My name is Monk Rowe and we are in Toronto
at the IAJE conference. I'm really pleased to have saxophonist Ernie Watts as my guest
today, and I appreciate your taking your time out.
EW: Well thank you. MR: I've been one of the many, many people
who have listened to you over the years and enjoyed your work. I'm wondering at this point
in your career is it difficult to make a switch to recording your own work, kind of transitioning
from that studio life that you had for so many years?
EW: Well for me it was all part of a natural process. The music that I grew up listening
to and the reason why I wanted to play music and the reason why I started playing was the
music of the groups of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, all of the sidemen that played with Miles
that became such great leaders, you know Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Wayne Shorter, all
of these incredible musicians. That's the music that I grew up listening to. My first
record, my first jazz record was "Kind of Blue." My mother gave me that for a Christmas
present. I had just started playing the saxophone and she joined the Columbia Record Club and
the freebie for that year was "Kind of Blue." So that's where I started. That's where I
came in. So I always had that central focus. So when I came out to Los Angeles, I came
out to Los Angeles with Buddy Rich's band. When I left Buddy I moved to Los Angeles and
I got involved in doing studio work and I didn't even know what studio work was when
I was with Buddy Rich. You know it's like when I left Buddy's band I figured I would
come to L.A. and see if I could get with another band, maybe try to get with Cannonball's band
or somebody, or another group, to continue to keep playing. And then I started getting
calls for record dates. And this whole thing evolved. But my central focus was always playing
jazz. So I did a lot of studio work for a long time but the dream and the concept and
the focus was still there within me. So the studio work wasn't really what I came to do.
So at a certain point it was just time for me to change, turn the page. And so for me
it was a very natural transition to go from doing the studio work and playing sessions
and stuff to doing my own music and traveling and recording and that kind of road life or
whatever you'd like to call it. The whole time I was doing studio work in L.A. I always
had a group, I always had a quartet, we would rehearse once a week and then we had a place
we played every week, it was a little club in North Hollywood called Dante's. And we
used to work there every Tuesday night. So I always had an outlet, a jazz outlet, even
though I was doing a lot of studio work for a while.
MR: Did that dream start before "Kind of Blue?" You were playing a saxophone already?
EW: No, I started when I was 13, 12 or 13 in grade 7. And so that was about that time
that that record came out. So what happened was I had taken up the saxophone, I was practicing
every day, my mother and father weren't having to bug me to get in the room and practice,
I would go in and practice. So my mother realized, well you know the kid's actually interested.
He's not going to put this thing down. He's not going to quit. So they began to support
me. So part of them supporting me was, you know that Christmas they gave me a little
- I grew up out of the Sears catalogue, right? So they gave me a little Silvertone stereo
record player, and it was this record player where the front came off and that made it
stereo. MR: I had one.
EW: You take the speaker off the front and put it over here. So I got my Silvertone stereo
and my mother joined the Columbia Record Club. And she didn't know. My folks were not music
people so they didn't know about instruments or whatever. But she saw that - she joined
the club and the freebie, the first record, was "Kind of Blue." And so that's how I got
involved with that. And then I had a neighbor that was a jazz fan. My next door neighbor
was a jazz fan. And he started to lend me records. So I mean one of the first records
he ever loaned me was Dave Brubeck's "Jazz Goes to College." And I heard Paul Desmond.
And that was very encouraging for me because I was just starting to play, I was listening
to the records and trying to play along with the records and Paul Desmond played so lyrically
and so song-like there were things that he played that I could play, that I could copy.
So that was very encouraging. And then it sort of continued to grow from there.
MR: When you were doing that, did you get a sense of these guys are improvising first
of all, and they're improvising over a form? Can you recall if you were thinking that?
Or were you just like trying to nail what they were playing?
EW: The forms I could hear. I could hear song forms. I didn't know anything about chords
or keys but I could play, I played by ear and I matched the sound. I was studying, I
was taking lessons, you know, so I was learning how to play the saxophone, I was studying
classical saxophone. So I was learning how to play the instrument correctly technically.
But as far as improvising I learned that from playing with records and just from wanting
to play. But I mean I could hear blues choruses and those kind of things and then phrases
that I could play I would take off of the record. And then it continued to evolve. See
because all of these things are going on at the same time. You're taking your lesson every
week with your teacher, you're learning about the saxophone, you're learning about the classical
aspect of playing the saxophone, playing transcriptions, playing your lesson book, and that's one aspect,
and you're practicing your scales and learning how to play the instrument technically, physically
correct. Embouchure, fingering, tonguing. That's the craft that you're learning from
your teacher. But also along with that I was listening to jazz records and the main reason
I was listening to jazz records was because I wanted to hear other people play my instrument.
My folks didn't play. They just listened to what was on the radio. On the radio at that
time it was the birth of rock & roll so the only saxophones that you would hear on the
radio would be whoever was playing with Bill Haley and the Comets, you'd hear King Curtis
with the Platters or "Charlie Brown," those things. I think they were King Curtis solos,
those kind of R&B solos. I remember one of the first pop saxophone pieces that was on
the radio was Earl Bostic. There was some Earl Bostic on the radio. But other than that
it was rock & roll people and bands and I wanted to hear more saxophone than was on
the radio so I started borrowing my friend's records. My next door neighbor's records.
And then the records that he lent to me were major recordings. So as I was growing up learning
how to play the saxophone, playing by ear, I was learning some of the most evolved stuff
of the time. And I just thought that's the way everybody played. I thought that was the
way you played. You know I heard Coltrane on "Kind of Blue" and I said well that's,
yeah, that's what I want to do. I said that's the stuff. So that's where I came in. I thought
that's the way you play the saxophone. You know you hear Cannonball, you hear Coltrane,
you hear Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz and those guys, that's the way it's supposed to sound.
You don't think about that being incredibly difficult. You don't think about it being
incredibly harmonically evolved. You don't think about how great these guys are. You
just say well that's the way everybody sounds. Because that's all you ever heard.
MR: Right. EW: Right?
MR: That's great. EW: So I'm a kid, I'm 14 or 15 years old and
the only stuff I'd ever heard was the best stuff there was.
MR: No one's had a chance to ruin you. EW: Yeah exactly. It was hilarious. I'd say
well okay. And that's where I started. MR: Wow. Now what kind of experience would
you have had that would allow you to step into Buddy Rich's band for instance?
EW: Well I was always a practicer. So all through high school I was studying and practicing.
During high school I performed classical concerts, I played with my hometown orchestra in Wilmington,
Delaware. I performed a very famous saxophone piece by Jacques Ibert called "Concertina
da Camera," played that with orchestra. I won a bunch of solo competitions for classical
music. I was also playing with my friends. We were practicing down in the basement. I
was playing little dances, all kinds of stuff like that. So that was all through high school.
I graduated from high school and I went to the Westchester State Teacher's College it
was called at the time. My mother thought that I should get a teacher's degree in order
to have some security to fall back on. So I went to Westchester State Teacher's College
for one year for my mother. It was a disaster. It didn't work for me. So I dropped out. I
taught privately in the parochial schools in Wilmington, Delaware, clarinet and saxophone,
and then I applied for a scholarship. I applied for a Down Beat scholarship to the Berklee
School of Music in Boston. And I won one of those scholarships. I was a winner that year,
my friend Alan Broadbent was a winner that very same year and he came over on a boat
from New Zealand to Berklee to come to school. So that's when I met Alan Broadbent. I went
out to Berklee and I was practicing and I was playing and studying. From the time I
got into it I was totally focused. So I leaned - by the time I was 15 I had decided, I knew
that I wanted to be a musician, so I've always thought as a musician. So everything I did
was focused in that area. So I got to the Berklee school, I was there about a year and
a half, Buddy Rich had made his first big band album, I think it was called "West Side
Story" in L.A. They were on a tour. Gene Quill, who is a very great alto saxophonist had done
the record and was with Buddy's band touring. They got to Boston, Gene Quill got bugged
and quit, and went back to New York. The band, Buddy's band was in a situation. The manager
of the band, who was a man named Jim Tremble, called Phil Wilson, who was a teacher, a trombone
teacher at Berklee, and asked who he would recommend to come out with Buddy's band for
a few days until they could get a real saxophone player. Or, you got any kids over there that
can play some parts until we find a saxophone player. So I was the kid that got recommended,
and I joined Buddy Rich's band and I was there for two years. And I made three or four records
with Buddy. That's how I joined Buddy's band. That's how I got to Los Angeles. I went to
Los Angeles on a tour with Buddy. Up until that point I had always thought of living
in New York, I'd always considered living in New York because that's where all the players
were, that's where all the music was for me, I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware so I was
an east coast person, but I went out to California with Buddy and I just fell in love with the
space. I really liked the hills, I really liked the feeling of spacialness there. So
when I was with Buddy's band we did a T.V. show. We were in L.A. for 13 weeks and we
did a summer replacement for the "Jackie Gleason Show." And it was a show that Buddy Rich had
with Buddy Greco. It was called "Away We Go." And it was 13 weeks, we were all in town for
13 weeks, and while I was there doing that T.V. show I met a lot of the musicians in
L.A., I started doing some rehearsal bands and just meeting other people. And when I
left Buddy's band I decided to settle in Los Angeles rather than New York because I figured
I would be starting from scratch either place and when I moved to L.A. I realized that more
people knew about me than I thought because of Buddy's band and the records and stuff.
And so I started working. I started doing studio calls. I started subbing. I started
working as a substitute for people like Buddy Colette and there was a great player Bill
Green, and these guys were doing so many record dates, it was so busy that they couldn't take
all the work and so they would sub things out. Or one guy would have like Academy Awards
but he couldn't make all the rehearsals so he'd sub it out. He'd do two rehearsals for
the Academy Awards and then they'd come in. But all the time you're meeting other people
and all of these things are happening, right? It's all relationships.
MR: Sure. EW: So it just evolved into this thing where
I was working all the time continually. MR: Was Buddy the taskmaster that most people
say he was? EW: It depends on who you talk to. If you
know my background, if you know who I am, I'm hard enough on myself. I'm a taskmaster
on myself. So when I work with somebody who is a disciplinarian it doesn't bother me because
he's half as hard on me as I am on myself anyway. If you're someone who is not disciplined,
if you're someone who is not focused, then he could be perceived as a difficult person.
One of his saying was there's 24 hours in the day. He needs you to be responsible for
four hours out of the day. Whatever you do the other 20 hours of the day is your job,
is your business, you know what I mean? Whatever you do, that's your business. Four hours a
day he needs you to be responsible on the gig. If you can't keep it together for four
hours a day then you shouldn't be there. And that makes sense. People talk about his temper
and that whole thing. And he would go off and he would get angry. The problem that he
had was he could not make a point and stop. He would get an adrenaline rush from anger.
But I never saw him get angry for no reason. There was usually a reason that he would get
angry. There was usually something that had happened and he would get angry about it and
he was correct. But the problem that he had was he couldn't state his point and then cool
out. And so that's where all the stories come from.
MR: Okay. Who were your section mates at that time. Was it Carmen Leggio or Menza?
EW: This was in nineteen sixty- MR: '66?
EW: '65, '66. So when I came on the band the tenor player was Jay Cory. There was Bobby
Porcelli was the other alto player when I came on, and oh boy I forget the baritone
player's name. Bobby Shew was there and shortly after that Chuck Findley came on. As I stayed
Jay Cory left, Don Menza took his place. Don was there for a while. Charlie Owens came
from Boston and played the other alto book. So I played lead alto, Charlie Owens played
second alto, Don Menza played tenor, Pat LaBarbara was there, and Joe Calo played baritone for
quite a while. And Bobby Shew and Chuck Findley were in the trumpet section. And it was a
very good band. MR: For sure, and it's all on record too.
EW: Yeah for quite a while. Yeah those were some good records.
MR: Well the studio thing, there's more involved than just being a good player. You have to
be a good player first, right? EW: Well yeah that's the given.
MR: A good reader. EW: Right.
MR: But your reputation also depends on being on time and dependable?
EW: Right. It's all relationships like everything. So it's about how you get along with people,
being responsible, showing up on time, all of that, taking care of business. I'm a woodwind
player also, so when I was doing a lot of studio work I was playing all the saxophones,
soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones, clarinet and bass clarinet. Piccolo, flute,
alto flute and bass flute. And I also played oboe and English horn.
MR: Wow. Were those kind of self taught? EW: I studied oboe and English horn at Berklee
with Joe Viola. He was my saxophone teacher. He decided to teach me oboe and English horn.
So I learned oboe and English horn reed making techniques and all of that at Berklee. I taught
myself to play the flute and then that technique goes through all the flutes, it's just a matter
of spending time with them, and I taught myself also to play clarinet from books and listening
to records, classical records, listening to great players. And then you just copy the
sound. You get the sound from hearing, from just hearing good sounds all the time.
MR: The times you were with Oliver Nelson must have been enjoyable. Can I assume that?
EW: Yeah, that was right after I moved to L.A. And I played with Oliver's big band in
L.A. We used to do clubs and I also did a three month State Department tour to Africa.
It was West French Africa, Chad, Niger, Mali, Senegal, that whole area. And I did quite
a few T.V. shows with Oliver. He did "The Six Million Dollar Man" and some other T.V.
MR: When you were doing a particular date did you ever have a sense of this tune or
this date is going to last? This is going to sell records, it's going to be something
that years from now people are still listening to?
EW: No when you're working you're just working. It's just your work, it's just what you do.
I mean I was doing like I would get up in the morning and I'd go and I'd do a record
date. And it could be the Jacksons or it could be Sarah Vaughan or it could be Barbra Streisand.
I did pop records, I did jazz records, I'd go and I'd do a record date in the morning
and then in the afternoon was "The Tonight Show." So the record dates usually run three
hours so I'd do a date from 10 until 1, take a break, go over to "The Tonight Show," do
"The Tonight Show," "The Tonight Show" would be off at 6:30 and I'd do another record date
at 7. So I'd usually do two record dates and "The Tonight Show" just about every day, or
I'd do three record dates or a big movie date and I'd send a sub to "The Tonight Show."
Because sometimes you know movie dates are all day long. I did that every day for twenty
years. So when you're doing that, all you're doing really, all you're thinking about is
keeping your health together and going to work. You have absolutely no idea of the greatness
of what's going on, or how something is going to last or whatever. What's happening now
is all of these R&B records that I played on with The Temptations and Barry White and
all of these people, they're being used for commercials, and I'm getting these big checks.
I'm getting these checks for Billy Preston things.
MR: Oh yeah, "Will it Go Round in Circles." EW: "Will it Go Round in Circles," "Nothing
From Nothing." All of that stuff. They're big commercials now. Or they use these things
for T.V. themes. And there's all of these re-use checks that come in. I say, "Did I
play on that?" You know? MR: That's cool.
EW: It's hilarious. And at the time you're doing it you're just going to work.
MR: It's nice that they're keeping records and that it's working.
EW: Well there's a union record of all of that stuff because it was all union work,
so you fill out a contract, you know there's a contract, it's W-4 income with withholding
and pension and all of that stuff if it's union work. So that was good. But the whole
time, all the time I'm doing all of these record dates and T.V. and all of that stuff
I'm still thinking man this isn't it. I should be playing. This isn't playing. It's craft.
That's the thing that I learned in L.A. L.A. is an incredible place for craft. You really
learn to play your instrument well, you learn to play in tune, you learn to show up on time,
all of those disciplines, the disciplines of the craft are there. But your soul, your
spirit you know, is not usually nurtured. Every now and then there's a date, every now
and then you know, somebody like Herbie Hancock will do a film or somebody, or Oliver would
have a record date or someone that you really, really love would do something. And it would
be a special thing. And that would feel special. Those things disappear. The stuff that you
did that you thought was just work, you know, that stuff's around forever. The Commodores
"Brick House," all of that stuff. The Earth, Wind & Fire "Way of the World," all of that
stuff I played on. And that's all like legendary R&B stuff. It's wild. But you don't think
of it when you're doing it. MR: Yeah. You are on a Cannonball record,
and I wondered how that came about. He's a big - let's say I'm a big fan of his and I
just wondered how that came about. EW: Well I grew up listening to Cannon. And
I met him when I was in high school. He came to the University of Delaware and did a concert.
And I was a kid, I didn't know, I walked up I said, "Hi, can I try your horn?" He says,
"Well I've got to do this concert now and I don't want to mess up my reed but come back
after the concert and I'll let you play my horn." So I came back after the concert and
he let me play his horn. MR: That's great.
EW: That was the band with Yusef. MR: Was he playing the King at that time?
EW: Yeah he was playing the Super 20. MR: Yeah.
EW: And so I met him then. And then I didn't see him for years. And then we got back together
again when I was in L.A. because he was doing records, he had a T.V. show, he was producing
some other people, and his producer and his partner at Capitol Records was a guy named
David Axelrod. I was doing dates for David. And I got back together with Cannonball through
David. And then I did two - I did a live record at The Troubadour, I did a thing called
the jazz - it was the horoscope. MR: Oh "The Zodiac."
EW: Yeah, exactly. And there was Rick Holmes who was a disc jockey in L.A. And he did narrations
and we did music for each of the signs. I don't know what happened with that. Cannonball
had a T.V. show. A talk show. MR: Yeah. I'd love to see that.
EW: Yeah and I played on that. So we knew each other pretty well. And I knew Nat very
well. MR: The Troubadour date was interesting because
Mike Deasy was on it. EW: Yeah Mike Deasy was on it, Airto was on
it. Yeah. It was very interesting. We recorded for a week there. It was good.
MR: What was he like as a person for you? EW: Very natural. Just like you know, just
like on all the records when he talked and did his introductions and all that kind of
stuff, he was just sort of like that. Very open. A very hospitable guy. And you know
Cannonball is from cannibal. And if you ever hung out with him this guy could eat. He had
a party at his house and Alvin Battiste- MR: Alvin Battiste, clarinet man.
EW: Yeah the clarinet player. His wife and Alvin, they came up from Atlanta. And she
made this gumbo. And I mean it was like in a cauldron you know, it was like in a witch's
caldron. And Cannon ate half of that. It was incredible.
MR: Wow. Trying to live up to his original name, yeah.
EW: Yeah he was like that you. It was like everything he did was two hundred percent.
MR: A couple more things, just in that realm, Frank Zappa? What was that like?
EW: The music was very difficult. He was like a contemporary classical composer that happened
to play rock & roll guitar. I mean he was very, very bright, a very bright man. And
he knew his music and he knew what he wanted and all of that stuff was scored out. I mean
it was like classical composition. And when you hear his stuff it's very similar. It's
very similar to contemporary classical. And it was difficult stuff. It was like playing
Stravinsky. Very good music. MR: Boy it must have been hard for him to
get the kind of players who could handle that I would think, in the rock world.
EW: Well yeah it was. L.A. would be the place that that would be though, because there were
really good players that were familiar with a lot of different forms. And so he had jazz
players that were really good readers that could play classical things and play rock.
And he had rock players that were really good players and could go over into the other side.
So he knew how to put that together. But I don't know, he couldn't have done it in any
other place but L.A. and maybe New York, for the level of the musicians.
MR: Right. Did some of those things seem - oh gosh - weird at the time for you?
EW: Nothing is weird after you listen to "Ascension" and all of those Coltrane things, which I
grew up with. I mean I grew up listening to free music. I mean what I came into, "Kind
of Blue" was sort of the beginning of that and Coltrane took the modal improvisation
thing and then he just took it on out. And that was the stuff I hooked into because I
hooked into with Coltrane with Miles' band. So as soon as he went to Impulse and 14 minutes
of "Impression" and "Chasing the Trane" and all of that stuff, that was the blues to me.
That was like, hey, that was it. So that's what I-
MR: You can't shock me. EW: I mean I had to re-learn, I had to learn
about chords. I had to learn about bebop. I had to learn about 2-5-1s and all of that
stuff because the music I came into was free modal music. So I had to come back to Charlie
Parker and Dexter and Lester and all of those people. But I did because I love all of that
music. So anyway going to Zappa, no, Zappa wasn't weird because where I was coming from
made Zappa look like Bill Haley. MR: That's a great statement.
EW: Depends where you're coming from you know. MR: You know you've got a very distinctive
sound. And I'm wondering was there a period of trying different mouthpieces and all that,
and were you trying to sound like somebody to arrive at your own thing?
EW: No it evolved through the music business. The only person I ever really tried to sound
like was Trane. Because that was where I'm coming from. That's where I plugged into.
Everybody has someone they emulate when they're a kid, when they're learning how to play.
And so Coltrane was it for me. I developed my sound, interestingly enough, from playing
pop music. When you play pop music, when you play pop solos on all of these records, and
you have eight bars in the middle of the tune and then you get to play on the fade while
they fade it out and then the DJ tries to fade it out as fast as he can, as soon as
they hear the vocal end and the saxophone start you're out of there.
MR: It's their cue. EW: Unless you bought the record, and then
you get to hear the saxophone solo go for like twenty bars at the end of some of these
things. But on the radio as soon as the DJ hears the saxophone solo you're out of there.
So anyway, I started working on my sound and concentrating on my sound when I realized
with pop music, in order for it to be pop music, it has to be within a certain genre.
It's set up a certain way, production-wise it's set up a certain way, harmonically it's
very simple structured music. As a soloist within that genre you can't do anything harmonically.
You can't play chromatically through that music. You can't do anything in that music
that is intricate or evolved on a technical or harmonic level. Because at that point it's
not pop music. You take that music to a different place and it's out of context with the music,
therefore it is not right for the music. So you don't go to a pop session and play a Charlie
Parker solo. So what happens is the idiom of the music is so simple harmonically that
the only way you can establish a style is to have a sound that is recognizable. So that
when you play one note, when you play three notes it's recognizable because it's a unique
tone quality. And I recognized that in the music. And so I developed my sound. It's a
combination of the stuff I grew up listening to, it's a combination of Coltrane with a
softer edge but it's still that center and it's still that intensity but it's just very
simplified. MR: If you could go back through all those
things you did, and you had some students, and you wanted to show them examples of that,
could you pick out two or three of solos that you had done that - maybe you're not proud
of them for all those things you mentioned that you can't do, but that they were in the
context of the song and that you felt that they were good pieces?
EW: Oh there's a good one on "Find One Hundred Ways" that's Quincy's album of "The Dude."
It's just very melodic. There's an alto one that's real good on "Arthur" that I did with
Christopher Cross. Boy there's a lot of them. Things with Bill Withers that are very melodic.
Quite a few. MR: Okay. Can you tell someone, if you have
a student, about how to play melodic? EW: Yeah the basic thing is to think like
a singer. The saxophone is a voice. The saxophone sings a song. So when you hear a tune and
when you hear a production or anything, when you hear a jazz tune, we always, as a saxophonist
you always approach the music from a melodic point. That's how I learned to play, before
I learned about scales, before I learned about chords, before I learned about anything what
I did was I listened to records and I responded to melody with melody. After you've learned
about chords and harmony and rhythm and everything else when you get up and play you still respond
to melody with melody. You try to create something beautiful that is within the context of the
idiom you're performing in but you're always striving to create something that's beautiful.
So it's always a vocal approach. It's always like a singer to me. All the things I do with
Charlie Haden, I've done like five albums with Charlie Haden with the Quartet West.
Quartet projects. String projects. Big string projects where we worked with Shirley Horn
and Bill Henderson, always in that music I think of myself as singing. It's always singing.
It's always about melody. MR: That's a great answer actually. This is
just an aside. Do you happen to know who the tenor player is on the Classics IV recordings?
"Spooky" and those things? EW: No.
MR: Okay. Some good sound on that, I always wondered who that person was. It could have
been someone in the band actually, I don't know. So when you've decided in the last number
of years to cut down on your studio work, did you have to sort of make an announcement
or did you just kind of start turning down? EW: I did an interesting thing. I've lived
my life intuitively. I always follow my heart. I can almost tell you the day when I did my
last record date that was fun, you know what I mean? It was like one day the switch clicked.
And I said you know it's time to turn the page. This is not bringing me joy, this is
not happening. And then from that point on I started to evolve into my next chapter.
Now what I did was - and I didn't think about it logically or anything else - but what I
did is I took my body out of the scene. I bought a house in Colorado in 1987. I bought
a house, six acres of property, and I moved to Colorado physically. Because I knew if
I stayed in L.A. and somebody called me, you know if I stayed in L.A. and I said I'm going
to practice and write tomorrow and just work on my music and get some stuff together and
then the phone rings at 8:00 in the morning and somebody wants you to help them out on
a date or there's a dog food commercial or whatever, you take the gig. Right? You say
oh man I was going to write today but I can really use this bread. So you get in the car,
you drive for an hour and a half, you take 20 minutes to find a parking place, you go
in the studio, you warm up, you do this jingle that takes an hour, but then it takes you
an hour and a half to drive home, and by the time you get home you're so bugged and you're
so frazzled, you don't feel like practicing, you don't feel like doing anything. And the
day is bummed out. Right? So I took my body out of L.A. so that I wouldn't be there. And
I started doing my own things and working with Charlie Haden in special concerts and
doing some things with Pat Metheny here and there and different people. I work with Lee
Ritenour, do some fusion things, all kinds of projects. And then that evolved. And that
evolved to the point where I'm doing my own special projects and stuff like that all the
time: clinics, my concerts, tours of Europe, whatever. And so I moved back to L.A. because
I never could get to Colorado anyway. I had the place for 13 years, never could get there.
I got there like three weeks a year. So I sold it a year and a half ago and I moved
back to L.A. So now I'm back to L.A. but I'm doing all of my traveling and everything and
I do a date here and there, but I'm not on the call list anymore. See it's like when
you're in Los Angeles when you are a studio musician you're on - it's like out of sight,
out of mind. I used to tell people it takes 15 minutes for everybody in town to know you're
out of town. It takes three months for everybody in town to know you're back in town, right?
So that's the way that thing works. As long as you're there sitting by the telephone all
the time you're there to take calls. As soon as you go out of town everybody thinks you're
out of town. And then you come back and you have to remind them that you're not out of
town for three months. MR: So in the middle of that thing, if something
comes up where you can go on this great tour with these great people for a week, you've
got to think carefully about doing that because it's going to effect your livelihood.
EW: Well yeah if you're involved in the studio thing and you have that fear then you have
to try to figure out how to get out of town for a week and get back without telling anybody.
So you leave your answering service on, you take your calls, you do all of that stuff,
you just don't tell anybody you're out of town. So yeah there's a lot of guys, I mean
when I was doing studio work there were guys that were afraid to go out of town because
somebody else might get their gig. There's all of that fear. But anyway now I've gone
back and I do what I want to do. MR: That's nice.
EW: Yeah. MR: So projects you've done for JVC, when
you have a recording project coming up you've got decisions to make about personnel, material.
Regarding material, is there any pressure or let's say suggestions from the record company
about actual songs to go on this record? Are you free to do your own music and pick your
own - EW: It depends on the situation. With JVC
I picked all my music. And if the producer had any questions we would talk about it.
But usually when I do a record I have an idea, I have a concept of what I want to do, and
I'm pretty good at putting my ideas together and picking the tunes and presenting the idea.
And most of the time the other people in production that I'm involved with, they're agreeable.
So there's not a problem with that. And now I'm older. And when you get to a certain age
you really don't care about what anybody else thinks anymore. And I just do what I feel.
And if they don't agree with me then we work it out. We work it out and if it's really
not in agreement at all then we just can't do the project. You know because you can't
play music with people that you don't have a harmonious feeling with. You can't do production
work with people where you're spending hours and hours in the studio if you don't agree
on the music. You have to surround yourself with people who are in a harmonious vibration
with you in order for the music to happen. And if I don't feel good about something I'm
out of there. Period. I don't do stuff for money. Because I'm not ruled by money. So
if it's not feeling good I'm gone. And there's no scene, there's nothing like that, it's
just like after the rehearsal or after whatever, there is a quiet dinner somewhere and I say,
you know I'm not going to be able to do this because I don't feel good about it.
MR: Just being really honest about it. EW: Yeah. I have to be honest. Because that's
the only thing that works. If you're not honest, if you're not straight with yourself, at some
point it comes up behind you and bites you in the butt. So in order to live with yourself
you have to be straight. MR: Yeah. We're in the middle of this huge
convention about jazz. And sometimes it seems really positive and then you're thinking maybe
it's not really realistic. What's your opinion on the state of - maybe not just jazz, I'm
just wondering in a sense about live music and the recording business. Is it possible
to address that big subject? EW: Sure it is. I mean everybody has their
own views. You know I'm going to give you my disclaimer now. It's just like all statements
that will be coming forth are the concept and the ideas of the one individual Ernie
Watts. This is my concept, right? It's just my idea. Everybody has an idea. There's a
lot of good in what's going on. There's a lot of change in what's going on. See what's
happened is for jazz players, for jazz music, there's no place to play anymore. There's
no jam sessions, there's no clubs, there's no place for young people to learn how to
play from guys on the bandstand that kick their butt every night and then they come
back the next night and maybe they can get through the tune a little better. All that
stuff is transferred to the schools, okay? Now the problem with that is you've taken
an art form that was an individual communication with people, and it's become institutionalized.
Now people are writing papers on Charlie Parker. And Patricia and I were laughing the other
night and it was like man if Bird were here he'd be cracking up. He would be falling down.
And then we were saying yeah but he'd have a lot more bread. He'd have an honorary doctorate
at the University of Illinois, you know what I mean. Dizzy saw some of this. And these
are the guys that, you know, they opened that door. The schools are keeping the music alive.
But we were also talking about the endangered species, right? The zoos are keeping the tiger,
the Bengal tiger alive, right? And all of these incredible animals that would be gone
in Borneo if it wasn't for game parks and zoos. Right? The schools are keeping jazz
alive. But the price that's being paid is institutionalization, the institutionalization
of this thing. Bach and Beethoven and these guys when they wrote their music, they wrote
their music in their house, it was what they did, it came from their heart and they died
for it or whatever. Then somebody came along and wrote a book about it. Somebody went through
all of Bach's music and wrote out the formula of how he wrote this stuff and now there's
universities all over the world where people study Bach and they write three part inventions
and whatever, in the style of Bach. That's part of their education. That's part of how
they get through the university. And so now the kids are doing transcriptions of Sonny
Rollins' solos. Same kind of thing. It's academia. That's an observation. It's not good, it's
not bad, it's just an observation. And it's keeping the music alive. And that's a good
thing. And out of all of this there are individual people, there are young players who are gifted
and very bright who will come through this and this music will continue. So I think it's
a good thing. It's a good thing anyway people can have an opportunity to grasp this music.
I don't know about the deification of John Coltrane and Cannonball and the players. They
were just guys. So they were guys that loved music and they practiced and they had whatever
their gift was and they put it together with some discipline and it came together. They
worked hard. MR: Yeah. I sometimes wonder how they would
feel when they look at the articles on - where someone will transcribe a solo and then they'll
analyze every phrase and how it related to the chord change underneath and what was played
six bars before that; if those kinds of things came natural to them and to analyze it to
death, what's the purpose of that? EW: Well see in an academic environment that's
necessary in order for there to be something that can be graded. It's like in order to
get a doctorate you have to have a paper. There's so many doctorates and there's so
many papers that people are running out of stuff to write papers about. So they'll write
a paper for their doctoral thesis on whether John Coltrane used an eraser when he was writing
a lead sheet or if he just wrote the lead sheet straight through. Or you know what I
mean? MR: Minutiae.
EW: Yeah. Basically though the music is there. And when you get past the things that people
have to do to keep their jobs the music that is there that all of this stuff is based on
is some really great, incredible music. So the kid that has to do the transcription of
the Sonny Stitt solo or the Sonny Rollins solo or whatever, after he listens to that
thing forty or fifty times, like he has to in order to write it down, he's going to get
the grasp of what it is inside of it. You know? And I think that's the most important
thing is that people feel. And when you hear music and when you hear some of these great
performances and you hear these people play it creates a feeling and that's what keeps
you going on. What keeps you going on is this beautiful, beautiful feeling of love that's
in this music. No matter how screwed up Miles Davis was, you know, and there's 25 books
about how screwed up Miles Davis was, or whoever, right? When you put all that crap down and
you listen to the music it's undeniably great. And it's undeniably beautiful. And that's
all that it's about. All that it's about is how it makes you feel. And if it makes you
feel loved inside then it's worthwhile. It doesn't matter whether Miles Davis beat up
his wife that morning. It matters to him, it matters to the police station, but the
music is there. And then I think that's what everything else comes out of that, trying
to explain all of that so that you can do it too. You're not going to do it too. You're
going to do what you do. You can be influenced by Miles Davis, you can be influenced by John
Coltrane, you can be influenced by Charlie Parker, but you can't be them. You can read
all the books, you can play all the transcriptions, you can write all the transcriptions, you
can pray on your knees every night until they bleed, but you're not going to be them. So
you might as well get to who you are and get inside of you and be you.
MR: Some great thoughts there. EW: You know because we don't have any choice
with that. MR: Yeah that's right.
EW: We're stuck with us. So we might as well take what we are and try to make the best
it can be. MR: What's coming up in the near future for
you? EW: We're going to Montana tomorrow. And I
have a concert there. I'm doing some recording there with some friends. There's a friend
of mine, Harry Blaser, that has a home studio there, and playing with another friend, a
great bass player, Abraham Laboriel, and Ron Foyer, and we're doing some recording up there
of some music of ours and we're doing a clinic and a concert for the community in Whitefish
and Kallispell, that area. And then we go from there back to L.A. and I have a concert
in Santa Barbara with Charlie Haden. And then we go from there to Europe and I have some
concerts of my own and a two or three week tour this time. We're going to Kiev and we're
also going to Istanbul. And then around Germany and stuff. And it just goes on like that.
Then I come back and get ready for the next tour. So it's very busy.
MR: Good. Well it's been a great pleasure talking to you today.
EW: Well thank you. MR: I was looking forward to it. Thank you
very much. EW: Thank you.
