John Abercrombie Interview by Monk Rowe - 4/19/2001 - Clinton, NY

monk row and we're filming at hamilton college for the jazz archive i'm very pleased to have john abercrombie with me today nice to be here welcome to the college thanks looking forward to your performance tonight me too yeah it should be it should be really nice it's just a it's it's a trio tonight and which is how this band really started we started as a guitar organ in drums and we've added different instruments along the way but for this particular performance we're back to our sort of beginnings kind of which is nice almost eight years you guys have been yeah it's about that could could be even a little longer i'm not sure again time passes so quickly i'm not sure when the first uh thing was recorded but it was the first album where cd was a thing called while we're young on ecm and that was recorded after we had been playing some gigs together and we were starting and then there was a second one called speak of the devil a live record which i just listened to in the car coming up today i sort of wanted to remind myself what we sounded like as a trio and that's called tactics which was recorded live in new york and then there was a a uh an album called open land that came out about i guess about two years ago and they had joe lovano and mark feldman on violin and kenny wheeler so it was more like a project i'm glad you listened to that today because you anticipated one of my questions okay that was uh if you listen to a tape of tonight's performance whatever happens and then you listen to what you guys were doing seven or eight years ago how does it change um i think what changes for me is just that i mean as usually we're off all doing different things and then we come back together and i find it just either with this banner with other bands i think which i just hopefully you get better i i think it i find it my i'm able to uh my phrasing is a little different i have a little more control over what i do than i did when that album was recorded and if i listen to that album and go back to listen to something earlier i realized oh boy i had much more control when i recorded the live album so i think what happens is you just get you get the ability to at least i do to shape things as they're happening a little more you get a little more mature maybe you're not quite as wild and crazy you know but there's still that element in there too yeah you know you know that uh term wild has i've been reading some of your past interviews oh really does it crop up a lot or it does you talked about some of your you're playing especially in the fusion world and that you felt you were kind of wild and you actually said that your your timing suffered for it do you still feel that way i still feel it i think a certain kind of timing suffered by playing that music i think i gained something from it too but because most of but most of that music it was very um much harmonically it had no motion i mean it was mostly the the your solos were over one chord and maybe two if you really got lucky uh and all the rhythms were very sort of straight ahead almost rock rhythms you know they were they were what we would refer to as even eighth note rhythms or more latin style as opposed to jazz swing so i think what suffered was my my ability to play the jazz feeling the jazz time swing feel because i just hadn't been doing it i was playing this sort of even eighth note rock and roll and then also somewhere in between mahavishnu indian thing which is all very even oriented so the beats were always kind of evenly divided and the jazz of course is much looser yeah so i think what happened when i came back to try and play jazz is that's when i found my g my my time is really kind of odd you know i i play kind of speedy and nervous for jazz you know so i had to kind of re i re had to rethink things and re-uh examine how i wanted to play okay i want to take take you back a little bit you had some experience at berkeley would you be able to put a percentage of what you play now and attribute any of it to your quote formal education yeah i i think so i i don't know if i'd attribute it as much to the the actual uh education that i got from from specific teachers uh i think it was more just the experience of being in school playing and developing and being around teachers and other students and and if anything i would attribute certain things of course to the there's a couple of teachers that were very important to me herb pomeroy was one he was the he was a wonderful trumpet player but his main job at berkeley was to teach uh he taught arranging he taught advanced arranging which was sort of not really always in the style of duke ellington but that was his guy you know so he had loved duke and he kind of like wrote in that style and more more modern if you can do that because duke's stuff was was pretty modern and he also led the jazz workshops which were small ensembles of anywhere from like four to maybe six people it could be a couple of horns with a rhythm section my i was in one that was just guitar and saxophone piano bass and drums and it was wonderful because i i was a i had to function like a horn player yeah i had and i couldn't read with i was terrible i mean you know most guitar players will acknowledge that they it's a difficult instrument to read on so i remember when they would first write tunes on the board that the saxophone player could read quite well and i could read kind of i could kind of read notes i knew what the pictures were but i was terrible at reading rhythms i just didn't know how to do it so i would just i'd find the notes on the guitar and i would listen to the saxophone player like mad just to find out what would this okay you know i kind of listen and i get it a few times through yeah but i think i would have to attribute like a lot of things to to herb and his uh not just specific things but just his inspiration his uh his his confidence building he was a great uh you know he knew how to say things to you like that was very good you know or like avoid this constructive criticisms i think mostly i'd have to say herb and then my guitar instructor is a wonderful guy who still lives in florida named jack peterson and he was every week he would change his mind about what you should be learning because he was he was a new teacher the first year i went to berkeley was his first year teaching so and he was from texas so i you know i'd come in and he'd say remember what i showed you johnny you know that last week and i said yeah jack he said well forget about that now i want you to hear here's some bach violin concertos i want you to go home and learn this i said we learned this so and then next week for you know forget bach you know and then it was back to charlie christian or so he was always changing and he was just a good player that he was very inspiring so i think i remember those two teachers the most and then it was just the atmosphere of the school playing all the time and then one day you kind of just you play something and you feel a little more connected than you did you know you just sort of hear it a little better you say oh maybe maybe i can play music yeah in the beginning it's all like you know a lot of self-doubt you know more more than anything and i think it's just like gee do i sound good you know can i play you know what is this anyway and then one day you sort of cross into another area where you begin that your ears begin to open up and you get some confidence and i think that was came from being in school and playing with a lot of these people what kind of music was in your household when you were growing up as a kid i remember on the television distinctly i remember two things i remember uh lawrence welk was on the television and uh and then there was a lot of country music on television i remember at the time there was there was these these sort of country shows and there was like a young young girl i think their brother and sister they played like guitars and mandolins and they played double neck things like double mandolin on one and then six string on the other and they were like three feet high i mean these were kids and they were playing faster than the speed of light they're playing all these country rags so that but this wasn't music that my parents listened to my parents we didn't really have music in the house in terms of there was no you know it was a victrola i guess not a wind-up kind of you actually plugged it in and it went around so you didn't have to crank it up you know i'm not quite that old but so they bought me a record player i think the the the music came from outside the house you know because the only music in the house really was was lawrence and this country stuff and i knew pretty early on that lawrence wasn't for me i know something just didn't click i didn't get it you know i later learned to like champagne a little bit you know from the champagne ladies but i didn't really like in all the bubbles but i did right what about the rock and roll of the day the ventures and all that kind of that was influential for sure yeah i mean i think because i had chosen the guitar as an instrument i didn't choose it because of charlie christian or barney kessel or wes montgomery i chose it because of people like you're mentioning you know like chuck berry the ventures bo diddley elvis presley you know and all these kind of people so i chose it as a way to like maybe gain social acceptance you know plus i like the sound of the electric guitar and my first guitar was acoustic it was a harmony guitar with i mean i think it was forty dollars and this you could barely put the strings onto the fretboard i used it once as a baseball bat i remember i took it outside and said something throw me one you know and i cracked the guitar i always remember that this is a true story there's a true story i really i just like well i liked baseball too maybe i just got confused at one point as well is do i want to play baseball or guitar well let's use the guitar as a baseball bat then we've you can sort of do two things and but once i got an electric guitar i think that i was kind of like bitten by the sound there was something about this sound coming from the speaker more than an acoustic instrument it was just something really exciting and uh very electric about it was an electric guitar you know it was very cool and i i loved chuck berry and there was actually a singing duo at the time that i remember very distinctly called mickey and sylvia yeah lovely love is strange yeah love is strange was it was a a song that was very popular when i was growing up and you could hear it on the jukebox which is where i heard a lot of the music you know you've dropped a nickel into the slot you know and pressed the button and there it would come and one of these things was love is strange and they had these really hip sounding electric guitars with maybe tremolo or some kind of weird little effect on them you know at the time and it just and then i saw pictures of them and they were playing like sort of solid body les paul guitars and i saw this is this is so cool i mean i have to know what this is about so yeah that music was very important to me i still like it and uh but that took me just quickly into into uh into hearing electric guitar and i remember we were talking earlier i heard tony matola play on the perry como show and i he was playing a gibson electric guitar and he would sit on a little stool and play pretty chords and so i got a guitar teacher and i asked my guitar teacher so can you show me what these pretty chords are that tony mattola plays and he could he was a good guitar teacher so that kind of got me into wanting to play something else and then i think the first ele a jazz guitar i really heard was barney kessel and that that sold me on the idea that i wanted to play jazz on the guitar and not rock and roll and and what age was that kind of beginning at the beginning of of high school years probably like 13 14 and you know early teenager yeah and i had some friends in my head to my town who were two brothers who played music and they would take me into their little their little room where they had their stash of records you know and they'd play me dave brubach miles barney kessel r silver whatever and they so they were really hip and way ahead of the time of course then i went to my mother and told her i wanted to be a jazz musician you have to realize my i'm first generation my parents come from england and scotland so i mean they had i mean it would have been difficult for american parents to understand jazz or even know what it meant but for them it was like jess jazz what's jazz you know nobody knows what jazz is and even in my high school most people didn't know what jazz was and i was i remember the music teacher trying to discourage me from wanting to go to music school to study jazz she said you don't really want to do that john you do something serious well i really like the way this sounds you know i don't you so there was in in the 50s you couldn't get a lot of encouragement if you were a young white kid in the suburbs because the music wasn't there nobody listened to it you know and so you just you kind of had to like say well this is what i really want and then i found berkeley which was really you know probably one of the greatest things because berkeley was one of the only places that taught jazz and was serious about it there were very very few places that would even accept a guitar even if you played classical guitar you couldn't get in there was no program for it yeah of course here i was with my little gretch electric guitar and my amplifier and i wanted to play music and i opened up the berkeley catalog and there was a picture of gabor zabo from hungary standing there with a gretch guitar i said i think you know i relate i can go here you know this guy plays electric guitar and he's studying this school and i went there and i think there were like 10 guitar players the first year now there's about over a thousand unbelievable it's just how much it's grown so uh but that was the that's kind of how i got into playing guitar so there's the 50s rock and roll was very important to me and then that kind of naturally seemed to move into barney kessel who was like i say was the first one i still love the way he plays but he was the first one i really heard that excited me and made me want to play the guitar did you go at the garage band route at all yeah i had bands we had bands like that sure i had i was in a couple of bands like that the first band i was in i think was the very first band i played in had accordion guitar drums maracas and harmonica and trumpet it was interesting i mean probably would be a hit band today you know you could probably get on a lot of european festivals playing you know with this kind of you know oddball band you can call it world music now or something you know mariachi some poke i don't know electric guitar i didn't you could make a concept out of it but basically we played we played vfw falls and and poker gigs and yeah the accordion player's father was it was polish and got us all these you know polish american clubs you know and then i was in a second band that played had three guitars now no bass no bass guitar this was three guitars three electric guitars and the way it was broken up it was like the ventures it was one of those bands where one guy would play sort of the lead part the the higher part the other guy would strum chords and then there was a third part it was the in between part it was sort of like you you'd play honky tonk like ding ding ding ding sort of like muted guitar kind of i can't really play in fifths so there was actually these three parts it was really orchestrated you know and that's the way the guitar bands played and that was really a garage band and we would just sit down and work it out all by ear none of us could read just took things from records one guy would do this one guy would do that and and i was just starting to learn how to play pretty chords you know for my other teachers so i would bring in some of that you know and then we got a saxophone player who could play a couple of standards so then we would start adding things like tenderly or misty or something to the harlem nocturn these kind of tunes so we were starting you could see it starting to there was it was a move towards jazz but there was still this garage band you know uh that stuff expanding your harmonic knowledge for sure to to get into harlem nocturne and those kinds of things yeah immediately i mean just there was something about it was so enticing you know these kind of all of a sudden hearing some of these minor major seventh chords and these this this harmony which is doesn't exist in rock and roll yeah i always find it interesting when the communication element because i remember playing with my first rock and roll guitarist and i've been playing for a long time and he played interesting court and i said what's that and he say this you know he'd hold up his hand and i go well that doesn't mean anything to me to do guitar players like with that trio of guitar players is that how you would yeah something sometimes we would do that i didn't really know the names of everything i was playing you know yeah i would just kind of like give them one of these you know and then the other guys would go wow look at that i mean he can stretch more than one fret you know how can he do that you know and then later i started to learn what the names of them were so somebody would say i said what's that say that's a g13th man you know and then when i went to berkeley then i said it's a g7 with an added 13th you know then i got even hipper you know but in the beginning you don't know what it is because i learned it all by road you know my teacher would show me a chord melody that's where you play the chords and the melody kind of together the first thing i learned i think was misty or tenderly was one of the two i forget it was misty it was i read this okay then it was misty you're right see they're like the chord note chord with the melody on top and then data chord chord chord i mean it was kind of corny but it made you you know made opened up my ears to this kind of harmony and uh but i didn't know what i was playing i just did it by row and then later i learned you know that this was the one chord and this was the four chord and this was like a subdominant minor that's when i went to school and then i then i started to put together then i started to hear it then once you hear it you don't really even have to know what it is anymore because that's what it is it's it's what you hear you know deep so you don't need to know the name of it anymore and that became really apparent when you listen to guys play like west montgomery and and wes couldn't tell you what chords he was playing because he came to the school once he was invited to the school this is really an early kind of like workshop they asked him invited him to the school to play for the kids and he came to berkeley we all met him and the instructor at the time jack peterson had this little uh guitar ensemble which was like seven or eight guitars playing arrangements right and so we we were going to play this arrangement and let wes solo on it so jack gave him the music he was meant to put it on western stand and west one no no no i don't and we sort of all knew you know that this he didn't read music so he said just play it for me so we played the tune once i mean played through the arrangement then it came time for the solo section of wes just soloed him he heard it he heard exactly where the chord progression went and it wasn't that he had been moved through a few couple of keys you know a little temp would it not key changes not tempo changes and he just nailed it because he could hear it you know and that was like a real lesson right there it's like you know well gee i don't have to know what all these scales and chords are it doesn't hurt that i do but here's a guy that just hears it probably can't even tell you what key's in it's just it's unbelievable and you know chet baker apparently was the same way he couldn't you know he was very natural player but but i just it's so when you do arrive to a point where you hear it that's what it is you know and you don't really have to codify it so much unless you're trying to teach it and and today when as a teacher i mean i have to be able to like you know keep up with students you know and they'll start to run circles around me when they're talking about the theory you know in the modes and all that kind of stuff okay slow down now wait a minute this is a melodic minor what tell me what that is again i have to ask the student and they'll say it's this oh i said well yeah i know that but i wasn't sure that's what it was called you know sometimes you forget the names which is the ultimate goal is to forget all that and just and that's what her pomeroy said to me years ago which is why i liked him so much i said herb why do i have to learn all these chords and scales why can't i just play he said with a boston accent john just learn all this stuff and then forget it and then you can get on with playing music you know and that always made so much sense to me you know just just learn it and then forget it you know don't think about it it's in there you don't have to think about it you don't have to know what it's called no it's available to you because through your ears through your ears and also you've studied it you know what it is so if you had to recall it you know and tell someone like what the name of it is you know to give it a name you could do it but you don't that's not what's the most important most important is what's in your head and how you can do it okay they got the point at berkeley where did you feel like i'm ready to get out and play well let me rephrase that did you get out and play like with johnny hammond before you felt you were ready i think i was nervous about it and i was still in school when i was playing with johnny hammond i mean i was in i might have been in my third year i mean and i got recommended to johnny hammond through a i used to play in a rhythm and blues band called the danny wright orchestra and danny wright's band had a i had an interesting rhythm section it actually had a drummer that i used to became my drummer years later peter donald who lives in california a wonderful pianist named carl schroeder who's a mad scientist who teaches out in california one of the uh music institutes but it was like three hor three or four horns in a rhythm section and i started to play a lot in this band also mark levine the trombone player you may be familiar with plays trombone and piano and i got a lot of help playing in that band i learned a lot and then danny thought i was really the leader thought he well gee you real you could play with this guy johnny ham and he's looking for a guitar player i think i'll recommend you i said really you think i mean i think i could do this he said well you know a lot of standards rightness i knew a fair amount and that was it he just said he called up johnny johnny said well bring your guitar down to this club and it was a club in boston which is no longer in existence and but it was near a club that still functions there's a club now called wally's that a lot of the students go to and wally's was there when i was a kid but this other club was called the big m which stood for morley's on the avenue i never met mr morley i don't i don't think i ever wanted to meet mr morley you know it wasn't important but uh that's what we played seven nights a week on a matinee on sunday and you'd play like three or four sets a night you know you played like two in the morning and you get up and go to school and was at that point where i realized i really wanted to be a player you know i was out playing professionally then and playing with people that had nothing to do with the school a guy that didn't wouldn't know one mode from the other could care less how much you knew all he just wanted to know could did you know the song could you swing could you play the right changes could you play 4-4 rhythm like like freddie green he said play 4-4 man i just want to hear 4-4 or charleston you know really simple but then once he got to know you you could play almost anything it was a real it was a real a great place to to to learn to become more of a traditional musician and also it is a thing that doesn't exist anymore these these kind of uh apprentice ships and places especially for a guitarist especially now that all the organ players are dying i mean jack mcduff's gone groove homes is gone johnny's gone and those are the places where young guitar players got a lot of that experience and it doesn't happen anymore so i was lucky that i got in when i did and yeah but it was at that point that i kind of i knew i wanted to play i still wasn't totally securing what was going on but i knew i was i wanted to play that kind of music and then everything changed then it became the late 60s and i met michael and randy brecker and they recommended me for a band called dreams which was a fusion band with a singer you know so i went i went to new york and started playing yeah can you recall what kind of money you were making with in that six nights a week well i do know that after i played with him for like over a year it was um i think that the deal was it was uh 90 dollars a week in town i remember him telling that once and then 110 on the road pay your own hotel let me get let me do the math there yeah i mean everything was so much cheaper in those days and we used to stay at hotels were pretty much much near the clubs a lot of them were in ghettos so they were like they weren't so expensive and it didn't really cost that much money to be on the road you know in those days but it um i always remember i remembered it was i remember him telling me that 90 90 a week in town 110 on the road pay your own hotel so if i worked with him and when i moved to new york that was when i moved to new york i don't know what he paid me in boston it was probably less because i was just a student and then i went kind of on the road with him and we played i moved to new york and i used to used to live in a hotel in those days you could you could get a hotel by the week and it would be like 20 some bucks a week with maid service you know so i'd live in these hotels and i'd go and we'd play a lot of times at count basie's lounge or these clubs in harlem was count bases there's a club called wells uh it was near the smallest paradise which i never played at but there was about three or four of them club baron which i did play at there was a place in new jersey called the key club that i played at and so you'd start to play all these joints and you can and uh then he that's when he started paying me a little more money you know and i began to become more of a professional musician and also i was out of boston and i was now i was in new york you know and i didn't stay there i went back to boston it took me a couple of times to actually land in new york even when i met mike and randy i was still torn between boston and new york but i went on the road with this band called dreams now i was in a completely different thing with johnny i wore a suit and tie and i played if i were a bell in blues you know and all these kind of tunes when i when i started playing with the dreams band i wore leather pants and headbands and i played with wawa pedals and played over one chord i mean i got a real identity crisis i didn't know where i was going you know because i had really wanted to be just a jazz player and then all this explosion happened and then whatever miles davis did everybody did if miles got a wah-wah pedal everybody played with a wawa pedal trumpet players saxophone players it didn't matter of course guitar players always had the wawa pedal were um what sweat and tears in chicago a reason for some of those things i think they were a definite reason for dreams i think dreams was it was a band that was i mean it was a they like guys like to play that way but the band was also put together to try to be successful i mean they saw the success success of blood sweat and tears and randy brecker had been in blood sweat and tears and actually left before the band yeah went gold i mean he did an album with him called the child his father to the man and then then he quit he said i don't want to do this stuff and then lou soloff took the gig and lou was on the famous spinning wheel record and that went wherever it went and you know and he could have kicked himself i think so dreams was kind of started to try to be a band like that but it just wasn't as successful because it was too weird the horn players were too interesting the guitar player was completely off the wall me the singer was that was again he wasn't he wasn't he was a pretty good singer but he wasn't powerful like david clayton thomas or one of those guys so the band never really didn't quite know what it wanted to do and so that band kind of i left that man and went back to boston to play in another band with electric vibes and drums and was called the stark reality which i've never spoken about much in interviews but it was a was led by a vibes player named monty stark and therefore the name the stark reality and monty had fuzz and everything on his vibes he was a very creative interesting guy still is the best of my knowledge and uh so i'm back and played with them for a couple of years uh we made one cd which was the music of hoagy carmichael's it was hoagy carmichael's children's music this is very odd because hoagie's hoagy carmichael's son hoagy jr was a worked at a television station in boston wgbh we all became friends because monty was doing some music for the television thing so hoagy kind of hooked us up with his father his father had this book of kids tunes we were it's the strangest thing in the world we recorded them for ahmad jamal's record label which i think was called ajp records which i think had our record on it maybe one other record and then went bankrupt it was never you know my mother's the only person with a copy of this record it was just hysterical things that i was involved you know like involved in and then finally in the early 70s i moved to new york to play with chico hamilton yeah on a recommendation from a friend who was leaving the band and that's when i moved to stay and then i never went back to boston and then i started becoming a new york musician yeah did your parents um become uh comfortable with your choice of living eventually eventually they did but but it but it took a long time i think it really i don't know if it ever really quite sunk in you know because they you know they'd always say well why don't you you know can't you go back just because i didn't quite finish berkeley i didn't get the degree the music ed degree and they said why can't you go back to berkeley and finish and get that i said no no i'm i'm working now you know it sort of reminds me of like you know there was this there was someone woody allen movie where his parents come on at the very end you know i forget which one it is and they're just saying if you don't know i mean he could have been he could have been a lawyer he could have done this he could have done that look what he did with his life you know and yet you're talking about someone who's like ridiculously successful doing exactly what he wants to do but i think parents will never they never let go of that somehow you know but they luckily they let me what i always appreciated was they even though they had no idea what i wanted to do they let me at least pursue it and when they saw i was making a living they just they just did fine i think in their own way they were proud of what i what i did but they never really understood the music yeah but that's okay i'm not sure i do sometimes you seem to have had your your tastes in a lot of different places um has it always been of your own choosing uh no i mean no i mean i think it gets mixed up sometimes it's hard to know whether it's your own choosing sometimes it's sometimes you find yourself in a situation that you think you wanted to get in and then once you're in it you realize you you shouldn't be there i say since i started playing this this music most of it's been pretty much stuff i like to do it hasn't always been my own choosing sometimes somebody will hire me and i need to get i need the gig especially when i was younger and i would take any gig that was offered to me from the time i started working in boston as a musician until i moved to new york where do i where where do i go how much do i make you know what do i have to play and then as i got a little older and i sort of found myself getting a little bit of a reputation i found that i could do more of what i wanted more of what i wanted to do not that i could do everything i wanted to do for sure i still can't but more or less especially once i started recording for ecm and starting to develop more of a of an identity you know and i had my own records and that happened in the early that happened pretty quickly in the early 70s once about around 74. yeah and before that i had worked with billy cobham which was a great experience and that was like a return to the dreams band because it also had michael and randy and then and i got a phone call one morning from jack de janet and he just asked me if i wanted to come up and play at his house and i said sure so i went up and we played and we started a relationship and that was what sort of pulled me back away from the um from the pure fusion music and put me back closer to where i had started that's really interesting how names get passed around and people just call you because it's all word of mouth yeah it's all word of mouth he just knew he didn't know what i played like but he knew someone mentioned my name to someone and they mentioned it to jack and he he was looking to start a band and try to do something and he wasn't playing with miles anymore he was kind of on his own and matter of fact one time we had a band with myself and mick goodrick also great guitar player and ron mcclure and then we had a band clint houston a bass player and then finally jack formed a band with myself and um alex foster a saxophone player and mike richmond on base and we we toured for a while as a band and made a couple of records for manfred for like manford i said man for ecm memphis sure and but that's when i met manford and ecm and i met ralph towner and then this whole thing started with ecm yeah and i did my first recording in 74. and i knew jack so i asked him to be on it and i had known yon hammer the great czech musician because we used to share an apartment in boston me him and george maraz it was like two checks and you know whatever i was maybe it was a bounce check i don't know but we shared an apartment together so i knew them just as as friends and roommates and yon was just such a tremendous musician and i knew he played oregon and i once said i wanted to do something that reminded me of where i had come from so that's why i chose chose him because he could play such great organ and we did this record in 74 which sounds nothing like an organ trio record for the most part but it's there the sound of the organ is there but the music is very different yeah i love the critics sometimes let their personal feelings show this one fellow said from the cd a guide to jazz he says john is cited or blamed for helping create the ecm sound excited or blamed apparently he didn't like the easter she didn't like the ecm uh well it's too bad for him i mean also i don't think it's i mean in a way ecm you know what i mean people talk about that it's just uh i mean the ecm was a recording label before i went on it i mean they were recording john garbereck they had recorded keith jarrett they had recorded ralph town or eberhard weber there were some european musicians and so it was starting to develop just it was just the beginning the first records i think paul belay had a record you know whatever and all of a sudden manfred decided he'd like to record me so i think my first record you know so that's when i started i started recording 74 i think the label started this label actually started probably in maybe the very late 60s like 69 or 68 69 or maybe not till 70. and i think after a while i think a lot of the recordings were done in particular studios like in oslo or in stuttgart a lot of times they were done with similar musicians playing with each other like might be a you know i might be playing on a record with kenny wheeler and then there was jack de janeiro and to be a jack deschanette record that i would play on and then jack would play with or kenny would play with somebody else and john garbreck would play and then i did a record with jan garber and you know it did a record with enrico rava which had a norwegian rhythm section you wind up playing with a lot of players who play with these other people and you do them in the same studios the engineer was always most the times was this wonderful guy john eric kongsang who's a norwegian and a great engineer and also a great guitar player and memford eicher was always the producer so you take a lot of similar musicians but the same producer a lot of times the same studios one or two of the same engineers you're going to wind up with something that doesn't sound that there's a consistency to the sound and if you go back and listen to blue no records they all sound good joe henderson is playing with mccoy and then mccoy asked joe henderson to play on his records and it's i mean maybe it's stylistically what that guy was talking about is he just doesn't like the way things were recorded i mean he see i also dcm records where some of the especially in the present day where some of the more better and beautifully recorded record recordings you know yeah i think but i also love blue note records and columbia records but you know i never was too crazy about cti which had a sound too it was sort of sounded a little plasticky to me slick and i thought i think ecm just had a wonderful way of sort of like making the music sound like it's very not coming from like there's the guitar there's the piano there's the drums you know it made it sound like we were all playing in the same place and had some kind of a a group sound to it do you think european musicians play significantly different some of them do sure for sure i think i mean you you take someone like john gubarak and he he he can play the saxophone in a lot of different ways but he's not you know you're going to hear a very strong norwegian you know a folk kind of element in his playing because that's what he wants to pursue but there are also a lot of european musicians who who who pride themselves on playing bebop and they want to be like american jazz musicians and there you won't hear much difference really i mean you'll hear the guys pretty much sound it's interesting they sound the same you know like in in in stuttgart or tokyo or you know kongsberg or any place you go if they're if they study the same music if they're all playing out of the real book and they're all playing stella by starlight and they all listen to lee morgan records they're all going to wind up sounding the same you could say that's a sound you know you know why was he cited or blamed for making playing the trumpet that way you know everyone imitated in there he made a sound charlie parker could be blamed for a lot of you know everyone's trying to sound like charlie parker right but then when you get you find musicians i think especially more and more now you find european musicians who who go back to their roots go back to music of their their little their country they try to incorporate the the music of norway or sweden or or wherever they happen to be coming from i mean and into jazz and then you have other your people that record for ecm that i mean there's this wonderful ude player named anwar ibrahim i think i'm not sure if you're pronouncing it right ryan but he doesn't play jazz at all he plays ood but he improvises you know and he did an album with dave holland it's wonderful you know and it but he then again in the end you start to raise the other question well what is jazz and yeah yeah i mean a lot of what's on ecm i wouldn't consider coming from a pure strain of jazz at all but it's it's coming from a the spirit of it which has to do with a lot of improvising and that's one of the ex aspects of of of jazz that you know that take they can take it away from being the pure form of jazz which has to do with blues and african american music and you know the what the ken burns show presented which is definitely true and i really believe in that there's a pure strain of jazz but then there's something else that's jazz influenced and and inspired and that's improvisation and i think maybe you don't quite call it jazz in the purest sense but it's jazz in the spirit of what the music is and i think there's a lot of disservice when when they don't talk about that kind of music because it there's some great improvisers who don't play in the jazz tradition you know i happen to be kind of caught in in the hole i'm i'm walking funny lines because i mean i really consider i'm a jazz guitar player but i also like to play things that sound nothing like jazz and it doesn't bother me at all you know i don't feel like i'm breaking the rules you know how much is the um changing technology allowed you or helped you to do some of that to go in those different directions um at one time i thought i thought maybe it it had a lot to do with it but i really i don't think it had too much has too much to do with i think i've always enjoyed even in a low tech world to experiment and try to pull things out of the guitar that made it sound like not so much like a guitar i think the only period where it became even further removed from that was when things got more synthetic i was fooling around with a guitar synthesizer and the guitar was attached to all sorts of keyboards and modules and then it really started to i enjoyed it but it started to get so far away from playing the guitar that i i and there's also a lot of problems involved and a lot of equipment and just too much stuff you can't go on the road you can't travel with all this so i just basically gave it all away and went back to playing the guitar so i really don't i think maybe that was one place where technology kind of came in and said oh you know you have a lot more opportunities now you don't even have to sound like a guitar you can sound like a flute or a piano and that was i went crazy with it i thought it was just fantastic but then after a while i just came back to the guitar because there was more nuance in it somehow there's more control you can do more with the string you know you can bend it and inflect it but you can't do that with a synthesizer as well yeah yeah so i don't think the technologies played that much of a role i think things sound better now in the old days i mean you didn't have much of a choice you had like a two different kinds of amplifiers to play through now you've got like a lot of different things you can choose from and digital uh reverberations and and kind of things that make the music that makes it sound like it's been recorded it makes it so when you hear it live it has a more pleasant sound and to my ears and just something that's coming out of a broken you know fenders amp speaker you know and in the old days that's pretty much all you had you had like an amp and you were lucky if it was working right you had stated uh way back in 76 that you liked chinese and japanese music yeah there's so much space in it oh yeah very much yeah yeah i love it i don't listen to it so much now but i remember there was a uh one time when i went to japan i went to uh i know if you're familiar with the no theater you know where they wear the masks you know and i think all the parts are played by men even if it's a woman but they're about all these weird masks and off to the side would be three guys one was a singer one played a string and one played a wood block or percussion you know and the music was so far out i mean it was it made it made john cage sound like cocktail music i mean it was like i mean you've got to realize this stuff is from like i mean centuries old you know and all you hear was just like you know how do they count this i mean no one's going one two you know they don't have a conductor going like this i mean how do they feel the space but it always sounded like they you know maybe it's just a certain maybe when i go clearly and then you're gonna go but you have to wait and they just know when to do it and it was amazing and the music it was beautiful so i've always liked this music for that for that reason too the the space i always like the sound of it too just the way uh like i remember hearing a a chinese violin being played somewhere in it at a ferry boat stopping somewhere in seattle some with some oriental guy he was just sitting on the floor playing like a thing with a bow and it would just like i mean it would just open your floodgates if you let it i mean the sound was just so emotional it was just this thing being bowed i don't know maybe a couple of strings you know you probably would reckon if you heard it you it sounds like a violin but more and i don't know what they call it i don't know which they call it an ear or something yeah maybe it was that it was absolutely just devastating this amazing sound so i always like that kind of stuff so i've always been the fact you're if you're attracted to that then you try to draw things out of the your own instrument they won't make it sound you try to kind of actually try to copy something else you're influenced by another culture you know and that's the thing i like about that music is why i enjoy trying to play with people sometimes that i know i can't play their music but i might take some element of that and just play with it you know you know yeah and then it starts to color the other music and on top of it i still like to play you know swing music and bebop too so it's it's a funny combination sometimes i don't know quite quite which way to go but you're bound to satisfy yourself one way or the other yeah i try to make myself feel good about what i'm playing usually the band tonight i mean is it'd be interesting to see which directions we take because we'll probably play a little some a little more traditional things than we would normally do with our we than we do with the violin with feldman because the band has really been going in a more out outer direction you know with marking it playing a lot of very uh abstract kind of pieces with the trio we might we might come a little more inside it'll be interesting to see what we do i've always been fascinated by the the challenge of hearing i guess what you would call alternate chord changes you know if your organist decides to start some new substitutions that you haven't heard before how do you nail those or or do you i i i well some of them you just hear i mean some of them are you know my might be more things you would expect i mean just kind of substitutions that occur a lot he generally uh he won't go too far away from what we what we play i mean he won't he won't play things that i'll never hear unless unless we're improvising really freely and then you don't try to nail anything then the whole idea is not to not to really nail anything but just to sort of kind of play it's like playing alone together you can be playing together but you might have your own separate little story story you're telling you know yet you're listening to the other person and you just kind of try to cross paths at a certain time if he if somebody plays certain kinds of substitutions in in a song form or a traditional song it could be it can it could throw you and you know it depends what they play you know i've actually remember doing a record date once that mark copeland was playing piano and peacock was the it was mark's record and peacock was playing bass and we're playing a blues and we're recording it and you know i mean i had to stop because they were it's not that they were really playing substitutions they were just chromatically sort of moving and shifting the harmony around in such a way that i couldn't get a center on anything and i find you know i i don't know if i stopped the take or maybe i waited till it was finished i said i mean this is great i mean you know but i have no idea what to play over it i mean could you be a little more just traditional for me or maybe you know just as you know i sort of blamed myself i said oh yeah no problem you know so there's sometimes you you're never going to get it you know i mean sometimes and i don't worry about it if i really can i might i might just ask somebody i might just say would you what the heck were you playing i mean you know what was that you know because if you play it again i want to know what it is because i didn't catch that you know yeah if i'm in doubt i sometimes i just won't play you know i mean i'll like i'll let something go by just recently no i'm sorry this is 1986. he said playing what you hear is the greatest challenge well yeah i still bless i still yeah believe it i mean it's it because it's very easy to get i mean i still do we all do i mean it's it's very easy just to get wrapped up in like finger wiggling or knowing you know like well i just or just sort of going on automatic pilot and you have to have a certain amount of that that's just like technique and vocabulary but it's nice to be able to really it's nice when you can start to hear all of these things and that you when you play that it comes out in a way that's not so premeditated and natural and that you hear it as you as you're playing you can sort of hear one phrase moving into another phrase and there's a logic to it yeah i still think it's the greatest challenge because i don't do it all the time i mean i try try you know when i'm playing at my best i'm really hearing everything for most of what i play but you know it's not always going to be the case what's the challenge of dealing with record labels and keeping your place in the market these days i'm fortunate this way i mean i really am because i don't have to deal with them in the same way that other people do some people have to change their labels every couple of years i mean because that's you know if you don't sell a certain amount of records i mean it's sayonara arrivederci hasta la vista goodbye so long been nice to know you forget about it you're you know they just won't hire you again with ecm i mean i can do a record every year and a half it's not going to change unless i think unless uh manfred once said one day wakes up and says he wants this doesn't want to have a record company anymore decides to sell it then my situation could change so i don't i don't have to really go to a lot of record companies and i feel very fortunate i mean i don't have to keep shopping new stuff or call up and try to find a new label and when i do record for another label it's always as a side man or maybe it's a cooperative project with somebody so i don't really worry about that because i'm not tied to the wreck of that record company so i really don't have a problem i i think it's i think it's hard depending if you're not with a record company that has any clout it's hard to get noticed and you'll notice who the record companies are that really have the big machine the big machinery and the ones with the biggest machinery the ones with the most toys at the end will win but the ones of the biggest machinery can make the most noise buy the most space add space put their ax on a festival you know and i that i i don't like that aspect of it but because ecm doesn't really have that it's very well respected but it doesn't have that kind of clout it doesn't really want to be that kind of a of a label they're not into that and they don't have that kind of money anyway so it's a the bigger american companies are the the ones that you know the machines yeah you know and a lot of good musicians record for them it's just like if you get in on one of those things your your chances of work and exposure are greater but if you don't sell you're gone right away is there uh any kind of discrimination with the age of musicians these days that are landing on those kind of labels do you think i think there probably is i think i'm i would almost bet that it yeah like if i wanted to go to another label right now at my age i might be able to land a deal with somebody somebody might give me a shot but the because i've got a proven track record but an older musician trying to you know who wasn't as established probably wouldn't get a deal no i think there is a tendency to towards the brand new and terrific you know or brand new that says whether it's terrific or not i mean there's lots of young brand new talent i mean they come you've probably heard these kind of phrases before i mean they seem like guys walk out of universities with their with their saxophone here and the press agent here's here the managers here the record labels there and the suits are cut and tailored and everyone's you know it's a manufacturer thing and it's not that some of these guys can't play but some of them really don't play that well and and or they're they're marketed very quickly and it's interesting because i mean years ago i remember having conversations with people and say yeah gee why couldn't they you know i remember conversations why couldn't they sell jazz because in those days i mean the only reason i knew coltrane was playing in town thomas i would walk down boylston street in boston and see it on the marquee john coltrane quartet hey man coltrane's in town let's go bill evans is here wow cool let's go and either place might be packed but there might be 15 people there was no big hullabaloo there was no big huge ban i mean nowadays i mean it's like i mean if you if you read some of these magazines you know like and these ads for records is like it's like the same kind of stuff they do for movies you know you know when you open it if movies just coming out you see the ad for the movie i laughed i cried movie of the year boston globe nominated i threw up watching it it was so good you know and it's the record the the record business is starting to look like that you open these magazines and it's it's all shiny and flashy and it's become it's it's a marketable thing now it's a marketplace jazz is they sell it like they sell shoes is that good or bad very good question i mean so i mean i think it's i think ultimately it's somehow i think it cheapens the whole the whole thing maybe i'm just jealous though because i don't get sold that way you know as much but i think it's uh i'm just trying to be honest but i think it's yeah i think basically it's kind of a it's it's cheapens and it's not that just cheap and it sort of like tells people what they're supposed to like people don't have the ability to make up their own minds as much as i think maybe they did some years ago it's just all like you know it's it's what's trendy i mean it's like you know like cell phones are in and a certain kind of jazz is in and everything's just in and i don't know who runs this stuff but i sure like to meet them and tell them what i think of them you know because it's it's just it seems like there's somebody's if there's some people somewhere that do this they sit around and they go wouldn't it be cool if someone's if we could do this and we could do that and we can make the cell phone speak to the computer and then the jazz musician can have the cell phone implanted in his horn and i mean i just have these weird fantasies that there's people back there and there's a small group of people and they do this stuff and they they wield a lot of influence and i may not be that far wrong i know i'm getting into dangerous areas but that's okay you know this is for the archive and this isn't this is going on public television if it was i would actually i'd like it to you know yeah yeah i wish i could do it for public you know like we'll see what we can arrange and maybe you can arrange something maybe you can get it out there you know if you had the opportunity to address those thousand plus guitar students in berkeley and maybe this would be a subject you might address but what would you say to them about how to prepare for the future of where this music's at oh man i mean you could just tell them it's uh don't quit your day job you could say it's uh you could say i mean the hardest thing is with a lot of players i i always tell the ones i mean and i don't i can't address a thousand of them at a time but but even with the students i have you know if they play really good i always tell them look i said you know i hope you really like this music you know because if you don't i mean there's a lot of you guys around right now i mean there's the play there's a lot of good young players i have a couple of students at the concert new england conservatory where i teach now you know about eight times a year i mean they can really play i mean i've had a few of them are you kind of go wow this guy can play really play you know and uh when he gets out in the real world and he's more of a he's really going to be able to play but where are all these guys going to work you know and i always try to tell them i always say look keep keep keep keep yourself open to all the aspects of the of music you know whether it's being a jazz player maybe it's writing songs maybe it's as a producer i mean there could be a place in music for a lot of people but it may there's only so many places that people who are going to be quote unquote performers or especially jazz performers are going to be able to play i mean there's the amount of venues that haven't changed dramatically since when i was starting to play and there's like 100 times more players out there i'm lucky i have a you know a record label and a reputation to be a young musician coming now it has to be tough from that point of view because it's just there's so many guys and there's just not enough places to play so i just tell them make sure you really love this stuff because it's you're going to have to be doing it for that reason if you want to be a jazz player because there's not going to be you know and and don't even worry about anything else just only do it for that as long as you can get by and then if if you're really true to what you do things will come your way you know probably you'll make it you know you'll make a living and you'll be able to play with your music and hopefully maybe things maybe you'll get very successful you know yeah let me run a few names by you and maybe they have an impression and maybe they don't eddie lange i don't know is playing that well but i remember i'd be kind of like the father of a modern kind of guitar one of the fathers of modern guitar for sure but i i remember his playing to be very um virtuosic is the right word but he he was more of a kind of almost like a soloist like a real complete kind of guitarist he could play with chord melodies and kind of like a piano yeah he was more like a piano player when he played alone i know there were the duets with lonnie johnson which was really interesting because you could hear these two really very different styles eddie center very very calculated in a way you know very clean and then chris lonnie was more of a blues player you know so i thought that was it was interesting that they were they were a team and played together how about django passion you know fire on brilliance you know absolutely just for brilliant there's no other word for it i mean just how anybody could play that way again i mean it was even when i went to school i mean it was there was criticism that django's not really a jazz player he had so much of the uh the the gypsy fire and the and the certain kind of scaler thing that he would do in a way just the way he would play yeah it didn't sound like charlie christian but i mean i don't i mean to me it was still jazz you know and i think that was one of the early experiences of hearing someone play who wasn't coming from the american jazz tradition but who was improvising just incredible stuff and and uh playing standard songs that everybody played all around the world but he had his own way of playing them too he was he was unique i mean passionate fiery brilliant unique and he did it all which is what two fingers or something you know it's pretty amazing about jimi hendrix i considered hendrix was like a he was the he was the one rock and roll guitarist that i really listened to i mean i didn't really listen to a lot of the other guys i mean i heard them i liked some things but when i heard him it was like yeah i mean it was like it was yeah it was like listening to a jazz musician and but playing a different kind of music he was played so fluid and liquid and just soulful and he was so creative that it just he could have been playing anything you know he could could have been any instrument you know the vocabulary was not jazz like i know jazz but it felt really improvised it felt loose too it felt like it really had a loose kind of jazz quality i just think you know he was just he was the one i mean i i kind of got you know when i heard that i when i heard an album called axis boldest love that's when i went and bought a fuzz stone on a wah wah pedal and i said i really like this stuff i want to play i don't know if i want to play like that but i mean i i want to try to do some of that you know and that was i think he had that impact on a lot of jazz musicians and and not all the rock musicians did you know i mean but hendricks i think he universally probably had a strong impact not only in guitar players but on every a lot of people who grew up in my period horn players everybody was like oh that's they would hear it on a record they know the media is jimi hendrix the other guys i couldn't tell particularly later in years i wound up really liking eric clapton but i didn't really care for cream all that much i think i mean i thought was very interesting but it was kind of like a wall of notes that it never really had a lot of energy to an excitement but i didn't really get the the melody to it you know it didn't seem very melodic and that's why i thought hendrix was very melodic did you ever see him no i never did i'm surprised they never did because i saw so many great jazz musicians and i was in that scene with playing with fusion bands but i never got to see a lot of the great rock players it uh played opposite chicago once i remember that and that was really enjoyable and then i heard some bands and heard that van mountain one time with leslie west it was it was so loud my my my stomach was rumbling i had to leave the it sounded good but it was i remember was in in the village gate it was just like the music had been pinned against the wall have you ever had uh any trouble with playing the fusion type thing and volume and all that oh yeah yeah yeah i mean it's i mean when i used to play with with cobham i mean sometimes the will you come off a gig and your ears would be ringing yeah and the roadie would come over and say congratulations you've gone beyond the threshold of pain for the third concert in a row you know i say no wonder i mean okay and now i now i play yeah now i just won't play so loud i mean it's only so loud i'll play because it just it hurts my ears there's certain frequencies that hurt my ears yeah i guess high frequencies really just go right through them i remember a concert with al dimiola and john hammer that i went to in san francisco and i don't even think they were playing probably as loud on the stage as it was pumped out into the the pa sure and people were sitting there with their fingers in their ears listening to the concert you know and people some of them were just kind of like yeah man grooving and it was like i was like i felt like someone had taken daggers and it jabbed them through my eyes it was like right it was just like so painful i mean i i just i kind of i didn't want to see have anyone seen me i was kind of like really got down real low and kind of crept out of the theater just like went away and said this is i can't listen to this and maybe not even a default of the musician you know he's just it was just so loud and i decided i never want to play music that loud ever just has no place for me i mean i know i don't get it you know and i have played it that loud what about weather report have any thoughts on them well they were probably of all the groups i guess those groups the the most the most colorful the most musical the most interesting i i always for a short period or a period i i when i started especially when i started playing the guitar synthesizer i wanted to uh i kind of always looked to zavanol as kind of a a role model and and since i was playing with peter erskine who had played with weather report you know he would always give me some insight into how joe would do something or how he thought about things and it's interesting he's a very very creative creative man he's one of the only people i can listen to play the synthesizers because he just uses them to create all this all this wonderful color and atmosphere and and of course him and wayne shorter it's a fabulous band i mean i think there were two bands from that period that kind of stick out in my mind and i always say it was what would be the weather report and the mahavision orchestra that had completely different approaches to to playing that kind of music and of course miles as bands but i thought most of the other stuff that i would hear including the stuff that i was involved in not that it was bad i mean some of the stuff i played with billy gilly cobbles band was tremendous fun and i think some of it was quite good but i think a lot of the music out there was just after all i think was just people just trying to make money and i mean it really didn't and i but yeah i always felt with maha vishnu it just was totally inspired kind of music and with weather report it was just these guys were just just were so cool about putting things together they just really had a yeah they just did it and when you tried to imitate it it never worked i mean i used to always try to imitate that stuff when i was younger and it just never never quite worked i don't know one more little quote i was curious about here you weren't talking about yourself i don't think but you've noticed a syndrome that some people have where they feel guilty about being a great musician do you remember saying that or i don't know about being a i i think uh well i think that gets into a really you know that could that could open up another whole can of worms that you know like it gets very psychological i mean i think when people aren't uh i think if you don't feel you have trouble dealing with the fact that maybe you play well it could be tied to a whole a whole bunch of issues and i don't know if it's a syndrome i don't know if i really i've known a lot of players players over the years you know the kind of player that you know and you know they'll they'll finish something you know and it'll sound really good and i won't name any names because but they're friends of mine and they're like oh that really sounded great they go and i just can't i guess i can't get it together i don't know i think maybe i was talking about that that players that won't allow themselves to accept anything good about themselves you know there's then there's the reverse of course the people that are you know constantly you know like just kissing everything they do you know and i think there's just like a i think neither thing makes makes sense i mean i think i think you if you fall in love with everything you do and you don't have any editing and you don't have any criticism of your own playing i think you're in trouble but i think the reverse is also true i mean if you walk around like beating yourself up because you know you don't think you can play and yet and that that actually is the more dangerous of the two in a way because it stops the process you know you're never you're never really happy with what you do maybe i think i was talking more about more about that because and that but that's tied to like the whole issues about how people feel about maybe themselves and how they're you know what their what their life was like when they were younger so then you get into stuff that actually comes up in a therapist office which is very interesting but maybe not right for the archives when i don't i don't want to go there for um our guitar viewers what's your instrument of choice these days the actual instrument i'm playing yeah well i brought to the concert tonight i brought two instruments uh i i've i was it's funny because i was just listening to a couple of recordings coming up and i for a long for many years i played on ibanez style les paul then i switched to a roger sadowsky telecaster style instrument which is on a lot of those recordings which is a wonderful instrument and then i switched more recently to a a guitar made by a company called brian moore it's called brian moore custom guitars it's not custom made for me but it's it's like a les paul with uh with a switch just as you know for the guitar guys a five-way switch that you can move it and split the pickups and make it sound like single coil pickups if you want it's got a beefy fat sound it's got a nice bridge pick up and also has under the bridge it has a piezo pickup which is sort of a fake acoustic pickup for those that don't know it's like a little crystals actually i don't know how this one works but they're under each string and you know if you listen with your eyes closed from from a distance of you know like several thousand yards it almost sounds like it's an acoustic instrument so i use that kind of blended in with the magnetic pickups and with the regular guitar pickups and i find it's an interesting it creates an interesting sound it's still sounds like the guitar but gives it a little little a little bit of a shine that doesn't have normally and i also bought a handmade guitar by a wonderful maker in uh california named jim mabson which is like a little very thin bodied arch top with one just to pick up in the neck and i'll probably play that on a couple of tunes because it's you know it is it is a pretty open guitar so in a certain situation it may feed back a little but it's it's a wonderful instrument so those are the two i'm playing mostly right now i have a room full of guitars yeah but uh most guitar players we tend to collect even even yeah i don't know how it happens it's just i have old les paul you know i've got my eye bananas i've got a wonderful old 175 from the es175 from the 50s which i never bring on the road but it's actually probably the best guitar i have i have two handmade guitars by a maker named rick mccurdy in new york that are wonderful a big large top and then a small body guitar also lovely you know and i have played them they've all been on the road they've all been on a record date i mean they've all had they've all had some use but you can't use them all the time right which is a shame i wish i could just said about 10 hands i could just like go around and play them all at once every day just to keep everybody happy okay sometimes i think i should do that just open up the case and say okay now i'm going to play you for five minutes and then yeah at least we communicated today good karma good karma for the yeah well i think it's important i if an instrument sits too long it can die i said i had a beautiful guitar kind of diamond years ago an acoustic instrument and it'll happen anybody uh just to wrap up that you haven't played with that you wish you could well i always said i i mean it's probably because of my connection to jim hall and what he did with sunny rollins i always like to i've gotten a chance to play with jim well i'd like to play with him a little more i mean maybe just one-on-one that would be great we've we've done some on concerts but it's never been real just sitting down in a room and playing you know that would that would be very cool i'd like to do that but i'd love to play with sonny rollins and one drummer that i i play with a lot of the great drummers and you know dejanette and i played with roy haynes a few times and i played with you know billy hart and just uh you know peter erskine a whole atom that's just a whole slew of great drummers but i haven't played with elvin jones and i just think that would be that's got to be great i mean it's how can that not be great i mean it's just it's it's impossible that would be impossible not to feel great playing with him right i mean that's just come on he's sort of like the epitome somehow of a certain kind of drumming and a certain kind of feel that i think i would just fall and play with very easily which is why i like to play with nussbaum a lot because this bomb is kind of like comes from that that basis you know it's a very wide open just natural feel that just feels like yeah this is the way this this music is meant to be played so those two i would say are three including gm i guess you know of the sort of people you would know you know that's that's what i'd want to play with okay i wish you best in your future projects and thanks juggling all the things you know when i look at your resumes and so forth that people send out it's quite amazing how much recording you've done and how many people you've played with and people that have played with you yeah there's a lot i mean i i i one day i sat down i was traveling with peter erskine on a bus this is a good seven eight more maybe more years ago and just we were both we were both very bored and we're tired he said why don't you write down he said everything you've ever recorded on and he said you can leave nothing out i mean even the worst possible like thing that you don't want anyone to know about you have to include it and we just kind of wrote down as many things as we could think and i think at that time i was up to about like 80 or 90 and he was up to like already recording and he's younger than me about 150 projects you imagine what a guy like you know ron carter and these people are probably like on like you know a couple of thousand albums you know can you remember the worst thing you ever did would you would you like to you know i i don't know if i can remember well i do remember one and i i could yeah i do remember that what i considered probably to be one of the actually worst projects i ever did maybe the worst and there were some great people on it but it was and i won't even i won't tell you the name of the person whose record it was because i've never heard from him since i think he just i think this was his one chance at trying to make a record i don't know if he was a tax write-off or if just somebody really liked him and just wanted to give him a chance but he was a piano player and it was just really he really couldn't he couldn't play he just couldn't play i mean but he had gotten this band together he actually on the record was was myself jack dejanette stanley clark freddie hubbard and a lot of people it's and more you know i mean and it that might have to go down i i can't remember then i do remember the name of the record i remember the guy's name and he it wouldn't be worth saying it but it was that was pretty bad and i think i've actually had a couple of people i've spoken to and said oh yeah i heard that record i mean what a terrible yeah that was rotten record that is why'd you do that i only had one answer i did it for money somebody offered me extremely good money to fly me out and do this project and i think well all these great musicians it's got to be good and it wasn't and in a situation like that it wasn't just that he didn't sound good nobody really sounded good everything just kind of came down to this base level it just i mean i sounded terrible i mean you know and it's it's hard to know when you're going to say you know how things are going to sound when you record or even when you play a gig but if you're going into a situation with people you don't really know anything about it could get weird i'm doing a recording and actually on sunday in montreal with some canadian musicians and dave leibman's playing on it and i do know one of the musicians i know is playing the other one i don't know that well the drummer i don't know at all but i know dave and i know i got a sense this is going to be probably pretty good a good one i mean it'll be good i just hope that i play good on it you know it's because when you're recording you've got the whole recording statement oh can i hear myself properly you know recording is not a natural it's not like playing in a club or a concert hall sometimes you can't hear what you're doing as well or you can't hear the piano or the horn player or the drum you're just not hearing properly and a lot of times the recordings are made and people will say to me gee why don't you that was kind of a strange recording and also look i couldn't hear anything i played on that record i remember doing one record but literally i think i played like by braille i mean i couldn't i just couldn't hear the rhythm section i couldn't my sound sounded like was coming from underneath blankets and the drummer sent it really far away and that was just the best it could get in the headphones and it was a small studio and i just was dreadful it doesn't sound so bad on the record but but i remember you know recording is is is a strange one yeah can be really satisfying and can also be very very devastating if it's not good because it then you hear the playback and it's like it's like looking into a mirror you know and it's like seeing all the stuff you don't like you know god there's a you know there's a wrinkle you know or there's a why is that there you know you see all the you see all the the the good stuff but you also see a lot of the bad stuff about your play right well i hope those are few and far between four they're getting fewer and farther between as i get older yeah all right well thanks for your time today well i look forward to hearing you tonight okay nice thank you [Music]

Channel: Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College

Views: 5,696

Rating: 4.9619045 out of 5

Keywords: Berklee College of Music, Herb Pomeroy, Jack Peterson, Jack DeJohnette, ECM Reccords, Billy Cobham, the band Dreams, jazz guitar, Fillius Jazz Archive, John Abercrombie, Monk Rowe, Hamilton College

Id: mRqb9BfaYCE

Length: 73min 20sec (4400 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2017