We know you, Gerry, as a musician who has been involved,
as a player and a writer, in a wide range of activity. Working with a symphony
orchestra is something else..
Stretching out a little more—yes. The first reason for starting
to do the symphony concerts was to play this new piece of mine. I took off
the Winter of ‘83/‘84, spent four months working on the ideas, and then
two months—well, about a month, I suppose scoring it. So altogether it occupied
five months out of the year, preparing this piece called “Entente”. It’s
geared to be a piece for solo baritone saxophone and orchestra.
Then the other piece we’re playing in these concerts is called
“The Sax Chronicles”; I had this idea with my friend Harry Freedman, who’s
a Canadian composer, to do a piece that allowed me to play with the orchestra
in various kinds of contexts that 1 don’t get to play with because none
of the composers wrote for the baritone saxophone! And I wanted to be able
to do this; it always breaks my heart to listen to the orchestra play even
its standard repertoire and not be able to play the music of great writers
of the twentieth, nineteenth and eighteenth centuries.
So Harry decided the way to solve my problem was to take melodies
of mine and re–compose them in the styles of Bach, Brahms, Mozart.. . We
call it “The Sax Chronicles” because we’re jumping around in time, and it’s
sort of the idea of doing a revisionist history of the saxophone!
A fascinating idea. But your opportunities of experimentation
with a large orchestra must have been strictly limited anyway.
Well, actually, after doing this piece, I had the opportunity to
play with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl during last
Summer and, of course, that gave us a deadline to aim for. And it’s been
a wonderful thing: because of the existence of the piece those other things
have happened kind of naturally, you know.
We spent a week in Treviso, Italy that’s in the Veneto province,
North of Venice we rehearsed for three days and did four concerts with them,
and that really came about because the music existed. It was one of those
coincidental things; this was when their orchestra was having its season,
and they had asked me if I would do a Quartet concert. I’d said: “Love to”;
then we got into conversation about what I was doing... “Ah, you have a
piece for the symphony—oh, that’s wonderful!” So we wound up performing
it, and it was great, because to have the three days of rehearsal as a luxury
and to do four concerts in a row it meant the thing really came to life
for me.
One of the drawbacks is always having a minimal amount of rehearsal
time it’s a great luxury, being so expensive. This allowed me to iron out
all the inevitable problems copying mistakes and that sort of thing. Also
I put some time in and wrote an arrangement for the orchestra with the Quartet
on one of the pieces that we do regularly, called “K–4 Pacific”.
Oh, yes, I remember that from “Age Of Steam” a particular favourite
album with me.
Right well, I do that all the time with the Quartet. You know,
I hadn’t really even thought about it before, but when I finished the “Entente”
I was so wound up, spending that much time, that finally when I got down
to scoring I couldn’t quit! So I went on and did the other piece. When we’ve
finished the current tour I’m going to go back to Italy and see if I can
do some more writing.
Would you call it fusion music in terms of fusing elements
of jazz with classical elements?
It certainly is doing that especially “Entente”. “The Sax Chronicles”
is intended to be in the styles of the various composers; really, the only
thing that’s jazz—like about it the fact that I’m primarily a jazz musician
so I tend to phrase things in the way that I’m used to. No matter how hard
I tried, I would never be a symphonic player! It’s the force of habit, you
know the things that are so ingrained in me, as far as phrasing is concerned.
But what we have is a kind of a mutual adapting to each other, within the
framework allowed by the styles that we’re writing in.
In writing, this is quite a departure for you. Is it something
that you, hopefully, will be doing more of?
Yes, I intend to. Yes—I love to write for the orchestra. I really
never thought that I would write for the orchestra—I didn’t feel like I
could do it. But it’s been kind of a sequence of events you know those sorts
of things: you meet people and things happen, without thinking about it.
And that really is what’s happened here, because, in a way, the springboard
for all this was the happy accident of meeting Zubin Mehta on a plane going
from Los Angeles to New York.
We got talking about this and that, and he wound up inviting me
to play the soprano saxophone solo part on Ravel’s “Bolero”. And he invited
me to come to rehearsals whenever I wanted to; so being in contact with
and spending more and more time around the orchestra had its effect, and
Zubin kind of gave me the confidence to go ahead and try it. I’d been very
hesitant about taking the chance. It’s not easy to be a beginner at any
time in your life, but I think to get to be my age and feel like a rank
beginner again—just trying something you don’t know at all is not at all
easy.
Well, it’s been in there sort of waiting to come out, I suppose.
I suppose so because I’ve always been interested in orchestration,
I’ve listened a lot, and I’ve always felt like I knew a lot about it. Intuitively
because I never studied orchestration or composition when I was young; I
never had the opportunity to. But I understand the principles and the logic,
and I’ve always been curious when I listened to any composer’s work.. .
I’m always more concerned with why he would solve a problem in such a way,
or why he would use such–and–such a combination of instruments. The imagination
that a composer can bring to what he does by the kinds of orchestration
that he’ll evolve for what he’s doing that’s the great fascination for me.
But it’s an extension, as it were, of what you’ve done for the
jazz orchestra. You always tried there to get as wide a palette of colours
as possible, didn’t you?
It’s true I’ve always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral
way, rather than a band way. I suppose that’s one of the things that has
always separated me and certainly separates me now from the general trend
of the existing bands. Well, there are only a few of the well–known bands
left. But, you know, one of the bands I wrote for and played with in the
‘forties was Claude Thornhill’s band and one of the things I loved about
his band, and Claude Thornhill’s approach, was his conception of the dance
band instrumentation, with seven brass or so.
In this case, he had six or seven brass and a couple of French
horns, with the five reeds and we usually used a couple of clarinets in
that. But his approach was basically orchestral, but with no string involved.
That’s always fascinated me, and I’ve always leaned in the direction of
orchestral writing rather than band writing.
Of course, Gil Evans, whose ideas are very similar, was there
too...
And that’s precisely what Gil was doing and that’s why he was so
ideally suited to be writing for Thornhill. But that was Thornhill’s conceptionhis
band was like that when he first put it together, before Gil ever wrote
for it. Did you ever hear any of the things that Claude wrote? Marvellous
thingsthere’s one thing in particular.. .
Yes, it was Gil who drew my attention to them, and I later got
hold of a record. The one you mean had a funny title “Portrait.. .”
‘Portrait Of A Guinea Farmer”—well, that’s an example. The kinds
of things he was writing were very much in the vein of some of Debussy’s
humorous music. Aside from the tone poems we associate automatically with
Claude Debussy, he had a sense of humour and this was the thing that Claude
Thornhill enjoyed so much. Anyway, that was the conception of the band;
that was an inspiration to me, and it made me very conscious of orchestral
writing. Another bandleader that I worked for, who also inspired me to listen
to orchestral writing and to his favourite composers, was Gene Krupa.
Oh, yes Gene’s first love was Delius. He loved Delius, and we’d
spend a lot of time listening to that music. When we were on the road, Gene
always carried his record player and his records, and he would invite some
of us up to his hotel room. And he listened with such enthusiasm; he’d say:
‘ “Now, listen to this... listen to what he does here.. . listen to the
bar of five–four he puts in here.. .” Oh, he was a great inspiration lovely
man. I’ve always considered myself lucky with the leaders that I worked
for, and Claude and Gene were certainly two inspiring people for me.
How about Stan Kenton? Was he not an inspiration?
Well, you see—Stan’s band I didn’t really like, because it represented
the opposite extreme. Everything was brass, and it was all this kind of
thing that we associate with the concert band—like the Sousa band, you know.
Although I use Sousa band only to explain the conception of the concert
band, because Sousa’s band, unlike Kenton’s band, was a very soft band.
When they play Sousa marches today, they sound very loud, very military
and all that but when Sousa played them they didn’t sound like that at all.
They didn’t use trumpets, for one thing, and when they did, the cornet was
still the primary instrument—and the cornets had a much softer sound. And
they used woodwinds; the clarinets served the function of the strings.
There are recordings around of recreations of Sousa’s band, that
were probably done in the ‘thirties it was a revelation to hear those things.
It appealed to me; I liked it very much because I don’t like really blasting
loud music. As a consequence, I don’t think Stan really liked my things
that much. He kinda got stuck with me, because the musicians playing in
the band liked my arrangements, and I think he felt he would have lost face
with the band if he’d refused to commission me to write more, or to play
them. But I know that he wasn’t really comfortable with them. My music is
too horizontal, and what Stan liked was vertical structures. He wanted powersort
of wearing your virility on your sleeve, if you will.
So what’s happening with the band now? You’ve brought it over
here a couple of times. Are you still keeping it together?
Yes you know, some years I do a lot of dates and a world tour with
the big band; and then the next year we’ll probably only do a handful of
dates. But we keep the spirit going in the band; we’re always in contact
with the players, and they all live around New York. There are usually very
few changes when I put it together; we did a concert very recently, and
had almost all the regulars. And, of course, we’ve done enough dates like
that, that there are plenty of people in New York in various chairs to make
it feel like we’ve been together a long time.
It always amuses mesometimes we’ll put the band together
for a date, and we haven’t played together for six months or more; we don’t
have a rehearsal, but we go out and play—and it sounds like the band has
been working every night! I never spring new arrangements on them without
rehearsing first. The amusing thing about it is: we’ll go and do a concert
some place, with no rehearsal, and then there’ll be the comment in the paper
that they think the band may be over–rehearsedit’s a little too polished!
I always save those to send around to the bandit makes them feel good.
And the other thing we do: we periodically have softball games
with the band, because they’re all baseball nuts that helps to keep the
spirit alive. That’s one of the things about a band aside from the music
and what you can do with it, as a social organisation it’s the thing that
we all became musicians for in the first place. That’s part of it.
Do you pretty well divide your time between the small group
things and the big band?
Right and now we have the third area: spending time on the symphony
concerts. As for the Quartet, Bill Mays is on pianoyou’ve heard him?
He’s wonderful; we have a great time together. Frank Luther has been here
with me before on bass two or three times, I guess. Also our drummer Richie
De Rosa has been here with the big band and the Quartet. So we have a continuity
going. No—we never have recorded; I don’t do as much recording as I’d like
to.
I’m always looking out for new things from you, and I get surprised
sometimes when you come out with something unusual like with the accordionist
Astor Piazzolla, with Lionel Hampton or whatever.
0r the other one in Italy I like very much with Enrico Intra, playing
on his compositions. There’s a lot of good music on that one.
Yes, you recorded that in Milan, and it was put out on the Pausa
label in Los Angeles. Great stuff.
Then, of course, the most recent thing, “Little Big Horn”, that
Dave Grusin and I planned. That’s really musically quite a departure for
me, because it’s not like the stuff that we do with the Quartet and it’s
different kinds of approach to arranging of things that I wrote. The idea
being that Dave thought we should use different groups for the different
pieces, so that a piece like “Little Big Horn” or “Another Kind Of Sunday”
should have the kind of feeling supplied by some of the players who as a
rule play with him in the New York studios. We have Buddy Williams on drums
and Anthony Jackson on bass. That’s a totally different feeling than the
Quartet, or even the kind of quartet things we did on that album like “Sun
On The Stairs”.
Or we have the thing that Dave did a lot of synthesiser work on
“Under A Star”. Of course, it’s something that I can do in that way when
I’m playing concerts, because I’m not about to start carrying all those
synthesisers around. I think those are invitations to disaster; you can
imagine all the problems inherent in carrying that stuffI never want
to start with that. But in the recording studio it’s great, you know; you
have the controlif a fuse blows, you can fix it!
Well, as long as you’ve got somebody who is a total
exponent of it and not just using it as a toy.
Well, Dave is such a complete musician, and he uses it as a composer
and arranger. Of course, Dave and I have been friends for a long time, and
we always enjoy working together because we both think as composer/arrangers.
You can hear how we adapt to each other. Bill Mays does that also—he listens
to me and starts following what I’m doing, and I do the same thing. It’s
wonderful to feel things evolving find yourself doing things that you like,
that you wouldn’t do otherwise. And it’s that way with Dave Grusin.
We did some tracking on that; he did one pass with synthesisers
set up in one kind of mode, and then we’d do another pass we could overdub
two or three times. I could hear the processes at work how he was laying
out the composition for himself, to go back and improvise on another part
of it. For a composer to use instruments like that it’s a new palette to
work with. You can get a lot of satisfaction out of it.
The other thing you’ve apparently been doing sometimes latterly
has involved Mel Torme. You played on some tracks of a double album by him,
and I gather you’ve done various special concerts where there’ve been you,
he and George Shearing.
Yes, we started doing that as part of the New York Jazz Festival.
Mel and I both love songs, and George Wein wanted to do nights, as part
of the series of shows, that were a dedication, a celebration of the American
songwriters. And, as you know, we had some great people to choose from there’ve
been incredible writers in this century. So that was really the basis for
the first couple of shows that Mel and I each appeared on separately. But
we always felt that we would like to do the whole show as a concept really
make the most of the whole idea. George Wein said: “Fine”, and that’s what
we did; we put a lot of work into those shows.
It sounds as though they were a lot of fun as well.
It was a labour of love. We didn’t get anything extra for all of
the production work we put in it, but I felt it was worth–while, and Mel
and I enjoyed it very much. Of course, he brought George Shearing into the
thing, and the three of us had such a good time putting those shows together.
And a couple of shows, I think, are some of the best of the concept shows
that have been done with the New York Festival. I have a vested interest
in feeling that way, being that they were partly my shows.
Didn’t you do some singing yourself on them?
I did. Mel said: “If we’re going to be doing American songwriters,
you’ve got to sing.” And for a couple of years there I was probably the
one person anywhere who could say: “I only sing at Carnegie Hall”! I don’t
even sing at home in the shower! Only Carnegie Hall. But, you know, it gave
me confidence, and I enjoyed doing it. That’s why I wound up doing that
vocal version of one of my songs “I Never Was A Young Man” on the “Little
Big Horn” album. That was Dave’s idea; he wanted me to do that—he thought
it would be fun to do And he’s right not taking it seriously, it’s a lot
of funthat’s important too.
Have you done any other novel recordings lately?
I’ve appeared on some other people’s albums. I did a couple of tracks
with a friend of mineItalian singer Ornella Vanoni. She’s one of
the favourite Italian popular singers, and she’d been wanting us to do
something together for a long time. She had an idea for an album, and
she wrote some songs; it was fun, and I like the way she sings very much.
And I had a telephone call from Barry Manilow; I’d received a letter from
Barry years ago, saying that he’d always been a fan of mine, and telling
me how I had been an influence on him when he first started out. He wanted
to know if I was interested in doing this album with him; I said: “Sure
I’d love to.” Because I think he’s a very talented musicianI like
Barry. Even though it’s a totally different field, I’ve heard some of
his pop records on the radio and said: “Oh I like that.” So I made this
album with him, and it was a lot of fun to do also.
But will there be a recording of the present orchestral venture?
Yes, there will I don’t know when, but some time; I hope it’s soon. It’s
kind of difficult these days, because there are not too many companies
that are really very concerned about recording jazz. The recording industry
has changed; they’re enjoying such incredible success in the pop field.
Now that it’s a multi–billion dollar industry, they haven’t got
much time for us fringe musicians. Which is a shame; it’s an odd form of
discrimination against various other kinds of music that are not in the
mega–bucks arena. That notwithstanding, we still manage to get some things
recorded. Of course, doing an album with the symphony is a very expensive
project, but eventually I’m sure we’ll get these things recorded.
Perhaps with the LSO, if you do it in this country?
I’d love to what a good orchestra! Incredible. They sounded so
wonderful on our concert. I’d certainly heard them on records a lot before
that, but this was my first personal encounter with them. It was a Close
Encounter of the Best Kind!
Part
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Copyright © 1969, Les Tomkins - All rights reserved
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