues [scats]. He used this phrase
every chorus. So it's improvised composition, which is, to me, probably the highest form
of jazz playing. It's just not playing hot licks. It's just not running up one chord
and down another. It's conceiving the whole performance as a single piece of music. One
of the great classics. I had an interesting experience with this piece last year when
I was asked by George Wein to play a concert at Carnegie Hall in a tribute to Bechet with
Jon Faddis and the Carnegie Hall Big Band. So George's idea with this band has always
been to take elements of traditional music but combine them with elements of more contemporary
you know, and make a synthesis. So I did that with this piece, and I started out, the whole
piece a clarinet solo, I played all of Sidney's notes, note for note. But as the piece developed
I changed the rhythm of the band from 4/4 to 12/8. So gradually they're going, instead
of one-two-three-four � [scats fast tempo] And I started developing, as I played Sidney's
notes. And by the time I get at the last chorus the band is going [scats] and all these figures
and everything. And he loved it. George said, "That's great." I mean it was a combination
of the old and the new. So I've had a lot of fun with that piece.
MR: Yeah. One more quick one. BW: Okay.
[audio interlude] Yeah, that's the Summit Reunion which is our
later name for Soprano Summit, Kenny Davern and myself. It's a piece we always enjoyed
doing by Jimmy Noone, the "Apex Blues," which was named after the club where Jimmy had his
group in the '20s, the Apex Club in Chicago. And Kenny is on clarinet obviously, and I'm
on alto, which is still an instrument I love to play. Interesting enough, Johnny Hodges'
teacher on the alto, or on the soprano because he was playing soprano as a kid, was Sidney
Bechet. He came to New York to study with Sidney, and Sidney was his God all his life.
I mean he was a man of very few words. But he would say marvelous things about Sidney.
So I felt Johnny was the first student of Sidney in 1924, '25. I was basically Sidney's
second student in 1945, '46, twenty years later. And I know for a fact that many of
the things that he taught Johnny he taught me too. So I've always loved to play the alto.
I've got a new recording coming out which I'm excited with Dick Hyman, it's called "The
Perfect Match" and it's a tribute to Johnny Hodges and Wild Bill Davis, who had a marvelous
group together in a short period in the late '40s when Johnny left Duke and went out on
his own. And he worked with Wild Bill and his group, with guitar, bass and drums. And
Wild Bill had this marvelous funky way of playing the organ, and it brought out a side
of Hodges of that funky side of Hodges more than Duke would bring it out. So I love those
recordings so we did this tribute to them, it's coming out very soon.
MR: Well we've barely touched on so many highlights of your career, I think we're going to have
to do Part 2 down the road. I know you've done the Smithsonian and the Cotton Club,
you got a Grammy and all that. And I did want to make note of an upcoming project that you
mentioned with recording the Benny Goodman arrangements that never were recorded.
BW: Yeah. Well this is something I've been working on. I discovered when Benny donated
his music, part of it, to the Lincoln Center Music Library and then the bulk of it to Yale
University, I discovered in researching the material in these two places, and comparing
it with the Benny Goodman Discography, that there was many, many arrangements, over 350,
which Benny had never recorded. And they were arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy
Mundy, Mary Lou Williams, Eddie Sauter, Mel Powell, all the major writers that wrote for
Benny are in these things, and they were never recorded. So many marvelous vocal backgrounds
that he wrote for Helen Ward, Helen Forrest, Martha Tilton, so Pug is going to be part
of this project too. We found a band in Toulouse, France called the Tuxedo Band led by a young
man named Paul Ch�ron. This is a very exciting group of young players who are very dedicated
to reproducing the sounds of the '30s and '40s, with, their particular specialty is
the music of Jimmy Lunceford, which I don't think there's any other band in the world
today that plays the music of Jimmy Lunceford. But they have all this stuff they've transcribed
off the records. They play it beautifully. So I started doing some concerts with them
a few years ago. Pug and I are doing a Benny Goodman tribute. And they're not maybe as
polished as your New York professionals, but they play the music with such spirit and they
approach it with such dedication that I find it very exciting. So Paul and I are collaborating.
He has acquired some of the arrangements from Yale of these things, and we're going to spend
a week, Pug and I, in Toulouse, working on these things. The first part is to make a
demo recording and maybe four or six of these things and then we'll sell the idea to a record
company. But the beautiful thing is that the critics can't say well it's very good, Wilber
does a good job but it doesn't sound as good as Benny's record, because Benny never recorded
them. MR: You're already over that hurdle.
BW: Yeah, right, yeah. MR: Well listen, we definitely have to get
together again but on behalf of the college I want to thank you for joining us.
BW: Oh thank you Monk, it's been a pleasure. MR: And congratulations on the degree you
got this weekend. BW: Oh I'm honored, I really am.
MR: I'm looking forward to hearing you play tomorrow night.
BW: Okay. MR: Thanks so much.
BW: Thank you.
