One of the leading innovators of the sixties is back with a new Verve contract, but the origins of his singular style remain obscure. Mark Gilbert searches for more clues.
You were born in Newark on August 25, 1933. Were your parents musical?
‘They only did things around the house that normal, other people did. I would catch my mother singing sometimes while she was doing the laundry on Saturdays. The songs she sang were not easy, and she was doing this like second nature. I didn’t know I was gonna become a musician till I was around 16 or 17, but I was hearing her sing when I was 9, 10, 11. I can remember her singing the first part of the song and then there’s no leading tone that tells you where the bridge is in some of these songs. You stop at the end of the first part of the melody, and you have to jump somewhere to go to the bridge, and there’s no help, and my mother would go to these bridges, and I remember she always went to the right place. Like Sophisticated Lady, after the A part of the melody, she’d jump right in there at the bridge. Her singing was just organic’
And your father?
‘My father liked country and western music. Also, he liked a show called Music A La Mood, which was like film music and soundtracks, like Spellbound and South Pacific. There was one song he liked, Bali Hai, and when that would come on, I knew he was going in his dreams to Tahiti. He played a lot of that stuff. He had that on Saturday and Sunday and then week nights, 7.30 at night, it was WNEW, the Make Believe Ballroom time, with Martin Block.’
Did your parents grow up in NJ, or did they come from somewhere else?
‘My father was born in Alabama, and my mother was born in Philadelphia and raised between Philadelphia, Virginia and New Jersey. When I was living in New York, a lot of cab drivers would say to me: “Are you from the Caribbean?” I watched my father, and there’s something about him that made me think that possibly his ancestors were from the Caribbean. There was something like 400,000 Carib Indians in certain islands, and some of them, during the wars, came to mainland America, so I can detect something about his physique and everything. I wish I had that physique. He was taller than me.’
So you decided that you wanted to be a musician when you were 16 or 17, but had you studied any instrument before then?
‘I got a clarinet when I was about 15½, but before that time I was majoring in art in high school, the same school that Sarah Vaughan went to. I took a minor in music in my junior year. That was 1950. I graduated in 1951, when I was 17.’
You had lessons on the clarinet?
‘I took lessons for one year, every Saturday. Just regular stuff, reading, excerpts from folk songs. But on my own I was emulating phrases that I heard on the radio, and phrases that I heard at a theatre that presented live music on stage – a stage show and a motion picture.
‘The first tune I remember writing, I didn’t write it, I played it on a tonette, and I can hear that phrase now. The first song I wrote was a song – I was 17 – about a girl I was dating who was thought of as being very difficult to date. It wasn’t blues, it wasn’t rhythm ’n’ blues, it was something … it didn’t sound like any of the standard song forms.’
That’s the case for a lot of your writing. When you went to NYU, you studied composition . . .
‘Well, it was music education, that was the whole thing, composition was up to us. They told us that they were actually there to teach us to be teachers. If we were gonna go composing, and do things on our own, we’d have to do that outside, and we’d have to stick to the lesson plan. But the teachers who knew gave us enough inspiration. One of the teachers – her husband wrote for movies in Hollywood – was Medina Scoville. She gave us an assignment sometime to compose something and we had to go and sit at the piano and play, and when I’d struggled through playing the one I wrote – it was only something like 16 measures or something – she stopped me and said “You know, you’ve gone through three different styles already”, and we were supposed to write something in one style. She said: “You know, there may be a way to mix styles and really tell a story. Someday, maybe, but try to get one at a time right now.” I didn’t have a chance to tell her, but I heard everything all together, every style together. They were like starting somewhere like romantic, going into a little bit of impressionistic and into a contemporary, modern style.
‘One of the pieces I wrote, a class assignment, became the beginning of Elegant People, the opening phrase. My piano technique wasn’t too good, and I stumbled around, but I was determined to get what I was hearing: “The fingers won’t stop me, the fingers won’t stop me.”’
Did you study harmony in a formal way, at college or elsewhere?
‘No. But we would discuss symphonies: “Did you hear when the II chord third inversion crossed over to the V chord?” We talked about all this stuff on the subway. We were talking and hearing, and somebody had a dummy keyboard for practice – you couldn’t hear anything – and she would play something and say: “How about this, can you hear this?” And my friend Larry Farrell, he had absolute pitch, and she was playing and he’d say: “I can hear it.” But he had his eyes closed. I said: “Get outta here, Larry.”’
So if you didn’t have formal harmony lessons, you got the material you wrote with by other means . . .
‘Yeah. Listening to symphonies and concertos, as time went by, I started to hear everything separately then together. I mean everything: “So that’s what Mozart, that’s what Shostakovich was doing, and Gustav Mahler – that’s what he’s doing.” And I said: “This is what people with perfect pitch hear.” But when you start to modulate, that’s when people with perfect pitch get in trouble; people with relative pitch don’t. Chick Corea has absolute pitch, I think; Joe Zawinul has absolute pitch. Nat King Cole had absolute pitch.’
So did you sit down, when you heard, say, Shostakovich, and try and transcribe what he’d written?
‘No, I didn’t do that. Sometimes I’d be lying in bed, going to sleep and have the classical station on – it had to be music with a lot of stuff going on – and I would confirm to myself what was going on, and then go to sleep. Instead of trying to transcribe what I heard, I thought “go write your own stuff”.’
Did you then go and try and write in a classical manner? Or did you try to apply what you heard from the symphonists to a jazz small group, like Art Blakey, for example?
‘No. When I wrote for Art Blakey, I wrote for what I thought that kind of combination could handle, believing that they could handle anything that a quintet was able to do in terms of what you call bebop, and whatever modern jazz meant up to that point.
‘With Miles it was more . . . Instead of writing what I thought could be handled, I wrote anything. In other words, I didn’t write with them in mind as a limiting factor, ’cause they were gonna do something more than handle it. With Blakey it was what could be handled in terms of it being a show band. The tunes had this show thing, with Blues March and so forth. So anything that approached the ethereal realm, the aesthetic realm, would not be a candidate for recording – that’s what I mean by “handle”. Art felt that he would record anything but something ethereal would probably have a waltz beat to it, and you’d still hear that shuffle accent.’
You did several albums for Blue Note in the early sixties. There, presumably, you had carte blanche to write whatever you wanted, get the players you wanted and so on.
‘Yeah, although that happened more with Miles’s band. With Blue Note, I wrote, we got the musicians together and went to record. There was no time to think about whether something could be handled or not. In the six hours we were together each person was allowed to bring with them a portion of their life and experience. But one thing we had in common was the quest for dignity in the music, for integrity, being that it’s new: “Be careful with the new stuff – don’t mess with it!”’
Can you recall how your Blue Note chord sequences were generated?
‘You know, when people used to say that I wrote a melody, and the harmony was far away from the melody, I’d sometimes discover that the melody and the chords, seemingly far away, are more organically close to the melody even if the melody is a seventh away from the chords. So that’s what I think I was always doing, hearing that oddity; I don’t have a monopoly on that.’
Having said that, before your compositions for Blue Note and Miles, there was nothing else in jazz that sounded like that.
‘I think Monk was the only other odd composer. Monk had that crucial sound in the music. Every moment was “crucial”.
‘You know, those songs came really fast. I’ll tell you the song that came the fastest was . . . the two songs that came the fastest… there were three of them: ESP, Nefertiti and Fall. Sanctuary was another one that came fairly fast, but Nefertiti: One night I’m sitting at 4 o’clock in the morning with candlelight and I just drew my hands up and it came. And Fall was like that. I just moved my hands, and there it was. I had to be careful with these pinkies. I said: “Wait a minute.” And they moved at the last minute and then resolved, and then the next one. I said: “Oh-oh, here it comes.”
‘You wait, and you imagine, and then you hear. And then something elusive comes, and you go for it. You say: “If I can make it, I don’t care how long it takes.” And then you find it, something elusive. And something that is elusive stays longer than something that gives instant gratification, that’s right in front of you and is like “blang, blang, blang”.
‘Something that’s instant, like “Da, da, da, my baby, oh” – it’s right all in front of you. But the elusive thing is fascinating. Sometimes they call that great beauty in women. A man loves a woman for many reasons, and one of them is that the elusiveness of her beauty is inseparable from her actions and her intentions and her endless substance.’
Is the new record a progression from Atlantic, Phantom Navigator and Joy Ryder, your Columbia records of the eighties?
‘Oh yeah, it’s gone on from those. It’s gone on except for one of the songs which is not finished on Phantom Navigator, called Flagships. We’ll see Flagships again as they come closer to our galaxy.
‘As far as the players on High Life are concerned, Will Calhoun came to me through my manager, Roger Kramer. Roger was managing Living Colour. With me he can do things that just didn’t fit in the format of Living Colour. David Gilmour was referred to me by William Calhoun, which tells me a lot more about William Calhoun. Rachel Z was first on the set with me, in my house, working with me for about six or seven months doing a lot of things that she doesn’t do on the concert stage. Then came Marcus Miller as producer. And then the 27 to 30 members of the LA Philharmonic and five copyists. I didn’t have to write any drum parts; I worked with the drummer in my house on drum ideas and it always came down to something unassuming, simple, pulsating and which leaves more room for whatever’s gonna happen in public.’
Ever considered writing for a traditional acoustic line-up again?
‘I think we may do something like that, but everything – every combination, every invention, synthesisers – that’s all acoustic music to me. Acoustic – it’s a sound, movement of air. I’m not about to bend the dictionary.’
Would you regard it as a regression to go back and play your early sixties compositions?
‘Not a regression, but it’s not what I consider preserving the spirit of jazz. For me, preserving the spirit of jazz means change. That’s what jazz is – breakthrough. And for all those young people who want to play like something that was played before, to preserve it, I would say maybe it’s better to preserve the process of discovery. Some might say: “Why can’t we have those days with the stagecoach?” I’m not gonna go from London to Manchester by stagecoach! Unless the name of that rocket ship was called Stagecoach!’
