AprilCadence2013

Slim and Him Bob Rusch Interview
Bob Rusch Interview:
Conducted by Slim and Him
Transcribed by Alan Simon
“Welcome to the Slim and Him Pod cast. This is our pod cast No. 3—I’m Him,
and I’m Slim!! And today we have a special guest—Him: Robert Rusch, Bob
Rusch, the founder of Cadence Magazine, Cadence Records, founder of creative
improvised music projects, the Chief Operating Executive of Cadence North
Country, there are more titles. Actually, Bob you’ve run four different record
labels over the years, right?
Bob Rusch: Quixotic, CIMP, CIMPOLE (which is Creative Improvised
Music Projects On Location), and Cadence Jazz Records,
Slim: So, we should note that he’s the producer of those labels.
Him: The producer, and one of the biggest record geeks I have ever known.
Slim: We call it an archivist.
Him: He doesn’t have a recollection-he has a record archive. By record
“geek”, I meant nothing but praise. LP’s, CD’s, I dare say at one point in
your life there were reel to reels.
Bob Rusch: I have hundreds of them.
H: So we wanted to take the occasion of your passing the baton editing
Cadence Magazine to look back over your career.
S: I thought we would start at the beginning, so if you could just give us
your vitals, where you were born, when you were born.
BR: I was born in 1943 in Manhattan, and I existed there until I was, well,
actually my interest in jazz started probably before I was a teenager. My
father was a viola player, and when Don Shirley and Dave Brubeck came
on the scene, it attracted him because there was a sense of classicism.
With Brubeck, of course, it was the fugues, and my older brother kind of
got interested in that. Pop music of the time really was on the ends of the
big bands, so some of the banal pop music of the time now is looked back
favorably almost as an extension of the big band era.
H: People today like to say “We went from the “swing-era” to the “singera.”
BR: I think that’s fairly accurate. And we were interested in rhythm music,
for lack of a better term, we called it jazz, and it was jazz, and people like
Benny Goodman and Hamp, and the ones that were just obviously rhythmic.
S: What are some of the earliest things you heard where it changed your life
to a degree where you thought: “I’m really interested in this”, ‘cause clearly
it wasn’t just a passing phase you built your whole life on jazz.
BR: I actually didn’t have those kind of moments. If I think about those
kind of moments in jazz, it would be much later with Ornette Coleman,
60 | CadenCe Magazine | april May June 2013