MR: My name is Monk Rowe and we are in Clearwater
Beach. I'm very pleased to have Dick Hyman with me
again today. And this is a real pleasure, first of all
just to talk to you, but also because you were my first interview. DH: Was I the first? MR: You were the very first. DH: What year was that? MR: That was March '95 in Scottsdale, Arizona. DH: Yeah. Well I remember it and of course I've seen
it, you were kind enough to give me a copy that I saw only recently actually. MR: I know you have not been idle in the last
six years. DH: No. Do you want a recount? MR: Well I'd like to talk about a couple of
things. First of all I recently saw the latest Woody
Allen film and I thought that was a great piece of work. DH: Well thank you. Everybody has enjoyed that film and paid more
attention to it really than some of the earlier ones in which I worked far harder. There's a lot more to do on "Everyone Says
I Love You," than on this one. This one was mostly Howard, Howard Alden. He did a marvelous job. And mainly these things were pre-recorded
and Howard taught Sean Penn to mime his playing very well. And so this had very few of the problems that
you usually have of putting music in afterwards. It's easier if you do it in front and the
film adapts to what you did. MR: I see. We should - for people who might watch this
- we should say we're talking about "Sweet and Low Down." DH: "Sweet and Low Down." MR: Yeah. Did you like the script? DH: I thought it was very funny and strangely
true to life. I've known several people like this. I've known guys who reminded me strongly of
that Emmett Ray, and I'd better not name them. MR: Yeah. He kind of had all his eggs in one basket
you know, so musical but a little short on the social skills and all that. DH: Well, yeah. MR: What's Woody Allen like to collaborate
with? DH: Well if I had to characterize it in a
particular way I'd say knowledgeable, musically. He knows music. He picks the tunes. He's open to suggestion and it's easy to work
with him, as opposed to some people who don't know very much about the subject at all and
may still give you a hard time. But the people who know that they don't know
about the subject, they're okay to work with, they leave it to you. Woody is both. Woody leaves it to me and to the other people,
I presume, the costumers and the set designers and so forth, but he has certain specific
ideas and in the case of music he knows quite a bit on his own, so we've always gotten along
pretty well. MR: When you're doing a tune for a movie that's
not nearly as music-specific, and you have to do background things for certain scenes,
how does that music evolve? Is it his suggestion of songs or is it-
DH: Well it's all different ways. If the background music is to be a specific
song, why of course Woody and I will have talked about it beforehand and then it becomes
a matter of arranging it according to what's needed in the scene. If it's original music I go to my piano and
work out some ideas, probably would run them by Woody in advance. And the mathematics of it is the interesting
part, and the difficult part - more difficult really than composing the music. The mathematics of writing to the requirements
of the dimensions of the film and the interior events of a scene require that you really
work things out beat by beat over the span of a cue which might be anywhere typically
from a minute to maybe three minutes long. So that's fun too. By now I know how to do that and I first began
to learn how to do that when I was doing television spots - commercials - which in many ways are
miniature movies. You practice all your skills within 58 seconds,
which was the norm as it used to be. Now I don't see many minute spots anymore,
they're mostly down to about 15 seconds. MR: Yeah, I've noticed that watching some
of the stations that have the re-runs and all that, it seems very odd to see a full
minute commercial now. DH: I think that's something out of the past,
but that was the norm. And then 30 second ones were - commonly you'd
do a 60 second and a 30 second. But when you say 60 seconds it always meant
58 because of some technical requirements of getting things going. In the beginning you couldn't ever start the
sound before about a second and a half of time had gone by, so they came to be known
as 58 second spots. But what I know, if I know anything, I've
really learned from those tiny little dramas. And some of them were very ambitious in their
way. Some of them have plots and emotional points
and so forth. MR: Would you get like a storyboard or something? DH: Well yeah. You get a storyboard and you come up with
an idea and you try out the music on the client. One time I was working for Herman Edel Associates,
Herman Edel that is, and we had a meeting with a client and we both thought we understood
the client explicitly. We thought we knew exactly what he wanted. And I improvised some music on the keyboard
and the client said fine and I said okay I'll arrange it and we'll do the date tomorrow. These things can be done rather fast if you
know how to do it. And we got into the studio and we ran it down
with the combo, and the client said, "that's not what I had in mind at all," which was
a terrible blow - not what you had in mind at all. But in such a case you tried to adjust. You don't want to change the rhythm because
then the time will all be wrong. But you say well we'll try it on a different
instrument, and we would ask Phil Bodner, the all-around doubler, don't play on an alto
sax, play it on flute, and the client still didn't like whatever little adjustments we
were able to make. Finally we had to give up and go home and
re-write it. That happens rarely but it can happen. I came to understand that in that business,
all of the drama was on the other side of the glass of the control room. Where we were, we could run it down once and
be ready to go and that's all there was to it. On the other side they were jockeying for
position. They were really jockeying for the status
so as not to be blamed in case the man up on high didn't like it. They had to be carefully dividing up the responsibility
- the blame that is. And that's where it was all happening. That's where the drama was. MR: That's really interesting. Who were the players behind the glass? DH: Well behind the glass we would have my
friend Herman Edel, who ran this company which hired the services of me and other composer/arrangers/conductors,
and then there would be the account executive, the guy or woman who was in charge of that
particular product, and then there would be somebody superior to that person in the agency,
and then maybe even a little later on at a fashionably late time just after you thought
everything was going well, about three-quarters of an hour into the session, the real Mr.
Big would step in and tell you that's not what I had in mind at all. So I learned a lot about how the game works
after a time. Of course I had been playing those commercials
for years, I knew very much about the playing side of it, but I hadn't understood all the
devious political game playing that was going on on the other side of the glass. MR: Yeah, it must have been some jockeying
because they probably want to take credit for it if it works. DH: They want to take credit, and they don't
want to take blame. But it's kind of funny. MR: Can you rattle off a few of the commercials
you remember doing, specific things? DH: Well it was so long ago that some of them
are now illicit. For example we used to do cigarette ads. I can't remember them now. Too many products. When I was working with Herman and then after
that for a year or so I had my own firm going in partnership with a fellow named Frank Garisto,
and we would do one or two of these a week. It was fairly good money and it was kind of
interesting and as I say the strain was in dealing with the client and not in producing
the music. MR: And you had top guys playing on the sessions,
right? DH: Well yeah. Well now you're getting into the studio scene
in New York, which I was lucky enough to get into in the 1950's and stayed with into the
1980's. There were several hundred, as I estimate,
it couldn't have been more than maybe two hundred people who did most of the recording
work in New York and by recording I mean not only the commercials for dozens of producers
around town, but the phonograph records, which were all ad hoc kind of orchestras - Andre
Konstelantz, Percy Faith, those were typical of the upper end of things you might say. And the rock 'n rollers, which you might say
was the lower end, we worked for them too. And then there were the film people because
films - a small number comparatively - of films were scored in New York and composers
would pick up a band to do that. But when I say pick up a band, this is not
just saying any old guy off the street could come in and do this, it was very specialized
work and all of these people, of whom I'm proud to say I was one, could really do any
number of jobs that were called on. I'm talking about people like Phil Bodner
say, the reed player, Bernie Glow, trumpeter, Mel Davis, Doc Severinsen, before he became
his own conductor of course. Al Caiola the guitarist, Tony Motolla, Bobby
Rosengarden, Milt Hinton, George Duvivier, goodness, Bill Lavorgna before he became the
conductor for Liza Minelli was a hell of a good studio drummer. And my colleagues in the piano department
were Bernie Leighton, Moe Wexler early on, but then he got out of it quite early was
Lou Stein, Hank Jones. Then there were the string players by the
dozens. Arnold Itis, David Madien. MR: So if you were listening to Andrew Konstelantz,
and then you listened to Percy Faith - DH: It was liable to be the same orchestra. Yes. And well the rock 'n roll groups also were
liable to have the same people, it was a slightly different cast, but I learned that the more
things one could do, the more gigs you'd be called on, so I could change hats, all of
us could really, and start being funky and play for Atlantic Records in the evening,
and to Konstelantz in the morning and somebody else in-between. MR: That's so cool. Let's talk about this. Because I went back and was reading your first
interview actually and you mentioned some of the people you played with - Ruth Brown
and the Coasters and the Drifters. And you made a comment about their version
of "White Christmas." DH: Oh yeah. That was a session we did "White Christmas"
- was that the Drifters or the Coasters? MR: I think it was the Drifters. DH: Yeah, I believe you're right. The session included Jerry Wexler, who is
a good friend of mine in Florida, he's long retired, he points out that that session with
the Drifters produced four hits. Not only "White Christmas" but "The Bells
of St. Mary," and two others which I can't name. In those days you know, it was customary to
do four numbers in a session. Now people take a month to do something and
they track it and they change it and they mess around with it. Well the union contract specified four numbers
in three hours. And many people did just that, even in pop
records, or maybe you'd go into a half hour or an hour overtime, but four tunes was the
norm. At any rate there was always something going
on and I loved it. MR: You had said that. "we said to each other at that time in twenty
years" - this was 1955 or so - "in twenty years people will say to each other 'listen
darling, they're playing our song.' You know that's exactly what happened. All that funny music that we laughed at became
classic rock." DH: That's true. That's absolutely true. We've all lived to see that. When I see now the musicology that's spent
on early rock 'n roll and the nostalgia and the way it's permeated everything we do I
just marvel at it. In those days we didn't really respect it
much. We just did it. MR: But what kind of adjustment was there
for players who were let's say swing oriented, to start playing that different style? Was it a big deal? DH: Well yes and no. As Milt Hinton used to say "yes and then again,
no." Of course there were adjustments to be made. Rock 'n roll was a blues style basically and
I knew what to do I think because I had grown up with a lot of blues and boogie woogie piano
records by Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson and all those people. And so it wasn't all that remarkable to figure
out how to play along with some of those people. And many of them really were blues singers. Then there was another kind of rock 'n roll
which came about soon after that. People weren't Blues singers at all. They were people like Jill Corey for example,
just to name one that I remember. Pop singers, in other words, for whom it became
customary to play a very formularized background. The pianist would always play triplets. High triplets that would go to Mars and back
again [scats]. And now and then
we would give it a more bracing style of playing eighth notes. And Frankie Avalon for example. Did I say this when we -
MR: No you didn't talk about Frankie. DH: Frankie Avalon was the center of a bunch
of artists from Philadelphia whom Al Caiola got to be the contractor for. Chancellor Records. They would come to town and do sessions with
bands that Al booked. And the drummer was liable to be Panama Francis
or Gary Chester. Al would play - the second guitar would likely
to be Dan Arnone or Al Cassamenti. There was always a honking saxophone. Sam "The Man" Taylor had the monopoly on that
for some time, but also a fella named Buddy Lucas, well that was a different company. If Sam wasn't around then - a fella who died
just last year, a very good saxophonist - MR: Jerome Richardson? DH: Jerome was another one. Absolutely Jerome, but I was thinking of a
third fellow. Had a slightly odd name. It will come to us. Jerome was another guy. Jerome was another very good all around player
too. He could honk like crazy if that was necessary
but he played good jazz on several saxophones, he could read perfectly and he played flute,
he played jazz flute. So people like that could fit into sections. There were a couple of others who were just
great Blues soloists who you really wouldn't want to hire in a big band to do any considerable
reading or non-jazz, non-Blues kind of stuff. Jerome could do that. The fun thing about it was that we would hire
each other. I might work for Caiola at one point during
the day and he would work for me somewhere else, then we'd both work for a third party
on other date. We'd meet each other coming and going all
over town, and playing wildly different kind of music. And the game was you rarely were consulted
in advance as to what was going to be taking place. If it was a very special and maybe virtuoso
situation or the arranger had some other reason to get a little anxious about it, you might
be consulted and maybe given some music to look at but that was rare. Usually you just walked into the date and
tried to figure out what was going on and lit into it. It was great fun but at the same time there
were dates that were so boring that you could literally close your
eyes and go to sleep and there were others that were terrifyingly difficult. Occasionally I came on some film score, I
remember distinctly there was a very accomplished composer/writer named Frank Lewin who did
the music for several different programs and one of them that I remember was called "The
Nurses." This would have been in the late '50's or
early '60's. And he wrote - it had nothing to do with jazz
what he wrote. He just wrote very, very - how shall I describe
it? Schoenberg maybe. Sort of like that. It required great reading skills and I remember
those were dates you didn't fall asleep on. MR: The typical part you'd get on a pop session,
did it have chord symbols and just an indication of what to do? DH: Yeah. Even, this is the strange thing, that in most
situations even if the rest of the band was highly organized, the piano part was really
almost always an automatic copying job in which you really reading the bass part and
the guitar part and being encouraged to do what was necessary. The piano player would figure out what I call
the in-betweens. If it was a swing kind of thing you'd put
in Count Basie things here and there. And in other cases it might be that you should
be playing in two or playing in four, maybe playing the part exactly the way it was with
no fill-ins, and sometimes there are some wide open opportunities to do something that
the arranger hadn't thought of. And if you were diplomatic about it he might
appreciate very much if you gave a slightly different cast to what he wanted. MR: Were you hearing the vocals, the way these
things were recorded? DH: Well formerly yes, but then came the custom
of enclosing the vocalist in a chamber altogether so that he or she could do it over again later. You would ask the engineer in that case. Yes, you would have to hear the vocal. There were times, however, and I thought it
was kind of poor planning, when the singer wasn't even around and he didn't know what
it was going to be. And in those cases you did the best you could. But the ideal thing was for the rhythm section
to hear the vocal so that they could put in anything that seemed appropriate. MR: Right. Or not appropriate. DH: Or inappropriate, yeah. But of course there were other dates too in
which things were quite closely written out. And those you read. Sometimes you adjusted them a little bit and
generally arrangers appreciated if you suggested you could play something in a different octave
or double it or something like that. We were friends with the arrangers and all
of them understood that we too were arrangers. So there wasn't a competition there. And everybody tried to do the right thing. MR: Who were some of those names? Would we recognize the names? DH: The arrangers? MR: Yeah. DH: Well besides Percy Faith for example,
Ray Ellis was really my connection for a lot of the rock 'n roll things. He arranged for Atlantic and he arranged for
Columbia for people like I think it was the Four Freshmen. And he did a lot of different things. Generally if you got an association going
with an arranger you would follow him to play for all the different labels for which he
was getting his jobs. So we would get to know every studio and every
combination. Well let's see if I can think of some others
in addition to Ray. Dave Terry was a very good arranger and he
did charts for Joanie James among others. MR: Not Quincy Jones? DH: Quincy would come to town now and then,
yes. Quincy of course we did things for him that
were often more interesting than some of the other people. They had more jazz content. Quincy actually worked often with the man
who scored his ideas who was the actual arranger, well depending on how you defined it, and
that was Billy Byers. Sometimes you know there's a division of labor,
especially in California. The composer will do a score up to a certain
point and then an orchestrator will take over. And Billy it was said did that sort of thing
for Quincy. Let me see if I can think of some other arrangers. They'll all come to me after we finish. MR: Well maybe we'll have to do Part III. DH: Oh, I'll give you a few more. Jimmy Carroll was an associate of Mitch Miller. He not only did sing-a-longs, "Sing-A-Long
with Mitch," which we pre-recorded and occasionally go trapped into being on camera for, but he
did a lot of the other pop dates, including, I don't know why I thought of it Doug Gelcoury
who I mentioned before, and all sorts of people who came into Columbia under Mitch Miller's
reign. I'll think of a few more, I'll interrupt you. MR: And you guys who played on these things,
you didn't get a piece of the record did you? DH: No. No, no. MR: You just got the union scale? DH: Well after a while there was something
that was instituted which did in effect give us a piece of the record, the number, there
was a formula that finally the record companies and the union agreed on which was based on
the number of dates annually that a particular player did for a particular record company. And that was put into a trust and the trust
was divided among the musicians. Something like that. But no, we never got a specific royalty arrangement. Some of us were fortunate enough to be artists
for one company or another and then you would get a royalty arrangement and occasionally
we would compose things and then be the composer and possibly the publisher. So that was another way. But generally the sidemen would not. And generally too the arranger would not. The arranger was paid a price and usually
it was nothing to do with the royalty. MR: So if you listened to - I don't know if
you ever sit and listen to the Oldies station -
DH: I do. MR: Are you likely to hear yourself? DH: Very much. MR: And do you remember -
DH: Yeah, I remember some. MR: Can you tell me a couple of spots that
I might hear? DH: Yeah. Johnny Mathis, there's one - there's a famous
Mathis record that begins with a piano figure. "Chances Are." MR: "Chances Are." Yes. That's you? DH: That's one. Yeah. And then there's another one that I whistled
on for Johnny Mathis. [whistles]
MR: [humms]. DH: That's right. And there's another Bob Allen song. MR: "Wonderful Wonderful." DH: Right. MR: That's you whistling is that right? DH: That was one of my - well you know I had
made my own - I have to admit - hit record of "Moritat," which then became known as "Theme
from the Three Penny Opera" and then finally became known as "Mac the Knife" in 1955 for
MGM as the Dick Hyman Trio which actually had four people in it I think. And I whistled on it as well as playing an
instrument called the harpsichord piano. So it became known around town that I was
willing and I was capable of whistling. Willing to undertake it and capable of doing
it without running out of breath. So I found myself being called to be a whistler
on dates and I promptly joined AFTRA, that is the singers union, because their scale
was higher than the musician's union, and on a good day I might collect both scales
on a single session. So I'm the whistler on that and I'm the whistler
on something with Nye and Marlowe for Archie Bleier's company Cadence, something called
"The Man and the Raincoat," one of those spooky third-man theme type recordings. MR: Was it a lip whistle or was it a teeth
whistle? DH: No, no, no. The teeth whistling we left to Bob Haggart. MR: Oh, of course. DH: No, it was regular whistling. And I did a fair number of those things and
they are very funny to think about now. After a while I dropped or suspended my membership
in AFTRA. MR: That's great. I love hearing that stuff. I mean you did, you know people think of you
as someone who can do anything. DH: I've done my best. I know it's not true. I know quite a few things I can't do. But I was willing to try almost anything. Another time, well I was, well I look at it
now that I've become a kind of elder curmudgeon, when I look back at it I was amazingly cooperative
and supportive in those days. And if the percussion section seemed to be
short one effect or another I would jump in and play claves or maracas or other Latin
sort of things. And one time Mitch Miller needed something
or other which involved slapping your hands on your thighs like [slaps] and don't you
know I volunteered to do that. And I gave myself terrible bruises after recording
some number that I certainly don't recall the name of. MR: I don't suppose you could hit up AFTRA
for workman's comp. DH: But also keyboardists were expected to
double on all sorts of instruments. And that's why I became an organist really. And I played, at times I played more organ
than I did piano. And sometimes went back and forth in the same
session or even on the same number that we played celeste. And we played various electronic things like
a Fender piano and a couple of other weird things that were fashionable for a few months. MR: And that was high tech at the time, right? DH: Yeah. MR: Those things? DH: Yeah. And I got into being able to play a very limited
amount of mallet instruments too if they were needed, you know I could help out on a xylophone
or some of the other strange instruments that might have been special effects devices rampant
from carol music, things that looked like a picket fence and made funny boing noises
and all that. I was fascinated by the percussion section
and I hung around with Phil Crouse, the leading guy in town, enough to get the hang of some
of this. And you see I was able to use all that knowledge
I picked up in my own arrangements. So the whole thing was quite interactive,
you might even say incestuous. We all hired each other, worked on each other's
dates and learned from each other. It was a time when
arrangers would call up players and ask to be informed about the ranges of instruments
or the nature of some new gadget that you might be using, or whether something was playable
or not. I did it myself and people called me and asked
me about things having to do with the Lowrie organ or whatever. It was a community of people who would help
each other out. MR: What changed it? DH: In my case I realized that I ought to
be getting out because I found I was competing with myself. I couldn't be hoping to be the arranger/conductor
in charge of things and then hiring myself out as anybody's piano player. I managed to do that for about twenty years
just that - sitting on the fence really. And once or twice being embarrassed by the
dual role but not often. But after a while I realized it was counterproductive
to do that and I was more interested in doing my own things and I had really to make a choice. So I began to make that choice whenever I
could and gradually. Gradually it happened that finally I was willing
to leave New York altogether and just return for my own things when needed. Also by that time I had become much more interested
in becoming a concert performer than I ever was in the early days I was speaking about. So the concert things and the specific calls
to arrange and compose were more important than just being a very busy piano player or
keyboard player. But I still do dates as a sideman occasionally
for friends. MR: I brought in a couple of examples of some
of your own things, and maybe you can comment on how this came about and -
[audio interlude] DH: Well the Jelly Roll Morton album for Columbia
was Sam Parkins' idea, the producer. And he thought, and he got Columbia to think,
that with the unexpected popularity of Scott Joplin from the movie "The Sting" and the
various recordings, including my own, that perhaps Jelly Roll Morton would be the next
on the list and that's why we did that album. And we did it with several components. We did it like that record of "Grandpa's Spells"
like that track of "Grandpa's Spells" with a big band. It was my idea to make it like to a big concert
marching band and that's the way I arranged those things. We also did some smaller bands and we also
did a couple of things as a trio with Joe Venuti - Panama Francis and Venuti and I. In fact Jelly Roll Morton did not become the
next pop hit after Scott Joplin and I think the record has never paid for itself. MR: Oh okay. DH: So much for predictions. They did re-issue that and the following James
P. Johnson album as one CD which is now available. But now I think even that's been cut out. MR: Oh. It's a great sound. There's some challenging parts in there too. DH: Yeah. And I occasionally use those arrangements
now for live concerts. They work well say for a college band or something. So I pull them out and I do them live. MR: Okay. Here's another thing. [audio interlude]
DH: Well this is the next album that I mentioned, the James P. Johnson album. God damn that's fast. MR: I know. In fact I was going to ask you if you'd like
to admit on tape that you sped this up after you recorded it? DH: No. MR: It sounds impossible to me. DH: Well no, now that I think about it, this
is not the James P. Johnson album, this is the "Enoch Light Company." MR: This is off this. DH: No I don't think so. This is from that album. This is from the "Enoch Light" album. No it's not sped up and it's too fast. One thing I've learned about these things
is that, and I think all young people that become old people learn it after a while,
is that speed is not the point. You should learn to slow them down so they
swing more later on. I went back and re-learned "Carolina Shout"
from Johnson's original recording, and after I'd been playing it too fast for many years,
and I learned that it should be done at a nice, comfortable, tap-dance tempo. This sure does sound like a sped up piano
roll but that's really not the goal. What else have you got? MR: I've got, actually after this comes a
recent thing with Ruby. DH: This is "Keep Off the Grass" isn't it? Yeah it is. Do you know all through this time of recording
the Johnson and Morton pieces, I had a Sunday night job at The Cookery in Greenwich Village. And I really worked on these. That's why that sounds so good. You have to be playing in a club setting at
least once a week, which was all I was able to do, in order to be able to manage that
kind of thing. MR: You said a moment ago that you learned
some pieces need to be slowed down so they can swing. Is it possible to define what makes things
swing? DH: No. It's not possible. It's not possible. It either swings or it doesn't swing. But the right tempo is certainly the way to
accomplish it. What the right tempo is is a matter of great
debate and trial and error. I'm interested in one thing though. When I listen to, well even as far back as
disco and now in terms of rap music, they really have learned mathematically what the
tempos are that swing. And when DJs program things
and when the records are made in the first place, I believe that they know which numbers
on the metronome are the ones that will swing. And so there is a possibility mathematically
of figuring that out. I've never gotten into it myself but I believe
that that's what programmers do. And I believe also that the records that they
use have the tempos calibrated so that they can move from one to the other with identical
or perhaps slightly increasing tempos in order to get the crowd moving. MR: Yeah. It must have something to do with how comfortably
people can physically move. DH: Well it has to do with that, and also
it has to do - the best theory I've ever heard has to do with the normal rate of a heartbeat. That is what I think normal march tempo is,
120, which is [scats] about that. That's I believe the normal heart rate. These are psychological and medical ideas
which probably you could explore a lot more. MR: Let me throw - I had another question
also about trying to define hard things - and that is the concept of what you choose to
play when you're improvising. DH: Oh. You mean what piece or what ideas? MR: No. Where does improvising come from? DH: It comes from your background and from
the ideas of whomever you may be playing with, and also your technical capability. The ideas of - I've used this analogy before
- the ideas are rather like a kaleidoscope which you shake up so that it produces different
images each time but they're made up of the same colored jewels and bits of paper. They are liable to be the same ideas in a
different form every time you shake it up unless you keep adding to the kaleidoscope
and put in different jewels, different colored pieces of paper, and then when you shake it
up the next time it's going to be a bit different. But there is very little, I think, of improvisation
that hasn't been thought of before or that you haven't somehow used. The point is to keep replenishing the supply
and keep on mixing it up differently. And a way that you can - certainly the tool
that you use is just technique. If I'm in good shape technically I will try
things that I wouldn't otherwise. If I'm not in shape technically I won't try
to do certain things, I'll say where it's safe and I know that I've been before. But if I feel very loose and in good shape
and I've played a lot then I really can stretch out and try things that maybe I've heard other
people do and see if I can get my version of, try things, just let the fingers go where
they may, and pose certain problems for myself and see how I can get out of them, and just
sometimes there are, too, moments where you don't quite know where an idea comes from. Those are precious and they're rare. If you're lucky you're recording them or you
can write them down and they become compositions. But you watch for those. Sometimes you can chase them. If you have to compose something on a deadline
of course, you really go out and you try to grab the muse and bring her back. Sometimes you can be successful. Some people use drugs and liquor to get to
that stage. I'm not sure that works. I do think that, in my case, in the first
part of the day might be the most creative part, and that possibly is because I've been
thinking about the things through the night that I want to get to the next day. MR: You bring up an interesting point with
liquor and so forth. It seems to have an unfortunate connection
with jazz music anyway. Do you have any thoughts on why? DH: Well I don't think, I really don't think
smoking pot and worse are creative inspirations. I don't think that's how it works at all. I do think sometimes people may be less inhibited
and they can release things that are there all the time, but I don't think those drugs
bring on, I don't think they're the bearers of inspiration. They can let things come out that you might
be too uptight to release. MR: Yeah. I remember reading an annoying article once
and the writer was basically saying that Charlie Parker would not have been able to play what
he did if he hadn't been on heroin. DH: I don't know the answer to that. I just don't know. I do know that there are on records certain
magical moments in various people's solos where you can only say to yourself where did
that come from? You find it on early Armstrong, you find it
on Bird's things. But not everything that Bird did. A good deal of what Bird played was enough
of a rote so that players ever since have been able to sound very much like him because
he did repeat his riffs. Every now and then. I've heard it also in some of Beiderbecke's
solos. I've heard it in - I heard it not long ago
and I was surprised because I hadn't really thought about him that way, in Django Reinhardt. Some of his solos. He suddenly goes into something, and it's
beautiful, and it's so free and unencumbered by any rote playing. We all do rote playing. That's what I was trying to express before. It's the vocabulary that you play with. You try to increase your vocabulary. And now and then you can break out of it and
do something and truly say where did that come from. Those are the moments you live for. MR: Right. You started to mention a couple of people
and I had a couple of names I was just going to throw at you, for maybe a short comment. Milt Hinton. DH: Oh. What can I say that everybody else hasn't
been saying about Milt since he passed? I did so many things with Milt that it's hard
for me to cite any one experience. I do - no I can think of one. [Thanks very much.] Some jazz party like this, I don't know, it
wasn't this one but I can't remember where it was, Milt played a fast thing and I was
playing in the rhythm section. And we got it going so perfectly. You know rhythm sections that are put together,
as jazz parties do, catch as catch can, sometimes they work and sometimes they work less well. And one of them that worked so well that I
was just terribly pleased to be a part of it was one with Milt and I don't remember
who the drummer was. But in that case it was exactly the right
tempo and Milt had exactly the right feeling going, his ideas were exactly right, his volume
was exactly right. You know sometimes people, including Milt,
would play too loud. Bassists sometimes do that because it's so
easy as we say to turn the knob to the right that they sometimes play too loud for a rhythm
section. Milt was exactly right. The piano was amplified correctly, the drummer
was right on, and it went on for a very long time at a pretty brisk tempo and Milt never
faltered. Some bassists have to leave out a note now
and then because they can't really sustain something that goes on like that for a long
time. It was just so wonderful. It must have gone on for about nine or ten
minutes with all the solos. That was just one thing. I could always count on Milt to play anything
I wrote and to embellish it and to make it much better than what I'd written. I always assumed that he would do that. There are other bass players too that I had
a very warm relationship with. George Duvivier was the other fella. Bob Haggart was another. These are all guys who could, on their own,
complement what you were doing and make something emerge that was bigger than the rhythm section. MR: You know speaking of rhythm sections with
Milt, if I had to do the classic what albums would I take if I were stuck on a beach somewhere,
preferably this beach, one would be "The Age of Swing" that album you did. Because even that first tune, which I kind
of assumed was rather improvised - DH: I don't remember. MR: It was just a blues. DH: Oh yes. We called it "From the Age of Swing" and we
had two takes on it. MR: It's so perfect to me. It's so perfect that if I had to play something,
here's an example of it. DH: Speaking about Milt though, unfortunately
he was a little bit under-recorded on that album. It was done by a company which prides itself
on doing things in natural sound without enhancing anything later on or even at the time, and
Milt was not, I doubt if he was playing with an amplifier. I've always felt that unless you compensate
a little bit as you play the record, he's just a little bit under. But at any rate, yes, and the way that happened
was that I asked Butch to get us going with a nice Count Basie tempo. MR: There you go. DH: And that's where it began. And of all the people I know that I could
be playing with they're all there for this kind of nice, Count Basie tempo. And that was with Butch and Milt and Bucky. Bucky, who is certainly the best rhythm guitarist
I've ever played with, he understands time in the same way that Butch and Milt do. And all I did was coast on top of them. We made two takes and they were both so good
that we used the first one to open the album and the last one to close it. I'm glad you like it. Thank you. MR: Yeah. And you talk about Bucky, he has this ability
too to put the right note on top of his strumming. DH: Well, you are so right. This is what he learned, I'm sure he would
tell you this, from Freddie Green. There's something about the voicing that is
right, and you know it when you hear it. MR: How about Thelonious Monk? DH: I don't like his piano playing at all. It makes me very anxious and angry. But I do value his compositions. And I understand and I value his freedom,
his license you might say, but I do not like, as a pianist, and I never wanted to say it
much while Thelonious was still around, I can't stand the way he plays. And there's one other person at least, a piano
player who would agree with me, but we know we're against the tide, Roger Kellaway. There's a record of Thelonious that just,
it's like somebody scratching chalk on a blackboard, that's "I Should Care." I never want to hear it again. But a great man. A great man in his way, just don't let me
hear him playing his own tunes. MR: All right. That's interesting. Speaking of that I'd love to hear you and
Roger play together. DH: We have an unreleased record that we did
and it's terrific. It's really very good, that we made in The
Bakery last year in L.A. I presume it will be put out someday. We were paid for it, and the idea was that
the promoters would find a record company for that and two other albums with two other
sets of pianists that they also produced. So I'm looking for that to come out. It's the best thing that Roger and I have
done I think. MR: How about Ken Burns? DH: Oh you don't need my commentary on Ken
Burns. I've read everything that's floating around
on the Web and various other magazine and newspaper articles. I think it's marvelous that there is such
a thing and that the publicity has been given to jazz to a degree that none of us ever would
have expected. And it's marvelous that I can stand up to
a concert audience now and assume they've seen the show and I can say I'm going to play
something which you might have heard on the Ken Burns show whenever they were talking
about Kansas City and Count Basie, I use this little riff, "Jumpin' at the Woodside." I wouldn't have done that in the past, but
I know people now know who Basie and Armstrong and Ellington and Bix Beiderbecke and so forth
were. People are much more sympathetic now than
they were. Much more educated. And that's wonderful. But the program, the series is not without
its flaws and the basic flaw is that some remarkably important people were not included. And some people were mentioned and then nothing
more was said of them. This is amazing. Unless I blinked I hardly saw anything about
Oscar Peterson and I know there was only a brief mention of Bill Evans and Benny Carter
was hardly mentioned, although I understand he was interviewed but somehow his interview
wasn't used. So those are the things that are wrong. But given a subject of such vast depth and
complexity and such great coverage you could hardly expect anybody would agree as to who
might have been favored more and disfavored, I understand that too. MR: Yeah. Well of course you make it in almost all those
things because of your participation in, it was the only clip of Charlie Parker, right? DH: Oh well yeah. I wasn't very pleased that they cut out my
piano solo. They cut out the piano solo and they didn't
say who was in the band. In fact I was there slightly to the left of
Parker, as I say if you didn't blink then you could see the side of my head for about
one and a half seconds. MR: That's pretty amazing that's the only
piece. DH: Well you know there is this other one
too which they showed. MR: Yeah. From Japan or something. DH: Yeah. The one from Japan is not a true film of Parker. We see him playing and we hear him playing
but they're not the same. Obviously they mimed to pre-recorded stuff,
or else maybe they put the music in after the video I'm not sure. MR: Yeah. You can really tell if you're watching him. It's like this is a weird thing to do. Well this has been a great conversation again. Just to wrap up, you've seen jazz - jazz changes
so fast, it's just amazing. DH: Well it does. MR: And I just wonder where is it going? How can it keep changing so fast? Do you have any opinions on what's going to
happen with it? When I look at this jazz party scene, it's
really wonderful to be at, I wonder how long it can keep going. DH: One of the most remarkable things about
this party is the way that Mat [Domber] has been including women. And that bass player, what's her name, Parrott,
Vicky is her name? MR: Nicki? DH: Nicki Parrott. You wonder - and I saw the saxophonist is
that Strassmayer? MR: Yeah. DH: Karol Strassmayer. She was terrific last night. And the drummer. MR: Sherrie. DH: Sherrie Maricle. Terrific. I realize that really we have been neglecting
a great resource. And this is the first party, the first casting
I've seen in which these terrific players are represented without being an all-girl
band and without insulting anything. So I'm happy to see that. Where the music is going I don't know. Who can possibly say? I find that I'm less interesting in such conjectures
and just trying to concentrate on where I'm going. MR: Okay. DH: Now that I've reached the mature age of
74. Ruby's [Braff] birthday and mine are very
close you know, and a few people are, I was very touched last year when James Williams
and what's his name Childs, the other pianist. MR: Billy Childs? DH: Billy Childs. They called me up together and wished me a
happy birthday and informed me that their birthdays are the same. This was very nice. At any rate so we've formed a birthday club
and now they tell me that George Coleman is also a March 8. MR: Well you're in good company then. DH: Yeah. MR: Well thanks again for your time and I
look forward to your next visit to Hamilton for your degree. DH: Well I'm looking forward to that. I absolutely am looking forward to receiving
that degree. And I'm sure we'll talk before then. MR: Yeah. Okay. Thanks so much.
