By Jason West
Perhaps best known for playing in pianist Bill EvansÃÂ last trio, Joe LaBarbera has been one of the top drummers on the mainstream jazz scene for the past twenty years. Residing in Los Angeles since 1987, LaBarbera keeps a busy performance schedule, playing regularly with Bud Shank, Alan Broadbent and Conti Candoli. For the past ten years heÃÂs led the Joe LaBarbera Quintet, featuring Bob Shepard on tenor, Clay Jenkins on trumpet, Bill Cohen on piano, Tom Whorington on bass. The quintetÃÂs latest release is available on the drummerÃÂs independent record label, Jazz Compass (www.jazzcompass.com).
On August 7 and 8, LaBarbera will join pianist Dave Peck and bassist Jeff Johnson for what promises to be an exciting two nights of live recording at Jazz Alley in Seattle. I had the pleasure of interviewing LaBarbera via telephone in July.
AAJ: What do you think of Dave Peck's most recent recording 3 and 1?
Joe LaBarbera: Dave's style of playing is very close to my heart because he is very much of the moment. He really focuses on being improvisational as opposed to being repetitive or cliché-laden. So he really goes for spontaneous performance, which I like.
AAJ: I know that one of Dave's influences on piano is Bill Evans, and you played with Bill Evans. Do you hear some of those influences in Dave's playing?
JLB: Yeah, every once in a while, something that's stylistically Bill's pops up in a lot of piano players, but I don't Dave as being imitative of Bill at all. I think he got it to the point where he was going for more of maybe the spirit that Bill was trying to bring into his music as opposed to technically approaching it in a manner like Bill's, you know, because you can hear that in a player in a second - somebody that's imitating somebody else. There are qualities of playing that transcend that, that are way above that, and that's really where the good players and the great players are. They're not trying to emulate somebody to the extent that they sound like carbon copies, but they're trying to get just the essence of maybe what they were after in terms of improvisation into their own playing.
AAJ: Is that something that you can tell pretty quickly about a player?
JLB: Oh sure, absolutely. I mean, I'm as big a fan of Bill Evans as any piano player you'll ever meet because I was influenced by him really early in my life. I think I first heard him when I was about 12 or 13 on record, so I've been following his playing my whole life, and you know when somebody is copying licks or patterns that a performer uses, as opposed to maybe going for an approach. I can't put it any clearer than that, but if someone is just imitating an idea on a particular tune, I mean that's okay, and we all learned to improvise that way, but when it becomes you're whole concept of performance, like there are countless Coltrane imitators that you hear out there and they pretty much run the gamut of guys that imitate Trane based primarily on one era of his life. For example, 60s Coltrane, you'll hear a lot of licks that he played in that period coming out of a lot of players. Well the same thing's true with Bill, like if someone is really deeply into his music - like Alan Broadbent is another example that I could mention, because you never hear any Bill clichés in Alan's playing and yet there's that essence of Bill in his approach, which is hard to describe, but it's there because he obviously grew up listening to Bill. The same with Dave; I don't get a sense of imitation, but I get a sense of extension.
AAJ: I just started graduate school in education, hoping to become an English teacher, and some of the things we've been talking about in the class are the levels of learning, the development of the brain, and how we learn. The first stage is taking what you know and approaching a new subject or idea, and then practicing it and practicing in, which are the intermediate stages. The final stage is becoming an expert and being fluent in that subject or idea. And in your case, playing the drums, can you describe the growth or the feeling of knowing that you're getting better and moving up in some of these areas?
JLB: That's a good question because as a musician I feel those stages. Certainly there is a period where you have the essentials to play an instrument and you can play at a certain level, but there are frustrations attached to that because you're hearing something that you're not able to achieve, or maybe you wish you could play better in a certain area, so that's the initial stage. So you take those tools and you practice very, very hard to reach that next level. Charlie Parker, for example, for a three year period was trying to develop his style, and he had the basic technique of the saxophone down very well; he practiced between 11 and 15 hours a day every day for three years, so you can just imagine the kind of growth that could take place when you dedicate yourself to that extent. I, unfortunately, have not devoted that much time to my playing, but I have devoted a lot of time to practicing, particularly when I was in my early twenties and in that middle stage of development. Then you reach another plateau where let's say you feel very comfortable playing in a lot situations, and you also find that you are being stimulated by other performers that take you to places you weren't ever thinking about. Real creativity is starting to happen now, because you've got the essentials and you've got the mechanics of performance under your belt and it's become second nature. So now when you're performing you can draw on those resources very quickly because they're so thoroughly ingrained, so now real creativity is starting to happen. Then what happens, of course, is that you reach another point where everything you're playing, because your doing it a lot, and let's face it, I've been at this for 35 years or more professionally - so you reach a point where you become stale and you start to really not like some of the things that you're playing, and you start to edit things out of your playing, you start to eliminate things - perfectly good things - but the fact is that I've done them too many times and now they're starting to sound repetitive to me, so you start to clean house a little bit and work toward developing some other new things; and that's a hard thing to do because, most of us, when we've reached a point where we've been playing a long time, we sit down at our instruments, we immediately start playing something that we played probably every time we sit down and play, and that's the key to breaking through to that next level when you sit down and not play the stuff that you're comfortable and familiar with. You've got to force yourself into that next area, even if it means sounding not so good for a while. And that's something I learned from Miles Davis, because this is a guy that for his entire career never looked back and never was comfortable with playing something that he knew he could play just because it was going to sound good. He was always forcing himself into new areas. So, quite frankly, there are albums of his where he doesn't sound that great, but he's forcing himself and the people
AAJ: That's a great way of instructing.
JLB: No, he would never go to someone and say 'Do this, this and this,' because his theory on learning - and he was vocal about this when we did workshops - was that he didn't want to rob the student of the joy of discovery. And that is such a beautiful thing; I mean it really just - when he said that I thought, 'Yeah man, you're absolutely right.' Because you can in fact show someone, step by step how to reach a certain goal, but if you just point them in the right direction and let them discover for themselves, it has much more lasting value. That was his approach, and that was something that I picked up from him.
AAJ: I remember reading something about Miles saying that there were only a few times during his career when he felt the music was right, and I guess I'm trying to lead into the rewards for you as a musician, and why you play music and how you recognize that this is what you want to do.
JLB: That's a very good question, and I'll tell you, there's no way to know, it's just that it's got to be something that you can't live without. I mean, that's number one as far as discovering whether or not music is for you, because I can't even begin to describe to you how difficult it is to get started in this business. You just got to be naïve, a little stupid maybe, but willing to persevere anything to have the opportunity to perform, and the performance is the reward. Again, from Bill, he told me early on that you work very hard at the music. He showed me this by example, and all of the benefits that you're going to get are going to come from that hard work. It's not like you sit down and say, 'Well, I've got to write this kind of tune or play this kind of music and I'll make X amount of dollars.' Rather, you find out what it is that truly motivates and fulfills you as a performer and the benefits will come from that. If they don't, you simply have to accept the music itself as your reward because you will get precious little else from it. It's a difficult business. Fortunately for me and for a lot of players those benefits do come. Nobody's getting rich, but were enjoying what we do and that in itself is a gift, because I meet a lot of people in my life that make a ton of money, but they always are struck by the fact that they see a musician doing exactly what he wants to do with his life and being happy doing it. That is worth a whole lot of money.
AAJ: Obviously a lot of people have listened to you play, and you've played a lot over your 35-year career. Do you get a sense of the joy that you've brought to people that listen to you.
JLB: I get a lot of feedback from fans, and that's a real gift - you just can't even imagine somebody coming up out of the blue, and they heard something. That means a lot to me; it means people are listening and a lot of times they say things that are so right on the money as far as what I'm trying to achieve as a player that it just astounds me because I just don't expect to get that from the average listener. It means a whole lot to me that people appreciate what I'm doing.
AAJ: Let me ask you about your influences, and some of the people you assimilated on the drums and not just necessary on the drums - certainly you assimilated things from Bill Evans - but if you could kind of fill me in on your growth in music.
JLB: Sure, I mean drummers play a big part, but I think one of the reasons why I play like I play is because I paid a lot of attention to horn players and piano players, and Bill is one and Sonny Rollins in one, definitely, and Coltrane and Miles; and the reason that they stick out is because not only did they influence me but their drummers influence me, so I'm talking about Philly Joe Jones and Elvin Jones and Jimmy Cobb and Tony Williams and Paul Motian - I mean all of those guys had an impact on what I do. But, I think, stylistically, as a drummer, I was shaped by - in the very beginning it was Joe Jones - Papa Joe - and that moved forward to Kenny Clarke, and from there I got into Shelly Manne, big time, and have been a big fan of his my whole life, and then probably Art Blakey would have been next and then Elvin and Tony.
AAJ: And you picked up little things from all of these guys?
JLB: Yes, but it's got to do with how they accompany: that's what I'm interested in. How do they approach creating the energy and the interest in the background that stimulates the people up front, and that's been my approach. I try to keep it interesting from the drummer's perspective and stimulating for the soloist. And the end result of course is that the listener gets something that is worthwhile.
AAJ: Could you briefly touch on some of the things that you learned about accompanying from the drummers you mentioned, starting with Joe Jones?
JLB: Well, Joe Jones - it was an era when drummers - it wasn't a conversational approach like we have with Bill Evans or Coltrane, for example, like one person plays something and you respond. I mean, that was going on, but not to the extent - in Joe Jones' era, the drummers were time keepers, and Joe, being a fantastic soloist, got plenty of solo space. Kenny Clarke kind of smoothed out the edges as far as the time playing. He made it more modern; it wasn't quite as - well, he started syncopating with the bass drum - he was playing a more modern feel, because with each generation, the feeling changes a little bit. Art Blakey: just pure fire and passion. He really showed me that you got to put everything you got into what you do, even if it's not loud all the time, there's got to be that intensity; and that's what I got from Blakey, just raw power. Shelly Manne was kind of the whole package because he had the power and he had the finesse and he had the stimulating ideas that kept it interesting for the front line, and also, he was very reluctant to take solos. He used his drum solos in measured doses and that to me was an eye-opener. He didn't feel compelled to play a solo on every tune, and then I understood why: because he was really feeling fulfilled as an accompanist on all these tunes, so he didn't feel the need for a drum solo. That was an eye-opener. Starting with Elvin Jones - and Roy Haynes, too, who is grossly overlooked as an innovator in jazz drumming - these guys started going over the bar line with their feeling, and that gave the music a more open feeling; it wasn't boxed into four and eight bar segments. The flow of the music started to extend now, and that's something that I got from those guys.
AAJ: Would that fit into what you mentioned about conversational playing?
JLB: Yeah, it would, because the conversation, for example with Miles' music in the late Fifties - the modal approach on Kind of Blue - now, harmonically, the improvisations for the horns and the piano and bass are opened up. So now the rhythm doesn't have to be as boxed in, and it can be more open as well. And then moving on to say Tony Williams or Jack DeJohnette, these guys are in my view the logical extension of all of the players that I mentioned, because you can hear the influence of Max, Philly Joe and Blakey in Tony, but it comes out sounding like him because he hears it a different way. But the characteristics of all those great players are in Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette, so they take it to the next step and adapt the music to the rhythm of their generation; because the feeling does change with each successive generation.
