The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight

By Peter C. Zimmerman

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the twenty-one conversations contained in this engaging and highly accessible book, we hear from the musicians themselves, in their own words, direct and unfiltered. Peter Zimmerman’s interviewing technique is straightforward. He turns on a recording device, poses questions, and allows his subjects to improvise, similar to the way the musicians do at concerts and in recording sessions. Topics range from their early days, their struggles and victories, to the impact the music has had on their own lives. The interviews have been carefully edited for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians’ actual words.

Peter Zimmerman tirelessly sought virtuosi whose lives span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The reader is rewarded with an intimate look into the past century’s extraordinary period of creative productivity. The oldest two interview subjects were born in 1920 and all are professional musicians who worked in jazz for at least five decades, with a few enjoying careers as long as seventy-five years. These voices reflect some seventeen hundred years of accumulated experience yielding a chronicle of incredible depth and scope.

The focus on musicians who are now emeritus figures is deliberate. Some of them are now in their nineties; six have passed since 2012, when Zimmerman began researching The Jazz Masters. Five of them have already received the NEA’s prestigious Jazz Masters award: Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Yusef Lateef, Jimmy Owens, and most recently, Dick Hyman. More undoubtedly will one day, and the balance are likewise of compelling interest. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people.

This book is a labor of love celebrating the vibrant style of music that Dizzy Gillespie once described as “our native art form.” Zimmerman’s deeply knowledgeable, unabashed passion for jazz brings out the best in the musicians. Filled with personal recollections and detailed accounts of their careers and everyday lives, this highly readable, lively work succeeds in capturing their stories for present and future generations. An important addition to the literature of music, The Jazz Masters goes a long way toward “setting the record straight.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496837394

Peter C. Zimmerman

Peter C. Zimmerman has been a music writer for more than three decades, interviewing everyone from Waylon Jennings to “Bootsy” Collins, and is author of Tennessee Music: Its People and Places and Podunk: Ramblin’ to America’s Small Places in a Dilapidated Delta 88. He is longtime editor of Odyssey Guides of Hong Kong and lives in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains. Zimmerman can be reached at [e-mail].

Book preview

Much has been written about the history of jazz and its storied past. Peter Zimmerman has posited the subject as a contemporary living musical form through use of original source material in the form of oral histories. This makes it an invaluable resource for jazz scholars and general fans of the genre. His style is accessible, personal, and familiar, avoiding the dryness of academic writing and conveying a real passion for the music.

—Alex de Laszlo, collection development librarian at the City University of New York (CUNY)

"Peter Zimmerman’s The Jazz Masters is an engaging and diverse mix of eminent players and fascinating personalities. Zimmerman presents their observations, opinions, and insights in a relaxed, conversational style that feel more like informal chats than traditional interviews."

—Bob Bernotas, author of Top Brass: Interviews and Master Classes with Jazz’s Leading Brass Players and Reed All About It: Interviews and Master Classes with Jazz’s Leading Reed Players

A necessary and enjoyable work.

—Marty Sheller, Latin jazz composer/arranger

[The musicians’] strength, fortitude, intelligence, humility, humor, and the sacrifices they made to play this wonderful music shines with all of them. Peter Zimmerman is an excellent interviewer, and this book is a must-read for all of us lovers of jazz.

—Mark Feldman, Reservoir Music

This is a wonderful book, filled with glorious living history. Thanks to Pete for doing this!

—Adam Nussbaum, drummer, The Lead Belly Project (2018)

"Peter Zimmerman’s book, The Jazz Masters, is quite interesting, and filled with information that would normally be unavailable to those who were not a part of the music scene. I commend him for his efforts in capturing this crucial part of jazz history straight from the musical sources who have not only witnessed it, but were a part of making it. Now more than ever, we need works such as this one to hold testimony of the musicians who devoted their lives to this creative art force that the world knows as jazz."

—Billy Harper, saxophonist, The Roots of the Blues with Randy Weston (2013)

Down-to-earth interviews with a gracious and well-studied writer. A must-read!

—Valerie Naranjo, percussionist, Saturday Night Live Band, and faculty at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

THE JAZZ MASTERS

THE JAZZ MASTERS

Setting the Record Straight

Peter C. Zimmerman

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON

The title The Jazz Masters is used with permission of the National Endowment for the Arts. This book is not affiliated with the NEA’s Jazz Masters awards program, and the NEA and the federal government have not contributed in any way to this book or endorsed the book, its author, or publisher.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Photographs by Gus Philippas and Peter Zimmerman

Copyright © 2021 by Peter C. Zimmerman and the University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2021

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zimmerman, Peter Coats, author, interviewer.

Title: The jazz masters: setting the record straight / Peter C. Zimmerman.

Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021026152 (print) | LCCN 2021026153 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3222-1 (hardback) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3743-1 (trade paperback) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3739-4 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3740-0 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3741-7 (pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3742-4 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Jazz musicians—United States—Interviews. | Amram, David—Interviews. | Blake, Ran—Interviews. | Cranshaw, Bob—Interviews. | Crow, Bill, 1927—Interviews. | Davis, Charles, 1933-2016—Interviews. | Hyman, Dick, 1927—Interviews. | Jordan, Clifford—Interviews. | Kuhn, Steve—Interviews. | Lateef, Yusef—Interviews. | Owens, Jimmy, 1943—Interviews. | Pizzarelli, Bucky—Interviews. | Ponomarev, Valery—Interviews. | Porcelli, Bob—Interviews. | Rollins, Sonny—Interviews. | Stewart, Sandy 1937—Interviews. | Sudhalter, Carol—Interviews. | Terry, Brad—Interviews. | Terry, Clark—Interviews. | Tucker, Mickey—Interviews. | Turre, Steve—Interviews. | Williams, Buster—Interviews. | BISAC: MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Jazz | MUSIC / History & Criticism

Classification: LCC ML3508 .Z56 2021 (print) | LCC ML3508 (ebook) | DDC 781.65092/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026152

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026153

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To Stephen K. Zimmerman

Jazz doesn’t stem from any single race, creed, or locality. It comes from a mixture of all these things. It doesn’t make any difference what names the writers and music critics want to paste on—it’s all music and it’s all an expression from the soul of a human being.

—Willie The Lion Smith (1893–1973), Music on My Mind

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Before Words

A Requiem for Cedar

MEET THE PLAYERS

Blowin’ in from Chicago: Clifford Jordan, Charles Davis, and Bob Cranshaw

The Big Kahunas: Sonny Rollins and Clark Terry

Old School: Sandy Stewart, Dick Hyman, and Bucky Pizzarelli

On the Scene: Bobby Porcelli and Valery Ponomarev

The Philosophers: David Amram and Ran Blake

Local 802: Jimmy Owens and Bill Crow

Shells and Whistles: Brad Terry and Steve Turre

The Mutual Appreciation Society: Mickey Tucker and Carol Sudhalter

Something More: Steve Kuhn and Buster Williams

The Gentle Giant: Yusef Lateef

RIP, 2012–2021

Select Discography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my parents, Betty and Steve Zimmerman, for their love and support, and to the musicians featured in these pages for their selfless participation. Not only did they agree to be interviewed but many answered dozens of follow-up emails. Sheila and Mickey Tucker read the manuscript and offered much-appreciated encouragement.

Additional thanks to Nora Balaban, Magnus Bartlett, Martin Bejerano, Peter Brainin, Ron Carter, Bill Charlap, Tom Charlap, Richard Davis, Clint deGanon, Alex de Laszlo, Dominique Eade, William Ferris, Greg Glassman, Aaron Hartley, Roy Haynes, Sarah Hollister, Sandra Jordan, Ayesha Lateef, Mike LeDonne, David Lida, T. S. Monk, Adam Nussbaum, Barry Olsen, John Patitucci, Gus Philippas, Martha Sammaciccia, Gwen Terry, and Kevin Twigg.

Louis Armstrong. Decca Records, 1961.

Miles Davis. Courtesy of Ned Moran/Avalon Archives.

BEFORE WORDS

Jazz has been voted the number one word of the twentieth century by the venerable American Dialect Society, and yet this genre of music makes up only 1 percent of record sales in the United States, tied with reggae, classical, and children’s music, and dwarfed by rap and hip hop. Hopefully one day our native art form, as Dizzy Gillespie described it, will be treasured as much here as it is in Copenhagen, Tokyo, and elsewhere around the globe. The Jazz Masters is my way of spreading the word.

I’ve been listening to Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller for some sixty-two years, at least subconsciously, since I was in my swaddling clothes. My parents Betty and Steve are big fans of early jazz and they would have been spinning Satchmo’s Jeepers Creepers and Fats’s Your Feet’s Too Big on the turntable. However, it wasn’t until the tenth grade that I discovered modern jazz after my old friend Peter Brainin (now a Grammy-winning jazz and Latin jazz saxophonist) gave me a record called Basic Miles, an anthology of Miles Davis’s recordings from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Some of the cuts featured tenor and soprano saxophonist John Coltrane, who is recognized as one of the most influential musicians in the history of jazz. On one of the ballads, On Green Dolphin Street, I could appreciate what Miles was playing on his muted trumpet, but Coltrane’s endless flurry of sixteenth notes and arpeggios were incomprehensible and, to my ears, his strident tone was somewhat abrasive. I had certainly never heard anything like it before.

However, after listening to the record a few dozen times, I began to enjoy what Trane was trying to express, and from that point on I was hooked.

I started branching out and learning more about the other musicians who played on these sessions, including people like the saxophonists Jackie McLean, Julian Cannonball Adderley, and Wayne Shorter, and the dream rhythm section of Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones, all masters of their respective instruments.

Another one of Coltrane’s albums called Creation, recorded in 1965, two years before his death, was even more challenging to my ears. Invariably, whenever I played the record at a party, my female friends would scream TAKE IT OFF! This came to be something of a running joke with me and my friends. (Long out of print, Creation was finally reissued in 2007 as part of a ten-CD box set called Kind of Coltrane, which can be had from Amazon for $45, but you can listen to the title track for free on YouTube. I say, Put it on!)

Bobby Porcelli (left) and Peter Brainin have worked together in several big bands, including the Arturo O’Farrill Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. Courtesy of Peter Brainin.

I also remember hanging out in the basement of another friend, Barry Olsen, also a professional musician, and listening to the pianist McCoy Tyner’s newly released Trident, a trio recording featuring the drummer Elvin Jones and bass phenom Ron Carter. From 1960 to 1965, McCoy (who passed last year) and Elvin were members of Coltrane’s groundbreaking group that later came to be known as simply The Quartet, as in the Quartet.

Fast forward forty-six years. I’ve collected many hundreds of jazz records and CDs and I’m still branching out and learning. I now have twenty-seven Coltrane albums in my iTunes library, including four CDs’ worth of him Live in Japan, which means that I could lie on the floor and listen to Trane nonstop for a day and a half.

The 1970s were a special time for jazz lovers in New York City.

I grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, a suburb of New York City. In 1974, my friends and I began driving down to the city and hearing live jazz at the many inexpensive jazz clubs and lofts that existed at the time. Although we were underage, the club owners usually looked the other way. Back in the day, you had your choice of Augie’s, Boomer’s, Bradley’s, the Cookery, Cleo’s, Eddie Condon’s, Hopper’s, Jimmy Ryan’s, Michael’s Pub, Stryker’s, Birdland, and the Village Gate, and these were all in downtown Manhattan, to say nothing of venues uptown in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

One of my favorite venues was the Tin Palace on the Bowery, which opened and closed its doors during that decade. On November 18, 1978—I remember that night vividly because it was my twentieth birthday—I went to a weekend benefit at the Palace for the ailing bassist Wilbur Ware. Dozens of New York’s finest showed up for the gig, including Clifford Jordan and Charles Davis, both featured in this book; the three went to the same Chicago high school, although Ware was ten years older. Notably, it was the only time I got to see Hank Mobley, one of my favorite saxophonists, in person. Tickets were only six bucks and the music lasted until four in the morning.

At those beautiful summer concerts at Grant’s Tomb sponsored by Jazzmobile, a non-profit jazz education organization, I saw many jazz greats who are now in a better place, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Jimmy Heath, Johnny Griffin, Randy Weston, and Horace Silver, as well as Buster Williams (with the group Sphere) and Clark Terry (with his Big B-A-D Band), both of whom I also interviewed.

On any given night, say in December 1976, one could have taken in Roy Little Jazz" Eldridge, Stan Getz, Mary Lou Williams, Barry Harris, Charles Mingus, and the drummer Sonny Greer (who joined Duke Ellington’s band in 1919). This same month, Dexter Gordon returned to the States after living overseas for fourteen years and proceeded to blow everyone away during a week at the Village Vanguard. One night was preserved for posterity on a double-album titled Homecoming.

This book consists of my conversations with twenty-one top-notch musicians, all of whom have been toiling in the jazz vineyards for at least five decades and some for as many as seventy-five years, amounting to a staggering combined total of more than 1,700 years. My goal is to preserve their voices by asking questions and, with the tape rolling, letting them improvise on a wide range of topics, in their own words—thus the subtitle setting the record straight. Almost all of the interviews took place between 2012 and 2016, the lion’s share where they live, or lived, within striking distance of New York City, which has been jazz Mecca since the early 1940s. I don’t read music or play an instrument, so there is not a lot here about theory; and since I’ve chosen artists whose music I enjoy, this is not a book of criticism but rather one of praise.

Five of the interviewees have already received the Jazz Masters Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts—Clark Terry, Sonny Rollins, Yusef Lateef, Jimmy Owens, and most recently Dick Hyman—and undoubtedly more will win this prestigious award in the coming years. I am blessed to have had the opportunity to interview some famous musicians, everyone from Waylon Jennings to Bootsy Collins, the funk bassist. Yet as a longtime jazz aficionado, it’s been especially thrilling to talk with legends like Sonny, Clark, and Yusef, and equally gratifying to spend time with lesser-known artists, all of whom are masters in their own right.

Six have died since I began working on this project, bolstering my conviction that I should focus on the oldest two generations of musicians, who were in their seventies, eighties, and nineties when I spoke with them. We are all like flowers of the field, as Psalms has it, that blossom and die, never to be heard from again. The Jazz Masters is dedicated not only to Clifford, Charles, Clark, Yusef, Cedar Walton, and Bucky Pizzarelli, but to the other elder statesmen who have joined the Great Jam Session in the Sky over the past nine years, just a short list including Bobby Hutcherson, Cándido, Charlie Haden, Donald Byrd, Frank Wess, Grady Tate, Jimmy Cobb, Marian McPartland, Ornette Coleman, Phil Woods, and Toots Thielemans. Just over the past year, we’ve lost Chick Corea, Jymie Merritt, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Bob Ojeda, and Howard Johnson. Tragically, COVID claimed the lives of Bucky and his wife Ruth as well as Lee Konitz, Mike Longo, and Ellis Marsalis Jr. (Two of the other interviewees contracted the virus but have recovered.)

Sonny, Dick, David Amram, and Bill Crow are now in their nineties, as were Clark and Yusef when I spoke with them. The good news is that some other well-known nonagenarians are still on the scene, among them Ahmad Jamal, Benny Golson, Sheila Jordan, Richard Davis, and Roy Haynes.

This book’s eldest two musicians, Clark and Yusef, were born in 1920, a quarter century after jazz first evolved in New Orleans and other towns along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, such as Kansas City, St. Louis, and Memphis. The youngest, Steve Turre, didn’t enter this world until 1948, the same year that Columbia released the first LP.

Jazz is considered to be a largely African American invention. Significantly, some of these artists spent the early part of their careers living under segregationist Jim Crow laws, while others came of age during the civil rights movement. The musicians come from different races, creeds, and ethnicities: black, brown, and beige (the name of an Ellington symphonic work), Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim, Caribbean, Italian, and African. I’ve also chosen two of the fairer sex, the torch singer Sandy Stewart and saxophonist/flutist Carol Sudhalter.

Jazz comes in many different flavors. Here I have focused mainly on acoustic mainstream or straight-ahead jazz, a continuation of the swing, bebop, and post-bop dating from the 1930s through the mid-1960s. Many of the musicians in this book have dabbled in various other jazz styles, from ragtime, stride piano, and boogie-woogie, through modal, avant-garde, and fusion, the latter combining elements of jazz and other genres, especially rock. David Amram and Dick Hyman have composed film scores and chamber music.

I saw Clifford Jordan, Charles Davis, and dozens of other jazz greats at this 1978 benefit for the bassist Wilbur Ware.

In addition to performing, recording, and touring, many are composers and arrangers, as well as educators, scholars, musicians’ rights activists, record producers, conductors, studio musicians (TV and radio), poets, writers, and artists. Half of them play brass and woodwinds instruments, including saxes (from baritone to soprano), trumpet, flugelhorn, flute, piccolo, tuba, and French horn. There are four pianists, four bassists, and a guitarist, a trombonist who doubles on the conch, and a clarinetist who also whistles for a living.

Geographically speaking, thirteen were born in the Northeast (including five from the Big Apple), four hail from the sunny South, three from Illinois, and one each from Texas, Nebraska, and Washington State. The trumpeter Valery Ponomarev emigrated here from the USSR in the 1970s.

The musicians were interviewed at their homes, by phone, and at various clubs, restaurants, and coffeehouses. The interviews lasted from forty-five minutes to two and a half hours. Each musician read his or her chapter for accuracy and the interviews have been lightly edited for sense and clarity.

I’ve known about Dick and Bucky since the 1960s and many of the others since the seventies. The rest were recommended either by the interviewees themselves (for instance, Buster suggested Jimmy Owens) or by mutual acquaintances (Valerie Naranjo put me in touch with Steve Turre). I stumbled onto Brad Terry in the nineties while researching my first book, Tennessee Music: Its People and Places; he once collaborated with Lenny Breau, whom Chet Atkins called the greatest guitarist who ever walked the face of the earth.

Each artist has his own unique career trajectory, philosophy of music, and way of expressing himself, with varying degrees of talkativeness. For example, Charles and Yusef were terse and Bob Cranshaw and Amram expansive, while Ran Blake spoke in a stream-of-consciousness manner, occasionally changing subjects in mid-sentence.

One commonality is a wry, ironic, and at times self-deprecating sense of humor, perhaps born of decades’ worth of less-than-desirable working conditions, irregular hours, grueling travel, smoky bars, and frequently not enough pay. The same vagaries of the human condition have provided fodder for comedians for thousands of years, dating from the hipster Lord Buckley (part English royalty, part Dizzy Gillespie), dating all the way back to the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. If you’re going to be a musician, David Amram told me, "you’d better have a sense of humor."

August 29, 2021

Mt. Marion, New York

A REQUIEM FOR CEDAR

IN AUGUST 2013, just five days after Cedar Walton and I exchanged emails and he agreed to talk to me, Cedar was gone: I opened the paper and learned that he had unexpectedly passed at his home in Brooklyn, a few months shy of his eightieth birthday. Thus, at least for my purposes, Cedar was the man that got away, to borrow the title of the Gershwin tune.

An impeccable pianist and equally accomplished composer and arranger, CEDAR ANTHONY WALTON JR., born in 1934, was known as a musicians’ musician, which is a backhanded way of saying that he was well-respected by his peers yet little known outside jazz circles. This, despite the fact that he made fifty albums under his own name and appeared as a sideman on countless other recordings led by many of the greatest saxophonists in jazz history: to name just a dozen, John Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, Wayne Shorter, Benny Golson, Sonny Stitt, Lucky Thompson, Joe Henderson, Gene Ammons, Junior Cook, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, and George Coleman. At the age of twenty-five Cedar played on the first recording of Giant Steps, but was so intimidated by Trane’s musicality that he declined to take a solo, which he later came to regret.

The pianist Cedar Walton with his wife Martha. Cedar received the NEA’s Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2010. Courtesy of Martha Sammaciccia.

I remember seeing Cedar in 2001 at an outdoor concert in Mt. Vernon, New York, that started with a rendition of Bolivia, his most famous composition. Some bandleaders would have kicked off the set by taking the first solo, but he let his alto saxophonist Vincent Herring stretch out for four minutes. To the Maestro, a nickname he shared with his idol Duke Ellington, it was all about the music, not getting house—showing off.

Cedar’s playing always had a definite melodic direction, and his ensemble work was nothing short of immaculate, fellow pianist Mickey Tucker, one of my interviewees, told me. If I had been a horn player, Cedar Walton would be the number one guy I would want to have in the rhythm section.

At a record session in 1959, the trumpeter Kenny Dorham asked Cedar for advice about arranging a song. Specifically, K. D. wanted Cedar, who was born in Dallas, to play me some Texas. According to David Amram, who was at the session, Walton proceeded to make up an intro that sounded more like Mance Lipscomb, the great old-time blues guitarist, than anything cerebral, and that’s the take that Kenny used.

Often pigeonholed as a hard bop player, he made eleven albums with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and nine with the vibraphonist Milt Jackson. At the same time, the ever-chameleonic Walton could dispatch himself in any groove, from his Latin reworking of Theme from Love Story, on Hank Mobley’s Breakthrough!, to Cedar’s funk/rock-tinged Mobius, complete with Ryo Kawasaki’s electric guitar. He cut four solo sessions, including Underground Memoirs and Live at the Maybeck Recital Hall. Those are his beautiful arrangements (and piano) on Etta James’s Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday (1994) as well as on his own Roots (1997), featuring an octet.

When you’ve worked in the music industry long enough—almost six decades in Cedar’s case—you’re likely to rub shoulders with many of your peers. In Cedar’s case, he worked with more than seven of my other interviewees, Bob Cranshaw, Charles Davis, Jimmy Owens, Clark Terry, Steve Turre, and especially saxophonist-flutist Clifford Jordan and bassist Buster Williams.

Over the course of their careers, Cedar and Clifford joined forces many times, beginning in 1960, on Jordan’s Spellbound. Just in 1974 and 1975, they cut no fewer than eight magnificent albums, some of my favorites being Firm Roots, Magic in Munich, and the seminal Glass Bead Games. Known as the Magic Triangle, the rhythm section of Cedar, Sam Jones, and Billy Higgins was one of the finest in jazz history. After Sam died in 1981, Buster, Cedar, and Smilin’ Billy recorded four albums together as members of the Timeless All-Stars, the final one with trombonist Steve Turre, who replaced Curtis Fuller. More recently, Buster played on Cedar’s Voices Deep Within (2009) and Song of Delilah: The Songs of Victor Young (2010).

MEET THE PLAYERS

Clifford Jordan. Drawing by Bob D. Smith, courtesy of Phyllis Smith.

BLOWIN’ IN FROM CHICAGO

Hard to believe that twenty-four years have gone by since the little-heralded saxophonist, flutist, and composer CLIFFORD LACONIA JORDAN JR. (1931–1993) passed away in New York at age sixty-one, a tremendous loss to the jazz community. I had a chance to talk with him in 1991; the rest of the interviews took place between 2012 and 2016. If he was alive today, the Chicago native would be in his late eighties, from roughly the same generation as the other musicians in this book.

Although in music there is no such thing as greatest, this being a matter of personal preference, Cliff appears on my all-time favorite record, namely the Jamaica-born trumpeter Dizzy Reece’s Manhattan Project, which also features Charles Davis (see below) on baritone sax, as well as the pianist Albert Dailey (1939–1984), Professor Art Davis (1934–2007) on bass, and the drummer Roy Haynes, who at age ninety-five is still going strong.

Awarded five stars by Down Beat—the Cadillac of jazz magazines—this straight-ahead blowing session from 1978 features what is, in my opinion, the definitive version of Woody’n You, the jazz standard penned in 1943 by John Birks Gillespie (the other Dizzy). Until recently only available on vinyl, it has been rereleased by Mosaic Records as part of a twelve-CD set called The Complete Bee Hive Sessions, comprised of sixteen albums recorded between 1977 and 1984 by Johnny Hartman, Ronnie Matthews, and Arnett Cobb, among others.

Shockingly, Cliff’s widow Sandy tells me that Down Beat never ran a full-length story about Clifford.

Jordan and saxophonist/educator CHARLES DAVIS (1933–2016) knew each other since they were in knee pants growing up on Chicago’s South Side. They attended the fabled (now defunct) DuSable High School, which turned out many other jazz greats, including their fellow saxophonists Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons, and John Gilmore, and singers Nat King Cole and Johnny Hartman. In their mid-twenties, Clifford and Charles both relocated to New York, where they collaborated many times and ended up spending the rest of their lives. In the early nineties, Charles was a mainstay in Clifford’s big band, whose other featured soloists included Junior Cook, Jerome Richardson, and Benny Powell.

Born in Goodman, Mississippi (his family moved to Chicago when he was three), Davis early in his career was best known for his work on the baritone sax. A decades-long member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Davis started out touring with Dinah Washington, yet another DuSable grad; he appears on her Grammy-winning record of What a Diff’rence a Day Makes in 1959. He also worked with Ben Webster (his first job), Billie Holiday, Brother Jack McDuff, and Clarence Frogman Henry. Charles served as music librarian for Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and taught at Jazzmobile for twenty-five years.

Also hailing from the Chicago area, MELBOURNE ROBERT BOB CRANSHAW (1932–2016) is best known for his work with the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, a musical marriage that lasted for more than half a century, beginning with their performance on Sunday, August 9, 1959 at the first Playboy Jazz Festival, held at Chicago Stadium. (For the record, the set list consisted of Oleo, Without a Song, and Playboy after Dawn. The pianoless trio featured Walter Baby Sweets Perkins on drums, also from Chicago.)

In the 1960s, Bob appeared on countless records on the Blue Note label. He was the original bassist for Sesame Street and The Electric Company and worked in the Broadway pit orchestras of Jesus Christ Superstar, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band, and Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music. Along the way, he backed everyone from Bing Crosby to Rod Stewart.

Cranshaw, whose ancestors came from Madagascar, an island nation off the coast of Mozambique, was strikingly handsome. While lobbying in Washington for Local 802, the New York musicians’ union, he was often mistaken for a congressman.

(A little trivia: Fats Waller’s collaborator Andy Razaf was also of Madagascan descent, royal no less. Born Andriamanantena Razafinkarefo, Razaf wrote the lyrics to such classics as Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Honeysuckle Rose.)

Caption: Clifford Jordan at the Keystone Korner in Tokyo, 1991. Photograph by Peter Zimmerman.

CLIFFORD JORDAN

On April 21, 1991,I interviewed Clifford Jordan between sets at the Keystone Korner in Tokyo, Japan’s fashionable Harajuku district. He was fronting a quintet along with his friend, the trumpeter Alphonso Son Dizzy Reece (b.1931). The repertoire consisted of equal parts Monk and Ellington, whose compositions Clifford routinely covered, and standards such as Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?) and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, as well as his own and Dizzy’s compositions. I found Clifford to be gracious, witty, and urbane. At one point during our conversation he intimated that I was a yuppie, even though he was probably better off than me. (A feature-story version of this verbatim interview ran the day after the concert in the Tokyo-based Pacific Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the US Armed Forces.)

Peter: Let me start out by saying that I’ve been a big fan of yours since the 1970s so this isn’t going to be an unfavorable review.

Clifford: Well, usually it’s the unfavorable reviews that bring the people out. Peter: Is that true?

Clifford: You know, one time I just had a hip operation, a total hip replacement, and I was walking on crutches. I was playing with Art Farmer out at Catalina’s in Hollywood, and I was kind of standing under a greenish purple light. So this reviewer came in and said Clifford Jordan looked wan and debilitated. The next night, man, there were so many people in there, and they said, Man, I believe I saw that review in the paper, I had to come and see you, catch you before you left the planet [laughs]. So that’s what happens: "He really sounded bad. Everybody wants to come in and hear you sounding bad. Catch that."

Peter: Down and out.

Clifford: Yeah.

Peter: That’s too bad.

Clifford: Yeah, well, you know, negativity—people are always open to that. Nobody wants to hear any good news much. Bad news is what’s really popular.

Peter: I see when you first started out in Chicago, you used to play in these cutting sessions with Wardell Gray …

Clifford: I never thought of it that way. If there was any cutting done, it was me. I was probably bleeding all over the place. But I used to sit in with Sonny Stitt and, you know, he was a very dynamic saxophone player. Yeah, I had kind of bad thoughts about it. I’d play my little solo and he’d come in and just take me out, you know. But after I realized that, you know, playing in this music for some time, that sometimes when a performance goes down, somebody has to come and step in and … lift the airplane up, if the airplane starts descending.

Peter: Did Sonny Stitt always play alto?

Clifford: He played tenor and alto. He played whatever was available. Yeah, he was an alto player but he would come through Chicago and for some reason, a couple of times, he came without a horn. But he was so good, there would be five or six saxophonists around and they would say, Hey Sonny, play my horn. So he started playing tenor that way. But he was originally an alto player.

Peter: What was it like, playing with Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy?

Clifford: Well, Charles, he was a very complex, uh, type of person, and his music would change from moment to moment. You talk about … hear him cussing … then about a beautiful lady, he’d get happy and be smiling.

He had this way of, you know, having five or six things going on in his mind. But he was very easy for me to work with because mainly I was working on a day-to-day basis, I was a substitute for Booker Ervin and Booker was sick at the time, so whenever Charles announced the saxophone player, he would say, Booker Ervin is our saxophonist but Clifford Jordan is taking his place for the night.

Peter: I thought you were with him for pretty long?

Clifford: Yeah, but it was still on a day-to-day basis. So we would do a European tour—I talked to [the baritone saxophonist] George Barrow the other day—so it was fun that way because I wasn’t really in the band. You know, I worked with him for ten months that way.

Peter: That’s all? There was a lot of albums.

Clifford: You see, we did a tour in Europe and they were recording us, radio, TV … public domain. After a while, the record companies started bringing it out. It took me about fourteen years … the small scale they wanted to pay me. But these are the things you learn playing music. Once you know all the tricks, you’re too old to play. That’s why they want some young guys around….

But you know, Mingus and Dolphy—it was a good band. One thing, Charles never gave us any music, he sang all the parts. We worked at the Five Spot two or three months before we went on tour. And he would sing the parts and we would play them on the sax. Sometimes he’d sing some part one night, then sing something different, so you had two, three ways to go. It wasn’t really that easy but with his personality, the music had to be played. If he didn’t like what you were playing, he would tell you right then, No! and he would sing it again.

There was never a dull moment, I can tell you that. Eric felt that way, too. Most of the guys would be uptight, anticipating what he was gonna do, you know, thinking he might do something really weird, but I guess I was the only one who was kind of beyond that because I was just day-to-day basis, I was ready to go anywhere.

Everybody liked the music. Me, I didn’t hear it that way, but what I heard, he wasn’t gonna play anyway.

[In an earlier interview, Jordan described Dolphy (1928–1964) as an angel that came down to earth, played his saxophone incredibly, and passed too quickly. A Los Angeles native, Dolphy tripled on alto sax, flute, and bass clarinet.]

Peter: What about [Mingus’s composition] Meditations on Integration? Have we progressed from where we were back in the sixties, in terms of race relations?

Clifford: You mean are we still there? Well,I don’t know. Maybe one day we might improve, and the next day, maybe backslide a little bit. He called that Variations on a Theme, too. So that problem varies from day to day. Black people, Israelis, you know, everybody’s boxed off in a category. I think basically the same thing’s going on, it’s just another sophisticated way of doing it. I mean, they’re not quite as brash as they used to be. But you know, at any moment, we’ll go back to medieval days.

Peter: Looks like it’s going that way.

Clifford: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: Do you live in New York?

Clifford: I live in New York City, yes.

Peter: Have you lived there for a while?

Clifford: I’ve lived here for thirty-three years now. I left Chicago in 1957. I lived one year in California. I moved from New York to California, then back to New York. Then I lived one year in Brussels, and then back to New York.

Peter: Who did you play with in Brussels?

Clifford: I was just over there by myself, just solo. Around Europe. I played some gigs with Slide Hampton and an Austrian pop singer.

Peter: And you’ve worked with [the bassist] Richard Davis recently?

Clifford: Richard and I grew up together. I’ve known him since I was seven years old. We made a record last year called Four Play. We play occasionally, whenever we get together. And I’ve been working with a big band for the last thirty weeks, a regular gig in New York at a place called Condon’s.

Peter: Eddie Condon’s?

Clifford: No, it’s called Condon’s Restaurant but it doesn’t have anything to do with Eddie Condon. John Condon. And it’s on Fifteenth Street,117 East 15th Street. It used to be a Greek restaurant called Z.

Peter: Yeah, I remember that place.

Clifford: It’s right next door to Lee Strasberg’s acting school. And we play every Monday. I have fifteen pieces in it.

Peter: When I used to live in New York, there was a big loft scene and jazz was pretty reasonably priced, but these days most of the clubs are really expensive.

Clifford: Yeah, well, all the professionals bought up all the lofts, doctors and lawyers and businessmen are living in those places, so the art is gone. The painters and musicians are out of it. What happens is … so we’re back in the clubs. That was like an escape. Because there weren’t enough clubs to take care of the musicians at the time. And consequently, a lot of musicians, Ornette Coleman had a place, and Sam Rivers, and some other guys, and they were using space for performances.

Peter: I remember Ali’s Alley.

Clifford: Yeah, right. I played there, too.

Peter: What was that last song you played tonight?

Clifford: That’s called Con Man. It’s a Dizzy Reece composition.

Peter: Can you tell me what your inspirations are, either musically or just in general? What you do when you’re not working?

Clifford: Well, my musical inspiration is to play some music and make people feel well. When they’re feeling ill at ease, I like to make them feel better, so they leave the club kind of charged up with some kind of energy. Or at least get ’em home—and in bed or something, you know [laughs].

And also, to put people together, and I don’t mind people talking when I play, but I do try to play something that’s gonna make them talk about something that’s sincere and truthful, and no BS. And the music charges me up also.

Peter: What kinds of music do you listen to? Are you into other kinds of music besides jazz, like classical or blues? Actually, I once saw you play at a place called Dan Lynch’s Blues Bar on Second Avenue.

Clifford: Oh yeah, that’s right down the street from where I live.

Peter: I went in there to have a drink after work one day and there was this rock ’n’ roll or blues band, and this guy got up to take a solo, and I said, Wait a minute, that’s Clifford Jordan, what’s he doing here?

Clifford: I live on Seventeenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. So, sometimes I’d rather go into a place like that, to jam, rather than going to some jazz club where everybody’s expecting you to do something special. I just want to play my horn and get in the context of the music that they were playing, rather than superimpose what I usually play over what they do, because it doesn’t always fit. I just try to stay in that groove. In fact, I was in there not long ago. It’s still going on…. Do you live in New York?

Peter: I used to live there, yeah, for a couple of years, until I couldn’t take it anymore. My brother and sister live there and they say it’s pretty bad, there’s a lot of people out on the street.

Clifford: Well, that’s true. The economy is at a point now where they have all these warehoused apartments and if somebody moves out, they don’t rent that apartment anymore, they just keep it empty. And it’s always available, they can always sell a building quicker if there are no tenants in it, you know, so there’s a lot of people on the street, and