Posts tagged 2009

In conversation with Sonny Rollins

Apr30
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

Today, a great 2009 interview with the legendary Sonny Rollins From Stuart Nicolson and Jazz.com. Topics the great tenor saxophonist covers here are greats Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown, his theory of improvisation, and more. From the interview, on improvising:

In fact, in a way, improvisation is making the mind blank. When I’m playing, I’m in a trance. I’m not thinking of anything. Sometimes I’ve thought about a nice pattern I wanted to play, maybe a little riff on the song. It’s very clever and I’d think about it and go, ‘Oh yeah, this song I’ll put in this clever riff, it’ll really sound clever, everybody will think I’m clever!’ But I can’t do it, because when I think about putting it in someplace, the music has gone by so fast that it doesn’t work, so I just forget it. Just absorb it and it comes out at some weird time and for some weird reason from the subconscious, so I’ll play it, but don’t try to manage it and put it in to a solo. So that’s what I have learned about music about improvisation and it’s beautiful. I think somebody told me Miles [Davis] said something like that, he learns something and he forgets it because you can’t be creative if you know too much about what you’re doing.

Click here to read In conversation with Sonny Rollins

Posted in Rollins, Sonny - Tagged tenor saxophone, text interviews

2009 DTM interview with Albert “Tootie” Heath

Apr08
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

DoTheMath is pianist Ethan Iverson’s great blog about mostly jazz and jazz piano, but also about classical music and classic crime fiction books and a whole host of other stuff. It’s required reading for the jazz musician and fan alike.

From Ethan’s blog, here is a great 2009 interview with Albert “Tootie” Heath. The legendary drummer talks about his musical family, Kenny Clarke, The MJQ, and tons of other stuff. A great interview. A quick sample:

Albert Heath: For drummers I listened to Max Roach, Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, and Specs Wright, a local drummer who was an amazing musician. He was in my brother Jimmy’s band, and he took me on as a student. I learned most of the rudimental drum studies through him. I kind of cast those aside for a while: you need to be really mature and secure in your musicianship to be able to sit down and deal with the basics. When you’re young you think the basics aren’t hip. So the rudiments I got in early life, I chucked them out, but in later life I’m discovering how important they are, and how much the guys I admired and wanted to be like knew their rudiments. Kenny Clarke was probably one of the most rudimental players in jazz. And Max Roach of course, same thing. His solos were very melodic but you could still relate them to rudiments.

Click here to read 2009 DTM interview with Albert “Tootie” Heath

—Peter Blasevick

Posted in Heath, Tootie - Tagged drums, Ethan Iverson, text interviews

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

Posted in Solal Martial - Tagged piano, Ted Panken, text interviews

Bruce Lundvall: 25 Years at Blue Note

Dec31
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

From Jazziz Magazine, record company executive Bruce Lundvall reflects on a quarter-century at the helm of jazz’s most storied label, Blue Note Records. From the 2009 interview with Ted Panken:

Not every head of a large label is as hands-on as you. I could be wrong.

No, they could be wrong by not being more hands-on. They have to be. If you love the music, you are hands on. Are you going to sit and let someone else do everything? After all these years, I’ve become a fairly decent delegator. In the past, I was never that good at delegating. But I still want to keep my hand in. I don’t allow anyone to be signed whom I don’t approve of.

I feel we’re a team of people who are friends, who respect one another, are first and foremost about the music, and work together very effectively – though from time to time, we have to face issues that are not so pleasant. I’d really be embarrassed if I had to tell you that this has been a failure. It’s been successful commercially and artistically as far as I’m concerned. But it will never be as successful as what Alfred Lion created. His artists were so one-of-a-kind, such giants. We have to see how many of our artists become that 30, 40, 50 years from now.

Click here to read Bruce Lundvall: 25 Years at Blue Note

Posted in Lundvall Bruce - Tagged business, Ted Panken, text interviews

Nat Hentoff in 2009

Dec17
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

Interviews this week from the wonderful Marc Myers at his award winning JazzWax blog! Today is a two parter with a true legend in Jazz journalism, Nat Hentoff. In part one, Hentoff discusses growing up in Boston, how he landed a job at Down Beat in 1953 and what he did to get fired in 1957, while part two covers Charlie Ventura, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus and the links between jazz and justice. From the interview:

Was the competition tough among jazz writers back in the 1950s?
There weren’t that many of us at the time to have much competition. Besides, I never compete with anyone. As a reporter, I don’t believe in exclusives. If your job is to get the news out, I’m happy to help. I’ve often given leads to reporters on other newspapers. I’ve even shared things with reporters if I knew things they didn’t. I never viewed jazz writing as a competitive sport. I may not have agreed with other writers and critics, but I never saw them as rivals in the pure sense.

Click here to read Nat Hentoff in 2009

Posted in Hentoff Nat - Tagged critics, Jo Jones, journalism, Leonard Feather, Lester Young, text interviews

In Conversation with Jeff “Tain” Watts

Aug19
2012 Leave a Comment Written by 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 drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts by Ted Panken. From the interview, Watts’ comments about working with Wynton Marsalis:

“He brought in the bulk of the tunes, and the music emerged from what his original repertoire needed as well as the tunes from the lexicon. I guess the early band was supposed to try to pick up the threads and move forward from where he felt the music had stopped, with the exception of the pure avant-garde free music. Maybe at the time there was a vibe from him that people had been seriously playing music, seriously playing jazz, that Ornette’s band was there, and Trane’s band was there, and Miles’ band was there, and some other stuff was going on, but then it stopped, and then there was this evil fusion, and then there was all this free music with people that can’t really play trying to play, and that this made people not really serious.

“His initial jumping-off point was Miles’ quintet, and then he started to introduce Ornette Coleman’s music. Logical extensions of what was happening in the ’60s. Not so much Coltrane until much later. We were just checking stuff out. Wynton’s focus is very systematic, and whatever he’s checking out at a given time, that’s what’s going on. So Miles’ group in the ’60s—at that time, that’s what it is. I know he had an appreciation for John Coltrane’s music and that quartet, but because of the way his mind worked, he only had room to appreciate Miles’ group back then. I can honestly say that we were in Europe somewhere, on a bus, and we actually got into an adolescent comparison of Miles’ group in the ’60s and Coltrane’s classic quartet. I’m sure everybody has conversations that they would like to take back …

“From Wynton’s perspective, his thing was, like, ‘Work on your instrument, really try to play it on a high level,’ and a good percentage of his criteria at that time of what it takes to play an instrument felt like it was based on the European aesthetic. So when making the comparison of Miles’ band and Trane’s band, he felt like Miles’ band dealt with that European standard more. There was more harmonic sophistication. The way that Tony Williams played the drums, there’s more overtly European type of techniques being used as opposed to Elvin.”

Click here to read In Conversation with Jeff “Tain” Watts

Posted in Watts, Jeff "Tain" - Tagged drums, text interviews

In Conversation with Jack DeJohnette

Aug15
2012 Leave a Comment Written by 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.”

Click here to read In Conversation with Jack DeJohnette

Posted in DeJohnette, Jack - Tagged drums, text interviews

2009 Interview with Keith Jarrett

Aug10
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

A great, long, revealing interview with Keith Jarrett by Ethan Iverson from his great DoTheMath blog. The interview starts:

EI: Do you play the piano every day?

KJ: Now I do, yeah. There was a long time in my life (when I was ill) when I didn’t practice really at all regularly, but now, yes, I do. It really depends on what I am working towards or away from or both. Sometimes I have to slowly erase one thing and move towards another.

I was just working on Bach over the last few months, and now I have to shelve that and pretend that I know how to do a solo concert, and while I’m pretending that, that’s practicing. But! I thought I was going to shelve the Bach, but now I’m playing the Bach, and for the last twenty-five minutes I do the other thing and it works very well. Because by the time I do the finger-work that Bach requires, and the control thing, my fingers are ready to be completely out-of-control and in-control at the same time. I didn’t realize that it was helping me improvise until Gary Peacock looked at me between sets and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

Click here to read 2009 Interview with Keith Jarrett

Posted in Jarrett, Keith - Tagged Ethan Iverson, piano, text interviews

Jimmy Heath 2009

Aug02
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

In the first part of this two part interview with Marc Myers at JazzWax.com, Jimmy Heath talks about growing up in two cities, starting on the alto sax, joining Howard McGhee in 1948 and how he and his brother Percy came to the attention of Dizzy Gillespie in 1949. In Part 2, the the 82-year-old tenor saxophonist talks about Miles Davis and the niche he carved out, playing the baritone saxophone on two recordings, his admiration for trumpeter Kenny Dorham, his incarceration, and how Chet Baker wound up recording an album in 1956 that featured Jimmy’s jailhouse compositions.

From the piece:

“Jimmy’s career began in the mid-1940s, and he played with virtually every modern jazz trumpeter, including Howard McGhee, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan, Art Farmer and Freddie Hubbard. Jimmy’s career was interrupted by a four-year prison sentence for narcotics possession in the mid-1950s, a period that would have destroyed most artists. Instead, Jimmy continued to compose and play during his incarceration, and he emerged determined to succeed and flourish.”

Click here to read Jimmy Heath 2009

http://www.jazzwax.com/2009/10/interview-jimmy-heath-part-1.html

Posted in Heath, Jimmy - Tagged alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, text interviews

In Conversation with Chick Corea

May30
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Peter Blasevick

Ted Panken interviewed Chick Corea on May 26, 2009 for Jazz.com and asked about everything from life on the road to his years with Miles to Bud Powell at Birdland.

Click here to read In Conversation with Chick Corea

Posted in Corea, Chick - Tagged piano, Ted Panken, text interviews

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