AprilCadence2013

Interview Buster Williams
AS: “Dual Force” was a new name for the tune?
BW: Yeah, now, i first wrote “firewater” when i was with the jazz crusaders.
AS: So that was quite a bit earlier.
BW: Yeah, and that was around ’67, and i didn’t have my own publishing company,
i put it in the jazz crusaders publishing company. and then when i formed my
own company they sold it back to me for a dollar! except by this time pacific jazz
was sort of who we were recording for. pacific jazz had sort of like, bought out
the jazz crusader’s four nights music, so my tune was involved in pacific jazz,
so i really couldn’t get my tune back, that’s what happened. it was my tune called
“native dancer” that i got back from the crusader’s for a dollar. But i couldn’t get
“firewater” back because it was now in pacific jazz recording company, so i retitled
it—my publisher always tells me, she says: “don’t tell that story!”
AS: When you and Herbie recorded “Firewater” on The Prisoner, and that was
his last Blue Note record; the way it was arranged, it must have been in a very
different guise, the counterpoint between the horns and all that kind of thing.
BW: oh yeah, well that was herbie’s brilliance. he did a great arrangement on
it. This was in the sextet, i brought it in one day, we were having a rehearsal, one
of the few rehearsals we ever had, and herbie liked it. With the quintet, we had a
totally different arrangement of it, but it was always the same song. herbie wanted
to do something different with it for The prisoner so that’s what he did.
do you know that there is a new book [You’ll Know When You Get There—herbie
hancock and the mwandishi Band] written by Bob Gluck, and it’s very good.
94 | CadenCe Magazine | april May June 2013