The one year anniversary of TNYDP! Thanx to everyone who visits the site, I really hope that people are finding it useful. For the last month we are averaging about 20 new visitors a day and we’re up over 200 followers on Twitter, so I guess some are!
Here is a long in-depth interview with Tommy Flanagan conducted by Ted Panken. The pianist talks about everything in what was originally a Sunday Jazz Profiles show on WKCR in November 1994. HEre is a quick excerpt:
TP: …so many great stylists of Jazz came up out of Detroit around the same time. Milt Jackson, Lucky Thompson, Billy Mitchell, Barry Harris, you, and the list goes on.
TF: Yes. Well, as a young musician, Lucky left Detroit early. So we didn’t know him until he came back to settle in Detroit for a while. I think he’d even been to Europe, and he did the West Coast scene with those bands out there. When he came to Detroit, I guess I was like 17 or so. Lucky formed a band with Pepper Adams, Kenny Burrell and myself — I can’t remember all the other players. He was a wonderful writer. It was a seven-piece band, a septet, and he wrote some beautiful arrangements, and really got me interested in how to voice music, and got me interested in trying to arrange — although I never did get that far into it. But he was a big inspiration, and he helped us a lot in learning how to play music on a professional level. He certainly was in a class with Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster and Don Byas, just a notch under them, and he certainly was cut from the same cloth.
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