Joe LaBarbera Interview by Monk Rowe - 7/15/2021 - Zoom

my name is monk grow for the phillies jazz archive at hamilton college i'm very pleased to have joe la barbara with me i'll introduce you as a drummer composer jazz educator well we're going to talk about that um i see you look like if you you've survived the uh the covid time intact how did you keep busy well that was my actually my final semester at cal arts i retired just at the end of the spring semester in the at the end of june after 28 years so i was doing that here and i still i have a a handful of private students as well and then my wife was busy with her job in the office you know one room down so we had to go i had to negotiate you know when i could crash and bang and you know when she needed when she needed silence for uh important meetings so but it worked out i mean honestly for us we thrived we were together every day all day three meals a day we haven't had that in in our 26 years of marriage yeah funny how things work out i want to uh offer up a quote from an earlier interview you did um it said and you said from the age of 12 on my course was set i knew it was something that i wanted to do and i was not going to be talked out of it i think you have to have that attitude if you're going to survive in this business meaning the music business do you try to pass that on to your your students or people that think that this is a glamorous life and boy i sure want to do that absolutely i mean that's part of being a mentor when you have a student and you are you are designated as their your mentor as we are at cal arts it's important that you're telling them the truth about what and about the realities of being a jazz musician so you have to be willing to accept just the just the maybe the thank you just the reward that the music brings you and then hopefully if you're working at it hard enough then financial benefits will flow from that right if you're getting into this and i've had students that were focused mainly on celebrity more than the music itself that's the wrong that really is the wrong motivation your motivation when you were um nine or ten was jump started by your father and and your brothers um did your father try to instill some of that reality in you or was it sort of like a just a way for the family to be together i think it was more of that because we as a family did everything together we were all in music together we were all in scouting together and because of that involvement pat john and i are all legal scouts because my parents were involved in everything that we do right so i believe it was more about the family community the family commitment and also at that age uh you know someone might say i want to be the president or a fireman or whatever you know and of course you know you're allowed to to say that but as they got closer to the reality of going into the music as a profession i think that's when our parents started to become a little more concerned but they never ever tried to deter us they never said anything about you know don't do this they just said it's going to be difficult and pop for sure knew about the realities of the music business as a profession had he tried it he tried it on you know to the extent that you could in the community we're from which is 4 500 people still you know he wasn't going to make a living from it but it was always his advocation and he always led bands and he knew what what what musicians were going through that were trying to you know carve out an existence just playing music impossible in that area yeah so when you were 10 uh or in that age if your friends said come on joey we got it we got a team together we're going to play baseball and you said oh man i got a gig did you actually say gig at the time or what did you say no we called them jobs that was a it was a it was a dance job you know and at 10 years old i may have been more inclined to go with the with the guys to play you know but by the time i was 12 then the music had really captivated all three of us we were just completely in love with jazz so that was our total focus from that point forward when he uh he had stock arrangements for a lot of the things that you did were there drum parts and were you expected to follow them uh no i mean there were drum parts monk but if you look at any of those stocks from the from the 30s the drum the drum part really the what's designated for playing time is basically four quarter notes connected by rolls and four beats on the bass drum you know that's kind of a of a ballpark approximation of uh of what uh you know baby dodge would have played or or any of the early drummers you know that kind of real no nothing on the ride symbol there was no ride symbol it was all about playing the time on the snare drum so i started out playing in that style of baby dots what if someone uh wanted to do a rumba would your father have um vocalized the beat to you yes he would have sung it to me play it like this and then i would i would do my best to imitate it okay and the drums wasn't the only part of your musical education am i correct like you played a clarinet and sax a bit that's correct i started drums at five and then by the time i was seven i think or eight my embouchure had fully formed so i could i took up the clarinet and then that was followed by the saxophone and i played that all through high school i see i think that must have paid some dividends down the road when you decided did you want to compose also it also get that's true i didn't mean to interrupt you it also paid the most dividend when i was starting to improvise with other musicians and i had that melodic sense kind of ingrained into my into my head about what music is supposed to sound like you know i could i could almost visualize the perspective of the saxophone player as that person would relate to the drummer you know i've picked up uh i our viewers should know that i have also met with your two brothers so a few little anecdotes i understand that the band and steve gad auditioned for the mickey mouse club that's right and and he beat you all is that correct that is correct hey listen if you're going to lose to somebody it might as well be somebody great you know uh is it true that you had to start taking tap dance lessons after that because steve tap danced yep yeah but then you replaced him in 1968 with gapman joan yes i took his place when he enlisted in the army i i took that gig which only lasted a matter of months because i was drafted very quickly this was 1968 right but uh got through my military service uh fortunately and uh came home and went back with uh with gap and then went out with woody's i was curious about that if you got drafted or if you had enlisted and um gee at that time how were you able to get out in two years with a lot of lobbying i mean fortunately this is this is kind of an interesting story you you arrive at the induction center in the in the dark of night so you don't know where you are you're completely disoriented they stick you in a barracks but as luck would have it the band that i would eventually be stationed in was in the induction center so i hear i hear guys playing so i immediately like snuck out of the barracks went over and started jamming with these guys and put myself on their radar from day one so all the way through basic training i was going over there playing with these guys you know ingratiating myself as much as i could and uh by the time uh we were we were given our orders after basic training mine was to go to the 173rd army band in the induction center and that's where i stayed for the next two years i can add that to uh quite a few stories we've heard from musicians who made their way through the military and sometimes escaped combat because that they were able to play and and be versatile you know i go back to my father about this because he talks generations of uh young boys in my hometown starting in with the 30s and i cannot tell you how many of these grown-ups would come to us later when we would meet them and they say your father saved my life during world war ii because i was able to get into a band here or there or wherever so i was extremely fortunate did your parents live long enough to uh witness the success of all three of you in the music business absolutely my father used to take great pride in telling woody herman that he was the real joel a barbara [Laughter] or he would or the original excuse me the original joella barber yeah my parents met woody they met buddy i don't know they never met bill because we were in new york and my parents weren't traveling to new york at the time mostly uh i'm pretty sure they met elvin pat would have spoken to that door but yeah they met all all the bands everybody knew them i mean i i'm sure pat or john must have said that after one of the gigs in rochester the entire buddy rich band bus pulled up in front of our parents home at three o'clock in the morning and my mother got out of bed and started cooking and my father brings out the wine the homemade wine and they partied until dawn and then they all clam climbed on the bus and off they went my family passed through mount morris numerous times on the way to angelica new york oh i know where that is sure they where they grew up so i was living we were in rochester so i never knew that i was traveling through a town that had a famous band did the idea of pursuing a music career necessarily include college uh i think the college aspect of it was simply the uh the road that everyone was taking you know all of my classmates were going on to college pat and john had previously uh enrolled in state university of new york at potsdam and they both pat transferred out of there and went to berkeley college in boston so yes i think it was it was simply that i was following my brothers once again whatever path they were taking i was gonna take it and i'm pretty sure i knew at least enough that to know that i didn't know much and i needed more you know that's a good thing to know yeah um the idea of going to school and sort of jocking in position with the other drummers and where did you fall in that hierarchy pretty good actually right away i mean harvey mason and i were uh he was a year ahead of me but we were we were the two guys basically from from our generation the real guy was peter donald who was three years our senior at that point so he was getting ready to graduate when when i got to berkeley but uh i i you know i was known right away because i could play a little bit you know i could i could play pretty good time and i knew tunes so yeah that's really all it was about and then i wanted to play all the time as did everyone else so did the music of the pop world have much influence on your listening habits or did you feel desire to get into i'll call it rock music no not at all it just you know it i we heard bill evans and miles and coltrane when we were in our early teens i mean that just captivated us how could we com how could we compare that with what was being played on the radio at that time we're talking 1960 now you know there really is no comparison i have grown to love the pop music from that era now i listen to it now i'm playing catch up with that and i'm really enjoying it at the time monk i had no use for it whatsoever when you were listening to bill evans and cannonball and all that did you sense the song form and what the band was doing to make a seven minute performance into a cohesive listenable piece of music not that early on all i know is that we were completely engaged from the the second that needle hit the the grooves of the lp until the side was over it's just like that music completely captivated us and drew us in and didn't release us until it was finished okay i'm getting a picture in my head of the three of you in one of your bedrooms you know with that lp going and like oh listen to that listen to that oh close it was in the basement or it was in the kitchen it was a portable job you know real small one and a half watts of power and we would take that everywhere so we would be listening in the basement constantly and then we take it upstairs and play it during dinner and our our parents would just fine you know my father started singing along with jerry mulligan after a while you know i guess he was the first joel of barbara he was so uh woody herman uh was who was on the band at that time that showed you the ropes that sort of jazz education that you can't get in school yeah let's see alan broadbent who had been a uh a classmate although we didn't really engage that much at berkeley but he was there when i was there he was on the band he helped me um sal mistico was still on the band and sal was someone that we really admired coming from western new york he was from syracuse he was there uh frank tiberi who was with the band probably the longest of anybody he was still there in the sac section and he he always had advice for every drummer and so yeah he was all of those all those guys would would share their knowledge that band in particular had more more uh older musicians on it you know that it was probably 50 50 experienced players and guys just out of college or just out of the army or you know just getting started what might you have done that woody herman would not like as a drummer uh well if if you weren't listening if you weren't paying attention if you weren't swinging the band you were out of there i mean woody was notorious he would walk right over to to where you're sitting and point to bill byrne who was the band manager right behind you and say get me another drummer for tomorrow night i mean he was that he could be that cold if it wasn't happening he wasn't going to waste any time you know it's interesting you say that about concentration because that's not necessarily a given with musicians um you're playing along and you're thinking about man i got to get to a laundromat or i haven't sent my rent check home and that's not a good thing you know that's something that uh bill evans addressed pretty thoroughly in that uh creative process video he did years ago with his brother harry and it's something that that i discuss also in in the book it's about bill used to say i flip a switch and then all of my concentration is focused on whatever i'm doing right then and there and nothing gets in the way i know exactly what you're talking about thinking ahead about you know what am i going to have for dinner did i take out the trash i mean blah blah blah if you allow it you could be bombarded with the external uh input of things that don't relate to the music or with the task at hand you know so that's something that musicians you really have to train yourself for that was their music uh this is sort of a similar question about when you were in the family band was there drum music for most of woody's charts there absolutely was but like most of my predecessors from that era and even even drummers that followed me we learned woody's book from listening to jake hanna play it you know on all of those woody 63 and there's like three albums i think that they did around that time where jake just kills it and we listen to them so many times that i know jeff hamilton says the same thing we knew that book called before we even walked on uh you know into the gig how did you adapt to uh living on a bus i loved it you know 21 years old i'm out with a band that i l i've loved since i was a kid i've got you know heroes on that band frank of vicari who was i knew from maynard's band and bobby burgess and al porcino and salnistico you know and woody you know so i loved i didn't mind it at all at first at first yeah well come on think about it you're on a bus with 16 other guys day in and day out night after night you know you start to rub on each other a little bit sure and i've looked at itineraries for bands and it's fascinating how one night you can be playing like a dance at a vfw the next night you're playing a jazz festival with you know like the ups and downs of the life are very fascinating it points to the economics of running a big band i remember i always tell my jazz history students duke ellington received the presidential president uh medal of uh freedom from richard nixon and then the next night he was playing a high school prom in a local dc area high school gymnasium that tells the whole story right there if my math is correct there was only about seven years between woody herman and bill evans is that correct yeah that's about right do you think you could have handled the gig with bill evans if you were 21 like when you joined woody herman i don't think so but i don't know i don't know the answer to that honestly there are days when i think that i'm i might just now be qualified to take that gig with bill honestly man i mean you go through all of this all of these periods of growth and self-examination and self-editing and all all of the you know a lot of other things but fortunately it came at a time i think when i'd had enough experience under my belt to be able to to walk in there feeling confident that i could do the job can you expand on self editing what we play as musicians you know we're we're the most self-critical people there are we're listening to ourselves play and if you're if you're doing a recording and you're hearing the recording played back you say to yourself oh man i i've played that idea so many times i got to get that out of my vocabulary i'm just i'm that's done for now you know things like that you know or if you find an obvious flaw in what you're doing now you've got you're constantly examining yourself were the the people you played the leaders would they tell you would they give you guidance would they like chew you out or was it sort of like uh apparently count basie wouldn't say anything unless he was really unhappy so i'm just wondering did you ever be like look for guidance or almost welcome it and not get it i don't know that i ever actually asked anybody but i i was fortunate in that you know woody's band chuck's band chuck man johnny's band uh bill evans and all the different side men all the different leaders that i worked for in new york they really hired you hired you for you so they allowed you to learn or they allowed your input they wanted you to interpret the music the way you heard it i i love the music of chuck man joan and i actually uh full disclosure i i asked a gap i said well what are some things i should know about joe and he said nice things rest assured he he sent me a link to a really nice video of of the group uh when you were in a 1980 live at monterey and there's a full tune on there it's fairly lengthy and you have an extended drum solo on it and i was i noticed that you started just on the snare drum and uh you started this this pretty like in intricate rhythm and then you you picked it up and you moved it over around and earlier when you were talking about listening to horn players compositionally it sort of connects with that drum solo so is there a question here mike my question is when you have a drum solo are you trying to think compositionally absolutely in fact when i'm accompanying i try to think compositionally i look at the i look at the big picture in music always so from the minute that tune is counted off i'm tracking the the growth the dynamic ups and downs uh how much i'm adding if i can maybe dial it back i'm i'm watching all of that i'm trying to observe the music i know that's that's something a cliche almost that people say all the time but it's so it's such a a good way to think about it you know if you're really focused on the music and not your part so much then i think you're gonna get a better result and i can say emphatically that bill evans was that way even though he was a a giant and a major star the music was always the most important thing he never put himself above what we were doing musically yeah i believe you you said uh he had no ego when when he was playing correct that is correct yeah well he had nice things to say about you um that you were willing to pay you were willing to make the concessions of dues toward the end of playing quality music yeah that meant a lot to him it's with bill it was always about commitment he used to say you know talent is cheap what really is required is the willingness to be dedicated to this and to stick with it you know to really invest yourself into into the music to make you know this is not something you do lightheartedly this gets back to what you were asking me initially about my students and do i actually say to them the the reality of what it's going to be like to be a jazz musician bill knew that only too well man i mean this is a man who who could have done anything with music and uh in fact he he mentioned this in an interview where he got to new york in 55 and sometime between 55 and 56 he was approached by tony martin you remember that name tony martin the singer okay good you're old enough i can talk to you now that's good so tony martin now we're talking 1955 dollars here tony martin offered him 25 000 a year for a 17-week commitment annually and bill said it took him all the 10 seconds to turn it down because he realized that if he took that job it was gonna it was gonna take him in another direction it was gonna distract him from being a jazz musician now having said that he was perfectly willing to go out and play bar mitzvahs weddings you name it like all of us when you when you first hit the scene because that's part of the dues that you pay but that you take that in stride and it's not something that's going to just occupy so much of your time your focus is still completely on the music so bill was committed to playing jazz and being a jazz musician and that you can't stress that strongly enough to young people that want to be in in jazz at the same time you have to pay the rent so you know don't you can't really afford to have an attitude like you know i'm not going to play that club date oh no you got to take it all man i mean even when i was playing with bill i was working with a wedding band on weekends when we were off you know in the upstate area had to make some money did you save your calendars from from those days i've got a couple of itineraries yeah yeah yeah sometimes you you open up and you look back like oh i remember that gig i remember that club and i remember that road you know how tough it's funny what we remember about gigs sometimes it's not the music sometimes how many stairs do i have to go up well as you mentioned previously my woody herman itinerary i still got a few of those and they are packed i mean it's day in and day out i mean you had to do that in order to just pay for the ban and pay for the bus you had to work every day uh back to drum solos for a moment do you prefer to play a drum solo over like a bass vamp or are you more comfortable if it's just like it's just the drummer i don't mind a vamp i mean for me and this is what i've always taught to my students it's all about the connection with the song form whatever whatever that song form is i'm much more at home if i'm playing over a form a standard tune or original tune i want something to work with because everyone else is using it has something to work with if you do that long enough then playing over an open vamp with it with a bass ostinato or not is easier because you know you can use your own imagination to create create the arc you want you want to express but i like playing over form about a year ago i interviewed a really fine bass player and he he got on the thing about how come when it's time for the base solo everybody stops and i get nothing as far as accompaniment do you have a decision to make when it's a base solo like should i help him out here what should i do absolutely i do you know that's another thing that i've always taught my my drummers the ability to practice the ability to control your ideas at a low volume so that you can be an effective accompanist for a base solo basis don't want to hear rick tick tick tick tick tick on closed hi-hat forget it you might as well not play what they want is for you to engage with them rhythmically but unobtrusively so as long as you keep that the the volume of the bass and the register of the bass primary in your in your sights then you can start to gauge the kind of accompaniment that you can fill in underneath the when and how and the what you know to make it to help that soloist you know play the best solo they can and this is what what you should be doing for every soloist in the band in today's well generally who do you think is the main time keeper in a in a combo i've always felt that there was everybody's responsibility to play the time the musicians that i grew up with and that i grew up listening to my brothers and i will say the same thing we would go to rochester and hear joe romano and chuck mangione and don menza those those guys could stand on the stage and play without anybody and you feel that time you know rock solid so that's what i expect from all musicians they don't have to play it exactly the same feel that i that maybe i'm used to but as long as they're playing with a consistent time that everyone can relate to then we all have we all have a starting point we all have a place where we can start to communicate and it can really get interesting this may expose my musical tastes but it seems like i've hear a lot of contemporary groups now where most people are playing playing with the time instead of playing the time and i wonder if if you've noticed that kind of thing maybe in a different fashion but it almost feels like they're avoiding being too obvious you might have a valid point there monk i haven't really uh thought about that too much i mean i know musicians like a joe lovano for example joe plays with the time in a way that makes it very very very fun to play along with he'll sit back on the time you know he's not trying to like put it you know in a metric grid he's playing around with the timing you know it's if if you need a a a comparison for this the way basie's band sits back on the beat right so bud shank played like that i played a lot with butch he would he would play back on the time and really like it was almost like he was suspended above a solid rhythmic field he didn't want you to go back there with him he wanted you to play a pulse that he could he could work with you know right over the top of that but he was definitely working with you yeah right imagine trying to fall back with like billie holiday or something you would you know believe it or not the the person who threw people the most and was the probably the most rhythmically uh hip was anita o'day i've never heard anybody that could back phrase like that and be exactly on the money i i think i worked with her when she was in her late 80s and she could swing you right off the bandstand man what um inspired your move to the west coast it really had to do with family uh considerations back then you know i was married at the time to someone whose family was living in phoenix arizona they were getting older and she wanted to be closer to her parents so i agreed to move to move west i wanted to be in los angeles you know and our marriage started to fall apart for other reasons at the time so in an attempt to not be too far away from my daughter who was five at the time i decided i'll go to los angeles and see if i can make a go of it there and that was probably the best decision i ever made can you describe for me i'm totally fascinated by the the life of the studio musician and the you know the starting from the phone call where that comes from be it x studio at this time and how much you know about the music and what is the expectation of the producer and all that stuff that's a long question it's a long question and unfortunately you're asking the wrong guy monk because i'm not a studio musician i never have been i mean i made the mistake early on when we got to tom uh my wife and i and i'm remarried we've been together now for 26 years and we have a hard and fast rule of a vacation every year and one year one of the one of the big film composers in los angeles put out the call to me for a session you know it goes through a service so i'm talking to the to the person at the services she's saying you know uh so and so watch it for uh you know two days double scale blah blah blah and i and i said oh gee tell them thanks so much but you know i'm i'm not available we're going on vacation and she was stunned i mean she was literally like do you realize she said you realize who this is i said yeah but you know we've got our tickets booked we're gone you know so that pretty much ended that any aspects but i never really had a desire to do that i came out here to play the music which might seem insane at the time but i realized that for for decades there have been great jazz musicians on the west coast my brothers and i grew up listening to all of the cats out here our pepper bud shank bill perkins you know teddy edwards you name it you know so i knew there was a senior it just wasn't maybe uh maybe as viable as new york city but it's grown a lot over the years did you play a role in finding your own gigs for the music yes you basically have to pound on doors you know make your presence known call club owners if you start to work in these clubs and you know people started to call me i started to work in town with people that were more well known in town so gradually your reputation grows and then you can start to hit up a club owners that you know want to bring my own band in and if you're lucky it'll happen and i was lucky again did you uh play your share of uh quote exposure gigs uh i suppose so i mean uh you've got to give it away sometimes just to just to be seen or heard and as long as you don't overdo it but when you're a local player even in a city like new york or los angeles you'll be quickly become a local musician and along with that with that visibility is the is the the understanding that now you're going to work for what everybody else works for in town and that's something that we had to work at making an adjustment so what what uh jillian and i decided was that i was going to for quite a while stop working the local gigs and just focus on the touring because we realized i could go away for for three weeks you know come back with enough money to cover like a half a year's worth of in-town gigs that's really interesting so you have to go away from home to be able to stay home later i suppose and also also to be able to have some bargaining power for the cost of your services so let's talk about uh jazz compass for a bit um there was an interesting statement i read that you got aggravated that your projects were falling on deaf ears with most of the record companies so and and there's a quote here from about the label to provide the serious listener with outstanding improvisational music without compromise what would be the compromise if if you were with any number of labels plenty trust me you know when you when you sign on with a with a major label they want to have a lot of input into what you're going to put out and that was one of the things that bill was always concerned about if he was going to sign with a label he had to have complete control over the content but i don't even think it ever got to those discussion points but you could actually be you could actually be required to play songs you don't want to play necessarily you know maybe play things in a style that is more popular that you don't necessarily want to play there are a number of ways in which you would have to compromise to to satisfy some producers it you just gave me a flashback um i was privileged to do a session with james moody years ago and i happened to have his most recent cd with me which was uh you know tribute to henry mancini so i told him how much i enjoyed it and he was like yeah but that's not what i wanted to do james moody yeah i've heard tell that uh john coltrane didn't necessarily want to make the ballast album but i'm so glad that bob thiel was able to talk him into it because this is our favorite listening record around here yes so as a as a composer i see a piano behind you um where do your compositional ideas start they come from anywhere you know uh i don't know how familiar you are with any of my records but native land for example um on that one i've i've got i think five originals and uh there's a tune called sixth sense which is actually in 5 4 but the melody is a subdivision of seven over five so that all that came to mind when i was practicing something at the drum set i'm playing two with my bass drum three with my hi-hat and and seven or five on the snare drum and i'm hearing all of this stuff just layering very nicely and i thought you know there's a possibility for a tune in here so i started to hear something then on my first record message from art which is a dedication to art blahey that came to me like bam as i was driving on the freeway and i mean it was like it came in fully composed and by the time i got home i was able to write it out yeah don't even i don't know how it's just the way it is you know i could picture that like don't talk to me for a minute i got to get this i got to get this down or i'm going to lose it yeah exactly uh the tomb kind of build that's on that same album i worked on that for almost 10 years i mean that was a struggle a struggle but i finally got that thing working at it um sitting at the piano yes oh absolutely that was a total piano tune had to be bill evans wow that's fascinating what is the um music business now uh for you and what is your observation on what has happened to the music business in the last 10 years oh man it's been in such a state of flux you know with the with the advent of streaming and uh cds are now not a viable way to go realistically you know it's really made it more difficult for for a young person who wants to get started in jazz to get their foot in the door you know the gigs of course are catch as catch can um and but at least it used to be possible on a gig if you had a cd you could sell it you know but these opportunities are disappearing i feel fortunate that i'm at the kind of the back end of this thing because i stopped touring in 2018 i just said i'm not going on the road anymore so what i'm doing now is just playing in town with with musicians that i want to play with my own band and some younger musicians that i would like to help you know get get their name out there a little bit more that's my focus but that's a that's a a luxurious uh position to be in because you know i've already been there done that i i'm i worry about my my students that are stirring starting out now but the fact is that i've always said this and i believe it sincerely this music will always survive because it's just too strong of an art form it's too strong of a concept and there are just so many people young and old that want to be involved with it have you been overseas um on tours playing jazz oh for years i mean that's what i when i said going on tour you know in the last 20 26 years i was going to japan europe new zealand annually i was going all over the place was there a noticeable difference in the audience reaction [Music] in general oh i think in a city like new york or los angeles you know it's it's possible to uh to encounter an audience that might be a little more blase but i have never experienced that the audiences here are great people really want to want to want to hear the music they want to be a part of the music overseas obviously if you're someone coming from out of the out of the country to visit and as someone that they all know from a record or or a video or something that might add a little more uh draw power or maybe a little more celebrity to what you're doing but i find i find jazz audiences to be pretty universal let's pretend you're at a cocktail party and uh you get in a conversation with a person you don't know and they don't know who you are so if they ask you what what you do what's the first thing you you say i say i'm a jazz drummer and then they say oh yes jazz well i like it until they start doing that stuff and then i don't what what the heck are they doing how do they know when to stop and start i mean do you try to answer or just go get another drink it depends on i mean if if the person strikes me as someone that is actually being sincere i'll spend some time and talk to them in fact i really i really like hearing comments from people after gigs they'll come up and they'll start out by saying i don't know anything about jazz or this is the first time i've ever heard jazz but they'll give me their impressions and i say i would say nine times out of ten their impressions are pretty accurate all we all we need from a listener from an audience is a willingness to participate a willingness to sit there and actually do what we're doing which is to tune in exclusively to the music you know and just react to it what are you feeling i feel the same way when i go to a museum or an art gallery i don't know much about art but i can certainly have a reaction to what i'm seeing and i can certainly get it get a feeling from the music it really is all about feeling you can get a feeling from a painting you can get a feeling from music if you're willing to go there and let that happen then that's all i ask of you i totally agree i i used to work with elementary school teachers not music teachers and they would make comments about music that i never would have thought of that were so perceptive and not with the music language you know we're always we usually speak in the music language and they had these other words and i i said well i have to take note of that it's very informing yeah because at the end of the day it's really all about communication you might think you're hip you know you might think you've got the greatest stuff on the planet to offer but if you're not communicating with an audience then i think it's pointless you need to get your music across to people how do you teach that to students it really starts basic basically with um with it adherence to the song form so if you are connecting [Music] everything you do whether it's accompaniment or improvisation to a song form right away you've made a connection to everything that's going on now hopefully the band as a collective unit can get that point across to the listener that's that's as succinctly as i can put it because you know beyond that it's really just doing it over and over again until you start to feel like you are getting a reaction from an audience for the appropriate reason you know not because you played some blazingly fast single stroke role or you know you were going crazy all over the drum set the fact that that you did something that communicated with the audience and this gets back to those comments that i would uh get from lay people people would say you know i could really hear you trying to help that soloist that means more to me than any anything else someone could say excellent what's your feeling about um there's a large question the state of our country at the moment oh god look i know well at the moment i tend to be very optimistic but you and i both know that lying in the weeds is something very evil and something that if we're not mindful of is going to come right back and rear its ugly head and be right in our faces again so you know to that end we're doing what we can do to support the people that we feel are going to help take us in the right direction keep us in the right direction is there anything in particular either musically or in life in general that makes you angry angry well yes of course you know injustice makes me incredibly angry and to hear to hear lies being said over and over again and believed by 70 million how many people was it i don't want to i really hate to go there but the the number of people that are that are fooled by by the lies that are being told that makes me angry to see blatant disregard for rule of law that makes me very angry to see money being siphoned to the top exclusively you know and then to have to go outside and drive around and see homelessness in numbers that you can't even imagine staggering that makes me angry to realize that people are hungry that makes me angry we have so much wealth in this nation and the inequity of all of that it gets me going okay thanks for answering that have you ever had to let someone go a musician who made you angry about something made me angry about something well or or just um you know i've asked this question a number of times and i should say that most people say i've never fired anybody i just don't call them again have you ever been in that position certainly there are people that uh that maybe uh you prefer to work with so that will be the person you call for a job now if it's something that you've worked with over and over and over again like to say they've been in your band for years and you decide to part ways then there has to be a really good reason and really the number one reason for that is simply if that person is becoming a problem if that person is disruptive you know if that person is not contributing to the music because they're constantly undermining maybe your decision about something or just carping on about whatever comes to mind a person like that can be uh can be a cancer in a band i've never experienced that unfortunately okay well um there's an opportunity to to talk about your upcoming book for a moment what made you decide to do it and uh what can we expect to to learn about bill evans you don't have to give away all your good stuff but oh that's okay i don't mind sharing a couple things but the reason i wanted to do it is because these stories were fresh in my mind starting in you know 1980 after he passed away and i just kept re-experiencing them and mulling them over so sometime in the in the 90s i started to write them down and then they were just kind of compiling i would have different episodes of things you know and when i had enough material together uh i reached out to one of my former graduate students who is older charles levin and charles for 25 years was a newspaper journalist so he had experience in the in the field of writing and uh we started working on this together and it started to really take shape and so uh now we're at a point where it's really uh i think it's it's going to be something worth worthwhile for people to read there's a lot of anecdotes about bill that i share from my personal experience with him because i actually spent time living with him in his apartment from time to time you know and we were on the road a lot of things that i had seen and also we were able to track down witnesses you know people that were actually there when i when i describe an event for example i'll give you an example here's one here's one that i don't mind sharing because it's with a buddy of mine peter erskine so when i was on woody's band in 1972 we played the newport jazz festival in new york it was uh called reunion at newport alan broadbent had written a featured tune for with that title and it was featuring stan gats and alcone and suit sims and chubby jackson uh i think was reading over there i can't remember a number of people that were in woody's fans over the years right so that was our segment i went backstage and i see this this skinny kid with long hair he's 19 years old and uh we meet and it's he's it's peter erskine and i say what are you doing he says uh this is i'm playing with stan canton i said well how long you been with the pain he said tonight's my first night so so what happened with peter was he had been hired to play with june christie nobody knew who he was not even the guys in kenton's band right so peter shows up long hair nobody knows him his sight reads all the june stuff perfectly they do the gig he does a fantastic job and and right after the gig stan says you know have your bags packed tomorrow morning you know meet us meet us in front of this hotel so that was that was actually a fun recollection i was able to get peter to to describe it from his perspective and uh he did a great job that's that's interesting almost like a reporter who needs to get confirmation about their their stories yeah well that was that is one of charles's strengths because he's very good at investigative journalism he's very good at tracking people down and he's very good at conducting the interviews and getting the correct information for what we need what's in the near future for you um john tells me that he's got a recording coming up i believe hopefully that's going to happen because i love playing john's music you know john is an interesting study monk because when we were kids he was always reading and somewhere between popular science popular mechanics and sherlock holmes this is where john's whole writing concept was formed and it's it's amazing plus a love for for all the same music that uh that we grew up listening to there's a really enjoyable video of one of his pieces and the recording and i think you're in a room by yourself with headphones on does that so take some getting used to oh sure it does especially with a big band you know you're used to being in there and everybody feels everybody you know you really want you really want the band to feel what you're doing it's just not practical anymore fortunately you get a there's lots of we have a great engineer out here and there's lots lots of great engineers but the one we work with tally sherwood he he has the ability of making it sound as if you're in the same room together that's that's crucial oh that's a talent yeah but you know to answer your question which is what's on the horizon i'm actually getting ready in uh next weekend with the queen my quintet is doing a live album recording at a club called sam first sam first is inaugurating with this project their own record label sam first records so um we're going to be their first project so i'm excited about that i'm writing for that and uh bill conniff is writing for that so uh the band's excited about getting together and just playing again it's been so long so that's on the horizon that's coming right up okay back uh we'll we'll wrap up shortly uh the guy at the cocktail party wait a minute where's my drink if i gotta talk to my guy he says oh what's the worst gig you ever played that's tough it is tough the worst gig i've ever played i was probably probably some club date that you know was just so aggravating from start to finish nothing really comes to mind monk you know i can tell you the most unusual gig that i ever played please do when i was with tony bennett we were we were scheduled to appear at a friars club roast here in uh in los angeles and uh we were on with uh doc severson's tonight show band so eddie shaughnessy you know and all the cats and us well around four o'clock that afternoon tragically ed shaughnessy's uh younger son was killed in a car accident so ed of course was not going to be available so they come looking for me at the last minute to go in and play with the tonight show band which i was more than willing to do but we couldn't find our tony bennett's road manager he had disappeared and he had my symbols and my stick bag and and eddie like he would like any drummer would do had his symbols and his stick bag with him so the only thing that was on the stage was ed's drum set which is massive and and hi-hat symbols so i ended up playing with the tonight show band for about 30 minutes maybe 40 minutes with two butter knives and i'm trying very carefully to not rake the heads you know with these two butter knives playing along with the band while we do our little you know our our set and then fortunately by the time it was tony set we'd track down the road manager and we got my drums my symbols and my sticks but here's i'm playing behind connie condoley and snooki young you know pete chrisley but i got two butter knives in my hand i can just see what happens when you're playing a ballad no joe brushes we want brushes good luck i don't know what i did honestly mike it's a long time ago but uh that's the oddest thing that's ever happened to me all right that that qualifies as is most unusual well i uh i really enjoyed our conversation today and um hope for the best for your new recording and for john's and i have to say that uh this is the the first trio of brothers i've been able to meet with and that reminds me of alvin hank and and thad and uh boy it's it's quite a legacy that i don't know how how much we can uh set all of this success on your father's lap but uh he did a good thing both my parents did or both our parents did and i have to say going through this music business with my brothers together has been the most fun that's what's made it the most fun we've been in this together from the beginning and still to this day you know that's the best part of it maybe i should get all three of you on a zoom and just let you go go at it telling stories oh you know we have a zoom every sunday morning and since you've done your interview with pat and i've watched it and john's watched it you know pat's revealed things to you that he never revealed to us so now we're starting to get the stories rolling you know on those zoom calls and it's it's really john had a had a lot of things to say last time that were that were very interesting so i'm even to this day i'm learning things about my own brothers that i didn't realize fantastic last question if you had a convention of drummers sitting around uh having a few drinks who do they talk about as the drummer of most distinction wow you know i'm going to take a stab here and just say most distinction probably if and it's my generation they're probably going to say elvin jones probably going to say elvin i mean it could be buddy rich who i admired greatly it could be tony williams but overall in terms of of shaping the sound and the feel of the drums and setting the course for the next generation and beyond elvin jones's impact is monumental i would i would venture to guess that it would be alvin well i saw him live once and he made an impact on me i mean he was fierce when he was playing and uh yeah talk about communication that was there you betcha yeah thanks a lot for your time today you're welcome it's been a pleasure speaking with you i knew it would be but uh thanks for the invitation and uh hope we see each other face to face soon okay see you on the flip side

Channel: Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College

Views: 447

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords: jazz history, jazz interviews, jazz video, Monk Rowe, jazz conversations, Bill Evans, Woody Herman, Tonight Show Band, Chuck Mangione, Mount Morris NY, jazz record labels, Elvin Jones, Peter Erskine

Id: o7bIAoUcfKo

Length: 65min 47sec (3947 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021