(...Story Continued from Previous Page) My father
wanted to introduce me to the piano, but I wasn't interested. See what gets him
excited to play. But, yeah, piano, and drums -- I think every little kid wants
to play the drums.
Then when they start learning, have them learn melodies, teach them how to
have fun playing. Don't worry about form, let them have some freedom to play and
to explore. It's like when a little kid is babbling, just learning to speak, you
don't start by correcting their grammar.
You have a new collection coming out of American standards you've
recorded over the years. What makes a song a standard, what gives it the
durability so that it survives over the years?
There's the harmonic sophistication -- something that comes out of the
Schubertian tradition of songwriting, in people like Jerome Kern. And there's also the effect of a certain time of
immigration into America, and the appropriation of the blues and different
vernacular music.
Those songs are about fundamental human things. They developed as people went
from the country to the city, from naivete to sexuality and sophistication.
There was a belief in the rituals of courtship and romance -- and sometimes
the lyrics can be a little corny. But the craftsmanship of the musicians writing
these songs was so strong, the melodies and harmonies are never sentimental,
even if sometimes the words are.
On your last album, "From the Plantation to the
Penitentiary," you incorporated some hip-hop elements. Did
you learn anything from working with more contemporary urban music?
No. I grew up in New Orleans, so we grew up rhyming in that meter on a beat.
We would do something nasty, talking about sex or whatever, not anything
political, but with any of those New Orleans chants, you do that kind of double
rhyming. So rhyming on a vamp -- that's going backwards to me.
You're about to do a major tour with the orchestra featuring the love
songs of Duke Ellington. What still surprises you when you encounter Ellington's
music?
The confidence he had in his vision, at a time when a lot of contemporary
music was not going in that direction. It's like what you learn about someone
when you walk into their house.
Ellington believed in certain
principles -- he believed in American popular song, in New Orleans polyphony, in
call and response, in breaks and riffs and solos, in individual personalities,
in lush harmonies. And he maintained those beliefs for 57 years, and he never
compromised who he was or what his music was.
Last year, we lost Max Roach, one of the last
surviving members of bebop's first generation. How do you think our relationship
to that music will change as we lose the ability to hear it directly from those
who created it?
Well, very few people can play bebop. There's this quasi-facsimile that's
passed off as bebop, but it really isn't. Bebop is too hard for people to play
-- not many people are really even trying.
But every step of the way, we lose musicians. There's always this question --
when the New Orleans musicians were dying, what would happen to jazz? When big
bands started losing popularity, what's gonna happen? Well, what's gonna happen
is that people are going to keep playing, and those who find the things that
they want to play are going to play that. The question is, can you play
something good enough to attract an audience who wants to hear you?
But that's life, you live and you die. Elvin Jones was like a father to me, and it hit me very hard
when he passed. John Lewis, Sweets Edison, Gerry Mulligan, each time was very
difficult. But what can we do? We embrace it, we keep the music going. That's
all we can do.
Re: Masters is a monthly interview column dedicated to exploring a
veteran artist's body of work.
Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Spin, Vibe and Tracks
magazines and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. His writing has also
appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. His
book "The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys" was published
in 2006. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for
excellence in music writing.
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