dave douglasis getting good enough that he’ll be able to accompany me on Tin PanAlley piano.” Once the trombone was in the house, it was mine. I quit playingpiano immediately.It took me two years to realize that in the school band the tromboneplayers only had long notes and the trumpeters always had the melody.Now I wish I still played trombone because I think some of the hippestparts are happening down there.I STARTED TO LEARN TUNES when I was really young and tried tomimic my favorite artists like Billie Holiday. She was the first performer ofsongs that I could identify as something to aspire to.My father was the person who brought the music into the house andcollected it. My mother encouraged me to do whatever it was that I reallywanted to do. If I took on something unorthodox like, “I want to learn‘All Of Me’ the way that Billie Holiday was singing it,” she might not haveknown what that was about, but she knew it was not something that everykid would say. So, she’d give me that, “OK, this is great! Do it!” She wasmy encourager.BEFORE I GOT INTO HIGH SCHOOL, my father bought TheSmithsonian Collection Of Classic Jazz on LP. It was all selected by MartinWilliams, a very astute collection of music from the beginning of jazz, upuntil the mid-to-late ’60s, which was pretty amazing at that time. We’re talkingabout 1973, and I’ve got Cecil Taylor in the house. I gravitated towardThelonious Monk and Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, CecilTaylor—the last two LPs in the collection. I wore them out. I don’t know why.No one was there saying, “You should listen to the modern stuff.”WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG and hear music, it has great meaning for you.You listen to the same songs over and over and over. And you can probablystill sing the saxophone solo that you memorized from those records whenyou were 11 or 12.So, for me, it was Cecil Taylor’s “Enter, Evening” and OrnetteColeman’s “Free Jazz.” It was only later that I realized how really lucky Iwas being exposed to that music so close to when it was actually made. Itwasn’t like it was a 30- or 40-year-old document. It was really fresh.I was listening to the early sides, too. And I think it’s something particularto my generation and those who came after. When we came up hearingthat complete collection, I wasn’t separating it out in terms of thetime periods and genres. It was like, here’s Louis Armstrong and here’sRoy Eldridge. Here’s Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Here’s FreddieHubbard and Lee Morgan. Here’s Ornette Coleman. And it’s all just thisthing that’s together.That’s something that has stuck with me in my own composing and myown vision: There’s no reason that we have to separate all these differenteras and genres. It’s why someone like Mary Lou Williams was so importantfor me as an influence. She was somebody who brought together theentire history of music and really personified it.WE LOOK AT MILES DAVIS, now that he’s sadly gone. We can experiencehis whole 50 years of output in one view and see the full range of allthe worlds of music that he created. It’s so vast. It also inspires us. We don’tneed to be limited to one small thing. We can be wide open.I WAS AN ATROCIOUSLY bad trumpeter, I found out, when I got toBerklee [College of Music]. I had a lot of ideas, but I couldn’t execute them.It took me a long time to find a teacher who could help me get to where Iwanted to go. I had a lot of teachers who would change my embouchure andsuggest this or that. There were a couple of years where I was in crisis andkept thinking, “Well, it’s going to be great once the new embouchure kicksin.” Note that all the trumpet players in the audience just chuckled.I DROPPED OUT OF BERKLEE. I had a trumpet teacher who workedwith me all year and then in the final lesson said, “I don’t think you’recut out to be a trumpet player. I think you should quit and take up anotherinstrument.”I don’t think it was tough love. Maybe it was. Maybe that’s what I neededto hear at that time, but you can imagine how angry I was that he hadn’tsaid it earlier.It wasn’t like I didn’t care. It wasn’t like I was just messing around. Iwas clearly working on music. So I left, and I transferred to New EnglandConservatory because I knew John McNeil was there. I just moved up thestreet to NEC, and John was incredibly helpful. It was great. I’m not puttingdown Berklee. I got a lot out of Berklee. Some of the things I learnedin classes there, I still apply in music. The same goes for New England.IT WASN’T UNTIL I was introduced to the Carmine Caruso techniqueby John McNeil that I was able to find a way to play naturally, without asmuch effort, and was able to have a full range and a full tone.I still swear by the technique, although I do it very differently now thanI did back then. I took lessons with Laurie Frink, and she was, of course, thetop student of Carmine. She has carried on in his spirit, but with her owntake. She’s a fantastic teacher and takes every student as an individual withhis or her own needs. That’s what’s really important.I thought about switching to piano. It’s easier to say in retrospect, but atthe time, it was a complete personal crisis—practicing eight-to-10 hours a dayand not making any headway. Wanting to throw the trumpet up against thewall at the end of the day. Just month after month of fighting with this thing.I think I stuck with it because I could see that, as a composer, I wasgoing to want to have that voice in my palette. I could see the trumpet wasgoing to be part of that for me.I MOVED TO NEW YORK in 1984. After two years in Boston, I saw somany people were practicing, [and they were] practicing so they could moveto New York. I was a headstrong 21-year-old. I thought, “Why don’t I justcut the circuit short? I’ll just move to New York, but I’ll keep practicing.”I moved and then eventually got all my credits to transfer and ended upgetting a bachelor’s degree at New York University as an independentstudystudent. During that time, they had something called the GallatinSchool at NYU, and it allowed me to take classes with Carmine Carusoweekly for credit. I studied composition and arranging for a semester withJim McNeely. I had a semester where I studied with Joe Lovano. So, nowthat I’m out there playing with him, I remind him of the crazy things thathe said during that time.It’s interesting: I moved to New York because I wanted to play, but as28 DOWNBEAT JUNE 2013
you all know, when you break into a new city and a new scene, you don’tjust go out and right away and have a million gigs. So, I was invited bysome friends to go out and play in the street outside The Plaza Hotel fortourists on a Sunday afternoon. This was on the first week that I movedto New York. I met this culture of street bands on that day. And a lot ofthe people that I met are people I’m still in touch with and became veryimportant in my development as a musician—Vincent Herring being one.I played in bands on the street with Vincent for two or three years.And then in ’86, we both got the gig with Horace Silver at the sametime, but independently, not knowing that the other one had it. KermitDriscoll, the bass player, and Bruce Cox, the drummer, used to play outthere. A great tenor player named Charles Davis, too.IT SOUNDS FUNNY, but it’s reallytrue: When you’re out there andyou’ve played a two-hour set—maybe your second one of theday—and you’re still trying tobounce your tone off the Time-Warner Building or whatever isacross the street in ColumbusCircle, that’s real-world education.That’s how you develop a sound.PLAYING WITH HORACE SILVER was great. I wouldn’t say I was theperfect trumpet player for that group, but he was incredibly generous andpatient with us younger players. He took some time to tell me what waswrong with my playing. He would go on rants occasionally about whatwas wrong with us young players, but it was always based in somethingthat was real. The difference between bebop, hard-bop and modal playingfor him was in the voice-leading. He felt that with younger players, wewere just trying to play the hippest thing over one chord when what’s reallyhip was how you got from one chord to the other. So he would insist onproper voice-leading.ONCE SOMEONE TELLS YOU THAT, and you’re on the bandstandwith them night after night, you start to hear in their playing what makesthem so great. We played the same set pretty often, and we pretty muchplayed “Song For My Father” every set. It was a big hit, people wantedto hear it, and I was thrilled to play it. Horace would play a five- to10-minute introduction to the song … and it was different every time.And it was equally witty and brilliant. He would quote the most hackneyed,nursery-rhyme song, but in just the right spot. You’re laughing,but you’re getting hit in the gut at the same moment. Head and heart—that was Horace.THE WAY I’M TELLING IT, it sounds like I went to NYU and Ifound Carmine Caruso and next thing you know I was on the road andthat was it.It was far from that easy for me. I struggled for a lot of years, not havingany gigs. I think part of it was trying to play a little bit differently, notwanting to sound like every other post-bop trumpet player. But anotherpart of it was after I played with Horace, I came back to New York. I feltlike I had to start again.JUNE 2013 DOWNBEAT 29
Change language