Posts in category S

Esperanza Spalding: The Intimate Balance

Apr29
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

Here is a September 2010 AllAboutJazz interview with the very talented bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. In the piece she discusses jazz and classical, her album Chamber Music Society, and being a musician and singer both. From the interview:

AAJ : Where does Esperanza the singer start and the musician end?

ES: That’s a good question—I never saw it like that, I guess. It’s not organized in my mind at all, really. I’m just going for what needs to be done, whether that means singing in a track or not, or I don’t know… You caught me off guard! It doesn’t really go with the way that I’m operating with my music. I certainly feel like all the elements, singing and playing, they’re really part of the same motivation, which for me comes out of composition: that’s my main passion, and what I really think rules everything else. It all comes from there. 

Click here to read Esperanza Spalding: The Intimate Balance

—Peter Blasevick

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Two Esperanza Spalding from the 2011 Newport Jazz Festival

Mar11
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

This week I will be linking to some great video interviews from the JazzTimes YouTube page. There is so much more there than I’ll be posting this week, so be sure to check it out!

Today, two interviews from the incredibly talented Esperanza Spalding at the 2011 Newport Jazz Festival. In the first segment, Spalding talks about her jazz and music education, about her teachers and mentors, and about her own experience as a teacher and mentor. In the second, Spalding talks about playing at Newport for the first time, the significance of the festival and the unique environment created by George Wein. Spalding also talks about why jazz and music festivals are important. Interview by Lee Mergner.

 

—Peter Blasevick

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John Scofield – Guitarist of Many Talents

Feb20
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

The week of podcast interviews from JazzCorner.com continues! JazzCorner is 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.

Guitarist John Scofield started at the top, playing Carnegie Hall for his first gig in New York – and, he notes wryly in this interview, he hasn’t played there since. Scofield, a master of many guitar styles, also has a wonderful sense of humor. JazzCorner.com producer Reese Erlich caught up with Scofield early in 2012 for a quick seven minute discussion, where John talks about starting his career off with Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, playing with Miles Davis, and his 2011 album “A Moment’s Peace”.

Click here to listen to John Scofield – Guitarist of Many Talents

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Horace Silver—The Nitty Gritty

Feb18
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

JazzCorner.com is the largest portal for the official websites of hundreds of jazz musicians and organizations, and this week I will be posting some podcast interviews from their Jazz Perspectives and InnerViews podcasts series’.

Horace Silver is a living legend and one of America’s most prolific composers, with standards such as “Song For My Father” and “Sister Sadie.” Today’s JazzCorner.com Innerview was first aired on radio station WRVR on Lois Gilbert’s Jazz Masters series in 1979 and updated for the 2010 Detroit Jazz Festival and the theme of Flame Keepers: Carrying the Torch for Modern Jazz. In this hour-plus long podcast Silver talks us through his entire career and we get to hear a number of fantastic Silver recordings!

Click here to listen to Horace Silver—The Nitty Gritty

 

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Wayne Shorter On Jazz: ‘How Do You Rehearse The Unknown?’

Feb11
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

As the great Wayne Shorter approaches his 80th birthday, he’s just reunited with the label that championed him as a bandleader back in the 1960s, Blue Note Records. On the new album Without a Net, he leads a quartet with whom he’s spent more than a decade through live recordings and some striking new compositions.

Speaking with NPR’s Laura Sullivan, Shorter says he absorbed a common principle from Davis, Coltrane, Blakey and his other great peers and mentors: They left their musicians alone.

“The six years I was with Miles, we never talked about music. We never had a rehearsal,” Shorter says. “Jazz shouldn’t have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that’s required to sound like jazz. For me, the word ‘jazz’ means, ‘I dare you.’ The effort to break out of something is worth more than getting an A in syncopation.

“This music, it’s dealing with the unexpected,” he adds. “No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?”

Click here to listen to Wayne Shorter On Jazz: ‘How Do You Rehearse The Unknown?’, including Shorter’s Miles Davis impression!

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Introducing Wayne Shorter—The Jazz Review, November 1959

Jan14
2013 Leave a Comment Written by 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!

Today I’m linking to a early 1959 interview with Wayne Shorter. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) gives a nice background of the legendary tenor’s growing up in Newark, NJ, and speaks with Shorter about his contemporaries and his time with Maynard Ferguson and Art Blakey. From the interview:

“What it comes to is seriousness! Nothing comes to anything unless you’re serious about it. Man, that’s the only things I dig. . .serious people doing serious things…otherwise, there’s not much to it. Of course, there’s such a thing as serious humor too. You know? Like Monk. Man, that cat’s jokes are dead serious! To me, that’s what people like Sonny and John represent, a really serious approach to music. And with people that are constantly improvising, you can see the real accomplishment. It’s amazing! At least, it amazes me. John especially. I mean, he doesn’t ever stop taking care of business.”

Click here to read Introducing Wayne Shorter—The Jazz Review, November 1959

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A Fireside Chat With Bud Shank

Jan08
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

Today I’m linking to a great 2003 AllAboutJazz interview with alto saxophonist Bud Shank, who made his name early on in the West Coast Jazz scene and Stan Kenton. In this piece, Shank talks about his early years, playing the flute, and a bunch of his contemporaries. Here is a excerpt about fellow West-Coaster Chet Baker:

Chet Baker was a strange case. I always got along well with him. There are other people who didn’t. The only problem I had with Chet is I would go for a couple of years and not see him and every time I would see him, the first thing he would say is ‘loan me twenty dollars,’ which I never saw again.

He had a lot of notoriety and a lot of fame at an early age, more than he could handle and that is why I think he took the road to avail all that and he did it so violently and so much that he was in jail in Italy and he was about to be the next James Dean. They were about to make a movie star out of him. That I how far he got up in the popularity kind of thing and he blew it all because he couldn’t face it.

All he wanted to be was just a player. He would go through periods when he was living in Europe when he would take the Concord to fly back to New York. He was really up there. Italians were really serious about him and that is why he was in Italy when he got thrown in the slammer for a year.

Click here to read A Fireside Chat With Bud Shank

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On Martial Solal’s 85th Birthday, a Downbeat Feature and Public Blindfold Test at Orvieto in 2009

Jan01
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

More interviews from Ted Panken this week. Here is the full text from a Downbeat Blindfold Test done with the legendary French pianist Martial Solal in 2009. Solal is his usual honest self in this interview, and here he remarks on a recent Ahmad Jamal recording:

The leadoff track was “Where Are You,” a standard that Solal has recorded, performed by Ahmad Jamal (In Search Of, Dreyfus, 2002), who, like Solal, conceptualizes the piano as a virtual orchestra. Within two minutes, Solal made a dismissive “turn it off” gesture.

“I don’t know who is playing, and it’s not so important,” he said. “I had the feeling it is someone who played the piano well in the past, 20 years ago maybe, and stopped practicing since. He is trying to do things that he has in his mind, but his fingers can’t play it as he did before.”

Told it was Jamal, he elaborated. “He played beautifully 40 years ago. Each time I met him, I knew he did not practice. So he has the same story to tell, but he can’t express it. I must add that he is still a marvelous stylist. I always admire people who have a personal way to express music, and he is one of them. Now, this happens to many pianists who are getting old. They stop practicing at home—except me. For instance, maybe 40 years ago, I heard Earl Hines, who was a great pianist, and he couldn’t play any more. I was crying. They should do like me. Practice every morning. Except today.”

Click here to read On Martial Solal’s 85th Birthday, a Downbeat Feature and Public Blindfold Test at Orvieto in 2009

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Duke Ellington in exclusive interview from CBC’s Hot Air archive

Dec13
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

More great jazz interviews this week from CBC-Radio Canada! The Bob Smith Hot Air archive is a treasure trove of approximately 50 interviews Smith recorded with some of the greatest stars of the day, from the world of jazz and beyond. Captured between 1950 and 1982, these interviews include conversations with Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Harry James, Oscar Peterson and Lena Horne, as well as Sammy Davis Jr., Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte, Liza Minnelli and many others.

Here is a 1962 CBC-Radio Canada interview with the legendary Duke Ellington. Bob Smith had a lifelong fascination with Ellington and interviewed him no fewer than three times for the CBC. This featured conversation, perhaps Smith’s magnum opus as an interviewer, captures Ellington in a chatty and casual mood, with a surprise visit from the legend’s close collaborator, Billy Strayhorn.

Click here to listen to Duke Ellington in exclusive interview from CBC’s Hot Air archive.

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Trombone Shorty on Tavis Smiley 2010

Nov16
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

Keeping with this week’s string of interviews from talk show host Tavis Smiley’s archive here is a cool 201o talk with the very hip trombonist and trumpeter Trombone Shorty. The New Orleans native talks a little bit about wanting to be both a Jazz musician and an entertainer like Louis Armstrong:

“Well, I mean, just being in New Orleans, you’ve got people from Louis Armstrong that was an entertainer and I try to follow that. You know, just follow that plan hard and I just get bored by myself when I’m up there playing all this. So I just wanted to become an entertainer all around, singing, dancing, whatever, getting the crowd involved. You know, it’s just that thing. It’s just part of the city and what we do and taking that from Louis Armstrong.”

— Peter Blasevick

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The mission of The Notes You Don't Play is to be the Web's first comprehensive library of jazz interviews. Click on an artist below to go to their collection, visit our about page for more information, or contact us to suggest interviews to include in the library. Read more...

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