MR: We are filming today in Aspen, Colorado
for the Hamilton College Jazz Archive and it's a great pleasure to welcome Bucky Pizzarelli,
guitarist extraordinaire. I hate to tell you this but someone sold you a guitar with too
many strings. BP: No I've had that for quite a while now
you know, thanks to George Van Eps, a seven string, since '68, '69 I think, that's when
I started with it. MR: Was it a big adjustment at first?
BP: It was. I was doing a lot of studio work and in the evenings I was doing The Tonight
Show. And I went to Manny's Music Store on 48th Street and bought a seven string Gretch
after I heard George Van Eps play it the night before in a night club. And I think about
five or six guitar players in New York City all bought them the same day.
MR: He made a big impression then. Is it always the lower string that's added - on the seven
string? BP: Well there are variations. Lenny Breau
for instance has an extra string, only it's a high string. And on the six string actually
sometimes you tune it down to a D. This is a low A. And I've seen some tuned to low B
flat. MR: A B flat?
BP: Yeah. MR: That seems an odd note to put on the bottom
of a guitar. BP: Yeah. An old friend of mine from Princeton,
Bill Priestly, an architect from - a very good architect - from Chicago, had one, a
seven string, in 1929, an old Martin, he just put an extra peg up there and put another
string on. MR: Did you come from a musical family? Because
I know your family now is pretty darned musical. BP: Oh yes. My two uncles taught me how to
play and they told me who to listen to, you know, Benny Goodman's band and George Van
Eps and Alan Reuss and Charlie Christian. But they happened to be very good. My older
uncle, Peter Domenick, had a day job so he never thought of going on the road but was
very capable of playing with any band in those days. He was an expert banjo player. And my
younger uncle, Bobby, did go on the road with Bob Chester, Raymond Scott, Buddy Rodgers,
dance bands, playing rhythm guitar. MR: So you were a teenager in the early 40s?
You were born in '26? BP: 1926, yes.
MR: Okay. So you kind of were right in the middle of the swing heyday.
BP: Well I was fortunate because of my uncles guiding me, telling me who to listen to, only
by way of radio, and a few 78s of Charlie Christian and maybe Django Reinhardt. But
they were always up on whatever they had to play, they happened to play it correctly,
which was in my favor, because they passed it on to me to make sure everything - the
bass notes were right, the chords were right. MR: Did you learn to read music also at this
time? BP: A little then. And then as I got into
the band business I found out what I really had to know how to do so I jumped on the bandwagon
and started to learn what was required. In those days mostly it was rhythm, and a few
little solos here and there. MR: Was Vaughan Monroe your first full time-
BP: Oh yeah. I was just 17, I just got out of high school and I was about to be drafted
as soon as I turned 18, you know they were taking them right after 18. You were in the
Army in two weeks. MR: This was right at the tail end of the
war, right? BP: The beginning.
MR: Oh. Okay. BP: I'm talking about 1943 I went with Vaughan
and I turned 18 in '44 and because I was on the road with Vaughan a little bit, about
three or four months, I wasn't drafted until April. But I got a touch of the band, and
I said that's for me. MR: So when you anticipated getting out of
the service you knew what you wanted to do. BP: Oh, Vaughan gave me the job back. I was
in the service for two years. I was in Europe at the tail end of the German war and from
then I went to the Philippine Islands for nine months.
MR: What was your role in the military? BP: I was a PFC, I did nothing but shoot baskets.
We had nothing to do. The war was over. We were sitting around Manila doing nothing.
MR: No kidding. Did you get to play at all? BP: Oh yeah, we did play a lot. So we listened
to a lot of V-discs in those days, all the best records. I heard Nat King Cole on these
big records, you know they had these large 15 minute transcriptions, with a big long
arm and they would play them and they'd last 15 minutes.
MR: 15 minutes. You know now that seems like nothing. It's like such an annoyance with
the LPs now, you have to turn them over. BP: Oh they were the best records. I mean
Vaughn made some V-discs and in fact some of the best music is on those discs today
if you can ever find them. But all the great bands made what they call V-discs.
MR: Doing their part for the war effort. BP: Yeah.
MR: Vaughn Monroe's music wasn't considered jazz?
BP: No but he had a jazz flare to it. They played some fast tempos and they had a great
arranger there named Johnny Watson who wrote the theme song and he had about 25 originals
"Take it Jackson" and all kinds of - "Harvard Square" - I mean originals. I mean just little
vehicles for the jazz people to play on. MR: Almost like Paul Whiteman, they had some
hot players mixed in there? BP: Yeah, well Paul was a little more I would
say like symphony kind of thing, they were more classical end. And Vaughn's band had
some good players in it, some real good soloists. We had a great lead alto player, Andy Bagni.
The band was built around what he did. MR: What was the work like at that time? Was
it dances? BP: All dance jobs. And we'd jump on a bus
and go, average 200 miles a night, or 250, play in Sioux City, Iowa and the next - you're
in another place. I mean I was single, it didn't matter to me, I just jumped on the
bus and I was happy to be there. It didn't matter. Those long trips never bothered me.
MR: Could I ask you what you were making at that time?
BP: $125 a week. And we did a radio show which paid $60 on Saturday, it was a national show,
the Camel Caravan. So that was a lot of money. MR: At that time that was pretty good money,
right? To do, especially what you liked. BP: Oh yeah, yeah.
MR: Well after that you know, how do you make it in the jazz world, at that point?
BP: It's hard today because you can go to college today and get a degree in performance,
which we were never offered in those days. But I think the thing that's wrong about that
is that the kids are too over trained so that if they get a job with the Glenn Miller band
or the Tommy Dorsey band, they can read those books with their eyes closed after one week.
And then boredom sets in if they're not playing any solos. If that's what they want to be,
so there's no place. But you know, the Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, and all the great soloists,
only played eight measures in those days in the bands. Vido Musso with the "Jersey Bounce"
with Benny Goodman, even Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, solos were not ever 32 measures.
And if you were given an eight bar solo, you had to say something in eight measures, which
is very difficult. Today, kids play for a half hour. I don't know what they're saying.
MR: Well in the early '50s then, after you were - how long were you with Monroe?
BP: Oh I left around '52, '53. MR: So had you started to establish a reputation
or did you have to kind of start from the beginning?
BP: You know what happened, we had, through this radio show we had a violin section just
to play the show with us every Saturday. They would complement the six violins that we had,
we had another six come in. And when we played in New York, half of those six violin players
were contractors you know, one would hire the other. So they saw me playing in the band,
so when I quit - when the band folded really - I went to New York and the rock & roll thing
started hitting. See they were using a lot of different guitar players as opposed to
only one, which was the case with the dance bands. So now they needed three guitar players,
and they would say well they knew me, so get Bucky. So I was hired to play a lot of recordings
because I knew the contractors. Maybe some better players came to town, but nobody knew
who they were. MR: So you met the right people at the right
time. BP: Yeah, at the right time
MR: So you got in on doing some recording of the early rock & roll?
BP: Yeah. MR: What did those charts look like at the
time? Were they chord charts? BP: They were mostly rhythmic patterns. One
guy playing a tight afterbeat, another guy playing [scats], you know those things, and
another guy with a vibrolo [scats]. And after a while you say to yourself we could do that
without the music, or fake the bass line with doubling the bass line with what they call
a stop sound [scats]. You put your wrist on the strings and have a muffled sound. And
that's what I used to do. MR: Just that little lick that you were singing
reminds me of a Paul Anka song. You did those things.
BP: Oh yeah, we made a lot of those. I made all records. The first six records with Dion
and the Belmonts I had Mundell Lowe was on guitar, George Barnes, all jazz guys on those
rock & roll records. MR: I didn't realize that.
BP: Yeah. Billy Bauer from the Woody Herman band, Osie Johnson, Panama Francis played
drums, and none of us had those exotic guitars they use, that you see on these videos today.
We had old fashioned archtop guitars with little diomer pick-ups on them.
MR: It's interesting when you listen to some of the early - especially the Chuck Berry
records - that he was into the straight eighth note rock & roll thing.
BP: Oh yeah. MR: But the rhythm section was kind of still
playing a swing mode. BP: That's right.
MR: Like they're feeling each other, like what's going on here now.
BP: Well we were on a session, I'll never forget, I know it was Tony Mottola playing
guitar and Sol Gubin was playing drums, and a couple of other guitar players. And it was
Paul Simon, believe me. And he kept saying I don't like what I'm hearing from the guitars.
And he picked up one of our guitars and played these eighth notes like you described, and
that's the feel he wanted, but none of us knew how to do it. But he had that in his
mind way back when he first started. I don't think these records ever came out but they
might be in the can yet at MGM. MR: Yeah he actually had his first duo, it
was called Tom and Jerry I think, and he didn't really make it at that point, maybe that's
what you were talking about. BP: I actually played with him once, I had
forgotten, I had played with so many different people that I had made a record with him and
he was a guest on The Tonight Show with Garfunkel. I got a call, I was home, and they said we
need a bass guitar and you're the one that made the record or something. So I had to
race in play that one number with them. MR: On bass?
BP: On the bass guitar, but it was a six string bass guitar. It was an octave lower than the
regular guitar, and it doubled the string bass.
MR: Wow. I love listening to the difference in the way they recorded things back then
too, in that the bass wasn't nearly as prominent as in pop music nowadays.
BP: Oh yeah. It finally got to that Fender bass and it got too loud, I mean for me, I
never liked that. MR: Well how did the - you got on the NBC
staff? BP: Yeah, well I was on about three different
times on NBC. I mean when I left Vaughn Monroe I went right on NBC with the
Kate Smith Show. And that was live, five days a week. That's how I got the job, the cello
player knew there was an opening, Brownie his name was, Maurice Brown, and he says,
"Go over and see Roy Shields, he's looking for a guitar player."
MR: Was this radio you're talking about? BP: No television.
MR: A live T.V. show. BP: And I went up and he said, "Yeah we need
a guitar player, you start Tuesday." So I went up and played and I was making $250 a
week. It was a lot of money. MR: Just for that show.
BP: Just for that show but you had to do five days a week. And it was so, in those days,
if you were on staff, other than doing the Kate Smith Show, maybe you'd only do two or
three days a week so you'd make the same money. MR: And so you'd have a short rehearsal before
the show. BP: We'd rehearse in the morning at eleven
and we were out of there by five or six in the evening.
MR: So you could play at night too? BP: I did. In fact one of the guests in one
of the groups was the Three Suns. They were playing a block away at the Aster Hotel. That
consisted of organ, guitar and accordion. They had a very big hit called "The Peg O
My Heart," and "Twilight Time." They wrote the song, a very big song.
MR: Didn't someone record that with words later on?
BP: The Platters, yeah. But they came on it and I had known them because they were guests
on the Vaughn Monroe Show. And unfortunately the guitar player was unable to play, Al Nevins,
and I jumped in and subbed for him. I put on his gray tuxedo and played on his D'Angelico
guitar which I still have. And in the evening they asked me to play at the Aster Hotel - everything
was a block away. I lived two blocks away at The Woodby on 45th Street. Kate Smith was
on 44th Street and the Astor was between us. MR: You just walked to all these gigs.
BP: Yeah. I could walk and everything. And when Kate Smith's show ended that season I
went to - I joined the group as a regular. And Al stayed in New York and hooked up with
Donny - I can't think of his last name off hand - but he became a big publisher.
MR: This was '56? BP: '54. '54 and '55. And he became a very
big publisher. He had like 45 writers coming - Carole King, people like that.
MR: Oh, and the Brill Building. BP: Not the Brill, the other one, 1650 Broadway.
MR: Yeah they just churned out those tunes. BP: And all Al would do is pick up the phone
and call Connie Francis or somebody, "Hey we need a tenth song for the album." Boom
they shoot down and they had demos made. They made them down in the cellar of the same building,
churn them out. Neil Sedaka was one of the writers too. They all became very, very big
you know. MR: So if you were to listen, to sit and listen
to the oldies radio station - oldies meaning '50s and '60s music - you're likely to hear
yourself now and then, right? BP: "Stand By Me" I made and I never realized
until they sent me a check because they used the record in a movie, and somehow my son
said, "Did you make this record." I said, "I don't remember this." Because we did it
three times a day. We were at all the major companies, 10-1 in the morning, 2-5, 7-10
at night, and sometimes a midnight session. MR: Amazing.
BP: Yup. MR: There was a core of people that were - what
do they call it - first call? BP: Yeah.
MR: Like Milt Hinton. BP: Milt was there all the time. Milt and
George Duvivier. I mean we had all jazz people. I mean the drummers were all from that, from
the big bands, all from the big bands. And then once they got that eighth note feel,
they were in. MR: That's really interesting.
BP: And the tenor players all had to play those chicken solos - that's what they called
them. MR: The chicken solos.
BP: And King Curtis was the champ, and Sam the Man Taylor.
MR: How did you guys feel about this music? BP: Well we were making money you know, and
we could play gigs at night, but we got so busy we had no time to play gigs, no time.
But I used to do, on Fridays and Saturdays, I played over in Jersey with a trio - piano,
bass and guitar - all the time. I always had a little thing like that going on the side.
MR: Keep your jazz chops. BP: Well not to keep them but I just did it
automatically because I felt that this is what I like to do so I'll make some money
and support the family and everything doing the recordings, and go play for - I don't
know it was $35 or $40 a night to play that kind of music.
MR: Keeps things in perspective I suppose. And you had a family by this time.
BP: Oh yeah. We were all grown up and I tried to make it work you know, but then in the
middle of that whole thing I got hooked up with Benny Goodman you know. And that changed
everything around. MR: I think that's great because you mentioned
when you were just learning the guitar that your uncles said, "Now listen to this Benny
Goodman record." BP: Oh definitely, oh yeah.
MR: And then you end up playing with him. BP: Oh that's a big thrill too. I always think
of that. And I always also think when I was in high school on our own time we had an orchestra.
And I played the bass in the orchestra, because they had no guitar parts, but if they needed
a guitar I could play it. But we had violins, we might have had 14 violins playing. Every
morning it would be a half hour before we started class we were rehearsing. And maybe
an hour after school in the afternoon we were rehearsing again. And I always had the sound
of those violins in my ear. So when Vaughn Monroe had those violins playing I said I
heard this before. And some of the other guys never played with violins, I mean older guys.
So that's an advantage. When you learn something, you get a sound in your early days, you can
only enhance that. It's in your favor. MR: There was something I wanted to ask you
about the studio scene that you were so much a part of. What was the racial make-up of
the studio musicians at that time? BP: Oh there were a lot of blacks and all
mixed in. In fact all the rhythm sections were that, and they had horn players, and
before we got out of the business we had a violin section. But nobody knew who was playing
because half the time they wouldn't put your name on the record. But if you wanted a good
feel, you had a great mixture of different people.
MR: You had four children? BP: Yeah.
MR: They were pretty musical? BP: Yeah every one of them play something.
MR: We'll talk about John in a while. The Tonight Show orchestra. How did that come
about? BP: Well because I was up to here with the
rock & roll and I felt it slipping away because those old licks that I knew so well weren't
being used anymore, and there were new sounds coming in that I wasn't even ready to even
try to do it. And I heard some new kids coming up and playing some great solos, and I says
let me get out of here. MR: When you say "new sounds," was it partly
new technology? New amps? BP: Well it was. It was the feel of the records
changed. But you know when you listen to those old '50s rock & roll records, that's got to
be one of the greatest rhythm feels ever. I mean if you want to call it jazz it's still
got that feel. It was airtight, and you couldn't make the record unless every beat was right
there, the way they locked it in. And then it became very loose, it became folkish or
whatever. MR: Less arranged almost.
BP: Yeah. And then the set groups were playing now. They weren't using studio guys. Record
companies turned over the studios to a group. Now the group would sit around all day long
trying to make a track. A rhythm track. And nobody could get in - Mitch Miller couldn't
get into his own studios down there because some group was sitting there trying to make
rhythm tracks, and they're subtracting and adding - take this out, put this in- waste
of time. Big waste of time and money. So I didn't want to get in on that so Gene Bertoncini
quit the show and they asked me to do it with Skitch Henderson, and that was one of the
best moves I ever made. Because I played better music and we were featured a lot, playing
the kind of music that I knew how to play. Well Doc Severinsen was in the band, Bob Haggart
played the bass, Hymie Schertzer, who played lead alto with Benny Goodman. I mean it was
the best in the world. And I'm sitting there with Al Klink who played with Glenn Miller,
and Clark Terry, Maxwell, Jimmy Maxwell, Snooky Young. I mean that band was incredible.
MR: And what was the schedule like for that show?
BP: We did five days a week, but I used to split that up with Tony Mottola who was on
staff. He'd do two nights, I'd do three nights. And if we had a recording I would sub for
him, I would go in and do his night and then he'd make it up another time.
MR: Do you remember any funny or weird instruments of The Tonight Show orchestra with people
coming on that you had to back up? BP: Well you know that show was great, the
band was great because we had everybody played whatever they felt when they were asked to
do it. So if somebody came on and Skitch would go into something, we never rehearsed. Skitch
never rehearsed. We had music up there and the only time we'd play is when they were
off the air, we played for the audience and then you might hear a little of the band.
But we were forever just getting there on time from another session just in time to
play the theme. MR: No kidding. What a life, huh? You recorded
some marvelous duo records, if fact I think you said some of your best things are duos?
BP: Oh yeah. My favorite records are - the first duo I made was with Tony Mottola, then
I got hooked up with George Barnes who is one of America's great individual guitar players
I ever heard, nobody played like George, and he was in the studio scene with us. And he
was fed up with them, so he always had little projects going on with jazz on the weekend
somewhere, and some little project where he arranged something that had a lot of body
to it, and Jack Lesberg was involved, I was, George, and then George and I really hooked
up when I got my seven string guitar. Because he had been playing duets with Carl Kress,
one of my heroes. MR: And Zoot Sims and Stephane Grappelli,
all those folks. BP: Oh, yeah.
MR: When you got together to do a duo record with some of those people, mostly just talking
through tunes, picking out tunes, did you rehearse it a lot?
BP: Well at first I would say with Tony Mottola, Tony took advantage of the seven string and
we made a couple of beautiful records together because Tony was a very lyrical player. And
then the same with George Barnes, and it was a different approach. George and I went through
a fake book one night out in Jersey with the machine, the recording machine on, we played
one tune after another, like just turned page after page. Go into it, play it, and we had,
oh we had enough for about ten albums. But it was the beginning of the duet. And we finally
honed it down and we made a couple of great albums, because we were playing in the evenings.
I was playing at the St. Regis. After the Tonight Show I'd go over there and play with
George. And we got some good notices and we made an album, we made two albums. We made
one live at the Town Hall with McLaughlin, Charlie Byrd.
MR: John McLaughlin? Charlie Byrd? BP: Yeah, he was on the bill. Tiny Grimes,
the famous Tiny Grimes with the four string guitar who played with Art Tatum. Joe Beck,
Chuck Wayne. All the same place. But we knew what we were doing. They were - you know who
else was there? Benson. And they were all rehearsing in a corner with Major Holley and
a drummer, you know, I want to do this, I want to do that, and I'm saying boy, it's
too late for that. Well that's the way the business is you know, but we had set groups
and we went out there and we played - when they released the album we had one side of
an LP all to ourselves from the company to do what we did.
MR: I'm curious, when you're working with two guitars like that, and you are going to
be doing some substitution chords or something like that, how do you communicate that with
your partner? BP: You just lay it in there and all of a
sudden, George heard it, bang, he went right with it. That was the beauty of two guitars.
It's communication more than preparing. We knew, we perceived what the other was doing
all the time. And I'll tell you, with George Barnes, sparks used to fly when he was on.
Whew. I mean he used to go into high gear once in a while, I mean I wish I had a tape
machine. I mean I remember it all here. So I mean when somebody tells me that somebody
else is a great guitar player, I says you better watch out because I worked with George
Barnes. MR: Yeah. It makes you play that much better
too, right? BP: Oh of course. It puts you, it lifts you
right up. And sometimes we got serious and we got together and you do this and you do
that, look out, it got fierce. MR: So you've never worked a non-music job
in your life, is that right? BP: That's true, yeah. Never.
MR: That's saying something. BP: That's 53 years of playing the guitar.
MR: Well I have something I wanted to play for you.
[audio interlude] BP: It's George.
MR: Listen. BP: Oh that's John [Pizzarelli Junior]. Well
he got that from George. MR: He got that from George? This is wild.
That was great how it came out of that. BP: It's George's arrangement.
MR: Yeah? BP: Yeah. We got that from George. In fact
we sent his widow a copy of this. MR: Marvelous.
BP: Yeah, Evelyn. MR: It almost sounds like you guys had played
some banjo along the way too. BP: Well that's what it's from. You know John
studied banjo with my uncles, and they had this wrist thing going, so you apply it to
guitar, that's what happens. MR: And John plays seven string also?
BP: Oh yeah. He played seven string right away.
MR: He's been getting some great press. BP: Yeah.
MR: It's great - the Pizzarelli name is out there.
BP: Yeah we're going to - I haven't played with him that much but when we do we do right
into it. We can get that thing going right away. But we're going to play at the Smithsonian
in November. There's an archtop exhibition going on, all the best guitar makers have
made blue guitars. MR: No kidding.
BP: And Scott Shinnery from New Jersey owns them all. He commissioned them all and they're
doing a thing in the Smithsonian. We're going to do our own thing, and then maybe play a
couple of acoustic duets on the blue guitars. MR: What's it going to be called? Does it
have a name for the exhibition? BP: No, I don't know. It's at the Smithsonian.
MR: You guys probably, I'm trying to think what his attitude would have been to his father
when he was coming up. Did he get into some rock bands?
BP: Oh he had that way before he started playing a seven string. He's got a stack of songs
he wrote. They're all over the house - lyrics and chord symbols, and wa wa pedals.
MR: Was he influenced by what, The Beatles, or even more recent people?
BP: I don't know, everybody. Chic Corea - I think he liked Chic Corea right away. In fact
that's how I learned "Spain," I heard them playing and I says gee I played that on the
classical guitar. That's where it's from Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo.
MR: What was his attitude toward what you do? Did he realize how much playing you had
done up to that point? BP: Well he knew, but I think it set in when
we played one summer together at the Pierre Hotel. I was playing there with a trio and
in the summer they cut down and said can you just come in with two guitars and make it
easy? And John did it with me and then he got his baptism of fire there with me giving
him the dirty looks when he hit the wrong chord. And he gave them to me when I did.
But fortunately he can sit down with a tune and come up with a good set of chords for
it. That's what I like about him. MR: Good singer too.
BP: Yeah. Well he heard all the - he heard Nat King Cole and Joe Mooney from Paterson,
New Jersey, who is the father of all the right chords for my money.
MR: You've had quite an on and off association with Stephane Grappelli.
BP: Yeah. That was something I never planned on, it was the same as going with Benny Goodman.
You say to yourself wow, here I am with Benny. I played with Benny a long time and then to
add to that, I was called to go with Stephane at the Boston Pops, just a duet, honoring
Joe Venuti, who I had played with until he died. And we did a couple of Joe's tunes,
"I'll Never be the Same" and a couple of tunes that he made famous with Eddie Lang. Then
our association began because when Stephane came to the United States he preferred to
have an American bass player and an American guitarist. He left his group back home. And
it gave him a different outlook, instead of playing the same old stuff all the time. So
we had to do what he wanted, and we tried our best to do it.
MR: Speaking of Joe Venuti, were you ever on the receiving end of any of his practical
jokes? BP: I've seen situations that it got into,
in fact everything carried right to his funeral. I went down and played his funeral and there
might have been three or four violin players from Philadelphia, all arguing about how he
played the ending of a certain tune that they wanted to play for the service. I said Joe
must be laughing you know. MR: He pulled some good stunts along the way.
BP: Oh yeah. MR: I guess a sense of humor helps in the
jazz world. BP: Well he was a tough guy you know. He said
you couldn't quit his band, he'd beat you up. And then when he got sick and tired of
the band he had, because they were traveling with cars, he would go around and put signs
in different directions so that when the guys followed the signs to certain places, half
of the band went one way and the other half went the other way. That's the only way he
could break the band up. MR: That was his way of giving notice, huh?
He sent you out in the sticks somewhere. That's good. I had mentioned I read something in
Milt Hinton's book about of the greatest gigs that he ever played he felt was with you and
Bob Rosengarden and Benny Goodman at the Rainbow Room I think it was?
BP: Oh yeah. MR: With John Bunch.
BP: Yeah. We played, I remember we played about three weeks, three or four weeks. And
it was a great rhythm section. And Benny played of course and I think Urbie Green was there,
was Urbie on that too? MR: I think he did mention that.
BP: And then Lionel Hampton sat in, oh Peter Appleyard played vibes, and one night Lionel
came in and sat in with us. And Johnny Mercer came up and sang with us one night. So things
like that were happening a lot. MR: And these days, you split your time between
going around to these jazz parties and doing recording. Have you got a recording session
planned coming up? BP: No the only records we make now for companies
that want to make a jazz record like Arbors or the company I used to be with, LRC Records
with New York Swing, it's John Bunch and Jay Leonhart, just a trio, and then we add drums,
either Bernard Purdie or Dennis Mackrel or Joe Cocuzzo. But we found out that it works
better on the road with just three, without the drums.
MR: That's a fairly popular combination. BP: Well Nat Cole put it together, and everybody
used it. Art Tatum had the same thing and I mean he did it because they get more money
as opposed to playing solo piano. They told him put Tiny Grimes in and Slam Stewart and
according to Tiny, he never told him what tune he was playing. They were just there
and Art's making big money and never said anything. In fact the funny line was that
Tiny said, "It was a great honor but it really wasn't a great pleasure," or something like
that. MR: Yeah? He didn't even tell them what tune
he was going to play. BP: Well he just got up on the stage and started
playing. MR: I've always wondered what that would have
been like to try to keep up with Art Tatum. BP: Well I don't know. Listen to the records.
I know, but Slam could. Slam had that uncanny knack of whatever was going on, I don't care
what, if you're tapping on a tin can, he could make it work. I think he was the greatest
bass player ever. The greatest bow soloist I ever heard on the bass I mean he had such
a beat in his playing, and his control of that violin. He had the same control of his
bow as Heifitz did on the violin. I mean that's the weapon when you want to evaluate a good
violin player, it's how he holds the bow and what control he has on it, not what he does.
MR: I want to take you back a moment. Something you were talking about, music education. You
seemed to say that the musicians were over educated these days.
BP: Yes. Over trained. Well everybody goes in school and they want to be a soloist today.
So they go and they learn how to read and they do ensemble playing and they learn to
read so well that when they get with a band, a commercial band, it's boring. They could
play it, like I said before, without even thinking about it. So when boredom sets in
on any musician, you better quit the business. You've got to like what you're doing. And
I think the big thing with the dance bands, half of those guys, and I mean this as a compliment,
couldn't read well, but they could feel the music. And I know, without mentioning any
names, the best guys would sit there and learn the parts and in a week or so they'd have
the whole book down. Plus when they had to play these four measure solos and eight measure
solos, they were gems. I mean they used to write those solos out in Down Beat you know,
so-and-so's solo here, he played this on it, and you'd analyze that and it was incredible.
MR: Yeah. Instant classic. BP: Oh Billy Butterfield, a great example,
all those Artie Shaw solos, all Benny's, Lou McGarrity and Vido Musso on "Jersey Bounce,"
and the guy that played, I think it was Rollini, on "Stomping at the Savoy." I mean they were
great solos. MR: And it wasn't just a matter of playing
as many notes as they could in the time they had?
BP: No. They were swinging. Swinging all the time. If they weren't, Benny wouldn't have
them. MR: He'd give them that look?
BP: Well, the look, you know. The look was nothing. The look was an afterthought. Benny
would do that. MR: The opinions you get about him seem to
be very different. Some people felt that he went out of his way to be nasty to them, and
other people felt that he just was - that the music was -
BP: That was his way of telling you he wanted something. He wanted the beat. He wanted to
get the kick in the pants from you. And if you didn't get it, he would harass you a little
bit. I know I worked with Sonny Igoe who played with Benny a long time, maybe one of his last
great bands, you know. It might have been the bebop band he had. That Benny looked at
him, you know, gave him the bit, and looked at him straight in the eye, and Sonny went
like this. And Benny never bothered him anymore. And Benny always used to like look at the
set up and say "uh, drums, move a little bit this way." No matter what. And Grady Tate
used to go BANG and hit a big hard rim shot. And then he'd say "leave the drums there."
MR: Enough said. That's good. Oh boy. What's in the future for you, coming up?
BP: Well next week I'm playing with Rosemary Clooney, two weeks at the Rainbow Room. And
I'm doing a concert with John. I'm doing a couple of symphony dates with Skitch Henderson
in Florida, in Tampa, four dates - Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Tampa. I get a big kick out
of doing that too. I'm playing things that I used to listen to on record, a score by
Victor Young called "For Whom The Bell Tolls." It's something that we all used to listen
to when we were young: listen to this - and listen to this. And the record was worn out
in one spot. And 40 years later I'm playing the same tune.
MR: That's marvelous. BP: So you know it's a big kick. And it's
something I didn't push, but there I am. I did it three weeks ago with Skitch at Carnegie
Hall. MR: Man you have been around.
BP: Yeah. MR: You played at the White House a number
of times? BP: I played there twice. Once with Benny
Goodman and Buddy Rich and Milt Hinton thank you.
MR: Good company. BP: And the second time was with Sinatra,
with just a small group. Tony Mottola, myself. MR: Do you and your son handle business in
a different way? Has the business of music changed?
BP: Well he's on a different plateau. John gets big money with his group. So I mean they
go to Brazil and there's the bookers, and there's enough money. And they draw. That's
the secret. If you ask a guy for a lot of money and you get there and there's 20 people
sitting in the audience, you better give that money back. You have to.
MR: You have to give it back? BP: Well I'm saying to myself, you didn't
draw. You didn't draw the people. So even on the small jobs I do, I count heads all
the time. When I was at The Pierre Hotel, I knew how much it cost each person to get
in there, whatever it was, it was on your tab. And I knew I was making money for them.
It reminds me of a funny story of Benny doing a gig down south. He got there and somehow
everything was loused up. They changed the venue, they had the wrong date in the paper,
everything was wrong. So when he got there the promoter said, "Here's your money" whatever
it was, seven grand in those days. And he says - it was a total bust, there was eleven
people in the audience. And Benny says, "Never mind, we're going to play anyway." He played
the whole gig, and when it was over Benny said, "Guys, that's the best I ever played."
MR: Those eleven people got the show of their life.
BP: But he was like that. MR: He was very professional.
BP: Oh yeah. He took care of business. But if somebody at the other end louses it up
for you, and it's out of control. MR: Well I enjoyed listening to you last night
in good company here in Aspen and I was struck by your attack on the guitar. You have a very
strong attack. BP: Well I feel like that. You know when I
play with Ross Tompkins and - who is the other piano player who played last night?
MR: Ralph Sutton and Dave McKenna. BP: And Dave. I haven't played with Dave,
I haven't seen him in a couple of years. You get up there and you just forget, and you
say wow, something different is happening. You know just sitting there floating. And
I can hear him here and I hear what's going on and with Peplowski, bringing everything
down. And it makes you play better. And that's where I get my - I don't know I start hitting
the guitar a different way. You do that. But if you're all on the level up there, you can't
go anywhere. And I like to play up and down, no matter what kind of tune it is. If it's
a fast song it's got to be here sometimes, it's got to get down, it's got to be up.
MR: Yeah. You have to give the listener some levels to -
BP: That's right. You have to build. You have to start with nothing, get up to something,
then come down to nothing. And sometimes less is better.
MR: Those are good words. We'll put those in capitals.
BP: No it is true. The same with an arrangement. If you've going to write an arrangement and
all of a sudden the singer sings something, and you've got the whole band coming in, there's
no place for it to go. You've got to let the rhythm play first. Like Count Basie, there
is the best example. They start - MR: Chunk, chunk, chunk.
BP: And maybe 32 measures later you hear: waaaaaa, and it knocks you right out of your
seat. That's good music. MR. In a sense it has similarity to classical
music. You know when you play tapes in your car for instance, if you play rock & roll,
you can usually set it at one volume and hear it. With classical music sometimes it gets
so low that you can't hear it. BP: That's right. But it works with an arrangement.
And when you look at a score and you see notes and notes and notes where one phrase ends
and you see another section picking it up, I can tell a good arrangement as soon as I
look at the guitar part. But then I don't know what's going on, and the only way I can
help that arrangement, if you're involved with it, take away. Say don't have the violins
come in until say 16 measures. And then all of a sudden you get different colors coming
in and then you come right down to where you were.
MR: That reminds me of some stories I've heard about Basie. When arrangers would come in
with their thing and he'd say, "Well this is good but-"
BP: Well "Li'l Darlin'" was fast, and they played and Basie suggested playing it real
slow, one-two-three-four. Biggest hit they ever had. Neal Hefti wrote it.
MR: Can you imagine Neal Hefti going, now what are you doing? That slow?
BP: Well if you think about it he didn't interfere with one note on that, or a chord or anything.
He just said play it slower. I mean does that work?
MR: I guess that was his genius right there. BP: Of course. Oh Basie was a master. Well
Basie played with Benny you know on a couple of records. "Airmail Special" I think he's
on one of those records. MR. Do you have any advice for those over
educated young musicians coming out of school these days?
BP: Well I mean utilize the education you got, which we never got. We learned hard knocks
you know. Somebody'd say you're playing the wrong chord or do this or do that. Sometimes
it's costly. You're on a job and you don't get the job back. But you have to learn the
repertoire. The repertoire is Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, Richard Rogers,
Cole Porter, Walter Donaldson, people like that, Harry Warren. And it takes about this
much space on your shelf. And for about five bucks a piece, or seven dollars maybe now,
you can buy everybody's book. That's where it's all at, right in there. All the changes.
Learn the song the way the guy wrote it first. And then apply all that slick stuff you learned
in school and sometime you're going to end up playing exactly the way it's written.
MR: After all is said and done? BP: That's right. Well Dave McKenna, best
example, how a song should be harmonized. And the hardest thing, harder than writing
an arrangement, is to write a set of chords for an arrangement. Say you only have four
people in the band. And now all you need is the right chord and the right bass note. Bobby
Scott told me that years ago. He said, "Over night, I sat up all night trying to figure
out where you wanted the bass to go." And you've got to look underneath the song itself
and say hey, there's a lot of beauty here, let's make it happen.
MR: Well I like those words, especially at 9:50 in the morning. Terrific sentiments.
BP: No but if you want to hear great arrangements, listen to anything Johnny Mandel wrote or
Robert Farnon who was the daddy of all the arrangers. He's got some great albums, Schwartz
and Diets songs, made in England, unbelievable orchestrations.
MR: A recent Joe Williams record he did. BP: Oh yeah that's right, he did Joe's last
album. But I mean he did an instrumental and then you hear the melody with either violin
or trombone or maybe electric guitar playing like George Shearing and his little ensemble
with vibes, but what's going on behind them is unbelievable. All correct. All correct.
And then if you're an English literature major, buy a book on Richard Rogers' songs and it's
all in there. MR: All the words.
BP: All the words. Without the music. MR: I guess that's mark of a great lyric.
If you take the music away you still have a -
BP: Of course. Schwartz and Diets, all those songs, "I guess I'll have to change my plan"
and all that stuff. It makes a lot of sense. MR: By the way you play on one of my new favorite
albums, and that is Dick Hyman "The Age of Swing."
BP: Oh yeah, I like that concept because it has a Count Basie flare to it and that was
the whole idea. We did it in New York State. MR: Purchase was it?
BP: Purchase, New York. MR: Yeah. Just the sound of the recording.
BP: Oh it was done on a stage in an empty theatre, and everything was natural.
MR: Very nice. BP: Oh I enjoyed that. Yeah we made two of
those. What's the name of that company? Alliance? MR: Reference Recordings. Excellent. Well
I want to thank you for your time today. BP: Oh you're quite welcome. We could sit
here all day, couldn't we? MR: We could. We'll probably have to do Part
Two next time around. BP: Let's do that.
MR: We will. Next time we're at another festival we'll do it. Between then and now though,
I want you to write down every recording you ever played on. Okay?
BP: You know it's something I couldn't do. MR: I know. I asked Milt Hinton about that
too and there are just hundreds and hundreds, right?
BP: You know it's the ones that my name doesn't appear. We made so many records that nobody
knows who's playing what. MR: Do you suppose that's written down anywhere?
BP: Well only on the recording itself, on the contractor's list of musicians on a certain
date, where they were supposed to put the title of the song on the contract.
MR: It would be some archival project for somebody, to try to straighten all that out
some day. BP: My last recording session was with Tony
Bennett, taking off Billie Holiday from the Basie band on a old soundie, and me playing
along with her, playing rhythm with the New York rhythm section, and they extracted her
from the soundie and put her on our track, and then they took her off and made Tony sing
a few lines. MR: Wow. Studio magic, huh?
BP: Yeah. Phil Ramone. He's one of the great engineers in the country, did that. In fact
I think they made it longer, but it only ran a minute and twenty-six seconds from the soundie.
But I was very happy about that. But they didn't put our name on the record, nobody's
name. MR: Unsung heroes. Well you've had a great
career and I'm sure it's got many, many years to go.
BP: Well thank you. I'm looking forward to keep on playing. Nothing else I know how to
do.
