The Gary Burton Interview

hey everybody I'm Rick be at the honor of having legendary jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton to be my guest today I have been wanting to interview Gary for years and years and I've been wanted to meet him this is the first time that we've ever met and I've been a fan of his since I got your record with Keith Jerrod your it was a group record that's right Gary Burton Keith Jarrett that came out in 1971 and it is an amazing record I've been listening to it again I have it on LP and I've had it I bought it I've had it back then your recording career actually started in 1961 on RCA Records my first record as a leader mm-hmm was 1961 I believe but I actually was on several records in 1960 the one with Hank Garland the legendary country guitar player who discovered jazz and actually had a real natural gift for it and if there's such a thing as a you know a big break that you know starts your career I don't I'm not a big believer in big breaks I just believe that it's so there's a lot of small breaks along the way but if there was a if there was a big break in my case it was this opportunity I was in high school in rural Indiana and a local musician named boots Randolph saxophone player told me that he'd been going to Nashville guesting on record sessions in that the local guitar player there was gonna make a jazz record and was lamenting the fact that there were no vibraphone players in Nashville that he really liked the idea of guitar and vibes and so boots told him well there's a kid this kid in Indiana you might want to hear so the plan was that I would ride down to Nashville with boots the next time he was going and meet this guitar player and we piled the vibraphone in the car went down played two songs together before some record session started and Hanks turned to me and said well you know what are your plans and I said well I finished high school and then about a month from now and then I'm going to college in Boston in the fall so he said well come to Nashville for the summer and we'll play at this local club for weekends and we'll make this record so that's exactly what I did and in the course of that summer was on my first gold record with a piano player named Floyd Cramer country style piano player who had me play in the background with little triads on the vibes but he went gold you know and the end of the summer Chet Atkins who was the RCA head for Nashville's division took me aside and said I convinced the guys in New York to offer you a contract and so I went off to college you know a few months later with a record contract already hadn't you know I was still 17 years old I was watching interview with you where you talked about playing with Stan Getz in the 60s and talking but the audience is the age of the audience's that he was playing for and then when you went out on your own playing your own music you wanted to play for people that were in their 20s I didn't I thought that was so interesting can you talk about well my first two professional experiences were with George Shearing really classy wonderful jazz musician that was my first band I was 19 years old and we're touring all over and oh and everybody in the band was in their 40s or 50s and I'm this you know turning 20 at this time and so it was a great opportunity and all that and then there I am with Stan and the same thing Stan this was in his 40s then and so was Roy Haynes our drummer mm-hmm you know and when I was at the point after three years with Stan I was you know ready to start my own band that was pretty sure and I sort of said well okay what what do I want to do to distinguish myself to build my career and I realized that the audience's that knew me most were all people in their 40s and 50s and by the time I was 40 they would be 80 so very supportive audience right and and I was trying to figure out how do I connect with more of my own generation and I had become a huge Beatles fan Bob Dylan fan at that point Rock kind of became much more mature and serious and creative yeah you know we left behind the Elvis years and things were getting more interesting from a musical standpoint so I decided that's what I wanted to explore I said it'll need to be a huge failure and I'll be back as a sideman again you know for the next how many years before I get another chance to go out on my own but you know that I knew I couldn't do something that was you know still continuing to play the old standards and so on it had to be something new and that led me to what was first called jazz rock and then was called fusion hmm I didn't choose it either of those names that was what critics came up with finally but I would never think of you as a fusion musician nor the people nor the any of the records that you did to me is not fusion and this brings me this brings me to an to connect this there is a harmonic language that you have in a lot of your records and and I'd say more in the records starting in the 70s or early 70s that was more based had folk elements in and him him like I mean if when I was going back to the record you did with Keith there's a song called the fortune smiles on it and then the bridges started majorie over G sharp G major gather for F sharp lotta major chords tribes over Basin those things like that different vocabulary than jazz who's not just two five ones can you talk about that yes well there was a lot of the focus on my groups in that era was this combination of jazz and rock mm-hmm but in fact my original concept and I you know I said around with Steve swallow hours and hours of discussion and debate of he's was my bass player mm-hmm it was the bass player was Stan Getz yep so when I left and started my own band he came with me soon after but it was you know what would the concept be and it was to actually use a variety of different kinds of music a classical jazz rock country you know I wanted to I felt jazz was in a straitjacket we were all playing the same 150 standards over and over again and slightly different tempos and little arrangements and everything but 99% of it was syncopated time and all the harmonies were based on Broadway show tune compositions and and it's beginning to feel repetitive to me mm-hmm and I thought okay let's see what it's like to play with harmonies they don't you know do this two five one you know kind of normal chord sequences that were so used to and I first thing I noticed was that rock music you know didn't do that they've you know they famous you know there's only three chords in rock rock song was somewhat true but mostly it was like they were unexpected combinations I would listen to a Beatles song and I would think you know I would never have gone to that chord next yeah it came from out of the blue and at first it almost sounded wrong to me but by the time I had heard it a little bit I thought no no it sounds kind of cool how do you know who thought that up and I realized well they didn't come from show music they were making it up themselves by year and so that's what we started doing we started trying to write songs using these newer kinds of harmonies interesting and swallow did a lot of our original music so did I so did Larry Coryell and then gradually I've always depended on the musicians in my band to contribute music to it this is a side topic but a big issue for me that so many musicians in the jazz world feel an obligation to only play their own compositions and I can tell you I can count on almost one hand the musicians in jazz that deserve to write a hundreds songs most people write the same two or three songs over and over in slightly different keys or whatever but if you get a Chick Corea or a Pat Metheny or Carla Bley or whatever you you end up Keith is another one you end up with people who can really cover a wide range of styles and types of composing and credibly original and so on I don't count myself as one of those major composers I write a song every five years or so mmm that I like otherwise my specialty is fixing other people's songs I consider myself a good tune doctor they used to call it my band member might bring in here's this something I've been messing around with and so I say well this beats something else here how about that and then next thing you know we've turned it into a more finished product and then we added to the repertoire sort of thing but that's why all the years I've played more music by chicken and Carla and Steve and others then impact than my own because they were available to me mm-hmm they were always sending me new tunes that they thought would be a good fit from my band I should keep them coming that was an eye-opening thing to me as well that you said that you would have always let the people that were in the bands that you had would be the composers of songs under and that yes that was really unusual at the time well most a lot of band leaders you know they really wanted Hoggett for themselves and there's two motivations for that one is you get to you know to keep the royalty money that comes in and secondly it's a prestige thing you look at you know a lot of the major jazz artists and they wrote all their own songs and so there's this pressure that if you feel like what in order to be held in the same you know high estimation I need to do this as well and and I had the opposite approach which is I want the best tunes I can possibly find and I'm surrounded by these great friends of mine who all happen to be genius composers and then they're gladly giving me their songs so you know I'd be a fool to you know pass that up when you did your first record we check that crystal silence record I think of that first record that definitely you recorded that really quickly right it was done and there was your first CCM records yeah correct it was and this was this Manfred's idea he saw us improvise one song one night at a concert in Munich we weren't playing together we've been playing separately and the promoter wanted to have some kind of jam session at the end and nobody wanted to do it so chick and I agreed the two Americans on the concert agreed that will jam something together so he taught me a song at the soundcheck which was La Fiesta woman became one of his things lobular pieces and we played it at the end of the concert as an encore and their audience loved it and Manfred I sure the who ran ECM start had just recently started he see him in those days was there at the concert and came up to us and said oh you've got to make a record of this and I said oh come on who wants to hear a whole hour of just piano and vibes you know it doesn't make sense and but he kept writing us and calling us saying you know come on let's do this let's do this so finally we agreed and we ended up in the studio in Norway that he liked mm-hmm and we'd hadn't played much before so we didn't have anything prepared and we each brought some songs I had some Steve swallow songs and he had some of his new originals and we would put a new tune up on our music stand and then spend I don't know half an hour kind of learning it and making an arrangement of it and we'd say okay would turn the machine on let's give it a try now we do a take and we listen to it as well it was pretty good you know yeah let's move on and so in the course of that day we did the whole record we did one tune twice okay all the others were first takes as soon as we learned made up the arrangement we would record it and move on and by the end of the afternoon we were sitting around listening to the playbacks and decided okay we don't need the other two or three days that were booked that we expected to need and we changed our plane tickets and flew home and and even then I didn't expect there would be much notice this was a small label they didn't even have a u.s. distributor yet when we did that record and and it was pretty esoteric that's a jazz record it was no bass and drums and that sort of thing it was almost classical music yeah at at times and we liked it but you know we didn't really know what people would think of it so it's what's interesting is how the two instruments propel each other since there is no rhythm section you have to have two really strong rhythmic players yeah and you have to be able to accompany the other person and create energy rhythmically with your accompaniment well they're improvising the particular combination of vibes and piano just sounds incredibly good we had never thought of it you know he played with me in my band for several months when Larry Coryell left the band Roy Haynes was the drummer Steve salt was the bass player and although I didn't I'd only met chick personally a couple of times but they were they had recorded with him before and knew him and so on they said chick would be the perfect guy and I tracked him down he was working for Sarah Vaughn as her accompanist and he said oh god I'd love to you know get back into a band I said you know it's great with Sarah but I don't get this solo much yeah or anything so we tried this this out and although the music was okay it seemed like we never you know kind of settled in playing together and after a few months of gigs we had a break and we sat down and talked about it and we both agreed it just wasn't gelling that's the way we thought it would I thought it was going to be my dream band you know so I went back to guitar players and about a week later he called to tell me that miles had called him to join his band he was all excited yeah and so everybody was happy but then came this duet thing and I think the magic of it is that it's really like words to piano players yes only the difference is instead of the instruments sounding the same and getting confused with each other you can always separate the sound of the vibes in the piano and and and hear the differences better but we're thinking alike in terms of how we picture the music picture the instrument and and and we also came from a very similar background which came of age musically in Boston he grew up there I went to school there we had the same kind of influences and teachers and so on when we were learning to play so we we had a lot of common background as well and we just you know hit it off musically at a level that I've only experienced with one or two other people in my whole career and it always seemed kind of otherworldly though the way we could anticipate what the other guy is about to do next and be there to do it with him I noticed that in your book you talk about you did I believe 18 Records on ECM mm-hmm that's right now that went from I guess 72 to 89 something like roughly like that yeah period eat making a record for ECM records was it what a two-day affair and that was it it was it kind of normally really regimented and then yeah in most cases with Manfred it's either music that you've already rehearsed to something play it on gigs and and yeah with your band for instance so you're not working it out in the studio from scratch you come in all kind of ready to start recording or it's pretty loosely assembled you know he he put me together recommended me to try a project or with Ralph towner turned out we were a really great fit together and so we ended up making three records together two for Manfred and then some more guest appearances on a on a GRP record I made and he also recommended that I you know collaborate with Eberhard Faber which turned out to be good we made several records together but yes it tended to be a two day three at the most kind of experience and that was true for 90% of all jazz records apparently I mean Blue Note was the legend for this I mean it was you got one day and every record had a blues and the ballad and a premium this Alfred Lyon had this whole formula okay the labels stuck with and that was how much your budget was for and so on and and this was typical of small record labels they didn't have lots of money I was always you know amazed that Pat Metheny would sell so many records that he would have this sort of unlimited budget to make them and they would spend weeks in the studio and spending they might spend an entire week just doing synthesizer pads you know in the background and I and I would think wow in fact at the same time Pat was making records with his band he also made a couple of records with me mm-hm and one of one of them we finished our record in three days and and he was saying well you know I'm still in the middle of this record with the band we're in week seven now and he said I can't believe we just did this in three days and it wow it seems just just as satisfying as he said but you know with the band I like letting everybody do whatever they want to do until they're satisfied speaking of Pat how are you involved in bright size life oh I was sort of behind-the-scenes producer mm-hmm we worked out all the songs in the basement of my house okay where I had I had a piano this was in suburb of Boston at the time okay and Pat had had moved he lived and it's in the same suburb only connect six blocks away from my house and he would come over every free evening and showing me his newest you know tune effort and we would fix them you know fine-tune them put together the repertoire for the record and then the plan was that we would record a Gary Burton quartet record but actually it was the quintet it was the Carla Bley record dream seemed so real yeah and and we booked both the days to do that record and immediately started on bright sighs life the next day and Jaco Pastorius flew in to join us on bass and Bob Moses who had played drums on both records was there right so we just transitioned in - you know making this trio record with manfred and so on so you were there during the oh yeah yeah and I was you know constantly you know making comments suggestions you know being you know I say kind of an informal producer and late and Manfred you know has always produced all his own records right and so it didn't surprise me that that my name wasn't mentioned it wasn't even on there at all right no no at all and in fact I think he probably felt like I was just hanging around because you know I was already there in the town in Ludvig burg in Germany and was you know just being supportive and and kind of helping and Pat actually made more of a fuss about it later he said I don't know why he didn't put your name on there I did has always bothered me and so on and I hadn't even really thought about it until Pat mentioned it to me and then I said well maybe I should have had my name on there somewhere in some kind of credit but it didn't happen and that's you know water under the bridge from a long time ago at this point but but I was very proud to be involved in bright sized life because I watched it from its first moments of creation as he would bring the songs in and we would spend hours you know messing around with them finishing you know how to go about them and so on no did you and you ever met Jaco before that I had met Jocko once or twice in passing okay you know but didn't really know him pat know him because Pat had been here in Florida going to school for a year at Miami and Rocco was still living here then he's from Fort Lauderdale actually yeah and we have a park here named after him it's from the section of town that he actually grew up in which is Oakland Park and there's a nice Chaco Pastorius Park and I'm sure there's a big mural of him on a wall with this electric bass and I'm sure that 99% of the people who go that park for a big offense they have all kinds of stuff they're going on had no idea who this guy is with a funny name but I got to know him more later on yeah as the years passed we would cross paths at jazz festivals and that sort of thing I never played with Jocko that was actually gonna be my next question no just just know him you played with many guitar players so Mick good Rick Larry Coryell Pat and then Julian Lodge I mean you played with Scofield you did with played with everybody well almost play with pretty much all the big guitar players yeah of that time period yeah not only played with them but you were the you know gave them their careers real I was the mentor for a whole bunch of of them and you know that the guitar divides guitar combination which worked so well for me of course came from my first experience with Hank Garland back you know in Nashville when I was 17 and when I was starting my first band I had left Stan and we kind of had a fight over a concert that he walked out on refused to play and left me and Roy and Steve swallow you know trio with in the trio and I said and the promoter said oh for God's sake play do the concert you know don't leave me hanging here I've sold out two concerts tonight in Belfast in Northern Ireland so with great trepidation we've you know we went out to play and by the end of the beach performance the audience loved it and we're a great relief to us mm-hmm and at that point the the tour guy from George Wayne's office that was had Oregon was helping us said you know you don't really need to stay with Stan anymore when you get back to come and see George and they start talking about options so I suddenly need it to form a band and I had no idea what to do I went to a jam session somewhere in middle of New York City with with Steve Marcus my one of my buddies from Berkeley who's this so what's a sax player with woody Herman's band at the time and so I tagged along and there was this guitar player playing this weird mix of jazz and rock and it was larry coryell mm-hmm and i said this is exactly what i'm you know and hoping to find some way to combine the other kinds of music and so I and he was in a rock band at the time okay and and but yet he had started out as a jazz player and so he kind of had this weird combination of you know two licks would be jazz licks and then he would do a some kind of a rock lick and back and forth so he was free and available joined me in the car and we drove up in this rented station wagon to Austin for the week and I told blenny I said by the way were a quartet now instead of a trio we came into New York soon after word got out that I was doing something new and different in the audience that week Quincy Jones came in all kinds of people that had heard that I was doing something different George Wayne came in he's the you know did all these huge jazz festivals around the world came up to me and said I'd love it yeah I want to book you on all my festivals this year great so I suddenly had almost a you know a full schedule for my new band and and then he became my unofficial manager for an agent for the next two years whenever I got offers gig offers I would call him up and say you know how much should I ask and who should I talk to what's this guy legit or what do you know what do you know about this place and so on he even signed a loan so I could get my first van for the band that's always important day yeah is everything you also had this relationship with Berklee College music that started later that started okay well I had been a student at birth yeah originally and 60 and 61 mm-hmm and then I decided that I wanted to my career was sort of bubbling up I had already started making records for RCA and and so on and getting notice showing up in the jazz pulls suddenly as a new comer and all that and although I was only 19 at that point I said that I may be doing this too early but if well you know if it doesn't work out I can always come back and do more school so I moved to New York in 1962 in the summer and started putting the word out you're looking for work and my Savior at first was Marian McPartland okay who recommended me to George Shearing those George Shearing was one of the few bands that used vibraphone as a regular instrument hmm that's one of the thing challenges you have if you play the vibes is you know every man needs a bass player and a drummer and so on but nobody needs a vibraphone player mmm and but she called up George her fellow Brit you know piano player and told him about this wonderful new vibes player in town and I got a call to come an audition for George and that got me the job with with his band and so I went on touring with George then with stan getz then started my own band when I was about 24 let's say and I ended up back at Berklee oddly enough because of the new thing that was going on in the jazz world then clinics mm-hmm were a new thing suddenly you would get calls to come and do a little something at a music store or at a college or something and you would use at first you would get paid by the instrument company to promote you know it would be Ludwig or Musser that would want to promote their instruments so I would be in a music store with folding chairs set up and do a kind of a question-and-answer and demonstration and so on and in pretty soon Amos colleges that were calling in high schools and it became a kind of a second you know source of income yeah for us players and I discovered that I seem to have a knack for explaining things and seem like know whatever questions I got yeah you know I think hazers how that works and so many jazz musicians you know you ask them well how did you know what to do there tonight you know I just heard it you know that doesn't help anybody you know understand something it was kind of good at how to break it down into you know information mm-hmm I got an offer out of the blue to teach at the University of Illinois in Champaign Illinois I've done two visiting clinics for them and they're the guy running the program there said you're so good at this you know you know I could get you on the faculty here and easily what you know it'd be wonderful to have it how can I do that I live in New York and I've got a band and and so on he said well we have classical players who tour all the time and but they come in do some teaching and so on couldn't see it working but I could imagine maybe it would work in Boston close to New York and so I called up Berkeley they said we'd love to try it so that was 71 the fall of 71 I began teaching at Berkeley thinking that you know I would try it if it didn't work out I could always you know quietly you know drop out of it after a year or two and and instead I ended up finding it very inspiring and enjoying it and there were times I was there at Berkeley 33 years there were times when I was overwhelmed with work between teaching and later being the administrator of the school and and also touring at the same time and I began sometimes would feel like I got it lessons I got to quit something and I just couldn't make up my mind which one to quit so I kept on persevering until it finally was time to say it's time to retire from birth I was 61 when I this I said this is a young person's you know kind of thing to do I mean you're dealing with all this 18 21 year old young firebrands and I was finding it harder and harder to get into their mindset as I you know got to know what they wanted in their lives and their careers and so on and I said now this should be you know there should be younger people you know doing this making these decisions and guiding where things go next and and so it was time to what do you say that Berkeley in the 70s for example had a the big focus was on jazz oriented music and improvisation improvisational music we used to call it well actually it used to be that commercial music and jazz music were much the same yeah that is the only difference as one of the teachers pointed out to me is that when you played a commercial gig you played softer and on a jazz gig you played louder and longer the solos but it was the same standard tunes hmm that diverged in the 70s suddenly popular music was now hold sets of new stuff by the Beatles and by rock bands and so on and and the more and more the commercial music even in local performance bands and so on was not the old standards anymore that we shared with the Jazz community so where do you see jazz today Gary well jazz is more diverse now I mean when I was first playing there was one central kind of jazz that was 80% of the jazz world in the 60s 56 Miles Davis's bands whichever one he had at the time Sonny Rollins there was a handful of you know style setters trendsetters and every successful band was somehow closed into that same thing and you did have outliers somebody playing you know almost old Dixieland music or you know early New Orleans music or new modern avant-garde but they were always on the fringe right the mainstream of jazz was this kind of Center and that started changing in the 70s just as rock was you know mixing things up so were things like ECM records yes that word you know he was recording people who were not disinterest players he was recording the raff towners of the world and people who played well you see him had its own style we would always call it ECM I know they became stuffy in style jazz yeah because it was more acoustic I mean in a way it was like fusion in that it was combining different kinds of elements but instead of it being loud guitars and synthesizers it was acoustic instruments and you more of it sounding more classical yeah very well recorded I mean Manfred raised the standards of recording studios for jazz you know what used to be throw him in a studio and turned the machine on and you know we got a jazz right there who cares if it's perfect or not and Manfred took great care to find the best studios and engineers and took great care making sure that every record he made was you know premium sound quality and so on and a lot of his artists continued that path that's a perfect example Pat learned how to record from working with Manfred mm-hmm and became also a perfectionist of recording production he knows more about making jazz records than anybody I know to be honest and so you know that you know changed a lot of things and the whole jazz world now is instead of one big central stylistic thing it's a half a dozen different they're still fringe things that are you know not widely supported but there's more than just one central style now but it used to be you know you would look at any decade and you would say that was the swing era that was the cool school that was the whole jazz community kind of moved from one decade to the next as a as a stylistic you know unit that went away starting in the 70s so now you know you have a lot more individual choice if you're an upcoming jazz musician okay so a couple I have to two other question okay did you foresee Pat Metheny becoming as big as he became I didn't at the very first because I met him first when he was a student and and his playing was kind of rough edged and he was new at it he only been you know improvising for a couple of years and it was still you know kind of been developing stage and in fact the first two years he was in my band he was the second guitarist yeah with Mick being the main one and during that time I noticed Pat who would only solo on a few Tunes a night instead of the bulk of them that he was getting better and better and so it was kind of perfect that Mick decided to stop touring and go back to teaching and that left Pat is the only guitarist in the band and by then he had matured into a much better player mm-hmm but I noticed something about Pat after a year or two in the band which he was with me for about four years altogether I noticed that he really connected incredibly well with audiences people were entranced with him I've seen that only on a rare occasion Julian Lodge is another one and and I even said to Pat at at some point during that when I began to notice this how audiences were just captivated by not just his playing but also his whole persona mm-hmm that he just came across as charismatic and likable and I said people are just you know tuned into you they're flocking to you they all want to talk to you they all want to you know they all want to be you you know they and of course practically every young person from the 1970s on plays a little guitar you know they did it in college they did it in high school and when they see Pat you know beautifully performing they feel like they can identify with that I said I'll never have that as a vibraphone player but you've got it as a guitar player and so when he started his own band he was nervous he was shy about it and scared as we all are when we break off to start our own thing and we hope to god it works and we don't fail at this and I kept trying to tell him look you have laid the groundwork so well you're with a major label already we're with ECM you're just you're putting out your second record now it's not even your first it's your second one and your first did really well and you've got one of the best jazz manager in the business as well representing you you've hooked up with Lyle you know this super talented keyboard player you guys seemed to really bond well as I there's so much going for you I you know I don't know what else you could you know put in the mix that would you know make it any more likely to succeed you're pretty much got it just you know go right go right ahead and follow through and of course within a year he was you know hugely successful and and became even more successful than almost anyone in in the jazz world you know yeah he kind of redefined you know how to be a almost a rock pop star but being a jazz musician while doing it and you know he kind of figured out how to how to make that happen and keep his integrity and he's never wavered on his commitment to quality and the music he's an inspiration to be around he's far more perfectionist than I ever would we do these records together and he would still be tinkering with the mix for you know hours and hours beyond the point where I'm you know ready to fall asleep but at the end I would say well you know it is just at least a scotch better than then I would have settled for and I can tell it when I hear the final product so I I went from being his mentor to then learning a ton of stuff from him which is just the way it ought to be so one question that I wanted to finish up with is to talk about your legacy and what you want to be remembered for mm-hmm well I figure I I should get credit for a few things and in some cases I it has happened others it some of them are kind of small behind-the-scenes for instance you know I reinvented playing with four mallets I wasn't the first to do it but no one else was doing it at the level that I came up with and and so I hope that at least among vibraphone players I will go down in history question as the guy who no question about that revolutionize the instrument I mean you become a legend in jazz by either redefining how an instrument is played or how the music itself evolves creating a new style and and hopefully you get to do both of those things so I'm hoping that's what my legacy will be that I revolutionized the instrument and I also played a hand in this modernizing of jazz to break it out of absolutely of the standards into a wider range of influences and and musical choices and a long along the way I think chicken I was part of you know making the duet format a legitimate jazz format thanks to me and chick doing it together mmm at first it was just us and and it was just one record but you know five 10 years later you look around and there's the ton of ton of them do it and we weren't the first do it I mean the mic one of my favorite influences with Jim Hall and Bill Evans oh yeah undercurrent yeah and so on but no one else picked up on it it was just that one record and so on and here we came and we thought it would be a one record thing as well but it turned out to be you know I wish I'd kept track of how many concerts we played over that 45 years we played every year we never skipped a year Wow if it was a slow year we would do a few jazz festivals or something when we had a new record coming out we would drop everything else tore like crazy to promote the record and the new music that we had come up with and so on but it added up to awful lot of gigs and very course very proud of that I also like to think that I'm well thought of as one of the best improvisers I've had when other musicians come up to me and say you and Keith and I did a few other people are in the class by yourselves when it comes to the actual the quality of your improvising it's you know it's always fascinating that makes me feel really good and occasionally someone will come up and compliment my song choices absolutely you you know you have a knack for finding really great material and of course the secret is I don't play only my own tunes I you know I'm surrounded by talented songwriters and I use them I take advantage of them and so it's kind of easy to get a good reputation for a material if you've if you're you know taking advantage of the opportunities so yeah I guess all those things kind of together and so one night somebody comes up and says wow you really play fast or you know yes or love that I rolls right off but when somebody nails one of these you know more explicit things I get a little buzz of well I I agree with with all of those and I'm I'm so honored that you agreed to to talk with me today absolutely this has been fantastic this is still totally different from any other interview like whatever degree so that was why I was really looking forward to this and it's been fine excellent Thank You Garrett sure

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 142,260

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, education, Gary Burton, vibraphone, vibraphone jazz, pat metheny, Chick Corea, keith jarrett, berklee college of music, Julian Lage, crystal silence chick corea gary burton, Bob Moses, bright size life pat metheny, jaco pastorius, Marimba, Perfect Pitch, roy haynes, steve swallow, jazz improvisation, Vibes, Interview, Bebop, Stan getz

Id: 9VOw0oomUEY

Length: 47min 11sec (2831 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2019