JAZZ MENTORS (2005)
Randy Weston, 79, remembers his childhood in Brooklyn, going for milk and cookies at Max Roach's house or his buddy Cecil Payne's place to meet Dizzy Gillespie. In Harlem of the 1940s, Sonny Rollins who turns 75 in September played in a high school band with Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, Art Taylor, and received words of wisdom from the architects of bebop: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell. Dewey Redman, 74, recalls his high school marching band from the only black school in segregated Fort Worth that won the 1948 Texas championship, and included the future free-jazz revolutionary Ornette Coleman. Charles Lloyd, 68, speaks of his parents putting up black musicians from the big bands that passed through Memphis when no hotels would take them.
The four veterans, still on top of their game, bring stories of their beginnings and, thus, great beginnings in jazz to this year's festival (in Montreal). Their voices over the phone crackle easily between past and present, traversing the swing era to the birth of bebop to free-jazz the time-tested improvisational languages of jazz.
"My first love was Coleman Hawkins, from hearing his hit Body and Soul on the radio," says pianist Weston. "Growing up in the African-American community in Brooklyn, music and sports was our life. We knew everything who's the best saxophone player, Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young? Our parents introduced us to top-shelf music be it gospel, opera, jazz, Cuban. In our neighbourhood there was no television, no disco everything was live, and nobody locked their doors. We didn't call up to visit, we'd just knock on the door at Max's or Monk's house. Monk never gave me a piano lesson, but every day he gave me a piano lesson just being with him, going to rehearsals and concerts, spending time with him at home.
"Today there's a lot of electronics. Well, our masters were born with electricity. It was more than just notes, it was a way of life in the African-American community that produces music."
Rollins, whom many consider the greatest living improviser, remembers Fats Waller on the radio in the early 30s, being "a big force when I was three or four or five, maybe before you never know exactly when you absorb these influences as a child. He was a funny guy, a great entertainer, but also such a consummate musician." Redman recalls sitting on the lawn in Fort Worth at age six and listening to the sounds of Duke Ellington and R&B jump band great Louis Jordan from the juke joint across the street. "By the time I was 11 or 12 I listened to, for one thing, Ornette Coleman. They used to have jam sessions there.
Lloyd put his pillow over the radio at night so he wouldn't disturb the rest of the house. "Finally at midnight, I would get to hear Lady Day (Billie Holiday) she was 'my' Lady. I just knew that one day I'd get to New York to rescue her and take her away from all that pain and sorrow. But at the time, I couldn't even reach the gas pedal. When I did get there it was too late.
"And to hear her with Prez (Lester Young), words would fail to give expression to my feelings. Prez, so tender, was like gossamer wings. Then there was Bird flying through the air at the speed of light
They kept me company and gave me hope."
Back then, the now timeless modern sounds of Parker and Monk took some getting used to. Redman lived across the street from a fan who'd bought Bird's first Dial records of 1947. "When I heard them, I said, 'C'mon, man, he don't play as good as Johnny Hodges!' Gradually I began to get hip to Bird."
Weston laughs when he says, "The first time I heard Dizzy and Bird, I said, 'What kind of music is that!?' It was incredible, you know. But the beautiful part of that generation was that Charlie Parker played with Jay McShann, and Dizzy Gillespie with Cab Calloway, Monk played behind Coleman Hawkins. I realized that these so-called differences [in styles] are not really there, from Louis Armstrong all the way up until now. For me it's all equal music that describes what the scene was like.
"But first time I heard Monk, I didn't think he could play no piano! I went to hear him on 52nd Street, and I guess Monk was kinda 'relaxed' that night he didn't play many notes and I sat at the bar and said 'What's happening with this guy!' But Hawkins was my guide, you can't go wrong with him, and if Coleman Hawkins has got Monk (in his band), something's going on. I went back, and he blew my mind. I decided that's what I'd like to do on the piano get that magic and mystery that Monk was able to get. After that I hung out three years with him."
Sonny Rollins grew up worshiping Parker, who died 50 years ago last March 12 at age 35. "The older beboppers, like Bird and Max and Dizzy, they really had to come up against the resistance from the older styles of music. So I didn't really have to come up too much against it. I began playing with these other guys, so I didn't face a lot of that industry resistance, as they did."
While Bird was also the most famous heroin addict in jazz spawning a generation of junior junkies, like Rollins (who quickly cleaned up) he "was more like a father figure to me and all the young guys," says Rollins. "That's why it was so hard on him when he saw his followers beginning to use drugs and everything like he did. That's what I discerned, that it was a very difficult thing for him to see." The depressive personality portrayed by Clint Eastwood in his 1988 biopic Bird was not the one Rollins knew. "He always treated me in an avuncular manner. I think there were things he was sort of ashamed of but to us he was very normal and he tried to present that aspect of himself to his followers."
Rollins worked more often with Monk including the seminal album Brilliant Corners (1957) and while he "might've seemed a little bit odd to some people," he was "a very honest person, a very sensitive person who really helped me a lot," says Rollins.
"You must remember that Monk and these men had a lot of travails because they were marginalized by the music industry. In their music and as people, they were trying to be individuals," as opposed to being members of a big band dutifully playing charts. "There was a social context through which you have to also look at their lives, as being an oppressed group," racially and musically. "They had to live in a society in which they were demonized and everything else. At the same time they made this great music that many people were just ecstatic about. So that led to a schizophrenic life in some way."
It was a life that Redman, in Texas, wanted no part of. He observed the big band musicians passing through town "cramming into cars afterwards to get to the next town, trying to find the black hotel, if there was one. I didn't want to do that, so I went to college with the idea of teaching."
But he developed a big dark sound, and locals encouraged him to follow his high school buddy Ornette to New York, where Coleman set the jazz world aflame in 1959 with so-called free-jazz. "Even in high school Ornette was a great artist. When he blossomed and began to sound like Ornette Coleman, we didn't think it was anything unusual. That's just the way he played. We didn't know until later that nobody else played like that."
Redman figured he'd play for five years, then return and teach. But first he went to California to look for his father, whom he hadn't seen in 15 years, and wound up staying in the Bay Area for seven years (Joshua Redman, his more famous son, was born in Berkeley in 1969). He finally made it New York in 1967, where Coleman offered him a job. After seven years he joined pianist Keith Jarrett's American quartet with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian for another seven years.
And he himself has spawned another leading saxophonist, son Joshua, of whom his kidding is tinged with just a touch of acid: "He's a very good musician, a very good saxophone player, he addresses himself very well. He's rich and famous, and I'm still trying to play a couple of notes. I'm not jealous, just a little bit envious. But I'm very proud of him you know. He's come along and
he can play! He's a Harvard graduate, graduated number one in Berkeley High School. After the first semester his mother [Renιe Chedroff, she's Jewish] called me. 'Please help me, he's very upset. He made a B-plus. He didn't major in music, in social studies. The rest of his grades were A's. Sum cum laude. He lived with me in Brooklyn for a year, I took him around, we played at the Village Vanguard a couple of times."
"The first thing I reach for is the sound," he said. "The people I heard and admired growing up had a good sound, that was the clue for me. It doesn't matter how many notes you play, I can blow you away with my sound."
It was with Charles Lloyd's late 1960s quartet that Jarrett blossomed, in a group adored by the psychedelic crowd. Indeed, Lloyd is sensitive to the bad rap "West Coast jazz" has in some circles, although it spawned revolutionaries like Ornette, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy. "Yes, it is bothersome
the past few years how I have been labeled the 'hippie's musician' I don't know what that means or implies
True, I live here (in California). It is paradise, and the beauty of the nature here strongly impacts my work. But my crucial and formative years were in Memphis and Mississippi on my grandfather's farm
" He takes solace in the words of childhood friend Billy Higgins, the drummer who started out with Ornette and finished with Lloyd: "You still got mud on your shoes."
Meanwhile, Rollins became notorious for never being satisfied ("I try, that's what I do"), which led to his famous two-year sabbatical from performing in 1959, when he could be found at night practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge.
"True, I am a perfectionist, but I'm somewhat of a self-taught musician. My older brother and sister both had a formal music education. I didn't want to go that route until I began trying to play the saxophone. I wish I had their musical knowledge in my hands. So all my career I've been striving to better myself. I consider myself like a work-in-progress, I'm never really there, you know. I think that's pervaded my outlook my whole career. So when I went on the bridge, trying to brush up on some horn techniques, it was just a chance to get myself a little better prepared."
Acclaim never meant much to him, "because I'm a person who's always tried to seek my own counsel. And I kind of realized the public is fickle. I knew inside myself I needed to get some more work done on my own playing. So that's why I did what I did, and I've always tried to lead my life that way, trying to do what I think is the best thing, regardless of what people might say."
Randy Weston says his father told him early on that "I was an African born in America. He said, 'To understand me you have to learn about Africa when it was great.' So I grew up in a house with books on African civilization, African kings, the whole bit, completely contrary to what I got in the school system."
In the early 60s, he became one of the first American musicians to live in Africa, "to understand more about myself and our people. I found out by just being with the oldest people I could find, listening to their stories like I did with Monk or Eubie Blake, that these rhythms which we called different names, like jazz, blues, samba was just African music. You look at Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico and the United States, everywhere you find African people, they're simply carrying on rhythms from thousands of years ago. Based on spirituality and love, these rhythms have made people happy all over the planet in different forms."
Weston will perform a tribute to Chano Pozo the Afro-Cuban drummer who played with Dizzy's 1940s Latin-jazz orchestra and died young in a knifing with guest 80-year-old percussionist Candido, an acolyte of Pozo's who played on Charlie Parker's Afro-Cuban sides.
"There's still a lot I don't understand because these people deal with music totally with Mother Nature. It's very deep, pre-blues, timeless. Who was Monk's grandmother, Art Tatum's grandfather, where do these people come from with this beautiful music? It didn't just come out of thin air. We all come from this music and this continent, all of us have blood from there, and these rhythms, sounds and colours bring us together. Before Louis Armstrong, you know, white people and black people couldn't play together. Louis played that horn, man, and broke those barriers down, see."
1995