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(soft instrumental music)
A musician's music
is only what it is, music.
Some is sad.
Some is happy.
Some is fast.
Some is slow.
(avant-garde jazz music)
If you think of jazz as,
let me begin with way back.
You have one guy on a porch,
singing the blues, he's by himself.
So the blues chorus can be 12 bars.
It can be 13, it could be 14 and a half.
It could be nine.
It's whatever he's doing,
but add a bass player.
Now you have to have an agreement between the two of you.
And this becomes more and more obviously necessary
as you add other musicians,
and suddenly you have a big band,
and everything is scored and composed.
What the avant-garde began to do,
is to go back the other way and say,
you know, we have really mastered this music.
We understand how to talk to each other.
Now let's take away some of those agreements,
and see, can we still talk to each other?
Can we really improvise freely?
They're not saying that we don't like the past.
They're not saying that we're better than the past.
They're saying that this is another way to hear music.
(crowd cheering)
This is what I would love to have in my music, presence.
You know, as long as I can live, I mean,
I don't care about nothing I played yesterday,
if I can go home right now and write some music,
that is a presence, you know.
That's why they have machines, you know?
So you can, if you want the past,
there's a machine that's got the past,
right there, you know,
and which I think is very good, you know?
So therefore that means we as human beings
can be in the present.
Every movement in jazz reflects its time.
And one of the ironies of jazz in the 20th century,
because it moved so quickly
is that you were brought up in one era,
but you played something else.
You were brought up listening, loving swing,
a listening to Duke Ellington,
but you ended up playing Charlie Parker's music.
One, two, three, four.
Bebop, you see, wow.
Bebop had an urgency.
It had a kind of arrogance.
There was no way you could get by,
by being a narrow player and just play ensemble, you know.
If you were in a bebop band you were a soloist.
See, the swing bands on the records,
you don't have these lengthy solos.
With the boppers, you got a chance to hear Charlie Parker.
I saw him when I was just a kid.
That was 1949,
but I never will forget it.
And I was amazed at how this human being, one man,
can stand up there looking like a saint and an angel,
in a white suit, playing all this beautiful music, man.
It changed my whole life.
Charlie Parker looked like Buddha.
Charlie Parker, who recently died,
laughing at a juggler on TV,
after weeks of strain and sickness,
was called a perfect musician.
Charlie Parker, pray for me.
Pray for me and everybody.
Charlie, did you realize at that time,
what effect you were going to have on jazz?
Well, I mean,
ever since I've ever heard music,
I thought it should be very clean, very precise.
I mean, of course it could stand much improvement.
Most likely in another 25 or maybe 50 years,
some youngster will come along and take the style
and really do something with it, you know?
Just imagine what it'd be like
to be in New York in 1959
in the wake of the death of Charlie Parker,
who's still alive then in everybody's heads,
as Miles Davis doing what he's doing,
you come to town and say, well,
now all of that's really wonderful, but what about this?
Ornette was creating notes
that had not previously existed.
Ornette comes in,
the first thing he does is breaks a standing rule in jazz.
People don't want to give Ornette Coleman credit for this,
but I don't have any problems with it.
I'm sure there may have been some people historically,
who at one point said, well,
maybe you could improvise without following any chords,
but in my mind Ornette Coleman is the first guy
to make it work.
Many people would have been discouraged,
'cause he got a lot of the abuse from musicians around town
who really didn't get where he was coming from.
There's one occasion where he was playing with some guys,
and while he had his eyes closed playing,
they all got up and walked off the stage.
One musician after the other left the stage.
Ornette was left alone.
Then the waiter came up and said, Mister Coleman,
somebody wants to talk to you.
He walked out the door and they took his saxophone,
threw it down the mountain.
It was on a hill,
and beat him up.
His lung collapsed.
He had to go to the hospital.
That's when I started trying to not worry
about whether what I was doing had any value,
or whether it was good or bad, but to do it.
Whatever Ornette was doing, it worked.
I was converted.
You know, just conversion,
instant conversion,
and instant adoration.
It was like a religion.
I can't imagine how to describe it,
how to compare it to anything.
The thing that Ornette Coleman was doing with pitch,
that a lot of people just weren't getting,
the people who were saying he was out of tune,
is that he was playing quarter-tone pitches,
by which he meant that he's playing the notes
in between the two adjacent keys on the piano.
If you play the exact ratio of quarter notes,
then you're in tune.
You're in tune.
You're not in tune with the rest of the planet,
but you're in tune with yourself.
In my classes at one college
where I teach the history of jazz,
when I play that some people say,
just gives me a migraine headache.
Well, I don't know what to say to you,
but I would agree, it's not easy to listen to,
but that's not what you think about
when you're writing music.
Is it gonna be easy to listen to, you know?
To be perfected,
and acknowledged without ever having to
sell out, what they call sell out,
I'm for that all the way.
(scat singing)
(dissonant piano music)
It seems to me what music is, is everything that you do.
Straight from the heart.
So.
So to read or dance, you know,
to converse is all a part of the making of music.
Cecil and Ornette come from
very different parts of the musical map.
You had Ornette who comes out of the southwestern style,
where he has a really raw jagged approach
to the tempered scale that's made a lot of people
compare him to blues and rhythm and blues.
(avant-garde piano music)
Cecil Taylor obviously listened to Ellington.
He knew Bud Powell.
He studied formally.
He studied at the New England Conservatory.
He had an education, not only in Europe,
but he grew up listening to a lot of pop.
So he listened to all of that stuff growing up,
but he had his own approach.
A lot of people misunderstand him.
He's kind of microscopic in his improvisations.
But in a certain way, because it's so dense,
it reminds me of mountains,
oceans, all these kinds of elements,
not human elements.
(avant-garde piano)
The point is you have to understand this music
in terms of the traditional jazz that you've heard before.
Next question please.
Now, when we talk about jazz,
we use these terrible semantic terms
that sort of create battle lines.
For example, bop is a meaningless word, bebop.
It has to do with the sound of a drum lick.
It's a shorthand for communication.
So that if I say to you bebop,
you immediately think Charlie Parker,
Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell.
If I say avant-garde, you think Cecil Taylor,
Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler.
Swing, Benny Goodman, Count Basie.
Although, you know, the truth is,
and the farther we get away in time for any movement,
you see how there is a real logic in how
all of these musics really do have an interactive,
not just progression,
but just sort of feed on each other.
(gun firing)
A gun.
Mingus initially made a very interesting remark
about Ornette.
He said that Ornette is like,
he's playing in his own world
and it doesn't relate to anybody else's world.
This is the bass.
Mingus Mingus.
But eventually Mingus's music itself
became more consciously avant-garde.
Charlie Mingus was always ahead of the game.
I mean, he played during the period with Bird,
but there was not that much of a big divide
between what we were doing and what he was doing.
One must remember that he came from
the same neighborhood as Eric.
I came from a more oriented bebop style,
so when I saw Eric Dolphy for the first time,
I couldn't stand Eric Dolphy because that felt like
he couldn't even play the saxophone
And then the second time I seen Eric Dolphy,
he turned out to be my most favorite musician of all times.
So then I embraced that kind of music,
the freeform, avant-garde jazz.
One of the things that makes the avant-garde different
from every other school of jazz,
certainly that proceeded it, and I think that's followed it,
is that the major figures
all come from very discreet backgrounds.
I mean, these are artists spread
all over the United States geographically.
So first off, tell me where you're from.
Well, I'm from New Orleans.
Oh, it's a place called Texas,
okay, Fort Worth, Texas.
Yeah, that's where I'm from.
And here's the great Ornette Coleman.
We used to play in the auditorium at our high school.
I think I met Ornette Coleman in Texas.
Then I moved to Los Angeles.
As fate or whatever would have it,
I'm on the street car one day,
and there was Ornette Coleman.
And in the months that followed,
I played around town with him.
There were places to go to jam sessions all over LA, then.
When Ornette Coleman started to make
his move around Los Angeles,
going to the jam sessions to sit in,
he was up against a real brick wall, but he hung in there.
You can see and finally got some people surrounded him,
you know, who were sympathetic,
empathetic to what he was doing.
When Ornette came to town,
he ran into Don Cherry.
They didn't know each other.
And Don Cherry was ready.
And then Charlie was also completely willing and able
and joined his band.
And Ornette now could write for another person.
You ran into people around town
any time you went out to play.
I used to go to jam sessions with Eric Dolphy,
and here's a guy who was a really great player,
and no disrespect to Eric in saying what I'm saying.
A lot of people seemed to think that Eric
was one of the figures around Los Angeles
who was playing some sort of free jazz.
That's not true.
He was not going around town
doing anything like Ornette Coleman was doing.
And Eric was really good, man.
But I see him as just a very sophisticated bebopper then.
Now when he came to New York,
things began to go another direction.
But once Eric came to New York,
I think what was happening in New York, in that period now,
late 50s, early 60s,
a lot of people were flirting
with going, in quotes, now outside.
(avant-garde music)
What brought you to New York?
The music.
brought you to New York?
Prince Lasha.
What a character. (laughing)
Yeah, he's my man.
Yeah, I'm looking for some questions.
Do you have any?
What's that? You have any questions?
I need to ask, you have any questions?
Ask me? Questions?
Yeah, I got plenty of answers, man, come on.
The way we came to New York,
back in '60-
'63.
Yeah, '63, sure was man.
How could I ever forget that? Thanks, Don.
Let me tell you that story.
Okay, make sure your mics are on.
Yeah, here's what happened, man.
My worthy constituent, my orangutan, Sir (indistinct).
We were at a music store,
and he was listening to this music.
I said, who is that?
He said, Eric Dolphy.
I said, Eric who?
He said, Eric Dolphy.
I said damn, where is he?
He said, he's in New York.
I said, is he gonna be ready to leave in two weeks?
He said, what?
I say, I'm leaving for New York,
because my worthy constituent Ornette Coleman
was the God of freedom.
And here is Eric Dolphy right?
I want to see this mother, you know what I mean?
So at this time I already had a record out
with Prince Lasha called, The Cry,
and it was making waves in the world.
I'm gonna get read to the meat of the story.
I repaired a Chrysler, I had an eight-cylinder Chrysler.
Sure did, man, we drove across the US.
And I remember very vividly,
that we were on the freeway,
what we thought was a freeway at that time.
4:00 a.m. in the morning, man.
So I was really tired.
Gorilla was tired.
So I give it to my orangutan to drive at night, you know?
And so at a certain moment,
I hear all these sirens and lights and everything,
and they pull us over, and said, you know,
you're driving on the wrong side of the highway.
This cat was a smooth talker.
I observed that right off, man.
This cat was a smooth con artist.
We had no idea it was two lanes, you know.
We was used to two going and two coming.
So they tell us go.
Free at last.
Very good.
So that's part of the story.
Want to hear the rest of the story?
Okay, ask me any questions.
I can answer anything.
Did you call Dolphy
while you were on the road?
Look, I'm surprised you asked me that question.
When I called Eric Dolphy,
what do I hear on the record player, but The Cry!
He said, man, I'm listening to you now.
I said, yeah, I can hear it.
I don't believe it.
Then all the cats that play great music
and great stars and recording artists
came over to the loft to play with the Prince and I.
And it was great, man.
We had an ally in the back of our pad,
and one evening I heard-
I look out the window because we could see
right from the kitchen table window,
and look out in the back and see who's there.
And it's Prince Lasha.
I got up from the table and went outside,
and he had another guy with him
that I didn't recognize right away.
And after millisecond, I did.
John Coltrane,
the high and mighty one.
I moved to New York in 1960,
which was a wonderful period in this city.
There was so much creativity,
and so many artists, musicians.
I call it like one of the golden periods.
(jazz music)
There was an immediacy in the air, man.
It was like a short fuse and a long explosion.
I was into now, doing it now.
Whatever it was, I had to do it, now.
Coltrane would come to town when I was in Philly,
and we had a place in Philly called Music City.
So I went down there,
I got myself good and fucked up on some wine and shit.
I felt like I could do anything at that point.
And I asked him to let me sit in, but he wasn't having it.
And I was bugging him a lot, you know?
And so he told me, he said, well look man,
what you really need to do, Rashied,
you just need to go to New York,
because there's a lot of guys in New York,
playing this kind of music that you're interested in.
I mean, just like John said it, man, I was,
they was waiting for me here.
I mean, first I have to say that almost every week,
literally, almost every week for a couple of years,
there was somebody new in town.
(avant-garde jazz music)
And it took a while before the movement, in a sense,
gave them a legitimacy that they didn't have individually.
One of the big moments
that sort of began the idea that there's a movement here.
This is bullshit, man.
That these young musicians,
all thinking in a similar way,
was when Ornette Coleman made a record
in 1960 called, Free Jazz.
(avant-garde jazz music)
Because that was the name.
(avant-garde jazz music)
I was in college when he did Free Jazz,
and he sent for me to make that recording.
It was just before the end of the semester,
which meant I would just fail the course,
and I decided to not go.
And so he sent me a ticket, as I remember,
and I sent it back.
And people say to me all the time, man,
you should have made that famous record.
(avant-garde jazz music)
That's a historic recording.
A lot of people had a lot of trouble with that.
That's a record.
Now you see that Ornette Coleman's earlier recordings,
you can still hear a thread of Charlie Parker
making its way through those early tunes, but free jazz man.
That apron string or,
or whatever, umbilical cord to bebop
certainly disappears on that, man.
That's all Ornette Coleman.
I knew there was a new era
on the scene of jazz music in America.
(wind blowing)
(avant-garde jazz music)
(gasping)
Most people are used to only having
one melody going at a time,
and cannot cope with polyrhythms and polytonality.
But we were looking for that
freedom to play in any kind of tempo,
and each individual could play in his own tempo
and create melodies that were independent
in a way from what the other players were playing.
You had to break something down
to be able to create something new.
I said that improvisation is thought
informed by a passion and
conditioned by knowledge.
Don't mention it.
And of course, Cecil Taylor made a great impact,
both positive and for the people that liked it,
and negative for the people that hated that type of music.
We were talking about how difficult the music was
for a lot of people.
And Cecil said,
the musician prepares, the audience should prepare to.
You know you have to prepare to understand literature,
to understand painting.
Why is music different?
It just scared the hell out of people,
because everybody who grew up thinking jazz is this.
You always know where the beat is.
Even if you don't know anything about harmony,
your brain tells you that the harmony will resolve.
All of those things are suddenly taken away.
And it was terrifying for people.
A lot of people just, what the hell is this?
This isn't even music.
With the avant-garde,
the critics thought it was
just a lot of untalented musicians
squawking on their instruments.
Downbeat said that this was poisoning
the minds of young musicians.
A lot of older musicians felt that way.
One time, man, I sat in with Max Roach's band,
and he had Clifford Jordan in the band.
Everybody was playing, and Jordan took a solo,
and Freddie took a solo,
and everybody was taking a solo,
and then I reached to hit the cymbal,
and looked and Clifford had took my cymbal away.
So I go, like I say, man, why you do that?
You see, man, I got tired of listen to that shit.
What kind of fucking shit is that?
How dare you, motherfucker,
come in here and sit in on Max Roach's drums?
Ah man, it was that kind of a thing I used to get.
But eventually Max Roach, in his later years,
who was, you know, the bebop drummer,
the most magisterial of drummers to come out of 1940s,
made duet albums with Cecil Taylor.
And he couldn't go further out than that.
But at the time the old guard felt
that they had the right to just dismiss
the avant-garde as charlatans, frauds.
For me, as far as I could see,
there wasn't much mingling between the,
between the established players and avant-garde players.
Miles at first was very critical.
He just had nothing good to say about them.
There was a notorious essay in Downbeat about Eric Dolphy.
A friend of mine opened a club in Berlin in '64,
and wanted us to play there as an opening,
and he said, could you like bring somebody, name person.
And I said, well Eric might want to play.
We were told to open the club in Berlin.
And I said, hey Eric,
And he had the Downbeat on his lap.
And he looked very sad, and he said,
I don't know why Miles put me down like that.
I really like him.
(avant-garde jazz music)
We brought him to this hotel in Berlin.
He ordered ice cream and juice
and Coca Cola and stuff like that.
That was his dinner.
And it turned out later that he was like a heavy diabetic,
He had no clue.
He had no clue that he had it.
He played the first song with us.
Then he said, excuse me,
I have to go into the dressing room,
and he didn't come out anymore.
And then I said to Karl, after another few songs,
we have to look where Eric is, and the door opened.
And Eric cried out,
on the floor
and he said, help me.
And we immediately brought him to the hospital.
And the doctor told us
that they had never seen so much sugar in anybody's blood.
Like it was just way beyond saving him.
And then we called his mother.
Did he tend to realize that how great he was?
No.
(muffled speaking)
He was always real honest.
He wouldn't say anything.
We never realized either
how well thought of he was,
until he died.
Man, the cat was really a genius.
Here was a genius, right.
He was like something never I've ever heard, you know?
I ain't gonna get into Dolphy now,
he's beyond words with me,
not only as a supreme musician,
but a human being as which is rare in our day.
And especially in the music business,
where the slogan is dog eat dog.
In New York, it's a certain energy and creativity
that is really kind of hard to explain,
but maybe it's because of, you know,
I, myself, man, I don't believe in,
I don't think of competition in music.
You know, I don't think of something being better or worse,
it's just different.
And I think that kind of thing brings a certain ego
that is keeping a lot of development
of musicians coming together.
You know, because everyone wants to feel
that they're doing something different
than everyone else is doing.
And all the innovators that I've known in my life,
they all were playing their music
and trying to develop in music.
It wasn't to try to be an innovator.
And meeting Ornette Coleman,
coming out of the bebop period,
was like a whole study, which I could see,
like even now, I'm still like a disciple of his in music.
Don Cherry was smitten by Ornette.
They played like identical twins,
and that music was created
to the point where you think of Ornette and Don
being always together, but they weren't.
And Don was his own
absolutely inventive, unique musician,
who played maybe more perfectly than anyone I'd ever heard.
He never lived to the point where anyone got used to him,
and said, oh, you know, Don doing that,
no one ever got used to him.
And I never certainly got used to him.
I was in awe of him till the day he was gone and still am.
But he was beautiful.
He came up to our house
for two weeks to do cold turkey,
and he came, but he was already so out of it.
He was beautiful.
Intelligent, and he was fantastic,
with a real level of musicianship
and human being like Ornette.
And then he told me then,
going to New York is my downfall.
New York, see like I've been in New York at times
when it was very hard and no place to sleep, no food, no-
I mean, even then, I mean,
you feel that New York has some kind of a conscience.
I mean, you go into paying all these dudes.
Karl, me, and Don, play the concert.
And then afterwards he came up and said, Ingrid,
can you lend me some money for a taxi?
And I said, Don, didn't you get paid?
He said, no, they don't pay me
because it didn't bring enough audience.
In New York at that time,
there was a level at which black players
were not gonna get what white players were playing
in the same club.
What it amounted to was Ornette decided at one point
that the clubs weren't paying him at what they should.
The club that happened to be the focus of that
was the Five Spot.
We had played there,
and the place was packed every night.
And Ornette had decided that he wasn't gonna work
unless they paid his price.
There's no magic here.
You've got a wife and a couple of kids.
Ornette was fighting for musicians being paid better.
It was not for him alone, it was for everybody.
When I retreated in America,
because I was mad about
and heard about how my relationship was.
I was reading a paper where I was selling like 3000 records
and I'd be evicted the next month, you see?
Then it doesn't make any sense for me
to be what I thought I was,
that they had made me what I thought I wasn't, you know?
So I just said, okay, you know, I mean,
I grew up without being,
I grew up hungry so I can be hungry now, you know.
It's not gonna be any different, you know.
That was the shock of my life,
as a European,
finding that respectlessness
to these fantastic jazz musicians.
For me, it's the true art form of US.
Jazz could have happened, happened nowhere else.
No respect.
So I said to Karl, I'm going back to Europe.
We went both to Ornette.
Ornette was really very insistent.
He said, you gotta stay, you gotta stay, you gotta stay.
It was devastating to see how the musicians were living,
and what was going on and how the music was being treated.
When you see the bands coming to Europe,
and you go to the concerts,
and see that glamorous flashy performances they make,
you get an idea in your mind about it.
Oh my they're stars.
But then when I came to the States,
and I saw how some of the musicians were living,
and I said, there's something wrong here.
The situation is still the same
for African-American musicians,
or have things gotten better?
Well, I don't see how they can get better
for black musicians
until they get better for black people.
We can't protect our culture
until we can actually alter economic and social institutions
to reflect better our needs and our desires, I think.
The music of the 60's,
it was like the music of the 40's,
except the guys from the 40's,
they were doing it from a diff,
they were doing it from the night club,
and that was their thing.
We weren't allowed in the nightclub.
In fact, that was the reason
I formed the Jazz Composers Guild.
It, started with me being invited
to Bill Dixon's workshop orchestra.
And there I met Rudd.
It was a very diverse group of personalities,
and was very colorful, I think almost too colorful.
See, I don't have these Bourgeoisie concepts
about time and space and death and taxes
and insurance companies.
It's all a bore, but okay, we'll talk about that.
So, okay.
Bill, Bill Dixon, and Cecil
had a great idea.
Why don't artists take this whole thing off the market
and put it in our own hands, have our own recording spaces.
And try to get support going
for grants, commissions,
and just through a strength in numbers, you know,
getting foundations to recognize what was happening.
The intention was to further the music
and to better the opportunities for the people involved.
We started to do concerts there,
and of course it started with the Cellar Cafe,
the October Revolution at the Cellar Cafe.
(avant-garde jazz music)
October revolution.
I didn't know anything about that actually.
At the time, once we started rehearsing, I said,
what are we rehearsing for?
And they were explaining to me
that there's a bunch of venues in New York in October,
we're gonna just bombard the city with new music.
It was about, there is no environment for this music,
so let's create one.
They made a real difference
in the music that we were playing.
In fact, they made a lot of people aware
of what we were doing.
They really did.
The October Revolution is all part of a sense
of creating a movement,
of creating some kind of guild of musicians
for those who are basically alienated
by the mainstream jazz world.
Dixon and Taylor saw the long-term objective here.
Together we stand, divided we fall.
But some of the guys didn't get it.
And I think that was the demise of the Guild.
It lasted about six months, but the guys were too hungry.
I'm not gonna mention names,
but a couple of guys signed a contract here, or did this.
Undermined the whole principle.
You've got to put teeth into it.
If you're gonna go on strike,
you can't go back and sign with the man.
But also another thing was the fact
that the personalities involved,
it was really hard to get everybody to conform as a unit.
Bill, can we bring back
the community spirit to the music?
No, absolutely not.
Because you know why?
Young musicians don't want to go through that.
They all want to be famous.
But I mean, if I had to have money
and behaved the way these cats, no way, keep it.
I had no place to live when I arrived in the city.
And so I stayed,
I stayed overnight in Grand Central Station on a bench
and met a lot of homeless people.
And we would go and live in a different place every night.
And some of us were mentally ill.
A lot of us would wake up screaming, but that was okay.
I totally accepted it.
I thought this was life in New York City.
And it was fine.
I mean, everybody was okay in my book.
I just wanted to be there.
Everything was fine,
whatever I had to eat, wherever I had to sleep,
whatever I heard was perfect.
But the most interesting years of all
were the early 60's, that was it.
That's when the best music got created.
Everyone knew what they were doing.
They were at the height of their powers.
There was an individual,
there was individuality then,
and there were better feelings too, among musicians.
You didn't have, I mean,
there wasn't a competitive spirit in a certain kind of way.
And we were all friends, all went to parties together,
had open house.
You know, it was different.
There was a great spiritual underground,
people knew, you know, what was happening then.
Everybody knew what was happening.
So the real main gigs in town, there weren't that many,
where we could play, like Slug's,
a few places like that.
Everybody knew and turned up.
It was support, you know.
We all knew each other, we all played with each other.
There was a period when I lived on 3rd Street,
between 1st and 2nd, and Sun Ra lived on the block.
I lived on the block.
Dave Burrell lived on the block.
Kind of hard to remember the sequences
of all this stuff, because-
Norris Jones.
Noah Howard lived across the street.
Rick Colbeck lived down the street,
Pharaoh Sanders lived around the corner.
Dave Burrell was living right across the street,
he and Bobby Kapp.
And so this was Marion Brown's apartment.
Marion sorta lived at Archie's.
You had all these musicians in a concentrated area.
Marion Brown, Dave Burrell, myself, Bobby Kapp.
That was a good group.
We were always over at each other's houses,
just messing around.
And Marion Brown could just carry on
a musical conversation for hours.
I found out he can be an intellectual,
and be a jazz musician too.
We had this conversations a lot,
about what is the pianist's role?
(avant-garde jazz music)
In my head, I was doing whatever I felt like doing,
whenever I felt like doing it.
Marion Brown, he was on my first quintet record.
Marion had this really, you know, lyrical thing.
He could float over everything.
He was an introspective guy.
When I first came to New York,
I didn't even know Marion Brown was a musician,
because he didn't have a horn, he wasn't playing.
He was just hanging out.
He was just hanging out and hanging out,
just hanging out with everybody.
And I never seen him with a horn.
I didn't even know what he was.
I just thought he just liked music.
And then we was up in Archie's playing,
just me and Archie.
And then Marion comes up there and he say, man,
I bought myself an alto saxophone.
And I looked at him, you know, like,
but I didn't know his history.
He had been a player before.
I didn't know that.
He turned out to be a hell of a musician,
but I thought he had just started playing.
So I kinda was like, kinda cool with him, you know?
'Cause I didn't come to New York to play with amateurs.
I came to New York to play with professional players.
One time I was playing with Albert,
and we were playing and
somebody came over to the drum set, saying man, you know,
Coltrane just walked in.
I went, yeah, where where?
I was trying to find out where he was,
and Albert started playing.
I'm sure John wasn't trying to intimidate nobody,
but the room was full.
A lot of people was in the room.
He couldn't get in a place.
So he got a chair and he brought it out
in the middle of the aisle so he could see.
And man, I saw John.
Man, he said, man, that you see that?
I say, what?
You say Coltrane was out there, man.
He say, why did he come to my gig, man?
I say, man, he's just checking you out.
He say, man, why did he come to my gig?
He pulled the chair all way up
in the middle of the aisle and shit,
and say, man, I could hardly even play.
I said, look, man, I don't know why he did that.
And he say, man,
he looked like he was looking right down
the bell of my horn, man.
Well, anytime John would show anyplace,
Trane would show anyplace (indistinct).
Trane is in the house man.
Chief, we'd call him Chief, Chief is in the house.
It was really cool, man,
'cause that shows you the kind of cat Coltrane was,
you know what I mean?
He was always looking for something different,
looking for something different to do.
I mean, he wasn't never satisfied
with just doing what he was doing.
If you followed John Coltrane,
every record took you to a place
that was way far from the last one.
You really were able to follow from
the guy who came up playing
in second rate R and B bands in Philadelphia
to the pinnacle of jazz as Miles's sideman.
To Giant Steps, to Love Supreme, which everybody loved.
Huge success, to Ascension,
which scared off the entire audience
that had bought Love Supreme.
Coltrane troubled the old guard,
and the old guard critics the most.
Because if you didn't dig Ornette,
if you didn't dig Cecil,
you could just say that guy doesn't know what he's doing.
You couldn't say that about Coltrane.
You couldn't say Coltrane can't play,
because Coltrane was already a superstar in jazz.
For the avant-garde, it was liberating.
It just changed everything.
This was the baddest band in jazz.
The John Coltrane Quartet.
That was it.
I mean, you know, Miles Davis was before that,
but John had the banner then,
and he was the baddest thing that ever walked.
John Coltrane was the father of the scene,
the father of all of us.
And he was our spiritual leader,
but he was a tangible person
that you could actually befriend.
Coltrane was the Parker of our era.
It's hard not to want to play
what he played.
Even now I mean,
I listen him and just incredible,
he always gives me something new.
Archie Shepp was working at this department store
during the day and he didn't want to do that kind of stuff.
And actually John lifted him out of that gloomy shit.
John gave him the shot, put him on a couple of records,
took him on tour a couple of times
and got him started, you know?
Bob Thiele, being a producer at Impulse at the time,
had said that if he would listen to John Coltrane,
he would be recording everybody.
John was doing that for everybody.
He did the same with Albert.
He used to pay people's rent and their shit.
If they couldn't pay rent, they would call John
and he would send them money.
I mean, this is the kind of guy he was.
So I didn't even have a clue he was sick.
And then I found out
that he had this history of liver cancer.
But I never noticed that until the last gig we played.
And for the first time ever,
I seen John sit down and play, and he never sat down.
And three months later, after that, he died.
While John was alive,
everybody was trying to play this music.
Everybody was playing avant-garde, the music was there.
And you talking about gigs being scarce,
man, we wasn't working hardly nowhere at that point.
It was in a bad time when John left the music,
because the biggest name in jazz was gone,
and that whole thing went with him.
It killed it.
(mournful jazz music)
(audience applauding)
(jazz saxophone music)
When Albert came, in Cleveland,
Albert Ayler came from Cleveland, everybody knew him,
the minute, we were all somehow begged, borrowed, stole,
and got up to the top floor of Philharmonic Hall
when he came out,
and we heard him in the dressing room
before he came on stage,
Cecil was already started playing with this group,
and we heard Albert in the dressing room,
and that towering sound.
He was a saxophone player, man,
that we all are thinking
we just broke the sound barrier, wow.
Here's a guy that's gonna take us to another planet.
Is that what we want to do?
A lot of people you see would talk about
what they heard Albert Ayler do,
but they weren't willing to participate.
Nobody got successful, hardly at that time.
Albert, as great as he was, died with practically nothing.
The East River.
I mean, every time when you were around Albert,
you always felt that you were around a spirit.
Not everybody gets the message,
or wanted to, other believers.
The ever seeing eye is always watching us,
that we must be well aware of this,
because it's getting late now.
And there's a very talented man, you see,
daring, but convinced about what he was doing, you know.
If you're not convinced, boy, they'll destroy you.
You have to really be pretty well sure of what you're doing.
None of us are alike.
We have many examples of individual pursuits
that enlightened all of us,
either with the light,
or with the darkness.
I started to think in terms
of what I'd like to do as an individual.
I encountered some spirits who happen to feel the same way.
And from there as the AACM, we proceeded.
The AACM stands for
the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
And our mission from the very beginning in Chicago,
was to create and perform unrecorded new music.
And it was headed by none other than Muhal Richard Abrams.
We did have a rule.
One rule within the AACM.
You had to do your own music,
no other music except yours.
The Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,
was a group of spiritualists who were trying to search
for what is the meaning of music?
Nobody had any money.
We all come from poverty and no one would give an inch
with respect to their aesthetics and their music.
The problem was
to produce a community from a group of people
who really had very diverse ideas about sound.
What brought them together,
what brought them together was a shared sense
that they should be responsible for each other.
I come from a family who believed in unions,
strong unions, and I looked at the AACM as like a union.
Yeah, when I saw the AACM in Chicago,
and the fact that they were organized in a very formal way
and presenting themselves on a weekly, monthly basis,
and having meetings and memberships and all of that.
And I came back to Saint Louis and got our guys together
who were having our informal jam sessions and said,
why don't we become a branch of the AACM in Saint Louis?
And someone said, no, wait a minute.
Let's do our own thing here in Saint Louis.
And so we started the Black Artists Group.
So now outside of Chicago and Saint Louis,
nobody really still weren't familiar
with what we were doing.
And I have to say,
maybe Europe got more familiar and acquainted
with this music before the US.
The Art Ensemble was invited to Paris, France,
but it wasn't The Art Ensemble until we got there.
And when we got there, then we had to give a name.
And that was the name we gave, Art Ensemble of Chicago.
So the whole scene from Chicago went to Paris
and they fell over the whole city.
There wasn't a theater, there wasn't a room
where you could play, where they wouldn't play.
I left for Paris.
I had a one-way ticket, I had $50 in my pocket.
I took a taxi cab then to Montparnasse,
which took something like $30.
So I had $20 left.
My motto was, play or die.
Paris had been invaded by the Midwest and the Northeast.
Everybody was there and it was like paradise.
And every night the audience would have
everybody that you could think of.
Cecil Taylor was there,
and Ornette Coleman was there.
This film was made during two days in Paris,
spent with Ornette Coleman.
Ornette Coleman helped us quite a bit.
Ornette Coleman came to our concerts,
and it was my first opportunity to meet the great man.
And he asked us to play the first half
on a concert that he was doing in Paris.
All sold out.
Thousands of people there.
Well, Braxton, Jenkins, and Smith and McCall opened for him.
He was a big champion of all of us.
It was a symbolic gesture to endorse us.
And after the concert,
he invited me to live with him in New York,
because I had never been to New York.
When I was living in Europe.
And a lot of the expatriate musicians who lived there
told me the same thing.
They felt like they were giving out a lot,
but they couldn't feel anything coming back.
A lot of musicians who live in Europe
always feel like they have to be recharged,
and the recharging happens when you come home.
After Coltrane's death,
so many jazz musicians moved to Europe.
In the early 1970s, they started coming back.
A lot of players from Chicago and Saint Louis
moved to New York from Paris.
New York was the center of the world,
especially the music world.
We wanted to be a part of that.
They had gone over to Europe and made a really big splash.
The Art Ensemble, and Braxton as well.
Then they came back.
But now the guys have a name.
They are established.
Then Columbia University
invited us to do a whole series of concerts.
Three days of all AACM music.
Muhal was elated.
And Muhal is doing concerts everywhere.
Muhal Richard Abrams did a concert in a church one day,
in a downtown club the next,
in an art gallery,
always doing something different.
The movement from the Midwest stimulated the whole scene.
This whole experience with Muhal and the AACM,
all of that set me up
for what was to come.
And what was to come?
Sam Rivers.
(tribal drums beating)
Rolling? Nobody hired Sam.
Rolling.
Nobody would hire us in clubs.
Sam always had musicians that would gravitate to him.
He had an open space,
and so he opened up a loft.
Suddenly musicians started taking control,
and they started turning their apartments,
in areas that nobody wanted to live in,
into lofts, musical spaces.
Sam Rivers had Studio Rivbea.
I happened to run into this woman on day,
when I was just talking about, I need a place.
I need a place to do this.
She said okay, I just bought this building.
And I'll rent you out the first floor.
And years later, I found out
that it was Robert De Niro's mother.
I didn't know it at that time.
She never mentioned it at all.
Robert Mapplethorpe was on the fourth floor.
We were good friends.
He was a good friend of mine, Miro, yeah.
He gave me one painting.
I don't know if it was stolen.
I never did find out where it is.
So whoever's got my Miro painting out there.
It's on there, Samuel Rivers, 1969, boom.
Sam had a lot of connections.
He was a little older than we were.
And he had done the Blue Note recordings.
He had worked with Cecil Taylor.
He had created a whole new music scene.
Miles Davis.
I played with Charlie Parker, too.
So musicians gravitated
to Studio Rivbea.
Studio Rivbea was a family run affair.
The publicity was run by Bea Rivers, Sam's wife.
The people at the door collecting the money was Sam's kids.
Sam presented anyone whose music he felt was presentable.
And you got paid for the gig.
The only thing he said to me ever
in all the years we played together.
Keep the energy up.
That was it.
The loft scene, once that got started,
it took off no matter where it was.
At Ladies' Fort, Joe Lee Wilson's place,
down on Bond Street.
Studio Wish, where Warren Smith had his place.
The loft that I had
was kind of centrally located on 21st street.
Max Roach was using it as a rehearsal spot.
And when people heard him playing with this group,
they would walk over the rooftops and down the fire escape
and climb in the back window.
And my partner, Anton Reed said,
we ought to make this into a presentation.
It was Max Roach's idea with all those percussionists,
form a group like Boom Boom, was all percussion.
So we began rehearsing every week with that for a year.
The fact that we were rehearsing all the time
and attracting audiences to the rehearsals,
kind of made the spontaneous theatrical presentation,
just explode where, you know,
that's how the whole loft scene developed.
What made it work, people's tastes had changed.
They wanted a more informal kind of setting.
People would open up their home
because this wasn't like traditional jazz.
This was art music.
That was the heyday of the avant-garde,
was the loft jazz scene.
Real estate in Manhattan changed all of that.
So these lofts were flourishing and I don't think anybody
was paying more than a hundred dollars a month.
I had a friend who was a real estate lawyer.
He said, you artists come in,
and you civilize a place with your talent, you know,
whether it be visual arts or theater arts
or musical arts or whatever.
And the whole area becomes unaffordable to those who
brought this activity about.
That's what killed the loft jazz scene.
New York was a mystery,
a mystery.
I started to play this kind of music,
in a different way, obviously.
For me, it's a mystery what I did,
because sometimes I don't think I do it.
For me, music is everything.
I don't have barriers.
It's simple.
I consider myself an international musician
who plays music.
(ethereal chimes ringing)
I got influenced by broadcast, East Germany,
at an an age of 11 or 12 years.
And I remember the quality depended always on the weather.
This was first time I was listening, audibly.
It was a positive shock for me.
Jazz, you know, during the Nazi time was forbidden.
The stupid Nazis, as Adolf Hitler,
there was no jazz music.
And the Americans, when they had won the war,
the first Americans I saw were the black GIs.
And so I had my first jam with a black GI,
when I was eight years old.
They changed my life.
They come to Europe, they freed me from the Nazis,
have given me this incredible music.
The situation in Germany, you know,
was so down and people also need
to have a new feeling of life.
We found jazz music.
I mean, if you think about the jazz musicians,
with the exception of Django Reinhardt, of course,
and a couple of others
who came along in the 30's and 40's,
they were mostly playing imitation
of the American players who had toured there.
The avant-garde didn't give you that option.
And suddenly you could be a European player,
not a European player, imitating an American player,
but using your own culture.
Where do you come from?
What is your folk music?
Europeans, we're not obliged you see to play blues.
And what that means is now,
we can get up here and improvise.
It doesn't have to swing,
but it is an improvised music
that obviously has roots in jazz,
but we don't have to jump through a certain hoop
so somebody can say, is this jazz or not?
The Germans were happy with the title of free jazz.
That was the only period
the word free jazz had little meaning.
I hated it afterwards.
But at that time it was like we needed that.
England was more radical.
They called it free improvisation.
The German guys used to call English jazz
washing machine music,
playing around, around, around, around in circles.
The Dutch was the most, let's say eclectic.
We in Holland, we were the treaters or traitors.
We were the motherfuckers.
We still played the blues.
No way England was playing the blues.
The Dutch seemed to have been more inclusive.
They seem to have been able to take
from whatever experience they've had.
The English school operated more from a subtractive base
where we excluded various elements.
I mean the Dutch thing also includes humorous elements.
I am a complete fraud.
My piano playing is poor.
Well, that's all true, but I don't care anymore.
Good answer.
In Holland, we were just in between,
I think it has to do with living in a little country.
Misha Mengelberg and Han had invited me
to do things in Holland.
And they'd asked me about who else is playing in England.
Who else is interesting?
So the exchange between the European countries
was always fun, and competition is good,
and you have to fight on stage.
That's what I learned from my English colleague,
or Dutch colleagues,
be onstage and do your thing.
The first time I brought someone,
I couldn't believe, you know,
that's a very loud saxophone.
Yeah, it was a bit special, yeah.
Han Bennink, a force of nature.
Mister Han Bennink, very famous Dutch drummer.
Yes, I mean, he is, as everybody knows,
quite a case.
People ho see me playing sometimes,
they think I'm a sort of wild maniac,
but I make only little tiny little lovely things.
The reason we gravitated towards one another
was more to do with the shared attitudes.
That was more important
than any sense of national identity, I think.
It's much more about those strong individuals.
Please say hello to Sun Ra.
This really is special.
(audience applauding and cheering)
Now who are some of your early influences.
Well, the planets, the Creator,
mythical gods and real ones, people, flowers,
everything in nature, my inspiration.
Musicians get their inspiration
really from environmental things.
And all musicians are inspiration to me,
no matter what style they're playing.
By all means, let's do it.
Thank you.
(audience applauding and cheering)
At that period of time,
there was not a possibility to play in an orchestra.
Sun Ra's orchestra was the only orchestra
you could get into,
and I was very interested in just the whole concept
of playing in a big band and orchestra, you know,
and he was wonderful,
because he wrote a lot of his own music.
I had an opportunity
to work with Sun Ra.
I smile because of the fact
that it was such an incredible experience.
Sun Ra said to me, oh, here.
He gives me my space suit.
I wasn't hip to this.
But he finally convinced me.
I did not fully understand at that particular time
Sun Ra's philosophy, but I learnt later to understand it.
I liked Sun Ra's band.
I liked everything that was going on
musically with the band,
but I didn't like the cult part of the band.
The musicians were great, great players,
but they wouldn't play with nobody else, but Sun Ra.
Well, he was the first one to really introduce me
in the high forms of music, you know,
past what you may would say
what Bird and Monk and the fellows were doing.
I didn't think anybody was ahead of them
until I met Sun Ra, you know.
See music is a universal language,
and it represents the people of Earth.
One day, it will happen
that a voice from another dimension
will speak to Earth.
You might as well practice and be prepared for it.
Sun Ra was famous for having
raw and rigorous practice sessions.
Right, we had long sessions.
Every night, every day,
rehearsal.
Sun Ra is a perfect example of somebody
who really comes out of left field.
I mean, you can make jokes that he, yeah,
he comes from another planet, but he, you know,
he comes from doo-wop for heaven sake.
He comes from swing.
One point, he played piano with Fletcher Henderson's band.
He really went back in history,
and he's one of the first guys to use synthesizer,
and electric instruments.
The thing that has made jazz
such an enthralling experience
for over a hundred years worldwide,
is that it has never sat still.
My story is not part of history
because history repeats itself.
But my story is endless.
It never repeats itself.
Why should it?
As a creative artist, you have some choices.
You get to be a point where people
are looking to you for music.
You can go forward,
if you have any ideas.
If you don't have any ideas, then you go back.
The forms are very simple here.
We're talking about 12 bar blues or 32 bars,
I got rhythm or something.
To rehash that over and over again,
it makes me want to regurgitate.
You can't use it, man.
It's like going back, digging up the dead, man.
You know, I mean, what validity does it have
with us today, man, from that period?
It's been done so many times, so well,
that we don't all have to do the same thing
over and over again, you know,
it's like reinventing the wheel.
It's really almost lost.
I mean, unless it's the musicians themselves,
some who are aware of that era, nobody else is.
It's part of the very conservative attitude
towards new art and new expression,
and new ways of expressing yourself.
If somebody wants to keep forms of expression,
so tied up, it's unhealthy.
And it's not for the betterment of the society.
And then you have messengers,
your creative people,
that define the language in a different way.
It's all about creativity.
And the history of the greatest players
has always been about taking the music forward,
fighting between this camp and that camp.
It doesn't make sense.
It's all one music.
We're all in this.
We need to be stronger than ever with the music.
Because I think it's a good time now man.
What's happening with the politics is going on.
What's happening with the country?
How screwed up the country is,
the administration that we have.
For a long time, I thought that,
very naive I suppose on my part,
that something as vital as jazz music
would sort of take care of itself.
Somebody has to sort of help jazz stay in focus.
I don't know who that is.
A guy like Ornette Coleman doesn't come along
every five years, or Charlie Parker,
or John Coltrane.
Maybe the next guy
is about 10 now, right?
Runny nose kid,
out playing basketball on the blacktop now.
That'll be our next big Jazzer.
(ethereal jazz music)
(crowd murmuring)
When you hear music after it's over,
it's gone in the air.
You can never capture it again.