By Jason West

Don Lanphere, Seattle's Grandfather of Jazz is still going strong. The spirited, seventy year old tenor saxophonist has a new CD out with fellow tenor, Pete Christlieb; Don's rhythm section, New Stories, is becoming recognized as one of the best in the country; and he seems to be playing more than he ever has. Well, almost. In Bebop's heyday, Don jammed with New York's best all night, every night--and that's a lot of playing!

Lanphere's career spans six decades and includes two tours with Woody Herman's band ('49-'51 and '59-'61). In the early sixties, drug abuse sent Don back home to Wenatchee, WA to work in his father's music store, but since moving to Seattle in '85--spurred on by his #1 fan and loving wife, Midge--Don's career has taken off again.

For this interview, I met Lanphere at the New Orleans restaurant, a long time Seattle jazz joint. Of course, everybody knew Don and greated him with smiles. Certainly, to be his company is an honor, but to hear the voices of Max Roach, Stan Getz, and Lester Young come alive is--for jazz fans--pure heaven.

JW: How long have you been playing music?

DL: 62 years. I started when I was eight.

JW: Did you start on tenor?

DL: No, alto. I was rummaging around the basement of our house and I found my dad's saxophone down there. I used to sneak down and open the case and push the keys, and one day I got caught. He said, "You like that?" and I said, "Yeah." and he said, "You want to hear it?" and I said, "Yeah." That was the tenor, his tenor, and he played it for me. Then he said, "Would you like to play?" So that's where it began, right there. Around my home there was always music playing. My dad was a big band lover. In fact, in those days, in the thirties and early forties, the bands were known by kids all over the country. You talk about the Duke Ellington Band or the Count Basie Band or the Tommy Dorsey Band and you could tell people who played second trumpet, who played third trombone. Part of growing up interested in music was just knowing who played with who.

JW: Do you think that's changed now? Obviously jazz isn't as big, or maybe it is. What's your opinion on that?

DL: Well, I feel like it's just as big in a different way. As far as the big band thing which spurred most of us to our listening and introduced us to the various soloists who played with the big bands, now, nearly every highschool and college in the nation has got a jazz band. So if not players, more listeners are being developed along the way.

JW: How important is music? Can you gauge the significance of music in the world?

DL: Well, music is an important part of life, but if you're talking jazz audiences and jazz CD sales, I think it's in the two percent area. It's tiny, and yet it's world renown. Nearly every country is spawning jazz players.

JW: Of course, to you, music is very important.

DL: It's my life. It has been all the way through, starting with my little band in junior high school, and going through high school and then to college. I graduated from Wenatchee High School when I was sixteen, turned seventeen during the summer, and went from Wenatchee, WA to Northwestern University in Evanston, which is a suburb of Chicago. So I went from little to big, and when I arrived in Chicago, being the star from Wenatchee, I thought I had the world by the tail, musically. I went to the first of hundreds of jam sessions that took place over the several years that I was there, and people said, "How come you play like that?" I said, "What do you mean?" 'cause I had grown up copying Coleman Hawkins-he was my first major inspiration. They said, "Have you heard Lester Young?" and I said, "Well, yeah, I've heard him a little." "Have you heard that new kid from L.A., Dexter Gordon?" "No, I haven't heard him." "Well, you got to do some listening here." So, that's when the listening training started, and as soon as I heard Bird, my life turned around.

JW: Did you ever worry about sounding too much like these guys? Or was that the goal at the time?

DL: We copied everything that Charlie Parker recorded and wrote it down. One of the prime people doing this was Jimmy Knepper, a trombone player. He and Joe Mania, an alto player from L.A. would follow Charlie Parker around and record him wherever they could. They would get into the club and get into the basement and drill a hole through the floor, put a microphone up on the bandstand-anyway they could do it-hang microphones backstage. Another important guy doing this was Dean Benedetti, and his tapes are available now. There was a nationwide classroom of everything Bird did and everything he played. At the same time, I was introduced to the music of Lester Young through Zoot Sims and Stan Getz, so that was a major part of my learning process. You know, Zoot Sims, he knew all of Lester Young's solos off of all the records. You could just name some record and Zoot would sit down and play the solo for you.

JW: I know that a lot of musicians wish they could have been in New York in the forties with Charlie Parker. What was that like for you?

DL: I had, before leaving Chicago, been introduced to heroin, and I was reasonably stung-out before I ever left for New York. My first gig was with Johnny Bothwell's band at a club called the Baby Grand on 125th St., just a block up the street from the Apollo Theatre. It's still there; I was back there recently and walked along the street-the club is still there. The night we opened there, his date for the evening was Chan [Don's first wife]. Chan came with him, and left with me 'cause I was the new 20 year old comin' to town. She took me home with her. So I moved into her apt. on 52nd St. right off. Johnny gave me two weeks notice for taking his woman, and one night during the two weeks, Chan brought Ross Russell to the club. Ross Russell was the owner of Dial Records and that night as he left the club, he gave me a note saying to be at a certain address on Friday afternoon and to bring my horn. I didn't know what it was, but I showed up and here were, among others, Max Roach and Fats Navarro. I was being hired to play backgrounds to a singer, Earl Coleman, with the rest of the group, but when they saw this young white kid come into the studio, they wanted to get me out of there quick. So Max came over to me and said, "We have this new tune called 'Move' by Dezil Best, and we'd like to start of with that. We don't have it written down but Fats knows that head on it, and then it's yours, OK?" So that was the first recording of 'Move' ever released and if you've ever heard the record, it's superfast, just immediate speed. Fats played the head on it, turned to me, and I was supposed to fall on my face and didn't. In fact, that recording is still available. My next recording was for Bob Weinstock, who had a little company called New Jazz, before they became Prestige. He had heard that first record, and got in touch with me and said, "We want to do a date with you. Who would you like?" I was being funny and said, "I'd like Fats Navarro on trumpet and Charlie Parker's rhythm section: Al Haig, Tommy Potter, and Max Roach." "OK." So all my first records were with that group, and they are also available a CD called, Prestige First Sessions.

JW: You mentioned that you were the only white guy in the studio. Did you catch a lot of flack from the black musicians who felt that you were playing their music?

DL: When I recorded with Bird's rhythm section, the piano player, Al Haig was white-in fact they called him The White Knight. But no, there was no problem. I spent a good part of my time in Harlem, just walking around the street with my horn in my hands and nobody ever bothered me. It's a different scene now, I understand, but everybody was great to me.

JW: It must have been difficult for the black players to tour the South, however.

DL: Well, only Milt Jackson went down. Gene Ammons was playing tenor, and he wasn't going South. Ernie Royal played trumpet and he wasn't going South. Terry Gibbs, the vibes player, decided he was going to get off the band. They hired Milt Jackson to take his place, and the other guys, Gene Ammons and Ernie Royal, tried to talk him out of it. "Man you don't want to go down South." He joined the band and did. Now there was a lot of racial segregation, but it was outside of the musicians. It was disc-jockeys that refused to shake his hand; they would nod but not shake his hand. He couldn't come into some restaurants with us; he had to stay in hotels on the other side of town.

JW: But among the musicians there was kind of a camaraderie, I guess?

DL: Yes. It had started much earlier in groups such as Benny Goodman's quartet.

JW: Where do you think that came from, that sort of stick together feeling among musicians?

DL: People that could play. You get Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson and Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa together, and they created marvelous things. And it was two and two.

JW: That must have been great to be a part of that brotherhood.

DL: And to be around during the birth of the Bebop years in New York, and watching the music take flower and spread to the clubs. When the Royal Roost opened, Symphonh Sid was the DJ from midnight until four every morning. You'd hear Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Fats Navarro; all these people were part of the scene-Bud Powell-they were all working. I remember one person that came out of that Royal Roost scene, who was kind of an unusual one-they called him The Cinderella Gentleman. He was a singer, and he'd come up and do part of the set every night. His name was Harry Belafonte, and that was kind of his start in the scene.

JW: You mentioned that session with Max Roach and Fats when you recorded 'Move' and you were able to keep up. Have you ever had an experience where you couldn't cut it, or just weren't good enough to play with a certain group?

DL: No. I've always managed to stay placed with groups who are compatible musically and been able to keep up. But situations like some of the music that was being played last night [Dave Holland Quartet] would have left me.

JW: Why is that?

DL: Times that I'm not used to playing, 7/4, unusual meters-it's just not a part of my upbringing and I haven't really gotten into it, but most of the young players do.

JW: Over the last fifty years jazz has branched out a lot with fusion and free playing. Do you try to incorporate these different styles into your playing?

DL: I'm still working on things all the time, but at seventy years old it's kind of beyond going back and practicing all the various things that are a part of the musical education these days. These kids are getting started in a lot of great directions. When you get to be Warren Moon's age you still may be a good player but you're not going to outrun some of these young kids. Chris Potter, who I thoroughly enjoyed last night, is in real command of his horn-meters and times don't bother him at all-they would me. I heard him down in Southern Mississippi last spring when I played a concert down there at the college, and one of the woodwind instructors played me a tape of an alto player without accompaniment, just playing. I figured it was probably one of the kids at the college and he said, "That's Chris Potter, age 12." I told Midge, it's kind of like we flew the Piper Cub and they're in a spaceship. It's a different language.

JW: How do you build a solo?

DL: I can't say that there is any one particular way because the idea of improvisation and musical creativity is for a solo not to be build in a particular way. The idea is for tunes to take different shapes every time you play them. One of the big helps for me is working with students. I've probably had 500 different students in the 13 years we've lived in Seattle, and in all those students there is a lot of give and take as well as just give-you're exchanging ideas all the time. And I guess I never give a lesson where I'm not playing right along with the student. So I have the advantage of three or four hours of daily playing in my studio with different students at different levels, including the university students who are really excellent players-they come in with their guns loaded thinking, "Gonna shoot the old man down today."

JW: When you get on the bandstand and you start playing, do you know by your mood how you are going to play?

DL: A lot of times the choice of tunes is shaped by the audience. You go for audience response, what they seem to like. I like to try and have three or four tunes on each gig that we haven't played for a while, along with the core group of standards in the repertoire of the group.

JW: As a writer, I think in terms of beautiful words. As a musician, do you think in terms of beautiful notes?

DL: I think it's important for musicians to know the lyrics to standard tunes. Lee Konitz taught at the Port Townsend/Bud Shank Jazz Camp a couple years ago, and before anybody could play a tune for him he made them recite the lyrics. He said, "How are you going to tell a story to somebody if you don't know what the story is about?" You got to know what you're building on so that you can tell the same story. So I try to have students of mine learn lyrics, too. I guess the famous example along those lines would be Stan Getz and Lester Young playing a Jazz at the Philharmonic tour together. Lester was Stan's idol-everything Prez played was something beautiful to Stan-so one night during a medley they were doing Prez lost his place and floundered for a few minutes, and later, on the bus, Stan said, "Man, I've never heard you lose your place in anything, anytime, anywhere. What happened?" Prez said, "To tell you the truth, I forgot the words." So he was always thinking lyrics when he played and you can hear it in his playing.

JW: Do you find that, in your seventies, it's harder to play the saxophone?

DL: No. The limiting factor is arthritis that's coming into my fingers. They don't hurt when I'm playing, but they do when I'm not. This was explained to me by a finger doctor who I went to. He said, "What's happening to you is what we call passion over pain. You're so involved with what you're doing, and so anxious to do it to the very best of your ability that the pain subsides while you're doing it. Because when you stop, the pain returns." It occurs in a lot of sports, to athletes that play with pain.

JW: What have been some of your most memorable gigs?

DL: It's a variety of different things. I thoroughly enjoyed playing at the North Sea Festival in Holland. I played in the Rotterdam Festival. Those were great fun for me. There have been stays at the West End Café in New York through the eighties and early nineties while it was still a major jazz club, so playing there was fun-getting back to the city and having a lot of old friends come around. I did a concert at a college in Michigan where the two soloist for the evening were Louis Bellson and I, and we got to do some things together. So it can go from something like that to a seventieth birthday party at Jazz Alley [in Seattle]. You just never know when it's going to happen. In Woody Herman's band, we would travel around to ballrooms throughout the Midwest, and anybody that came to hear that band considered it great. The excitement was always high from night to night. Within all of that there might be one night out of ten when the band really ignited. It was good enough even when it was tired and late, that the crowd loved it. But when the band would ignite within themselves, the people felt it, and it would turn into a back and forth thing with the audience-that made it worth all the average nights. One time I remember we did eight months without a night off, seven nights a week, doing from three to five hundred miles every night.

JW: Do you have any dessert island discs?

DL: There are so many things of Bird that are important to me. I love the things that he did with strings. Some of the Dial recordings, the ballads, "Don't Blame Me", "Embraceable You", those things are an important part of my listening experience. Miles' things, too. Michel LeGrand's "Legrand Jazz" with Miles, Bill Evans…Coltrane is on it.

JW: You work a lot in education, traveling to colleges for clinics and music seminars. Obviously that's important to you.

DL: If somebody told me twenty years ago that I was going to be teaching, you know, it wasn't my idea to get out there and start giving my 'secrets' away. But, you don't hold onto this stuff. It's important that it be passed along. That's why whenever I'm playing with a student, its open for them to ask me, "What was that? How did you do that?"

JW: Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

DL: One of the major things would be my conversion to Christianity in 1969 which was thoroughly unexpected by me, and it was a life-changer because I would be dead by now, otherwise. About half of the colleges I visit are Christian colleges and they are especially meaningful stops for me because I usually get to speak in their chapel and play. Sometimes the concert will be on a Saturday night and I'll stay over and do a Sunday morning service. You'd be amazed at the quality of the jazz bands at some of these Christian colleges. And where it is down, I just go in and tell 'em, you know, we should be better than the other colleges--we've got the Holy Spirit to work with.