Dizzy Reece: From In to Out

AAJ: It's very avant-garde, free, or whatever you want to call it.

DR: It's strange, because I remember a review came up in Le Monde, the French post, and they said it was the best record of the year. Another review came out, and they said it was the most nonsensical—they couldn't figure it out. It was no big deal, but it sounded like something else then. You know, that record is a minor blues, the entire thing, the oldest minor blues, and it's called "St. James Infirmary." If you study it, it goes back to New Orleans. If you listen to "St. James Infirmary," it's a minor blues everybody is crying about. It's what you call a slow minor, and if you listen to From In to Out and the construction, it's basically a minor blues.

AAJ: It's interesting because it has that lead-in that you find in a lot of minor blues as well as in Indian music, and they call it the alap.

DR: Yes, exactly.

AAJ: This is also a major part what you find in a lot of later Coltrane music as well.

DR: That's what I was getting at, the connection, and of course the minor sound is the Eastern sound and the major sound is the Western sound. This is why you have the diatonic scale, and Western civilization has been built on the diatonic scale. In a lot of my writings, I go through all that, the scales and how they relate to the civilization. The Greek modes, all classical music is built on that, but you still have the chromatic. The chromatic system is where you bring in the Eastern, the other tones, the quarter-tones and the mixed modes, and that's what Trane got into with Ravi Shankar, who was one of the great exponents of that in music. It's all jazz and improvisation—it's improvising, and they take it out, they really take it to another level with it. Of course it's universal, the ragas, it's all there, but the New York sound, this is it. When you get to the peak of what's happening in civilization, that's Broadway in New York. For me, that's it, and everything that's gone before is assimilated and packaged into modern jazz.

AAJ: Then you can build a diagram to all those other things.

DR: Everything is in there, of course, it's in the package and you don't need fusion, it's already fused. That's just a game—the fusion and the games they play—but it's already a package. The music is classic already, and it's got all the dynamics of every civilization, so then you bring it down to right now, what's happening, and that's the modern thing. The intelligence is incredible when you put it together; the young exponents of the jazz now, they're still into it and it's very good, aside from what you said before that it's missing. Technically [the young players] are expressive, but nothing is new under the sun.

AAJ: There is always a precedent somewhere.

DR: What has made it jazz you can see sticks out so sublimely. You can listen to all the great civilizations that came before and the music, and no matter how great the music is, it's nothing like now. You can go play all the music of thousands of years before, Roman music and it's hip for them and well-organized, and all the classic elements were there, but then when you take it to another intelligent level and you listen to the music now, of course humanity has developed since then. The intellect—and creative people have a dynamic imagination—that's what it's about.

AAJ: The essence is still constant in some ways, through all of it.

DR: That's what keeps the universe going, it's got to be constant or everything would decay.

AAJ: When the United States invaded Iraq, and there was all this sentiment going on around then, one of the first things I did was to pull out recordings of Persian music, because the culture is forgotten about when a country invades another country. You assume that everything is gone and washed away, but I'm curious to see what's actually there.

DR: I know what you mean, but the music is part of the war, too. If you go back to the drummers and the trumpet players, you bring them right down to the bugle boy—the end of the cavalry is always the bugle and the drums. They'd bring up the corps, they'd excite the warriors—that's why the drummers were in the middle of the fighting, and they would give them their energy. The drummers, the bugle players, the flutes—music was very martial. It still is and that's why it's a political thing. That's why you've got two sides, the good guys and the bad guys, the drummers from over there, and they all still fight like warriors. It's the essence, and life is a journey for a warrior. Your body has got free radicals, and that's why hygiene is so important—if you don't have that, your body is wracked in a minute. Hygiene is the element that holds up everything; it's in the ten commandments of the body, next to last—mental hygiene is very important, don't you think? That's why there is music and the creative forces that make it, because that's how you think. That's the hygienic force that everything wants.

AAJ: The more mentally active you are the less sick you are.

DR: Exactly, mental food is the main food. It keeps you alive—if you don't think for one second, you go unconscious. Consciousness becomes attenuated, and it means that you're thinking. How do you think? If you want a proper system, you've got to give it the proper mental food. That's why you have so much sickness, the mental food is what you talk about when you feel something is missing, the problem. Sure, you try to attain as an individual or an artist—that's why I keep saying it's one and one. These commandments are all you need mentally; they keep you out of the hospital and in shape. It's psychosomatic, everything is.

You have to work physically, as it keeps you mentally active. Construction work, I did all that too in England. I used to build the roads there with a jackhammer; I did all that stuff, and I'd get frustrated, but I'm a warrior. Everybody is—you have to be hygienically together, because you're always being attacked by something in the world. To get a bit of beauty out of it and symmetry, you have to be prepared hygienically. To be prepared means how you think, it's up to you. This is supposed to be in the school curriculum, all of what we're talking about in music and art, this is the basics. It's missing in the school and the education system, and each individual gets into something like this, he gets a taste of it and if he can use it to better the circumstances, then good luck.

AAJ: It's funny that I didn't get any of that until college; to that point, it was sort of like being babysat. I didn't get the hygienic aspect of education and a curriculum in the arts until I went to the university.

DR: It doesn't pervade society as such; you have to look for it. That's why everybody is looking for it; some people come to jazz and some people go to church in looking for it. I count myself important for myself, because I try to keep hygienic and keep everything in perspective. I can't stand anything shady and dark or obscure; I like everything transparent. If you listen to my music, whether you like it or not, everything is bold, it's raw and fresh—nothing is hidden. A baby can hear it, a kindergartener, everybody and on that level I have nothing to hide. It's a lot of knowledge that's accumulated in everything I play, put together and synthesized, and I've got an audience over the years as people buy my music. Certainly there is a force that doesn't want that music to be out there; those forces exist in nature, so this is the fight that the artists and the culture have. Everything is designed to show the great human spirit. If you can get some peace out of that individually, the world is beautiful but then it's got a devil too. There are two sides of the coin, and it's a warrior's world. Before you come out of the womb, you start fighting; kicking in the womb, from there it starts, you're bound alive.

AAJ: There's a lot of resistance in there, and it teaches you how to move around.

DR: Of course, we live in terror. When you're in the womb, you're in terror already, and by the time you get your ways together... this is why the cultural scene is important. I grew up in that scene and the music was always around; it was in the house and there weren't a lot of distractions. Music was on the radio, and it was in the consciousness of the people. It helped to build America—black, white, jazz, the totality of it structured the American scene (besides steel, anyway). The music was the steel, the essence, and that's been diffused.

AAJ: It's cultural steel.

DR: Sure, that's what we are about, what artists contribute. This is what I am about and what my compatriots are about, and the younger musicians are into it whether they know it or not, that's what they're doing. I don't know any other purpose for it.

AAJ: When you study history in school as a kid, at least here and now, that aspect is not taught.

DR: Again, it's that you have to look for it. That's why from when I was a young man, she put the first books in my hand, metaphysical books. I was seven years old, and I didn't know why she gave them to me. But they put me on another level, and she helped to prepare me. Everything around me was on that level, even though she was struggling, and she bought me my first trumpet. Up to this day, all through my struggles, she's always shown me encouragement—she was always there. A lot of musicians don't have that, and it shows you how, in that environment, [music was important, and] especially jazz and classical, everybody studied classical. A lot of people don't know that most jazz musicians studied classical, because jazz was taboo in the house. You could play that piano, some boogie-woogie, but you dare not play that [jazz]. Jazz was always a resisted intelligence; you'll never see bebop on Broadway or Charlie Parker on Broadway, you'll never see the real stuff [anymore].

AAJ: I was talking with [pianist] Bobby Few and he was saying how he had to find another piano teacher to secretly teach him boogie-woogie, because his regular teacher would hit him on the hands.

DR: Of course, I know Bobby well, and it showed him how to play classics because pianists wanted to get the foundations, and most of them had to. Sonny Clark, Kenny Drew, I can mention all of them from Art Tatum to Earl Hines into the youngest cats. You'd be surprised by the repertoire. I met Sonny Clark and he knew the whole repertoire. He was playing with Buddy DeFranco and he could call any tune, and he knew all the classical pieces. The thing about it is that they don't make it obvious. You can hear it's all there, but it's not obvious unless you're Oscar Peterson, whose chops are so great, and Bud too. All the hip modern players—Clark, Drew, Horace Silver, Bud Powell, Elmo Hope—they were child prodigies. Even Herbie Hancock, he was a child prodigy. Ahmad Jamal and all these cats are very classically-oriented, but then the jazz came in and they could develop. Of course their teachers didn't want to show them boogie-woogie, because it was open to free thinking, and all the great stride players who played boogie, they were the greatest piano players. They used to play a whole show, all those silent films and all that, and they used to bring that emotional aspect to the film and used to make the film come alive on screen. This was before it got to Hollywood with all the string sections, and one pianist could make the whole thing come alive. You've got to be a psychiatrist too as well as a musician—you're not just up there banging away. It's dealing with heavy psychology.

AAJ: It's interesting to think about the silent films because that's something I've never seen and not heard too much about, how music was integrated into the film like that.

DR: That's a whole era, sure, show-business and Broadway and the pianist, and I don't know how good my father was, but he used to play it for me. I don't know much of him, but he gigged as a pianist for silent films at that time, and in the States all those great piano players used to go in and sit and watch films as they played. I don't know if you know about it, but the first modern jazz I wrote in England, Nowhere to Go, it was the same format—watch the film and we'd improvise with a quartet right there. I referenced the format, and it was the first modern jazz film made in England. I had Tubby Hayes on it and everybody, and that's part of the [Jasmine reissue] package. We'd set up, watch the film, do it in one take, and we got a masterpiece out of that. All of that came out of the lone silent film pianist, and he'd have to build the whole repertoire. Fats Waller would sit there overnight and write thirty or fifty songs for a show, start to finish. They'd play the show and play everything, dramatics to the show, the whole Broadway show, till they got the band musicians. That's the entrance of this music, they carry a heavy load—it's a big thing there, it's not just banging around. These cats left a heavy legacy.

AAJ: There's a film that I was always curious about on a small town in Alaska, and they had an improvising ensemble compose the soundtrack live to a screening of the documentary [by Michael Krassner with music by the Boxhead Ensemble, soundtrack on Atavistic]. I didn't see the film; it's from a few years ago and it's called The Last Place to Go, and I've heard the music which is a wonderful evocation of very uninhabitable land.

DR: Well it's the rapport, it's like you're doing a painting—you're in the painting, right there, and that's what improvisation is all about. It's the creative force. They say God created the world in seven days.

AAJ: Not long, as some would say.

DR: But that's because he's using the diatonic scale, the seven-toned scale, and that's part of my philosophy in my writings—we'll go into that. The way of creation, that's what it means—it takes a creative force to go through that diatonic stuff. That's the biological form, you get the egg which is the octave (Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do), that's an egg or a complete cell, a biological musical form. That's the basics of creation and that's what it meant to the creative force. Seven steps to heaven.

AAJ: I was speaking with [Prince Lasha] about this, that the whole idea of the length of a day was different in this context.

DR: It's not to be looked at literally or physically, ten thousand years—they throw out these numbers like the earth is sixty million years, but you can't even imagine what twenty thousand years looks like. Everybody gets hung on numbers, but we try to transcend the numbers. When I say Creation, I mean Now. You can start with the Bible and go through time, but there is no beginning and no end. When they give you the number, the physicists are just talking about one scheme. My aspect is the creative force, which references the seven steps—it's now, it goes through all the periods and transcends all creation. You take seven steps to build [upon]—that's the basis. It's in physics and it's in the digital, in everything.

AAJ: You look at a calculator, and it all seems rather small.

DR: You don't have to go back in time; the music is Right Now. That's why it's so important when you play it now. All that's building right now is the creative source, and creation is always going on now. Stepping back into those time zones, it's really Now—that's the essence of it. class="f-right"> Return to Index...

Playing and a Philosophy of Temperament

AAJ: I was going to ask about the astrological history of jazz and musicians' personalities that you had written. Would you care to talk a bit about that?

DR: Well, I've written an encyclopedia called Black Brass, Black Reeds. It covers the innovations in music, starting in 1860 and going to right now. It's listed in chronological order, and it's listed zodiacally by the months and seasons of the year. I don't call it astrology; I call it astro-analysis. The word "astro" just means "star," really, so you can call it any name. It means organization in time, so everything is written from the day and the month, and it goes to the birth date. Musicians weren't born alphabetically; you are born in time, chronologically. That's the essence to start to think philosophically about the music—you don't start alphabetically, you understand? That's a convenience, though there is an index in the back where you can refer alphabetically. It's set up in a time capsule so you can see the music, where it comes, from the beginning to right now. You don't start haphazardly; everything comes back in a time frame, and it deals with the temperament. That's one of the main things in the music, the temperament, character.

AAJ: That's how and why innovations happen.

DR: Exactly, musicians are not just empty suits. You're dealing with their character and their temperament, and that's all chronological if you look at everything. It has a birth, the cells, biologically it has a growth, and I've tried to think like that. All my writings I try to write chronologically, so you get a view—just like a movie comes out at you not haphazardly. In my music and my compositions, I try to get a transparency. So it's written like that, and it's heavy, and it goes back to the first cats in New Orleans, all the innovators are set up in a time frame, and it's a lot of work and I've been working for forty years on it. It's about black musicians; it's got white musicians too, of course, but most of the innovators are black. That's a true perspective; there's no racism in it, it has no meaning of that. We've been through that. It's called Black Brass, Black Reeds so you can see the innovators, the styles and how it's developed. It's very well put-together; it's concise and everything is by the minute, by the second, by the hour, by the day, by the month, because everything is in cycles. Music is in cycles of fifths and fourths, a scale is a cycle—your life is a cycle.

AAJ: Your cycles definitely adjust to those who you spend time with; like my moods are cyclically correlated to those of my girlfriend, and we're definitely related. I move in ways that are very similar patterns to hers.

DR: Sure, there's no escaping it. It's life, and if you want to regulate your existence, you have to think like that. You regulate your life in an order and a fashion, and if you say there's no synchronicity and no order, that's your problem. That's what we do, why we create; there are four seasons in the year, and four moods. Everything in music—you listen to Duke Ellington, and it's created in moods. The theater is from moods, your life is developed in moods, from morning to night moods change.

AAJ: I'm best in Fall and Winter; in Summer and Spring I'm not in a good mood.

DR: There are things for that. Look at the North, the suicide rate is worse and they kill themselves in the winter. That's why they drink so much—the cold is their terror in the Northern Zone. They have a lot of suicide in Japan, too. Some people get adapted and like the cold, but you can see a different frequency between the cold and the heat. You have the Tropical Zone, your body has zones, and they are all related. I correlate everything; I see everything as one.

AAJ: It's so easy to get away from that because of the way society structures itself is very compartmentalized into specifics—we get away from the cyclical and interactive nature of things.

DR: That's what the world is about. You have to realize the distractions, and you have to set yourself and your cycles into an orderly fashion of living. Who you are, your character and your temperament, what you're about, whether you're a painter, a basket-weaver, a baker, I respect everybody. Everything—physics, chemistry—started with agriculture, the soil, and these are the basics. I play music and all of this is part of me, it's one thing and it's not disjointed.

But maybe it takes time for you to put the pieces together, the different departments, and maybe you study one specific. Like the doctors of today; when I was growing up, the physicians had to know the physiology of the body. Now you have specialists for the toe [laughs], for all the different organs. They all relate to the rest of the body, and real physicians have to know the full anatomy, why one relates to the other, the lungs related to the heart, and pull things together.

AAJ: That's one reason why I think of improvisation as the living music, as it is alive and relates to your humanity.

DR: It goes on in the body; the physician is looking at your body to see how the throat works musically, everything. The sounds serve the body, and when the sound stops, you die. It's all sound, and the doctor has to put a trumpet on when he listens to your heart; he puts it on your chest to listen to the beat, and it's got a drum. The whole thing is musical. class="f-right"> Return to Index...

The Drummers and the Beat

AAJ: The whole idea of arrhythmia and your heart not beating in a certain rhythm, it's interesting to me because I tend to gravitate towards music that is not in a steady rhythm, more 'free time' music.

DR: Why?

AAJ: I don't know, that's a very good question and I've often wondered about it. There's something about straight 4/4 time, that I often have trouble getting into it.

DR: This is a problem that I'm glad you mention, because it brings us to the psychology of resistance to the music too. There is that One, you're looking for a beat, and when the music doesn't have a beat—jazz has a beat, a One that everybody relates to. It's called God but in the music it's called the beat. Everybody relates to that one, if you can't tap your beat... it's the rhythm you have, and that's your beat. Once you can't relate to that one, well that's why they tell people to practice with a metronome. I don't need it, but it's good to know about it. When you go to the doctor, you have to tap out that beat and relate it to that One. In every creation you have that One. It's the heartbeat, a universal micro-macro beat. The universe is a heartbeat; the solar system is a heartbeat; you have a heartbeat and a synchronicity that goes on in your body and all around you. If it doesn't synchronize, you're out of kilt and you're sick. You start with your body; you hear a sound and you've got to listen to yourself, your heartbeat, and that's the thing about that One. 1-2-3-4 time, that's the creative, and everything is related to it. If you don't have that One, the orchestra falls apart, and a lot of people go into freedom because they don't relate to the One. It's a psychological thing, but once you find that One within yourself, you start to regulate your life and you start to open up. You start to get happier and more comfortable, because every time you listen to music, that's what you look for—where's the beat, where's the One? That's your relationship as a listener.

AAJ: I like to listen to drummers like Sunny Murray because, you know, you can feel a beat without it being so implicit. That's what I was getting at.

DR: Good, right, but the beat is always there.

AAJ: I almost think of it more as a wave.

DR: Sure, we get into that, it gets so subtle that you don't have to hear the 'boom-boom' pounding.

AAJ: I don't like things to be so obvious.

DR: You're like me, I'm sure, because my playing—I hate the obvious, but the One is there. You understand that you have to recognize it and you feel comfortable with the music. I know Sunny, I remember him and all the free drummers and Sunny is fantastic but for him to relate that to a band, he's got to have that beat. He's got it there, he can play and that's another thing, that a lot of drummers stop playing the bass drum. The bass drum is the beat, the boom-boom, and it can be subtle, you understand? When Max Roach is playing, you almost never hear the bass drum, but it's there!

I play drums, and believe you me, if you don't play the bass drum, it's not gone. You can play hip and all that, and it's different—you must play it, and you hear it in your foot. It's got to synchronize to the bass and not obtrude, but you can hear it, it's there. If you don't beat your foot on the bass drum, it's not swingin.' You understand? It goes through life; it goes through everything—you have to have your own beat. A lot of drummers nowadays have stopped playing the bass drum, and that takes the guts out of it. That's the beat of the marching band and you hear it all over the city; you hear the 'boom,' and that's the beat. It brings the people and that's why it has the bass drum. The church, they have the bass drum, and the sound of the warriors when they go to war is the bass drum. I've got one right here, the mamba drum, the beat right there in the middle of the bullets and they're playing the drum, are you kidding? It's heavy! Each side, each company is listening for the beat. It sounds free-form going on, but it's organized, you know. The warriors, they have it for organization, and the music is organized—it has a beat. The group that loses, the side that is victorious one is the one that has the beat going. It's the same in life and the same in the music; you've got to have that beat, and that One. If you don't have a beat, you don't have anything.

AAJ: I can tap my foot to a pulse, not da-da-da, but it's moving when I listen to about anything.

DR: I have a thing where you give everybody a drumstick and have them beat rhythm, because a lot of societies are uptight rhythmically. A lot of people can't get their coordination, but if they practice drumming da-da da-da, hand to hand, they develop a drumming. That's a normal person I'm talking about; you give them a drumstick for therapy and you'd be surprised. Psychologically it loosens them up, too, and they find themselves with a beat—'I can do this, I've got coordination and synchronization, and you know, I've got the whole thing.' That's why you have friction and why everybody is running from that One, that four on the cymbal, it's so subtle. They took a million years to play that straight four, that's what makes it modern. Fast or slow, you control the time and that's what it's all about. The rhythm, that's what drummers do—they control time.

AAJ: It's funny too, because I played cello in an improvising context, and one of the bands I was in some years ago, whenever we would lock into a more rhythmic element and play something a bit less free-form, what I would do on the cello, instead of doing something rhythmically I would play a drone underneath it, maybe singing along wordlessly as well. It would add an underpinning to the music, but I would never want to play actually 'in' that time. I would want to play it in an expanded way.

DR: I know what you mean—I know the cello is good for improvising. Have you heard Oscar Pettiford play it? If I may say so, you have a rhythmic blockage, and once you get over it and you get comfortable with that One, you can control a lot of stuff. A lot of people, they go against the One. It's easy to play bossa or whatever, and that's why we have so many players that play Latin, but that four-four is civilization right there. To play four-four, even in classical music they play cut time, one-two one-two, not one-two-three-four. That's where jazz is; once you say one-two-three-four [in classical music], you'd have chaos. With a big symphony orchestra, if you write it out in four-four time, you have chaos. That's why everything in Vaudeville and Broadway is in cut time, and that's where the old music changed, the drummers and the control of universal rhythm is straight four. The old political systems changed right there, and most people can't get comfortable with straight four. They go back to the da-da-da and all this retread, even the great early musicians from New Orleans came from Vaudeville—even Louis Armstrong. Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie started to get into four, Charlie Parker, but all those other guys were in half time.

AAJ: I bought this record of Baby Dodds playing solo [Talking and Drum Solos, Folkways, 1959], and it's amazing to me because it's cut time and it does stick out like a sore thumb, but the things he was able to do with that time are unreal.

DR: Well, that's the era, the era of cut time, and the thinking was tight. But he's a master; he used to play in Congress Square and he started to play those big [ride] cymbals, and those cymbals mean so much. And then drumming went to Big Sid Catlett, and as a matter of fact Baby Dodds is a Capricorn, like Catlett. Kenny Clarke, I played a lot with him—he's a master of modern drumming, and he's a Capricorn. Max, who took it from Kenny Clarke, he's a Capricorn. It's that temperament, and that's how that book [Black Reeds, Black Brass] is laid out.

AAJ: It speaks well of Capricorns.

DR: That's one aspect of it; there are different signs of course and everybody has a different rhythm, swinging in a different way or same swing and having a different temperament. The Pisces, they swing—all that is laid out, it's in the signs, and when you put everything together you can see what it is about. That's my lifeline.

Sure, Baby Dodds started it, and you've got to listen to Max from Baby Dodds, and Max plays so fast it's like another civilization from Baby Dodds. Those things with Clifford Brown and Max, so fast—it's the modern thing, the race car driving. Everything changes; the people who couldn't keep up with that, some went to free-form because they couldn't keep up with that One. It's easier to play free-form, but...

AAJ: But then you get somebody like Art Taylor, who can play both.

DR: Oh, Art, Art, you heard him on those records of mine. Nobody ever really heard Art play, because that was a sublimation of his drumming, and that's why it's called From In to Out. Art is one of the swingingest—Art swings his ass off, and half of my records are with him. I don't think many people heard that record of Art's.

AAJ: And he's on some records with Frank Wright too [Uhuru Na Umoja, America-Universal, 1969 and Space Dimension, America, 1969] that are wonderful, and he really plays free on those.

DR: Art took an interest [in freedom]; and I bring it out in drummers, that's why he played my music. He really played the shit out of [free], but he had that swing to it, a swing through the whole thing.

AAJ: As someone who is interviewing musicians, Art is a great influence because of his Notes and Tones book [Da Capo, 1977/1993]. That's like a blueprint.

DR: I told him to write that book—I gave him the inspiration. We hung out in Paris and that's how we made that record, and that's when he started interviewing musicians and ended up with a book and so forth. I used to have drama classes and we'd do plays, and I'd have him reciting. When he came back to the States, he had a few book tours and gave some lectures, and said "Dizzy, I'm grateful for all that you did for me in Paris," all those readings and things, he was very grateful. It came in handy, because he had to give speeches about the drums and so it's all in the mix. It's funny you mention Art because man, [Futura are] getting that back out on CD. He played his ass off and he swings all the time. He's one of the swingingest drummers in jazz.

AAJ: He's a very liberated drummer, too.

DR: At the end of From In to Out, he took the tempo fast—he took that shit and played so fast, and that's what the title was about. I had all that written out for big band orchestra.

AAJ: It's very dense music.

DR: It's written for an orchestra, swinging like that with a band and dance, and that's the big band shit that I'd planned to record. I've got all that stuff. All these guys trying to write swing and classics, but it never makes it, or very few, but I've got the stuff, the full aspect of New York and the physical aspect, the skyscrapers, this all goes into it. Then they bring it up-to-date and tighten it up—that's what should be in the Lincoln Center [laughs]. So you know, that was my idea, and touring with Dizzy Gillespie's band was the next thing I did after that. Of course, Gillespie is the epitome of modern jazz, his big band, you've got to go back through that and listen to all the Dizzy Gillespie band, all those charts and you can hear the new sound, it's alive and it's all written in there. class="f-right"> Return to Index...

Education and Communication

AAJ: With modern jazz being so small-group oriented, it took me a while to get into large orchestras, but now I gravitate to it more.

DR: I've got an article I'll publish in a minute about big bands, and you know it represents the community. It comes out of the church, and that's why it's a family affair, when you're on the road with a big band, it takes on a family lifestyle.

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