My name is Monk Rowe. We are filming for the Hamilton College Jazz
Archive in Tarrytown, New York, and I'm very pleased to have composer and arranger Manny
Albam with me today. I'm going to pick up a thought you just had
before the cameras were rolling, and that is retirement has been a busier time than
ever for you. MA: Yeah, it has. I guess I'm more available in a sense. I'm at home more so the phone can ring a little
bit more. And for some reason or other I'm getting hot
again. I don't know why. It's been fun. I've been over to Europe many times, I send
music over there and I do not have to bring it sometimes but I love to bring it with me. I just came back from L.A. We were in that four-day arranger's whatever
they want to call it - every arranger in the world was out there except Bill Holman who
unfortunately was in Europe at the time. It was quite a bash. They put together bands for us. Let me see - Gerald Wilson was there, Neal
Hefti. I spent one day there and rehearsed a band,
did a concert, got on the plane and back home. Clare Fisher, Bill Potts, who did that marvelous
thing on "Porgy and Bess" some years ago, he wrote all that music and played it, and
on and on. The Basie band, Thad and Mel's band was somehow
represented by their music. It was an incredible four days. They do that every couple of years, radio
station KLON, which is the jazz station of Long Beach. MR: When you say it seems like you're hot
again, do you think your style of writing has changed significantly in the last few
years to make you hot again, or is it something that they're just rediscovering? MA: Well no what happened to me is I began
to write for larger ensembles, for symphony orchestras or what they call studio orchestras
or whatever. And people begin to call me because they've
heard that I do this. A soloist will go out and have to do a pops
concert with some orchestra and have no music, and so they'll call me to provide charts. I send stuff for the Metropole Orchestra,
which I think is one of the best in the world as far as understanding everybody's writing. They have every arranger in the world at one
time has done a project for them and I've done several. I write for the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band for
Jon Faddis' group, and it goes on and on. Sometimes the phone rings and occasionally
I even have to turn down work which I never did before. And I teach, I have one day a week at the
Manhattan School of Music and Jim McNeely and I do a workshop for BMI and that's every
Tuesday afternoon, four or five a month. And that kind of assuages my guilt about not
teaching anymore, and it works out nicely. MR: When you write for a studio orchestra,
and you write for the string section let's say, and you want them to swing, do you -
MA: The 64 dollar question. MR: Do you try to write specifically what
the swing eighth notes are supposed to sound like or do you just hope that they follow
the leader. MA: It depends on the orchestra. Now the Metropole Orchestra, which is in Holland,
I think they have about 30 strings, maybe a little less. And they'll ask occasionally, "do you want
this to swing or not?" And they know what it means. It used to be that we wrote in twelve-eight
time for the strings and four-four time for the rest of the people. But I don't particularly like to hear strings
swing anyway. I like to have them do things that they know
how to do, and that is rapid stuff, nice lush kind of organ style things, and they can do
things that no other instrumentalist can do. A violin player can leap like three octaves
in an eighth note. And those kind of things are what strings
do better than try to swing. So we try - the least thing that I think about
them swinging is to swing. MR: Yeah, I've heard some attempts at that
that really don't come off. MA: Well I did one, in fact I see you have
the album cover, it's called "The Blues is Everybody's Business." And there was one section that I expected
them to do something and they didn't do it and we just cut it out, we just removed it
from the ultimate tape. They tried to do a few things on that, that
at least violin soloists know a little bit about. MR: I was going to ask about that and we might
as well talk about it now, it was Gene Orloff, wasn't it? MA: Gene Orloff. MR: I was curious as to how much you wrote
for him and how much was improvised. MA: No, that was all written. Gene also, incidentally, was a jazz trumpet
player. He used to play at one of the radio stations
on third trumpet, or sometimes fourth trumpet. And so he understood the venue. He loved Dizzy Gillespie. The thing with violinists is this hand, it's
not this hand. It's the way they bow to make the things happen,
and they're generally a little stiff. There's a few people, there's Gene, there
a fellow by the name of Harry Lookofski who transcribed for himself Charlie Parker's solos
and makes them sound good. There were very few people that can do this,
and so we don't try to make them do it. There is an orchestra out in California, it's
called the American Jazz Philharmonic, and they did a piece of mine that I wrote originally
for Phil Woods and recorded it, and I didn't, I had a few sections where the strings were
predominant, but I didn't expect them to swing. I had sort of bebop lines but they were smooth
lines. And so all they had to do was run their fingers
up and down the thing, under one bow. It's an interesting problem and there are
a couple of jazz fiddle players around that if they were concertmasters they might have
things happen, but they're not - in the Lovano album I did last year, the Frank Sinatra thing,
"Celebrating Sinatra" I guess it was called - we used a string quartet, it was a cellist
and a first violinist that really knew what was going on. And that was really a pleasure because I knew
they would bring stuff off that they didn't have to. And in the final analysis I didn't write very
much for them to do. There was a cello solo I wrote that he made
happen, but the quartet was there, they were there to do other things anyway. MR: Did you ever have occasion where you had
a string section come in or mostly classical players and was there an attitude problem
at all? MA: Sometimes. I'll tell you, strangely the attitude problem
- I hate to say this - is with the string teachers. It's not with the young people that are learning. They want to come in and play the stuff. The teachers say well it's not too valuable,
you know you have to learn your sonatas and this and that and whatever. And I find it's unfortunate. When I was at Eastman, Ray Wright began a
program up there with a studio orchestra which was never there and it's still a great orchestra. He's not with us anymore. But he fought like hell to get the string
players to come either from the opera orchestra or the symphony orchestra or something, and
to sit in that orchestra. And they only did about two concerts a year. But he fought with the teachers and he finally
convinced them that, like I try to do, and one of the problems that string players have
is that if they join a symphony and music comes in for them to play at a pops concert,
they have to sight read it. They can't take it home and practice it. They can't do what you do with legit stuff,
and that is to conductor might have five or six rehearsals. They have maybe a three-hour rehearsal and
they have to do their concert. Now if they can't - they can read the music
but they can't interpret it. And they should learn how to interpret that
stuff. There are certain scales that we write that
any saxophone player, trumpet player or trombone player knows how to manipulate it; the string
players have all kinds of problems with. They should learn those scales. Bartok wrote them, and they struggle over
Bartok. So it's an ongoing thing but there are some
places in the world where we can really have the strings kind of do what we ask them to
do and we don't ask too much. MR: Well let me take you back a few years. You were born in the Dominican Republic. MA: Right. MR: You moved to New York. MA: I moved to New York at the age of six
weeks so my Spanish isn't too good. And it was kind of a complicated reason that
I was born there and we don't have to go through it. It had to do with immigration laws with my
folks and the whole thing. So at any rate, I did spend six weeks there,
a lovely six weeks they tell me. MR: What did your father do for a living? MA: He was a teacher and he played, he was
sort of an amateur flute player. My mother was a teacher also. I grew up listening to opera and symphony
music and I used to wind the Victrola and I sharpened those cactus needles that you
had to use. And one day I think I was about six or seven
years old, I went to a playmate's house, a kid about my age but his older brother, who
was probably 15 or 16 years old, was playing Bix Beiderbecke records. And the hairs went up on the back of my neck
and I couldn't figure out what that was at all. Having heard Tchaikovsky and all these - Rachmaninoff
and all those people around my house all my life, it really stopped me. It started me thinking of whole different
musical thing to do. MR: And those records must have been fairly
current right about then. MA: Yeah they were. This was probably about 19 -, let me see,
1927 I was 5 years old, so 28 and 29 I was six and seven years old. I guess that's about the period of time that
it all happened. And from there on in I used to go over there
whenever his older brother would play records I really paid attention see. I was very fortunate in that my mother didn't
stop me from trying to be a musician. That was the nice thing you know. Generally they want you to go into law, or
doctors, whatever. She encouraged it and that was a nice thing
to happen for me. She didn't know very much about jazz but she
learned something about it as I grew up and appreciated it. As a matter of fact, it's funny, I was at
the Apollo Theater up on 125th Street with Georgie Auld's band and the curtains open
and we were all on a dolly which moved forward. And as we moved forward I see my mother sitting
in the second row. You know, she appreciated the music, she came
to wherever it was that I was playing, she knew some of my friends who were strictly
jazz musicians and all that, and didn't put it down like a lot of people did - "ooh that
noise." MR: Why the saxophone as your instrument? MA: It started as the clarinet. I think I was about 13 or 14 and I guess I
was mesmerized by Goodman and Shaw. And Pee Wee Russell. Pee Wee was actually more of a hero of mine
than the other two guys, they were a little too glib and smooth and all that. But Pee Wee had that essence of jazz. The rough tone and the whole thing. MR: His personality was kind of interesting
to watch too. MA: Oh yeah. I finally met him in Boston, we stayed at
the same hotel and I ran into him in the lobby and we talked a little bit. As a clarinet player I was almost forced to
take up the alto. And I started sitting into a lot of bands
as a second alto player. Now the second alto chair in those days, in
the four-man sax section was also baritone chair and so I became a baritone player and
I'm glad of it. I finally sold my alto. As a writer from the baritone chair you hear
everything up above you. You hear from your position way up to the
first trumpet and you hear right through all the chords and the voicings and all of that. It's a great place to live. And conversely, a lot of the arrangers, they
were trombone players and they sit right in the middle and they hear it from both sides
I guess. That's where their thing is. You know, Brookmeyer, Billy Byers, Ray Wright,
a whole bunch of them, Don Sebesky, for some reason or other, Nelson Riddle was a trombone
player. It seems to be those two chairs are great
places to hear what other people do. So if you play other people's arrangements,
you can learn a lot from them. MR: I never heard it said that way. MA: Well that's the way I felt about it. And the baritone, when you lock into the lead
trumpet player in an ensemble and you're on the bottom and he's on top and you're whipping
the whole thing around, it's a great feeling, it's one of the good ones. I was a jazz clarinet player and baritone
sax player with Muggsy Spanier and I did have to play some alto. And I think I replaced Ernie Caceres who was
in the band. Muggsy had a big band at that time, which
was a lot of fun. And I finally gave up playing actually. I tired of the road, that was the only thing
we had to look for in the 40s and 50s was being on the road. I was getting lots to write and I figured
well if I'm going to hang around one place, being New York, and I was going to become
a studio saxophone player I'd better pick up a bassoon or an oboe or something else,
and I didn't have the time for it anymore. And so I gave my baritone sax away, my clarinet
is now with Paul McGinley who is a tenor player, he used to be with Woody's band, he's in California. I gave him that and I don't own any other
instruments except a little Irish tin whistle. MR: It kind of was a conscious decision to
like really become a writer then. MA: Yeah it was. And it was also a conscious decision not to
be on the road anymore or to go into a jazz club and all you hear is cash registers ringing,
you can't hear yourself play, and I think the environment is really what did it. It wasn't so much my consciousness, it was
the fact that I began to get all these calls to write. The minute I stopped playing I got a call
from Charlie Spivak, Sy Oliver was leaving, he was the chief arranger for Charlie, or
the only arranger at one time. And would I replace Sy Oliver as a writer. And I stayed about four years with Charlie
as a writer. Now I was sort of contracted to do two charts
a week. And you learn a lot. Two charts a week, and it isn't as difficult
as it sounds, because there's a style. You work within a particular style. Spivak's band was, see he was a great sweet
trumpet player. The things that he - he had a gorgeous tone,
and he could breathe through long phrases, and so you did that for the band. And then the swing parts for the band, I started
out trying to emulate Sy, and then I slowly got into my own thing with him, and spent
all that time at two charts a week. Maybe I was negligent a couple of weeks, you
know you need a vacation. And it got so that in the summertime I'd be
writing and I'd have a ballgame on, you know, listening to the ballgame, and when the music
came on for the commercials I'd just stop writing for a while, and I was a big New York
Giants fan. And also in football, and it's funny, we bring
up Mona and Milt, in Section 26 at Yankee Stadium for the Giants football games were
Mona, Milt, Barry Galbraith, a whole bunch of guys. The New York Rhythm Section - well more than
that. There was a whole section of Giants fans and
Mona would lead the cheers. You know: "Give me a G" you know. And everybody would "G!" you know. And you could hear it all over the stadium. It was fun. It was great fun to be there. I was sort of a swing guy with the ticket. It wasn't my ticket but whenever somebody
couldn't do it I would show up. MR: Let's see, the Giants at that time, they
were pretty good. MA: They were pretty good. And then they turned pretty bad. The Giants at that time were at first Chuck
Conerly and then Y.A. Tittle were the quarterbacks, and they were
pretty good. MR: Gee, were you at that game that had that
famous picture of Y.A. Tittle with the helmet off? MA: Yeah, but I thought that was in San Francisco. I don't think that was in Yankee Stadium. Anyway. So I was a pretty good athlete as a kid too,
and I still feel that there is some kind of affinity between athleticism and music, and
I can't figure it out. And there is also with mathematics and chess
and all those things. Occasionally I would play chess with Charlie
Parker I remember in Philadelphia. I ran into him, he was in a club and we were
in the theater, and I'd known him from a previous time. And he said, "do you play chess?" I said, "well I'll try." And I knew the moves but he didn't know them
too well either. MR: And so you were evenly matched. MA: Almost, yeah. At any rate -
MR: Can you recall the first thing that you wrote for somebody, and hearing it back? MA: Yeah. We had a band up in the Bronx. I didn't live in the Bronx but I used to go
to the Bronx to play with these kids and we were high school people, I think I was 16
or 17. In the band was Shorty Rodgers, let me see,
the trombone player DeVito, Eddie Bert, a whole bunch of all young kids in the band. Lenny Hambro, who wound up playing with Gene
Krupa for years and years, a great alto player. And we were all kids. And somehow or other I wrote a chart on the
Pepsi Cola jingle. "Pepsi Cola hits the spot." And every time I used to run into Shorty Rodgers,
50 years later, he wound sing the end of the bridge, which is very strange. That was our greeting. He'd look at me and go. Memory. I think memory has a lot to do with musicality. I can remember things that I heard in those
days, I can remember things I heard yesterday too, but I mean I'll go back to solos that
I played and still remember them, little parts of charts that really hit me. Oh also in the band was Stan Getz as a youngster,
a lot of very good players from that area. MR: Did you have a book or something that
you learned about transpositions or you just figured it out? MA: No I figured it out from playing stock
arrangements. One of the things about stock arrangements
is they were awful. The voicing was awful. I used to take them home and re-voice them
for saxophone. That was the beginning of it. Now I never knew about scores in the beginning. I used to write the first trumpet part out
and I would lay it aside and then look at it and write the second part out and then
say well my alto is going to have to do something, and I'd write an alto part and before I knew
it my bedroom was covered with music and I couldn't find what I was looking for. And the reason I did this, I was on the subway
once and Fletcher Henderson was in the subway writing out parts. Now that's the way he wrote. He did it from another aspect. He had the whole thing in his head. He could start writing a third trombone part
for the whole chart, or whatever. And I guess he didn't learn about scores either. Neal Hefti occasionally can sit down and write
parts, when he has to, and I can too, but I don't want to, I need a score page. And somebody showed me about scores and that
kind of opened up a whole new thing about writing. MR: Yeah, like wow. A score pad. MA: You can put it all down there and you
don't have to throw them all over the room. MR: Then your mother comes in and cleans up
and you're going like where is - MA: Right. What happened to the second trombone part,
my God, oh it's under the bed. And that's the way it looked to me. I wrote about four or five charts like that. I wrote an arrangement, I think the third
arrangement I wrote was an arrangement for a singer on Muggsy's band on "The Man I Love." And ultimately Muggsy didn't buy it and so
I sold it to Georgie Auld when I joined the band for his singer. What else? Oh, Herbie Fields, by that time he was in
the Army. He had a band in Atlantic City and I wrote
a chart for him on "Ghost of a Chance." That was about the fourth or fifth chart that
I wrote. MR: What was a chart going for back then? MA: Oh it wasn't going for very much. Copying - I used to copy and Georgie, this
is something that really taught me, you asked about books. I didn't need books. I copied a lot of Georgie's books. And the arrangers, one of the arrangers was
Budd Johnson who was a marvelous tenor player but he wrote a lot of stuff for Earl Hines'
band, Billy Eckstine's band. And he would bring charts into my room, I
had a great room on 52nd Street. And when he gave me a new score I'd ask him
about why he did certain things in the score that I was working on. And he would sit there for hours and tell
me what Benny Carter told him and what this guy said about this, and why you put these
notes together, it makes the thing ring a little bit more. He, and then later on Dizzy was another teacher
I had, and there were no books anywhere. I can't remember. Ultimately there was a book I think by Russ
Garcia, but by then I think I knew all the stuff that was in there. And also Van Alexander's book. I took a few lessons with Van. I couldn't afford them, I couldn't stay on. And at the time Johnny Mandel was studying
with him and I was, and Johnny and I used to learn our instruments at the same place,
at the Charles Colin studio. And there was a saxophone teacher that used
to come in, and Johnny would learn trumpet at the time. He was a trumpet player to begin with and
then he became a bass trumpet and trombone player. He studied with Charlie and I studied with
Jay Arnold, who wrote a whole bunch of saxophone studies. And we hung out a lot together, John is a
good old friend. And he really hit it with "I'm So Happy to
See You." He became very successful as you know. MR: Was the Musician's Union in at all on
the arranging end of things? MA: It became, after a while it was into - the
arrangers, you know, kind of looking after arrangements if you were arranging for Broadway
or radio or television - well television didn't even exist then. But if you had those kind of jobs, or recording
sessions they would monitor all that stuff and make sure you got paid and the rest of
it. But it didn't work all the time. If you were sitting in a band for instance,
and you wanted to write for the band and the leader would say well I'll give you twenty
bucks, and then we'll record it and maybe the record company will add to it - maybe. And if you got on the contract you would get
paid. So that's the way it all started for most
of us. And they would put their name on a composition
of yours because of ASCAP. They didn't take the royalties from the recordings,
but they used that to amass more credit at ASCAP. Woody did that, everybody did it, Benny Goodman
especially. In fact he had his own publishing firm with
his sister and brother running it, two brothers, and so if you wrote for him it would be you
plus Benny Goodman as the writer. MR: They did that with Ellington. MA: And he did take the royalties. MR: Another Goodman story. MA: Yeah, well I don't want to get into that. MR: You were mentioning Charlie Spivak as
one of your first kind of steady things. Did you get an assignment from him every week
that they told you what tunes they wanted? MA: Occasionally. He was the second one. At first I arranged for Charlie Barnet's band
and then I sat in the sax section for a while. So he was the first guy that kept calling
me to write things for the band. Charlie would leave some stuff up to me. Original material that I wanted to write he
would put into the book. Occasionally - song pluggers in those days
were very big. And so Charlie would call and say call so-and-so
at Robin's Music or something, and he's got a couple of tunes that he'd like you to look
at. And when you'd hear, "Like you to look at"
it means write one of them. Choose one or the other. They were still playing a lot on the radio
then, and those plays helped all the ASCAP, all the publishers and writers and the rest
of it. So I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a lot
of the bands weren't subsidized by publishers. Charlie was subsidized by Glenn Miller in
the beginning, as was Bob Chester, who I also played in his band, and Stan Getz sat right
next to me there. Herbie Fields I think also, he had some kind
of future and then suddenly he turned into a rock tenor player, I can't figure it out. He went with Lionel Hampton and learned how
to honk. But he was quite a player - good clarinet,
all the saxes, whatever. And I wrote a lot for him in the later 40s
after the war. And then Barnet and Jerry Wald and Woody and
ultimately Basie and Kenton and all those people. MR: The tunes that came out back then that
the song pluggers pushed, a lot of them seemed to have a verse that we never heard. MA: You never did the verse. MR: Was that some standard? That you wouldn't do the verse? MA: Occasionally if it was a great verse,
like "Someone to Watch Over Me" you know had a beautiful verse, and most singers wanted
to do it. The band leaders didn't care that much. The tune was popular, the chorus was the popular
part of the tune. But if you did want to use the verse, that's
fine with them, no problem. The verses sometimes were uninteresting in
a way. But some of them were marvelous. And they belonged to the tune. Like "Stardust" - the verse to "Stardust"
is part of the song, you can't do without it. And a lot of Gershwin stuff had marvelous
verses. MR: Do you think the songwriters themselves
almost knew that that was going to happen? That they would write the song so that it
could stand alone if someone just did the chorus, even from a lyric standpoint? MA: Oh sure, yeah. You know the people that wrote the verses,
actually that was all part of Broadway, it was all part of either the movies or Broadway. And there were introductions to the way the
songs were presented on stage or in the pictures. Very few of the non-Broadway or film writers
wrote verses. They just wrote the tune. But when you came across Jerome Kern or Cole
Porter or Berlin or all those people, they had to have the verses as introductory material. A lot of times the people would just speak
the verse, with the orchestra like playing the melody of it and they would just talk
the verse and then go into the song. And it was part of the set up, dramatically,
for the song. So whether you did the verse or not I think
it was moot. You could either - if you loved it, you did
it. If you didn't like it, or if you didn't have
the time - MR: Did you get feedback from the bands over
the years about, this isn't really working, can you change your style for us a bit? MA: No, actually I kind of looked at it philosophically
in a way. When I joined Spivak as the main writer, the
only writer as a matter of fact for all that time, I can't remember anybody else writing,
and I followed, first Nelson Riddle wrote for the band and then Sy Oliver, and then
myself. I wrote the first maybe 20 charts were in
Sy's groove in a sense, so I kind of weaned Spivak back into my own style slowly. I didn't just hit them with, hey, I'm going
to sit down and change your whole thing. So from Sy Oliver I would stretch out a little
bit. And strangely enough in speaking about Sy
now, we're doing, at the Carnegie Hall, on November 12th, half a program of Jimmy Lunceford's
stuff and I think Gerald is coming is, and the other half the program of Sy Oliver's
things that he did for Tommy Dorsey, and we're just taking the material and re-doing it. But here I am with Sy Oliver again. And I used to do a lot of sessions and his
wife would be the second girl singer and if I had to have a group, she was great, marvelous. So anyway, that's what some of that writing
is about. There's a psychological thing that happens
too. After a while, I won't mention names but I'll
tell you a tale about producers and what they expect you to do. I got called by a producer of a record company,
he said, "Come on in I want to talk to you about a project." And I did and we talked about a male singer,
a pretty good one actually. And as he's talking he goes over to the record
player and he begins to play a whole bunch of Sinatra stuff with Nelson Riddle. He said, "That's what I want you to do." And I didn't even think, but I looked at him
and I said, "Look, you're asking me to be Nelson Riddle, you're going to get a second
hand Nelson Riddle. Call me when I go back home and I'll give
you Nelson's number, and he doesn't get any more money than I do, and then you'll be getting
the real thing. Why should you look for a half-assed chart? You know, a half-assed Riddle." And I walked out of his office. And from that moment on I think I became Manny
Albam and not guys that had to write like other guys because you felt that that's the
way you could work. You know psychologically work with the leaders. It took a while to do that but it was a stepping
stone, a milestone. MR: A good moment. MA: Yeah. And he went like what? How could he leave? MR: Well probably a few years later there
was some other office where someone was saying, "we want you to do this Manny Albam thing
here." MA: You know, it's funny you bring this up. I didn't meet the man until much later, maybe
about six years ago I met him in California. But a lot of people used to think I was Marty
Paich. Why I don't know. I would walk down streets in New York and
some song publisher or plugger would stop me and say, "Marty, when did you get in?" And I'd say, "Wait a minute, I'm Manny." And they'd say, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
right." This went on for years and years, and finally
there was one of these things in California, I think we were doing a Stan Kenton tribute
for four days, and Marty showed up. And I had never met him and we had breakfast
together. And we were talking and my wife was looking
at me kind of - oh this never happened to you, you don't look anything like Marty or
whatever it is. And Marty said, "you know the same thing happens
to me in California. So she still didn't believe it. She thought we were just kind of kidding. I went to see the show about Singapore which
was done in sort of a night club atmosphere, it had to do with Amelia Earhart. It was a very strange show because it was
kind of a nice jazz score to it. And we're sitting at a table and a guy taps
me on the shoulder and he says, "Marty?" And my wife looks at him and I said, "No,
I'm Manny Albam." And he said, "oh, of course." And he was a producer at Columbia Records. So that's as close as I ever got to be somebody
else. So why I bring this up I don't know, but for
a while I think people were hiring me thinking I was Marty Paich, until they saw my name
on the contract. MR: Well you've written for so many people,
we don't certainly have time to talk about all of them, but I'm interested in your writing
for Basie, how that came about. MA: Neal Hefti called me and he was light
a couple of charts for an album. And so I wrote a couple of things for Basie
and I wrote more and more. Some of them got recorded and some didn't. I wasn't really writing the Basie style in
a sense. I think I was writing the voicing a little
wider and things like that. And I had enough to do with other things at
the time. I wrote some for Woody, I wrote some for Kenton,
and I had all my own projects that were going on. And I was doing a lot of commercials too,
a lot of jingles. So Basie you know was another one of those
guys that will bring the music in and you never got paid until the recording happened,
and it could be two or three years away. And Norman Granz would finally write the check
out. And Basie figured that - he would stand out
in front of Birdland and as arrangers walked by he'd say, "Hey I'm having a rehearsal next
Thursday afternoon, bring something in." And so maybe six guys would bring stuff in
and then he'd realize that well I can't pay six, I can't pay all these guys, and maybe
he'd choose one or two, and then wait for Norman Granz or whoever it was, later on Morris
at Roulette was another guy. So a lot of band leaders did this. I mean that was par for the course. Buddy Rich still owes me some money. I hope to collect it one day. So a lot of guys. Dick Haymes, my God, I could retire on what
he owes me. I'm kidding in a way. MR: So there was enough writers around, so
you kind of had to get out there and compete in a sense? MA: Well yes and no. There was a time in the 50s that we had an
arranging office. And in the office was Billy Byers, Bob Brookmeyer,
Al Cohn and myself. And when a project came up, a lot of times
all four of us would be into it. There was one Ray Charles thing which we all
wrote under the name of some other arranger. I won't - and Al Cohn won a Grammy for this
guy, and he didn't even recognize the fact when he picked up the thing. So the arranging office was a lot of fun. We all learned from each other. It was a great way to act, and finally, I
lived in New York. I was known to be a very fast writer. I wrote in cabs on the way to a session sometimes
and things. And I wanted to stop that, so I moved up to
Nyack and I figured if people want me to write something for a recording session that's already
in progress, they're not going to call me because it's going to take me an hour at least
to get in. But that used to happen. MR: No kidding. You're not exaggerating? MA: Not at all. MR: Someone would call and say listen we've
got a session going here - MA: We've got a session going, write something
and then give me the instrumentation and all that. And I'd get dressed, get into the cab and
begin to write and there'd be a copyist there. It was shorthand. I must say you did a lot of repeats. You know, here's your first eight, repeat
that, make a solo for the bridge, do a little more and make some solos with a little bit
of background and write the bass line, and there you go. So I bailed out a lot of arrangers doing this. And suddenly it got a little too strong for
me. MR: What kind of sessions would those be? Were those jazz sessions? MA: Mostly jazz sessions. The first one I ever did which actually got
me into a lot of hot water because of it, and they figured out I can always do this,
was one for Al Cohn. I think the project was called "Mr. Music." And I wrote a piece called "Cohn My Way." And that came out of, I had remembered a little
phrase that he played in one of his solos, and I used that and made a piece out of it
on the way down. And that got the producer to start thinking
about me when they were in trouble. I mean they wouldn't think about me when they
had four or five weeks to do something. But hey we've got a session coming up on Thursday,
it's Tuesday, write a couple of charts. And it was fun. But as you get older you don't want to do
that all the time. At least with the Carnegie Hall people they
give you months and months. Months in advance. They only do about six projects a year. So it's a fun game actually. It's really nice. The best thing about writing is that you look
at a score, it doesn't have any kind of sound. The paper doesn't have a sound at all. It does in your head, but to anybody else,
if they look at it, it's a piece of paper with scribbles on it. The minute somebody breathes through a horn
and makes it happen you have music. And so the love that you have between yourself
and the players is what makes the whole thing work. If you can't get your friends there, you'd
better get some pretty good playing enemies, which I don't think I have any. I love it. I come into a record session, I think I'm
more relaxed then I have been for years and years, I think I'm more relaxed in a recording
session than I am in my own living room. Because you're with 17, 18, 30 of your friends,
and you expect the best out of them, and they are the best musicians you can think about
to begin with. In the days of, actually you have those two
albums of the 50s, you called Phil Woods, you called Clark Terry, you called all these
people, Joe Newman. If Basie was in town you use half the Basie
band, and all these people became friends of yours, close friends, not just people that
you would see on recording sessions, but guys you could hang out with and have a very nice
life with. MR: Let's talk about these records here. This album "The Blues is Everybody's Business." How much - was the concept yours? MA: Oh yeah. MR: From the beginning? MA: Yeah. The whole thing was. The producer came to me and said, "Look, Lawrence
Welk and Debbie Reynolds made millions of dollars last year." Debbie Reynolds had some hit record, I don't
know what it was, the only recording she ever made. And Lawrence Welk you know made thousands
of records and brought in a lot of money and they had to spend it. So he said, "think of a project that will
go through a whole album, I don't care what it is, and think of a budget of 30 men per
session and four sessions." So actually I did it in three sessions, but
when I did the big band stuff, which is just an additional bass player and a tuba, that
added up to 19 people, so that saved me 11 people that I could use on the other session,
and add that to strings, and then reduce the horns. So I could have more and more strings, and
enough horns to make it work. So the second and third movements are done
with a smaller horn group but a bigger string thing. And the first and fourth are done without
strings and sort of a big band. Now the players were all available, marvelous
players, Art Farmer, Phil Woods, Gene Quill, Al Cohn, Bob Brookmeyer, all these guys. And I just thought about, you know here I
am, I've been writing the blues for Basie, for all these other people, and it's kind
of a part of your bloodstream in a way. If you have a musical bloodstream and you're
jazz oriented, the blues is what you think about. So I worked this out. It took me a while to think through the whole
thing. I don't make too many sketches when I write. I just put the paper down, I begin to think
and I begin to write and I love to see where it takes me. Sometimes I don't know, I have no idea of
where it's going to end or what other parts of the things are going to be until I get
there. And I think I trust my judgment about how
long something should be and where the emphasis should come, where the climaxes are and things
of that nature, that I feel that I just let the pencil - there was a writer by the name
of Obie Massingill and he said he loved that feeling when you had to hold on to the pencil
for dear life. The pencil just started working. And I recommend to all my students that they
do write sketches, and really plan things a little bit, but I think my experience tells
me that it will work. MR: Personally for you it works. MA: Yes. For me it works. There's a couple of other guys, for Neal it
works very well. But for a lot of other people, we were trained
that way because we didn't have the time to sketch it out. MR: Well the musical description that you've
written was very specific. Was it written - did you have this whole scenario
in mind when you started, even down to describing the muted sound of Nick Travis - I believe
that's the trumpet player's name? MA: Yeah. Well both he and Art played in the mutes,
there were two different mutes and each one traded off as a matter of fact. But oh yeah, I had all that, I knew who I
was going to have. I knew I was going to have Nick, and I mentioned
them. Nick, Art, Brookmeyer was going to be a soloist,
Al Cohn was and Phil Woods and Gene Quill, who were the two great alto players. They were alter-egos for each other. And so I knew they would be there. Eddie Costa, an incredible piano player - unfortunately
he ended his life too quickly in an automobile accident. But a marvelous player and so I knew he was
going to be there. I figured Gene Orloff was going to be the
concertmaster and I didn't think violin solo until I came upon it. A lot of it is predetermined by just the people. Now I had gone after Charles Mingus as a bass
soloist. Milt was on this and finally Vinny Burke was
the soloist. Mingus said, "yeah let me think about it"
and by the time he thought about it we'd already hired the rest of the band and he said no
he didn't want to do it. And so we scrounged around, and as a matter
of fact Eddie Costa suggested Vinny Burke. They had been working as a duo for a while. And that's the way all this came about. The thematic stuff for me is very simple stuff. MR: Well I'm glad you mention that, I just
wanted to - Yeah, you seem to have found some nice licks
and stretched them from one instant to the next, is that -
MA: Well that's orchestration, yeah. There's a difference between arranging and
orchestrating. A lot of people don't recognize that there
is. Orchestration you want to change the colors
that you're using rather than turning everything gray with the same thing all the time. I'd like to do things, like if I have a melody
that stretches out over a goodly number of measures, I like to pass it around. And so somebody might start the melody and
as he passes it on to somebody else he becomes a secondary person. And maybe the first guy was a secondary person
to him, so it's like weaving a cloth. Some of this, you know a lot of people where
do you get the inspiration? You don't get the inspiration. A lot of it comes out of fear that you're
not going to finish the damn thing. In these days I was doing a lot of writing
and I specifically turned my phone off when I started to do this, and didn't think about
anything else until it was finished. And another thing that I thought about, you
know this is one of the first projects of its kind of a jazz composer to write maybe
a 35, 40 minute piece. Duke used to write suites, but they were made
up of a whole bunch of different tunes. What I tried to do is take some of the thematic
material out of the first section and sort of turn it around a little bit and make that
into the second, so the themes were always folding back on themselves or maybe carrying
themselves forward a little bit. The end of the first section, the last two
notes of the first section are the first two notes of the second section. Now you think about those things. They just don't come - they come because you're
hearing as a big brass thing, and then suddenly you go with a cup muted trumpet. And that took me into the next tune. And then I wanted to do a minor blues, I did
it in a weird key and Brookmeyer always, you know, no problem with those guys, to do it
in G flat and actually E flat minor is not the same as D minor. MR: Why would you do that? MA: I don't know I just kind of heard the
introduction, which was a violin solo and then it became a string thing, I just heard
it in that key and it turned out to be - I could have modulated up or down and put it
in E or D but I left it there, with all those flats. MR: Do you sit at the piano when you write? MA: I'd like to but I don't always. I like to have that -
MR: Not in a cab, right? MA: Yeah, the luxury of doing it - or an airplane
sometimes. But I visualize the keyboard. I also, my ten fingers are - this could be
a soprano sax and that an alto or a trombone or whatever. So I can visualize. And it might sound strange to an uninitiate
but that's the way I work. And I heard Beethoven wrote the same way,
that his piano music was orchestrational and that you could hear what he would do for flutes
in some of the things or whatever. I heard that after I had talked about the
way I think. I don't experiment as much without a piano. I kind of play it safe because I'm not too
sure. If I try something, if I'm at the piano I'll
do it and then the piano will sometimes tell me how to fix it if it doesn't work. And sometimes in just writing quickly somewhere
else, if I do make the mistake it takes a little more time to try to figure out how
to fix it. MR: Did you ever have an occasion to get the
music from this recording performed? MA: Oh yeah. I did it in L.A. just recently. I made a suite out of it for a choreographer
so that it started actually with the second movement and it got into other parts and ended
with the fourth movement and then back into something else. And they had heard it but they didn't want
to do the whole 40 minutes so I said okay I'll make you a suite out of it. And I use it kind of intermittently. If somebody asks me to do a concert that sort
of will go back and become a retrospective, I'll pull this out, I'll pull a part of it. If it's only with a big band I'll just pull
the part out of it that starts at measure 45 and ends at measure 246 and that's the
big band section with all the soloists and all that. MR: You had a little statement on the "West
Side Story" thing that - MA: Oh that. I've got to tell you about that. MR: I think this really says something about
- you've already spoken about how your ears absorb these. It says, "When I sat and listened to the prologue
to this opera ballet at the Wintergarden it was obvious from the first few bars that this
was to be a musical with an unhappy theme and probably an unhappy ending." To me it just says a lot about you as a listener. That it didn't take you long to realize where
Bernstein was coming from with this thing. MA: Oh yeah, I've got to tell you about this
whole project. The producer of Coral Records, at the time
it was Bob Fields who produced a lot of jazz for various labels and all that. He called me up on a Wednesday and he said,
"I've got two tickets for you, they'll be at the Wintergarden on Thursday night. It's the last preview of Bernstein's new show." You know I didn't know anything about it. And he said, "You want to go?" I said, "Yeah, sure." And my wife and I went, and I got back, they
opened the next night, the real opening. They got tremendous reviews on Saturday. Sunday, about 11 o'clock in the morning my
phone rings and it's Bob Fields and he said, "How'd you like the show?" And I said Jesus, you know, "Pretty illuminating. The orchestration was great." I knew the guys that orchestrated it. And I said, "It was marvelous, a great experience." He said, "Well all the music is on the way
to your house now. I booked Wednesday morning and Wednesday afternoon
and Thursday morning and we've got to get this album into the stores by next Monday. MR: Oh, come on. Next Monday? MA: The following Monday. The reason for that is you can't put out anything
from a show until the original cast album hits the stores. And the publisher told him well the original
cast album which they already recorded on the day that he's talking to me, on Sunday,
will be out on Monday. Now he said, "Who do you want in the band,
I'll get all the guys you need" etcetera, etcetera. And some guys were unavailable so you can
see that they're - at any rate, I stayed awake from that Sunday morning until Thursday night
writing, recording, and I don't remember the Thursday session at all. I have no memory of it. It's weird. I mean it's like you're in a foxhole. By Monday night I had been awake already for
about 48 hours or whatever it is, 36 hours. Stayed awake, stayed awake, wrote. Between the Wednesday night thing and Thursday
session I had to write the finale. And I had a copyist that was sitting across
the desk from me and at one time I guess, because he told me this finally, I was writing
like this, trying to - and I thought I was just whipping them out. And he looked at me and he picked me up and
he said, "I'm going to put you in the shower." And he put me in a cold shower and then the
next four days. Now I never want to do this again, and it's
probably the most successful thing that I've done - that I had done up until that time. I got a Grammy nomination and everything. And I have a very vague recollection of the
whole thing. Also when I looked at Bernstein's - a lot
of the stuff came in in Bernstein's hand, in the way he wrote the piano music. And I said well Jesus, they're not going to
be able to blow over this stuff, so I had to reconstitute a lot of the tunes. About a week later after it came out, I got
a call and a guy said, "This is Leonard Bernstein" he said, "I want to really congratulate you
on what you did." Now if you did something like this for Richard
Rodgers, he would never talk to you again, and he'd probably go out and say, "Take that
thing out -I'm going to sue -he changed my bass line." Some composers are like that and some aren't. I don't mean to demean Richard Rodgers but
he enjoyed his bass lines to the extent that you couldn't make a move. At any rate, Bernstein asked me, he said,
"Do you ever write anything, would you ever write anything for my big band" which was
the New York Philharmonic. MR: His big band, yeah. MA: And it scared the hell out of me. And I started studying. I asked around and people said, "You ought
to go to Tibor Serly and study." I had never studied writing or anything. And he was Bela Bartok's roommate and they
went to the Conservatory of Budapest together and they studied with Kodaly. Kodaly was their teacher. So I figured, yeah, why not? And he really put me into a whole different
way of thinking about form, about overall form, and I'd already thought about longer
works. Barnet got me to do something once that he
had the faith in me that I could pull off a 15, 20 minute piece. And "The Blues is Everybody's Business" was
a result of his having that kind of faith. And I began to think about longer things,
which leads me into chamber music and other things that I do besides just jazz arranging
and all that. I had one experience, Harvey Phillips, I don't
know if you know Harvey. MR: Tuba player? MA: Incredible tuba player. He calls me up and he says, "Manny, I've got
a string quartet and me and we're coming into Carnegie Hall. I've got Carnegie Hall booked but I don't
have any music." "So what do you want me to do, Harv?" He says, "Well write something." So I wrote a four movement piece for tuba
and string quartet. And people said tuba and string quartet, you're
crazy. You know, the tuba will wipe them out. It doesn't. I figured out if you write for any one instrument
against any other instruments, they're not going to overbalance each other. There's no problem. Okay. So that came off pretty well, it got a nice
review, and the tuba teacher at Eastman had heard about it. And he said, "Please can I use that?" And I said, "Sure, go ahead." And so the trombone teacher went to his recital
and heard it and called me up and said, "Would you do something for me with the string quartet?" Okay. Then Jim Pugh and Dave Taylor called me up,
"Hey I just heard what you did for John Marcellus. Why don't you do something for us?" And so I wound up with all this, and then
I had done one for a harp and string quartet. I did a CD with Hank Jones's trio and a string
quartet which I thought was just great. I mean Hank and I had been talking about doing
something like that for years, and finally we got the opportunity to do it. So that leads me into a whole other thing. Now when I spend some time teaching at the
Glassboro State College, which is now called something else - somebody gave them a lot
of money and they re-named the school, Rowan - anyway while I was there the other teachers
in all the different departments said hey write something for the choir, write something
for the wind ensemble, do something for this. And so I began to do things other than just
jazz charts, which I was still doing when I was home. I'd commute. It was a three hour drive. I'd go there Monday night and I'd be home
Thursday night so I could write over Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday and then get in
the car in the late afternoon, and taught the three days in between. And that kind of opened my ears up to a lot
of things that were not just jazz charts for Woody or for Basie or for whatever else. And I appreciated what I did there. I kind of sometimes feel that I might have
wasted a little time, but every time I think about that and say no, wait a minute, I did
branch out into doing other things. MR: Yeah. You made a contribution in another field. MA: Totally, until I just finished something
for Harvey Phillips with the United States Army Field Band, which is a heck of a band,
a concert band. And other things like that. You know, brass ensembles and this and that,
that I wouldn't have done if I hadn't taken that job at Glassboro. The summers I spent at Eastman with Ray Wright
were, we both taught in the same classroom at the same time, and occasionally - we wouldn't
come to battles, but we did have differences of opinion about something. And I thought that was the best way for a
pupil to learn something about the fact that are not formulas in music. They come expecting to find the formula. And Ray and I were kind of friendly arguing,
and he would see my point and I would see his point and say oh sure, there are other
ways to do this. And if we could instill in a student the fact
that these two guys are thinking two different things, why can't I think another one, my
own way of putting their own thoughts together. Ray wrote an incredible book about arranging
called Inside the Score. I don't know if you've seen it or heard about
it. He took three different writers and really
boiled them down to the essentials, some of the best analysis I've ever seen. MR: All through these years when you were
constantly writing it seems like, did you have time to sit and listen? MA: Sure. MR: What did you like to listen to and did
it effect the way you wrote? MA: I always listened to classical music. I have great favorites starting with Bach
and ending with Lutoslawski. I've always heard Prokeviev and Schoenberg
and Bartok and Ravel and all those writers were people - this three hour jaunt that I
used to have, or six hours in the car, I would put all kinds of cassettes into the thing
and drive with them and listen to them. And when I wasn't writing and I wasn't on
my roof cleaning up the leaves or anything, I'd listen to symphonic stuff. My wife is an opera lover. She's an artist and she works downstairs in
her studio and she generally has opera on, CDs or the radio or whatever. When I don't shut her door that music kind
of comes up when I'm not working. And I have thousands of LPs and CDs of other
than jazz music. In fact I think I listen to that more than
I do jazz. I think jazz is a spontaneous thing more than
anything else, I like to go and hear it live. It's a big difference. Although on recordings you have people like,
oh anybody you've ever admired and you can get them and listen to them as much as you
want. I have a story I can tell you about Coleman
Hawkins. Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter were playing
in Fletcher's band. And in downtown New York there used to be
what they called a split week theater, where bands would come in and play three days and
then they'd go to the Bronx or Brooklyn or something. And around the corner from this place was
a little delicatessen where - it was a delicatessen or maybe a creamery of some kind. At any rate, it would be long tables. You didn't go in with two people and have
your own table, you'd just sit at tables. And I think I was 13 at the time, not that
I was there. But here are Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins
having whatever they're having. A vegetarian meal or whatever. And my mother is sitting at the same thing
and she hears them talking about saxophones. So she interrupts them and says, "you know
my son is a saxophone player." And she tells me that she sat with these two
black men and they were very nice, very beautiful men and all that, and they talked about saxophones
and one of them is called Benny Carter I think and the other is Coleman Hawkins. And I turned, "What?" You actually - And she said "Yeah and I told
them that you were playing the saxophone" and all that. And I said, "Oh for God's" you know how you
are like. Some years later, I'm doing an album with
Coleman Hawkins and RCA Victor and somehow or other we got into this thing and he said,
"That was your mother?" He said, "Man I thought you would be the greatest
saxophone player that I ever wanted to hear." It's weird. It's like he remembered the scene pretty well
too. So it pays to have a good press agent in your
own family. MR: She was quite an advocate. MA: Well see she was in my corner about whatever
I wanted to do. It didn't really manner if it never paid off
or whatever. But that was a strange - kind of a strange
thing - ultimately I did a couple of things with Hawkins. Wow what a giant. I mean his thinking, his playing, his musicality
was something extraordinary really. MR: You have had a kind of amazing list of
people that you've been able to have bring life to your music. MA: Well I'm asked to bring stuff in for them. Sometimes they don't know who I am. It happened with Ben Webster. He didn't know me from Adam. I mean we wound up to be great friends. You can't avoid being a friend of his because
if you weren't, he would knock you down on the street. Really. He was a bull of a man, but a very gentle
guy. And he had that reputation of being pretty
powerful. So he would - sometimes I'd be walking down
Broadway and he lived at the Forrest Hotel on 49th Street, and if he ran into me he would
grab me and say, "come on upstairs I've got something to play for you." The guys in the Ellington band, which he had
left many years before, would send him tapes of the band almost every day, and he had a
whole room full of tapes. In those days they were reel to reel, they
weren't cassettes. And he would play this and say, "listen to
this, they just did this in Calcutta," or they just did this and that. And incredible that he lived with that band
and he hadn't been playing with them for 20 years or so. But that's where his life was, all his friends
were there. And so he taught me a heck of a lot about
being honest to your trade in a way. He felt that the best work he ever did was
with Duke and that he made a mistake I think by leaving the band. MR: You think he wanted to work as a soloist
more? MA: Yeah. Well he was, you know somebody got after him
and said why don't you record for us? And then the clubs got after him. He didn't really mind it in a way. But I think deeply he wished he was still
with Ellington. MR: You mentioned you lived on 52nd Street. MA: Yeah. MR: Was it near the famed block? MA: I lived right over - oh my goodness what
was the name of that place - The Three Deuces. My room, I had one big room and a tiny little
kitchen. And so I could come home from the gig and
just walk into any one of those clubs and hear Tatum or hear Dizzy or hear whatever,
and then go upstairs and go to sleep. I don't know what brought me there. I think a friend of mine lived down the street,
and I used to hang out with him and suddenly I saw there was a For Rent sign there for
a little, it was like a whole walk-through but it was one big room. And I enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun and met a lot of great
musicians. MR: We didn't talk about the jingle scene. MA: I'll give you a clue as to the - I did
Coca Cola, I did Chevrolet, I did a whole bunch of things. And this is a clue as to how people think
in the advertising business, or try to think. We were doing a project for I think it was
cosmetics. It was a female product of one kind or another. And they called me in and we started talking
about a month before the recording session about what would be nice. I said, "well I'd love to use a string quartet
and a harp and maybe an unamplified guitar, a classical guitar and a bass, no drums, maybe
a percussionist, maybe vibes and little bells or whatever." And the guys says, "great, great, boy that
sounds beautiful" it sounds like, whatever. And we talked more and more and I go in and
see the cuts that they're making in the film and then they would call me up and say well
they changed something and come on and look at it, and you had to take very detailed things
about what was going on so you could fit the music. And finally we get to the studio, the guy
walks in and he looks in through the glass into the studio and he says, "what's that
violin doing there? I hate violins." So his associate says, "We've been talking
about a string quartet for a month." So he says, "Well I thought a string quartet
was four guitar players." So take it from there. He'd say, "Well all right, we can't do anything
about this, let's listen to it." And so we played it and in about an hour we
were out. We did a minute and we did a 30 second and
maybe a 15 or whatever. Out of there. And he takes the tape over to another studio
to have the voiceover. And the voiceover is a guy by the name of
Mason Adams, whose voice you would know, almost every, about 80% of all the voiceovers was
Mason Adams. And we used to sometimes hook up at various
projects and all that, and we had the same answering service and a little room that you
could go to to change your clothes or something. So Mason does the voiceover and he's telling
me about it after this whole thing was over. He said he went to the producer and he says,
"You know that's one of the most comfortable tracks I've ever worked with." He said, "Nothing got in my way" he said,
"Everything was just fine." And the guy said, "Oh yeah, well we had string
quartet all the way." Now that is how you have to deal with Madison
Avenue a lot of times. I mean there were some guys that were musicians
that were good musicians that ran the music stuff, but you also had people like this. And I couldn't deal with it anymore. You play something on the piano and you say,
"well this is going to be a French horn, you know. And they come in and they go, "What was that
sound" and they expect to hear what you did on the piano. And you tell them it's going to be a French
horn. So fortunately I had other things that kept
me busy. I just left the scene. And it all changed. It changed when synthesizers began to rear
their heads. One guy could do the whole thing. MR: You seem to have certainly survived the
rock & roll onslaught. Did it change your work at all when rock & roll
became the popular music? MA: Well what happened to me a couple of times,
there used to be a group in Canada called The Guess Who. And there was another one called the Lloyds
of London. They would come down to New York and cut a
basic track and then I would go in and add strings and horns and whatever. And that began to become like a joke. They'd go in, first the bass player would
come in and play his line. And then the guitar player came in and says,
"Wait a minute I can't play with that thing, you've got G natural and it's the wrong - I
can't do that." So the bass player would have to make another
track. And then the piano player came in and they'd
change - so to get one thing down sometimes took three or four days. Finally they got two tracks down and I took
them home and I would write "sweetening" is what they'd call it - strings and horns and
all that. And we'd call the session and the string players
came in and sat down and they played the thing through once and we recorded them the second
time and they left and then the horn players came in. And these guys were, "Holy Jesus, you mean
you did the whole thing in 20 minutes? I can't believe it." I said, "Well they're musicians. They read music." And after a while, I mean it paid but -
MR: I can't imagine it. MA: It's taking money under false pretenses. MR: Really. After working with the guys on these things. MA: Some of the guys would come in and be
in the horn section. You'd have like Marvin Stamm or Bill Watrous
or whatever. They'd just come in, sit down and go and leave,
and pick up their 90 dollars or whatever. And the groups didn't know then who they were
dealing with yet. They were dealing with great players. Jerome Richardson. These guys were - they had no idea. So God bless them. My kids love the Beatles. You know you can't do anything about that. I like them, especially towards the end when
they started getting arrangements. So I was sort of impressed by some of the
groups that were at least musical in a way, went beyond the three chords. I loved that "Yellow Submarine," that movie. It was a great thing. MR: Yeah. George Martin. MA: Yeah. George Martin was the guy that really - I
had a lot of admiration for, because he knew what he was doing and he convinced them that
he was doing the right thing. So anyway, I don't have any kind of anger
about rock & roll. I'll go along with it. But I don't like to hear it when I pull up
to a red light and all I hear is a bass line coming out of the car next to me. That's something else. MR: It's curious over the years, the - I'm
not sure what word to use - it's orchestration but it's the volume that they put in the mix
has changed a great deal. It used to be the vocal would be out front
if it was a vocal. Now obviously, as you said, the low end is
king. MA: You know there's a peculiar thing that
happens, that I notice happens with pops concerts. The first time I had done something for Stan
Getz and the Boston Pops, and Stan brought a very quiet rhythm section with him. I think Jim Hall was there, God I can't think
of the drummer, a beautiful little drummer that worked on "Focus" with him. And they wiped out the whole orchestra. And what wiped out the orchestra was the amplified
bass. And you don't know why, but it seems like
you can't mix, for me I don't want to mix an amplifier with live strings. It just doesn't work. And when you hear it, and this was a live
concert at Tanglewood that was recorded on that album, that you can barely hear the woodwinds,
you can barely hear the strings, and what you hear is the bass and Stan and the drums
and I guess Gary Burton might have been there too. So you have to kind of juggle things. And one of the things that Ray and I professed
up at Eastman when we taught was that if you really want the strings to do something that's
prominent, keep the rhythm section, just write them out. Let the strings do it all by themselves, and
they will come out actually. Or if you have something big going you write
the strings high and all in unison, so that they soar over the top and you don't write
harmony and there's lots of things that you wouldn't do. MR: Yeah. The subtleties will get covered up. MA: Of course. Even if they're not subtleties. They could be like gross harmony that you're
never going to hear because everything is covering them up. So subtleties work if you begin to manipulate
the orchestra. And that again is orchestration. I learn a lot from listening to Jim Hall and
from knowing Jim Hall. He is the quietest guitar player you'd ever
want to know. He commands attention because you have to
listen to him. He doesn't wack at the strings and you know,
like you have to lean back and say, wait a minute, get out of my way. With Jim you go like what did he do? And you go more and more into what he's doing. And that is lot of times is what is dynamics
in orchestration do for the audience. You suddenly realize wow, they're doing something
I can't quite hear, I'd better pay attention. That's part of audience manipulation. I did things orchestrated on Broadway, not
too much. I used to help other people and then I got
my own thing to do. And I worked with George Abbott, Mr. Broadway,
a great director and all that. And I wrote this great arrangement for one
of the singers in the show and he called me over and he said, "We don't want applause
at the end of that." I said, "No?" He said, "No, we want that to dwindle off
into the next scene and to be a smooth thing that will go right into the next scene." And I learned something about that. They don't want applause. If you want to bring the audience to their
feet you write these big chords and the rhythm section and everybody's wailing away, and
the audience will go, "Hey! Yeah!" and get up, "Encore! encore!" You know, the show stopper. But these things are for dramatic changes
that happen. No applause. I had to re-write the whole last 12 bars of
the thing to bring it all down to nothing and then the whole thing would swing into
place. Now once you learn things like that from other
venues, in other words this is drama, this has nothing to do with music, but music has
got a lot to do with drama anyway. I did another thing later on, a thing called
"The Soul of the City" which to me was the way I felt in various parts of a city or different
cities or whatever. How do I feel when I walk down to the river? Most cities are built on a river. How do I feel when I'm in a playground or
I walk past kids in a playground or at a football game or at a cocktail party where I don't
know anybody. And sometimes when I'm amongst friends. I had an apartment that my window was this
and these windows were a synagogue. And in the summertime all our windows were
open and I would hear the music come in and I'm trying to write, and the feeling that
I would have trying to fight what was happening there. So all these vignettes came along. In Rochester the year that I wrote this were
a bunch of riots and I would stay in the hotel room and listen to silence all night and say
I wonder what's burning now. And one night I said to myself wait a minute,
you know I could be in an ambulance taking a woman to a hospital to give birth. So the opening thing is called "Born on Arrival." And how I felt sitting in an airport where
you can't understand the words. I used sound effects, the big band, strings,
and all that and it made me think about myself. The music was easy but it really saved me
some, probably a lot of time with an analyst. I really figured out a lot about myself thinking
about this in order to portray it in a way. It's like doing a dramatic movie or a show
or something, but without the drama, it's just the music. A museum, walking into the Philadelphia Museum
of Art and the first thing you see is that Calder thing that's spinning around. How does that sound? So anyway I also like students to learn about
this. You can look at a picture and describe that
picture very easily in music. You can think about what happened in your
life the night before and if it was good or bad, you can do something about it and make
it turn into some music. So you don't have to write an opera, you can
work on all that stuff. MR: That's a great statement. It really is. Just to wrap up, what's you feeling about
the state of jazz these days? MA: I think it's very healthy. The kids, there are some young players that
I can't believe. I'm glad I stopped playing saxophone in a
way. Yeah, I think it's very healthy and it's healthy
in Europe, it's healthy in Japan, it's healthy here, it's healthy in Canada. I give it a long life I think. MR: Great. Well this has really been fascinating, everything
I hoped for. MA: I told you everything I know. MR: And you're off to where next? MA: To home. MR: The next big assignment you've got? MA: The next thing I have to do is at Eastman. I'm going to do a concert on November 22 or
23 or something. And then I have to think about a project for
the Carnegie Hall band. There are four of us that are going to do,
for the first time I think, original compositions and being the elderstatesman, I'm taking the
first - it's the whole history of jazz music. And I'm going to do from the beginning, maybe
Jelly Roll or something like that, into the swing era, and then Slide Hampton is going
to pick it up into the bebop era and then Jim McNeely is going to take us further and
Richard Abrams is going to try to predict the future of the music. Each one of us will do about 25 to 30 minutes
worth of music. And it's fun. I mean I've been thinking about that I mean
as I'm doing other things, things will pop into my mind. MR: Well do those sketches you know. MA: Yeah. You know my sketches are little pieces of
paper that I write on and I throw them - I don't throw them but I find them, sometimes
I'll find them in places and look at them and say jeez I did that about five years ago,
maybe it'll work now. And sometimes throw them away or put them
in the fireplace or whatever. And they're just little germs out of which
grow big diseases. MR: Well said. MA: Or friendly bacteria. MR: All right. Well listen, thanks for your time and I hope
your assignments go well. MA: Well thank you. It was fun.
