Interview with George Benson

[Music] this is brandon dialamonte with the city of pittsburgh's office of special events and for this year's black history month we are featuring pittsburgh jazz legends so today i have the honor of welcoming on pittsburgh jazz legend george benson who doesn't have a lot of time for us today so i just want to jump straight into it and ask him george what was it like growing up in pittsburgh and everything about the music that was going on in the uh 1950s and 60s it was an interesting time i had a singing group and at that time scene was very popular and my group was one of the most popular groups in the pittsburgh tri-state area where we had west virginia ohio and pennsylvania so those little towns and we had dozens of them we had plenty of work we didn't make a lot of money but we had plenty of work yeah and so the singing group was the thing that was keeping me going i was known as little georgie benson the singer not a guitar player yet but i did dibble and dabble with the with the guitar at the time that's great i know one of the stories i read was that uh you got your start playing at a corner drugstore and then eventually a nightclub that uh i guess went on to be shut down can you tell us a little bit more about that yeah my first day at selling a newspaper was when i was seven you had to be at least seven before you could sell newspapers so the first my first day of newspaper i had to take my ukulele with me because i forgot to take it upstairs and leave it in my in my house so i took it to the newspaper stand and the guy agreed to hold it until i got back from selling papers i sold exactly one newspaper that day i got my one penny for selling it plus a 20 cent tip so for a seven-year-old that was pretty good i had 21 to spend at the candy counter yeah so i went to the drugstore which is right next door and i was looking in the candy counter and somebody came up to me and said hey little boy can you play that thing so i turned around and struck out into a song called uh uh bloodshot eyes and i started strumming in the crowd forming around and they were going in their pockets but i couldn't stop singing and strumming so i just they just went in their pockets and my cousin came in the door saw him going in the pocket took his cap off and passed it around and we had my first payday yeah nice so how did you get your start into music i know you just mentioned the ukulele was that really your first introduction to it or was there was there maybe another instrument or that got your attention or what i tried to play the violin when i was very little my hands were still small but the violin would have been a good instrument i imagine by now it would have turned into something you know uh halfway decent you know all those years but at that time the teacher found out that i was not reading the music and he wasn't happy about that so they kicked me out of the violin clash at a very young age i guess i was about five years old i started school earlier i started kindergarten when i was four years old everybody else in class was five or six years old so i was always the littlest guy in the classroom therefore the name little georgie vince okay well seems like it worked out for you so yeah so uh did you have any inspirations growing up uh was there someone locally or even on a national level who kind of inspired you to pursue music professionally [Music] this is amazing i live near a kind of a mecca there where they had a lot of bars and a lot of traffic street cars and buses and a lot of cars on on cobblestone streets the main intersection they branched out into different parts of the city but that main part everyone wanted to get to that place it was a wiley avenue and they had the stanley bar on one corner and then they had the blue note on another corner and uh down the other corner in another barn and they had the jazz club which burned down while i was down there they moved up town but anyway everybody came through there and i found out later why people coming from the midwest like charlie parker and all those great musicians they were trying to get to the big apple new york and they had just built something phenomenal in the united states the pennsylvania turnpike which is 300 miles long so it was a 300 mile straight shot to new york city the big apple from pittsburgh yeah so they went and did all their jamming in pittsburgh and that's why billy eckstein had the greatest jazz band in history his pianist was sarah vaughn he had charlie parker dizzy gillespie and um eric blakey was his drummer [Music] ray brown was his bass player just to name a few yeah the whole van was loaded with people who became superstars in the jazz world later and starting with billy extra himself who was a he was an instrumental stew he played the val trombone and a great singer so they congregated in pittsburgh so a lot of those people saw me as little georgie benson the seven-year-old walking around the corner with a ukulele in his hand and they gave me quarters including the great charlie parker who was my natural father's best friend he hung out with charlie parker a lot wow and he tried to get me to copy him when i when i was coming up i didn't know who that game was talking about yeah well that's great so how would you describe the music that you typically create i know i've seen you know everybody try to define it from r b to pop and jazz is there a label you give yourself or is it kind of just free form to you it won't make any difference what you call yourself because people are going to find another name for you good or bad you like to call it something you don't want to be called but but uh that's what life is all about they're gonna see you from their point of view and um although the music was called bebop [Music] they ended up calling it jazz the music that was created by charlie parker and um and dizzy gillespie and thelonious mom and charlie christian was called bebop but it sounded so much like jazz the critics just called it jazz music but actually it was a whole different culture it was a highly sophisticated and i say that by harmony the harmonies involved were very and the rhythms that were involved were very sophisticated and you had to be good to play it that's why charlie parker was so famous because he handled it like it was nothing he just went through the car changes like he did like there were nothing you know yeah uh and his tonality he was a great uh kansas city a tight blues uh musician and he brought all that with him to new york but when he started playing bebop along with it a whole new world opened up yeah so what do you think you'd be doing right now if you hadn't gone into music and you know made a career for yourself is there any other kind of passions you had um i know i saw you roller skating in the uh give me the night video maybe professional roller skater or something else that that you really liked uh coming up yeah i was i actually learned loved uh science and i think that's what happened with my guitar i became a musical scientist i began to search for things that the guitar had not done after hearing montgomery and a few other approaches and hanging out with the greatest guitar players in the world barney castle i went on tour with him it was like going to a great college because he was passing out lessons every day so i like hanging out with him though he he made me feel this big but but i learned something i was going to college by hanging out with him him and um what was his name uh jim hall we were on tour in europe and every day barney will beat us up like stepchilds but what a nice beating up at the end of that tour man i came home with some wonderful stuff man that barney had showed me just being in his presence yeah going back to some of the clubs you mentioned um on wiley avenue in the hill district was there one that kind of stands out to you i know a lot of musicians i've talked i've talked to always mentioned the crawford grill obviously um was there one in particular that you remember fondly and running into a lot of guys and if you have any stories we'd love to hear them there were two grapes the one you mentioned a minute ago crawford's grill the owner was quite an incredible guy he was a genius he was a a wig a great brain lots of money too he knew how to make money and that club was very sophisticated very nicely arranged really a great place to be and there was one called the hurricane the woman who owned that was birdie dunlop and her and her husband whose name was shine that was the r b house he had everybody so between the two clubs we had everybody one would be arthur pryor down there at the r b house and him and his brother and uh it would be jimmy smith or johnny hammond smith or people like that and then up at the um the other club what's the jazz club you mentioned the crawford girl the crawford grill had um take five was um [Music] was take five they did the originator who wrote the song i'm not sure the day of brewback quartet baby i got so many friends but he sticks out because he's such a great such a great musician and he wrote these incredible songs blue rhonda alatorch was another wizard kind of song but you had to be a wizard and um and we saw everybody there ron carter's first group was the jazz brothers featuring chuck man jones oh the man joan brothers that's why they called them the jazz brothers but it wasn't their group though it was the ron car disapproved and they were all coming out of berkeley school of music not burpees uh rochester uh what they call that the camera people there but it was a rochester uh music school they graduated from they had master's degrees when they were 23 years old yeah and they were indeed um master musicians so a lot of that kind of thing was going on chico hamilton quartet reaching gabor zavo on utah you know and uh charles lloyd uh playing all this crazy things on either the flute or the telescope i saw all of that stuff man they were right across the street i used to play right across the street from the crawford grill yeah at the corner tavern a corner bar and they used to come over from the from uh the corporate grill to see me at the club when i was about 17 years old yeah man you know some of you you could play jazz if you wanted to i said no i can't play jazz he said yeah she could two years later i saw um west montgomery's brother uh the youngest one not montgomery yeah maybe the one who played keyboard and he saw me at the jazz workshop he said i've seen you before i said i'm from pittsburgh i told you you could play jazz guitar and i saw him at the jazz workshop in san francisco and he reminded me that he we had that conversation yeah that's awesome so of all the songs and all the albums you've written if there was one album or song that you would tell somebody hey this defines me as a musician or this is one of my favorite things to play and this is who i am is there a song or album you can kind of uh name for us that defines you or would you say it's again sort of a free form for you that whatever you're doing at the time that's what it is i learned to think like that because things change time changes everything era changes what used to be important is not important and what used to be unimportant is important all of a sudden so you have to be flexible to do that but you got to keep your musicianship up because you don't know which way it's going to go somebody had to come out of nowhere there's a cat called pat martino you ever heard of me 17 years old and i'll play almost anybody in the world so you got to be prepared for that kind of stuff you know and also um singers people writing i heard about it when he was a little boy [Music] gladys knight told us about him said you know we got a little boy in our church we know he's not going to be ordinary so when i heard this voice on the radio i said you have to be the boy she was talking about because i can't think of anybody again i'll sing this young fellow and show enough she's here that's the boy i was talking about that's great i know it seems like you have been evolving your sound um throughout the decades like you said it's always changing and even most recently saw your collaboration with the gorillas on that song humility and you could definitely obviously see the influence between some of your big hits uh for them including looks like um give me the night and uh breeze and for sure definitely heavily influenced them how did that come to be did they reach out to you and say we're huge fans we'd love to do this or how did that come to be first i thought it was an insult oh the guys called me and said my manager or secretary manager she's manager and secretary she said there's a group called the gorillas who want to record with you and i said ain't no way in the world with a group called a gorilla that was an african-american group called a gorilla and said that's all we need somebody calling us gorillas she said no no it's not african-american she said these are caucasians they're from uh great britain i said no i said you got to be kidding me so she said just take a listen to it and see when i heard and i said nah i can't make another play on this and i don't want to fool them and i don't want to take their money so when she sent it back to him they said can you ask mr just put something on him we think that what he'll put on her will be significant we can hear him on this record i said send it to me she sent it back with another song that was terrible i said let me hear the first song again maybe i can do something with echo this one ain't gonna work so i listened to and i said i told my engineer you know what man this is a nice band turn it up put the speakers on man then we got all this equipment here turn it up and he's got a very sensitive you know used to jasmine he likes everything you know just so as a man forget that turn it up so he turned it up and i could feel the band for the first time i said there i am i'm sitting right over there in that chair with the band i'm the guitar player in this band turn this up man let me put record he put in record mode and it was all natural it was rain so that's how we ended up doing that when they heard it they said yeah this is better than what we thought we were yeah that was great i mean you could definitely see the influence and uh you know the talent i love that project man i'm glad that they stuck in there and you know and uh and hung in there with me and got me to do what was the right thing to do yeah that's awesome uh so i got two more questions for you um one of them being what's a bigger accomplishment for you winning multiple grammys or being recognized as a jazz master by the national endowment of the arts both of them are tremendous one is an industry related thing it's good to know that the people who are exposed to your music are accepting it that's what the grammys do and they give you tremendous exposure you can't get any other way and the endowment of the art says i'm an artist and it matches up to the incident that happened to me when i was a teenager no i was coming out of my team i was with jack mcduff and we we were being interviewed uh they were reviewing one of our records or show that we had done and they called me a guitarist and nobody had ever called me a guitarist before they called me a guitar player or a guitar blubber but they never called me a guitarist that stuck in my mind like there was an elevation in my life it was like a stepping stone yeah and i had a great great time um practicing after that practicing meant something to me then because i mean i was making movements that was going somewhere so that was a big step in my life [Music] okay george just one last question for you then is there a um piece of advice maybe that someone's given you before that you just kind of carried on through your career that's helped you maybe to get to where you are today wonderful thing is that we learn from each other man okay we are in the world [Music] the daughter of ravi shankar became a superstar you know that's nora jones right her dad was the number one sitar player in the world and his little baby one of his babies grew up to be a fantastic singer and had one of the biggest records in record history it shows what we can learn from each other she's coming all over india with that you know that's her her heritage is from there very bloodline is that her father was a world traveler very highly respected but that's what the world is i don't care where you go in the world when i went to russia i was in the lobby of a hotel and i heard this incredible song the piano player was on a different level second level but i walked up to the piano i said what is that incredible song you she said you kidding me george benson i was shocked she knew i was first of all she said you're kidding me george vincent i said that's not one of my songs she said yes it's one of your songs i couldn't believe it man she was playing crap because you know technically great musicians they insist on technical jesus that's what she was so i found that i could learn something from anybody okay where you from you know i did a record with um uh tomatito you met me playing for makeover [Music] you know there's some great great players and so but i was a listener and one day he asked me to record with him i said what can we play together we can't play nothing together man because it's so different the the basis of the songs and it turned out to be one of my favorite things i like hearing back that i've ever played i heard i said that can't be me playing guitar man with thomas though no that's great all right george well thank you for your time i'll let you go and we appreciate you making time to sit down with us and talk about black history month and being a pittsburgh jazz legend thank you so much it's an honor [Music] you

Channel: Department of Innovation & Performance

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Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021