AprilCadence2013

Slim and Him Bob Rusch Interview
and Charles Mingus with Eric Dolphy, and Coltrane, but growing up it just
was a natural thing. Benny Goodman was still an item, I should mention
Gene krupa, at that time was leading a trio, and I was very attracted to the
drums—later I played the drums. Then my father kind of got involved when
Don Shirley came along and Brubeck with his fugues and his nod to Darius
Milhaud. Then I was a teenager, and going to clubs, and starting to begin
interviewing people
H: How did going to clubs fit in with being a teenager?
BR: Well I was large (everyone chuckles) and New York was much more of
an open city—the drinking age at that time was 18, and I think people were
fairly lax—if you looked at least 16 they were probably Ok, and as I say I
was tall, I was large.
S: So we’re talking the mid to late fifties. How did you account for being gone
with your folks, didn’t they wonder where you were?
BR: No, well my folks were very supportive in that way. We’d go to
concerts at Carnegie Hall, and we’d drag them down to Birdland, and Basin
Street, and then as I got to be about 14, I started just staying out late at night
and going to Birdland on my own, and going to Condon’s on my own and
later the Five Spot.
To show you how different New York was at the time, my mother would
call up sometimes around 10 o’clock, or 11 o’clock, she’d call Birdland
which is usually where I went, and she says: “Is my son down there?” And
they would look around and they’d go back and tell her I was there. “Well,
tell him to get home.” That wouldn’t happen today, you wouldn’t get in I
don’t think in the first place.
S: Were you able to interact with the musicians at all, was it accessible?
BR: It was very accessible. When you’re that young you don’t think
anything of it to go out and interact with musicians.
S: Do you think it was more accessible to you because you were a kid?
BR: I think it was more accessible to me because I wasn’t self conscious
about it. I remember calling up Edmund Hall one morning, it was 10
o’clock on probably a Wednesday or Thursday. He sounded very tired, and
I said “Are you asleep?” He said “Well I got in around five o’clock,” and all
of a sudden, it occurred to me, that’s right these guys are playing.
S: So were these numbers, were they in the local phone book, how do you
get the numbers?
BR: They might have been in the local phone book.
S: Did you have a musician’s directory or anything like that?
BR: No, Leonard Feather’s encyclopedia of Jazz, the first edition had
addresses in it. As a matter of fact, Willie “The Lion” Smith was always in
the phone book, so was Eubie Blake, even into the 70’s.
H: He was in the phonebook under “Lion.”
BR: I looked under “zoo!” It was definitely more open and jazz was less
61 | CadenCe Magazine | april May June 2013