Pat LaBarbera Interview by Monk Rowe - 1/5/2021 - Zoom

my name is monk rowe for the phillies jazz archive and i'm very pleased to have pat le barbara with me this afternoon and uh we are in two different countries but we're doing the zoom thing yeah welcome pat thank you mom thanks for having me yeah i wanted to tell you that i have been as a child mostly through mount morris many times oh yeah we used to travel from rochester down to the southern tier to visit relatives and when i when i saw that um you know about where you're from and your brothers and i wondered if the mount morris shopper which was the local newspaper did they ever do a story on the your family band yeah there was quite a few uh actually the mount wars enterprise was the paper before that there was two papers you have the picket line post and the mount morris enterprise had early you know really early stuff on us in the 50s what the enterprise or the uh the shopper would do is they put those little photo sequences in like they put a picture from the past uh newspaper network in town and then a little comment on that but yes they did one on all of us and my father you know that paper you know were your mother and father both on the same page as far as i don't know if i should can say raising musicians but i'm guessing this was not a chore for you well no i i i think my mother just went along with uh with the program she played piano and you know she was interested in music because my mother was a nurse my father was the one that really got us going with it and he started us off really young and kind of kind of grooming us as a as a young as a family band and then we would go out and play jobs with my father or with a kind of a composite of something that he had put together with the three of us then my mother got upset because she was left at home so she started playing bass learning how to play bass and then we went out as a family band and worked as a family band so you you were playing gigs at an early age did they pay you yeah yeah we used to get five dollars sometimes which was pretty good in 1954 or 55 you know but you know we the jobs were like you played 55 minutes on and five minutes off basically for a wedding so i mean you were you were just going and going going all the time yeah i mean i started working in 54 i think i'm 54 you know i was eight i was eight years old and my brother joel was probably working when he was around six or seven he said maybe six what was the set list like at that time you you probably were playing swing era tunes but also maybe whatever was being on the ra at the radio swing and pop music of the day glenn miller stocks a lot of them were stock arrangements a lot of italian tunes if it was italian weddings we had to play all of the traditional italian berserkers and polkas and so we had he had a whole library of that italian music and then the pop music of the day you know which was in the 50s you know a lot of the stuff was kind of he had some funny stuff but a lot of it was swing he had quite a few of stocks from the 30s and 40s because he had his own dance band at one time so he had ordered all the stock arrangements so you know we had in the mood and string of pearls and the casa loma orchestra stuff and you know he had a bunches of books of jazz transcriptions frankie trumbauer's solo books and shoeberry solo books and toots mandello books you know so we had all these transcribed souls that he would get us to read at some point um did your father say especially to you and john on trumpet that okay now it's time to play music that's not on the page and how did he describe that i'll tell you my first experience with that because we never did that what happened was we always read the solos that were written in there there were little note songs that were written and the first time i remember we were playing a talent contest in danzil new york uh with the family band i've even got a picture of the night somewhere where somebody took it from the audience and i had to stand up and read the transcribed solo and i looked down and i lost my place so i just started improvising and after the set i remember we finished and i went over in the offstage to my two brothers and he said man i just made up my own stuff and it felt really great i was really enthused about it and that was the first time i ever had really improvised on my own and then from then on it didn't last that that long the spark i mean we kept doing it as kids so it didn't really come hit me until i got into high school you know that that's the direction i wanted to go into and it wasn't my father it was my school music teacher that really instilled the spark about jazz i see where you were you and your brothers um did you have some notoriety in high school like almost as if you were the quarterback and the wide receiver and the fullback or something on the football we had some articles in the paper we auditioned for the ted mac amateur hour we auditioned for the mickey mouse club i remember that and they put little articles on us in the paper but no that you know it wasn't really something that went anywhere or follow this anywhere uh you know everybody knew that we played music and we were you know they knew we were musicians where did you go to audition for the mickey mouse club uh it was in rochester uh uh siblings i think was it sibley's uh building upstairs on one of the floors yeah uh jimmy dodd came and he was one of the guys um that auditioned us and uh steve gadd of course went i think steve won i think steve won an audition did something at st i remember steve had auditioned for them wow was there any rivalry with your brothers regarding music never we've always gotten along we never had any kind of arguments that i can see we we kind of always basically i was the first one interested in i got interested in it i wrote my brother john and joe into it i got them into it and then some local kids that were in school with us i got one of them to play bass and the couple that played trumpet and and uh but we never really fought over anything even to this day and we're still in kind of an agreement and it's kind of unusual there's a lot of you know i play a club here called the wrecks and i know the club owner bob is always amazed that the three brothers get along you know they said well we've always we've always gotten along how do you hear that it was in school and my father did that to us and he just made sure that none of us really i mean there was always a little space occasionally but never any grudges i see what were your aspirations um you went to suny potsdam i i had a sunni experience of fredonia and i wonder when you went there did was your jazz interest met at suny potsdam uh i have to say no but i i auditioned for fredonia first that's where i wanted to go because i knew that don menzer and san noto or don mensah had gone there and my f there's a bass player named link millerman who played bass link was from basically six miles outside of mount morris is where he grew up so i used to play with his father his mother and his sisters and with link so i i knew they went to fredonia so i auditioned for fredonia but they turned me down because i couldn't sightseeing you know they made me they've got you know like i played an audition and then i i sight they put a piece of sight singing up so i never sang anything and then they so they said no they turned me down and then i and then i touched them see the other thing was that i wasn't a clarinet player i was a set i was a saxophone player and wanted to get into new york state as a saxophone player but they didn't they didn't take saxophone players but the year that i went in 62 i was the first saxophone player in the state of new york that was allowed to go into the state of new york school system as just primarily a saxophone player and because you always had to be a clarinet major and then double on saxophone player for what they had at that time called the wind ensemble you probably remember william muster had the wind ensemble when i went to potsdam my music you know i go at the time he did not want me there he actually said how did you ever get into this school you know he was a clarinet major and he just did not want me and it made it difficult for me and then there was an opening in the wind ensemble and joe roccosano i know if you know joel that joe was a great saxophone player joe was going to school at the time and he auditioned me on tenor to go into the wind ensemble and he said yes that's good you can you you'll pass you'd go in and my clarinet teacher blocked and said no i don't want them and they would not ensemble so with that animosity i only lasted one semester and you know jazz was not you know the school system at that time the big band had to rehearse off campus you couldn't be you know school facilities and all that but yet they had sent a jazz combo from potsdam to villanova festival and we got all kinds of notification and a lot of these places got awards i see you know nick brignol at ithaca college with rhys markowitz they all got noticed and they won this award but yet you couldn't practice jazz and no practice rooms at ithaca college it was you know a different era back then now potsdam has a great jazz program uh all of the schools do easily do it and why one time eastman you know forget it if it make you feel any better regarding fredonia don menza told me when he was at fredonia he said practicing bebop was a a felony practicing dixieland was just a misdemeanor [Laughter] it was the turn of a different era of music and you know we i just happened to be right in the middle of that thing it was turning around in the 60s and you're talking 1962. okay i'm sure by about 10 years later everything had changed around because every school had to have some kind of a you know a big ban or jazz band brilliant yeah i want to talk a little bit about that a bit later um i was reading uh the in the grove dictionary of jazz there's an entry on you and your brothers and i was going to read you know it's a challenge uh they try to describe musician styles sometimes in one sentence for space reasons i was going to read i was going to read what they said about you but i'm thinking how would you like an opportunity to describe your own playing in in about 20 words can you do that well my playing comes from the earliest rapper you know references that i referenced were basically jerry mulligan prez stan getz honey rollins the coltrane i mean i've listened to all those guys lester young was a huge influence on me and even to this day as i you know i went through all the periods of music listening to everybody study with everybody that i could and you know playing with elfin you had to play a certain way or i felt that i didn't you know i'm more modern but even now today i go back to lester young and the things that i learned from about prez you know it's just one of those um i'm drawn back to that but i would say stan getz uh richie camille was one of them lester young for sure i mean pres i copied a lot of prez solos and jerry mulligan was huge influence on me and all the guys that worked with gerrymandering because i bought all the couples you know ben webster meets very much and johnny hodges i used to copy johnny hodges solos so all of those guys were big you know well i'll read what they said they should have called you he said in regards to your style his style is derived principally from that of john coltrane to which he adds his own rhythmic looseness and lyricism i mean you listen to early training it's prez and it's gene evans and it's dexter you know i mean they're all in there everybody's kind of mixed up in there but yeah i mean the time that i was being probably being you know more recognized for my sowing would have been with eldon jones the money of course i was known as a soloist but with a big band you're only going to get a small chunk of space to stall right maybe one big feature that you get the channel one suite was something that i kind of inherited from don menzo and so with alvin's band when they heard it or hear me play and those articles were probably written back then i was you know heavily influenced by train it's pretty hard not to go down that road when you're playing with with alvin and then especially if you're playing with alvin and mccoy and reggie workman and you know all of a sudden there's that trio behind you and you know i'm gonna come out and play like zeus sims it doesn't it just didn't fit the flow of where where i felt that the time was so and i wanted to study how i learned that music i studied with used to go see coltrane all the time when i was in rochester or uh going to berkeley that was one of the things you did when he came to town you went down the scene can you describe what that was like leaving the club after seeing coltrane well there's a couple of times when i left the club early and had to go outside just to kind of just calm down because it was you know frantic uh sometimes in in that period so we were catching him 64 65 66. uh it was you know just it was certainly an eye-opener and um i learned you know the dedication you used to watch train um come off the bandstand and then go right into a either a room where they put the beard cases and all that and he'd just keep playing and then i was lucky enough to when i was at berkeley and one of my friends was a waiter at the jazz workshop and he got us to go in and in the daytime we'd go in and listen to train practice because he would come to the jazz workshop go into the dressing room and then the three guys we were three of us we would sit there and order a coca-cola at lunch and there was nobody in the club and he would be practicing in the background and we would be trying to figure out what he's doing and he was right next to the bathroom so every once in a while we'd pretend we had to go to the bathroom and look in and i remember seeing that he had he had a whole table full of reeds and we used to just listen to see what he would be practicing i'm trying to form a question here about what did you try to copy uh oh boy train i i mean the sound was one of the things that i've always been drawn to his use of vibrato in the later period you know where he was really almost into a classical vibrato well you know when i studied at berkeley with joe viola he we he stressed classical etudes but not playing in that style and so what i was always listening to the way train would use his vibrato where he would play usually a jaw vibrato but sometimes a jaw and a diaphragm combination vibrato i heard sonny ron is doing the same thing where they combine the flute with the yaya yaya jaw so you get two two things working at once you get the depth of the of the stomach vibrato so that's going here and there it's kind of tricky to i just picked it up but um and i mean i just i can't be i copied a lot of his souls i mean not so not in total but more like what was that phrase and i would listen to what's that idea i would pick little devices out and just to see if there were things that i liked did he ever um go out too far you know in his later last year or so for you to um keep up with there were times when you know like the one of my uh let's see expression that album um that last you know there's one there with where i really like from that period back and then forward the other ones like ohm and some of those other ones uh live in seattle just import things that i like but there was a point where i made it a there was a couple of years there where i decided i'm going to listen to all of that stuff and see what what he's trying to get across in there you know i i i always studying and being an educator also i mean i always wanted to kind of understand what's going on with him um some of it i didn't like all the time but you know i certainly i always enjoyed the way he played not always the combination of instruments that he had i could see he was searching for a certain thing but didn't always all everything didn't appeal to me but uh most of it did okay when you were at berkeley um were you and your classmates sort of waiting for the phone call i wasn't thinking that way when i first went there because when i came from boston well i didn't come right there i ended up working for a year and you know a lot of day jobs to save money to go to uh to uh you know to get the tuition because at that time birthday was expensive five hundred dollars this semester a thousand dollars a year 1962. that was unheard of still unheard of my father had to go to some shady characters i i got i got enough as i could as much money as i could but my father tried to get a loan from the bank and they wouldn't give it to him so we had to go to some other guys that he knew that we're kind of you know but he got the loan you know to to get me to go in my first semester at berkeley and then my other two brothers followed john went to pakistan and then came to berkeley joel went directly to berkeley they should have given him at least a discount for the you know third one's free but you know i'm sort of wondering uh it seemed like berkeley was a place where band leaders could go and pick up young musicians who were hungry to get out there and play you know i mean in my first two years i didn't think that way i was just basically trying to learn everything i possibly could i wanted to we had a bands you know small bands and saturday morning sunday morning we'd be rehearsing with our own big bands that we put together we we had access to the practice room so we could put groups together and uh you know there were a lot of guys that were in school at that time who became later became you know big big names but uh we were all just you know trying to learn by my third year you see my my problem was that i made the mistake of every year going back to mount morris new york which meant that there were no music jobs or an occasional gig here and there i had to get a factory job a truck driving job a construction job so i did that every year except for my last year when i went my last year i said you know what i'm going to stay in boston and see what i could pick up and i stayed in town and as soon as i looked like a week afterwards i got a call to do a a summer in old orchard beach maine with a with a quartet jean roma the drummer we used a very fine drummer was in the band and i went up there and did that for about two months or a month and a half and then my brother joe was working with chuck israel's and todd o'brien down in tanglewood and he said you know there's a jazz club here across the street up on the hill called avalok which they have a jazz club in there and randy weston is leaving and they're looking for they put us they put a you ever seen that movie with a gig where they got all these cops well this was this was the gig exactly you like it they put all these guys together young college guys had gotten this gig and they needed a saxophone player so my brother joe finagled it and i left the gig in all origin beach came down to uh to tanglewood and took this gig when there was all of us living in a house now they didn't have a drummer so they ended up getting the guy who was the bass player the real jazz guy in the in the movie they ended up getting a drummer actually who was the real jazz guy gene gamage was a drummer that worked with oscar peterson chet baker uh zoot sims and gene was looking for a gig so he came up and so here's all of these young college guys and this one guy who'd been on the road with everybody and lived with scott lafaro and live with joe romano and you know so gene he wasn't of course he's and i got to hang out with him and he became a real close friend all through the years and then i went back to berkeley and that was my last year i started but my my for my start of the semester in september about two weeks in you want me to keep going with the story because this is where it goes and yeah yeah okay so i went back to berkeley jenny moser was the alto player who had just gotten off the summer tour with buddy rich he did the away we go jackie gleason special but he came back to berkeley to teach so they put me in his ensemble and i was in for about two weeks on the second week we were we all go to a bar afterwards on a friday night rehearsal me linda well then lynn had left already and lynn had gone out on the road lynn viviano the trumpet player and he was out with woody herman and and so jimmy moser was hanging out in the job in the bar and he said you know you've been in school too long he said you should go out on the road you know we're all drinking and he said there's a job opening with buddy rich i'm gonna make a call and get you the gig this is overall dream friday so monday morning comes around and i see you give me emotion and i say okay where's that gig with buddy rich he said quit all your classes and leave through new york you start thursday so i said oh my god and i was in the recording band with her upon i had to go tell her pomeroy i was leaving school i had to fly home and get a suitcase and i'd never flown before i had to go back to rochester i had to fly to new york and ernie watts ernie and i were already in an ensemble year before with charlie mariano but ernie had taken the gig with buddy rich playing lead alton and charlie owens who was in was in berkeley also had taken the second alto gig so when they when jimmy mosher got me the gig ernie knew who i was and because we did work together so i went to new york and i rehearsed for a week with the band without playing they were working the riverboat and i went down every night to cop to cop the band so i could see what was going on last night bobby keller was the saxophone player he came up to me and handed me the bag of suits because the suit the tuxedo you got it sunday morning we flew to minneapolis-st paul first night frank sinatra the first i'd get off the bus and jay corey who was the tenor player missed the plane so i had to play the league book which i had never seen i'd only been rehearsing the fourth book now i'm stuck playing west side story and then backing sinatra with this testifier you can't make this up no i both the thing is both of my gigs when i went with alvin was the same thing no you know no preparation just like bang just jump in there and you know had to do it well that's like graduate school you know i there's you can only learn so much in in school was um what was buddy like to play right in the beginning for was he like yeah like he was you know he he just said hello to me at the airport a little um you know i could see excuse me the show business aspect of it because he was he'd always do you know his body was money and you know just i just kept my head low and just read the book did the book jay corey came back after a couple of nights and i went back to the fourth book and we were just touring around and we did one month tour down into the south we went back to los angeles played marty's on the hill i believe and then we left for a tour of the orient we went to you know taipei and hong kong and japan and uh you know all through also then we ended up in hawaii so we did a month tour into the whole month of december into january was your mother happy for you i think they both they miss the fact that i wasn't there for christmas first year 67 i was christmas in japan um you know that was hard for the italian family not you know have everybody together but um and then um yeah i think that they both were my father was i mean the first time he saw me on the ed sullivan show said okay that's everything's fine that's great well moving from any big band as you mentioned you get a limited amount of time to solo you know sometimes the leader might say i'll open up go around again but still not too long so going to elvin jones i'm guessing that was a big uh a big change in adjustment for you yeah we used to have a chart on buddy's band called uptight remember that up tonight like what we had so dave lehman told me when he said man you went from uptight to up loose because you know all of a sudden now i'm coming from you know you have a solo in a big band and you got you stand up it's you gotta go it's like machine gun time you know most of the time unless it's a ballad or a medium thing but you have to kind of jump in there and you don't leave space and none of that stuff really comes now i go with elvin the only thing he ever told me a couple of things was i played the vanguard and he said look you're not playing long enough because we only played four turns a set maybe five four tunes of set so he said you gotta and you gotta take your time and develop your solo and that's something that i had learned earlier on from lester young so it wasn't hard to go back to it but you know don't forget i had almost done seven years with buddy rich of doing the other thing now i have to go and back and learn a whole new way of playing because i was with buddy you're always not playing on top of the beat now alvin's time was really you know it's it is a lot of space in the bars that also has a lot of space joe farrell told me said you're gonna once you play with elementary you'll have you'll realize what your time is and you'll have the best time that you got to think about because he's not going to spoon feed you it's not it's it's it's like a big wash of sound and you had to kind of learn how to put put your lines on top of that not rush be relaxed take your time leave space leave face to draw the rhythm section into your soul which again was something i had learned from lester young was the um the difference in bass players make a difference in your playing when you were with alvin yeah because the bass player a lot of times you would rely on the bass player to kind of give you the steady four where alva would kind of be losing you know playing lucy goosey around it uh strong bass players you know elven relied on a strong bass player he he didn't like a bass player that played the amp over the sound of the string you know the percussiveness of the string you know if you had a basically if he was putting this much intensity into the right symbol and the bass player was just doing this because he's allowing there's a mismatch of energy that's that isn't there and he would feel it so he would get really upset he didn't have many of those guys all the guys that i played with from when i first went on were always strong base players i don't know if you can answer this but if you were uh playing an extended solo with alvin jones trio what is going through your head are you thinking okay harmonically or that's my question i i know all of the okay i know all the changes right when i learn into it i have to know everything that's going on underneath me do i hear it at first maybe not when i first learned how to how to in blocks when i was working in the factories that's how i learned my tunes i used to work for uh mohawk tires and i worked for the canning factory at mount moore's where i had to load pallets stack pallets up with boxes six feet high and then ring the buzzer for the forklift and the next day so i do this all day long so i would bring my tune in and i had a tune on an index card with the changes all written out and i tack it up to the post that was right next to me and as the boxes came down i'm going g minor seven c minor seven seven b flat and by the time i got home at night i knew the changes like i learned poetry because i had a great english teacher who taught me how to memorize poems and so i learned them but i didn't hear them now i get home i know all the changes don't have to look at a book i know the melody and now i start looking at the melody and see when i see what i memorized and then started to play up and down when i had memorized to hear it that way so it's kind of a weird way of learning how to play but that's how i did it so when i was with alvin the changes were not a problem then i realized that melody is really your prime source to to glean improvisational you know ideas from my biggest thing is you listen to somebody play straight no chaser okay you got that melody uh all that chromaticism the minute the head stops how many people reference the melody they go right into their stop way of playing on the blues but yet there's that great you know source there of all of that chromatic material very few people who bleed and that's kind of a good way to practice think of that tone and then solo off that too and then go back to play a standard and think about how what does that melody mean good advice today i mean it's a lot of it is technique there's so much technique involved in playing today you know bobby shoe once told me a great idea you know bobby shoe he told me a great uh most statement that i've always remembered he said do you play to impress or do you play to inspire and so i always think about that when i play i'm not trying to dazzle you with my technique i'm trying to like draw you into a theme a melody of themes that it changes in a direction that i'm going with my soul so building the solo is important you know depending you have to depend on who just sold before you because you have to take you know you have to keep that in your mind if you have somebody playing up the hundreds of notes and really busy solo you can't come in and keep doing that because it's going to just be just a continuation and if you want people to listen to you basically you have to reflect the direction and go a different way to build your soul to you know grab the listener if you're teaching a student um and they are let's suppose they're playing on so what and they're obviously missing the half step change um my question is about wrong notes yeah what term do you use with them with i mean wrong notes now seems to be a thing like well don't call them wrong notes so how do you approach them with you're playing wrong notes that's the best i can say you know what i do is i actually make students play wrong notes i'll do it too like so what and i'll just say okay let's let's check let's figure out the notes that are going to sound bad on the on d minor seven okay let's figure the notes are going to be something that and let's work on hitting that note e flat right okay let's let's an f sharp on the d minor seven chord let's practice hitting those notes first of all to get rid of the fear of hitting a wrongdoe because that's one thing that keeps people from going uh wonder you know keeps them from searching is they're always afraid like i'm gonna know so you i just say okay let's let's play a blue i play a blues and i say just play as let's play as much you know activity that you want that's just chromatic and out but resolve it toward the end come back into the chord so if you've got d minor seven play three bars out of chromatic nonsense no matter what you hear but get into the d minor at the back at the end now hold some of those notes that you find unpleasant and resolve them see where they go so that if you're ever into that spot words you know but don't be afraid of them because those sometimes are the strengthening votes that pull you into the chorus you know upper and lower podge i don't want to get too technical the upper lower the positor upper lower chord tones and you know a half step above has to follow pentatonix i do that all the time with students if i have them playing on a d minor pentatonic i'll say okay play the pentatonic a flat six away and a flat five or you know a sharp five and a flat five away so d minor right play b flat minor pentatonic play a couple of moles of b flat minor come into d minor more notes of b flat minor come back in do the same thing with the it's the root and the fifth right because in harmony the fifth can always be replaced by another note the root has to be there but the fifth is one of the notes that you can kind of get out rid of on a chord and still keep the quality right so this is the device to train you so he would you have d minor seven he would play e flat minor pentatonic right or a c sharp minor into d right or a flat a half step above the fifth b flat minor or a flat minor below the fifth but you just play a few of those notes and then come back in and then a few loops out and come back just get used to hearing those notes out but feel the resolution that's a little more advanced than you know learning how to play one or two wrong notes but those are devices that train you because if you hear anybody play so what nobody plays in the mode at all maybe miles is first solo he stayed pretty strict into the d minor door but after that everybody went out in and out of the court upper lower neighbor tumbles and there's so many devices the train with super impulse giant steps changes over it before he would come back into videos so much theory there but it all came from the fact that if you want to play the dorian mode in a church setting the way you know that through those church modes fine you stay in the mode traditional way of speaking but nobody ever plays that way when you're playing it that's very interesting uh because we they make such a big deal out of modes but i'm not sure that the people that are making a big deal about it are actually players sometimes they're critics trying to figure out how to describe i mean that what we've what we learn as moles i mean everybody's been playing those for centuries but in improvising on them too you know i mean it gets a little bit hairier if you go on to more advanced thinking like messianic you know the composer his modes of limited transposition take you in another direction they're a whole different way of thinking about music uh you know the altered scales and the diminished scale and all those things uh the pentatonic scales and the uh you know there's hungarian double harmonics and all of these scales used people use them in jazz but well you went from uh woody herman and buddy rich and elvin jones were there any gigs that you turned down along the way well i was with woody herman only for a short bit i just went out to help frank tiberia and they just called me out as a sub i loved it but i wasn't with him for a long time same with the glenn miller band and went out for a bit this had to help um uh somebody you know needed to get off for a week um yeah i turned down joe henderson i'll tell you why because joe i was studying with joe henderson in new york i was on buddy rich's band and you know joe called me one day i was at the hotel president hotel in new york and he called me and he said you know he wasn't uh i need somebody to go on to play bass clarinet he wanted me to play bass club i said joel but i can't play play space i think pete yellen was doing the gig maybe at the time i'm not sure if pete was doing it but he wanted me to go out and play with the band and he had this idea of bass clearing and i just i can't do it i'm not a bass player in that player i mean i can play you know i had to play clarendon buddies band and i started on that instrument no way i was going to go out and embarrass myself with joe anderson oh was um he had a big band at the time this was a small man this was he had like i think um it was either julian priester i think he had three horns in front i know i know at one point he had alto trombone and himself on tenor i had seen that man at the vanguard i don't know what he was thinking at the time but you know he always he was always composing when i was with him he was writing for blood sweat and tears when i was studying with him he was he was kind of doing that blood sweat and tears band that never took off they were just rehearsing all the time yeah i remember i remember seeing that like joe henderson is with blood sweat and tears because i love blood sweat and tears i want to take a lesson one time and joe said look at this he said i got a complete brand new magnavox sound system he goes i've got over here they gave me a tenor of barry and alto a soprano because magnafox owned selma at the time he said i got all of the stuff they gave me i joked because i joined the rock band i played jazz all my life nobody ever gave me anything he said i go with one rock and look at all the stuff they give me uh going back to buddy for a minute of course it was mostly young guys but there were some older veterans in that band like el percino yeah well al came on just after i uh joined he came on in january of 68. yeah did were those guys uh did they teach you anything no i mean well el porcino and our pepper came on right at the same time right so i sat next to art pepper for almost a year about the buddies man because men's and menzer came on us around the same time too so yeah when jay corey left in vegas in 68 i took the tenor chair for about a month and then don mensah came on with the league chair and i went back to the fourth chair which was good for me because i got a chance to kind of hang out with our pepper and hang out with don who taught me a lot menza taught me a lot and he was like just like a father to me he taught me all kinds of still to this day we talk almost every week and so on yeah hanging out with those guys art pepper was great al was really interesting and he he had given me a whole bunch of charlie parker i used to drive him around i had a volkswagen that i read and i would take him to places that he had to go and uh he gave me a bunch of charlie parker reel-to-reel tapes that he had done when he was on woody's band and he played the apollo theater and he took his reel to real tape recorder held it up backstage next to the speaker back there and he taped all of these bird shows and then he gave them to me and i i put them on cassette i still have them downstairs they're all out on cd now but yeah l would give me stuff we and of course a lot of stories about all those the older guys yeah i heard a story about something about the playboy club with buddy rich and and ale yeah you know downstairs in the uh in new hefner's he had a game room downstairs in the bar with a glass with a big glass uh window that went into the swimming pool in alberta swim fire with nothing on in the news and by the window of the pool did you um your your entrance into uh jazz education and academia was that partly to change a lifestyle of being on the road never thought i'd be my father was a music teacher i helped my music teacher in school teach younger kids clarinet never thought about teaching went to potsdam state teachers college and never thought about teaching went to berkeley never crossed my mind i moved to canada in 74 and i was with yamaha at the time i had signed with yamaha in the states the last couple of months with buddy rich and so when i came to canada i was with yamaha they called me they said i've got we've got this young student who's a they call them the rising star yamaha rising star award we wonder if you give them a couple of lessons i said yeah i never taught anybody no i don't know i don't know about teaching he said well give him so i had him come by my house on saturday mornings and we'd go there for four hours and i basically just retraced my steps of how i learned what i did because i had lots of notes i mean i had been since being in berkeley i had all kinds of notes i've learned how to take notes i learned how to write all my practice routines down so i just kind of went i listened to him play and i could see what he needed just by if it's you know musculature or emotion or whatever i could see that and then the theory about improvisation was something i had just picked up on my own through berkeley correspondence course when i was in potsdam i was still studying the berkeley correspondence court and all the stuff i learned in berkeley and then with her pomeroy and ray santisi and charlie mariano i just basically retraced my steps and showed him what to do and then there was a college hearing in toronto called humber where humber colleges the berkeley of canada they had the first program matter of fact some of the guys from berkeley came up to help them establish this school and there's a ranger named ron collier one of canada's most famous arrangers one of the only guys that ever arranged for duke ellington and wright wrightford uh he started this program at humber and they had been running about three or four years and they heard that when i had taught this kid who went eventually to the school and they called me and asked he said would you like to teach three more students i said oh okay private lessons and so and i wasn't getting a lot of work see when i first moved to canada i couldn't work for six months because of the union rules you know they had a rule you couldn't work a steady job you know i was sneaking across the border before computers and they could check up on you i would go back to rochester to work italian weddings i'd work up north so they couldn't trace me you know you had to kind of do everything under the table because you weren't allowed to work at steady gate i had a baby out of the way and so i couldn't do that so i took this job and then elvin called me in 75 like a year later and i got the call and he had been trying to get me because he had heart he basically wanted me to join when he said it was in buddies band and ronnie scott's a year before he came in and sat in and took my number and was you know if i was interested but i moved to canada and he lost all my contact information so he called me and then i was around 70 1975 so i had taken his part-time job teaching then alvin called me so i took the job with jones and i did the part-time lessons as i could you know throughout the semester which was something they allowed me to do i said you know i'm going to be i've got to travel to make a living here because i'm not doing anything in town and so that's what happened i got the job with alvin and then i started to get more and more students each year but it was always part time until the 80s when they offered me a 87 they offered me a full-time position so i was off and out with elvin for almost 20 to 20 years plus i would go out with him you know for 75 76 77 78 79 i was with him pretty much then i left for a bit came back left came back helped him out and then his last two years i went back for his 75th birthday tour and did two years on a sabbatical that i had taken from school and then he passed away in the following year am i correct that you worked with him more in europe than you did in the states yeah you know uh we we had a few yeah we did mostly europe we did a lot of european festivals uh italy the first tour i did was sweden and italy we played ronnie scott's every year um the same as buddies man buddy would play ronnie's gods elves play around these guys we worked all through europe we did south america we did a tour down there in 1970 i can't remember in the 70s this was whenever and see this we went down for the cia it was like a branch of the cia called the us information service they sent us to every trouble spot in south america right so we went to uh uruguay paraguay chile medellin bogota coinka guayakia santiago you know every place where there was some they sent us down as a kind of a piece and so we went there for with that and we went to japan the belgian in the states we always had a circuit we would work a vanguard two or three times a year we'd work the jazz showcase in chicago um i don't remember and we'd work a couple of other places in detroit baker's keyboard lounge there were some other you know spotty places that we would work um but that's about it there were only a few you know places i don't remember california we'd work the jazz bakery but there was there wasn't a lot of activity going on at that time through your career have there been times where there was any racial subject coming into playing black and white musicians et cetera yeah that's let's just understand that goes on yeah at that time it went i've that used to go on on buddy's bed not so much the members of the band but we would play florida and then ernie watts and charlie owens could not swim in the swimming pool and this was in 19 talking about the 69 70s you know elvis band was not so much amongst uh amongst the band members it was more or less sometimes people who assumed certain things in europe that the band was all black and then i show up as a different you know because i was at certain times i was the only white guy on the band but that's never amongst the players and occasionally there was a little two guys that came out with some attitudes listen no what are you gonna do i mean i grew up in a town that had that when i was a kid you know that idiot the sicilians were looking at is the the lowest you know ab at one point in the town that i grew up in so it was a whole different thing i mean i never felt it but yeah it was just that was going on it's just it never bothered me and they never bothered elephant elven didn't see color he was not that oh he didn't no never we got off we got off a train one time in in germany and uh the guy that uh booked us was this old german luffa pilot who who basically met us at the train it was me david williams who was from trinidad elvin and real kawasaki was from japan all right so that and he comes up with the german accent and he says but i thought you of us are all college band he tells elephant and elder goes we are he goes we're all colors that's a good one yeah i mean that's well music is just like every other part of society you know it's everywhere so it's awesome yeah you know so you did some you did some work with the jamie abersold camps so i want to know like jamie says can anyone improvise well i think they can i was talking about that i watched a beautiful documentary this morning called uh moonlight sonata and it was all about a deaf child who got cochlear implants when he was young and they taught him how and he got to here and he ended up performing it's a beautiful document i was telling my wife i said you know i i used to do that with my uh classical players and i said jamie used to do that too you'd get some even though you're working on a certain performance piece and a lesson you should always let the student at some point in the lesson make up something of their own so they get the feeling of creating something even if it sounds horrible let them and that's why jamie puts on those those one chord dorian vamps and just said play something you know just play a couple of notes what do you hear you know he just tries to get them to kind of come out of that just reading the situation i taught from me i talked to jamie for many years and then i moved on to the skidmore institute you know up in albany new york at in saratoga at skidmore college they have a summer institute there i worked there with you know bill hinton and eddie shaughnessy and so many guys but i i just ended up being a teacher which is something i never thought i'd go into nice do you do your brothers uh do you get on the phone with your brothers and t and trade band stories or when you few you know the rare moments you all together we're all together usually every sunday around 1 30 and we talk on zoom and then yeah we'll we'll pass on stuff or i'll try to remember i said do you remember this remember this happening and we'll pass on some information we're always talking you know i'm texting yeah no we're constantly in touch with each other and uh we're all joel is not retired yet john and i are both retired joel will be retiring this year so i mean i was i retired uh not last year but the year before last right 2019 right and then i was like that's kind of remembering and i had also i mean i had the whole year blocked off for japan a couple of recordings and i was going to do a couple of weeks teaching teaching here at some kind of summer jazz clinics i had concerts books and all kinds of courses so now i just i'm practicing every day i see with the hopes that it's still going to happen i think i've got a few more years left about some more well i have a inside source who i don't know if you want to pursue this story or not but something that happened uh with tony bennett and al hibbler and your brother i know the story but i'm not gonna i i wasn't there and i only heard a third or fourth hand so i don't wanna i wanna repeat that would you mind if we didn't do that just i do not mind i'd rather you i think you should talk to um who was on that gig it would be uh paul langos i think if you know pauling i would contact him i think it was paul okay i don't want to go there especially yeah you know jazz myths get spread around too much so so no no yeah i've heard that story okay sorry your audience it's okay yeah but along those lines i'll try a question that hardly ever works also and that is have you ever do you recall like just a terrible gig or series of gigs that you just couldn't believe you were involved in well there's sure i remember one night i had i had booked a gig with a group in town a guy in town here who i work for doing a lot of trade shows and he said you have to go get fitted for a costume so i went down to this place where they have theatrical costumes and i went and got fitted for the costume and uh he said we're doing this dentist convention and the theme is the movie tom jones so you have to get fitted for the satin pantaloons the button thing the george washington wig and he said i'll be playing harps accord and we'll be playing you know tunes like in a 20th century drawing room and i i and i was taking anything at that time this was in the early 70s no i had i had a week at the village vanguard we finished on a sunday night the gig was on a monday so i finished jones on a sunday night and monday i go down to this gig at a one of the hotels here and i get on stage and there's the guys with the harpsichords they're all having the george washington wigs and the guys at the harpsichord is a bass player and there's a drummer and we are in straw this thick with goats and chickens and all kinds of livestock on the stage with us and we're playing i was playing flute and saxophone and we're supposed to be in a barnyard soon and i thought to myself jones one night and here the next night that's real life right there but you know what that that working with my father as a kid learning how to work fireman's picnics and clam bakes and you know weddings and all of these jobs where you just took them because it was work i just learned how to tough it out and tough it through i mean there were times when i played with elvin that i hated the gig because of certain things going on same thing with buddy there were nights when you just didn't do it but you knew that it was always going to get better there's always going to be bad nights and it's just one of those things and there's always good nights coming down the road at some point she well that's um something that students should know about although those kinds of gigs are hardly around anymore i i think it's a shame i've been on bands where i i didn't like all of the players i was playing with and there was one man i found that i hated everybody in the band except the band boy i like the leader but everybody else i couldn't stand working with but i did you had to do it once you got on the bandstand you had to function if you want to play if you don't want to play the music you walk out i've only walked off a couple of games and then it's just because the the leaders were so obnoxious i just you know and after working with buddy that's one thing i learned the work of working with buddy rick after you work with buddy rich you never took any crap from anybody because you've seen the original act i said you know i would watch these guys and i'd say well i'm out of here i don't need this you know like i walked off jazz gigs with very famous guys listen i said i saw the original i don't need to see a carpet coffee i'm gone i don't need the money at that point i just watched a video with you and buddy and the setup was very interesting because he he looked like he would always look to his left when he played for the most part i do not oh okay i asked him one time i said uh because he i saw him one night we were playing and he sat in with bassey's band and he knew all the charts whirlybird all of it he knew everything i came after came up i said buddy how did you do that without because he doesn't read music he said well i know all of all the charts of every book he said tommy dorsey because i have them all in my head i said what happens if somebody throws your chart you don't know he said you see why i'm always looking to the left because i'm always looking i'm watching the lead trumpet player and elite trombone player breathe i don't care about the saxophone players but i'm watching how they breathe if i know they're going to go i know there's something coming up and i can usually psych out the film that's what he told me said i learned that from working with dorothy said i watched him breathe and i watched the lead guys breathe if it was something i didn't know but he was fast he picked up stuff so fast you know you know he just i was always amazed how he did it a channel one suite when we did that we we brought it into las vegas we were playing there right after that japanese tour and my brother joe was playing buddy's drums because he was backing the singer who we were backing frankie randall so he had joe come by in the daytime to rehearse channel one suite so joe was the first one to do it and channel one sweet goes one two three one two three four five one two three one two three so it had that kind of uh you know fake for three and five which is really eight but you know he he that's the way it was broken up so joel played he listened to it for just a little bit and he said get off the drums and he went up and played the part oh yeah we wore out that record with don's thing on that well in that video i thought he was staring at you because for some reason you were set up right in his line of sight and i wondered what that was like because you were soloing well a lot of times you would rely on me for certain for certain things if i'm soloing he could tell what i'm going to finish he'd also retire if you look at if you look at any time you see if you can see my wrist this wrist here i always had a wrist watch that had the head of the watch turned backwards so that buddy because buddy would come off and he would say to me how long have we been up here and i know it's just look like this because if i look like this it would look like we were taking the time so i had i just looked at my wrist and i could tell you know 40 minutes he said okay so he would always and then uh you know but he would just he at some point at one point he was relying on the answer you know hiring guys and rick stefan was hiring guys at a certain point uh but he he was again you never saw him really look over at the rhythm section that much he was always looking that way and down i think it was an easy place for him to kind of open his hand did he prefer the electric bass well you know i think when joel debartolo and ron paley came on that's and paul congello we we went to the electric bass we had a lot of problems with bass players there were times there when i i was hiring firing so many guys you know some really good guys but it's just that just they couldn't get couldn't get the right guy we got joel de bartolo finally we got joel on there for a long length of time but boy there were there were just just times when you couldn't get a bass player that buddy could agree with i always felt you know i felt that nobody always wanted sometimes on facebook who would kind of go with him if he wanted to move the music up just a little bit in tempo and not hold him back you know if you get a baseball that says no this is where the time is and i'm going to stay i don't think he always liked that because sometimes he'd like to push the charges i don't know i really don't know did you ever let a guy go that um buddy disagreed with like why'd you let him go i i let guys go uh i had to fire guys who basically yeah he did guys he disagreed with also but also there were guys who weren't up to the level yet and had to go i mean i'm not going to name names but there were guys that had had to do that it's just it was just part of the thing and once he got somebody that he liked joel de bartolo was really what i think one of the ones that stayed for quite a bit and it was that was a big that's a kind of a story i don't know how much time you got with that but you know joel had been working with my brother in rochester with gapman joney's band and he had worked with chuck manjoni and my brother joe and so i knew that he could play the gig i hired him on the gig he comes and we were playing in st louis missouri and big hotel and joel had never seen the book now joel was kind of nervous he was very nervous and joel had a stutter he really stubbed he had a problem stuttering he ended up playing in the tonight show band with johnny carson for years you know he was the bass player so i got joel on and joel came on the bandstand and buddy used to do this bit where he'd come out to and dave long as the piano player and i think that was the time dave was on it but he would say give me an a and he'd yell down to the piano player and the piano player would play an a and then buddy would hit the snare drum and then he'd pretend he was tuning but he comes on that night and he sees joel back there and joel is just shaking and buddy knows he's it's like a deer in the headlights so buddy and i'm going oh god i'm just saying no please and so buddy turns instead of going to him he turns around to joel and he goes give me an a and joel went like that but he fell on the floor on the right off the stool on the floor and was rolling around we couldn't play for 20 minutes i mean he just could not stop laughing buddy and joel was in didn't care how he but he just couldn't would not and that was kind of an old bit that they used to do in rochester all the italian i see and you just kind of just triggered him and he just went nice move yeah it was great i mean joey that's a classic story oh so relieved after that because buddy loved him yeah well we've been at this for almost an hour and i i appreciate your your your stories and your career i i wanted to just go off music for sure before we end um i wondering what the feeling in canada has been about america in the last number of years i mean i'm just so i'm so disappointed in that you know i'm not i'm kind of hopeful that this new you know new party democratic party will come in and kind of do something i'm hoping they're getting blocked i'm wishing today that both those senators become democrats because it could be a whole new change for the country i mean i've always voted democratic there's a couple of times when i maybe thought differently but most of my leadings have been democratic but i mean what these guys are pulling now just really upsetting i just can't understand it and you get you know i mean i don't understand first of all living in canada right i've lived in canada now since 1974 born in america so i remember when i was a kid the word socialism was just like oh my god it's like you're going to be the you know like socialist communist socialism communism and yet they have you know social security and every time a big corporation like the auto industry or anything goes bust socialism kicks in and they give them you know so so these guys are all afraid of it but in canada we have basically that kind of a system now when i first moved here i was really upset about the fact that my taxes all of a sudden whoa why am i paying this many amount of taxes never had to pay a doctor's bill two kids born i mean you know the medical thing and you feel so comfortable there's that pressure of having the fact that when i was traveling with buddy every month i had to make five hundred dollars to blue cross if i didn't get that in my mother would say make sure your blue cross is there because you ever get you know that fear of they're gonna take you're gonna lose everything if you have to go into the hospital it's just not here and so that's a big strain off now also the other thing is during this period here with code young musicians who are who have made five thousand dollars last year the government gives you two thousand dollars a month subsidy to exist so every young musician gets two thousand dollars or anybody that's out of work who can prove that they made five thousand dollars in the previous year they're giving two thousand dollars a month to live on now it's just gone down to 1800 because they started taking taxes on it so young young kids who you know work part-time jobs and all that and we're making that kind of money they get the subsidy basically through the government as a social system we may end up paying for it but just having that i can you can't call it free medical because it's medical that you pay for just having that off your your back is a big big weight off your shoulders and you have this feeling of comfort that you i mean i just dislocated my shoulder two weeks ago so i'm working with this show that i'm doing i had to slip and fall out on a walk on a walk i went out and it was just so painful i went down i went right into the hospital emergency they put me out they pulled it back right in within within three hours i was back home with the shoulder in and they started me on physio i have another month of physio to go but i just i wish the u.s could realize that you know just so what you pay a little bit more in taxes people that can't afford it they'll end up with it the guys that can afford it there and so what and then everybody's coming i'm telling you that would i think that would just make a lot of things better down there i feel i feel i don't know you know you have a teaching job you get it but if you if you work with certain companies you don't have a medical development but if you get fired or laid off it's gone a lot i appreciate the observation um you have any personal feelings about why this pandemic has occurred why it occurred in 2019 i don't i mean i just know that this is something that's been coming um my outlook on this right now is i'm i'm trying not to be negative i try to use this time for myself to to grow i'm exercising i'm doing you know i'm practicing every day exercising you know trying to get out and out and luckily now i have a house with a backyard and different rooms and different levels that i could go to if i had an apartment i may be thinking differently but you can still use it as a period for growth i've always been that was my thought all the time i'm always thinking ahead and planning for the next thing to come and being ready for it so i think you can use this time to kind of be ready for um you know for what's to come i don't know why you know i just know that when i was a kid when i grew up my mother had to wear masks my mother would come home at night and she'd have to take her clothes off on the porch and hang him outside and come in and take a shower because she worked with tuberculosis patients so as from a from a young kid all the way out we were dealing with this all the time with this you don't want to catch this then all of a sudden polio kicks in and we had to deal with holy ones you know so that was only you probably were around at that time yes you know so we all know but i remember mother you know we had to wear the masks all the time on the wards all right well pat this has really been great and um i'm glad we connected yeah monk thank you very much i hope i hope this helps you and if you need anything else for me i'll try to get these done today and see if i can remember how to fill out a w-2 okay i'm going to i'm going to i'm going to pause our recording and then we can sort of say adios okay

Channel: Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College

Views: 1,640

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Elvin Jones, Buddy Rich, John Coltrane, jazz education, wrong notes in improvising, the LaBarbera musical family

Id: 9TZ5iqcHhtk

Length: 67min 51sec (4071 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021