Jazz Professional               

 

TERRY GIBBS

The return of straight—ahead jazz


Buddy De Franco and Terry Gibbs
Leading a big band
A vibes virtuoso
Jazz - Rock and me
To speak of technique
Success of the partnership with Buddy De Franco
My approach to the vibes
The return of straight-ahead jazz
Speaking to Les Tomkins in 1983

In your leisure time, what do you listen to, Terry? Is it mainly jazz, or other forms of music?

Oh, I love classical music. I'm glad you have a classical radio station here; I listen to that a lot. I listen to some pop things—if you want to call good singers pop. What would you call Frank Sinatra?

I'd call him the Number One popular singer.

Right. Well, see, to me people like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee are actually jazz singers, because they sing with good time. I'm not interested in anybody going "shoo–be–doo–be" and singing bebop things—that's not the kind of singing I like. I like to hear somebody who can sing. I told Eydie Gorme one time: "You know something, Eydie—you're one of my favourite jazz singers", and she jumped at me and kissed me. She said: "Nobody ever calls me a jazz singer any more. You're the first one to call me that for twenty years!" And she's a very good jazz singer, because she's got great time. She can belt, and she can swing. So if that's pop music, I'll buy that. But, you know—I don't listen to a lot of jazz records. I listen to the jazz station we have in LA, only because I want to see what's happening, and whose records are getting played.

There's one particular disc jockey I like very much; his name is Chuck Niles. There's a few of them, but of all the guys, Chuck plays the best records—and he's held back by the station, because they want him to throw some fusion in. He's been there twenty years; he keeps getting fired, but he keeps coming back. But he plays more bebop than anybody up there—because he was a clarinet player, and he knows what it's all about.

Then there's a guy who's very big in New York, William B. Williams; it's a pop station, and when they were playing all the garbage he still played records of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett—all the good ones.

Well, why should the airwaves be swamped with just one kind of music, when there is so much other music to be heard?

Because it's a matter of dollars and cents. If a guy spends hundreds of thousands of dollars recording some of this trash, he's going to spend another hundred thousand making sure that everybody's going to play it. But there is far too much of it being passed off—they can't be that illiterate not to know that most of it is junk. Did you hear what Buddy Rich said when he was in Nashville? Nashville, of course, is where all the country 'n' Western comes from. Buddy was working there, and he said words to the effect that they were all a bunch of amateurs, that they can't sing, it's the worst music and so on. He's lucky he got out of Nashville alive! But you know Buddy—he doesn't care. He didn't wait till he got miles away; right in that city, he put down their music. And it is garbage. All the tunes sound like they were written by eight–year–old children.

And they all sound alike. When you hear one, you've heard them all.

Yes—well, the chord changes. Plus they'll sing five beats sometimes—and they'll all do it together. I can't see why or how. Why, mostly—I mean, you can sit down and figure out how, but I can't sec the validity in that at all. As Buddy said—a bunch of amateurs.

On the whole, I think what you call good, straight–ahead jazz is coming back. When we worked with Buddy's band recently, I was glad to see that he didn't play any jazz–rock at all—he just played straight–ahead. Well he doesn't need it any more—see, he's proved his point. I think maybe when he first started his band he had to reach all the young kids, or he tried to. He doesn't have to reach anybody any more—they're all there; they all know how good Buddy Rich is. Now he's going to go back to his roots. Which doesn't mean old–fashioned—nothing that swings is old–fashioned. It's like good classical music.

Without wishing to sound like an egomaniac, I must say that those arrangements for my big band of 1959, that Bill Holman, Al Cohn, Manny Albam and all the guys wrote, still sound as good as any that are done today. We play them once in a while, and people scream their heads off. Good classical music will never get old—it's the same thing.

If it's good, it's good I think Woody Herman too is tending now to play more charts of an uncompromising jazz nature.

We just did a concert with him—Buddy De Franco and I, that is—his band looks like they're all fourteen–year–old kids! And they sound great. Yes, they were playing straight–ahead. You know what's happening?—these young kids are playing bebop. Buddy's got a young trumpet player who plays the heck out of it, and Woody has a kid named George Rabbai. As for that young alto with Buddy—he's great. I think they'll make something out of it—it's coming back to that.

When you take a tune like "I Can't Get Started" or "You Go To My Head", you have to say something on it—you can't just play one chord change after you play the melody. You can't get out of making some sense with those chord changes—they're too pretty. If you just played the tonics to all those chords it would sound beautiful. So you have to think melodically along those lines.

They've found Charlie Parker again—not that he ever went anywhere. Nobody's ever caught up to him yet. And if you want to hear how good Charlie Parker really was, go buy the Supersax albums, and hear what they did.

They took his choruses and voiced it out so it was the most beautiful song you ever heard—it just came off the top of his head. It's amazing. Any time people ask me about jazz, it's so hard to explain, but my answer is that instant composing is what it is. If you're going to play eight choruses you're writing eight tunes on the spur of the moment—eight completely different tunes on the same chord changes. It's like taking the structure of a house and making eight different houses out of that same structure.

A vibes virtuoso died recently—Cal Tjader. Would you like to say something about him?

I would. I'm very proud to have, in a way, started Cal Tjader out playing vibes. I was with Buddy Rich's band back in 1946 when Cal was playing drums in San Francisco. He used to come and see me every night at a place we were working, and I'd go back with him; he was just starting to play vibes. I think he was probably one of the most underrated jazz vibists; because he got lucky in the Latin field and had a cult following of people coming to hear him for those kind of things. Maybe the jazz musicians didn't know what he really could do. But he was right there with the best. First there was Red Norvo and Lionel, then Milt and myself, and Cal came right after that—playing that good. He never got the recognition in jazz that he deserved.

I reviewed a record he made on which he played some nice ballads, some swinging themes—no Latin music at all—and it was beautiful, it was great to hear him do that again.

Yes, he played great; didn't he? In fact, about three years ago my wife and I went up to Concord, to the Concord Jazz Festival, when he was there. We went backstage to see him, and he kept telling everybody: "Here's the guy that started me out on vibes". We weren't far away in age, but he spent some time as a drummer first. I always loved Cal as a person; I was very sad when I heard the news of his death.

Another sad loss last year was Art Pepper.

That was a shock. I hadn't seen him for years, and then we were bumping into each other a lot, because I started doing more travelling. We were here with him on the Capital Jazz Festival in '81; we travelled on the same bus and we all went back to California together. I'd known Art for a long time, but we never worked together; unfortunately, he went through his bad days, the fifteen to twenty years when he was very sick, and that was my period of really being on the road and playing jazz. But in the more recent years I thought he was in good health, he looked great, and his playing was terrific. In fact, I heard a recording he made in London and it's beautiful. He was playing "Goodbye"—so emotional; he just sang through the whole thing. That's a big loss, and such a shame, because he was at a point in his life where he was very much in demand and very successful. He made an album the same week I did for the Japanese Atlas label—he and Lee Konitz did one together: That was something he'd been wanting to do.

Oh, a whole bunch of people died last year. Bernie Glow—he was the lead trumpet player on the Woody Herman band when we recorded "Early Autumn" and those things. Also Monk Montgomery, the bass player and Jimmy Jones, the piano player. That's why I'm jogging and running around and getting myself healthy. I've still got a few more things to say—I'm not through. My mind is still very active—I'm going to keep saying 'em.

Specially now, with this thing with Buddy De Franco and myself; we're having so much fun—got to keep going.

Copyright © 1983, Les Tomkins. All Rights Reserved.