All the stuff he used to record was played and rehearsed on the road, so by the time we got into the studio, it was just a case of hitting the record button. I was still young at the time, but I remember he ran the band tight. He was like a general, like you have to be when you have a big band like that. I got fired in the end, because I was late twice for rehearsals.
If you were lat once you got fined, twice and you got fired. You also worked with Hendrix. No one knows what happened to those tapes. The sessions we did were bizarre, man—real heavy. We did them in his Electric Ladyland studio, and just about everyone came through. It all got too much for him. The industry killed him in the end, making him play fifty nights in a row.
Where did you start to jam with the free-jazz guys? We bought a piano and put it in there, then Les Walker took it apart, and then we put it back together, then we took it apart again. We also used a loft on the 23rd and Lexington. How was the prison experience? There were over forty thousand of us [conscientious objectors] in there. It was like we broke into prison. Because of that time being the way it was, we had all the right literature and the right musicians; we had Coltrane and Hendrix.
You know, I think Black people have been blessed with holding down the music of the planet, to keep people happy and keep an element of spirituality. I think we have done a good job as people with that. So you considered yourself a spiritual musician back then? I have always approached music spiritually. As a drummer, you must. The original priests of the planet were drummers. You played with Sun Ra for a long time. Off and on, I worked with Sunny for fifteen years.
I left for seven or eight years and then went back in I did, maybe, a hundred shows. Sunny was very influential for me in the way that I was able to get some real big-band experience. I got a chance there to play with different types of players. If I was with someone I felt was progressing, I would stay. Someone has to help and give them a chance.
He knew how to pick players and to let them play and create a situation, but without controlling it. Some people wanted that responsibility. Not many can stand the creative pressure every night. What got you into the free stuff? They were playing avant-garde without the overtones.
Theirs was the heavy shit, not just squealing and squeaking. They say the avant-garde is made from that stuff, but there are different ways of handling it, and at its best it was a reinvention of jazz. After bebop came to the modal stuff, and some jazz players needed to get out of the jazz category, climb out of the box, not get into it.
I was one of the few guys playing backbeat in the middle of the avant-garde shit and I made it appeal to the people. The real cerebral stuff narrows it too much. There are all the little avant-garde labels that you never see in the stores. Arthur Blythe came from blues, so we had a natural swing to us. It was avant-grade, but it was swinging, like Ornette Coleman. We played places in New York and colleges. At the time, bebop had died.
You were heavily involved with Charles Tyler too. We did something like thirteen or fourteen albums. That was some heavy music. We recorded on a lot of different labels. What made you do that? Les Walker was in the same year as me at university, and Joe Rigby I had known for years. There was a club in Brooklyn at that time that was influential called the East. Alice tried to get us signed to Impulse, but they wanted to sign us for free. With the Brother hood, things were more open than with Charles.
I would always be playing his music, and I wanted to play mine. Yeah, man. All rights reserved. Reset your password Click the eye to show your password. Contact Me Follow Me.
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