Here is a brand new (April 2013) five part video interview with organist Joey DeFrancesco from the JazzTimes YouTube Channel. The interviews were conducted by Irene Lee on board the 2013 Jazz Cruise and cover DeFrancesco’s musical education & development, his ideas about jazz education, the Jazz Cruise and his band, his current & future projects, and playing the trumpet & singing.
—Peter Blasevick
From the cool JazzProfessional website, here are five interviews with the iconic alto saxophonist Paul Desmond conducted by Les Tompkins. As always, Desmond is classy, funny, and articulate throughout. “The personality of Paul Desmond” and ”The jazz audience” are from 1963, with “Back in the crook”, “Giant jazzman, gentle wit…”, and “Sax viewpoint” from 1972. Additionally there is a special tribute story from the time of 
Desmond’s death in 1977, and a page of Desmond quotes.
From the first interview, Desmond on practicing:
“I feel the necessity for practice, but the results don’t generally justify it. I have a tendency to get bugged by some small thing when I start practising and do one of those Stephen Laycock retroactive bits for five or six hours, ending up playing one interval and working on the intonation or something. After about four hours I come to the job and I can’t play a note! So I’m really better off without practising. I either have to just make it playing the job or forget it. There isn’t time then to get introspective or critical and tear anything apart. You just have to keep going.”
—Peter Blasevick
Here is a cool 10:00 video interview with the great Jack DeJohnette. In this 2010 interview with Dr. David Schroeder, Director of the NYU Steinhardt Jazz Studies Program, the drummer talks about a number of topics including playing with Sting and going to see Charles Mingus.
—Peter Blasevick
This week I’m posting interviews from the music journal The Jazz Review, which has been wonderfully preserved at the great website jazzstudiesonline.org. Founded by Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams, and Hsio Wen Shih in New York in 1958, The Jazz Review was the premier journal of jazz in the United States. Short-lived as it was (1958-1961), it set an enduring standard for criticism. All the interview links point to the full .pdf for that issue, so it might take a second to load. Worth the wait!
Eric Dolphy was an important force in Jazz during the late 50s and early 60s; this 1960 interview with Martin Williams finds the versatile reed-man during a show with Charles Mingus. Here Dolphy talk about comparisons to Ornette Coleman:
Comparisons between Dolphy’s work and Ornette Coleman’s are probably inevitable and will just as probably plague both of them from now on. ”Ornette was playing that way in 1954. I heard about him, and when I heard him play, he asked me if I liked his pieces and I said I thought they sounded good. When he said that if someone played a chord, he heard another chord on that one, I knew what he was talking about because I had been thinking of the same things.”
More from my week of interviews from JazzOnline.com. Today’s post is a recent talk with the versatile George Duke in which he answers a few questions about his influences and the like. From the interview, Duke talks about the first recording he ever bought:
“The first record I purchased was “Hard Times” by David “Fathead” Newman produced by Ray Charles. David was the most soulful sax player I had ever heard, and the songs were a kind of cross between jazz and what they called soul music at the time, but in an instrumental context.”
Classic Miles Davis on the Philadelphia talk show Timeout in 1986. Miles didn’t sit for too many of these long form interviews, but this is 45 minutes of Miles at his best. He initially doesn’t seem to have much time for Boggs, especially when Bill tries to give him a hug when Davis first comes out on stage, but he warms up a bit and gets into the interview later on. Here is Boggs on how the interview came to be:
BB: I have been told by people over the years that this was an historic interview. ‘Do you ever remember Miles Davis being on a talk show?’ Apparently not too many people do cause they keep telling me this is unique. How’d it happen?…I ran into Miles when I was in a restaurant in Los Angeles. Actually, he came to my table and said hello. ‘That Midday was like my Today show,’ he told me in that raspy voice. It turned out he’d been watching me for years and said, ‘I always wanted you to interview me.’ So the way this whole thing happened was he asked me what I was doing and I told him I had a show in Philadelphia called ‘Timeout’ and he basically said let’s arrange to do it. And about a month or so later, there he was. I was not pleased that the producers of the show chose to add other guests. It should have been just Miles and me for the entire hour. But they were afraid he wouldn’t carry the ratings-small thinking, in my opinion, since his appearance on the show made headlines and was discussed before and after on local radio. Anyway, the charming Maurice Hines, an old friend joins in as do some young trumpet players-which sort of worked..See for yourself..Miles Davis circa 1986 in Philadelphia.
— Peter Blasevick
Here is a cool 1981 interview with alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson from the JazzProfessional website. In this excerpt he talks candidly about his style:
LD: Basically, my playing is a cross between Charlie Parker and Johnny Hodges—you know, the people that I listened to when I was coming up. See, when I play my ballads, I play almost identically like Johnny Hodges. A lot of younger musicians don’t know this; they say: “How do you do this? What is that?” But I say: “Well, it’s hard for me to explain it to you, unless you heard Johnny Hodges and Lester Young, people like that.” That’s the way they played ballads, and it’s natural for me to pattern my style slightly after that.
—Peter Blasevick
I’ll be posting some great interviews from jazz mega-site jazz.com this week, and today’s is a 2009 interview with the living legend Jack DeJohnette. A couple of excerpts from his talk with Ted Panken:
“I’ve always been curious about mixing different things, like an alchemist,” Jack DeJohnette told me several years ago. “Different genres of music have always cross-pollinated, but the rate is speeded up now.”
“I’m more refined now, but much looser in another way,” DeJohnette reflected in 2005. “I’m taking in much more. My heart is more open, and I’m free to do whatever I want. So playing music is more joyful to me.”
Last week Downbeat posted a classic Miles Davis interview with Nat Hentoff from 1955 called “Miles: A Trumpeter In The Midst Of A Big Comeback Makes A Very Frank Appraisal Of Today’s Jazz Scene.” Miles discusses West Coast Jazz, Charlie Parker, and a host of other topics with his usual candor. On Dave Brubeck:
“Well, Dave made one record I liked—‘Don’t Worry ’bout Me.’ Do I think he swings? He doesn’t know how. Desmond doesn’t swing, either, though I think he’d play different with another rhythm section.”
Miles never disappoints.
For Miles Davis’ birthday week: another great interview with Les Tomkins from the Jazz Professional website. Miles is of course his usual controversial self.
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