Bertha - Jazz Inside Magazine

HOPEHOPE

Eric Nemeyer’s

WWW.JAZZINSIDEMAGAZINE.COMWWW.JAZZINSIDEMAGAZINE.COM October 2021October 2021

I call myself a survivorI call myself a survivor

Interviews

Barry HarrisBarry Harris

Benny MaupinBenny Maupin

Michael PedicinMichael Pedicin

Comprehensive Comprehensive

Directory Directory of NY ClubS, ConcertS of NY ClubS, ConcertS

BerthaBertha

http://www.jazzinsidemagazine.com

December 2015 � Jazz Inside Magazine � www.JazzInsideMagazine.com

1 To Advertise CALL: 215-887-8880

COVER-2-JI-15-12.pub page 1

Cyan

Magenta

Yellow

Black

Cyan

Magenta

Yellow

Black

Wednesday, December 09, 2015 15:43

http://www.jjbabbitt.com

1 To Advertise CALL: 215-887-8880 October 2021 Jazz Inside Magazine www.JazzInsideMagazine.com

ORDER THIS 200+ Page Book + CD - Only $19.95

http://www.jazzmusicdeals.com


Eric Nemeyer’s

CONTENTSCONTENTS

CLUBS, CONCERTS, EVENTSCLUBS, CONCERTS, EVENTS 3 Calendar of Events 10 Clubs & Venue Listings

12 Bertha Hope—I call myself a survivor 50 Vision Festival 2021—Photo Essay by

Ken Weiss

INTERVIEWSINTERVIEWS 28 Benny Maupin 35 Michael Pedicin 39 Barry Harris

Visit these websites: Jazz.org JJBabbitt.com MaxwellDrums.com

LIKE US www.facebook.com/

JazzInsideMedia

FOLLOW US www.twitter.com/

JazzInsideMag

WATCH US www.youtube.com/

JazzInsideMedia

Get Hundreds Of Media Placements — ONLINE — Major Network Media & Authority Sites & OFFLINE — Distribution To 1000’s of Print & Broadcast

Networks To Promote Your Music, Products & Performances In As Little As 24 Hours To Generate Traffic, Sales & Expanded Media Coverage!

PAY ONLY FOR RESULTS

PUBLICITY!

www.PressToRelease.com | MusicPressReleaseDistribution.com | 215-887-8880

Jazz Inside Magazine

ISSN: 2150-3419 (print) • ISSN 2150-3427 (online)

October 2021 – Volume 11, Number 1

Cover Photo and photo at right of Bertha Hope by Ken Weiss

Publisher: Eric Nemeyer Editor: Wendi Li Marketing Director: Cheryl Powers Advertising Sales & Marketing: Eric Nemeyer Circulation: Susan Brodsky Photo Editor: Joe Patitucci Layout and Design: Gail Gentry Contributors: Eric Nemeyer, Ken Weiss, Joe Patitucci.

ADVERTISING SALES 215-887-8880

Eric Nemeyer – [email protected]

ADVERTISING in Jazz Inside™ Magazine (print and online) Jazz Inside™ Magazine provides its advertisers with a unique opportunity to reach a highly specialized and committed jazz readership. Call our Advertising Sales Depart-ment at 215-887-8880 for media kit, rates and information.

Jazz Inside™ Magazine | Enthusiasm Corporation P.O. Box 8811, Elkins Park, PA 19027

Telephone: 215-887-8880 Email: [email protected]

Website: www.jazzinsidemagazine.com

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION Jazz Inside™ (published monthly). To order a subscription, call 215-887-8880 or visit Jazz Inside on the Internet at www.jazzinsidemagazine.com. Subscription rate is $49.95 per year, USA. Please allow up to 8 weeks for processing subscriptions & changes of address.

EDITORIAL POLICIES

Jazz Inside does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Persons wishing to submit a manuscript or transcription are asked to request specific permission from Jazz Inside prior to submission. All materials sent become the property of Jazz Inside unless otherwise agreed to in writing. Opinions expressed in Jazz Inside by contrib-uting writers are their own and do not necessarily express the opinions of Jazz Inside, Eric Nemeyer Corporation or its affiliates.

SUBMITTING PRODUCTS FOR REVIEW Companies or individuals seeking reviews of their recordings, books, videos, software and other products: Send TWO COPIES of each CD or product to the attention of the Editorial Dept. All materials sent become the property of Jazz Inside, and may or may not be reviewed, at any time.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright © 2009-2021 by Enthusiasm Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied or duplicated in any form, by any means without prior written consent. Copying of this publication is in violation of the United States Federal Copyright Law (17 USC 101 et seq.). Violators may be subject to criminal penalties and liability for substantial monetary damages, including statutory damages up to $50,000 per infringement, costs and attorneys fees.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/JazzInside

http://jazzinsidemagazine.com


BIRDLAND JAZZ CLUB 315 West 44th St, New York, NY 10036

212-581-3080

Friday Oct 1: Birdland Big Band; Stacey

Kent and Art Hirahara “Songs from Other

Places” Album Release; Natalie Douglas

Saturday Oct 2: Eric Comstock with Sean

Smith (Bass) & special guest Barbara Fasa-

no (Voice); Stacey Kent and Art Hirahara

“Songs from Other Places” Album Release;

Natalie Douglas

Sunday Oct 3: Scott Reeves Jazz Orches-

tra: Featuring Vocalist Carolyn Leonhart;

Arturo O’Farrill and Afro Latin Jazz En-

semble; Marissa Mulder: Souvenirs, A Trib-

ute to the Songs of John Prine

Monday Oct 4: Amanda Green & Friends

Vaxxed AF!; Susan Mack “Music In The

Air”; Jim Caruso’s Cast Party

Tuesday Oct 5: Ron Carter’s Golden Strik-

er Trio with Russell Malone and Donald

Vega; The Lineup with Susie Mosher; Ron

Carter’s Golden Striker Trio with Russell

Malone and Donald Vega

Wednesday Oct 6: David Ostwald’s Louis

Armstrong Eternity Band; Ron Carter’s

Golden Striker Trio with Russell Malone

and Donald Vega; Dan Block Quartet

Thursday Oct 7: Ron Carter’s Golden

Striker Trio with Russell Malone and Don-

ald Vega

Friday Oct 8: Birdland Big Band; Ron

Carter’s Golden Striker Trio with Russell

Malone and Donald Vega; Don Braden

Quartet



no (Voice); Ron Carter’s Golden Striker

Trio with Russell Malone and Donald Vega;

Don Braden Quartet

Sunday Oct 10: Marcello Pellitteri; Arturo

O’Farrill and Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble;

Ann Kittredge: Movie Night with Alex

Rybeck and Sean Harkness

Monday Oct 11: Chad LB Quartet; Jim

Caruso’s Cast Party

Tuesday Oct 12: John Pizzarelli Trio; Tuck

& Patti Birdland Debut; Lineup with Susie

Mosher


Armstrong Eternity Band; Tuck & Patti

Birdland Debut; John Pizzarelli Trio

Thursday Oct 14: Tuck & Patti; John Piz-

zarelli Trio;

Friday Oct 15: Birdland Big Band; John

(Continued on page 4)

CALENDAR OF EVENTSCALENDAR OF EVENTS

How to Get Your Gigs and Events Listed in Jazz Inside Magazine Submit your listings via e-mail to [email protected]. Include date, times, location, phone,

tickets/reservations. Deadline: 15th of the month preceding publication (October 15 for November) (We cannot guarantee the publication of all calendar submissions.)

ADVERTISING: Reserve your ads to promote your events and get the marketing advantage of con-trolling your own message — size, content, image, identity, photos and more. Contact the advertising department:

215-887-8880 | [email protected]

http://jazz.org


Pizzarelli Trio; Tuck & Patti Friday



no (Voice); John Pizzarelli Trio; Tuck &

Patti

Saturday Oct 16:

Sunday Oct 17: Jared Schonig Big Band

Album Release; Arturo O’Farrill and Afro

Latin Jazz Ensemble

Monday Oct 18: Dominick Farinacci Quar-

tet; Jim Caruso’s Cast Party

Tuesday Oct 19: Issac Delgado y La Nove-

na


Armstrong Eternity Band; Issac Delgado y

La Novena

Thursday Oct 21: Issac Delgado y La No-

vena

Friday Oct 22: Birdland Big Band; Issac

Delgado y La Novena;



no (Voice); Issac Delgado y La Novena;

Steve Ross

Sunday Oct 24: Jennifer Wharton’s

Bonegasm; Arturo O’Farrill and Afro Latin

Jazz Ensemble; Benny Benack III Quartet

Monday Oct 25: Karen Oberlin Bewitched:

The Life and Lyrics of Lorenz Hart; Sasha

Dobson

Tuesday Oct 26: Django Reinhardt Festival


Armstrong Eternity Band; Django Reinhardt

Festival; Larry Fuller Trio

Thursday Oct 28: Django Reinhardt Festi-

val; Anaïs Reno CD Release with Emmet

Cohen Trio; Django Reinhardt Festival

Friday Oct 29: Birdland Big Band; Django

Reinhardt Festival

Saturday Oct 30: Eric Comstock, Sean

Smith (Bass), Barbara Fasano (Voice);

Django Reinhardt Festival; Janis Siegel &

John DiMartino

Sunday Oct 31: Migiwa Miyajima and the

Miggy Augmented Orchestra; Arturo O’Far-

rill and Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble; Moipei

Triplets Embrace New York

BLUE NOTE 131 W. 3rd St, New York, NY

BlueNote.net

Friday Oct 1: Robert Glasper Original

Acoustic Trio

Saturday Oct 2: Robert Glasper Original

Acoustic Trio

Sunday Oct 3: Robert Glasper Original

Acoustic Trio

Monday Oct 4:

Tuesday Oct 5: Robert Glasper X Ledisi

Wednesday Oct 6: Robert Glasper X Ledisi

Thursday Oct 7: To Be Announced

Friday Oct 8: To Be Announced

Saturday Oct 9: To Be Announced

Sunday Oct 10: To Be Announced

Monday Oct 11:

Tuesday Oct 12: Tribute To Wayne Shorter

(Featuring Marcus Strickland, Kendrick

Scott, Keyon Harrold, Vicente Archer)

Wednesday Oct 13: Tribute To Wayne

Shorter (Featuring Marcus Strickland,

Kendrick Scott, Keyon Harrold, Vicente

Archer)

Thursday Oct 14: Robert Glasper X Me-

shell Ndegeocello

Friday Oct 15: Robert Glasper X Meshell

Ndegeocello

Saturday Oct 16: Robert Glasper X Me-

shell Ndegeocello

Sunday Oct 17: Robert Glasper X Meshell

Ndegeocello

Monday Oct 18:

Tuesday Oct 19: Robert Glasper & Terrace

Martin Presents Dinner Party

Wednesday Oct 20: Robert Glasper & Ter-

race Martin Presents Dinner Party

Thursday Oct 21: Robert Glasper & Ter-


Friday Oct 22: Robert Glasper & Terrace


Saturday Oct 23: Robert Glasper & Ter-


Sunday Oct 24: Robert Glasper & Terrace


Monday Oct 25:

Tuesday Oct 26: Robert Glasper - Black

Radio With Special Guests PJ Morton &

Bilal

Wednesday Oct 27: Robert Glasper - Black


Bilal

Thursday Oct 28: Robert Glasper - Black


Bilal

Friday Oct 29: Robert Glasper - Black Ra-

dio With Special Guests PJ Morton & Bilal

Saturday Oct 30: Robert Glasper - Black


Bilal

Sunday Oct 31: Robert Glasper - Black


Bilal


Jazz

Mu

sic

De

als

.co

m

Jazz

Lo

vers

’ Li

feti

me

Co

lle

cti

on

Jazz

Mu

sic

De

als

.co

m



DIZZY'S CLUB Broadway at 60th Street, 5th floor, Time

Warner Center, New York City, NY 10019 212-258-9595

Friday Oct 1: Joey Alexander Trio

Saturday Oct 2: Joey Alexander Trio

Sunday Oct 3: Joey Alexander Trio

Monday Oct 4:

Tuesday Oct 5:

Wednesday Oct 6:

Thursday Oct 7: Joey Defrancesco Album

Release Celebration

Friday Oct 8: Joey Defrancesco Album

Release Celebration

Saturday Oct 9: Joey Defrancesco Album

Release Celebration

Sunday Oct 10: Joey Defrancesco Album

Release Celebration

Monday Oct 11:

Tuesday Oct 12:

Wednesday Oct 13:

Thursday Oct 14: Edmar Castaneda Album

Release Concert: Family

Friday Oct 15: Mike Ledonne Trio With

Ron Carter And Joe Farnsworth

Saturday Oct 16: Mike Ledonne Trio With

Ron Carter And Joe Farnsworth

Sunday Oct 17: Samara Joy Ft. Pasquale

Grasso Trio

Monday Oct 18:

Tuesday Oct 19:

Wednesday Oct 20:

Thursday Oct 21: Christian Sands

Friday Oct 22: Christian Sands

Saturday Oct 23: Christian Sands

Sunday Oct 24: Ashley Pezzotti And Her

Trio

Monday Oct 25:

Tuesday Oct 26:

Wednesday Oct 27:

Thursday Oct 28: Jeremy Pelt Quintet

Friday Oct 29: Jeremy Pelt Quintet

Saturday Sunday Oct 30: Jeremy Pelt Quin-

tet

Sunday Oct 31:

Monday Nov 1: The Trio Featuring Ted

Nash, Steve Cardenas, Ben Allison

Tuesday Nov 2: The Trio Featuring Ted


Wednesday Nov 3: The Trio Featuring Ted


Thursday Nov 4: Stéphane Wrembel’s

“Django New Orleans” w/ Guests Bria

Skonberg, Daisy Castro

Friday Nov 5: Stéphane Wrembel’s

“Django New Orleans” w/ Guests Bria

Skonberg, Daisy Castro

Nov 6: Stéphane Wrembel’s “Django New

Orleans” w/ Guests Bria Skonberg, Daisy

Castro

Nov 7: Stéphane Wrembel’s “Django New

Orleans” w/ Guests Bria Skonberg, Daisy

Castro

SMALLSLIVE JAZZ CLUB 183 West 10th Street-basement; NYC

Friday Oct 1: Doug Wamble Quartet; Phil-

ip Harper Quintet; Adam Birnbaum Quartet

Saturday Oct 2:

Sunday Oct 03: Alex Norris Quintet

Monday Oct 04: Ari Hoenig Quartet; Miki

Yamanaka Quartet & Jam Session

Tuesday Oct 05: Jason Brown Quartet;

David Gibson Quartet & Jam Session

Wednesday Oct 06: Troy Roberts Quartet;

Benny Benack Quintet & Jam Session

Thursday Oct 07: Sarah Hanahan Quartet;

Greg Glassman Quartet & Jam Session

(Continued on Page 8)


http://jazz.org/dizzys


Brian Lynch Smalls Live Jazz Club, October 23, 2021 Photo © Eric Nemeyer


Dizzy’s Club, Jazz At Lincoln CenterDizzy’s Club, Jazz At Lincoln Center

November 1November 1--3, 20213, 2021


(Continued from Page 5)

Friday Oct 08: Mark Sherman Quartet;

Corey Wallace Dubtet & Jam Session

Saturday Oct 09: Wayne Escoffery Quar-

tet; Eric Wyatt Quartet & Jam Session

Sunday Oct 10: Mike Troy Quartet; Stefa-

no Doglioni Quintet & Jam Session

Monday Oct 11: Joe Farnsworth Quartet;

Jonathan Michel Quintet & Jam Session

Tuesday Oct 12: Mark Whitfield Trio;

Evan Sherman Quartet & Jam Session

Wednesday Oct 13: Pratt-Eckroth Band;


Thursday Oct 14: Mike Clark / Michael

Zilber Quartet; Carlos Abadie Quintet &

Jam Session

Friday Oct 15: Dave Stryker Trio; Jon

Beshay Quartet & Jam Session

Saturday Oct 16: Palladium Plays The Mu-

sic Of Wayne Shorter; Stacy Dillard Quartet

& Jam Session

Sunday Oct 17: Joris Teepe Trio; Aaron

Johnson Quintet & Jam Session

Monday Oct 18: Eric Alexander Quartet;

Miki Yamanaka Trio & Jam Session

Tuesday Oct 19: Steve Nelson Quartet;

David Gibson Quartet & Jam Session

Wednesday Oct 20: Will Bernard Trio;


Thursday Oct 21: David Gilmore Quintet;

Carlos Abadie Quintet & Jam Session

Saturday Oct 22: Brandon Lee Quintet;

Philip Harper Quintet & Jam Session

Saturday Oct 23: Brian Lynch Quintet;

Eric Wyatt Quartet & Jam Session

Sunday Oct 24: Richie Vitale Quartet Feat.

Frank Basile; Stefano Doglioni Quintet &

Jam

VILLAGE VANGUARD 178 7th Avenue South, New York, NY

212-255-4037

Friday Oct 1: Bill Charlap, piano; Peter

Washington, bass; Kenny Washington

Saturday Oct 2: Bill Charlap, piano; Peter


Sunday Oct 3: Bill Charlap, piano; Peter


Monday Oct 4: Vanguard Jazz Orchestra -

Saxophones Dick Oatts (lead alto) Billy

Drewes (alto) Rich Perry (tenor) Ralph

Lalama (tenor) Gary Smulyan (bari); Trum-

pets Nick Marchione (lead trumpet) John

Chudoba, Terell Stafford, Scott Wendholt;

Trombones Marshall Gilkes (lead trombone)

Jason Jackson, Dion Tucker, Douglas Purvi-

ance (bass trombone); Rhythm Section: Ad-

am Birnbaum (piano) David Wong (bass)

John Riley (drums)

Tuesday Oct 5: Eric Harland Voyager -

Eric Harland, drums; Harish Raghavan,

bass; Taylor Eigsti, piano; Walter Smith lll,

sax; Gilad Hekselman, guitar

Wednesday Oct 6: Eric Harland Voyager

Thursday Oct 7: Eric Harland Voyager

Friday Oct 8: Eric Harland Voyager

Saturday Oct 9: Eric Harland Voyager

Sunday Oct 10: Eric Harland Voyager

Monday Oct 11: Vanguard Jazz Orchestra

Tuesday Oct 12: Ambrose Akinmusire

Quintet - Ambrose Akinmusire, trumpet;

Walter Smith III, tenor sax; Micah Thomas,

piano; Matt Brewer, bass; Marcus Gilmore,

drums

Wednesday Oct 13: Ambrose Akinmusire

Thursday Oct 14: Ambrose Akinmusire

Friday Oct 15: Ambrose Akinmusire

Saturday Oct 16: Ambrose Akinmusire

Quintet

Sunday Oct 17: Ambrose Akinmusire

Quintet; MATINEE: John Zorn's New Ma-

sada Quartet


Tuesday Oct 19: Fred Hersch Duo With

Julian Lage

Wednesday Oct 20: Fred Hersch Duo With

Julian Lage

Thursday Oct 21: Fred Hersch Duo With

Julian Lage

Friday Oct 22: Fred Hersch Duo With Jul-

ian Lage

Saturday Oct 23: Fred Hersch Duo With

Julian Lage

Sunday Oct 24: Fred Hersch, Julian Lage;

MATINEE: John Zorn's New Masada Qt


Tuesday Oct 26: Ravi Coltrane Quartet

Wednesday Oct 27: Ravi Coltrane Quartet

Thursday Oct 28: Ravi Coltrane Quartet

Friday Oct 29: Ravi Coltrane Quartet

Saturday Oct 30: Ravi Coltrane Quartet

Sunday Oct 31: Ravi Coltrane Quartet

“...among human beings jealousy ranks distinctly as a

weakness; a trademark of small minds; a property of all small minds, yet a property

which even the smallest is ashamed of; and when accused of its possession will

lyingly deny it and resent the accusation as an insult.”

-Mark Twain

“Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free

to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back that

is an outrage.”

- Winston Churchill

Jazz

Mu

sic

De

als

.co

m

Jazz

Lo

vers

’ Li

feti

me

Co

lle

cti

on

Jazz

Mu

sic

De

als

.co

m

“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.”

- Robert Anton Wilson



Dizzy’s Club, Jazz At Lincoln CenterDizzy’s Club, Jazz At Lincoln Center

October 7October 7--10, 202110, 2021


5 C Cultural Center, 68 Avenue C. 212-477-5993.

www.5ccc.com

55 Bar, 55 Christopher St. 212-929-9883, 55bar.com

92nd St Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10128,

212.415.5500, 92ndsty.org

Aaron Davis Hall, City College of NY, Convent Ave., 212-650-

6900, aarondavishall.org

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, Broadway & 65th St., 212-875

-5050, lincolncenter.org/default.asp

Allen Room, Lincoln Center, Time Warner Center, Broadway

and 60th, 5th floor, 212-258-9800, lincolncenter.org

American Museum of Natural History, 81st St. & Central Park

W., 212-769-5100, amnh.org

Antibes Bistro, 112 Suffolk Street. 212-533-6088. www.antibesbistro.com Arthur’s Tavern, 57 Grove St., 212-675-6879 or 917-301-8759,

arthurstavernnyc.com

Arts Maplewood, P.O. Box 383, Maplewood, NJ 07040; 973-

378-2133, artsmaplewood.org

Avery Fischer Hall, Lincoln Center, Columbus Ave. & 65th St.,

212-875-5030, lincolncenter.org

BAM Café, 30 Lafayette Av, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100, bam.org

Bar Chord, 1008 Cortelyou Rd., Brooklyn, barchordnyc.com

Bar Lunatico, 486 Halsey St., Brooklyn. 718-513-0339.

222.barlunatico.com

Barbes, 376 9th St. (corner of 6th Ave.), Park Slope, Brooklyn,

718-965-9177, barbesbrooklyn.com

Barge Music, Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn, 718-624-2083,

bargemusic.org

B.B. King’s Blues Bar, 237 W. 42nd St., 212-997-4144,

bbkingblues.com

Beacon Theatre, 74th St. & Broadway, 212-496-7070

Beco Bar, 45 Richardson, Brooklyn. 718-599-1645.

www.becobar.com

Bickford Theatre, on Columbia Turnpike @ Normandy Heights

Road, east of downtown Morristown. 973-744-2600

Birdland, 315 W. 44th, 212-581-3080

Blue Note, 131 W. 3rd, 212-475-8592, bluenotejazz.com

Bourbon St Bar and Grille, 346 W. 46th St, NY, 10036,

212-245-2030, [email protected]

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery (at Bleecker), 212-614-0505,

bowerypoetry.com

BRIC House, 647 Fulton St. Brooklyn, NY 11217, 718-683-

5600, http://bricartsmedia.org

Brooklyn Public Library, Grand Army Plaza, 2nd Fl, Brooklyn,

NY, 718-230-2100, brooklynpubliclibrary.org

Café Carlyle, 35 E. 76th St., 212-570-7189, thecarlyle.com

Café Loup, 105 W. 13th St. (West Village) , between Sixth and

Seventh Aves., 212-255-4746

Café St. Bart’s, 109 E. 50th St, 212-888-2664, cafestbarts.com

Cafe Noctambulo, 178 2nd Ave. 212-995-0900. cafenoctam-

bulo.com

Caffe Vivaldi, 32 Jones St, NYC; caffevivaldi.com

Candlelight Lounge, 24 Passaic St, Trenton. 609-695-9612.

Carnegie Hall, 7th Av & 57th, 212-247-7800, carnegiehall.org

Cassandra’s Jazz, 2256 7th Avenue. 917-435-2250. cassan-

drasjazz.com

Chico’s House Of Jazz, In Shoppes at the Arcade, 631 Lake

Ave., Asbury Park, 732-774-5299

City Winery, 155 Varick St. Bet. Vandam & Spring St., 212-608

-0555. citywinery.com

Cleopatra’s Needle, 2485 Broadway (betw 92nd & 93rd), 212-

769-6969, cleopatrasneedleny.com

Club Bonafide, 212 W. 52nd, 646-918-6189. clubbonafide.com

C’mon Everybody, 325 Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn.

www.cmoneverybody.com

Copeland’s, 547 W. 145th St. (at Bdwy), 212-234-2356

Cornelia St Café, 29 Cornelia, 212-989-9319

Count Basie Theatre, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank, New Jersey

07701, 732-842-9000, countbasietheatre.org

Crossroads at Garwood, 78 North Ave., Garwood, NJ 07027,

908-232-5666

Cutting Room, 19 W. 24th St, 212-691-1900

Dizzy’s Club, Broadway at 60th St., 5th Floor, 212-258-9595,

jalc.com

DROM, 85 Avenue A, New York, 212-777-1157, dromnyc.com

The Ear Inn, 326 Spring St., NY, 212-226-9060, earinn.com

East Village Social, 126 St. Marks Place. 646-755-8662.

www.evsnyc.com

Edward Hopper House, 82 N. Broadway, Nyack NY. 854-358-

0774.

El Museo Del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Ave (at 104th St.), Tel: 212-

831-7272, Fax: 212-831-7927, elmuseo.org

Esperanto, 145 Avenue C. 212-505-6559.

www.esperantony.com

The Falcon, 1348 Rt. 9W, Marlboro, NY., 845) 236-7970,

Fat Cat, 75 Christopher St., 212-675-7369, fatcatjazz.com

Fine and Rare, 9 East 37th Street. www.fineandrare.nyc

Five Spot, 459 Myrtle Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 718-852-0202,

fivespotsoulfood.com

Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Blvd., Flushing, NY, 718

-463-7700 x222, flushingtownhall.org

For My Sweet, 1103 Fulton St., Brooklyn, NY 718-857-1427

Galapagos, 70 N. 6th St., Brooklyn, NY, 718-782-5188, galapa-

gosartspace.com

Garage Restaurant and Café, 99 Seventh Ave. (betw 4th and

Bleecker), 212-645-0600, garagerest.com

Garden Café, 4961 Broadway, by 207th St., New York, 10034,

212-544-9480

Gin Fizz, 308 Lenox Ave, 2nd floor. (212) 289-2220.

www.ginfizzharlem.com

Ginny’s Supper Club, 310 Malcolm X Boulevard Manhattan,

NY 10027, 212-792-9001, http://redroosterharlem.com/ginnys/

Glen Rock Inn, 222 Rock Road, Glen Rock, NJ, (201) 445-

2362, glenrockinn.com

GoodRoom, 98 Meserole, Bklyn, 718-349-2373, good-roombk.com. Green Growler, 368 S, Riverside Ave., Croton-on-Hudson NY.

914-862-0961. www.thegreengrowler.com

Greenwich Village Bistro, 13 Carmine St., 212-206-9777,

greenwichvillagebistro.com

Harlem on 5th, 2150 5th Avenue. 212-234-5600.

www.harlemonfifth.com

Harlem Tea Room, 1793A Madison Ave., 212-348-3471,

harlemtearoom.com

Hat City Kitchen, 459 Valley St, Orange. 862-252-9147.

hatcitykitchen.com

Havana Central West End, 2911 Broadway/114th St), NYC,

212-662-8830, havanacentral.com

Highline Ballroom, 431 West 16th St (between 9th & 10th Ave.

highlineballroom.com, 212-414-4314.

Hopewell Valley Bistro, 15 East Broad St, Hopewell, NJ 08525,

609-466-9889, hopewellvalleybistro.com

Hudson Room, 27 S. Division St., Peekskill NY. 914-788-FOOD. hudsonroom.com Hyatt New Brunswick, 2 Albany St., New Brunswick, NJ

IBeam Music Studio, 168 7th St., Brooklyn, ibeambrook-

lyn.com

INC American Bar & Kitchen, 302 George St., New Bruns-

wick NJ. (732) 640-0553. www.increstaurant.com

Iridium, 1650 Broadway, 212-582-2121, iridiumjazzclub.com

Jazz 966, 966 Fulton St., Brooklyn, NY, 718-638-6910

Jazz at Lincoln Center, 33 W. 60th St., 212-258-9800, jalc.org

Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th St., 5th Floor

Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Reservations: 212-258-9595

Rose Theater, Tickets: 212-721-6500, The Allen Room,

Tickets: 212-721-6500

Jazz Gallery, 1160 Bdwy, (212) 242-1063, jazzgallery.org

The Jazz Spot, 375 Kosciuszko St. (enter at 179 Marcus Garvey

Blvd.), Brooklyn, NY, 718-453-7825, thejazz.8m.com

Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St., 212-576-2232, jazzstandard.net

Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St & Astor Pl.,

212-539-8778, joespub.com

John Birks Gillespie Auditorium (see Baha’i Center)

Jules Bistro, 65 St. Marks Pl, 212-477-5560, julesbistro.com

Kasser Theater, 1 Normal Av, Montclair State College,

Montclair, 973-655-4000, montclair.edu

Key Club, 58 Park Pl, Newark, NJ, 973-799-0306,

keyclubnj.com

Kitano Hotel, 66 Park Ave., 212-885-7119. kitano.com

Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, 33 University Pl., 212-228-8490,

knickerbockerbarandgrill.com

Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard St, 212-219-3132, knittingfacto-

ry.com

Langham Place — Measure, Fifth Avenue, 400 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10018, 212-613-8738, langhamplacehotels.com

La Lanterna (Bar Next Door at La Lanterna), 129 MacDougal

St, New York, 212-529-5945, lalanternarcaffe.com

Le Cirque Cafe, 151 E. 58th St., lecirque.com

Le Fanfare, 1103 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn. 347-987-4244.

www.lefanfare.com

Le Madeleine, 403 W. 43rd St. (betw 9th & 10th Ave.), New

York, New York, 212-246-2993, lemadeleine.com

Les Gallery Clemente Soto Velez, 107 Suffolk St, 212-260-

4080

Lexington Hotel, 511 Lexington Ave. (212) 755-4400.

www.lexinghotelnyc.com

Live @ The Falcon, 1348 Route 9W, Marlboro, NY 12542,

Living Room, 154 Ludlow St. 212-533-7235, livingroomny.com

The Local 269, 269 E. Houston St. (corner of Suffolk St.), NYC

Makor, 35 W. 67th St., 212-601-1000, makor.org

Lounge Zen, 254 DeGraw Ave, Teaneck, NJ, (201) 692-8585,

lounge-zen.com

Maureen’s Jazz Cellar, 2 N. Broadway, Nyack NY. 845-535-

3143. maureensjazzcellar.com

Maxwell’s, 1039 Washington St, Hoboken, NJ, 201-653-1703

McCarter Theater, 91 University Pl., Princeton, 609-258-2787,

mccarter.org

Merkin Concert Hall, Kaufman Center, 129 W. 67th St., 212-

501-3330, ekcc.org/merkin.htm

Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd St NY, NY 10012, 212-206-

0440

Mezzrow, 163 West 10th Street, Basement, New York, NY

10014. 646-476-4346. www.mezzrow.com

Minton’s, 206 W 118th St., 212-243-2222, mintonsharlem.com

Mirelle’s, 170 Post Ave., Westbury, NY, 516-338-4933

MIST Harlem, 46 W. 116th St., myimagestudios.com

Mixed Notes Café, 333 Elmont Rd., Elmont, NY (Queens area),

516-328-2233, mixednotescafe.com

Montauk Club, 25 8th Ave., Brooklyn, 718-638-0800,

montaukclub.com

Moscow 57, 168½ Delancey. 212-260-5775. moscow57.com

Muchmore’s, 2 Havemeyer St., Brooklyn. 718-576-3222.

www.muchmoresnyc.com

Mundo, 37-06 36th St., Queens. mundony.com

Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Ave. (between

103rd & 104th St.), 212-534-1672, mcny.org

Musicians’ Local 802, 332 W. 48th, 718-468-7376

National Sawdust, 80 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 646-779-8455.

www.nationalsawdust.org

Newark Museum, 49 Washington St, Newark, New Jersey

07102-3176, 973-596-6550, newarkmuseum.org

New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center St., Newark, NJ,

07102, 973-642-8989, njpac.org

New Leaf Restaurant, 1 Margaret Corbin Dr., Ft. Tryon Park.

212-568-5323. newleafrestaurant.com

New School Performance Space, 55 W. 13th St., 5th Floor

(betw 5th & 6th Ave.), 212-229-5896, newschool.edu.

New School University-Tishman Auditorium, 66 W. 12th St.,

1st Floor, Room 106, 212-229-5488, newschool.edu

New York City Baha’i Center, 53 E. 11th St. (betw Broadway

& University), 212-222-5159, bahainyc.org

North Square Lounge, 103 Waverly Pl. (at MacDougal St.),

212-254-1200, northsquarejazz.com

Oak Room at The Algonquin Hotel, 59 W. 44th St. (betw 5th

and 6th Ave.), 212-840-6800, thealgonquin.net

Oceana Restaurant, 120 West 49th St, New York, NY 10020

212-759-5941, oceanarestaurant.com

Orchid, 765 Sixth Ave. (betw 25th & 26th St.), 212-206-9928

The Owl, 497 Rogers Ave, Bklyn. 718-774-0042. www.theowl.nyc Palazzo Restaurant, 11 South Fullerton Avenue, Montclair. 973

-746-6778. palazzonj.com

Priory Jazz Club: 223 W Market, Newark, 07103, 973-639-

7885

Proper Café, 217-01 Linden Blvd., Queens, 718-341-2233

Prospect Park Bandshell, 9th St. & Prospect Park W., Brook-

lyn, NY, 718-768-0855

Prospect Wine Bar & Bistro, 16 Prospect St. Westfield, NJ,

Clubs, Venues & Jazz ResourcesClubs, Venues & Jazz Resources

— Anton Chekhov

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere

illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.”

— Socrates


908-232-7320, 16prospect.com, cjayrecords.com

Red Eye Grill, 890 7th Av (56th), 212-541-9000, redeye-

grill.com

Ridgefield Playhouse, 80 East Ridge, parallel to Main St.,

Ridgefield, CT; ridgefieldplayhouse.org, 203-438-5795

Rockwood Music Hall, 196 Allen St, 212-477-4155

Rose Center (American Museum of Natural History), 81st St.

(Central Park W. & Columbus), 212-769-5100, amnh.org/rose

Rose Hall, 33 W. 60th St., 212-258-9800, jalc.org

Rosendale Café, 434 Main St., PO Box 436, Rosendale, NY

12472, 845-658-9048, rosendalecafe.com

Rubin Museum of Art - “Harlem in the Himalayas”, 150 W.

17th St. 212-620-5000. rmanyc.org

Rustik, 471 DeKalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 347-406-9700,

rustikrestaurant.com

St. Mark’s Church, 131 10th St. (at 2nd Ave.), 212-674-6377

St. Nick’s Pub, 773 St. Nicholas Av (at 149th), 212-283-9728

St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington (at 54th), 212-935-2200,

saintpeters.org

Sasa’s Lounge, 924 Columbus Ave, Between 105th & 106th St.

NY, NY 10025, 212-865-5159, sasasloungenyc.yolasite.com

Savoy Grill, 60 Park Place, Newark, NJ 07102, 973-286-1700

Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Blvd., 212-491-2200,

nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html

Shanghai Jazz, 24 Main St., Madison, NJ, 973-822-2899,

shanghaijazz.com

ShapeShifter Lab, 18 Whitwell Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11215

shapeshifterlab.com

Showman’s, 375 W. 125th St., 212-864-8941

Sidewalk Café, 94 Ave. A, 212-473-7373

Sista’s Place, 456 Nostrand, Bklyn, 718-398-1766, sistas-

place.org

Skippers Plane St Pub, 304 University Ave. Newark NJ, 973-

733-9300, skippersplaneStpub.com

Smalls Jazz Club, 183 W. 10th St. (at 7th Ave.), 212-929-7565,

SmallsJazzClub.com

Smith’s Bar, 701 8th Ave, New York, 212-246-3268

Sofia’s Restaurant - Club Cache’ [downstairs], Edison Hotel,

221 W. 46th St. (between Broadway & 8th Ave), 212-719-5799

South Gate Restaurant & Bar, 154 Central Park South, 212-

484-5120, 154southgate.com

South Orange Performing Arts Center, One SOPAC

Way, South Orange, NJ 07079, sopacnow.org, 973-313-2787

Spectrum, 2nd floor, 121 Ludlow St.

Spoken Words Café, 266 4th Av, Brooklyn, 718-596-3923

Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, 165 W. 65th St., 10th Floor,

212-721-6500, lincolncenter.org

The Stone, Ave. C & 2nd St., thestonenyc.com

Strand Bistro, 33 W. 37th St. 212-584-4000

SubCulture, 45 Bleecker St., subculturenewyork.com

Sugar Bar, 254 W. 72nd St, 212-579-0222, sugarbarnyc.com

Swing 46, 349 W. 46th St.(betw 8th & 9th Ave.),

212-262-9554, swing46.com

Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, Tel: 212-864-1414, Fax: 212

- 932-3228, symphonyspace.org

Tea Lounge, 837 Union St. (betw 6th & 7th Ave), Park Slope,

Broooklyn, 718-789-2762, tealoungeNY.com

Terra Blues, 149 Bleecker St. (betw Thompson & LaGuardia),

212-777-7776, terrablues.com

Threes Brewing, 333 Douglass St., Brooklyn. 718-522-2110.

www.threesbrewing.com

Tito Puente’s Restaurant and Cabaret, 64 City Island Avenue,

City Island, Bronx, 718-885-3200, titopuentesrestaurant.com

Tomi Jazz, 239 E. 53rd St., 646-497-1254, tomijazz.com

Tonic, 107 Norfolk St. (betw Delancey & Rivington), Tel: 212-

358-7501, Fax: 212-358-1237, tonicnyc.com

Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd St., 212-997-1003

Triad Theater, 158 W. 72nd St. (betw Broadway & Columbus

Ave.), 212-362-2590, triadnyc.com

Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers St, 10007,

[email protected], tribecapac.org

Trumpets, 6 Depot Square, Montclair, NJ, 973-744-2600,

trumpetsjazz.com

Turning Point Cafe, 468 Piermont Ave. Piermont, N.Y. 10968

(845) 359-1089, http://turningpointcafe.com

Urbo, 11 Times Square. 212-542-8950. urbonyc.com

Village Vanguard, 178 7th Ave S., 212-255-4037

Vision Festival, 212-696-6681, [email protected],

Watchung Arts Center, 18 Stirling Rd, Watchung, NJ 07069,

908-753-0190, watchungarts.org

Watercolor Café, 2094 Boston Post Road, Larchmont, NY

10538, 914-834-2213, watercolorcafe.net

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, 57th & 7th Ave, 212-247-

7800

Williamsburg Music Center, 367 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn,

NY 11211, (718) 384-1654 wmcjazz.org

Zankel Hall, 881 7th Ave, New York, 212-247-7800

Zinc Bar, 82 West 3rd St.

RECORD STORES

Academy Records, 12 W. 18th St., New York, NY 10011, 212-

242-3000, http://academy-records.com

Downtown Music Gallery, 13 Monroe St, New York, NY

10002, (212) 473-0043, downtownmusicgallery.com

Jazz Record Center, 236 W. 26th St., Room 804,

212-675-4480, jazzrecordcenter.com

MUSIC STORES

Roberto’s Woodwind & Brass, 149 West 46th St. NY, NY

10036, 646-366-0240, robertoswoodwind.com

Sam Ash, 333 W 34th St, New York, NY 10001

Phone: (212) 719-2299 samash.com

Sadowsky Guitars Ltd, 2107 41st Avenue 4th Floor, Long

Island City, NY 11101, 718-433-1990. sadowsky.com

Steve Maxwell Vintage Drums, 723 7th Ave, 3rd Floor, New

York, NY 10019, 212-730-8138, maxwelldrums.com

SCHOOLS, COLLEGES, CONSERVATORIES 92nd St Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10128 212.415.5500; 92ndsty.org Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music, 42-76 Main St., Flushing, NY, Tel: 718-461-8910, Fax: 718-886-2450 Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, 58 Seventh Ave., Brooklyn, NY, 718-622-3300, brooklynconservatory.com City College of NY-Jazz Program, 212-650-5411, Drummers Collective, 541 6th Ave, New York, NY 10011, 212-741-0091, thecoll.com Five Towns College, 305 N. Service, 516-424-7000, x Hills, NY Greenwich House Music School, 46 Barrow St., Tel: 212-242- 4770, Fax: 212-366-9621, greenwichhouse.org Juilliard School of Music, 60 Lincoln Ctr, 212-799-5000 LaGuardia Community College/CUNI, 31-10 Thomson Ave., Long Island City, 718-482-5151 Lincoln Center — Jazz At Lincoln Center, 140 W. 65th St., 10023, 212-258-9816, 212-258-9900 Long Island University — Brooklyn Campus, Dept. of Music, University Plaza, Brooklyn, 718-488-1051, 718-488-1372 Manhattan School of Music, 120 Claremont Ave., 10027, 212-749-2805, 2802, 212-749-3025 NJ City Univ, 2039 Kennedy Blvd., Jersey City, 888-441-6528 New School, 55 W. 13th St., 212-229-5896, 212-229-8936 NY University, 35 West 4th St. Rm #777, 212-998-5446 NY Jazz Academy, 718-426-0633 NYJazzAcademy.com Princeton University-Dept. of Music, Woolworth Center Musi-cal Studies, Princeton, NJ, 609-258-4241, 609-258-6793 Queens College — Copland School of Music, City University of NY, Flushing, 718-997-3800 Rutgers Univ. at New Brunswick, Jazz Studies, Douglass Campus, PO Box 270, New Brunswick, NJ, 908-932-9302 Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies, 185 University Avenue, Newark NJ 07102, 973-353-5595

newarkrutgers.edu/IJS/index1.html SUNY Purchase, 735 Anderson Hill, Purchase, 914-251-6300 Swing University (see Jazz At Lincoln Center, under Venues) William Paterson University Jazz Studies Program, 300 Pomp-ton Rd, Wayne, NJ, 973-720-2320

RADIO WBGO 88.3 FM, 54 Park Pl, Newark, NJ 07102, Tel: 973-624- 8880, Fax: 973-824-8888, wbgo.org WCWP, LIU/C.W. Post Campus WFDU, http://alpha.fdu.edu/wfdu/wfdufm/index2.html WKCR 89.9, Columbia University, 2920 Broadway Mailcode 2612, NY 10027, 212-854-9920, columbia.edu/cu/wkcr

ADDITIONAL JAZZ RESOURCES Big Apple Jazz, bigapplejazz.com, 718-606-8442, [email protected] Louis Armstrong House, 34-56 107th St, Corona, NY 11368, 718-997-3670, satchmo.net Institute of Jazz Studies, John Cotton Dana Library, Rutgers- Univ, 185 University Av, Newark, NJ, 07102, 973-353-5595 Jazzmobile, Inc., jazzmobile.org Jazz Museum in Harlem, 104 E. 126th St., 212-348-8300, jazzmuseuminharlem.org Jazz Foundation of America, 322 W. 48th St. 10036, 212-245-3999, jazzfoundation.org New Jersey Jazz Society, 1-800-303-NJJS, njjs.org New York Blues & Jazz Society, NYBluesandJazz.org Rubin Museum, 150 W. 17th St, New York, NY, 212-620-5000 ex 344, rmanyc.org.

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world

and moral courage so rare.”

— Mark Twain

www.PressToRelease.com | MusicPressReleaseDistribution.com | 215-600-1733

PAY ONLY FOR

RESULTS

PUBLICITY! Get Hundreds Of Media Placements —

ONLINE — Major Network Media & Authority Sites & OFFLINE — Distribution To 1000’s of Print & Broadcast

Networks To Promote Your Music, Products & Performances In As Little As 24 Hours To Generate

Traffic, Sales & Expanded Media Coverage!

October 2021 Jazz Inside Magazine www.JazzInsideMagazine.com 12 To Advertise CALL: 215-887-8880

Interview and photos by Ken Weiss Bertha Hope-Booker [November 8, 1936, Los Angeles, CA], an accomplished pianist and composer, continues to be active, leading her bands at the tender age of 84. After a child-hood in Los Angeles, where Hope trained under Richie Powell and befriended future stars Eric Dolphy and Billy Higgins, she mar-ried and collaborated with luminary pianist Elmo Hope until his passing in 1967. Since that time, Hope has promoted and covered the work of her late husband, much of the time with the assistance of her second husband, the late, standout bassist Walter Booker, in vari-ous groups, as well as focused on her own work, and released a number of highly valued recordings with the help of Jimmy Cobb, Jun-ior Cook, Eddie Henderson, , Billy Higgins and Walter Booker. She has also performed with Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Foster, Nat Ad-derley, and Philly Joe Jones. Hope co-founded Jazzberry Jam, an influential all-female band in 1978. This interview was done by telephone on March 21-22, 2020, as life paused for the start of the COVID-19 pan-demic. Bertha Hope can be found playing every Sunday in New Rochelle, New York at ALVIN and FRIENDS for brunch.

Jazz Inside Magazine: We’re doing inter-view by phone rather than in person because the Corona virus pandemic has started. How are you feeling at this time? Bertha Hope: I’m feeling trapped. Some days I’m agitated and other days I’m really work-ing through it. I’m trying to be as consistent

as possible, although that’s not always easy. I think there’s very little that I will accomplish out of the things I wanted to. Consistency is one of them. I think not enough people are taking this pandemic seriously enough be-cause they’ve never seen anything like this before and that’s sad because those people endanger my life and many other lives. JI: What are you referring to when you say you aren’t going to accomplish all the things you’d like to do? BH: I mean things that I have not paid atten-tion to before because of the gigs, the prepara-tion for the gigs, writing music and practicing, and being on top of my game, as much as I could be. Those all took precedence in my life. Some of the things I want to do are fami-ly oriented. I also want to write a little bit more music. I’ve been working on a piece for a long time that’s kind of built on my life. I’m trying to write pieces that reflect the stages of my life. I’m also trying to get my music, and all of Elmo’s music, organized in one space. Now that there’s no performances or dead-lines [due to the pandemic], I am using my time differently, and it’s making a difference.

JI: Would you talk about your playing style? You don’t dwell on flashy technical displays. What’s important to you? BH: I try to tell a story, it’s not a planned story. I try to use what information I have, or if the song has a particular meaning to me, I want to be able to convey to the audience

what the history of the song is for me. I want them to be able to feel something about what I felt when I wrote it or when I learned it. The songs all have a lot of moving parts. I don’t have fabulous technique. My hands are small. I can barely reach an octave. I have to take all those things into consideration in how I sound and what the song gives to me, and what I can give back to my listeners. It’s not about flash. I don’t have any flashy technique, that’s very true. I did not learn a flashy technique style when I was taking formal piano lessons. I learned a basic, secure kind of sound tech-nique to get a good sound out of the piano, and I didn’t take piano lessons long enough to acquire a huge classical repertoire, so my technique is very basic. I’m learning more and more as I’ve taken more lessons later in life to expand on the idea that I have small hands and there are different ways to use my hands, a different way to manipulate my arms, and get more sound out of the piano. JI: When was the last time you took a piano lesson? BH: I started taking lessons again about 3 years ago from a classically trained pianist, whose hands were about the same size as mine. She taught me a different rotation to my wrists, which puts the fingers in an angle on the keyboard. JI: You mentioned being attracted to songs that you can tell a story from. How has play-ing your own songs or standards changed from your early career to the current day? Has their interpretation changed over time? BH: Yes, I think as I’ve gained more knowledge about life, for one thing, more on the idea of taking my time to examine what makes the song up. What are the elements of the song? What’s the tonal quality? Where’s it moving, where’s it going? What is it giving to me today? What is it giving to me on the pi-ano that I’m playing? What can I express on this piano that I couldn’t express on a lesser or a better piano? All of those things come into how I’m able to interpret the song. A lot of it is what the instrument has to offer. Piano players are at the distinct disadvantage be-cause this is not a personal instrument, unless you are somebody who moves their piano around. I know Oscar Peterson moved his personal piano around, but not many people are able to do that. I always say you have to marry a piano that you’re going to play. You have to find out quickly what this piano is going to give you and what you can give it in order to see what you are going to be able to say to the listening audience about that mar-riage. You have to learn that at a soundcheck, perhaps, and that’s not always easy. I’ve had people tell me after hearing me in different settings about how different the experience was for them because they had no idea that I could play with that kind of power because they heard me on a crappy piano first, and


“I always say you have to marry a piano that you’re going to play. You have to

find out quickly what this piano is going to give you and what you can give it in order to see what you are

going to be able to say to the listening audience about that marriage.”

Bertha Hope

I call myself a survivor

INTERVIEWINTERVIEW


then they heard me on a nine-foot Baldwin. JI: What are the benefits and disadvantages of you having perfect pitch? BH: [Laughs] The benefits are, and I guess you could ask if perfect is perfect everywhere, but I can say that it’s perfect in the Western, classical style of music. I can really hear and learn a lot of things by examining what they are with just my ears. The benefits are that I have learned a lot of music without even see-ing it because I can hear it and translate it accurately to the piano. The disadvantages of that are in writing, because if you can’t hear it, then it doesn’t exist for your ears, and you really have to have the education to know what you’re doing. I am able to read music very well, however. Some people say I don’t really have perfect pitch because perfect pitch doesn’t really exist, and I’m beginning to be-lieve that that could possibly be true, but what I have is something that allows me to repeat

what I hear. This all started when I was three and I don’t really know the science behind it. I feel that it’s a gift and I’m grateful for the gift, believe me. JI: You hail from a family of artists. What was your childhood like? BH: I grew up in Los Angeles. My father’s family settled there from Arkansas and South Carolina, and my father moved there to be with them when he got out of the army. He discovered in the army that he had a wonder-ful voice and he became a contemporary of Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. Those were the three most exposed black performers of that era. He had a great career. He traveled all over the world during that era – from 1915 until the banks crashed in 1929. He had a dramatic baritone voice and sang Italian bel canto, German lieder, English ballads, and the negro spirituals. He also got into a movie career later in the ‘40s, after he stopped traveling. I grew up listening to all of that music. My mother was an opera buff and a ballet dancer. Her dream was to open a dancing school in St. Louis, but she met my father along the way to her dream, and they married in England where he was managing

[the stage show] Show Boat. He then came to this country to put the cast together for that production in this country. It was a very rich experience at home. At school, there were many music classes from sixth grade to twelfth grade in the Los Angeles public schools. I started playing violin in the seventh grade. I never played it very well, but I learned how to read. Then I played viola. Eve-ry year, the teacher would elevate you to an-other instrument to take the place of some-body graduating. I had a great time. I played clarinet and all of the percussion instruments, and by the way, clarinet and flute were the only wind instruments that were allowed at that time for girls. No brass instrument of any kind was allowed. I played well enough that at age twelve, my father hired me to play church concerts with him in Los Angeles. JI: Your father was friendly with stars such as Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker, Paul Robe-son and Jack Johnson. Did you have any meaningful contact with them? BH: No, out of all those [well-known] people the only one I met was Eubie Blake, and I met him when he was in his mid-nineties here in

New York. My father and he were great friends. They were in Europe together at the same time, probably playing the same circuit and command performances for English roy-alty. The other people I met briefly [as a child with my father] when they came to town. JI: What were your early jazz experiences that led you to a career in music? BH: My first gig that I remember in Los An-geles was with Johnny Otis’ band. Little Es-ther Phillips was the singer in that band. I think she was fifteen and I was sixteen, may-be. We played on the weekends with our parent’s permission. Johnny Otis had to con-vince my parents to let me work in his band

and he had to have an escort bring me home right after the job. I’ve always loved big bands and the power that a big band gener-ates. I had pretty much decided at that age that I wanted to pursue jazz in a very focused way. The next gig that had a big impact on me was with Vi Redd. She was the only woman that I ever met who was playing a saxophone at that time. There were others in Los Angeles, I’ve learned now, but I did not meet them at that time. I knew about Clora Bryant and Melba Liston, but they were not people that came into my space. I always admired Vi because she sang and played the saxophone, and she was a great leader, very nurturing. That was my beginning. After that, I put together a quartet of my own that was kind of experi-mental with vibist Dave Pike, and drummer Billy Higgins, or more often, John Pickens. It was only a rehearsal band. Then I worked, when I was very young, with Teddy Edwards. That turned out to be a real challenge [Laughs] because he played such a bluesy horn and my ears were continually ablaze with the things that I learned from him. All these experiences had a great impact on me. JI: Hearing a Bud Powell recording at age 15

was also a turning point in your life. What did you hear in his playing that so inspired you? BH: It was an introduction to a different use of chordal material. I was listening to Duke Ellington records at the time. I had seen Bud live but it was the record, and not the perfor-mance, because by that time he was not per-forming as well as he had done on his records. On the record was a piece called “Un Poco Loco,” and that piece kept me up all night. [Laughs] That was what I considered to be the turning point in what was possible. I think it was an introduction of a new harmonic that I hadn’t been aware of before, and I stayed up all night until I could really find it in all the keys and analyze that piece of music, as much as I could. I really realized the work that it was gonna take to be able to approximate any-thing close to that kind of sound. JI: Billy Higgins was a high school classmate of yours who shared your interest in jazz. What were your early experiences with the future drum legend? BH: Billy was one of three people who were in our group of kids who really liked jazz and

(Continued from page 12)


“Billy [Higgins] told me that the [Ornette Coleman] band didn’t have a piano player in it but that I should come and listen to it anyway to hear

what they were doing. That was a revelation. They played until they wore themselves thin. That’s what people did at that time. They used the whole day and night to work through the music and it was very intense.”

— Anton Chekhov

“Encroachment of freedom will not come

about through one violent action or movement but will come about

through a series of actions that appear to be unrelated and coincidental, but

that were all along systematically planned for dictatorship.”

— John Adams, 2nd President

Bertha Hope


Concert Halls, Festivals, Clubs, Promoters

PAY ONLY FOR RESULTS PAY ONLY FOR RESULTS CONCERT & EVENT MARKETING!CONCERT & EVENT MARKETING!

Fill The House In Hours For

Your Next Performance

rketingrketing Get Your Phones Ringing NOW!Get Your Phones Ringing NOW!

CALL: 215-887-8880 www.SellMoreTicketsFast.com

Lightning Fast, Way Better Results & Far Less Expensive Than Lightning Fast, Way Better Results & Far Less Expensive Than

DirectDirect--Mail, Print, Radio & TV AdsMail, Print, Radio & TV Ads——Comprehensive Analytics!Comprehensive Analytics!


studied it. We listened to Duke Ellington, Miles, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell. Short-ly after that, Billy was beginning to rehearse with Ornette [Coleman], Don Cherry, and Charlie Haden, and I used to hang out at Billy’s place. I was a guest fly on the wall, listening to that band with no piano as the foundation. It was an invitation to hear what was happening in Ornette’s mind. I had heard Ornette way before I was in his company, and he had sounded much closer to Charlie Parker’s origins than he ended up sounding with his own harmolodic theoretical point of view. I was able to listen to them rehearse quite a bit. Billy told me that the band didn’t have a piano player in it but that I should come and listen to it anyway to hear what they were doing. That was a revelation. They played until they wore themselves thin. That’s what people did at that time. They used the whole day and night to work through the mu-sic and it was very intense. JI: What did you think about what Ornette

was doing at those rehearsals? Did you under-stand what he was doing with the band? BH: I heard it as something fresh, something unexamined. This is really funny – Billy gave me one of the song’s chord changes. It was a sketch of one of the songs they were about to play. So, I’m looking at the music, and I was beginning to really understand how to read chord changes, and they were just written symbolically. I couldn’t understand the move-

ment that the music was making in accord-ance to what I was looking at on the paper. I don’t know if I formed a real opinion about the music, I just felt that it was a new direc-tion. There were parts of it that sounded like parts were missing, and I always suspected that it had an underlining structure that I just couldn’t connect to. In later years, the more I listened to Ornette, I guess, the more free my own ideas about music had become, and it didn’t sound so foreign after all. I was really very young and impressionable when I first heard him, and he was looking for his own direction. It was an exciting time to be able to hear them because we were all young and he was definitely turning another page in the music world. JI: While studying theory and harmony at Los Angeles City College you befriended your neighbor and fellow student Eric Dolphy? Talk about that experience. BH: Dolphy was brilliant. He encouraged me to practice, practice scales. We didn’t have the opportunity to practice together but he was a big influence because he used to talk to me a lot. We took classes together, we studied har-

mony together in the first year. We carpooled together. One day he drove his car, and the next day I drove mine to conserve gas. He was intense, very, very focused. He taught me to really appreciate the idea that you needed to put in the hard work involved with being the best that you could be at this. And the scales, above all, were the foundation of what you needed to know, and I thank him for that. JI: You used to listen to him rehearse with

Max Roach’s band. BH: That was the beginning of the Max Roach and Clifford Brown band. They were just so focused on what they were doing. They would play until they couldn’t play anymore. It was a very intense experience. I keep on using that word but it’s the one that describes the theme best for me. They were all about the music and trying to get it right and they sounded fabulous to my young ears. I didn’t realize then that I was witnessing history. JI: How did you come to study with Richie Powell? BH: He was the pianist in the Max Roach / Clifford Brown band. I thought I would be extremely lucky if he were to say yes to teach me, because I really didn’t think that he would. I got enough courage together to ask him and he said yes. I was listening to them practice so that’s how that happened. And because they were rehearsing, at Eric’s house, which was not that far from mine, he was able to come to my house and give me lessons. I think that if I hadn’t met him [through Eric], I wouldn’t have been that fortunate. JI: What did Powell stress in his teachings? BH: He mostly stressed, and I think he re-spected the fact that my hands are small, alt-hough he never said that, but what he stressed was moving voicings in and out, voice leading a real clear passage from one chord to the next. He really did teach me the inversions of all of the keys, and how to voice chords and how to move them and make them have ten-sion and release, and all the elements that a chord needs to move from one place to the other. He didn’t go over any particular theory or technique, it was really about the theory that I learned from him. I had the classical technique that I’ve been able to use from my classical instructions. He didn’t sound like Bud, but he certainly had a lot of the same information that Bud had. I felt really fortu-nate to just be exposed to that. How much of that I’ve been able to really use and show that this is my background, I don’t know, but I thought I couldn’t do better at that point then having Richie teach me. I took lessons for maybe five months. A major part of the lesson was being able to hear him playing what he had just shown me. It was just a joy to be able to hear him play. My lessons lasted from sev-en to eight, and he would play my piano from eight to eleven before he would leave. Some-times he would have dinner with my family. I just sat on the couch and listened to him play. It was like a live concert in my living room and I learned a lot by listening. JI: When is the last time you ever took a pi-ano lesson? BH: About six months ago I took a series of lessons. I was able to fit it into my schedule



Bertha Hope

“I had other things that I needed to examine – how I got into what I got into, how Elmo’s death had affected me, and how I had chosen to cope with all these things. I couldn’t concentrate on the piano. I was getting ready to re-orient my

thinking that the music had so much to do with both my joy and my despair. I decided to just

give the piano away ... I wanted it to be used by somebody who would appreciate it. A friend

said, “I’ll take the piano off your hands ... This is temporary and once it leaves, you’re gonna

want this piano back, and you’ll appreciate it in a way you didn’t before.”


and my financial situation too. I started taking lessons a year ago because I had carpal tunnel. I still do, and I’m really very hesitant to have surgery on my hand. So, I have been doing therapy, and I took the lessons to see if I could alleviate the pain by using my hand in a dif-ferent way. I’ve been using the technique that she showed me and they’ve been very helpful. JI: Have you taken lessons from other noted pianists? BH: Not really. A few people turned me down, and I will never know the reason. I won’t mention their names but they’re very noted, and they both said, “You just need to go home and practice.” I think one of them did not want to give me lessons because I was married to Elmo. The people who taught me the most were the musicians playing in [Walter] Booker’s studio. They taught me an enormous amount, just by watching them play for hours. I asked them questions and they suggested things. I sat down next to them – Larry Willis, John Hicks and Ronnie Mat-thews, and that was the best way to learn. JI: Bud Powell was your biggest influence. What was the extent of your contact with him? BH: Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to know him in any real way. I heard him live in Los Angeles in a club that had mirrored ceil-ings and walls and it was very clear that Bud was not well. I wanted to tell him how much I enjoyed his music and was trying to learn from him, but it was clear that he wasn’t go-ing to be approachable. I was still in high school. The next time I encountered him was with his guardian, Francis Paudras, who had brought him back here to the United States. He was staying with Thelonious Monk and he wanted to see Elmo. That’s what Nellie told me, but they never made time for him to see Elmo. It turned out that Bud escaped their surveillance and it hit the newspapers and TV that the police were looking for him because he had gotten away from his caretaker. Well, he was on his way to Elmo’s house. He went to Elmo’s mother’s house, but we had moved to another part of the Bronx. Elmo was walk-ing from his house to his mother’s house, and Bud was walking from Elmo’s mother’s house to our house, and they met in the street. Elmo brought him to our house. He was really debilitated by that time. We lived in a second-floor walk-up and it took him almost a half an hour to get up the steps. That was the second time I met him. It was my fantasy to ask him all kinds of questions and sit down beside him and watch him play, but that didn’t happen. JI: What were your plans on graduation from Los Angeles City College?

BH: I was probably going to try to launch myself into the music scene there. I didn’t graduate. I didn’t finish, but if I had, that’s probably what I would have done. I may have even gone a whole different way and gotten into the studios. My plan was to put a band together and play and write. I ended up taking a road trip instead, and that was a learning experience. That’s what really brought me to New York. I eventually finished but I didn’t get my music degree. Several times over the years I thought very seriously about going back to school for a music degree, but I de-clined. What I’ve learned during all of these years has been through other people mentor-ing me, and from other musicians, just by playing with them. That’s really been the way that I’ve acquired whatever I have, whatever way I’ve used my gifts have been because other people have bestowed their gifts on me. JI: Would you talk about meeting Elmo Hope in 1957 after he moved to Los Angeles? BH: I met him when he had just left Chet Baker’s band. They didn’t record together so people don’t know that history. That’s been lost because there aren’t any records. He worked that whole West coast circuit with Chet for a couple years, from Vancouver down the coast. Right after he left Chet, he was sort of a first call musician on the West coast. I met him when he was working with Sonny Rollins, who had come to town and picked up a rhythm section. Then Elmo worked with Dexter Gordon. He and I were friends for about eighteen months. We got to be really close before we got married. I had a car and I would take him and Dexter, or who-ever he was working with, to all their gigs, and we just grew to be really wonderful friends. Before I met him, I was furiously trying to learn some of his music by putting the record on and listening to it over and over and over again, and then sitting down and trying to play what I heard. I wasn’t privy to any of his transcriptions. The very first night I met him I was excited that I was really meet-ing this person whose records I was listening to and here he was in the flesh. I said to him that, “I’m learning some of your music,” and he looked at me with doubt. He had this ex-pression on his face. “You’re learning my music?” And it was hard to tell whether he was kidding, or he was amazed, or if he didn’t believe it. Harold Land was there, and he said to Harold, “She said that she’s learning my music,” and Harold said, “Well, maybe she is.” He just didn’t want to believe it, and I invited him after that gig to come to my house and hear me play so I could see for myself if I was really making any headway in getting it right or if I was delusional. [Laughs] He saw that I was serious about learning the music. He did correct a couple things. The order that I listened to the bebop pianists in, and when I say bebop pianists, I mean only Thelonious, Bud and Elmo. I heard Bud first, then Thelo-nious on record, and then I heard Elmo. And then I learned that they were all great friends

and shared an awful lot of information with each other in their playing and writing style. It was funny that I heard Elmo last and ended up being with him. I always found that an inter-esting alignment to think that he was the last of those three piano players that I grew to admire so much. JI: For those of us who never got to see him, what was it like to view an Elmo Hope perfor-mance? BH: He was a constant smoker. He’d always have a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. He closed his eyes and hunched over the piano. He had a monotone style of singing that he did sometimes, where he was singing along to the melody in his own head, and sometimes it escaped. He had a very deep speaking voice. He played with a lot of fire in some instances, while his ballads were really dreamy, melan-choly, really deep, dark ballads. He was really gracious. He was a small man who got a great sound out of the piano. He could hit the piano and make it sing, and he played with a great dynamic range. He played the full sweep of the piano. Sometimes he was given pianos to play that were badly worn in the middle regis-ter, so Elmo improvised at the top part of the piano exclusively or avoided the middle part of the piano altogether. He’d play the left hand in the lower register and the right hand in the higher register, so sometimes he was really challenged. He wasn’t always privy to the best pianos, and as I talked about earlier, about marrying a piano, and finding out what it can give you? He was very good at that. JI: How did life change for you after getting married to Elmo Hope in 1960? BH: It changed drastically. [Laughs] My daughter Monica was born at the end of 1960, and by that time we were living in the Bronx. I was working at the telephone company as an operator, which I did for a long time, while I was also working in the Jimmy Castor band. Around 1963 I got involved in drugs, which was really unfortunate. That was something that I did not see coming. In 1966, my third child Darryl was born. My drug use was a drastic change. I didn’t have very much knowledge about drugs, or drug addiction, or drug use. It didn’t exist in my world in L.A. at all. My parents didn’t drink or smoke, and I didn’t grow up with people where even alco-hol was in the house, so drug addiction really caught me by surprise. I managed, because Elmo died in his forties, in 1967, when my youngest child was not quite a year old, and his death really catapulted me into looking at what my life would be like if I were to contin-ue to pursue drugs. It was a rude awakening. It’s almost that the way I fell into drugs, and the way I got out, were cataclysmic, in a way. I just decided that I couldn’t see a life for my-self at all because Elmo was greatly involved in my drug usage. I didn’t see it without him, so I just stopped cold turkey almost immedi-ately. His death was such a blow. I just decid-


Bertha Hope


ed that when he died that that was the end of my use of drugs. I just stopped. We were mar-ried seven years. It was a tumultuous seven years. There were some glorious moments, they were at the very beginning of the mar-riage. By the middle, [Laughs] I was just kind of overwhelmed, but the love didn’t disap-pear. My relationship to the drugs was some-thing that I didn’t think I could be a part of, but I became a part of it. I didn’t get to the point where I was totally destroyed by it, and I think the reason that I didn’t was because I quit as abruptly as I started. Since that time, I have not used any drugs at all. I quit in 1967. JI: It’s known that Elmo was a heroin user, is that what you were using also? BH: Yes. JI: Did you have concerns about Elmo’s drug use when you married him? BH: No, as I said I did not understand the dynamics of drugs or drug usage. I didn’t know what drugs did to people or what his life was like, so I didn’t have any concerns. I think I was just too young and naïve, and I didn’t ask any questions. That was unfortu-nate but I call myself a survivor. JI: Would you share some memories of Elmo Hope? BH: He never had a working band, as far as I know. I’m sure part of it was that he lost his cabaret card and so he wasn’t able to work in any place that served alcohol [in New York City]. Other people got their cabaret cards returned to them, but Elmo was not one of them, and that kept him out of clubs. That could very well be the reason he never devel-oped his own band. And whenever he had a record date, often he wrote music fresh music. He had a lot of material but would not use it for the date. I think one of the most interesting things was when he went to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, he would take a cab out there and he’d be writing the date, in the cab on the way to the studio. I wonder how many people did that? Many a song he wrote on his knees in the book he carried on the ride from the Bronx. When he got an idea, he would just scribble it on anything and compile it when he got some score paper together. JI: In 1964 the Elmo Hope Trio was playing at The Baby Grand, a New York club at 125th Street, when the then unknown Albert Ayler suddenly appeared, jumped on stage and start-ed blowing his saxophone for 20-30 minutes. Hope packed up and left the club. Did he say anything to you about this when he came home?

BH: I never heard about that. [Laughs] Albert Ayler? Well, this is a revelation to me. That’s incredible. I will tell you about another expe-rience that Elmo had. Charles Mingus hired Elmo for the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn for a date and they were to rehearse in the club. Mingus and the band and Elmo all got there before the performance, but the club was locked, and they couldn’t get in to practice. Mingus rehearsed the band in front of the Blue Coronet and he told Elmo, “Look, I can’t use you tonight because I can’t play this mu-sic without a rehearsal and I can’t give you your part, so you’re fired.” [Laughs] He came home livid from the rehearsal. JI: Your first recording work came on Elmo Hope’s Hope-full (1962, Riverside) album, where you played on three duets with him. How comfortable were you recording at that stage of your life?

BH: I was not comfortable at all. Although I had been playing in public for a while in other settings, I didn’t think I was ready pianistical-ly to play duets, or even to just play with him. I didn’t really think I belonged there. JI: How did you come to record those duets? Did Elmo talk you into it? BH: No, I think it was Orrin Keepnews and Johnny Griffin who thought it was going to be a good idea. I hadn’t had any experience play-ing with Johnny Griffin, we were just all friends. Johnny and Elmo were big friends and they played together. I think they thought it would be a good idea to record the two of us together but I never felt I was ready enough to do that album, but it has stood the test of time,

and I think that it’s probably novel, because there weren’t that many couples [that played together] at that time. People bring it up often, but I think I could have done a better job. Well, I always think I could have done a bet-ter job no matter when I record. Recording is not one of my favorite things. I’m extremely agitated in a recording studio, and that’s to-day. I was even more nervous then. JI: When did you feel confident of your skills as a performer? When did you feel you were able to stand your own on the New York jazz scene? BH: I can’t put a date on that. I don’t think there was ever a time when I said, ‘I’m ready.’ I just put bands together and kept on playing with people who were better than I was. I think with each band I learned some-thing different from the people that I was playing with. I learned how to be a communi-

cator, how to be more conscious of the band as a group where everybody has a voice. I listened to my first recordings and heard how selfish I was about soloing. I had to learn about making a record a more communal, democratic kind of experience. I’m always open to learning and being more aware of those things. I think, hopefully, I’m playing better now than I ever was because this is now, and there’s no going back. I’ve put a different quality of time into bands that I have. We rehearse, we practice together, I’m still working on Elmo’s music, and I have a steady band of five committed people who work on it with me. That’s very satisfying. I have a committed trio, and I’m playing new music and refreshing the old music. I hope I’m still evolving as an artist and as a person who plays the music, and I’m really hoping that today I play better than I did yesterday. I think I’ve had some great advantages to be able to do that, and as long as I’m on the plan-et, I really want to continue to evolve and grow and learn from my fellow musicians. That’s the most sincere learning I think you can get.


“Ultimate success is not directly related to early success,

if you consider that many successful people did not give clear evidence

of such promise in youth.”

- Robert Fritz, The Path Of Least Resistance

Bertha Hope

“I don’t think there was ever a time when I said, ‘I’m ready.’ I just put bands together and kept on playing with people who were better than I was. I think with each band I learned something different from the people that I

was playing with. I learned how to be a communicator, how to be more conscious of the band as a group where everybody has a voice.”


JI: How difficult was it for you to deal with his death at the age of 43, making you a wid-ow at age 31? BH: I was devastated for a while. It took a long time to get used to it, a long time to pro-cess. I was lucky enough to have family that surrounded me because it was a blow that took a long, long time to recuperate and make sense of it all. Sometimes I look at that period of my life and there’s still a lot of pieces that are still dangling, but I’ve managed to get beyond it and totally turn my life around in a new direction so that all the loneliness and despair dissipated. I did go back to college. I taught music for a while. I went into the gov-ernment Head Start program and taught while I was going to school. I was for a long time, studying and working on the weekends with a band which took almost ten years after Elmo’s death to put together with vibraphonist Doug Hawthorne and drummer Ivan Hampden and a bassist. That band worked a lot in the tri-state area from 1975 until about 1982. So, playing with other people, and with having my family, which if I didn’t have, I don’t know what I would have done. They were wonderful. By 1982, I had decided that I didn’t want to teach Head Start anymore. I wanted to see if I could have a career as a musician without any of the encumbrances of the day job so that I could be available to rehearse, write, compose, and to go on the road. That was 1982, so it had taken me a long time to gather my strength and con-fidence and a healthy attitude about life. JI: At one point, you gave away your piano and were done with music. What happened? BH: I decided that that wasn’t the best thing for me, and that I had other things that I need-ed to examine – how I got into what I got into, how Elmo’s death had affected me, and how I had chosen to cope with all these things. I couldn’t concentrate on the piano. I was get-ting ready to re-orient my thinking that the music had so much to do with both my joy and my despair. I decided to just give the pi-ano away. I didn’t sell it, I wanted it to be used by somebody who would appreciate it. The piano had a good sound, but it didn’t hold tuning very long, but it was all that I had at the time. A friend said, “I’ll take the piano off your hands, but you’re just going through a really tough phase in your life right now. This is temporary and once it leaves, you’re gonna want this piano back, and you’ll appreciate it in a way you didn’t before.” He said he was going to use the piano to give free lessons to children in the neighborhood and I thought that was a great use of the piano. He said he’d hear from me soon when I was ready to take the piano back and it would come back just the way I gave it to him. I half-heard that, because I just knew that at that point, I wasn’t

going to ever ask for it again. It was really a never, never feeling for me at that point. It took me two years to reorient myself and I called him up and asked, ‘You wouldn’t really happen to have the piano still would you,’ and he just laughed. He was overjoyed to hear my voice and he said, “I knew this day would come.” He brought it back and it didn’t have a scratch on it, and he had taught many a kid in the neighborhood. JI: Apparently, he’s buried in an unmarked grave? JI: Why do you think Elmo Hope’s unique talent never got recognized? BH: I don’t know. I can’t really answer that because many other people who were in-volved with drugs managed to get recognized. For one thing, Elmo really hated interviews. He read a couple things from San Francisco that had been written about him and said they were so full of inaccuracies he didn’t want to do anymore interviews. He just could not take lies. As to why that wonderful music was nev-er more fully exploited while he was alive, I don’t know. I think part of it was he didn’t have a working band and the lack of a cabaret card, so he wasn’t able to play in New York. Dexter Gordon wanted him to come to Den-mark when Dexter first went to Copenhagen. He tried to persuade Elmo to come with him because he’d be working with Dexter, but Elmo was not ready to leave here. His music is still fresh to me and there are people now who are beginning to play it. There are people who know his music today, almost like a cult. There are a lot of Elmo worshippers all over the world who play his music. I just wish they would record his music a little bit more and give it a nuance of their own. I’m having a great time exploring the songs with the band that I have now with Lucianna Padmore on drums, Kim Clarke on bass, Gene Ghee on tenor saxophone, and Riley Mullins on trum-pet. I love this band. We are in the process of rearranging some of the songs to give them new elasticity. Lucianna is a wonderful drum-mer. I think I’ve learned more from drummers because the weakest point in my own devel-opment was rhythm and the drummers that I’ve played with, have just been a phenomenal part of my growth. JI: How did Elmo Hope handle not getting the recognition he deserved? Did it bother him? BH: I think it did, but he wasn’t an angry

person. He felt that he should be working but he wasn’t able to get his cabaret card, he did-n’t have representation. But he didn’t carry an angry attitude around with him. JI: What do you find to be most misunder-stood about Elmo Hope? BH: Yes, I think that people thought he was angry, but he didn’t demonstrate anger against other people. I’ve seen other interviews with people who thought he was an angry person. I didn’t live with him feeling that he woke up angry every day. That was just not a reality. He was gentle, he loved having people around, he had friends that he watched movies and boxing with. He didn’t talk about the fact that he wasn’t working. I would like people to know that. If you listen to the arc of his mu-sic, how it changed from the ‘40s, which is the music I knew first about, all the way to the last record that he did, you hear darkness, you hear sadness, you hear melancholy, but you don’t hear clashing or anything that sounds like this is the music produced by an angry man. Yeah, he did write one song that he told me was about how he felt about me being angry. JI: What song is that? BH: That’s “Minor Bertha.” You’ll have to give it a listen and see if that sounds like an angry person. [Laughs] JI: Since Elmo Hope passed, you’ve actively worked to keep his music alive. Would you talk about transcribing his compositions? BH: Some of the compositions I transcribed, and the other’s I transcribed along with Don Sickler, who holds the publishing rights. He and I sat down and meticulously transcribed every note. Some of them I had already been playing. Now I’m trying to take those pieces that I’ve done and I’m trying to give them some expansion. One of the things I really would like to see is younger and younger mu-sicians incorporate them into their listening and have a version of it that they could be able to play. There would be a beginning ver-sion of Elmo Hope on piano, an intermediate version, and one for more advanced players. I’m happy to pass it on. Some will be in the quintet format too because that seemed to be Elmo’s favorite group to write for. I think all the music that remains has been transcribed. A lot of it is a labor of love because unfortu-nately, the band doesn’t work nearly as much as I would like. JI: Did you discover any hidden works of his? BH: No, I don’t have anything like that. He lost a lot of music early on in a flood. There was a fire in the Bronx where he had some items stored and one of the things was a suit-case full of his music that got flooded by the firemen. He had unrecorded things in there.


Bertha Hope

“When freedom fails the best men rot in filthy jails and those that

cried 'appease, appease' are hung by those they tried to please.”


JI: After transcribing and playing his music, what’s been the biggest discovery you’ve made about Elmo’s music after his death? BH: How difficult it is. I think one of the rea-sons that other people have not covered his work is if you’re a pianist looking at it, it’s one thing, but if you’re a horn player, you’ll discover that the music was written from a pianist’s view, so finding out places for the horn to breathe is a task that has to be under-taken. The biggest challenge I’ve had in play-ing this music with horns has been to discern how they were going to breathe and make the lines make sense to the flow of the music. But that doesn’t apply to all of his compositions, some of them are playable for horns because it’s obvious in the way the phrases are written. Once people are introduced to his music and play it, they really love it. If I could get this into the curriculum of one of the major schools, it would have a different outcome. I know Don Sickler does his part at Columbia through a course he teaches. JI: Would you recommend a few of his songs for people to get a taste of his work? BH: They should definitely check out the Clifford Brown-Lou Donaldson album [New Faces-New Sounds, Blue Note, 1953] that has “Bellarosa” and “De-Dah.” Those tunes are very playable. They’re almost dance tempos, which a lot of bebop music actually was. That would be an introduction. If they are serious about checking out his music, they should listen to his trio albums, especially the Elmo Hope Trio. Another album is a Harold Land’s The Fox. On that album, Elmo wrote most of the songs, and that’s some beautiful writing. There’s also the recording that I’m on, Hope-Full, which is Elmo in a different kind of set-ting, playing solo. The Harold Land album is a masterpiece. JI: I hope I’m not dredging up too many pain-ful memories. BH: I’m trying to be honest, so sometimes some pain comes with that. There are some things that I could say I just don’t care to talk about, but this is an interview about my life. Actually, this is exhilarating. I feel really charged up in this crazy pandemic time that we’re in. This is a great surge of hopefulness. JI: Is it true that you almost became one of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers? BH: Yes, that is true. He did ask me at a point in my life where I was recuperating from my drug use and I made a conscious decision not to go with Art Blakey. I didn’t think I was strong enough to do that. I was teaching at that time and he said to me, “How are you

going to learn to play the piano if you’re teaching?” He said, “You can’t learn how to play the piano if you teach it, you have to play. Go out on the road with me. When I let you go, you’ll be a leader. If you write any-thing, we’ll play it.” We talked for about half an hour, and in the end, I thought where I was in my life journey right then didn’t include being in the band with Art Blakey. As much as I loved him, and had been in his company a lot, and was great friends with his two chil-dren, went to Europe with his daughter Eve-lyn, and played in his son Art Jr.’s band, I turned it down because I didn’t think he was the best thing for me at that point in my life. He did take a woman on the road that year. Joanne Brackeen came into the band that year [1969]. JI: What were some of your early experiences involving the New York City jazz scene after moving there in 1961? What did you see that was most memorable? BH: I didn’t go out to do much listening be-cause by then I had a daughter, I was working in the telephone company by day, and I worked with Jimmy Castor’s band in the Bronx. I did hear Miles at the Village Gate and in Harlem. I didn’t have the energy by the end of the day to go out and hear music at that point. JI: Thelonious Monk and Elmo were friends. What was your experience with Monk? BH: We visited him. I was intrigued by his music. I was learning how to play his “Off Minor” and I was having trouble with some of the chord changes. I asked him if he would help me with it and he kind of gave me a nod as if maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. I played it and he said, “That’s wrong,” but he didn’t offer what was right. He was very dis-tant in a lot of ways. We would go over to his home and he would be sedentary, maybe watching television, very silent. The relation-ship he and Elmo had – sometimes they just needed to say a few words to each other and be in each other’s company. The relationship I formed was not so much with Monk but with his wife Nellie. JI: You remained friendly with the Monks and when Thelonious famously left his home in 1972 and moved into the Baroness’ Wee-hawken, New Jersey home, Nellie recruited you to go and plead with him to return home. BH: That’s true, but it wasn’t just me, I think she recruited everybody she knew. I was just

one of many. I told her, ‘Nellie, I’ll go but why do you think I will be successful? He didn’t have much to say to me when he was here?’ So, I did go, and he was on his bed with all his clothes on – shoes and a hat. I told him the reason I was there. There wasn’t any small talk because that wasn’t the kind of per-son he was to me. I told him Nellie had sent me to ask him to come home. He let me finish and he grunted that he heard me, pulled his hat down more to cover his eyes, and that was the end of that. JI: He left because he was angry over Nellie juicing and helping others? BH: Nellie told me that he told her that she had to get rid of the juicer and that as soon as she did, he would come back. That was Nel-lie’s music—helping other people get relief by using fresh, raw vegetable juice, and she did really help a lot of people. That was what she did, and she wanted to be able to see the two things live together—her music and him being comfortable with her music, but he nev-er did come back home. She was a very atten-tive wife, and I think he thought her helping other people took her attention away from him. JI: Later in life, you married bassist Walter Booker, Jr. Would you talk a bit about him? What should people know about him? BH: He was a real humanitarian type of per-son, very much a big brother, protective, and far seeing about what musicians could use and need. He had an underground studio that was very influential. It had a great sound and be-came a haven for a group of musicians from the high school of music and the arts in New York City that produced a lot of musicians who went on to have careers in the music world. One of those musicians was Theloni-ous’ son, who was part of a group that Walter let into the studio to work on their projects from high school. It was free of charge to have them record. He really thought that was something those kids needed. He built that studio himself and learned a lot about acous-tics to make it a top studio. I’d like people to know about that side of him, not just that he was a great bass player. He was a first call bass player and session musician from the time he came to New York from Washington, DC. He was a very gregarious person. He loved to have a lot of people around. He had a great sense of humor and a lot of people can attribute the beginning of their careers to the help that he gave them to practice in his studio for free. He also helped musicians who were looking to file for NEA grants – he did their tapes for a nominal fee. He was a lot more than just a bass player. He was well loved by a large group of musicians who he helped tremendously. JI: You were together for 23 years before getting married in 2004. Why get married after all that time?


Bertha Hope

- Edward R. Murrow, Journalist

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When opposition to

wrongdoing dies, the soul of America will die with it.”


BH: Most of it was financial reasons. We were advised it would be smarter to live to-gether and not marry. It was kind of a busi-ness situation, but it didn’t mean that I loved him any less. We didn’t have any children together but both of us realized it wouldn’t be wise for us to go on any longer without being married. We married in Florida and were to-gether a total of 23 years. He was very influ-ential in my life. I learned so much from him and we were partners and he helped me to develop Elmo’s music. JI: You were in a romantic relationship with Walter Booker while you both performed in the two Elmo Hope tribute ensembles you organized. Was it awkward for him to be working under the umbrella of your first hus-band? Had he had a relationship with Elmo Hope? BH: He didn’t seem to think so, it was his idea for him to be involved. The first inspira-tion for the band came from Philly Joe Jones who kept after me to form a band to expose people to the music of my late husband. Philly Joe gave me some guidance such as picking out a variety of material to show the different styles of his writing. He said to start with a dozen songs, get a group of people together and rehearse and look for work. Walter want-ed to learn more about the music himself, so he didn’t have any problem at all helping me to recruit musicians such as Steve Nelson, Grachan Moncur and Junior Cook. He was happy to do it. It was an ever-learning experi-ence for him in a genre of the music he had not been so involved in before. It does make a good story though, doesn’t it? He met Elmo a few times in the Bronx when he was working and Elmo was in the audience, but he didn’t know him. JI: Would you talk about the two ensembles you formed with Walter Booker dedicated to covering the music of Elmo Hope – ELMOl-lenium [included Leroy Williams, Charles Davis, Roni Ben-Hur, Virgil Jones, Amy Lon-don and others] and the Elmo Hope Project? BH: ELMOllenium was the first band to real-ly be able to work together. Roni Ben-Hur had a connection with a room downtown and he wanted to learn Elmo’s music. The wonderful thing about all of the people involved were not just part of a band, they all wanted to know more about Elmo’s music, and that helped make it work. Whenever Roni was involved with that room, he always called us in, so we had the opportunity to work on songs. We all learned the music together. That band was really interesting. It was the first time that I had played with a guitar, and that was a challenge. Also, Amy wrote beautiful lyrics to three of Elmo’s songs. The other band, the Elmo Hope Project, included Junior

Cook and Eddie Henderson. JI: Walter Booker served in the U.S. Army in the same unit as Elvis Presley. Did he tell any stories about Presley? BH: No, he just said that he was very friend-ly. JI: Would you talk about Jazzberry Jam, the all-female group that you co-founded? BH: That band started as a trio called the Big Apple Jazz Women with bassist Carline Ray, drummer Paula Hampton, and me around 1978. We became Jazzberry Jam in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when we added Sue Terry on alto saxophone and singers. We did the American Songbook and some originals. We played the Kennedy Center three times, which was the highlight of that band, and the quartet toured Europe. We played quite a bit in New

York. I don’t think there were any women bands at that time. Some of our sponsorship came from Cobi Narita, the Universal Jazz Coalition founder. She was very instrumental in introducing women in the tri-state area to each other. She put us all together. We didn’t know that we all existed. We were pretty much all buried in men’s bands. She put to-gether a women’s jazz festival so women could get together and support each other, talk about ways to be more prominent and get more exposure. That band was never able to

secure a recording contract, and when finally there was someone interested in us, we were told that we were too old. We never recorded but there’s at least one bootleg out there. JI: You were told you were too old? BH: Yeah, [Laughs] that was in the ‘80s. JI: I wonder what he would say to you today? BH: I don’t know, and I really don’t care be-cause I think I’ve lasted a pretty long time. I’ve revived myself and survived and rewrit-ten my story. I did just recently turn down a record session because I didn’t like the perpe-tuity, forever terms of the contract. I’m just never signing that kind of contract ever again. The contract had words in it about not only for what was available now, it also alluded to anything that hasn’t been discovered yet. They wanted those rights also. I had to say no

to that. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. JI: How was it to play in a band comprised of all women at the start and how did your male peers respond? BH: It always felt very comfortable to me. We had very different personalities but there were no barriers about how we operated with one another. We were open and shared ideas. We were all women, probably all going through the same kind of discrimination – being turned down, going to jam sessions and not being allowed to play. We didn’t form the band because we weren’t playing with other men, we formed the band because we were happy to have discovered each other. And that was the philosophy that Cobi Narita was try-ing to instill in all of us. That we were women and we deserved the right for space in a man’s world of jazz, and to support one another and


Bertha Hope

“I made a conscious decision not to go with Art Blakey. I didn’t think I was strong enough to do that. I was teaching at that time and he said to me, “How are you going to learn to play the pi-ano if you’re teaching? … You can’t learn how to play the piano if you teach it, you have to

play. Go out on the road with me. When I let you go, you’ll be a leader. If you write anything, we’ll play it.” We talked … and in the end, I thought where I was in my life journey right then didn’t

include being in the band with Art Blakey.”

- Sky News

“We live in a time when smart people are being silenced so that stupid people

won’t be offended.”


stop letting men divide us. So, spiritually, it felt very comfortable. I think we didn’t get our fair share of recognition, but people didn’t harass us about being together. We were prob-ably considered a novelty by some, but it was too important to not go forward. I don’t think we got pushback except the kind of talk I dis-cussed before, such as we were too old and that we weren’t sexy looking enough. JI: Being a female pianist, did you run into a problem during your career where people as-sumed you also sang?

BH: Oh, right. I still run into that. Before they ask me what I play, they say, “So what do you want to sing?” That’s an assumption that men are quick to make. They just assume that you are a singer, and a bad one at that, because they haven’t heard of you. JI: You surfaced in the ‘90s as an active per-former, recording three albums as a leader between ’90-’92. What led to your reemergence? BH: [Laughs] I have no idea. I was playing a lot on the weekends with a band starting in ’76 and I became a fulltime musician in ’82. I was practicing a lot and playing in Bradley’s with Walter Booker and Junior Cook. Junior Cook had a SteepleChase contract and he in-troduced me to those people. Billy Higgins was in town at the time of my first recording

[In Search of Hope, 1990], and I was so fortu-nate because I really wanted to make that full circle connection [with him being at the start of my career]. SteepleChase followed up the first recording by pushing forward a second record, Elmo’s Fire, the next year. It came out with no liner notes because we missed a dead-line. I was so upset because that’s when liner notes were important. The third one [Between Two Kings, 1992], this man from Minor Mu-sic approached me himself. I don’t listen to these records after I do them, I really don’t. JI: Why don’t you listen to your own record-ings? BH: Augh, because I always feel like it could have been better. I’m always upset when I listen to it. ‘Oh, my God, did I really approve

that?’ I feel that once I’ve done that, then I need to be moving on, and for me to sit around and listen to my own music is not real-ly that productive. It’s not pleasant. A lot of people don’t listen to their own music after it’s recorded. JI: The Bertha Hope Trio (Walter Booker, Jimmy Cobb) made two recordings in the ‘90s. What was your experience with that band? BH: That was just a real joy. Walter and Jim-my played together in so many different set-tings, so they were like a hand in a glove. They’d mold this rhythm underneath you that couldn’t miss. Of course, I managed to miss it a couple of times [Laughs], but I felt so fortu-nate to have them say yes to playing in my band. As I said, I always tried to play with

people that I knew I had to step up to their level. It was always a learning experience for me, having to stretch, even though it was my band. The meat of the band came from the great support that I got from those two master musicians. They used to look at each other once in a while with this knowing look that they had just connected some dots that were so spontaneous and so right. It was wonderful and I was scared to death. I took them to Eu-rope on a tour after Between Two Kings was released. Jimmy and Booker were also the rhythm section for Nat Adderley and Nat had a tour booked the same time I did. I was very distraught because I really needed them. I couldn’t even think of who else I would use because they were on the album. I went to Nat and said, ‘I’m asking you if I can borrow your rhythm section,’ because they really were working with him, although they had recorded with me. He thought about it for a while and I explained it was really my first trip out, and he finally said, “Yes.” So, they went on the three-week tour with me and when we came back, Nat said to me, “Never again, Bertha. Oh, my goodness! I really had a time replac-ing them. Moving forward, you can use one or the other, but not both anymore.” Nat and I turned out to be friends and he was a great mentor to me. JI: Would you name a few of your favorite original compositions and the backstory to them? BH: I like “Book’s Bok” because it’s kind of bouncy and exuberant. It’s a contrafact, it’s based on another song but the melody I creat-ed on top of it is not at all like the original melody, it’s just based on the changes. An-other song I like is a Blues called “Bai Tai Blues.” I guess I write a lot on the Blues be-cause I didn’t grow up playing the Blues and I’m still investigating where the pocket is. I had a cat named Tai, but my youngest son was allergic to him. I had to give the cat away, so I wrote a Blues for the cat to say goodbye. I ended up giving it to a neighbor across the hall from me. That made it nice and I continued to take care of her. JI: Would you recommend one of your re-cordings that someone not familiar with your work should listen to? BH: I think the one with no liner notes – Elmo’s Fire and also In Search of Hope which has some nice moments.


Bertha Hope

I took [Walter Booker and Jimmy Cobb] to Europe on a tour after Between Two Kings was

released. Jimmy and Booker were also the rhythm section for Nat Adderley and Nat had a

tour booked the same time I did. I was very distraught because I really needed them. I

couldn’t even think of who else I would use ... I went to Nat and said, ‘... can [I] borrow your rhythm section,’ because they really were

working with him ... He thought about it ... and he finally said, ‘Yes.’ ... when we came back, Nat said to me, ‘Never again, Bertha. Oh, my

goodness! I really had a time replacing them.’”

“You cannot comply your way out of tyranny.

You can only comply your way into it.”


JI: Your rendering of Sonny Fortune’s tune “For Duke and Cannon” on Elmo’s Fire is very special. BH: Thank you. That version is so different from his conception of the song. He played it very up-tempo and when I heard it, I wanted to slow it down. Sonny was very surprised that I wanted to include it on my record date. That was a side of him I’d never seen—that he’d be surprised that somebody else would want to play his music. He said, “I can’t be-lieve you want to play a piece of mine. I never thought about anybody else playing my mu-sic.” I thought that was very odd. JI: Why haven’t you recorded under your name since 1999? BH: Because I haven’t had a record contract offered to me that I liked. And now I’m in the midst of putting one together myself but that’s based on my own finances. There’s a docu-mentary being done about me by Mimi Jones, the bassist. I’m looking for a grant for that and I’m writing all the time. JI: The most surprising recording in your discography is your appearance on avant-garde saxophonist Frank Lowe’s 2001 Soul Folks release. How did you come to work in that setting? BH: [Laughs] Frank really loved Elmo’s mu-sic and he asked me to do it. I told him, ‘I don’t have the imagination or the expertise to play this far outside the box. I don’t think I’m right for this,’ and he just continually said, ‘No, you are. You’ll bring the right spirit to it.” I had a hard time interpreting what I was looking at on the page because he had a very spartan style of writing and it meant you had to do a lot of math inside the structure of the song yourself. I just thought I was an embar-rassment. I’ve had people tell me I was fabu-lous while some others have told me that I didn’t sound like I had a clue about what was going on. I did it because it was something I had never done before, and I just hoped that I could rise to the occasion. There wasn’t much rehearsal for that, and I had to learn on the fly. It is part of my legacy now. JI: The last recording you’ve had a role in was Jon Irabagon’s 2009 The Observer. You did a duet with him on Elmo Hope’s “Barfly.” BH: I think Don Sickler [the producer] thought it would be a good idea. Jon was working on that material at the time and I was brought in to meet him. I think if we had more preparation time that song would have moved into some other areas, because we were head-ed that way. But I think what is on the record is really beautiful, and I love Jon’s sound.

Now that is something I would listen to again, mostly because I remember what I was feeling when I was playing it. The voicings and direc-tions that were being revealed, and the inter-pretations that had not been explored before, that was really quite exhilarating. JI: What was your experience at Bradley’s jazz club in New York? You were one of the few women to play there? BH: From what I understand, Bradley Cun-ningham, himself, picked his favorite piano players to play there. If you played there, it was like playing for Bradley in his own living room kind of feeling. That was great, but if you weren’t one of Bradley’s favorites, you didn’t work there. I must admit that I did not work there as long as Bradley was alive. I was not one of his favorite piano players. I was there a lot, but I didn’t get hired. It was Wen-dy who hired me, and then I was in rotation there for a while. It was great, everybody came to that room, so I got a lot of exposure and I met people from all over the world. Great piano, great room. I had great experi-ences there. George Coleman used to come and sit in with me and pick a song like “Cherokee” and move it through all of the keys. I played with a trio of Junior and Book-er. I felt very special to have been invited into that space. JI: One of your compositions is “Prayer for Sun Ra.” Was that done in tribute to Sun Ra the bandleader? BH: Sun Ra is not the Sun Ra Arkestra, as people think it is named for, although I did see that band several times when they worked at Slug’s. They were really an eclectic group of musicians. Actually, my son, who I named Kevin, took that name. He renamed himself Sun Ra [Gurumayi] and was heavily into stud-ying the history of Egypt and Egyptology. I wrote that piece, which is a through-composed piece, without any formal structure, for him. JI: How is life for you today? Before we started this interview, you said, “You’re going to find out how boring my life is.” BH: [Laughs] Things are very promising. The last three to four years have been very inter-esting because I’ve gotten several awards and been recognized for some of my work. I’ve been honored by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and I’m to receive the Don Redman Heritage Award in West Virginia later this year, along with Reggie Workman. I still do a lot of local and community work and continue to work on the documentary that Mimi Jones has been doing on me. I rehearse a lot with the Elmo Hope project and I’ve been feeling very upbeat about the fact that a lot of things are coming together that I’ve been working on, such as getting into the studio for the first phase of the self-produce CD. I’m hoping I will be able to survive this pandemic. I do

understand how vulnerable I am. It’s a bless-ing that I’m still here and using my gifts. There are so many things I still need to do. I have tapes from Booker’s studio that probably have gold on them – gold and mold. JI: What are your interests outside of music? BH: Nothing unusual. I like to walk the city and I like birds. I’m not a birdwatcher but I’m a bird song person. I couldn’t tell you one bird from another, but I can imitate birds. I knit, sew and read books. I’m an opera fan. I go to the dress rehearsals and that brings back great memories of when I used to sit with the whole family around a single Philco radio and listen to the Met Opera Hour from LA when I was younger. I write some poetry. I like to cook and make bread. I don’t own a TV. Most of what’s on TV is garbage and it was getting to be an invasion. Once I stopped looking at television around 2015, I tell you, the nature of what I did with my music just made it take a 180-degree turn. JI: The last questions have been given by other musicians to ask you: Jon Irabagon (sax) asked: “Hi Bertha, I have fond memories of recording with you ten years ago! My question is what are the main compositional elements or devices that Elmo and you use that you would love to see carried on by the newer generations of jazz compos-ers?” BH: Interesting. I would like to see continued the use of more rhythmic underpinnings than I hear. It seems the structures of new composi-tions are changing in a way that opens up the rhythm to a longer margin and dissipates the feeling that bebop, which was originally dance music, engendered. That’s missing for me. And melodically, I think that music is getting so abstract that melody is not respect-ed as much as it was before. I would like to see writers give a little bit more respect to that particular era in their writing and a little bit more individuality in how they play once they’ve transcribed and learned the elements. They need to turn off that transcription and try to find their own voice instead of the carbon copy kind of music that I hear. It seems like the musicians are being geared to have a ca-reer and to be able to play all different kinds of music, without any real regard for preser-vation. Michele Rosewoman (piano) asked: “I am personally so taken with Elmo’s approach. It’s so personal and uniquely his own. The forms of his compositions and his voice on the in-strument are rhythmically deep and melodi-cally quirky, so asymmetrical and full of sur-prises. Love him like I love Monk—and Bud, I guess for some of the same reasons. Listen-ing to Elmo’s music led me to knowing you. I am curious as to whether there were aspects of Elmo’s approach that permeated yours and to how perhaps you impacted him! Did you


Bertha Hope


influence each other?” BH: That’s a great question. He influenced me much more than I influenced him. I don’t know that I influenced him. His own path is so intertwined with whatever he wanted to say. He had a very singular approach to the music. He was tricky and had a sense of hu-mor and devices that he used that were decep-tive. As much as people might think, we did-n’t play together that much. We wrote a lot more together than we played. We wrote at the same time, but not collaboratively. Sherrie Maricle (drums) asked: "I feel like I was born to swing and would be happy groov-in' away all day. Swing and groove are essen-tial identifying characteristics of jazz. With today's multiverse of styles called jazz, what do you identify as the necessary characteris-tics of jazz?" BH: I think swing is one element as much as you can redefine it. Some element of that al-most has to be there almost as a foundational cornerstone. The name of jazz now is being applied to a wider group of genres that almost doesn’t fit anymore because it’s not definable with any pieces of the foundation that be-longed to it. Melody, swing, rhythm, those are foundational aspects, I think, of the music that I identify as jazz. Some of the music that’s emerging today ignore those. Melody and the swing that causes the rhythm to be a synco-pated, are identified with the word jazz. Benny Green (piano) asked: “I realize that you’re so often asked questions about your legendary husband. It seems that when a tal-ented female musician has an association with a talented male, they often become societally viewed as a counterpart, and I realize that this tendency effectively diminishes the public’s perception of what makes the female artist unique. Are there ways that you feel that your creative musical voice has at times become overlooked for people clamoring to ask you about Elmo? I think that it could be good for us to hear about this, and anything you could contribute on the subject might help in our collective perception of what it means, the positive as well as the drawbacks, when a serious female artist joins her expressional voice with that of a celebrated male. BH: [Laughs] This is tied up with women’s rise to be powerful, whether they be a musi-cian or in any other station in life. Until men are ready to just talk about the subject matter at hand and leave out the fact that you are male or female, that situation will prevail. I’m always aware of the fact that when I’m ap-proached for an interview, 75 percent of the time, people are going to want to know more about Elmo than my relationship to him. Just stop. There is no other way to deal with it but to stop equating women who are affiliated

with men whose stature is already established. If you’re interested in any aspect of the wom-an’s development than you have to start right there. I think it’s getting better. Roni Ben-Hur (guitar) asked: “Can you tell us about the creative relationship you had with Walter Booker? Which projects excited the two of you, and what plans you had for future collaborations?” BH: Walter was a very curios person about a lot of things. He was a scientist, always look-ing at how many different ways he could be involved in presenting the music. The first creative relationship was over putting Elmo’s music together and putting a book together that made sense. We had our hands full with the Elmo Hope Project, which gave us both a lot of fulfillment, and he was very much in-volved in that with me. As far as the future, one of the other projects that we were plan-

ning to further develop was the music of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. That was also something that Elmo was interested in doing with John Coltrane, but they never got to complete that either. Vanessa Rubin (vocals) asked: “When we celebrate Women in Jazz, Bertha Hope is one of the long-distance runners to look at and

appreciate. I have always admired how you have thrived with respect and grace over the years in your own right as a jazz artist work-ing, both as a sideman in various aggrega-tions, and as a band leader in a male dominat-ed business, while also not being overshad-owed by your husband's historical image and story. What was that like and what were the challenges, if any, and things you found help-ful, gender related or not, along the way?” BH: I’ve tried to stay in my own lane. I’ve tried to be the best pianist that I could be, and take advantage of all the help, get the best players available without regard to gender, and try to develop myself without being com-pared to what Elmo’s legacy was. What was helpful was staying involved with my own project material, and the hope that once I got to a position of being able to be presented, that I would be able to share it with the world. I thought that I needed to go forge a way for

myself and not be caught up in all the things that were against me. I never considered that I was trailblazing. I always felt that I was mov-ing in the same direction that other women were doing, and that they had made a little place for me to be as long as I was good enough to be there. I knew that there would be some austerity involved if I was really gonna do this fulltime. I didn’t take a vow of pov-erty, but I did realize there were things I would need to pare down so that I could stay focused on what was most important, and to develop myself. I think I’m still in that same mindset of following the light that other wom-en have left on before me. JI: Any final comments? BH: No, this has been one of the most ex-haustive interviews I’ve had in my life. [Laughs] That’s my final comment! I’m still here and I appreciate that you recognized that I might have something worthwhile to offer.

“I did just recently turn down a record session because I didn’t like the perpetuity, forever terms of the contract. I’m just never signing

that kind of contract ever again. The contract had words in it about not only for what was

available now, it also alluded to anything that hasn’t been discovered yet. They wanted those rights also. I had to say no to that.

I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

Bertha Hope

- William Kingdon Clifford

“The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous,

and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must

sink back into savagery.”


Interview by Eric Nemeyer JI: Could you talk about your album on Cryp-togramophone Records? BM: It’s something that’s been a long time in the making. The project is a project that I’m very pleased with. I’ve been playing with these guys for a little while. Actually, just a couple years ago when I decided that I was going to the studio to record I was approached by some people to do some recording. But it didn’t work out. But, I pretty much had developed the mind for it that I was going to record—so that’s what I did. I just went into the studio, produced everything myself and I regulated all the music and as a consequence, when I finally got it mixed and . . . you know, had it condi-tioned up pretty good; and the preliminary cop-ies [were] made so that I can see how far I can go with it. And that’s when I started talking to Jeff Gauthier with Cryptogramophone. JI: What kind of direction or theme did you

have in mind when you began working on this recording? BM: Well, first thing, this is a piano-less group. I play the piano on one tune, but for the most part it’s a rotation. So the pieces that I’d written over a period of time. I wanted to see what I could do so as to put some kind of struc-ture to it so that the pieces would flow into each other. And as it turned out, it came out all right. They compliment each other. JI: Why did you choose to use a piano less group? BM: Because I wanted to get away from the standard kind of a sound. I wanted to explore a

lot of development in rhythm. That was the thing. I didn’t want to have any kind of instru-ment that would fill up the space. I wanted the music to be as transparent as I could make so by taking the piano out I achieved that on that end. And after we had been playing for a while, we had done some great tracks togeth-er—with Darek Oles, drummer Michael Steph-ans, and percussionist Daryl Jackson. It took me a while to find the right combination of people. JI: When you’re playing without piano of course there’s the benefit of not having some-body pre-direct you with certain chords and substitutes and wherever you want to go BM: Well, I felt that most of my career there’s always been a piano and (very few situations where there was not). Frankly I got tired of it. I wanted to see if I can create some music that would have a sound that’s uniquely it’s own—where harmony is more implied than actually stated. That gave me a lot of room to do what I

wanted in terms of improvisation. It’s working out quite good, but like I said I did take a mo-ment to find the right kind of people to do it. There was a period—actually the only person I had who was available to me to play was my drummer. So he and I would get together once a week and just play for like 2 hours. JI: Just drums and horn? BM: Yeah, and during that time I didn’t do tunes or anything, I just explored sounds and rhythms, and just did it like that and then Mi-chael suggested that maybe we should get a bass player. So I said oh, okay. Who do you think we should call? And we called a few guys and I think they were totally uncomforta-ble at what we were doing—because every-

thing was totally improvised. It made some musicians uncomfortable, but I’m a very tune-ful guy, you know. I know tunes. I just wanted to explore to see if I could open up some ave-nues for myself in the music. And what hap-pened between Michael and I was really great because there were only 2 people. And you’re even more exposed than when there’s four people. So we played and we had such a great time doing his. We called several bass players and they would play maybe once and then we would never see them again. They wouldn’t come back to play with us, but I felt at that point—I told Michael early in the process, you know—I want somebody that’s open enough to come and just create something. That’s never been done at least not by me and so we had Darek Oles. He came and we set up and we just started playing—and he was kind of baf-fled. It didn’t [have] any kind of music—no rhythm—music [at all]. We just started out. He wasn’t comfortable with that—not yet, you know . . . I mean he came a couple of times, but he didn’t come back any more. So we kind of kept going. I wanted to have acoustic peo-ple. We started just doing the trio thing and we got to play at a place that I love to play in L.A. It’s known as the World Stage and that place was founded by the late Bill Hayden—a well known artist in L.A. But it’s one of the few places where young musicians can come and work through whatever they’re trying to work through. It doesn’t matter whether you play well or not. It’s open for the public. . . . So I go there twice a year. There are other places in L.A. that I don’t even bother with because they’re so regimented in what they present that you know, I decided I’m going to let them come to me. I did start to write some of the tunes down, you know, so we could have a theme. But some of it was just open—just open improv. You know, just come out and you play. So the way I liked the structure is like I never talked about anything in terms of what we’re going to play. I just don’t. After a few bass players, Darek Oles came back, JI: Could you talk about the compositions? BM: I’ll usually have an idea for something and I usually like it when it just comes—when I get a flash. But from the ongoing improvisa-tion, that enabled me to explore some different things that I’m working on. There’s a gentle-man that I studied with in Los Angeles Lyle Spud Murphy in the late 70s. It was the result of a grant I received from the National Endow-ment to study composition. His techniques involve what he calls horizontal composition. So you create vertical structures by writing one line at a time. He introduced me to a way of doing things that was a little bit different and over time I kind of put my spin on it. I’m still doing it, but I’m finding different things that are working for me—especially in this context, with no piano. As we started playing more with the quartet—I call it the ensemble—we got quite a few things going on. In 2001 I received the grant that’s part of Chamber Music Ameri-ca—a new music presentation grant. I applied


Benny Maupin

Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock

INTERVIEWINTERVIEW

“There’s a gentleman that I studied with in Los Angeles Lyle Spud Murphy in the late 70s … His

techniques involve what he calls horizontal composition. So you create vertical structures by writing one line at a time. He introduced me to a way of doing things that was a little bit dif-ferent and over time I kind of put my spin on it.”


for it because I had some music and I never would of applied for it had it not been for Eric Reed. Eric Reed sent me emails. He sent me hard mail. He made phone calls. He said “look, this is something that you could do well with— you should really apply for it and I decided at the 11th hour that I would. JI: Under what criteria were you applying? Did they have certain criteria or limitations? BM: No, at that time the guidelines were for leaders of ensembles who have some kind of instrument, who do original music. You just apply for it and see what happens. Basically, all you had to do, if you’re a recipient, is to fulfill your requirements with them. To fulfill my requirements with them, I did two concerts. I gave them all the press that was related to those concerts and after that—that was it. I was able to pay the guys something really nice for doing it. I bought my first lap top. I got busy with correspondence and taking care of busi-ness. The recording that I had done with the trio is the music that I had used for the applica-tion. You can have up to 15 minutes of music. You can break it down anyway you want, you know. And so I just decided, I’ll send in this. I followed the guidelines and I did everything with the application and sent it. With that came the big surprise when I was notified that I would receive the grant. You can’t ever give up on what it is you know. It’s important to find ways to subsidize what you do. And so my involvement with Chamber Music America has really helped me tremendously. They actu-ally called me and asked me if I would come to New York to play at the 26th annual conference that they have here. And I said sure. So I said you just want me? And they said no we want you to bring your ensemble here. I actually played two nights. I made some great connec-tions with folks. We did a concert at Sweet Rhythm, and a concert at a church. At the church, I met two women who live in Califor-nia who were both presenters. So I was able to present my music in three chamber music se-ries. It was a different kind of a program. Be-cause of the nature of what we do, they said “why don’t we put it in the chamber music series?” Okay that’s great. That way it’s not limited. Because I think that lot of time when people hear that word—the “j” [jazz] word—they go like, “oh, I’m not going to that.” The concerts were well attended. I also made some great connections through Chamber Music America. During the year they have all sorts of workshops where they give you information on how to establish residencies—which a lot of people are starting to do now. Those give you the opportunity to put your music out there. JI: Could you talk about what got you started on your path in music? BM: Well, growing up in Detroit there was a

lot of music at the time. In the 40s and the 50s the school system was really thriving. Every-one could learn to play an instrument. The mu-sic programs were very good. Plus, there were a lot of musicians who lived in Detroit. I got this opportunity to study with a man by the name of Larry Teal and that got me going. From there once I got to high school, I started just hanging out with guys a little bit older than me and we started listening to people play, especially Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris, Charles McPherson, Joe Henderson I studied with Yusef. Larry Teal would give you what you needed if you were ready. He taught me flute, he taught saxophone. Yusef was already play-ing multi-reed instruments and experimenting with scales in other parts of the world. There was a lot of opportunity to hear him. There was also an after-hours place outside of Detroit where you could go hear music. I heard Eric Dolphy there with the singer Dakota Staton. Eric was the main soloist. At that time every-body played bebop. So you had to learn it. You had to get it. One of my friends used to go to Barry Harris’ house to study with him. I could-n't afford to study with him, but when my friend would take his lesson he would say why don’t you just go with me—so I would just kind of go and sit in the corner while he was taking the lesson. Barry taught me a lot. I saw him a few years ago and I told him that. I used to listen to Charlie Parker, Mingus, Bud. There were a huge number of players in Detroit play-ing bebop and later, a huge number playing Motown . . . and that’s how I managed to get to New York—sort of. I got a gig with the Four Tops. This was before their big hits. Joe Hen-derson used to work with them. They called me while I was going to the Detroit Institute of Musical Arts to go on tour. When I came to New York then, I went to see Monk at the old Five Spot. JI: What kind of gigs began to open up for you? BM: I got to New York in 1962. The first gig that began to open up for me was when I went to the New York employment office and ap-plied for the gig. It was the same kind of gig I had in Detroit—taking care of research ani-mals. They sent me on the interview in upper Manhattan to the George memorial hospital. I went to apply for this job working in the labor-atory taking care of the animals through human resources. I kept that job for three and a half, almost 4 years. That’s how I supported myself and I took private lessons with Joe Allard. I started playing with the players. I met Marion Brown, Archie Shepp, and all the guys in the Lower East Side. I also started reaching some guys who were Puerto Rican and they wanted me to come and play with them, but that was too many people. They had some tunes they wanted to play and nobody to write the music. So I transcribed some of the tunes. That was my first introduction to Latin music; I love Latin Music! Over time, I started playing, Fri-day night, Saturday, having a good time, just exploring all the different things going on. And on Monday—back to my day gig.

JI: What prompted you to leave the day gig? Were you getting so much work at that point? BM: Yeah, my reputation was growing and I was practicing a lot. Even though I had the day gig I was back home and I made my house the center of activity. The guys came over, we had a bass player right across the hall from us his name was Don Moore . . . He played with Elvin Jones. And there was another guy who was from Philly; never knew his real name—everyone called him “Bones the drummer.” When bones came home, we all kind of would have a little supper and we would play for two or three hours. I was always finding situations that I could play, even though I had a day job. I just made it a point that I was going to play all the time and that’s what I did. And I was tak-ing private lessons. Joe Allard helped me a lot. He gave me some good technique and helped me with that. A musician named Marvett Watts played the bass clarinet. He couldn’t play any-thing traditional at all. He was very successful as a painter. He wanted to sell the bass clarinet he had, after he went to Paris to buy a new one. So I bought his bass clarinet for about $75. I started playing and the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it because it’s a different voice. It’s a totally different voice because we’re dealing with the lower frequencies. And you got a lot of latitude there and the potential. I was playing it with McCoy Tyner. I just started playing it and just started really loving it. And I remember one night when we were playing, Miles came in. Jack DeJohnette—whose one of my very best friends—he had been talking to Miles about Herbie because his band was get-ting ready go on tour—and Joe Zawinul and Wayne had already gone on to form Weather Report. So, then I get this call that Miles want-ed me to come to the studio. I’m thinking that he wants to play the saxophone, but he says ‘no, I want you to play the bass clarinet.’ Now it was a beginning of a whole new thing. That enabled me to emerge into setting myself apart from all the saxophonists. JI: Were playing with McCoy in 68 or 69? BM: In 68. Actually, I got my first really im-portant gig with Horace Silver. I got to be in a lot of good situations. I really did. And I think it was because I did the work. I saw a lot of guys miss opportunities. They didn’t really have good people skills. They were good musi-cally, but it’s more than that. I just wanted to play well. I didn’t think very much about a career until I started working with Horace’s band. He gave me a lot of input. He took me to Europe for the first time. He taught me about how to establish a publishing company, and the business end. He always had that. So after I worked with him, it was very easy for me to move around. I kept the say gig until it was time for me to step out. And, I stepped out and fell down, and got up, and fell a lot of times. Back then there were so many great people—Trane was still alive. There were was Hank Mobley, Clifford Jordan, George Coleman, Dewey Redman… You just had to get in line. So I thought, “okay, I’ll just practice and do


Benny Maupin


my thing. One recording I did enabled me to advance. That was a recording with Kenny Barron and Jimmy Owens, called You Had Better Listen, on Atlantic. It was one of the first recordings that really got to the radio. As a result of being on the radio people started hear-ing my name. JI: Do you remember any specific conversa-tions you might have had or any advice that significantly impacted your artistry in that growth period you were going through? BM: Horace rehearsed us seriously. He knew exactly what he wanted. He talked about the dynamics of the music. Those are the things that you learn by being with someone that’s doing it. JI: You were doing a lot of his standards as well as new things? BM: He was writing new tunes, but of course he did the standards, but Horace was always working on something, every day. He always had some paper and he was writing new ideas. And he showed me how you deal with the pub-lic. Our first public appearance was in a place called Coffee Grill. And we were there for like two weeks. And after like the first two, three nights, we were going towards the weekend, and Horace told me, “I don’t want you to bring the music on the bandstand anymore. You have to memorize everything.” And I was like, “Ok!” JI: But you were playing a lot though. So you probably kind of had a lot of it down. BM: Yeah, but I mean, you know, that was a formidable challenge for me, to memorize all these tunes. That was a lot of tunes. JI: You weren’t always playing the melodies. You were playing… BM: …harmonies. Horace was playing the melody. So that was a really big challenge for me. He knew what he wanted. He was very specific about it. Some of the times, if I would explore a little bit to the outer limits, he would reel me in. He’d say, “That’s ok, but on this particular tune, I need to have you here—reel into what we’re doing.” It was great. Oh, what I wanted to say is, you know, when you play in the clubs, people just start drinking, and they’re getting loud, and stuff is going on, Hor-ace never lost his composure, never once. His manner, speaking to the audience, talking about the tunes and acknowledging people that have known him for a long time, ‘cause there’s lot going on when you’re that famous. People coming in there bringing him fried chicken and putting it in the dressing room. He’s saying hi to some people and talking about the next tune. But I just learned through observation.

JI: When you were with him, you recorded an album or two, didn’t you? BM: Yeah, first recording was Serenade to a Soul Sister. I’m on Side B and Stanley Turren-tine is on Side A. And then we did another one called You Gotta Take a Little Love. So that exposure going to Europe that opened a whole wonderful world to me, ‘cause I always wanted to go. JI: You were playing every night in Europe? BM: Pretty much, yeah. We were on a tour it was called The Newport Blues Festival in Eu-rope. It wasn’t the jazz festival. We went to London. We played in Rome, Milan, and Ger-many. JI: Was it tiring physically? BM: I was totally excited, man. Fatigue never kicked in. I was always excited just to be there.

‘Cause we were on tour—and as I said, it was The Newport Blues Festival in Europe—so we were on tour with Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, and a bunch of other guys who had probably played with Muddy for years and years, a gos-pel group from Philadelphia known as The Stars of Faith, and a guy named Joe Simon, who was kind of a—he did his best to try to sound like Sam Cooke. But it was just one of those experiences that I’ll never forget. First of all it was the first time working with George Wein, all of that kind of stuff. It was a real eye-opener. I was in Paris for the first time. It was all these things that you imagine going to see. JI: What prompted you to leave Horace’s band? BM: Well, actually, the way Horace conducted his bands during that period, he would give some guys that work [am opportunity to rec-ord] and he’d do a project recording for Blue Note. After about a year, he would do it all over again just find a whole new group of guys. So really he gave a lot of guys a good opportunity to get some good exposure.

JI: And then after Horace you hooked up with Lee Morgan. BP: Yeah, well, during my first few weeks with Horace, after Horace accepted me and wanted me to play in his band, we were re-hearsing up in Lyn Oliver Studios, and one day Lee Morgan walks in and I was like, “Wow!” I had seen him forever, you know, with Art Bla-key. I know all of his recordings. And so he came over and introduced himself to me and he said [lowers his voice to a whisper], “How you doing, man? I’ve been hearing about you and how’d you like to do a recording with me.” I was like, “Yeah!” He said, “Ok, I got your phone number and I’m going to call you,” which was another turning point. So there was a nice momentum being built up. JI: Were Lee’s tunes all written out too? How did he go about rehearsing, getting it all togeth-er with you guys?

BM: Lee was a terrific writer. He had a great hand. He wrote the tunes out. He brought the tunes over. In fact, he asked me when we first started rehearsing, “Do you have any tunes? Got anything you want to play?” I was like, “Yeah, I do.” “What you got?” So I brought in something. I don’t know what tunes it was. We started messing around with it. He said, “Yeah, I like it.” And then we rehearsed it, ‘cause I had sort of been playing them all day. So I had parts for everybody. But I was still kind of nervous about bringing it out. So he started playing it and showing me something about harmony. Then he said, “Got any more?” And is it turned out on Live at the Lighthouse, five of my tunes were recorded. JI: I like the complete three-CD set which they re-released [Editor’s Note: in 2021 a 12 LP set of every set from theat booking was released], which I was fascinated by because Jack DeJohnette comes in and sits in with the group. BM: Isn’t it awesome. It is, man. By the time we got to the Lighthouse, we had been touring I guess maybe a couple of years. And that was


Benny Maupin

“The recording that I had done with the trio is the music that I had used for the application. You can have up to 15 minutes of music … I followed the guidelines and I did everything

with the application and sent it. With that came the big surprise when I was notified that I would receive the grant. You can’t ever give up on what it is you know. It’s important to

find ways to subsidize what you do.”


great for me. It was a wonderful experience just getting to know him. He knew a lot of real-ly nice people that he introduced me to. JI: Did he make any suggestions about how he wanted you to phrase or how he wanted to you to explore the music? BM: No, never. He just gave me some pointers on how we could make our melodies sound better in the ensemble parts. JI: You mean specific articulations, dynamics? BM: Yeah, ‘cause he has all of that. Yeah, he knew all of that. I just basically just followed him a lot. So we had a great time. We played the hell out of my tunes. The one that a lot people remember is “Neophilia.” I wrote that in Japan sitting on a train. JI: How did the name for evolve? BM: I was reading this book, The Naked Ape. And that word, “Neophilia,” was in the book. I explored it a little bit and found out what it meant. It means love for new things, love for change. JI: You recorded an album on ECM Records in 1974 or so.

BM: Yeah, that was my very first project called The Jewel in the Lotus. That came about as a result of my involvement with Marion Brown. He had already done some work with them, and that’s when I met Manfred Eicher. He was the producer. So Manfred, we were actually on tour with The Headhunters, and Manfred approached me, we were in Germany, and asked me if I’d be interested in doing a project for myself. “Sure. I’d love to.” It all worked out. He said, “Ok. write the music.” He never talked to me about the music, never said “oh I’d kind of like to have this or that.” He didn’t say anything. So I took my time and I

wrote the music, took me I guess six, seven months. I just got up every morning and I start-ed writing little melodies. And then we would communicate via telephone. There were no fax machines or no e-mails. So he would call me up, “How you doing with everything.” “Ok, I think I’ve got enough for us to actually go and do this record.” So he said, “Okay.” We worked it so that the recording came at a time when Herbie was not working—because we were working a lot with the Headhunters. Manfred said I want you to do whatever you want. So I said, “Ok.” So we did the tapes, and a lot of the takes were like first takes. I think because of the nature of the music it was easy to do. I think we had one rehearsal. We just wanted to make sure that the notes were where they should be. And after that we went in and we recorded. We were done with all of the tracking in two days. Then Manfred invited me to come to Munich. I just finished doing this tour with Herbie and I was exhausted. I just rested. He said, “Why don’ you just rest and think about what you might want to do for the mixing.” So I stayed in Munich for the better part of a week. And he took me out for the evening, took me to dinner, brought me back to the hotel. After that, we went to Norway, went to Oslo, and that’s where we finished it. JI: With Lee, that gig lasted for… BM: …about two years. JI: You did Live at the Lighthouse and then right after that you hooked up with Miles Da-

vis for Bitches Brew, right? How did that over-lap? BM: Actually, I had already done that. Big Fun was recorded shortly after Bitches Brew. It didn’t get any attention at all, probably has gotten more attention now that it’s been re-leased on CD then it did initially because Bitches Brew caused such a stir. JI: Could you talk about your association with Miles Davis? BM: I think I learned a lot from him about just

allowing the music to unfold. He never said very much to anybody in the studio as we were doing these things. First of all no one really realized what it was that he was doing. He con-ducted everything in a certain way. He’d start the tune, of course Joe Zawinul and Chick they already had some harmonic stuff or something that they were working with. He was ok with that. I guess that they had already looked at it already. And then when it was time for me to come and play, he and I and Wayne were kind of baffled off from the drums. So we just played. Miles never said a word about anything concerning what I was playing. He never said a word. He never said a word. JI: Just the rhythm section’s going on. BM: Right. He would wave people in and then he would wave people out. He would let me know when he wanted me to play, when he wanted me to stop. But each morning—‘cause that went on over a period of days—each morning he would come in and he would say something like [lowers his voice], “Man, that was really interesting what you were playing.” And I never knew what it was because he nev-er let anyone hear any playback. There was no way you could imitate yourself and try to play what you thought was your best stuff. JI: So everything was fresh which was the way he wanted. BM: Yeah, it was a great experience being in there with him. That made me realize that his approach to creating music was really based on trust. There was no way in hell you could ever have planned what happened there. He wanted it to have the character that everyone brought to it. And that’s what it was. He just kept im-proving everything he was known for. No more “Funny Valentine,” none of that. After all these years have passed, a lot or people are just discovering this music, which is very interest-ing. He didn’t want to repeat himself. And he didn’t. JI: When you heard it back, how did that cor-respond with what you thought you were play-ing? BM: I had no point of reference. I had a funny experience when I heard it back, because it didn’t come out until 1970, or ’68, ’69. I don’t really recall. I think it was ’70, ‘cause I was in Japan for the first time. I came back from Ja-pan and I stopped in California, ‘cause I went to see the lady that I was going to marry. I did-n’t know that I was going to marry her but I did. And I was having this little vacation. I had just done this tour with Jack DeJohnette and Mel Lewis and a Japanese drummer, and Roy Haynes. It was the Gretsch Drum Festival. They used to do it every year. I got to be on that. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. So I stopped and I met my lady. And we drove from Southern California up to San Francisco. And we get to San Francisco and discover that Miles is playing at the Fillmore. So we go to the Fillmore. And I walked in the dressing


Benny Maupin

“… the way Horace conducted his bands during that period, he would give some

guys that work [am opportunity to record] and he’d do a project recording for Blue

Note. After about a year, he would do it all over again just find a whole new group of

guys. So really he gave a lot of guys a good opportunity to get some good exposure.”


room and Miles is looking at me, “What are you doing here? You bring that funny horn?” [the bass clarinet] Miles was great, to-wards me. He was great. We had no problem communicating at all. He had a great sense of humor. So we listened to the concert, said hi to all the guys. And then we left and while we were in the car, I heard this music on the radio. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was. And it was going on for a long time, ‘cause you know how long those tracks are. Then finally, after maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, the guy who was playing the record-ing says, “This is the new Miles Davis record-ing that’s playing here tonight the first time. It’s called Bitches Brew. I heard some stuff in there. I heard the bass clarinet and that’s not really what it sounded like. And finally this woman that I was with she said, “That’s you?” “Yeah!” I was shocked, man. When I first heard it, I was shocked. And they played it all. You know, San Francisco has always been so cool when it comes to the music. When the guy was playing it, the announcer, he said, “Look, I’m not going to be talking very much because we’re playing this really special recording.” And he put it on and we just listened to it. As I was listening to it I just felt so much gratitude and appreciation to be involved in something that was totally different from any music going on. And not only that, the fact that I got to be able to do it for the great Miles Davis gave me a sense of accomplishment. It made me feel how good you are is how good you want to be. Like I’d been listening to him all these years and he’s still forging ahead. He’s doing what-ever he can to come up with, something differ-ent. And he was criticized. That’s amazing. It was a parting of the ways. He incorporated all these elements in rock, and blues, and fused improvisation on top of that with the drums and all the African rhythms. People could not believe it [laughs]. They were all asking, “What’s that? What are you playing?” Every minute he was excited. That was the one thing I remember. He was excited about what was happening. He was very happy. At that point, Miles was very healthy. He would record and as soon as it was over, he would pack up his

stuff. He would pack the music and head straight down the stairs. He would get in the limo. JI: You said he packed up the music. What kind of music? BM: He had some music. He would have like a score, and you’d see a bunch of chords. He gave me some music. He had some voicings. He had some rhythms, and every now and then he’d have some melodies. That music just came out of everybody’s life. He opened it up, man. He trusted us and he gave us a forum to do the work. How many people are going to do that for you? He was a magician. That’s what it was, magic. That was magic. JI: What kind of direction did Herbie provide for you? BM: He was just like Miles. Herbie wouldn’t say anything. He had a little bit to say, but he left us to make our own choices. I mean he had the music. When we started out we were play-ing music from The Prisoner, Speak Like a Child, and “I Have a Dream,” beautiful compo-sitions. And so we started playing the music as a point of departure. And that music just evolved into some other music. It really did. Then Herbie recorded two of my pieces. One called “Quasar” and one called “Water Tor-ture.” And that took us in another direction too—because then Captain Gleeson was there with his synthesizers. So we started to get to be even more experimental. The things that we did together, I wish they could have been really been captured when we were at that piece. He was with Warner Brothers and they wanted very much to do what they could with the mu-sic, but they didn’t know what the music was—because the music was so far out that they were baffled by the music. But they had a schedule. They had a production schedule, “Gotta have a recording.” It was a lot of pres-sure on Herbie, because it was his contract. He was just going through one of those phases that you just go through sometimes. He wasn’t re-laxed enough to really compose that much mu-sic. JI: Was the Headhunters’ success unexpected for you? BM: The Sextant, even thought musically it was probably one of the best experiences I’ve had in a group, financially, it just wasn’t possi-ble to continue. So Herbie dissolved it and he asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the new stuff. Sure, I had a family to take care of. He asked me to work with him on some tunes. We went into rehearsal mode and Harvey Ma-son came and Paul Jackson and Bill Summers. We started experimenting and things. The tune that really opened up the whole things as far as Headhunters was concerned was “Chameleon.” “Chameleon” came about through us jamming. We were just jamming one day. We were down in the studio. It was the first time since I had started working with Herbie that we actually had a rehearsal sched-

ule on a regular basis. We rehearsed Monday thru Friday for two or three weeks. Then we recorded a little bit, made a little recording. We would put some stuff up and just kind of played. And then one day we were in there doing what we did and I was thinking about that little melody. And we went back and lis-tened to it and everybody believed that there was enough there that we should look at it a little closer and see if we could shape it into something. JI: Are you a co-composer on that? BM: Yes. That was a quirky melody. That came about as a result of I went to a concert sponsored by a company known as Wattstax. And they had a big festival in L.A. All these funk artists came. And I’m sitting there with my family all day just looking at people danc-ing. At that time there was a dance that was really popular. It was called “The Funky Ro-bot.” Everybody was doing this dance and I was looking at them. And I was just kind of looking at the rhythm. And I started thinking about how jerky it was. Everybody’s kind of doing robotic kind of moves. Then the next day when we came back, I just went into this thing. I just started playing this strut-staccato kind of thing with the melody. Herbie added some changes and stuff around it. And when it came out, people loved it. It was totally a collabora-tive thing. It was just one of those things, and the rest of it is history.

Visit Bennie on the web at www. BennieMaupin.com

This interview with Benny Maupin was origi-nally published in Jazz Improv Magazine,

Volume 7, No. 2, Spring 2007 (cover below)


Benny Maupin

- Samuel Adams

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men

shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced

patriots to prevent its ruin.”


By Eric Nemeyer Tenor saxophonist Michael Pedicin is a na-tive of Philadelphia who is currently based in New Jersey. He started playing professionally as a teenager and had his first major break when he began a ten year stint with Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Rec-ords as a busy studio musician and touring saxophonist for The O’Jays, David Bowie, Lou Rawls, Stevie Wonder, MFSB, and many other acts that recorded at the famous Sigma Sound Studios. Michael went on to pursue a few other challenges, earning a Ph.D. in Cog-nitive and Creative Arts Psychology, an hon-orary doctorate from Combs College of Mu-sic, and two illustrious teaching positions at University Of The Arts/Philadelphia and Tem-ple University/Philadelphia. He has played with Maynard Ferguson, Dave Brubeck, Stan-ley Clarke, Terence Blanchard, and Pat Mar-tino. His 2007 release is entitled Everything Starts Now. Web: www.michaelpedicin.com. JI: Let’s talk about your new album, the de-velopment of the repertoire and selection of personnel. MP: The new album is called Everything Starts Now. We’ve gotten a couple advanced reviews which have been good. The album came about when I gave up all of my Atlantic City stuff—when I just couldn’t stand doing it anymore. I just had to play my saxophone which is the one thing in my life that makes me happy. I went up to New York for a while and kind of tried to get over into that scene a little bit and found it extremely difficult—in 1999. I tried to hang out a lot in New York and play in New York. I was playing a lot at the 55 Bar—maybe every third week. It was harder and then I thought, you know what, I found L.A. to be a very friendly place years ago. So, I decided to make a move out there. My move out there really was just to be able to play more. I did what I wanted to do. L.A. is not New York. It is not the purist, real jazz scene that I feel New York is. It at least has more opportunity to play. And ,I think it’s a friendlier city in the sense that you can do more quickly. JI: In New York, everything takes place in a much more geographically compressed area too—so a slight advantage back east. MP: Right. The minute I went there, the day I was moved there – I got an apartment first by

myself. Saxophonist Vince Trombetta’s son, who I had known, called me and said, “Ernie [Watts] wants you to sub tomorrow in his band that we play in, can you do it?” That was the day I arrived. And I said, “Well my flight will get me in late tonight. Yeah, I’ll do it.” And, so as a result of that I became Ernie Watt’s sub. That was my entre into L.A., when Ernie Watts couldn’t do a gig, I started to sub for him. It meant a little work and some fun jazz stuff. From that web, I met some of the other guys. So while I was there, busy, again, not being able to survive financially by the way—which is why I ended up coming back to Philadelphia again—I met this guitar

player, Johnny Valentino, who is originally a Philly guy. He moved to L.A. twenty some years ago I guess. He has a wonderful gig. He is the music guy for the Mattel Industries, so he picks and chooses what he plays. He doesn’t go out and do all the gigs that some-body like me has to do whether you like them or not. So, I met John, and I had known him years ago. In fact when I had a band way back with [drummer[ Darrell Brown in the very late 70’s or early 80’s, Johnny later told me that

he used to come out and hang out on South Street where we used to play at Grendel’s Lair and Stephen Starr’s Club. He was a kid then, I never even knew him. He is a lot younger than I am. He was probably fifteen years old. We started to hang out and we talked and he said, “I’d like to write – do a project with you.” And I said, “Well, I would love you to do a project for me.” He said, “Well, I’d like to write it all for you.” So, I said, “What?” So, after being out there for a year and playing together on a bunch of gigs, because he had a bunch of little gigs, he started to write music for this record. Nine out of the ten songs are his. We recorded it in Philadelphia because it was cost effective for me to do it that way. I had since moved back. I guess I’m jumping ahead of the story. So, I moved back to Phila-delphia, came back to Philadelphia almost two years ago. We recorded a little over a year ago. Johnnie Valentino and Chris Colangelo, a bassist from Philadelphia who also moved out there, were on the recording. He plays in the style of John Patitucci. He’s got a lot of soul, a lot of balls and great intonation. A bass player with great intonation, I could fall in love with very easily. There aren’t a whole lot

of them around. You know, Trane played, well not out of tune, but he always had that sharp edge to his horn. In fact, when I was in Pat Martino’s band we used to get into match-es about that. Pat says, “No he doesn’t.” And I say, “Pat, everybody in the world knows he plays sharp.” That’s what makes his sound what it is. I love it. I mean I play the same way because I modeled myself growing up. That’s how I played, that’s how I hear. Now,


Michael Pedicin

Good Fortune & The Lifelong Process of Discovery

INTERVIEWINTERVIEW

“[Michael Brecker’s] mother once asked me a question … when I was playing a club date. I was

so embarrassed to see Mr. and Mrs. Brecker. I wanted to hide and she caught my eye and waved to me. When I came walking off, I gave her a kiss.

I knew them well and she said, ‘Oh honey, you are so lucky.’ We had talked about my wife and two little kids at that time. I said, ‘Mrs. Brecker, I am not lucky. Look what I’m doing.’ She said

“Honey, you are so lucky. You have a family. You have parents to love you. You have a wife and

two beautiful children. You’re so lucky, Michael.” … at that point in my life I didn’t really understand

it as much as I got to understand it later.”


on the new album, the other guys that we used in addition were drummer Michael Sarin, and Mick Rossi on piano. JI: I remember hearing him in Atlantic City around 1981 or 82. There was an after-hours club on North Carolina Avenue. MP: The Last Resort. There was a really good young alto player, Dave MacKenzie. He actu-ally was a young guy that moved to Florida—really talented, like a Bobby Martin kind of sax player. Mick lives in Brooklyn, plays around the city, and he’s Phillip Glass’ right hand, like, piano player person. I think he started with him as a percussionist believe it or not. He was a French horn major in college. He goes out with Philip a lot—which, makes it harder for me to access him when I need him. We recorded live a couple little things here and there. But it basically was done live. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. Where do you search for a deal in this day and age? JI: You put it out yourself. MP: That’s what I did. I found a distributor for the physical CDs. That will end up mean-ing in the long run next to nothing—because it’s all downloading today. CD Baby has some. My website of course has some. So, I feel great. JI: Promotion and marketing are really im-portant. Many artists I speak with think that “Oh, I have a Web site now and that will sell my music.” But, it’s like having a lemonade stand in the desert. If nobody knows you have one... MP: Exactly. If a tree falls and nobody is there to hear it. That’s so true. But, you know what, Eric? All I want to do—I mean I hope I sell a couple CDs—it’s really just about play-ing. All I want to do in my life...I just want to play. I always I had to get out of Philly. I mean musically, for the fifteen years it took out of my music life, was going to Atlantic City. I fell into it because I started making a living and I realized I could buy a house and send my kids to college, you know. Then when I realized I had done enough of that and they were okay, that’s when I got the heck out again. I went with Pat Martino. Pat’s band got me back on the road to feeling like a player again. When I went out with him, that really got me back to feeling comfortable to being a sax player again. With the new album, we recorded in Philadelphia at NZS Studio. Mike Forte owns it. He used to be at Alpha Studios when we used to do so much there for the Disco era in the late 70’s, I guess. He runs the place now. It’s a big room so he can do a live thing there. We brought in a piano, because I

had to rent a piano for the weekend. I took it up to Sterling to have it mastered. I’ve gotten good reviews saying I’m filtering Coltrane through Dexter, and Mike Brecker. I sound like either of them, but I mean, the influence of both of them is great on my part. I’m play-ing more now than I have probably for 25 years. I feel like where I was when I was a young guy. I’ve written a lot now since I’ve gotten back to it too. So, the next will be more mine. And this one was nothing of mine. JI: Which is more comfortable for you—recording live or in the studio? MP: I think my sound is more accurately cap-tured live then I ever have been when I go into the studio. I don’t relax in the studio like I feel like I do when I’m playing live. JI: Is it because you’re overcome with the need for perfection that recording many takes can provide? MP: That’s so true. Stanley Clarke told me a story about Joe Henderson. Stanley asked, “Well you want to take another?” And Joe

said, “No, I just played it. I just did it. It’s me, Joe Henderson. It wouldn’t be much differ-ent—just a couple notes. I mean the notes will be different. But, you will get a similar kind of solo.” That’s how I play. You are who you are and the solo you play is a beautiful thing. Even if it’s not what you consider to be the best. It’s you. It’s where you are at that mo-ment. Regardless, when I finished this project or any other, I almost can’t like listen to it. JI: I find myself feeling the same way when-ever I record. It’s painful sometimes—too painful to listen to, at least in the moments after recording. Then a day or a week or months later, I find that I like the music more. By that time, I can’t remember where every one of the mistakes, or what I thought were imperfections, were—however insignificant they might have been.

MP: So I’m not the only one. I went through the same feeling. And I had to listen to it be-cause it was going to be mastered. And you have to keep listening to those parts. You know, the mixing, mixing what was painful to me. Because you keep hearing yourself when you’re mixing it. And you keep listening to that same solo over and over. It’s a weird thing. So I said, “Let me get away from it.” Which I did for four or five days. And I said, “I’ll listen again and hopefully we’ll be able to go in and mix it.” But, I can’t stand listen-ing to it now, so. JI: Talk about your time playing with Pat Martino. MP: Pat and I had talked about playing to-gether for years. Pat’s four or five years older than I am. I looked at Pat like most of us did, I think, growing up in Philly. I idolized him. I was in awe of his ability and the way he spoke and his vernacular and his whole approach. Very deep. Very deep. When Joe Donofrio, his manager, called and said, “Pat wants to get together with you and he wants to have dinner and talk about going out.” He had just done

that album with Joe Lovano. Other than Eric Alexander, Pat doesn’t have a saxophone in his band. I was thrilled to death to be asked and said yes immediately. We put a band to-gether. He had heard this young kid from New York named Frank LoCrasto, who was 20 years old, a young kid from Texas. Pat called me and asked me if I’d rehearse his band be-fore I had even rehearsed with him. He was going to Ireland for a couple of days. So Frank, myself and the drummer and bass play-er got together for a couple of days before Pat got back. I really, really had a great time. It’s a whole other kind of perspective the way he plays and how he approaches what he does. And the appeal that he has to the audiences—no matter where we were. We even played the Blue Note in South Korea. We got along. There were two young kids in the band. They were a little maybe more, free-spirited—not


Michael Pedicin

“Trane played, well not out of tune, but he always had that sharp edge to his horn. In fact, when I was in Pat Martino’s band we used to get into matches about that. Pat says, “No he doesn’t.” And I say, “Pat, everybody in the world knows he plays

sharp.” That’s what makes his sound what it is. I love it. I mean I play the same way because I modeled myself growing up.”


musically speaking, but just in their behavior. Pat is kind of a little bit on the conservative side—about life and the way he handles his business. He’s almost always teaching. And I don’t mean about music—but about life and philosophy and history or culture. As far as the music, we took the heads up a notch from even the way that they had recorded them. I’m kind of a “ballsier” tenor player. Brecker is my, you know, one of my idols—and I ap-proached it that way, and Pat loves that. I played hard. We came out and just like burnt the shi* out of them. One of my favorite re-views was by a guy in Paris that said, he looked at me and said, “I can’t figure this guy out. He looks about 50, looks like Lex Luther [from the Superman comics], shaved head. “Silly hometown boy,” I guess he said, “Because I’ve never heard his name. But also all I can say is he is a player of his own shi*.” I thought, “Man that was one of the best things that anybody could say about me.” Here’s a story. When we were all idolizing Pat, I was probably in my 20’s. A guy named Joe Donofrio, not his manager, but a violinist from Philly who died at 40 of a heart attack was sitting around hanging on Pat’s every word. You would really get this, appreciate this if you were Italian—which we all were. We were sitting there, and Pat was going into some deep philosophy, “Well, you know, now Joe…” Joe looked at him and said, “Yo, Pat. What do yous talk about when you go over your mother’s on Sunday and eat macaroni?” It was classic because it was so true. Do you ever step down for a minute, you know? Overall it was a great time with Pat. JI: Did Pat make any suggestions to you about, how to approach the music? MP: Never. Never. Well never about the way I approach my playing...only the way to ap-proach the music, and only in a very general way. I mean I think our heads were kind of aligned. I know how Pat plays. I know he likes to swing, I like to swing. I like to take it out here and there. I like to play tenor and drums and take it outside for a minute. Over-all, you know, I like music that swings. I love Eric Alexander’s playing. It’s so cool and it’s unadulterated, it’s pure, it’s not going to take you outside of the box so to speak, but it swings. JI: When I first heard him play I thought for sure it was George Coleman, and of course, it wasn’t. MP: Those guys are my roots: Trane, George Coleman, Joe Henderson. That’s who I spend my days listening to. And, Michael Becker. I don’t know if you know how close Michael and I were—buddies. There were days when Michael helped me through trying to figure

out why I couldn’t get a gig. One of his final emails to me, before he passed away, which I treasure, said, “And you still rule.” And I emailed him back and I said, “Yeah, I rule what?” JI: What was your experience and perspective about the Philadelphia area music scene? MP: Philly always felt cliquish to me. The world is provincial. When I have a dilemma though I look inside myself and look at my life. I don’t really blame others. I place it on myself. I was playing in town and doing a lot. Then I got so disrupted. I didn’t know what I wanted to be for a period of my life. I never stopped being a saxophone player. I never stopped playing. But, I was so conflicted in my 20’s and 30’s. I went to medical school three times. Then I taught a course at Univer-sity of The Arts. Then I taught at Temple. During that time, I came to Atlantic City, when I got off of Dave Brubeck’s band. I wanted just to stay home for a while. That was, I mean, a major mistake for my musicali-ty. It put money and food on the table, but I distorted my own career. My first record was kind of cross-over pop/R&B, jazz whatever. Then I went to school. I was in and out of school. I got a doctorate in psychology. I nev-er, ever for a minute stopped playing. But, I think my playing was interrupted in a musical way because I didn’t know who the hell I was. JI: I’ve experienced that kind of pulling, and not being certain throughout life. Maybe there’s a silver lining if there’s some truth to Bertrand Russell’s quote, “The trouble with this world is that the foolish are cock sure, and the intelligent are all full of doubt.” MP: I grew up kind of middle class I was from that old school Italian household. When you’re fifteen years old you can start to make your own living. I did what I had to do in terms of that too—which is a beautiful thing. It’s funny I keep talking about Brecker. His mother once asked me a question on the dance floor when I was playing a club date. I was so embarrassed to see Mr. and Mrs. Brecker. I wanted to hide and she caught my eye and waved to me. When I came walking off, I gave her a kiss. I knew them well and she said, “Oh honey, you are so lucky.” We had talked about my wife and two little kids at that time. I said, “Mrs. Brecker, I am not lucky. Look what I’m doing.” She said “Honey, you are so lucky. You have a family. You have parents to love you. You have a wife and two beautiful children. You’re so lucky, Michael.” You know what, at that point in my life I did-n’t really understand it as much as I got to understand it later—because of, of course, what Michael was going through early on in his life. She looked at me as being lucky. JI: I guess when we have really high stand-ards and are hard on ourselves, we don’t ap-preciate the gifts we have that others see in us. So much energy is wasted on worrying about

what we don’t want, instead of more profita-bly and healthfully focusing it on what we do want. MP: Absolutely, it’s like that book The Se-cret. JI: The law of attraction. MP: Absolutely, same attitude. When you focus on the positive you don’t have time for any of that negative stuff at all. I went through that with my hair loss. My hair loss came from an auto-immune problem which eats the hair follicles. They say it’s all stress related—that you’re genetically pre-disposed to it. But stress will trigger it. Once that happens, some people get it back, some people don’t. I final-ly just shaved my head. When that first hap-pened to me, psychologically speaking, it was a great opportunity for me—and I’m not say-ing I did this the first day it took me a couple of years after the hair loss—to look at myself and say, “Are you going to keep whining about your damn hair? What else do you have to offer the world and yourself? I mean, you call yourself an artist and you’re here worry-ing about the way you look.” What does that have to do with anything? There’s nothing else in terms of health. Wouldn’t that be nice if that’s all Michael Brecker had to deal with? JI: Did you want to talk a little bit about Mi-chael and some of the experiences you had with him growing up? MP: Sure, it was interesting. He was about, two years younger, three years younger. I was at Philadelphia Musical Academy. His dad used to bring him in, if we ever did anything after school, to hear me play. What I always laughed about was that in about three years or four years it all changed. I was going to hear him everywhere that he played. But, we al-ways had a great relationship. JI: Could you talk about your first recording as a leader and the turn of events that opened and closed doors and opened other doors for you. MP: In the late 70s, after doing all the Philly International Records, Gamble and Huff re-cordings, I was playing whatever clubs were in Philly. My first record was with Philly In-ternational Records. Kenny Gamble invited me to do an LP. I don’t know why it was nev-er promoted. It was made, put on a shelf. I used to go to CBS in New York, and hounded the people there to try to get some support, or figure out why this record was not being looked at, or played or promoted. Finally, this woman there, named Michael, said “ Michael, you know, at this point you’re just beating a dead horse. For some reason Kenny has pulled away from it, and we’re not doing any-thing with it.” Then in 1981, a couple of years after that record came out, a guy named Barry who had been a Program Director of a Black Station in New York began playing one of the


Michael Pedicin


cuts entitled “You.” He had been a disc jock-ey at a Chicago station when the record came out and liked this particular cut. It had the Jones girls singing, and I was playing alto on it. He started to play the shit out of the single in New York. I remember Bobby Malach call-ing me from New York, “Man you’re record is being played 20 times a day in the city.” This if funny because it led to the biggest mis-take I made in my career – in the way I han-dled business inappropriately. Within a week or two of getting that phone call from Bobby, I got a phone call from Columbia. Somebody at CBS asked if I had any of those singles in any boxes that Kenny Gamble had given you. I said “I might have a couple,” but I played dumb and asked, “Why?” The guy from CBS said “Well, we’re getting a little buzz in the city, but we don’t want to press any more rec-ords until we see if it’s really going to do something.” So my antenna goes up. I’m thinking maybe I have a shot at getting some interest again in getting another album I could write and produce. So I got called in to Co-lumbia to talk to them about a new album. Here I am – young, naïve, foolish, stupid. I went with no representation – no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I’m thinking they’re in love with me because they see that this one little single is getting this incredible buzz on Black radio, not even jazz radio. I’m assum-ing they’re going to give me a five album deal, and build a career. Not only did they not want to give me five, but they didn’t even want to give me three. All they were offering was one. I told them all to take it and shove it, and I walked out. Career-wise, probably the biggest mistake in those days that I made in my life. I used to tell the story to all my stu-dents. Ego got in the way. My feelings were hurt. I felt that nobody cared, nobody under-stood me. When that happened in 1981, that’s when I said to my wife, I’m out of here. I’m going to get a job in the theatre in the pit in Atlantic City. JI: Talk about how your interest in psycholo-gy developed and led to your ongoing educa-tion and eventually a private practice. MP: When I was teaching music, I got in-spired to go back to school to try to learn more about what we do. I felt I could get an advanced degree in psychology and under-stand the dynamics of being an artist. I think all of us that do this, we’re hoping to try to figure ourselves out, and keep our own emo-tions in a stable condition while we continue to pursue our art form. I never resorted to any chemicals in my life. The way I kept my head above water was when I went back and got that degree I felt credible, validated myself, because I wasn’t doing much musically. I felt that no one really wanted me. Could I really play anymore? I wasn’t getting called by any-

one. I wasn’t getting any gigs on the road. If I wasn’t putting myself in the position of being a leader, I wasn’t being called anymore. That’s when I went back to Villanova and got my Master’s first in the 1990s. I liked it so much, and thought not only was it helping me figure out who I am, but I am also learning about human emotion and the dynamics of human beings. I continued and got a Doctor-ate. My degree is Doctor of Philosophy in Cognitive and Creative Arts Psychology. I actually presented part of my dissertation, which they call a capstone, at one of the IAJE conventions in California. My dissertation, which I had to wrangle in a very difficult way was about neurological and physiological changes that occur during the creative pro-cess. Now there is much more of that going. Some guys are doing some MRI stuff, while someone is improvising. That was really my desire. What is it that makes you and me and all these other people that we all love, idolize and love to be with, able to do what we do – whether it is a good or bad solo. What allows us to spontaneously compose like that? Neu-rologically, physiologically, emotionally, psy-chologically. I started a website called Coun-

selingForTheArts.com, when I did my disser-tation. I try to help young people what to do, how to do it, how to get some help while you’re in the process—not about how to make a living necessarily, but how to keep yourself emotionally stable during the process. Of course, it becomes harder and harder all the time, because it’s more difficult to make a living doing it. It helped me figure out who I am. I limit the amount of days to three during the week in the practice that I have now. It is probably 80% creative individuals from the tri-state area—primarily musicians, but referrals come in and I’ll see a painter and so on.

There’s about 20% of my practice that is not creatively oriented, that just come as referrals. JI: Talk about your return to the music you love to do and the spiritual connection. MP: From about 1998, I realized that requests from other people to do projects that did not correspond with my direction, musically speaking, and the kinds of things I wanted to be involved with, I would not do. From that point, I got back into who I am, who I was. I felt more like the saxophonist I grew up feel-ing like. The other thing that enabled me to do that, is that I have some root in making some part of a living in the people that I see — so I wasn’t scrambling anymore and having to do jobs I didn't want to do. So I could devote myself to my saxophone and my music again. Then of course Pat [Martino] came along and asked me to do that during that period of time. The other thing is my spiritual self, the love for my family, my wife. I think I developed more of a spiritual connection that I loved earlier. But I developed a better spiritual con-nection with them and all of my friends. I have no time or tolerance within myself for

anger anymore. I don’t want to be mad at any-one. I don’t want to have any anger in my life. I love people. When I see the way we react to each other, the way we do as musicians—we hug, we kiss, we hold… that connection to me is priceless. I don’t watch a whole lot of sports. But if I do watch a game, and I see somebody pat somebody on the butt, I love that connection. But, as musicians, we do that all the time—on stage and off stage.

Website: www.MichaelPedicin.com


“Stanley Clarke told me a story about Joe Henderson. Stanley asked, ‘Well you want to take another?’ And Joe said, ‘No,

I just played it. I just did it. It’s me, Joe Henderson. It wouldn’t be much

different—just a couple notes. I mean the notes will be different. But, you will get a similar kind of solo. That’s how I play.’ You are who you are and the solo

you play is a beautiful thing. Even if it’s not what you consider to be the best. It’s you.”

Michael Pedicin


Eric Nemeyer CorporationEric Nemeyer Corporation

P.O. Box 30284 P.O. Box 30284

Elkins Park, PA 19027 Elkins Park, PA 19027

215215--887887--88808880

PressToRelease.com PressToRelease.com

GetSalesFast.comGetSalesFast.com

BENEFITSBENEFITS Massive Seed Exposure To Increase Massive Seed Exposure To Increase

Chances For Chances For Increased Media CoverageIncreased Media Coverage——Positive Stories And Images Of Your Business Via Major Positive Stories And Images Of Your Business Via Major

Network & Authority Media Build Your Brand, Prime Your Network & Authority Media Build Your Brand, Prime Your

Clients To Trust You And Your Business More.Clients To Trust You And Your Business More.

Builds Your Positive ImageBuilds Your Positive Image--Creates Increased Creates Increased

Buzz And Exposure Buzz And Exposure

Increased Awareness, Trust, Reputation Increased Awareness, Trust, Reputation

For Your BusinessFor Your Business——Builds Your Positive ImageBuilds Your Positive Image

Higher Visibility To Build Your Authority Higher Visibility To Build Your Authority -- Via Publication Of Your News On Numerous Respected, Via Publication Of Your News On Numerous Respected,

High Authority, Major Network Sites & Media SyndicatorsHigh Authority, Major Network Sites & Media Syndicators

Improved Website Ratings & More Traffic Improved Website Ratings & More Traffic --

Through High Quality Links From Hundreds Of Trustwor-Through High Quality Links From Hundreds Of Trustwor-

thy Brand Name TV And Radio Websites thy Brand Name TV And Radio Websites

More Online Citations For Higher VisibilityMore Online Citations For Higher Visibility

Generate More Leads & ClientsGenerate More Leads & Clients

Distribution: Online & Traditional MediaDistribution: Online & Traditional Media 13,000 Radio/TV stations (AM, FM, News, Talk, Music, more)

3,000 magazines (segment by market, interest)

8,000 Newspapers (dailies& weeklies) in the USA

Comprehensive Media Reports Comprehensive Media Reports Click on links to see the 100’s of media placement of your news

PressToRelease.com

Get Your FREE! Special Report!

77 Critical Questions

You Must Ask & Answer Before

You Even Think Of Hiring A

Publicist

Get Your Music In The News With Massive Press Coverage Guaranteed In 24 To 48 Hours

Guaranteed Publication On Hundreds of Major Network Media & Authority News Sites + Distribution To Traditional Print &

Broadcast Networks — To Drive Traffic & Sales To Your Business All Without The Expense, Frustration & Disappointing Results From So Many Publicists!All Without The Expense, Frustration & Disappointing Results From So Many Publicists!

AT LAST! PAY-ONLY-FOR-RESULTS PUBLICITY!

ORDER Start Your Promotion NOW! - PressToRelease.com Experience Results In 24-48 Hours! CALL 215-887-8880

BONUS: BONUS: ORDER Your Press Release & Get FREE DISTRIBUTION SERVICES To Send Your CD to ORDER Your Press Release & Get FREE DISTRIBUTION SERVICES To Send Your CD to

the Media (You just pay for postage and envelopes). Why pay $500, $1,000, $1,500 a month or more for the Media (You just pay for postage and envelopes). Why pay $500, $1,000, $1,500 a month or more for

these services (often with no followup!) these services (often with no followup!) —— when you can get it free as a valuewhen you can get it free as a value--added premium!added premium!

http://www.presstoreleasee.com


Interview By Ken Weiss Photos by Eric Nemeyer Barry Harris [b. December 15, 1929, Detroit, Michigan], the legendary pianist/composer/educator, has graced the jazz community with his grandfatherly elan since his high school days when he joyfully gave free teaching sessions to all that came to his Detroit home. While in New York, he established the Jazz Cultural Theater in 1982 at 368 8th Ave, just above 28th Street where hundreds of musicians came to learn from him. At age 92, he remains productive, enthusiastic, and as nice a human being as you’ll find. He currently teaches two Zoom classes on Satur-days- a piano class and then an improvisation class. Critic Gary Giddins has called Harris the “Key Conservator” of bebop music. He’s been directly involved with most of the music’s lumi-naries, sitting in with Charlie Parker and play-ing with Coleman Hawkins, Cannonball Adder-ley, Dexter Gordon, Yusef Lateef, Illinois Jacquet, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Benny Gol-son, and Lee Morgan. This interview was done by way of four Zoom sessions between January 10 – 31, 2021.

Jazz Inside Magazine: How did you celebrate your 91st birthday last month? Barry Harris: Due to the Covid-19 virus, with very few people. I had about six people at my home and a bunch of people on Zoom. JI: How have you been spending these past 10 months of the Covid-19 pandemic? Harris: I’m doing pretty good, but I don’t even think about going out. I go out for doctor’s ap-

pointments, so I have to go out, but I go out well protected. I haven’t been doing a lot creatively, mostly thinking music more than playing music. I have a Zoom class that I do on Saturdays which is quite big. There are peo-ple from all over the world doing my Zoom class. And really, it’s a

nice way to do it. I see people that I haven’t seen in a long time and I love to just see them. It’s really been good. I can’t see doing all that trav-eling anymore. JI: Have you been composing? Harris: No, nothing has come to me recently. I’ve got two or three things that people haven’t heard, but not that much has been coming that way. You know what I’ve been learning more about? I’ll tell you, it’s something that should be learned by every instrumentalist in this country – all the classical musicians, all the violinists, the violists, the cellists, everyone. There’s stuff that they should know. See, I’ve been at this a long time, since I was maybe fifteen. I believed in jazz. I believed in Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Monk. I’ve learned so many secrets. I’ve learned secrets that I never heard anybody, no other teachers, talk about. I consider myself the con-tinuation of classical music. I’m the continuation of Chopin and Bach because if they were alive, where would they be today? JI: Many of your contemporaries in the music had short lives. Did you ever envision still creat-

ing and being very productive past the age of 90? Harris: I never envisioned this. Sometimes I feel I don’t like it because so many of my friends have gone on before me, especially some of the people I really expected to put me away. Now, I’m putting them away. I lose a younger person almost every month. Look at all the mu-sicians who have died recently – including [Harold] Mabern and McCoy [Tyner]. We’ve got a lot of problems. Keith Jarrett had strokes [a

few years ago] and can’t use his left hand. I talk to Keith. I like to talk about that kind of stuff because I had a stroke and I’ve never given up playing. My left hand is a dud, [Laughs] my left hand is not too cool at all. One finger is in love with the other finger [they overlap]. They stay together because they love each other. That’s the way my hand is now – it’s a funny-looking thing. But see, I play anyway, and I made sure to call Keith Jarrett and say, ‘Man, don’t be talking that nonsense about not playing again,’ because I had heard he said something about that. And I said that we don’t do anything like that, you’ve got to keep playing anyway. I hope I helped him. I’ve called a lot of people like that – Barney Kessel and people all over the world. I called Terry Pollard after she had an aneurysm. She shouldn’t have stopped playing. I think she was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, woman piano players, although I never heard Mary Lou [Williams] or Hazel Scott. Terry Pollard was very special to me because we grew up together. When she was 17, she had perfect pitch, she could play in every key. [Laughs] I was like an idiot compared to her. I leaned over her shoulder and Tommy’s [Flanagan] shoulder to steal something. You had to be a thief, and the biggest thief in the class is me, the teacher. One day I was playing in the original Birdland and Andy Bey was there. At the end of the night, he came over to me and said something like, “Man, you can play those whole tone thirds with one hand! How do you do that?” I said, ‘Oh, man, it’s not that hard. It’s just like that.’ When I got home, I said, ‘I ain’t never played no whole tone thirds with one hand. Get out!’ I played with two hands, he just didn’t see the other hand! I went home and I practiced so I wouldn’t be a liar and I learned how to play whole tone thirds with one hand. So, when he came in the next time I was playing, oh man, I started the left hand shaking [demonstrates it] so he could see I was doing it. You have to know how to do things. Sometimes a student says things and you say, ‘Oh, thanks,’ and later you say, ‘What the hell did he say?’ You really have to think about what they said, and when you find out, then you learn some-thing. We learn from our students, and that is very important to me. We need togetherness.

JI: You’ve focused on playing jazz standards during your long career, but the younger musi-cians are not upholding those songs as much these days.

Harris: People today don’t like to play stand-ards, but they should love to play standards be-cause standards teach us proper movements, and that’s what we need – proper movements. We don’t know all the movements that they knew. I’ve found some, and I know they’re right. I’ve found some things. There’s one thing I found that’s just so shocking that we weren’t told these things. I just don’t understand why we weren’t told. The major scale is quite different from what we know. The true major scale has a note in between the five and the six. It’s composed of a diminished seventh and it’s composed of a sixth. There are four chords. It’s composed of major six, a minor six, a dominant seven and five. If you look at those four chords you’ll see that those four chords are composed of two di-minishes. And there are three diminishes, so


“I was playing with Wes Montgomery at the original Five Spot .... and suddenly I was over at the side, watching us play. Suddenly I was divorced from my body, and I was watching

us play. Then, when I looked at the stage, and it wasn’t but three of us, but suddenly there were a lot of people on the stage. There was Art Tatum, there was Bird, Pres, there were other people. You know, it was real weird.”

INTERVIEWINTERVIEW

Barry Harris

I’ve Learned Secrets


what happens is, if these four chords are two, what do you do with that third diminished? You take that third diminished and you make a scale. That third diminished fits with each one of those chords. That we do not know, but I know. I teach it. Not too many teachers know about that. I should be teaching teachers, I shouldn’t be teaching youngsters. I should be teaching teach-ers because any teacher that would like to chal-lenge me on something, they’d be stuck. They couldn’t challenge me. I know what I’m talking about, and I can prove it all with logic. Every-thing is logical. People talk about free music; I don’t know what that means. [Laughs] I know there’s a lot of things they need to know before they can talk about free music. They don’t know. The schools don’t know. The schools are teaching the modes. I tell the students that I’ve never known a mode in my life. In my life of playing jazz, almost all my life, I’ve never known what the Phrygian was, what the Dorian was. I just hear people say it and I tell them, ‘I don’t know anything about that, but I play jazz.’ Ah, I play jazz, but I know nothing about the modes. Everywhere I go, everybody talks about the modes. When they first put that in colleges, they didn’t come to us. They didn’t come to Hank Jones, John Lewis or any jazz pianists and say, “What should we teach in schools?” No, they decided. They decided to teach modes. That’s ridiculous stuff, and I can prove it’s ridic-ulous. Line up the teachers and we can have a teacher seminar and I’ll prove my stuff. I can prove every bit of it. I can show you truths and there are truths. People think everything’s been played but that’s not true. It’s impossible to play everything. Music is math and math is endless. Nobody played it all, not Diz, not Chopin. No, they didn’t play it all, they just played their thing. There are certain things that we should know and that’s what I’m most concerned about. Truths, not guessing. Stuff that we should know, we don’t know. How do you get it to them? Here I am, I’m 91, I’m in the eleven-thirty of my life, [Laughs] I’ve got about another half-hour to go before twelve o’clock hits me and I get on that last train ride. [Laughs] JI: You said you don’t know anything about modes? Harris: I know nothing about modes, and don’t want to. I’ve played jazz all my life and not once did someone tell me I had to know all the modes until I got to teaching in some of these classes. JI: Your middle name is Doyle. Is that a family name? Harris: I think it is. I have a feeling that the plantation owner might have been a Doyle. You know what, I went to Scotland once and there was an odd feeling. I really would like to go to Ireland because when I went to Scotland, I felt at home, and I figure that Ireland must be part of this too. JI: It’s evident that people need music, all cul-tures have produced their own version of music.

What’s special about bebop? Harris: Yes, it is special. You very seldom hear me call it bebop, even though I don’t mind be-bop. Yusef Lateef, he didn’t want to be called a jazz musician. He made up some other kind of name. But I don’t mind being called a jazz musi-cian as long as I know the truth. I know truths that every jazz musician doesn’t know anything about. It took me years to realize why did people come to Detroit. I finally decided why, because they knew about this piano player who sat at the piano all the time and practiced and practiced all the time. Everybody knew where to come. Just go up those stairs and go into that house and practice with him because he knew how to prac-tice. See, that was me. People came to me; they came to Detroit for me. People from Motown and John Coltrane came to see what these young boys were playing and what I was teaching. They came to me. Sonny Clark came through town, most of the time with Buddy DeFranco. All of them came to my house. Most of the mu-sicians, when they came to Detroit, they knew to come look for me because I’d be sitting there practicing. All the musicians in Detroit came to me and I made them practice. I was in love with music, nothing else. I love music. I love jazz. I love classical, all of it. JI: Do you feel bebop serves a higher purpose than giving joy and entertainment to the listener? Does bebop serve a spiritual role? Harris: [Pauses] I’m hesitant to talk about this because people may not understand it. I exposed myself [in the past]. I said something to some-body who I shouldn’t have. My good friend told me I shouldn’t have talked about it. My biggest mistake was I talked about it. See, I was playing with Wes Montgomery at the original Five Spot. I was playing and suddenly I was over at the side, watching us play. Suddenly I was divorced from my body, and I was watching us play. Then, when I looked at the stage, and it wasn’t but three of us, but suddenly there were a lot of people on the stage. There was Art Tatum, there was Bird, Pres, there were other people. You know, it was real weird. I didn’t know how to take this. I was still playing the piano, but I was looking at me playing the piano. So that’s quite odd. JI: That’s quite the out-of-body experience you had. Harris: Yes, an out-of-body experience. After-wards, I sat at the table and couldn’t figure out what had happened. But you know, a fellow walked by and said something to the woman he was with. He said something like, “Man, this was like 1947.” That’s why I knew I was on the right track. That was Slide Hampton that said that as he walked by, and I didn’t even know Slide Hampton then. See, those kinds of things, we’re not supposed to talk about. I think it might have happened more times to me if I had never talked about it before. It’s never happened like that again, never. I think when you experience the out of ordinary things, you keep it to your-self. Be sure to keep it to yourself. Don’t tell anybody about it. JI: You’ve taught countless numbers of people

during your career. Has it been your hope that your students go on to play bebop? Harris: Yeah, some of them have gone on and they’re out there playing now. I’m just wanting them to play jazz. I wouldn’t call it just bebop, I’d call it jazz, and I want them to just be good players. JI: Past articles written about you have concen-trated on your role as a wonderful and beloved teacher of the music. Do you sometimes feel that your performing and composing skills are un-derappreciated? Harris: No, because people find out quickly. If you hang out around me, you come to my class, you’ll find out quickly that I’m the real deal. I’m not a phony. I can teach you, I can teach the ones who think they know how to play, too. Where I’ve taught the most [out of the States] is in Holland. I first went to Holland, [pianist] Frans Elsen had heard I was teaching in Spain and he had me come to Holland. Man, it was really something to walk into that room at the Royal Conservatoire in Holland where there were about 15 piano players who could play. They all could play. They may not play what you want to hear, but they all could play. I went back every year for maybe 20 years straight. There were 20 years in Spain also, but Holland was my special place because they had so many piano players that could play. Those cats could play, but I always found something that they didn’t know – all the time. They think they know, but when I get through with them, they know that they didn’t know. Now they know. That’s the way it goes. I never let them fool me – I had their number. I could walk into the room and mess them up by saying, ‘Oh, what was that you did?’ JI: I’d like to focus on you as an artist. Would you talk about your approach to the piano and what makes the way you play unique? Harris: I don’t believe in playing with your fingers, so that’s the first thing. Most people that play the piano think you play the piano with your fingers, but I don’t believe in that. That’s ridiculous. You play the piano with your arm, your seat, your butt, everything. You see, the whole thing about the piano is it’s a martial art. Whether you do martial arts [or not], I’m sure that you have to get right below the navel [smacks hands together]. Right below your navel is your strength. Now, if you play jazz, you’ve got to get into the pocket, up your arm, and to the connection to the butt, and then that brings you down to where your strength is, right below your navel. It’s just what martial art people do, Tai Chi and all that. It fits right in with music. That’s the way I believe it. I started taking Tai Chi at the time of the Jazz Cultural Theater. My Tai Chi teacher was the brother of my friend, bassist Larry Ridley, named Michael Ridley. JI: How has your approach to playing solos changed over time? Harris: The more you learn, the better you play. The more you learn about soloing, the better you play. There are certain things that we should know. We learn things and then you’re supposed


Barry Harris


to go and improvise. You have to learn to make up things. I think that’s how you do it. It’s been a gas, it’s been what you call a lifelong experi-ence that has gone on for 91 years. I’m con-vinced that I must have been thinking about this since I was 1 years old. That’s what it seems like, anyway. JI: What was the thing you needed to under-stand or skill you needed to acquire related to playing piano or composing that was hardest for you to develop? Harris: If you listen to the young cats nowa-days, they don’t play triplets. That’s like a thing of the past. They don’t play triplets. In theory, if you don’t play triplets, then you don’t believe because triplets say the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. That’s a triplet. They play a bunch of eighth notes. They play beautiful with the eighth notes, but they don’t know how to play triplets. I know a couple of cats who really play good too, and I go to listen to them. I get mad at them. I always say, ‘Why don’t you learn how to play triplets?’ But they won’t play triplets. Something’s wrong. Why these eighth notes? Eighth notes can’t rule the world. Triplets can rule. Triplets you can play in opposition to these eights, and then you’ve got some real stuff. You’ve got three against two, and two against four. That’s the secret of the music. I judge peo-ple by that. When they show me they can play triplets, I say, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ Bird played triplets. If Bird played triplets then I had to play triplets. Coleman Hawkins played triplets, so I had to play triplets. Pres played triplets. You can’t just play eighth notes – get out of here! You’ve got to use everything at your disposal. JI: Your composing skills are not what you’re best known for, but you’ve written many great pieces. Talk about your composing process. Harris: If classical pianist can play Bach and Beethoven, then I should be able to play Bird, Bud and Monk. So, that’s how I started knowing myself. I made a mistake [earlier in my career]. I should have played more of my songs because some of them are pretty good songs. I should have played them more so that other people could learn to play them. I don’t need more of my own songs now, not going all these years and not playing them. I’ve written quite a few, over 100 songs. Bud Powell, who may have been the greatest piano player, if not Art Tatum, Bud did stuff I’d never heard piano players do before. He always had something new that would make you say, “Who was that?” You’d have to go find out what he did because he was quite different than the rest. He’d put six or sev-en notes in a space where you should have put four. [Laughs] He could do that stuff too. I was trying to be like Bud. I was trying to be better than him if possible. I was trying to understand. There are secrets there in Bud’s work. We can talk about all the other piano players. There’s John Lewis, who wrote that beautiful song “Django.” He was really exceptional. Hank Jones, Duke Jordan, Dick Katz, George Shear-ing, there’s a bunch of them that could play. I

could name more. I’ll tell you a couple memo-ries about Bud Powell. There was a time that I was staying at the Alvin Hotel, which was right across from Birdland. One time there was a knock at the door. It was Bud Powell and he wanted to borrow some shoes because Bird had come and hid all the shoes or something. I guess we had the same size shoes. There was another time, much later, where Bud came over to this house to see Monk. He ended up disappearing and we couldn’t find him. We got the cops to start looking for Bud. It ended up that Bud was back in New York. Somehow he got back there. JI: Does composing come easily for you? Harris: It’s not that easy. JI: Many artists have covered your composi-tions. Examples being Jane Bunnett doing “Nascimento,” Dezron Douglas doing “Bish,

Bash, Bop,” and Joshua Breakstone doing “Lolita.” Would you name a few compositions you’re most proud of writing? Harris: I don’t know really. After I hear them now, I say, ‘Dang, did I make that up?’ [Laughs] JI: You’re also attracted to writing lyrics. You’ve written a number of lyrics for other peo-ple’s songs. Harris: I don’t really talk about writing lyrics. That kind of thing just comes to you. I wrote some lyrics to “Embraceable You.” I didn’t call it “Embraceable You,” I called it “Em-Barry-Harris-Able You.” When I would mess it up, I would call it “Em-Barry-Ass.” I wrote that on a plane coming back from Japan. One I really like is “Nascimento,” which I did the very first time I sang on a record [The Bird of Red and Gold, 1979]. JI: What’s the story behind you composing “Nascimento?” Harris: I wrote that, it took over. I was working at Bradley’s and when I went to work there one night, man, there were about ten piano players there that could play that song. “Nascimento.” Nica could play that song good, too. I said, ‘How the hell did you all learn to play that song?’ I think it was [pianist] Larry Ham who showed people how to play it because I had the Jazz Cultural Theater and Larry Ham was there. I named it not for the big time Nascimento, I named it for a drummer who came to the Jazz Cultural Theater.

JI: How would you describe your singing voice? Harris: [Gasps] We don’t talk about that. [Laughs] I think the singers fooled me, they made me think I could sing. [Laughs] JI: How would you advise your students who had a voice like yours and they wanted to work at a career as a vocalist? Harris: Learn to sing. You know what I did at the Jazz Cultural Theater? We had to make more money because the rent was very high, so I start-ed the singing class and that’s the best thing I ever did in life because there are more singers in the world than horn players and piano players put together. Singers will make your class be successful. I love singers, give me a hundred singers. Everywhere I go I count on the singers to make things successful. Every class is suc-cessful with singers.

JI: You’ve continued to take piano lessons throughout your career, including training with the late Sophia Rosoff. You’re a celebrated pi-ano master and teacher in your own right, why have you felt the need to take lessons? Are you still searching for something? Harris: I was never that good at classical but I always took lessons. I’ve always believed that one should have a teacher. In order to do some-thing good, you must have a teacher. I don’t care what it is, you must have a teacher. Look here, we do one to three gigs a month. That ain’t enough playing. It would be better to stay home and work the weekends at a place you work all the time. That is the way it should be. We don’t work enough, none of us. Who works a lot? Kenny Barron? No, none of us work a lot. I’ve always felt that way. When I had my stroke and my hand got funny, I should have gotten a teach-er right away. I goofed. JI: You were named an NEA Jazz Master in 1989, which makes you the longest surviving Jazz Master behind only Sonny Rollins, who was honored in 1983. Harris: I received it before a lot of people. Hank Jones should have received it first. I guess they knew that I was teaching all the time. I was teaching since I was about fifteen years old. I was so wrapped up in music that I would go home and practice all day. JI: Let’s talk about your beginnings. At age


“Most people that play the piano think you play the piano with your fingers, but I don’t believe in that. That’s ridiculous. You play

the piano with your arm, your seat, your butt, everything. You see, the whole thing about

the piano is it’s a martial art.”

Barry Harris


four, you started on piano and you knew then that you wanted to be a musician. How could you know that at such a young age? Harris: I knew it though. I knew it, don’t ask me. I think sometimes we know way ahead of time, what we’re supposed to be. I really did learn my first piece at the age of four from my mother. My mother was a piano player for the church, so I learned from my mother. The first piece I learned was a church piece—a real old Baptist song that I think was in the key of B-flat. This was my gift, at the age of four, to be play-ing the piano. That’s a gift. JI: Your mother was a church pianist. Talk about the importance of hearing music in the church and how that impacted your career. Harris: It was a Baptist church but there was no drummer or bass player, none of that stuff, it was just singing. There was singing. The dea-cons would lead the singing. It was weird how they’d do it. They’d say a line and we’d sing the line. That was a Baptist church. The churches that had drums, tambourines, and all that kind of stuff, we called them sanctified churches. We had great singers though and every day was church. Wednesday was the children’s choir and I started playing the piano for that. It wasn’t the best, but I played the piano for them. I think that experience helped my career but the greatest thing that helped my career was my mother

when she said, “What you gonna’ play, church music or the jazz?” And I shyly said, ‘I’d like to play jazz,’ and she said, “Okay.” So, I played jazz. I stopped playing for the church, and I started playing the jazz. I was around fourteen or fifteen at the time. I met my elementary school teacher years ago. Before a performance, a woman came to me and said, “I taught Barry Harris,” and I said, ‘You couldn’t have taught me,’ because I looked as old as she did. I started walking away and she said, “Yeah, in Detroit at Trowbridge Elementary School.” That was me. I was meeting my elementary piano schoolteacher at the age of 60-something. Ain’t that some-thing? I went out and told the audience I better play good today! [Laughs] good gracious. Just think about that.

JI: So, once you picked Jazz music, that was it for the church music? Harris: I never stopped playing church songs because my mother would come to concerts and if she was there, I’d have to play a church song. Some of the people would get mad at me in the audience. They’d say, “you didn’t play a church song!” And I’d say, ‘That’s because my moth-er’s coming to the second show. [Laughs] That was true. I’d play that when my mother came, that’s it! [Laughs] It was funny too because I played a church song in my church after I came back one time, and two old ladies sitting there said, “Woo, that sure was pretty. What was that?” You know what it was? “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and they didn’t recognize it at all. [Laughs] It was very different. Most piano players who’ve been church piano players, they play like church piano players, and I didn’t. I played like a jazz piano player playing church music. There’s a big difference. I couldn’t see playing like that. It had to be pretty. It had to be as beautiful as Bud Powell playing church music or John Lewis, Hank Jones. I remember being at a one funeral, it might have been Milt Hinton’s at Riverside Church, but Hank Jones came up and took one finger and played a church song with one finger. He played all the way through like that and suddenly, he started putting chords to it. He played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” with one finger and then added in the rest of the notes. Oh! I’ve been privy to a whole lot of experiences. JI: Do you recall the moment you fell in love with bebop?

Harris: We had music in elementary school. We had music in intermediate school. We had a big band with stock arrangements, and they were good arrangements too. And somewhere during that period, I heard this man playing on the ra-dio, and boy, what I heard, I can’t tell you. I know one thing, boy, I was in love then with Charlie Parker. Wow, and I mean in love with that music. And it looked like everybody in De-troit was in love with that music too. You’ll have to ask Sheila Jordan about that because we grew up together in Detroit. The whole school was involved with the music. The school kids loved to dance, and that’s what we did. We went to dances. We didn’t go to no nightclubs. Get outta here, we were too young to go to night-clubs. You had to be 21 for that. I’d play at

dances and the whole school would turn out. I’d play with a band and drummer Eddie Locke and Oliver Jackson would play with tap dancers and their band. Eddie was always jealous because my band had won a competition over his at an amateur show. He was always saying that we shouldn’t have won. He was always mad, and he kept that going on all through his life in New York. I never heard the last of that, that we did-n’t deserve that win. [Laughs] JI: Berry Gordy [of Motown fame] was a child-hood friend of yours. Harris: I went to high school with Berry Gordy. He got mad because his name was Berry too, but his was with an E and I’m with an A. I got a Grammy, and he was sitting right there between me and Hank Jones. Afterwards, he gave a party for us and there he started talking about how he had stopped playing the music because every-body had thought that he was the other Barry. So, I got up to the mic and I said, ‘Hey, man, that’s good because if I’m the cause of you get-ting Motown together, then I think you should give me 1 percent [Laughs] of the money!’ And so, when the thing was over, he had someone drive us to the hotel and when I got out, he said, “Forget about that one percent.” [Laughs] I was hoping he was gonna say, “I’m gonna give you that one percent!” Boy, I would have been set then, I wouldn’t have had to work so hard. He called me on my birthday last year, talking away, talking about school. We had a ball. He’s mad because I have all these women around me here. He’s something. I’ve had a wonderful life. I can’t complain. JI: The list of jazz greats who emerged out of Detroit during your time there is long and felt to be due to a number of factors including the ex-traordinary public school’s arts education pro-grams during the ‘30s and ‘40s, as well as the informal teaching sessions you’ve mentioned that you provided at your home. Outside of your training in school, how did you become so ad-vanced as a teenager to the point where older musicians would seek you out for learning? Harris: You ask that question but I don’t know the answer. I didn’t really realize it [at the time]. Now, that I’m up in age, I think about that and I say, ‘Why did they come to my house?’ They came from all over – Ohio, California, Chicago. Joe Henderson came and took lessons. The bass player with Motown, James Jamerson, was my bass player, I taught him. Charles McPherson and Lonnie Hilliard were my two good, young jazz musicians. Kirk Lightsey learned to play the piano through me, Hugh Lawson, a lot of peo-ple. I didn’t realize that I was important in that way. I was just practicing, that was it. And I practiced all the time. That was me. I love mu-sic. I spent most of my life, leaning over the shoulder of Tommy Flanagan, watching his hands, watching him play, stealing a chord. Go-ing home and practicing that chord in every key. JI: Your Detroit home has been described as a “jazz Mecca.” As you’ve been saying, it was open to anyone who wanted to talk about and play music. How did it first start that musicians congregated at your home?


“You know what I did at the Jazz Cultural Theater? We had to make more money be-cause the rent was very high, so I started the singing class and that’s the best thing

I ever did in life because there are more singers in the world than horn players and

piano players put together.”

Barry Harris


Harris: I don’t know. I can tell you that it start-ed way early. I was living on Russel Street and still in high school. Roland Hanna told me one time, “Barry, Sonny Red and I used to climb those stairs to come to your house to learn how to play chords.” That was early. At first, it was them and Frank Gant, Hugh Lawson, Doug Wat-kins. Paul Chambers used to come to my house with his bass to practice because he couldn’t play. He learned to play at 4721 Russel Street. I’ve learned so much about music. There’s no teacher that knows what I know about music. What I know is not written in the books. There are secrets hidden in the Bible and it’s up to us to get the secrets out. People don’t realize there are secrets there and I feel that I am the only one who knows that. JI: When you say the Bible do you mean music books are the actual Bible? Harris: I’m talking about the actual Bible. All the music comes from the Bible. There’s not one thing that doesn’t come from the Bible. See, the Bible gave us all of this. The Bible gave us 12. Twelve is the months of the year, the signs of the Zodiac, 12 is the world. And from that 12, everything else comes from it. The first thing you would get from the 12 is two 6ths. You’d have to know what the two 6ths are. They are the two whole tone scales and that’s also the man and the woman. And what do the man and woman do? They go to bed and have babies, and they have these three diminished 7ths. The scales come out of that. It all follows a pattern, but people don’t know the pattern. I know the pattern. In the schools, they’re teaching free music. I don’t know what the hell that could be – free music? They teach modes and such funny things. They decided to put jazz in colleges be-cause they knew that you could make money on jazz. JI: With the numerous traveling artists that showed up at your home, who were you most surprised to see, and what were they seeking to learn? Harris: John Coltrane might have been the most surprising one [to show up]. He wanted to know what I was teaching these young boys - Charles McPherson and Lonnie Hilliard, because they must have sounded pretty good to him. He came and I let them play for him. I gave him all the information about what I taught because I did have a system. I had a way of teaching. It wasn’t just no haphazard stuff. See, we used to have a band and we rehearsed every week. I felt funny and said, ‘We’ve got to have stuff to practice. So, I made up a lot of rules and we practiced those rules, and boy, that was the greatest thing we every did because those rules taught us a lot of stuff. Coltrane took my rules when he came. Others who practiced my rules were George Bohanon and Curtis Fuller. Frank Foster was another surprising one to show up at my home. Frank Foster brought stuff to us. He made us aware of Pepper Adams. He told us about tri-tones and different things, and we were happy to learn about them. I have a recording of me and

Frank Foster playing “Cherokee.” Man, we could play then. JI: In Detroit, you held down coveted house gigs at the Blue Bird Inn, Baker’s Keyboard Lounge and the Rouge Lounge, where you played with traveling artists such as Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, Flip Phil-lips and Lee Konitz. You also played with Char-lie Parker. What memories can you share regard-ing those performances? Harris: I sat in with Charlie Parker when I was about 17 and still in high school. He let me sit in at three different ballrooms. I might be the last of the generation to do that. I went to hear Char-lie Parker with the strings at the Forest Club, which was a skating rink. All us musicians just stood right in front to watch him. Oh boy, that was the thrill of a lifetime – to be there and watch Charlie Parker play. I know he messed up, and he messed up a lot of musicians. A lot of us musicians became junkies because we thought that it might make us play like Bird. This was all over the world. I wish everyone could have met him because he was the most beautiful person. He wasn’t a bad person, he just got caught up in a trap. JI: How well did you play when you sat in with

Charlie Parker? Harris: I did all right because he let me sit in the next time. It was a real honor to sit in with him. I sat in more with Gene Ammons. Gene Ammons came to town all the time and he played for dancers. He’d come from Chicago and when I’d come in, he’d see me and make Junior Mance get up. He’d say, “Junior, let Bar-ry play some,” and I’d get to play a couple songs with him. He probably was the greatest to me. Lester Young would count out the songs by moving his shoulder. [Laughs] Flip Phillips? I didn’t know he could play that good, but Flip Phillips could play. When he got with the Jazz at the Philharmonic, and he started honking like that, [I didn’t like that]. I didn’t get much of a chance to play with Ben Webster. JI: Did playing with those visiting artists give you an accurate sense of what life as a jazz mu-

sician would be like? Harris: I loved it, that’s all I know. It’s difficult but that’s the life. JI: Life for you in Detroit at that time was diffi-cult. You were very poor. Reportedly, at times, you’d wait for items to go on sale at the super-market before buying them. Harris: That’s right, it was hard because I had a wife and a little baby. Diz [Dizzy Gillespie] called me to come join his big band in Birdland but it didn’t pay enough money for me to leave Detroit. I should have joined him probably, but I couldn’t do that. I think it was only paying 90 dollars a week. JI: In 1956 you played with Max Roach. Harris: That was after Clifford Brown and Richie Powell had gotten killed in a car accident. I joined Max with Sonny Rollins, Donald Byrd and George Morrow. Harold Land had gone back to California because he couldn’t take it, so Sonny Rollins played with us. There’s no re-cording of that band that I’ve heard. Maybe there is a recording that’s stuck somewhere. JI: It’s surprising you didn’t leave Detroit soon-

er for New York City. You waited until age 30, when Cannonball Adderley convinced you to join his quintet and relocate in 1960. Why didn’t you leave sooner to find employment? You al-ready knew many musicians in New York who respected you. Harris: I recorded with musicians since I was the age of 20. I don’t know why I didn’t leave sooner. I just wasn’t gonna leave home, that’s all. In my mind, I never was gonna leave De-troit. That was my home, and I was gonna stay there my whole life. That’s the truth. The only time I came close to leaving before moving to New York was when I went to San Francisco, and believe you me, I wanted to move to San Francisco. I told my family we were moving to San Francisco. And then I started thinking about the tremors and the earthquakes and I just stayed


“I went to high school with Berry Gordy … I got a Grammy, and he was sitting right there between me and Hank Jones. Afterwards, he gave a party for us and there he started talking about how he

had stopped playing the music because everybody had thought that he was the other Barry. So, I got

up to the mic and I said, ‘Hey, man, that’s good because if I’m the cause of you getting Motown together, then I think you should give me one

percent [Laughs] of the money!’”

Barry Harris


where I was. [Laughs] I went out there with Cannonball for a week, making a record, and that was the most beautiful place. I played with Wes Montgomery out there too. JI: Once in New York, you easily found work because you were a flexible artist, but money remained an issue. You shared an unheated loft and a coal stove with a number of other musi-cians. Talk about living like that in New York at the start of your career. Harris: Right, but we were lucky because around the corner was a shop that made wooden things and they threw away a lot of scrap wood. We had wood to burn and then we’d go get some coal. We kept it together. I think what messed us up was there was a trumpet player that came and stayed with us and I think he was the Devil. I remember Nica came by to get me once but I wasn’t there. So, he went with Nica, and she had to stop at a hotel to see somebody on Eighth Street. When she came down, the car was gone. He took off in the car and he did some damage to it too. I don’t know if it was the Bent-

ley or the Rolls. JI: Soon after arriving in New York, you struck up a close friendship with Thelonious Monk. The two of you were seen all over the city to-gether checking out music. Talk about how that connection formed? Harris: Through the Jazz Baroness. I didn’t know him that well [until she connected us]. I was playing with Yusef and she came in one night. What she would do is she would bring this little game called Pegity where you’d have to get so many pegs in a row. She started playing with me and I started beating her right away. [Laughs] So, we had a good time playing Pegity. When it came time for the club to close, she was trying to write a check and they refused to take her check. [Laughs] One of the richest women in the world and they wouldn’t take her check! And I was just walking by, I didn’t know what was going on. She was talking to the owner. I realized something was going on and I said, ‘What’s going on? Oh, just give me the check, I’ll sign it and you’ll just take it out of my pay, that’s all.’ It was simple, just like that, and I

went the next day to her house to get the money. So, we became good friends because I paid for the check. She was hanging with Monk, so I got to meet him, and we became good friends and I got to meet his family. JI: What was it like to frequent the jazz clubs with Monk in those early days? Harris: We went to a lot of places together with Nica. She was the driver, she had the car. Oh, we traveled in class, too. We traveled in a Rolls-Royce, and when she got the Bentley Continen-tal back from being impounded, we traveled in that. We had a good time. JI: Can you recall any memorable performances you viewed or experiences you had in clubs during your first few months in New York? Harris: I saw a lot of people but the main one would be Monk. I played at the original Five Spot with Wes Montgomery. Monk also played there, and if Monk played there, I was there. When I played there, Monk came. I came at a good time to New York although you know a lot of the musicians couldn’t play in New York because in New York you had to have a Police Card, and if you got caught doing something wrong, you couldn’t play in New York for a

year. A lot of people like Stan Getz and Monk couldn’t play at times. JI: As a highly in demand session player, you made a number of recording dates for Blue Note Records, but when you approached the label for a date of your own, you were turned down. You were told that you played “too beautiful.” What did you make of that? Harris: I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and hung up the phone. [Laughs] Ain’t that wonder-ful for someone to say you play too beautiful? Oh, boy, that sounds like an honor. That’s a hell of a thing to tell somebody. I knew how to take that kind of stuff. So, I didn’t have too much to do with them, but I played with Lee Morgan on Blue Note and we did make a hit – “Sidewinder.” That’s when I asked them why not give me a date? JI: You’ve described your time as Coleman Hawkins’ pianist to be one of the highlights of your life. Would you talk about those years in the ‘60s when you played with him, and some of the experiences you had?

Harris: It was good. I was a person who loved Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie. I’ll never forget, one day I was play-ing with Coleman Hawkins, we were in the Van-guard, and he said, “Let’s play “All the Things You Are.”” I’d never played that with him, but I knew “All the Things You Are.” So, we played it, but it was strange. When he played it, this high pedestal that I had Charlie Parker on, the pedestal sort of dropped down a little bit because it showed me that Coleman could really play. You know the best thing about New York was the older cats, they all stayed in New York – Coleman Hawkins, Pres, Ben Webster, Art Ta-tum. All of them stayed in New York. JI: You were present for Hawkins’ death, as well as later, for Monk’s death. Would you speak on losing these heroes/friends? Harris: It’s hard. I’d gone to live with Coleman Hawkins because he needed help. He had health issues at the end, but he always could get him-self back together and be all right, but this was the last time, and he couldn’t be all right. We were supposed to go to Detroit and play but he couldn’t make it, so I took Sonny Red, and I had Coleman put into the hospital. I was sorry that I put him in the hospital because he always said, “In the front door, out the back door.” That’s what he called the hospital. That’s like seeing death, and he was right, because when I went to see him there he looked like he had sunk into the bed. It was a strange thing, and I knew that it was about over. I was sorry that I had put him there, but I did it, it was my fault. I should have stuck with what he said. What had happened was that I was good with him in the beginning but when he started getting weaker and couldn’t make it back from the bathroom, and as small as I am, I couldn’t lift him. That’s why I had to put him in the hospital because I couldn’t handle him, and I had nobody big around me. I was the one playing with him, so I always made sure to be there for him. It was different with Monk. There’s a small room that I’m looking at right now that Monk came to and laid in the bed there and stayed for ten years. He retired. This was interesting. He came out one time when we were having a concert dedicated to Monk with all his music that I was playing on at Carnegie Hall. Before I went to the last rehearsal on the after-noon of the concert, I talked to him and said, ‘Why don’t you get up and play this concert?’ And he didn’t say no. See, Monk was a cat who didn’t say too many words at all. He didn’t waste words. He didn’t say no, so I went down-stairs, and I told the Baroness, ‘You know what? He didn’t say no. So, what you should do is ask him if he wants to go and play this concert.’ I went to Carnegie Hall to get ready to play and who should walk in the door but Monk. He came to play the concert. I got paid, thank goodness, but he played, and he played it good. It was as if he’d been playing all the time, but he had just been laying in that bed. He ended up leaving that bed and going to the hospital, and that was the end of Monk. JI: After making your debut as a leader in 1958 with Breakin’ It Up for Argo Records, you re-leased five albums for Riverside between 1960 - 1962.


“...main difference is that Chopin, Bach ... could write

a song, go back ... and change something … jazz musicians … play a gig … can’t stop in the middle

and say, ‘Oops, I made a mistake,’ and start all over ... [the classical composers] would have really enjoyed

[what we do] because it would have shown how great they really were … [that] they could sit and

make mistakes without stopping playing.”

Barry Harris


Harris: There was one New York piano player named Frank Hewitt who got mad. He said, “Here you are, you come from Detroit and they’ve got you making the records. We live in New York and they didn’t have us making the records.” He was crying the blues. The differ-ence was that a lot of them were junkies. I was-n’t a junkie. I was too scared to be a junkie. Put a needle in your arm? Get outta here! That’s the scariest thing I’ve heard in my life! I couldn’t stand no doctor, goodness gracious. I think I smoked cigarettes to get away from that. Smok-ing cigarettes gave me a habit and that was enough habit for me. I wouldn’t even drink cof-fee because I thought drinking coffee and smok-ing a cigarette might kill me. [Laughs] That’s like two vices. You’ve got to be careful because people fall in love with coffee, just like they fall in love with heroin and cocaine! [Laughs] I did-n’t want to be a part of that, but I did smoke. I had to give that up because I had the stroke. I haven’t smoked since 1993. JI: You never tried any drugs? Harris: There was one time I was at a friend’s house in Brooklyn, and he was smoking some Jamaican Gold or something. I said, ‘I think I’ll try some of that stuff.’ He said, “What are you talking about? It must be the end of the world.” So, I took a big puff and nothing happened. I said, ‘Where do you get pleasure from this thing? This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of in my life,’ and when I said that my friend went to his piano and started playing and I laid down. Man, when I laid down, I became so high, [Laughs] it was the funniest thing. I be-came so high I said, ‘What?’ And then I had to go home, I had to get on the subway, get to the Port Authority. Let me tell you – that was the longest subway drive I’ve ever been on in my life. From one station to the next, it took an hour. That’s what it seemed like. [Laughs] I thought it would have been great if you really had that extra hour to practice. That would have been a good thing, but all you did [after smoking that stuff] was nod. Now that was the closest I came [to using] all these years. I was always scared. I was an introvert, I’d run home. I wasn’t going to hang out with musicians and get high. That’s nonsense. I only cared about music. JI: Those five Riverside albums were the largest burst of recordings you’ve led to date. Talk about the experience of releasing so much music over such a small period of time. Harris: It was just making dates and people were buying a lot of jazz records. Riverside was my record company, they looked out for me. They gave me a key to a building on 46th street that had a piano, and every day when I was in New York, I would go there and practice. Once the piano players found out where I was they started coming – Joe Zawinul, Hugh Lawson, Harold Mabern. It was special there. I remember one time they brought in an old grand piano and put it in that room. I had been playing this old spinet. I touched that grand piano and it sounded terrible, so I just kept using the spinet. I don’t

know how long after that but one day I decided to go play that old grand piano. And you know what happened? As I played that old piano, that piano tuned up by itself. All it was doing was waiting for me to play it. And that’s really true. I played it and that piano became wonderful. I can’t tell you how special that piano was. I couldn’t believe it tuned itself up. That’s when I knew that I was something special too. That piano let me know that I was special. JI: One of the early Riverside recordings you did was a solo record called Listen to Barry Har-ris [1960]. Did you have any reservations about releasing a solo album? Many of today’s young-er artists are reluctant to do that out of fear that their flaws will be exposed. Harris: I didn’t worry about that. I made the date, and I did a pretty good job. It wasn’t that bad, really. One song on that date was called “Mutattra” and people wondered why it was called that. What it was is Art Tatum spelled backwards. It’s a beautiful piece that I wrote in dedication to Art Tatum. One time I was teach-ing in Rome and the class ended and as people were leaving, one piano player started playing “Mutattra” and it was the prettiest thing, man. You should have heard it. This boy playing my song dedicated to Art Tatum. I can’t even play it now. JI: You were pretty steady throughout your career in putting out a lot of recordings except in the ‘80s. Why did you only release two albums [For the Moment & The Bird of Red and Gold] during the ‘80s? Harris: I don’t know. At one time I didn’t want to record. I wanted to wait until I got better. It might have been around that time. That was also the time of the Jazz Cultural Theater JI: How did the Jazz Cultural Theater come about? Harris: There was a lady uptown who had a little brownstone that she was tired of and I wanted to buy it. I had a little money saved, and it wasn’t gonna cost that much either, maybe ten thousand dollars. There were two other cats in-terested in opening up the Jazz Cultural Theater and they helped talk me into it but they ended up not being involved with the thing, so I did it all by myself. I kept it running for five years (1982-86). I paid the rent every month. I don’t know how I did it. I did call a rich friend who helped me at one point with finances one night by pull-ing out a check for fifteen thousand dollars. Im-agine that, giving out that much money. There was another cat who I called when I was behind. I hadn’t talked to him for a long time. I said, ‘Could you do me a favor and sign for a loan for me because I don’t want to lose this place.’ The next day he had arranged the loan and I paid him back. That was tough. I think it was about ten thousand dollars, and I made sure I paid him back. I’ve been blessed along the way. JI: Obviously, teaching has been a prime focus in your life, dating back to the ‘50s in Detroit, and more formally in New York. You’ve contin-ued on with weekly workshops, charging a nom-inal fee for anyone who wants to attend. What’s

driven you to commit so much of your time and effort to teaching? Harris: I enjoy it, I see and meet people. When I’m teaching I become better myself. JI: Why haven’t you sought an official teaching position at one of the many jazz schools? Harris: I wouldn’t teach in one of those schools. They use a syllabus; I think they call it. They want you to have a syllabus and they want to know every day what you’re going to teach, and at the end of the semester, they want to know everything that you taught. Music doesn’t work that way. Not at all, because you could have 45 people in the class - 15 you don’t have to say much to at all, because they’re real quick. There’s another 15, they’re a little bit slower than that, but the minute they get it, that’s it, they know it. Now you come to those last 15, they’re very slow. So, you’ve got to divide up this room to 15 - good, 15 – almost good, 15 – you’ve got to teach them all the way. You teach them so they all end up with the same thing. There’s the secret of teaching. The classes are so advanced now, and they’re so big, you don’t get to all the people. I did teach through the Jazz-Mobile but not as a regular teacher. I filled in for other teachers when they weren’t available. I didn’t want to teach there although in some ways I do regret it because I think we would still have JazzMobile if I’d been teaching there. JI: Are the classical teaching programs doing a better job of teaching than the jazz schools? Harris: I’d like to round up all the teachers, every teacher, and while you’re rounding up the teachers, you round up all the people that play instruments, including the classical people. Be-cause what happens with the classical people is it seems they learn to read but they don’t know anything about [anything else]. It’s funny, how can you just learn to read, and the best reader gets into the orchestra, and the rest, what do they do? They become teachers. They don’t know anything about a diminished [chord or scale]. They hardly know anything, and they should. Every classical musician should know stuff oth-er than just being able to read. You’ve got to know what you’re reading, and they don’t. I say change this. Our country is going through a cri-sis right now. They messed up my country. This is my country and they messed it up. They messed it up four days ago [the storming of the U.S. Capitol]. I can keep talking for ever and ever. JI: Do you see yourself as a political person? Harris: Yes, I’m political, yes. We were brought here not of our own free will. Anyway, most of us in this country come from someplace else. I don’t know how some people got the idea that they’re the only ones in the world. There’s no only one. I love my country. I’ve gone to a lot of countries I’ve never wanted to stay in. I’ve gone to a lot of countries and no, I come back to my country, the country that I love and grew up in. JI: Did you know Eubie Blake?


Barry Harris


Harris: I played a concert with him that includ-ed six or seven piano players and he was the feature. There was also Cedar Walton, Harold Mabern, Dorothy Donegan and some others. Cedar Walton’s mother was there, and she came up to Cedar after the concert and said, “Cedar you all right but you ain’t no Barry Harris.” Just like that. So, years later, I was wondering if she really said that or was that me making up some-thing. Sometimes you don’t know if something really happened. I was thinking about that, and one day I was working at the new Birdland and Cedar Walton came in, and do you know what he screamed out? “My momma said I was no Barry Harris!” [Laughs] Then I knew it was true. JI: When was that concert? Harris: I don’t remember but I know that I fast-ed before it. I did a juice fast for about 14 days. The only thing that made me stop – Nellie Monk and Nica de Koenigswarter. They got nervous because I had fasted so long on juice. They were scared. I told them it was okay and that it made me play better, and that’s when Cedar Walton’s mamma told him ‘Barry Harris, you’re not.’ [Laughs] That’s really something. JI: Is there a pianist that impressed you in New York that people might not know about? Harris: Mel Powell, whoa, Mel Powell! He could stride, good gracious alive. He’s a cat who ended up teaching at Yale, and he was teaching avant-garde stuff. He was a good piano player. JI: In 1998, you inaugurated the annual Barry Harris Achievement Award, known as the “Barry,” which you self-financed. Doc Cheatham was the first recipient. How were winners chosen? Harris: I chose them myself. I chose who I wanted to give it to. There were a lot of musi-cians who worked as sidemen and never got much recognition flowers, such as Junior Mance. I decided that the musicians needed something, so I started giving awards to people who never got awards. I don’t even think Jimmy Heath had gotten any awards at that time. I called it the “Barry.” I may still have a couple around that I wasn’t able to give to people. I stopped that a long time ago because I had the stroke. JI: You’ve given much of yourself to others during your career and you’ve also received back generous support. The most lavish support came from the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. She patronized many jazz artists, but you were the one with the most special rela-tionship with her. How did she come to offer you her Weehawken, New Jersey home to live in? Harris: That just came about, that’s all. We became tight. What happened was I ended up catching pneumonia after riding around in New

York in her car. I took sick and she moved all my stuff out of the place where I was living and moved it to her house. I got mad and said, ‘Why did you move my stuff into your house? I’m not living here,’ and I’ve been living here ever since 1964. [Laughs] I wasn’t gonna live here. That’s the way it happened. This is my home. It’s her children’s home really, but she told them that I could stay here the rest of my life if I wanted to, and they’ve been very good to me. JI: Monk also famously later on lived at the Baroness’ home while you were there. Were there other musicians that also lived there? Harris: Not that I know of. JI: That Baroness’ home became known as the “Cat House,” named for the numerous musicians that hung out there, as well as the 100 adopted cats that roamed inside. Monk complained about the cats, he called it “Catville.” How did you tolerate the situation? Harris: I kept the upstairs door closed. I never had cats in my room although I finally did end up living with one cat. That’s it. In all this time, I’ve only had one cat. See, we had a run all around the house and the cats could come from the basement all the way up to the top floor. This house was theirs. JI: Did you adopt your cat or was it one of the Baroness’ cats? Harris: I had one of hers. There were so many cats. I don’t have any cats now. That cat I had, I held in my arms when I had to put it to sleep. That was end of the cats, as far as I’m con-cerned. I don’t think about cats and I definitely don’t think about dogs. They’re out. JI: You’ve not been a fan of jazz music that rejects the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic lan-guage of bebop, yet you performed at a recorded Monk tribute event with Don Cherry, Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd. Would you talk about your feelings on and your connection to avant-garde jazz? Harris: There were avant-garde cats at that trib-ute, but we didn’t play avant-garde music there at City College. That music wasn’t even sup-posed to come out, but it was alright. I didn’t get too much involved with that [avant-garde jazz]. I don’t know how they put that concert together. It was just a gig, man. We played tunes, not avant-garde music. JI: What are your interests outside of music including guilty pleasures? Harris: Hanging with friends. I like vanilla and strawberry ice cream. I like watching game shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. I like cowboy movies because they play music. These new movies don’t have good music. Phil Bingham [pianist who helped facilitate the interview] teasingly says: “Barry Harris is the greatest bowler in the world!” Harris: [Laughs] Oh, you want to hear that sto-ry? Checkerboard Films decided to do [a film

on] me [Barry Harris: The Spirit of Bebop], they followed me around. I always go to the bowling alley because I like to bowl, not that I’m a good bowler. The day they came, let me tell you what happened. They set up and I got ready to bowl, and man, I hit the most beautiful strike you’d ever want to see in your life. Then after they left, I didn’t even bowl a hundred! [Laughs] That was one of the lowest games I ever bowled. JI: You’re also a whiz at crossword puzzles and Scrabble? Harris: I’m pretty good at them although Nica could beat me. We’d do the Sunday Times every week and she was well educated. I also like food. I think sushi is the best food. Right now I’d rather have sushi than anything else. JI: The word is that you like betting on the hors-es. What is the secret to picking a winning horse? Harris: I used to go the racetrack every day. The secret is looking at the head, looking at the butt. Yeah, the head has to be held a certain kind of way. The winner sometimes tells you he’s gonna win. You have to look at the angle of the body. The head is generally down. They don’t pay attention to anything in the stall but when they start running, woo. People say Secretariat was the greatest, but it really was Kelso. JI: What would you like your legacy to be? Harris: My legacy? [Laughs] I don’t know. I can’t think like that. I’d like to talk to all the musicians on this planet about my discoveries so that they’d be on the right track. I’m very inquis-itive about music, I’ve not stopped that. I learned more new things this last week, I had to tell all my students, ‘Why is it I discover things and I don’t see you coming up showing me stuff that you discovered?’ Things come to me, I don’t even have to touch the piano. JI: The last questions have been gotten from other artists to ask you: Joey Alexander (piano) asked: “As a leader on the album Sidewinder, how did Lee Morgan convey his ideas and concepts to the players?” Harris: He wrote down the songs that he want-ed us to play, and we learned them and played them. People think they can come up to me and ask me to play “Sidewinder!” [Laughs] You must be crazy. That was a record date that was done at that time, at that moment, and after it was over, it was over. That’s what it is with rec-ord dates. When it’s over, it’s over. What I did at a record date is to look at the music and memo-rize it quick, because I didn’t like the thought of looking at music and playing. I thought you were supposed to be natural. I wouldn’t neces-sarily remember the music [after the date]. The only person I knew who played “Sidewinder” was Harold Mabern, and he could play the hell out of it. JI: What was it like being around Lee Morgan? Harris: He was a nice cat. You know, musi-cians have problems, we’d be looking for the


Barry Harris


payoff, [Laughs] all of us. I knew Lee as a kid. He came along with the bass player from Phila-delphia -Spanky DeBrest. They were like little kids – 17 or something. Joey Alexander also asked: “What did you learn the most, both philosophically and spiritu-ally, from your time with Thelonious Monk?” Harris: Monk taught you don’t talk so much. Monk did not waste words. He didn’t hold an elongated conversation with you. Monk didn’t waste time talking. One day we sat at that Stein-way piano on my right side over there. We played one song over and over and over. He played a chorus, and I played a chorus. The song was called “My Ideal.” It was interesting be-cause I had never done anything like that, but I’ve heard two tapes of Monk practicing where he played one song by himself, in time, and played it for an hour. I don’t know how long we sat there playing. I wish it had been recorded so I could see what we did. Sheila Jordan (vocalist) asked: “Would you talk about the time I almost got you killed in Detroit?” Harris: Woooo. We were working in a Polish bar in Hamtramck, just outside of Detroit, and here come these two pretty, white ladies walking through the joint. There was a long bar, and they were walking straight at us. Every eye in that bar was following them. Boy, those [Polish] people got so mad [that the white ladies were paying us attention] that when the gig was over, we rushed out of there and we ran to get on the streetcar. They were running after us to try to kill us. That kind of stuff’s been going on for years. One of those ladies was Sheila. She was a Detroiter and she loved Bird as much as we did. Sheila was in a trio called Skeeter, Mitch and Jean and they wrote lyrics to Bird’s songs. I’ve still got some of [their music] here right now. Kirk Lightsey (piano) asked: “Talk about World Stage.” Harris: In Detroit we had a jazz organization open to all races called the World Stage that had five thousand members. Kenny Burrell was the first president. All the young musicians were able to come there, it was open to them, and many people like Max [Roach] came to play there. It wasn’t a bar so the young people could go there and get a chance to play with [touring] musicians. It was great, we were all jazz lovers. There’s nothing like it now. The only place I ran into that was something like what we had was in Baltimore where they had the Left Bank Jazz Society. That was something too. They had a lady that made all kinds of cakes and maybe food too. All the bums on Eighth Avenue always knew when I was going to Baltimore and they said, “You’re gonna bring me back some cake, right?” I’d bring back ten or twenty pieces of cake and I’d take it back to New York. I’d get off the bus and these cats would be lined up waiting for me to get their piece of cake. That was fun.

JI: Any comments about Kirk Lightsey? Harris: He was younger than me and I sort of put him on the right track which is what I did for good people. He learned. He’s part of me too. He called me the other day and all he said was, “I love you.” Louis Hayes (drums) asked: “Do you still eat raisins all the time?”

Harris: [Laughs] I used to eat raisins like that? I did? Is that what he said? I don’t remember that. Do you still eat raisins all the time? I guess I did if he said it, he’s probably telling the truth. Raisins are one of the good things to eat, any-way.

Chuck Israels (bass) had a comment and a question: “There are always musical traps and puzzles for which Barry has concrete solutions culled from his deep understanding of how the music of Parker and Powell functions, and he demonstrates those solutions in practical ways. It can appear to a musician educated in conven-tional theory that some of Barry’s solutions come in through a back door or overshoots the mark and then backtracks. But, in fact, Barry’s thought process is sometimes quicker and more efficient that what a conventional theorist would consider more direct, and it’s this immediacy and practicality that makes Barry’s approach so attractive. And Barry understands that fluency requires an extensive and easily retrievable vo-cabulary, and the vocabulary that is most appeal-ing and beautiful to him (and to me) is the vo-cabulary of Parker and Powell. That’s my under-standing of Barry’s perspective, and every en-counter with him expands my useful knowledge of that music. Like most everyone who knows him, I’m grateful for his generosity in sharing the things he’s learned. My question is how will the music continue to survive and remain rele-vant against the dominant culture?”

Harris: It’s very hard. We’ve taken a few steps backwards. It’s such a beautiful thing to be able to play music. We’re part of the classical tradi-tion of music. The main difference is that Chopin, Bach, and the others, they could write a song, go back the next day and change some-thing that they didn’t like. We jazz musicians, we go play a gig, we can’t stop in the middle of the gig and say, ‘Oops, I made a mistake,’ and start all over again. No, you have to put up with the mistake. I’m sure that [the classical compos-ers] would have really enjoyed [what we do] because it would have shown how great they really were—if they could sit and play and make mistakes without stopping playing.

Bertha Hope (pianist) asked: “I take your Satur-day class when I can. You’re an amazing teach-er. You’re able to start at the piano anywhere and make your lesson plan out of whatever you play. I don’t know of another teacher who is as effective as you are. What musical memories do you have of Elmo Hope? I remember you telling me that you didn’t play Elmo Hope’s music because it was too difficult, that it was too full of changes and decisions to make of where to go with it.” Harris: I was lucky to meet him once. I went to a piano player’s house on 110th Street in New York City once and Elmo Hope was there. It was interesting because he played very well. I

could tell that he could play but his things were so hard, man. I made a record date with Lee Morgan and Clifford Jordan and we played a song [“Take Twelve”] that Elmo Hope wrote. The record was called Take Twelve [1962, Jazzland] because it took us twelve takes to learn that song. Well, it really didn’t take us, Clifford Jordan and myself, that long, it took Lee Morgan that long.

JI: Why do you think Elmo Hope never got the recognition he deserved?

Harris: Because he played these hard songs that he wrote! If he had written a song like “I Got Rhythm” it would have been smart. Elmo was a cat who made up things to play when he’d have a record date. And all original things that had original changes. It was hard to play them. He’d have a record date and he’d make up all these songs and you’d have to learn how to play them [right before the record date]. He didn’t make up a little something that we’d been playing all our lives. We’ve been playing the blues all our lives and he didn’t make up a blues. That’s not to say he didn’t make up a blues, it’s that on some of his record dates he made up different things. He was a beautiful person. And Bertha, it was nice to meet Bertha too.

Benny Golson (saxophone) asked: “I’ve known you for many years. My burning question to you would be the same question to myself. Where does the music go from here?”

Harris: That’s hard to say where the music goes from here. I’m pretty optimistic because there’s a lot of pretty young people trying to learn how to do it and I try to make them learn how to make up things too. You know what Benny Gol-son told me? We were playing a festival in De-troit, and he came up to me and said, “You know Barry? I was the first person to send for you to come from Detroit and make a record date. I would like to hear that date. I don’t know if I ever heard it. [It’s unclear if he was referring to The Other Side of Benny Golson, 1958, River-side] I don’t know where the music goes from here. I’ve seen some really young cats. I remem-ber when Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett came on the scene.

JI: What message would you’d like to impart to future generations of music listeners?

Harris: I think that if it doesn’t make your foot pat, somethings wrong with it. That’s what it should be doing for you. I tell all my class mem-bers, ‘Every time you hear some music that’s got a rhythm, pat your foot. Even if you hate the music, still pat your foot. Learn to pat your foot at all times to what you hear. You’re in a restau-rant, listening to some jive music? Pat your foot. That’s how you learn how to feel. See, patting your foot and starting to play the instrument, you’ll find that the foot is doing one thing and what you’re doing on the instrument is another thing and it deals with different parts of the beat. It’s really interesting. I thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk and I hope that I’ve giv-en something about the music. I would like some teachers to call me and ask about the music. Keith Jarrett, if one hand can play, play.

Barry Harris


By Ken Weiss After the COVID-19 pandemic forced a year’s delay, Arts For Art presented the 25th annu-al Vision Festival, New York City’s multi-disciplinary celebration of avant-garde jazz music, dance, poetry and art, from July 22-31 at Pioneer works in Red Hook and The Clemente on the Lower East side. A plethora of the jazz avant-garde/creative music’s lead-ing lights, who’ve followed an unwavering path towards creative expression, performed including William Parker, Andrew Cyrille, Ol-iver Lake, Reggie Workman, Matt Shipp, Da-vid Murray, James Blood Ulmer, Cooper-Moore, Dave Burrell, John Zorn, Warren Smith, Joe McPhee, Joe Morris, Mat Maneri,

Ava Mendoza, Tony Malaby, Pheeroan akLaff, Amirtha Kidambi, James Brandon Lewis, Aruán Ortiz, David Virelles, Gerald Cleaver, Ingrid Laubrock, Jon Irabagon, Zeena Parkins, Tom Rainey, Jaimie Branch and William Hooker. Amina Claudine Myers was this year’s Lifetime Achievement honoree and the festival’s last day was an extensive tribute to the great percussionist/thinker Milford Graves who passed in February. “Breaking Free/Coming Home” was the festivals byline and aptly summarized the joy and spiritual cleans-ing that set after set of life-affirming, highly emotional music brought to the listeners in the audience and online.

Vision Festival 25 — July 22-31, 2021

Amina Claudine Myers Photo by Ken Weiss


James-Blood-Ulmer Vision Fest 2021

Photo by Ken Weiss


Aruán Ortiz Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss

Dave-Burrell & Darius-Jones Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss


Matthew Shipp Vision Fest 2021

Photo by Ken Weiss


James Brandon Lewis & Brad Jones Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss

Ben Monder, Michael Formanek, Tony Malaby, Tom Rainey Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss


Andrew Cyrille Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss

Tribute To Milford Graves Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss


Ava Mendoza Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss


Zeena Parkins Vision Fest 2021

Photo by Ken Weiss

Laura Cromwell & John Zorn Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss


William Parker Vision Fest 2021 Photo by Ken Weiss

Trust the world’s leading expert in vintage drums

Our experience: In addition to operating our NY and Chicagoland stores, I currently serve as manager and curator of the world’s finest private collection of rare and celebrity owned drums in the world.

We have authenticated and brokered the sale of instruments owned by such famous drummers as Buddy Rich, Joe Morello, Elvin Jones, Mel Lewis, Tony Williams, Sonny Greer, Don Lamond, Cozy Cole, Papa Jo Jones, Philly Joe Jones, Gene Krupa, Peter Erskine, Stan Levey, Dave Tough, Louie Bellson, Jake Hanna, Earl Palmer, Billy Gladstone and more.

We have sold more of the world’s rarest drums and drum sets than anyone in the world. Items such as: the finest known Ludwig Top Hat and Cane drum set; the finest known and unique example of Leedy’s Autograph of the Stars set; four of the twelve known examples of ’50s era Gretsch cadillac nitron green “Birdland” drum sets; more Gretsch round badge era 12-14-18 drum sets than any dealer world-wide; eight of the rare Billy Gladstone snares (of which only 25 exist) and one of the only two complete Billy Gladstone drum sets.

Our worldwide clientele consists of serious players; collectors, investors and anyone else who loves the finest examples of rare vintage drums. Our expertise runs deep and is rooted in the superb instru-ments crafted by US manufacturers from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Contact Steve: 630-865-6849 | email: [email protected]

When it comes to superb vintage drums

you need a true expert. I have over 40

years of experience with vintage drums

and have authenticated and brokered

some of the rarest and finest sets in exis-

tence, including sets owned by some of

the world’s most renowned drummers.

Whether you want to purchase or sell a

fine vintage snare drum or drum set, or

perhaps purchase something owned by

a famous drummer you admire, trust

the industry’s leading expert.

When you call or email, you get me. I am available and I want to speak

with you. Feel free to call or email with questions and requests.

No one does “vintage” better, and you deserve the best.

Steve Maxwell

Midtown Manhattan 242 W. 30th Street, New York, NY 10001 Ph: 212-730-8138 Hours: 11–7 M–F; 11–6 Sat

Chicagoland 2000 Bloomingdale Road, Unit #110 Glendale Heights, IL 60139 Ph: 630-237-4997 Hours: 11–6 Fri; 10–5 Sat | Additional hours by appointment.

www.maxwelldrums.comServing the

Community of

Professional

Drummers and

Drum Lovers

JAZZINSIDE_full-page_VintageExp10.07.17.indd 1 11/13/17 3:10 PM

http://www.maxwelldrums.com

Visit JohnALewisJazz.com

New CD Release from Dallas Area Pianist

John A. Lewis

John A. Lewis, piano Merik Gillett, drums Robert Trusko, bass TRACKS: Backstory Deadline Jacked Complicity Bylines Liable Precocity Excerpt from the "Ancient

Dance Suite" What Say I A Cautionary Ruse All compositions by John A Lewis

http://www.JohnALewisJazz.com

Bertha - Jazz Inside Magazine

Documents

Transcript of Bertha - Jazz Inside Magazine