Here is a cool CBS Sunday morning segment on pianist Chick Corea featuring clips of his Akoustic Band and Elektric Band. Dr. Billy Taylor interviewed Chick for this show in the mid 1980s and both the interviews and live clips are fantastic. You even meet Chick’s mother!
If anyone can help with an exact dating of this interview, please shoot me an email.
—Peter Blasevick
If you haven’t yet checked out Jacob Collier, do so. Right now.
In this 2012 interview with the Brazilian website Falafil, the singer, multi-instrumentalist, and all around prodigy discusses his famous videos, his family, the Royal Academy of Music, and other topics. From the interview:
You are a winning self-taught multi-instrumentalist. How and when you discovered your interest and natural talent for music?
I have been interested in and passionate about music every since I can remember. My mother inspired me from a very young age by playing her violin, and I often used to watch her conducting the chamber orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music. There were always instruments around my house, and I always loved to play, as well as to sing. I remember being given a Djembe drum when I was about eight, and loving it. I was introduced to Cubase software when I was about seven years old, and this enabled me to begin composing, arranging, and recording my music. I always loved to record singing in harmony, even at a young age.
—Peter Blasevick
Trailblazing bassist Stanley Clarke is as influential today as he was during the heyday of Chick Corea’s Return To Forever in the 1970s. Here is a lengthy interview he gave to AllAboutJazz in 2011. From the interview:
“…as a musician, I was only interested in sounding good. It didn’t matter, even in some cases, how much we were getting paid. We were just out there really trying to sound good and living up to the tradition of jazz music, and the guys that came before us. Like for instance, I didn’t really realize how big Return to Forever was until the last reunion that we did a couple of years ago. It was huge; we could have played any of those places two or three times, and we didn’t, because we said we couldn’t do it. But that was a pretty important band, and all those individuals have their own history.
“The great thing about Chick Corea, myself and [drummer] Lenny White, and not so much with [guitarist] Al Di Meola, is that we can go back to those guys. Chick and I played with Art Blakey; I played with Dexter Gordon, and we both played with Stan Getz; Lenny White played with Jackie McLean and a lot of older jazz musicians, so we had that in common. So whether we knew that was big, it’s not something you thought about; if I would have thought about it at the time, I wouldn’t have been with those people, I wouldn’t have played the way I did. It’s kinda like an oxymoron in concept, to have those two things together; a guy that thinks he is so big and there he is, playing at nineteen with Dexter Gordon. You’re so scared you can’t think of anything [laughs].”
Grammy Award winning Jazz Bassist, Composer and Conductor John Clayton visited with Don Wolff in 2011, and they discussed his career, and also the importance of Jazz Education, an area that Mr. Clayton sees as very important and for which he places much emphasis. Here is the great bassist, composer, and arranger on Milt Hinton:
“Oh gosh, he was such an inspiration. He’s a guy who really, really saw to it that the bass family remained a family. He was always taking time out to give anybody who was interested his time…he really exemplified the “jazz mentor”.
—Peter Blasevick
This week I will be posting some podcast interviews from JazzCorner.com, a portal for the official websites of hundreds of jazz musicians and organizations. There is a ton of great info you can get to from there, so check them out.
Drummer Jimmy Cobb turned 84 last month but still keeps up a regular schedule of performing and teaching master classes. Perhaps most famous when he was part of Miles Davis band (1957-63), NEA Jazz Master Cobb has a distinguished career as both sideman and group leader. Producer Reese Erlich interviewed Cobb for this special JazzCorner.com Jazz Perspective prior to his appearance at the 2011 Tanglewood Jazz Festival. In this 30 minute interview, Cobb discusses his career, his time with Miles, and a host of other topics.
Chick Corea keeps putting out great music; his latest duo recording with Gary Burton is testament to that! Here are four interviews with the pianist, all between 1972 and 1982. The final one, from 1982, is actually a joint interview with longtime collaborator Burton, and in it he discusses preparing for a tour together:
How much actual preparation do you need before embarking on a concert tour together?
The groundwork has already been laid in the past year since we’ve developed our way of working together. The only additional preparation we ever do is finding music to play; I compose, we find other compositions to do, and we work them into the repertoire by going over them once or twice, then finding where to drop the new piece into the performance. Except the next album project we have in mind is going to take quite a bit of preparation, actually, because I’m going to write a piece for Gary and myself with a string quartet as well. So the composing will be a process, and then us looking at the music, getting accustomed to it, and seeing how to make it work with the strings will be a full process in itself. I’m looking forward to that. The music will be sort of like a double concerto idea, where there’s two soloists and an orchestra that’s made up of four strings.
More from some of the great Jazz drummers this week. Check out this cool interview with trailblazing drummer and percussionist Billy Cobham from mikedolbear.com. Here Billy talks about Louis Bellson:
Q: I believe that the late great Louis Bellson was one of your tutors. What impact did he have on you as a drummer in terms of technique, attitude, expression and ideas?
A: It’s sad losing him but it was inevitable but what Louis Bellson gave me was latitude. He opened my eyes to many percussion possibilities like multiple bass drum presentation with two bass drums or more. I remember in 1978, he said to me “Well, you know what you got – well, that’s a good thing – now how are you going to use it in other ways?”. He said to come on out back; he had this ranch style home, and he said “Have you ever thought of playing more than two bass drums?” I said “I can’t play one bass drum!”.
I’m going to post a few interviews this week that are hosted on Mel Martin’s great site. Here is a cool 2002 interview with Benny Carter by Don Heckman for the Los Angeles Times on the eve of Carter’s 95th birthday. From the interview:
Carter, sitting quietly, smilingly insists that he is “really not a good interview.” But that’s true only if one is seeking the sort of sensationalism that has often surrounded the jazz world rather than the soft-spoken insights that he has to offer. Why, for example, did Ken Burns, despite having interviewed him extensively, find so little of Carter’s accumulated knowledge worthy of inclusion in his massive jazz documentary?
“There’s a lot that’s valuable in what he did,” Carter says in typically courteous fashion. “But I don’t understand why there’s such a need to emphasize all the darker aspects of jazz. It was the same with that Clint Eastwood film, ‘Bird.’ I didn’t know Charlie Parker well, but I spent some time with him, and he was articulate and well spoken with a lot of curiosity about music and the world. But the only way he seems to be depicted is as a junkie. And that’s not the full picture.”
— Peter Blasevick
Bill Charlap is one of the most sought after pianists in the world of jazz. He grew up in a musical household and absorbed the sounds of jazz and musical theater at a young age. Bill has recorded with many of today’s top jazz artists and also with his own trio. Bill was interviewed in Scottsdale, Arizona on April 16, 2000, by Monk Rowe, director of the Hamilton College Jazz Archive.
Bill talks about some recording that were influenctial early in his life in this excerpt:
“I know the first record I bought was Vladimir Horowitz playing Liszt, the “Hungarian Rhapsody #2,” the one that he did live at Carnegie Hall. That’s some incredible piano playing. It’s real gypsy music. Very soulful. And on a pianistic level it’s just ridiculous. It’s just really unbelievable. Also Art Tatum, “Piano Starts Here.” That one, the four recordings, the shorts of him playing “Tea for Two” and “Tiger Rag,” “Sophisticated Lady” and something else on there too, I forget what the last one is. And the Gene Norman Shrine Concert which is also on there. That was very nfluential, him playing “Yesterdays” particularly, “Time” and “Flights of Fancy,” the harmonic ideas. The lines. You know it’s a very linear Tatum, particularly on that. That’s a very important record for me. There were some early Oscar Peterson that my parents had. I think that was one of the first jazz albums I bought. The Horowitz was the first classical record, the first record indeed. I was a little boy, I went to Barnes & Noble and I said “do you have ‘Homage to Liszt?’” I probably said “Homage of Liszt.” And that’s the record. I still remember the cover, it’s this brown cover and it’s Liszt, the Abbe Liszt, the old Liszt on the cover. And I went and I bought this Oscar Peterson record many years later. It was “Return Engagement.” It was a Verve two-fer that had a lot of “Night Train” on it, much of the classic trio with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. Those were real important. There were many others. It would be almost impossible to name them all, and I would certainly leave things out. But there is a couple desert island discs for you, or at least the first records that I listened to.”
- Peter Blasevick
In this 2003 interview with R.J. DeLuke for AllAboutJazz.com, pianist Chick Corea laments:
“I see that the world is more turbulent now than it ever was and the music is not reflecting it,” says the composer-pianist. “There was more freedom of expression in the ’60s. There was revolt. There was ‘We want freedom.’ There was Martin Luther King, human rights coming to the fore. Today, a lot of that is under wraps and gone suppressed. So the music we hear is kind of just ‘nice’ music. There’s not a lot of cutting edge music going on, and yet the world is in total turbulence. War is all over the place.”
Also in the interview, Chick discusses his early days as a player, his first breaks, and how blessed he feels to be a musician:
“Being a musician doing what I’m doing at all is like leading a pretty charmed life, traveling around playing the music I love to play – and my own music, mostly, for my whole life. I continue to love doing what I’m doing. To have the friendship and the musical partnership with the greatest musicians alive is, of course, an honor and a great joy each time it happens.”
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