My name is Monk Rowe and we are filming during
the International Association of Jazz Educators conference in New York. I'm very pleased to have trumpet player Jimmy
Owens with me, an educator and other things I'm sure we'll talk about along the way. Thanks for coming. You've been a lifelong resident of New York,
is that right? JO: Yes. MR: Did you ever live anywhere else for any
amount of time? JO: Well - lived other places - the only time
I can say I really lived someplace else was '91 to '92 when I was a guest visiting professor
at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio. I lived there for a year, or actually eight
months. Other than that the only time I could say
I've lived places, I've spent as much as three and four months at a time in Europe, so I
was living there and relaxing. And me and my wife, we spent one or two weeks,
I mean one or two months, during the summertime in Europe. MR: What brought you to the point as a young
man, or even a child, where you felt like music was going to be your career? Was there a defining moment do you think,
or was it gradual? JO: It was not a defining moment. It was an argument when I said to my mother
and father, "No I'm not going to be an electronic engineer, I want to be a musician. I'm not going to go to the Brooklyn Technical
High School, I'm going to go to the High School of Music and Art." So I guess that was the defining moment. MR: Okay. JO: And seriously, I guess the defining moment
was when I started to play the instrument. Because it was from that point on that I had
the feeling that I wanted to be a professional musician. And that was at age ten. By the time I was fourteen I really had the
feeling inside that I wanted to be a professional musician. And at sixteen I auditioned and got into the
Newport Youth Band. It was run by Marshall Brown, and that kind
of put the top on the lid from the standpoint of being a professional musician. The training and everything. I'd been in the High School of Music and Art
for one year, that was my second year in the school and I was in the Newport Youth Band,
and we would have to stay off from school sometimes Mondays and Fridays, because we
had concerts. And we had the greatest musicians teaching
us. So that all added up to giving me a good insight
on wanting to be a professional musician. My chief mentor at the time was Donald Byrd. I studied with him when I was fourteen years
old. And living in New York, growing up in New
York, at fourteen and fifteen I was hanging out in the clubs. And a lot of the musicians after the Newport
Youth Band whatnot, they knew me, so they would manage to let me come in to the dressing
room or something, like at the Metropole, that used to happen, and that's where I met
Red Allen and J.C. Higginbotham, Buster Bailey, Charlie Shavers, people like that. And I must say I was a little different than
most of the other musicians my age who were coming up. They didn't have the appreciation for the
older musicians. I had the appreciation for the Clifford Browns
and the Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespies, you know, and the Freddie Hubbard, he was
five years older than me, but I also had it for those older musicians also. Somehow I guess it was just some kind of something
that was instilled in me when I was born. MR: Was there music in the household going
on? JO: No, there was no music in my household-
MR: Oh, that's interesting. JO: live. There was music all the time records. And my father would pick me up when I was
three and four years old, we had a huge mirror in our living room, and he'd pick me up and
dance with me to Stumpy Jones or a Billie Holiday record or an Art Tatum record. And I used to love to see myself in the mirror
you know. And I guess this is what put the sound of
the music in my ear. At, I think he told me I was four years old,
he could tell me, "Jimmy, go play your favorite record." And I'd go among all the records and pull
out this one record, it was a picture record. It had a picture on both sides. One side had a landscape scene and the other
side had a picture of a white woman. And it was a record by Charlie Shavers. The one side was "She's Funny That Way," and
the other side it was a song called "Dizzy's Dilemma." And that was my favorite record. I'd take it and put it on, the 78, and put
the needle on it, and sometimes I had to change the needle, put the arm down on it and play
my record, my favorite record. So I think that that was the sound of the
trumpet that was in my ear, because I don't remember any other trumpet players at that
time. As time went on I remember, many years after
that, telling Charlie Shavers that story. MR: That's great. Did the musicians that you met, either as
teachers or just in the clubs, did you get a sense of them instilling you with other
things, just besides the playing of the music? JO: Well I can't say - I mentioned that Donald
Byrd was my mentor. And he instilled in me what being a professional
musician was. He taught me about the business. He was the first to start that, let's put
it that way. And made me aware about copyright, and about
taking care of business. And then there were other musicians who were
equally as important and took it another step. Randy Weston was one of my mentors also. He taught me a lot about the business - publishing,
and how publishing works. And I always had people like that to help
me along the way. And then the other musicians, you know, by
the time I was seventeen and graduated from school, high school, and I was in the fold
of all the clubs, and I used to go to the clubs. And I'll never forget, the manager of Birdland,
at 52nd Street and Broadway, the original Birdland, Johnny Gary, the night that he said,
"All right, you can let him in, let the kid in." And then they finally knew me as Jimmy. And when I started to play in Birdland on
Monday nights and the whole week and everything, it was great. But I remember that time that Johnny Gary
told Pee Wee Marquette, okay let him in. For free. And boy, that was something very special. MR: That was. JO: I talked to Johnny Gary about that time. Johnny is now about, I think he's 78 or something. MR: It's almost like an early form of paying
your dues. JO: Right. MR: First you get let in to listen, and then
maybe later they'll let you in to play. Wow, that's interesting. I had a little note here that around '58 you
had played alongside Miles Davis for something. JO: Well what happened was my father took
me to see Miles Davis. I am fifteen years old. And Miles was working at a club called Small's
Paradise doing a matinee. And my father took me to see Miles, and when
we got there, the band was off. They were on a break. So my father is at the bar and I'm next to
him, and I walked over to the bandstand, which was this high off the ground you know, and
I'm standing there, I've heard all of these stories about Miles Davis being a nasty person. I'm standing there with my hands behind my
back looking at the trumpet and the piano. I'd never seen a blue trumpet before. And he had this horn that was tinted blue. And all of a sudden someone slides down at
the piano, and I see it's Miles. And he looks up at me and he's playing some
chords, and he says, "You play trumpet, kid?" I said, "Yeah." He played a little while, and he says, "Play
me a tune." And he gave me his horn. So I took the horn and I was going to take
the mouthpiece out and I said, "Take your mouthpiece." "What you going to do, play without a mouthpiece?" I said, "No, I've got my own." I put my mouthpiece in the horn, and I played
"Walkin'." Okay? At which point the musicians were coming back
on the stage. And the last person on the stage - Miles took
the horn back you know - the last person on the stage was Bill Evans. And Miles said, "Hey, Bill, you hear this
kid play?" "No," he says. Miles gave me the horn and said, "Go ahead,
play it again." So I started to play "Walkin'" and the whole
band joined in. And when I say the whole band, that's Cannonball
Adderley, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. And I played "Walkin'," and take a solo, you
take it out and Miles says, "Go play another one." I play "Bags' Groove." And Trane takes a solo you know, Cannonball
takes a solo. Oh it was unbelievable. Well I mentioned specifically Jimmy Cobb,
because we played together many, many times. And he was teaching at the New School where
I was teaching. And one day in the office I bumped into him. And I said, "Hey, Cobb, I want to ask you
something. You remember working at Small's Paradise with
Miles?" He says, "I remember working there." I said, "You remember a matinee that a kid
sat in with the band and played with them?" He said, "You know I do recall that." I said, "Man, that was me." He said, "What!" I said, "You remember that for sure?" He says, "I really remember that night, because
that was my first week working with the band and I look up and at the bar there is Philly
Joe Jones and I got so nervous. Well when he told me that story, I just broke
up. And he really remembered that night, me sitting
in with the band, or a kid, a young kid sitting with the band. MR: That's a great story. I'm wondering what your father was thinking
while this was going on. JO: Well you know it was funny because - oh
well he was so happy, he was so proud. But Quincy Troupe called me, when he was writing
the book, the autobiography. And he said, "Jimmy, this is Quincy Troupe,
I'm doing a book on Miles Davis, and I wanted to know if you had any -" I said, "Listen,
Quincy, I'd really like to talk to you man, but the limousine is waiting for me, I'm going
to Europe right this moment." And he said, "Well when are you going to be
back?" I said, "Well I'm not going to be back for
about three months." And so I missed the whole situation you know. MR: You missed getting in the book. Yeah. JO: And I mentioned that to Quincy a couple
of weeks ago. He was in New York. And I reminded him, I said, "Hey man, you
still owe me an interview." MR: Yeah, well I got it first. That's a great story, and it's especially
wonderful because I thought that was one of the great bands of all time with Coltrane
and Cannonball. JO: That was my beginning of a friendship
with Miles. Miles had come, and I have that date, I can't
remember the date now, the exact date that I played. Because they came out with a Miles Davis book
that is like a calendar of all of his engagements. And that particular - I think it was in June
of 1958, shows that he was at Small's Paradise, and that he did a matinee. And what happened was then a couple of weeks
later I played and sat in at a concert up in the Bronx - I lived in the Bronx - at a
place called the International Inn. And it got a big write-up in the Amsterdam
News, and Miles and his wife Frances were there in the audience. Because the musicians who were playing were
Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley and Curtis Fuller. I don't remember who was in the rhythm section. But I remember that because Kenny Dorham let
me play his trumpet. And I have pictures of me at fifteen years
old playing with Hank Mobley and pictures of me playing with Curtis Fuller. I told Curtis about this many times, and just
last October we did a series of concerts in Europe, Curtis and myself. We've played together many times and been
on tours and everything. Well I thought of it beforehand. I took this picture out and I showed Curtis
Fuller this picture. And he jumped. A picture of me and him. I am fifteen years old. MR: Isn't it funny back then when people that
are maybe four to five years older than you seem so much older. JO: Oh, so much older. MR: You know you figure, oh, they've got so
much experience. But it's interesting that you say just like
you were obviously probably kind of nervous playing with those guys. But there's Jimmy Cobb and he's nervous because
Philly Joe is there. JO: Exactly. MR: So I don't know who makes Philly Joe nervous. Probably nobody. At what point did you really start to make
money, make a living of a sort? JO: Well what happened was, after graduating
from high school my parents didn't have any money to send me to college. And just to tell you, the Manhattan School
of Music cost $750 a year. That was the tuition. Juilliard was a little more expensive, they
cost $900 a year in tuition. They didn't have that. And I stayed home that summer and practiced. And I would practice eight, nine hours a day. But by the fall, now my mother's working,
my father worked at night, so he was sleeping in the daytime and I would be in the front
part of the house. We had a big apartment, eight rooms, the front
part of the house and he'd be sleeping in the back and it didn't bother him. But come September all of a sudden my mother
is after me that I'm going to have to be responsible because someday I'll have a family and I'll
have to support my family so you have to go out and look for a job. And she couldn't understand that I was being
responsible. I'd get in at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, at
9:00 I was up practicing until 4, 5, 6:00 in the evening. I mean just all day long. She didn't think that was responsibility. I make them laugh when I talk about this now. Fortunately both of my parents are still with
me, they're both in their 90th year now. MR: Oh, that's wonderful. JO: But to tell them about that, they think
about it, I think getting this job was the best thing that had ever happened to me. It's the only time in my life I've ever worked
outside of music. Okay? I'm seventeen years old. My mother worked in a hospital in the Bronx,
Lincoln Hospital. And she got me this job. I was called, the title of it was I was "stationery
clerk" I was in charge of ordering all of the paper goods for the hospital. Every form in the hospital had a little number
and I had to keep all of these in stock. Because if we ran out of death certificates
it would be a catastrophe if the doctor needed a death certificate and there were none. So and other forms. So I wound up doing this job. I didn't want to of course. But I should say my mother made me do it. Not so much my father. I take this job, I work very hard two weeks
out of the month. One week taking in requisitions of what is
needed, ordering the supplies, putting the supplies in my little cubby, a little closet
that had all this stuff, then filling the requisitions. And that all took two weeks out of the month. The other two weeks I had very little to do. I would lock myself in my closet, because
I could lock the door from the inside, and I would practice with my mute, I'd practice. So the City of New York was paying me. I used to take home some ridiculous fee like
$99.51 every two weeks. The City of New York paid me for two weeks
to practice, and the other two weeks to work hard. What happened was I worked on that job for
a year and a half. I studied privately with a very eminent brass,
they called it "troubleshooter." His name was Carmine Caruso. MR: Sure. JO: Brass players who had troubles, they would
go to him. Well I studied with Carmine for a year and
a half. I studied with the very eminent American composer
Henry Brant. And I was learning my skills and I was saving
my money to go to, at that time I really wanted to go to Juilliard because a lot of my friends
had gone to Manhattan and they didn't seem to like it. So I said I would go to Juilliard. I still had ambitions of playing European
classical music. But still I was a jazz musician first. I worked the job for a year and three months
and told my boss, who never bossed me, told my boss, "Oh, Miss Auls, I'd like you to put
in a slip saying that I'm going to quit in two weeks." So she says, "Really? Okay, yeah, sure." She said, "What are you going to do, retire?" So I said, "Well I'll tell you what, I'm not
going to retire but I'm going to go out and in the first job that I take" - they knew
I was a musician - "I'm going to make three times as much money as I make here in six
weeks." And they all laughed. Well the week after I approached her and I
said, "Did you put in my resignation slip?" She says, "No." I said, "I'm serious." So I had to go into the administrative office
and let them know last week she was supposed to put it in. And she didn't. I wanted to apply the last week. And so I quit. And within about two weeks I did a job with
Slide Hampton. We went down to North Carolina and played
a concert. I made $350 for the concert, which was a lot
more than $99.51 for two weeks. In one night. MR: That's darn good money. JO: It's a lot of money. MR: And you were eighteen or so? JO: Yeah. But it was me and Richard Williams, that was
the trumpet section, and Slide Hampton and Garnett Brown was in the trombone section. Let's see. Hubert Laws was playing tenor saxophone. And I can't remember who else was in the band. But I mean it was a great band. And Slide was very popular. He'd had a hit, kind of a hit at that time,
called "Sister Salvation," so we played all of this music. And that was one of the times of getting paid. Now all the time that I worked in the hospital
I didn't take any of the jobs that people were calling me for. I would refuse those jobs. And lots of musicians were calling me to work
Monday night at Birdland and to do things. You know on the weekend I would do some dance
gigs type of thing. But I wasn't playing any jazz gigs, because
I was really just practicing. I didn't want to put myself out there before
I was ready, in my opinion. So I can honestly say that that Slide Hampton
job was the first that I really got paid. MR: That's a great story too. Your timing is impeccable. JO: I went on from there to play with all
of the masters of the music, and that's where I really feel very, very privileged, and like
I said, other than at Lincoln Center, I mean that Lincoln Hospital job in the Bronx, I've
never worked outside of music in all of my years. MR: I'm looking at your, the mid-60s, early,
mid-60s, really a lot of different, great names here that you were with: Maynard Ferguson
and Gerry Mulligan and Charles Mingus. JO: Yeah. I worked with Mulligan for a shorter period
of time. I worked at Birdland with him for I think
it was a one week engagement. And I did a few concerts. This was when he had the concert jazz band,
which was a precursor to the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band. Thad was in this band, Mel Lewis played drums
in the band, and it was from that experience that Mel Lewis and Thad - well I knew Thad,
I'd met Thad some years before - invited me to be in the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Jazz
Orchestra. But I mean my work with Lionel Hampton and
for the longer periods with Mingus - because I worked with Mingus two times, in 1964 and
again in '65. All of that was a tremendous learning experience,
not only learning musically but learning how people maneuver the audience in their band. And I was very interested in seeing how people
were able to be the masters of their audience - Lionel Hampton was a lot different than
Charles Mingus. MR: Uh huh. How did Charles Mingus maneuver an audience? JO: It was his giving that feeling of being
really crazy. He would walk into the club - we worked at
the Village Gate. Charles Mingus would walk in dressed in a
black suit and a bowler hat, okay? Impeccable. With a cane. Go into the dressing room, take all of his
clothes off and put on an old, dirty pair of blue jeans, a ripped up shirt and that's
what he'd go out on the stage and perform in. Then he would fire the band and keep part
of the band on the stage. And this was all part of his quote unquote
show. Okay? "You guys are not playing shit. Get out of here. You're fired. You're all fired. Y'all stay." And then the small group would play with Lonnie
and Charles McPherson and Danny Richmond. They would play. And he says, "Okay, maybe I'll hire you all
back. Y'all come on back." So this kind of thing, you know the audience
was very interested in this. And he managed to bait the audience all the
time. Lionel Hampton is completely different. He baited them with the music. MR: Well when Mingus would do this, were you
guys let's say in on it? Did you know that he was-
JO: Well we were in on it because it would happen three times a week, that type of situation. And he always was to have us back, and we
knew we weren't fired fired. But that was the impression. Herbie Mann dealt with his audience another
way. So that was a learning process for me, just
checking those things out. I guess I was looking to the fact of being
a band leader at that time and I wanted to know about those things. And I think all of that helped me to be a
much better band leader as time went on. MR: Yeah. It's a bit more than just playing the notes. Right? Wow. That's very interesting. Going back a little back to the Thad Jones-Mel
Lewis group, was that group formed partly for people who were doing a lot of studio
work and wanted to get- JO: Basically that's what it was. It wasn't formed for that reason, it was formed
to have Thad write some music. And he used some of the best players in New
York, who most of them were great jazz musicians, but who were very busy in the studios. Snooky Young on trumpet, Jerome Richardson
on saxophone, Richard Davis on the bass, Roland Hanna on the piano. All these guys were very, very busy in the
studios. Jimmy Nottingham on trumpet. And there were a group of us who were coming
in to the music. Eddie Daniels, Garnett Brown on trombone,
myself. And we were the young musicians in the band. We used to rehearse Monday nights at midnight. Every Monday night at midnight. Okay? Because that was a time that everyone could
make it. There were no record dates at that time, and
we rehearsed in New York here in a place called Jim and Andy's. It was a local watering hole for musicians. He had a rehearsal studio over the bar and
that's where we started to rehearse. And we rehearsed there for a while and then
moved into A&R Recording Studios and Phil Ramone. And what Phil would do, he started to train
young engineers how to record live music, a live big band, from our rehearsals. So it was one hand washes the other. He gave Thad the room to rehearse in and he
taught young engineers how to record instruments live. I wish I knew where all of those tapes were. MR: Yeah. I was just thinking the same thing. JO: Thad had them. They just disappeared. Because before Thad died some people asked
about those tapes. Maybe Phil Ramone had them and he erased them
or, I don't know what happened. But that's why the band was formed. And we rehearsed a good three months of Mondays,
when Thad came to us and said, "Listen, I was given a little offer, it won't pay a lot
of money, maybe $20 a man, but I want to know if you want to go into the Village Vanguard
on Monday nights." And everybody said yeah. So he told Max Gordon, yeah, okay, we'll go
into the Village Vanguard. And at that particular time, this is 1965,
66, clubs in New York were really having a hard time. Clubs were closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
and many times Thursday. They would open up either Thursday, Friday,
Saturday, Sunday, or Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and closed the rest of the days. Because there was just no business to fill
them. People were not coming out. This Monday night it was advertised, Thad
Jones, Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra, and it listed all of the musicians' names in the
orchestra. I have an ad. MR: Do you? Oh that's great, good. JO: And I came to the Vanguard that night,
and when I got out of the cab there was a line up the block, almost around the corner
to 11th Street. What is this? I had to squeeze through the people to get
in. And that's the way it was for the first number
of weeks, every Monday night it was packed, like people were just looking for someplace
to go and something different to see. And that was it. And we used to make enough money that one
Monday night that Max was able to open up the club all week long, whereas the Village
Gate was closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and they were having things on the weekend
only. Max opened his club up all week long because
of the money that was made by Thad and Mel on those Monday nights. I stayed with the band for about three months
of Monday nights at the Vanguard. And then we had a situation in the band where
you weren't supposed to take off. And nobody would take off, okay? They had a record date? They'd give it to someone else because this
was Monday night. Well I had a conflict and I went to Mel, because
he was in charge of that part of it or something. And I told him, listen Mel, I have to take
off for about five weeks because I'm going to Europe, I'm going to Japan and I'm working
with Herbie Mann. And he didn't want me to take off. I said well wait a minute. So I wound up quitting. I had to quit. And Thad didn't know anything about that for
a long time. He didn't know why I had left. And I worked with the band a number of times
after that, but just that sitting in stuff. So on leaving the band, that's why I'm not
on any of the recordings, the first recordings that were made. MR: Boy I sure wish those tapes were around,
those early tapes. JO: Right. MR: Japan seems to be quite a mecca for jazz
acts. They really enjoy the music over there? JO: They did. I can go back to 1966 with Herbie Mann, and
then I went back to Japan a little later in that year with a special drum tour that had
Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, McCoy Tyner, Ben Tucker played bass, Wayne Shorter
and myself. It was fantastic, but it was a very bad tour
in that the Japanese government had problems with American jazz musicians and narcotics. Narcotics at that time meaning marijuana. They'd arrested a number of jazz musicians
in the two previous seasons, so they were really on us all the time, and two of the
musicians got arrested from this tour, Tony Williams and Elvin Jones, and the tour came
to an end a week early because of that. And that stopped jazz musicians going to Japan
for about two years. Nobody was invited. I think the first groups that went back to
Japan were about 1968. MR: The association of jazz with jazz and
drugs and so forth is pretty documented. Has it changed over the years? Has it gotten better or worse? JO: Oh most definitely. It's gotten better because life in America
has gotten better. As we pinpointed racism a little more and
made things better for African American people, narcotics stopped a little bit in the jazz
musician - a lot I should say - in the jazz musician community. It's really difficult being in Duke Ellington's
band and traveling through the south in the 30s. There were no hotels. Being Billie Holiday, being Bessie Smith and
Louis Armstrong. There were no hotels, there were no places
to eat. I mean I know of stories that even Louis Armstrong
in his heyday in the 50s was turned away from being able to go and urinate in a restaurant
using their bathroom. In Connecticut. Okay? So it's this kind of stuff that placed very
high in the use of narcotics among jazz artists who were going through the stuff. And as a lot of that disappeared we found
many of the artists no longer dealing with heavy narcotics. And it's gotten much better as time has gone
on. Our problems that we had in the 40s and the
50s with narcotics, they are having those problems in various places in Europe in the
90s, and 2000. In some countries heavy narcotics is very
prevalent with many of the musicians being strung out, shooting heroin in 1995, '96,
'97, '98. In other words we don't find too many of the
younger musicians who are coming up in America even approaching that. MR: Do you think there's a misdirected opinion
with some of the European musicians that the narcotics help you to play this? JO: I think so. I think that being one of the things. But just the whole overall drug culture of
America of the 60s has transplanted itself and kind of shows a little bit of how far
behind the times they are in some countries. It took thirty years for it to get there. MR: That's interesting because for so many
years you know, the United States would borrow from Europe, and now it's definitely gone
the other way. Of course jazz has become so international
now, as we can see from this weekend. It's wonderful to see that this music has
been spread around. JO: Well it is wonderful and there are many,
many fine jazz artists who have developed in the last twenty years in many countries
of the world, and in some countries they can hold their own with Americans, certain instruments,
they can hold their own with Americans. The thing that I don't find being the case
is that there is not that sense of originality, but you see that is what has been happening
since the middle 80s, for the last fifteen years we haven't seen musicians in our country
coming out with that sense of originality. It's a sense of being able to duplicate what
was done thirty, forty years ago. Oh I want to play like those Blue Note records
of the 60s, and people learning how to play and duplicating that stuff. I heard a saxophonist in Europe and he sounded
so much like Dexter Gordon I was shocked. Many people in foreign countries are intent
on the duplication process as opposed to the originality process. MR: Why do you suppose it's happened here
since the mid 80s? JO: Well I think when the overall concept
of making stars changed. You see when I came up stars were made on
the bandstand. You practiced your instrument at home, and
you went out and played and the musicians said, "Wow, man, you hear so and-so, you know
he can play his buns off, yeah." And the musicians would talk about you, which
would allow you to get more work with the musicians, which allowed more people in the
audience to hear you, and before long you were making a name for yourself. You got put on some recordings with some musicians
and whatnot. That's how stars were made. Stars were not made by public relations. And that's what happened in the 80s. Wynton Marsalis was one of the first okay. Before that we had other people who were being
pushed into that position slowly but surely. Chuck Mangione. The machinery made him a star. Given, all of these people still can play. They're great players. But the overall star-making machinery has
changed. And with the advent of Wynton Marsalis and
the star-making machinery happening there, they started doing this more and more. MR: Yeah. They see that as a success. JO: Right. And it's a big difference between how one
has to deal with it. And I think because of this stars were made
of people who were not ready to be in this stardom. Their skill level was not ready. Their mindset was not ready. Yet when the money started to come in they
may have changed some of that stuff but they were still basically not ready to be stars. Not ready to be the John Coltrane, the Cannonball
Adderley, the Kenny Drew, the Blue Mitchell, who had to work on the bandstand to be noticed,
to become a S-T-A-R. MR: Well put. You think that in present day some of these
young musicians, obviously they have their own bands too soon? JO: Yeah. Most definitely. Because-
MR: Just to follow-up on basically what you were saying. JO: Well basically, being a band leader is
much more than playing the right notes, like you said. And that's what a lot of people, I was witness
to a concert that Roy Hargrove did as one of his first concerts after recording and
having a band. And the programming was abominable. He did not know how to program his music to
make this audience feel like they wanted to be a part of what was happening on the bandstand. And he had to do a workshop after that. He had no idea how to do a workshop. And fortunately for him, Rodney Whitaker was
the bassist in his band at that time who knew something about education and put this thing
together and took over the workshop and it became something very meaningful. But this is an example of being placed in
that position to do things that a so-called star is supposed to do and not knowing what
to do because you just haven't had the experience. I'm sure by now Roy knows how to program better,
and I do feel that he can do workshops better. But that being the first, that was a problem. MR: You've had a lot of other things you've
done with business administration and Collective Black Artists. What kind of led you down that path? JO: Just being a jazz musician. Being a jazz musician and noticing what was
happening to those around me. Not being so isolated in my situation that
I was the only thing that existed. That I started to notice what was happening
to other musicians and a few of us were like that. And we came together and formed this organization
called the Collective Black Artists to try to help the musicians who were around us change
their destiny a little bit. To become more in control of their destiny. And one thing led to the other. As I had mentioned earlier, you know, mentors
like Donald Byrd and Randy Weston helped me to understand the business side of music and
speaking after getting to know these men as musicians, and speaking with people like Horace
Silver and Benny Golson and Quincy Jones, they taught me more. Because I was always very inquisitive. J.J. Johnson remembers me as that little kid
that was around reading Hindemuth books, and he said, "What's that you're reading." I said, "This book here." He said, "Paul Hindemuth, man, that's the
stuff that I'm into now." And I was reading this stuff early. I was always there and I was always asking
questions trying to get answers. So that led me to want to help musicians understand
the industry that they were in. So in 1969 I started a course called the business
aspects of the music industry, where I taught, as part of the Institute of Education that
the Collective Black Artists formed, to teach this course to aspiring professionals and
professionals. And that's how I got more and more into this
stuff, just relating what I was fortunate enough to be told and taught by those that
came before me. MR: Great. Passing it on. Excellent. Here's kind of a tricky question sometimes. When you're improvising on a particular tune,
is it possible to put into words what goes through your head? JO: Yeah it's possible. The thing that's going through my head most
of the time is what it is I want to create. And this is one of the things that I teach,
that all of the technical end of the music should be in your subconscious mind, should
have been learned to such an extent that it is in your subconscious mind, allowing your
conscious mind just to deal with that process of creativity at that moment. And whatever song you're playing, you should
know it well enough that you don't have to think about, oh this is a D minor seven going
to a E half diminished seven, going to A seven. You don't have to think about that. That is in your subconscious allowing you
just to create. Because that's the way the masters did it
all along. Art Tatum was not thinking of this one chord
when he was playing. He'd worked through all of that so he could
create a line. John Coltrane. Sonny Rollins. They're not thinking of that kind of stuff. They are able to divorce themselves from that
and go right ahead with the creative process. That's basically what is in my mind with the
creative process. MR: Wow. What's on your plate these days? JO: Well I've been a band leader since 1969. I haven't been leading a band now for about
seven, eight years. I've been doing projects, the kind of projects
I like, along with other people. I stopped leading the band because I was just
tired. From 1976 to about 1981, I was very busy with
my band, performing in some of the most unknown places of the world where jazz has never been
live. I did concerts in places like Nicaragua and
El Salvador and Valise and Honduras and Senegal and Khartoum and the Middle East. Some of these were for State Department tours. What I'm doing now is setting up different
kinds of projects. I do college concerts with schools and bands,
trying to get them to hire me all the time to come in with my music, to do workshops. As a matter of fact Hamilton College should
be hiring me at some point to come there and do some workshops and concerts with their
band, playing my music, playing music of the masters that I've arranged, music that I've
collected over the years, original arrangements that I own by Benny Golson, by Dizzy Gillespie,
that kind of stuff. I just finished a - I did a concert this New
Year's Eve 2001 in Italy. I wrote some music for a dance company and
they performed in the piazza. It stopped raining at 10:00 and I started
at 11. And it didn't rain any more that night. It started to rain about 7:00 in the morning. And me and my wife were there from the 23rd
of December to the 4th of January. It rained every day in Rome. Every day. And I'm not talking about drizzle, I'm talking
about hard, hard rain. It was so shocking that the people in Rome
were shocked about the Tiber River because it had risen so high, they had never seen
it that high. I'm not doing any recording right now but
I have done some recordings in the last number of years, but very little really, compared
to what I used to do. I have no record company and it seems like
there's no record company that's interested in Jimmy Owens. I mean they sign the twenty year olds, the
twenty-five year olds, and they've forgotten about what I call the jazz in the middle ages. Those middle age musicians who are at the
peak of their skill level. But the industry doesn't want to deal with
them for some reason. MR: You're not the first person who I've heard
say that actually. JO: Yeah, I coined that whole concept of jazz
in the middle ages. MR: Jazz in the middle ages. JO: And I remember a number of years ago there
was an article written in the New York Times I think it was '88 or something, it talked
about that. And at first people thought it was a joke,
but they saw the seriousness of what I was speaking about and how these various musicians
have been overlooked. People just didn't think about them being
overlooked because they were still, in their mind, not that they were seeing them on television
or hearing them all the time on radio, but it was in their mind. Well Jimmy Heath exists you know? And this person exists you know. Now I've moved into that period in the middle
ages and I'm seeing it happening to me and those around me. Some of the most important thing is to keep
your spirits up and do the projects. I stay rather busy doing the kinds of things
I like to do. And that's what's most important. MR: Well this has really been a fascinating
conversation. Is there anything that perhaps I didn't ask
you that you'd like to- JO: Well there is one thing I would like to
speak about, I mean all of the people that I performed with over the years, we mentioned
some of them and then people like Max Roach and Art Blakey, Billy Taylor, working with
Duke Ellington and Count Basie. All of that has been a very important part
of my performing career. We talked about the Collective Black Artists,
well that existed from 1969 to about 1978. For the last eleven years I've been involved
in an organization called the Jazz Foundation of America and our program is called the Jazz
Musician Emergency Fund. We help jazz artists who are in need. The need could be a financial need, a medical
need, career development problem or substance abuse problem. We have a few hospitals that we're affiliated
with where we get free hospital services for those musicians, most of them who don't have
health insurance. And this has been very rewarding. We help musicians in all walks of life. And we've been doing this for ten years with
this program, the Jazz Musician Emergency Fund, all over the United States. And we've helped many, many jazz artists. And we've had a lot of help also, but getting
more help as time goes on. Every now and then you may pick up Playboy
magazine, in this February issue of Playboy they run the advertisement quite often, near
the back of the magazine after all of the pictures, there is an ad that talks about
the Jazz Foundation of America and the Jazz Musician Emergency Fund. And we usually get some donations from that. We've gotten grants and we're working on trying
to get more of the music industry to help the jazz musician communicate. There is an organization called Music Cares
that helps the music community and the record is all in there and Music Cares has millions
of dollars. Well the Jazz Foundation doesn't have millions
of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And we're trying to get to that point, to
help more of the jazz musician community. So that's been a very important part of my
life, service things have been coming into the picture in the last number of years. I got very involved with the musician's union
in helping them organize their Jazz Advisory Committee to help jazz artists get things
like benefits. So that takes up some of my time, and I am
trying my best not to let it take up any more, because I still need to sit down and practice. I still need to go out and play concerts all
over the world for my spirit. So those are some of the things that I'm involved
in. I love it all. I love being a musician and I speak with many
friends in other fields, I have a filmmaker friend who is Tunisian, who lives in Tunisia
and who lives in Paris also, and we've spoken many times how lucky we are that we're doing
what we want to do, and people are accepting what we want to do, they love what we want
to do, and they even pay us for what we want to do. MR: Well on that note, it's a good summation
of a lot of things. JO: Thank you for inviting me. MR: It's been very, very enjoyable for me. So I appreciate your time, and wish you the
best of luck with all of your projects. JO: Thank you very much.
