Old Jazz Sax Duets PDF

Jazz Sax Duets

Old Anonymous Dance Fake Book PDF

Old Anonymous Dance Fake Book

Matt Otto interview- part II

Here is part two of the Matt Otto interview. This part has questions from some of Casa Valdez's regular readers for Otto.

DCV: What projects have you been working on these days?


MO: I've been recording with a few different groups:

Josh Welchez, a great trumpet player here in L.A. Did a recording with myself, Joe Bagg on piano, Mark Ferber on Drums, Ryan McGillicuddy on bass. It's mostly straight ahead originals and a few standards.

I recorded on a sextet album with Brian Swartz, another fantastic trumpet player here in L.A. This group includes Andy Langham on piano, J.P. Maramba on Bass, Martin Sullivan on Trombone, Jens Cuross on drums, and Robby Marshall on tenor sax as well.

I also just did a trio album of all original material with Jason Harnell on drums, and Ryan McGillicuddy on bass, we call the group 3-ish and we're hoping to get that recording out soon.

My most recent quartet album is also done, and I'm waiting on some funds to press that one as well. The recording is a tribute to the Paris Commune of 1871 and will be titled, "La Commune".


Question from Steve Neff: Matt, I’ve been struggling with tendinitis and varied pain in my hands and forearms over the last year and a half. It seems like you have overcome your problems in a great way. I'm struggling with the pain everyday and would love some tips


MO: Hand pain is something I've dealt with since 1990. I was playing nearly all day for a long time, without stretching or breaking and I finally got carpal tunnel syndrome and had an operation a few months later. After surgery, my hand doctor said that the inside of my left wrist looked like the hand of a 60 year old man. The surgery did help but I've had problems off and on ever since. After years of trying everything I could find here's the best I've come up with:

1. Lift light weights with your wrists... forward wrist curls, reverse wrist curls. This will increase the muscle mass in the injured area increasing blood flow/circulation thus increase the healing process. This is the best thing I've found, I think babying your hands will only decrease blood flow, decrease healing potential and increase injury potential.

2. Stretch everyday at least once, or up to 3x. The main stretches are reverse forearm stretch and forward forearm stretch. Videos of these stretches are linked to my website and below.

3. The rest of these solutions are optional and I've had varying results with them... Alexander Technique, study this with a private instructor if possible. It is a postural awareness art that will help you regain your natural healthy human posture, this will help the healing process and help your bones align themselves with gravity, so that your musculature does far less work and does not become locked in spasm.

4. Exercise as much as you can, cardio 30 minutes 3x per week, light weights for all major muscle groups. Just go to the gym and work out, don't worry about big results or goals... keep it simple, just go and keep going. If you can't afford it, take a 30-minute walk every day.

5. Eat better and live healthier, more veggies, more raw food, more water, less sugar, less meat, less alcohol, less smoke. You don't have to be perfect, just be better. Moderation really works.

6. Practice with a timer. Buy an egg timer... find out how long you can play (after stretching and light weight routine) before it hurts. Time it... once you know, set the timer for 5 minutes less and only practice that long before taking a break, walking around, stretching and drinking water, Always use the egg timer, develop some discipline, over time your good habits begin to out way your bad habits and your hands and wrists will start to heal.

7. Listen more then you practice...as you probably know, listening is great practicing. You could try this, practice for 15 minutes then break, stretch etc... then listen to music... anything you like, just a little more than 15 minutes worth. If possible, repeat this a few times each day.

8. Try to slow down... stay relaxed and try not to practice fast, if you find you're enamored with speed, you may be in music for the wrong reasons, try to play slow, use a metronome, develop some patience and discipline. Try doing all your practice at metronome 40 until you break your habit of practicing too fast. Once you break the habit, met. 60 will seem like plenty of freedom.

Here are some of Otto's stretching and weight lifting for carpal-tunnel videos:









Question from Tom Periera: I'd like to know about Otto's teaching approach. When I studied with Joe Allard we rarely played the instrument. It was an approach that was more about why than how. Matt has a philosophy that seems to combine both a physical approach and a deeply spiritual and philosophical approach. I'd like to understand that process better. The reason why I think this is important is I believe that it illuminates Matt's own approach to playing.



MO: My main approach is to sing over pedals, which I really enjoy and find it therapeutic as well as beneficial to my playing and hearing. It took me a while before this became my main way to practice. I started singing exercises while studying with David Baker at Indiana University back in 1986, but it was not until I got carpal tunnel that I really began working on it. Over time it has become my main way of practicing and now I do it almost exclusively.

I practice all sorts of things by singing over a drone. I often use a metronome too so I'll sing something in time over the drone slowly. Today, for instance, a sang over the drone in each key for about 5 minutes while the metronome clicked slow triplets, I just sang freely and thought of the fingerings of what I was playing, which tends to be some form of major minor or dominant, nothing ground breaking. This is the way a practice most days, just singing freely over the drone while thinking of the fingerings.

One simple exercise I give my students is to sing a Bird head over the pedal. You put the drone on concert F for example, and then sing Scrapple rubato over it, making sure every note is in tune, you'll most likely have to go very slow to get each pitch even remotely in tune, so that one pass through the first A section might take 2 ro3 minutes at first.... you can use solfege or just sing the notes, just make sure each note is in tune, that you're really going slow and hearing the intervals exactly over the drone, not just singing the rhythms and pitches that vaguely resemble the tune. While you're singing you visualize the appropriate fingering on your instrument. It is an easy thing to practice as long as you go slowly. You can hold note for as long as you'd like until it's comfortable and centered. This is basically what I do only improvising more or less.

I have drone machine which I really like, it's an electronic tompura or tambura that you can order from the Ali Akbar Kahn website. It plays drones in all keys. I do the singing at home and when I drive, and if I'm working on a new tune, I sing that over the drone. If I practice anything more, it's on the horn, long tones, tunes, and playing short intervallic ideas through keys while displacing the rhythms.


Question from Pere Soto: How is the LA jazz scene as far as the jazz music/composing energy?


MO: There are a lot of great composers and players in L.A. I believe it to be a great music town, although very spread out and decentralized. Chicago, New York and San Francisco are smaller; more localized, which puts all the musicians in a closer vicinity to one another, which I think, facilitates more comradery and collaboration. I feel fairly inspired to write and practice here, I just have to remember to get out and hear all the great players.


Pere Soto: Do you think that young people in LA are becoming more interested or less interested in Jazz music?


MO: There are a lot of young jazz musicians in LA... there are several strong schools producing many fine musicians every year, USC, UCLA, Cal State Northridge, Cal Arts, Cal State Long Beach to name a few. Many of these young players stay local, some move to New York and elsewhere. I think in general jazz is becoming more a music for musicians and not for the general public. Popular music, although it is sophisticated sonically and texturally, seems to have become harmonically simpler. The pop music written in the 30's and 40's is harmonically far more complex than the pop music of today and so is a bit more substantive to improvise over or through. Even the harmonies and melodies found on Beatles or Beach Boys albums are far more complicated than modern pop. As a result, I don't think jazz will become popular in the mainstream until music production for profit comes to an end, and culture is allowed to blossom freely without the profit motive influencing what the public hears.


Pere Soto: How do you think the Jazz musicians in LA feel about being so far from what's happening on the NYC Jazz scene? Is the LA Jazz scene vital enough to keep you from wishing that you were in big cities like New York or Chicago?


MO: I'm not sure how others feel about it. I miss the New York music community. The writing and improvising there is really inspiring. I like LA for other reasons, the pace of life, the weather, and the standard of living. I don't really lack personal motivation so I don't need to be in NYC to keep working on my craft, I was in NYC for 7 years, which isn't very long but I got a little taste of the city and the great musicians that live there. However, I'll probably go back one day.


Question from Adam Beach: To my ears, your playing presents a cross between Warne Marsh and Dewey Redman... (and I really dig it!) bringing what many consider to be 2 totally distinct forms of jazz into one. In one tune on your website I heard you go from the softest "inside" style of the former to the most energetic "outside" style of the latter. How do more Marsh oriented players and listeners react to that? How do more Albert Ayler oriented players and listeners react when you shift into Paul Desmond gear?


MO: I'm flattered to be mentioned in the same sentence as Warne and Dewey, they are two of my favorite players. I enjoy players who move me both emotionally and intellectually. I think Wayne Shorter is quite good at doing that.

When I listen to those plugged nickel recordings I hear him playing with lots of emotion and lots of interesting rhythmic, harmonic and melodic material. I strive play in a way that allows me to express the whole gambit of emotions I'm feeling although sometimes I become stifled or self-conscious. If I get frustrated by my playing or by busy comping I usually allow myself to respond honestly to that. I think music is an emotional art and at this point in history. It's ok to express your happiness, sadness or anger when improvising. All of that has become the tradition of the music and makes it more liberating and cathartic to improvise.


Adam Beach: I was taught that working on long tones strain and tighten your embouchure making you play sharp and your playing more strenuous, your sound more stuffy, etc. -- that you need to strive for the most relaxed and natural embouchure as you can (if that isn't a double bind!!) and long tones take you in the opposite direction. You obviously don't agree, and you have a phenomenal tenor sound, in my opinion. What's your philosophy on long tones?


MO: I actually do agree that long tones can potentially tighten your embouchure and restrict the vibration of the reed and your sound, and that a "loose as possible" embouchure is ideal for a full, rich, vibrant sound. I believe that you can do long tones in a way that can help open and loosen the embouchure. Kind of like yoga, you can use yoga to both strengthen and loosen the muscles. I like to use a method I adapted from George Garzone; you hold a note, say middle B and lip is down as flat as possible. You hold the note like that, maybe a minor third or so below the actual fingered note. After a few hours of this, go back to playing regularly, the results are amazing even after only a few hours. Another variation I use is while playing over a drone, I push the mouthpiece in as far as I can, and I lip the note down by ear, until it's in tune with the drone. This is good for very slow scales, at the gig, you put the mouthpiece back where it was and just play. I really like this practice for sound production.


Adam Beach: "I've always considered improvisation to be a type of art, not so much a form of entertainment. I feel the artist should (to whatever extent he or she can financially afford) peruse the art, not with the intent of entertaining the general public, but rather contributing to the cultural advance of music." -- could you elaborate on this?


MO: I recognize that quote from our last interview. I still agree with what I said there. What I was trying to get at, although I was perhaps a bit vague, was the idea of studying the great musicians of the past, all of the ones that inspire you and than trying to build further on their work in your own humble way, in hopes of flushing out and accentuating the specific aspects of musical culture that you value and believe in. If for instance you find the music Alban Berg, and Messiaen compelling and captivating, you may begin to study their music and allow their influence to take hold of you. If you enjoy the music of Phil Ochs or Woody Guthrie, you can inculcate a bit of their music or message into your musical message. So I believe that music is an art and a language and that the conversation is between the artist and the history itself, not so much the individuals within it, and not so much for purpose of entertainment, although some will be entertained along the way.


Adam Beach: You said you read Alan Watts. Are you aware of his "life as music" metaphysic? Does this weigh in on what your saying?


MO: I've read a lot of Alan Watts and have listed to his lectures or "stand up", having such a great sense of humor, as it were. I've always enjoyed Alan Watts, for on thing, he presents his ideas, or his knowledge about "emptiness" and eastern thought in general, without making grandiose claims or conclusions from them. In this way he stays close to eastern concepts like those found in Zen Buddhism, which is supposed to be beyond thought and description and therefore beyond or before conclusions and judgments.

Simply put, I think mediation helps in balancing and centering the individual that has become unbalanced due to living within an unbalanced competitive class based society. I believe that if class society could be overthrown, and a society that is based on true material equality could take it's place, mental states like those cultivated through meditation would be common place, not due to personal discipline but rather through the more harmonious structure of society. It seems that the greatest influence on the individual is not the individual him/herself but rather the social/political structure he/she finds himself within. It's like a fish swimming in polluted water, you can give him antibiotics and medicines to keep him alive, but changing the water produces the best results.


Adam Beach: I read your "Red Liner Notes" and noticed your link to "World Socialist Web Site" which indicates to me your politics (which I more-or-less share). What do you believe is a musician's, or an artist's, social role in changing the world for the better? How do you see music and art contributing to change?


MO: I think we all have a responsibility to fight for social change, whether musicians, artists or in another walk of life. I think the world must be won over by regular working people on the planet and run in a planned, organized and fiercely egalitarian way that puts everyone materialistically in the same class. Far from thinking this is idealistic, I think its only way a social system can work in the long run, for both the human race and the planet. The different forms of class-based society have always failed the majority of humans as well as trashing the environment. I believe what's idealistic today, is to believe that 5 to 10% of the humans on the planet can own all of the productive forces globally and own 90% of the wealth and that somehow this can lead to global peace... that's idealistic. I think It's more rational to believe that material equality (for all people) is a necessary precondition for peace both global/social and personal. I think there will be no real peace until we all can live equally; equality is the basis of peace. I believe that only then, will we begin to see, the true potential of human culture, music, art and the like.

mattotto.net
lajazzcollective.com

The Alan Watts Podcast on iTunes

Alan Watts Podcast Website

Marx - Engles internet archive, many books written by Marx, Engles, Lenin, Trotsky...free.World

Socialist Web Site, covering current events.Red Theory Collective, present day marxists fighting for

social transformation.

Links to recent sound clips of CDs that Matt Otto has recorded recently:

Pastorian Fantasie from Brian Swartz Gnu Sextet Album
Lennie's Pennies from Josh Welchez Album Lost and Found
Family Matter from 3ish Album Baobab
Enigma from Matt Otto album La Commune

Garzone sings 'The Chooch'

This is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time......

Honest band leader

Scribd- World's largest document sharing network

I just ran across a web site that blew my mind called Scribd. It's the world's largest document sharing network and it's free to register. You can search and download millions of PDF documents that other people have uploaded. There are documents on every topic you can imagine and I found a ton of interesting music docs.

This is what the Internet was really supposed to be about- the world's libraries at your fingertips. Scribd is simply incredible, I wish I had known about this before now.

Scribd.com

Further conversations with Matt Otto

DCV: You seem to have had a wide range influences over the years, some that I hear are Ornette, Trane, Garzone, Getz, Warne Marsh, and Sonny Rollins. How have you thought about the effect these players have had on your playing? I mean have you consciously tried to integrate their styles into your own music, or do you strive not to sound too much like them? Do you see what I'm getting at?

In my own case I've gone through phases of trying to sound like a particular player and phases when I've fought against sounding like a particularly strong influence of mine. Some teachers tell their students to absorb everything they can about a great player and then focus on a different one. I feel a bit mixed about this way of learning. How do balance that with striving to be original?


MO: I'm really into all the players you mentioned and have transcribed and played solos and lines from all of them. When I was younger I transcribed Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Trane, Dexter, Rollins, Stitt, Ammons, Bird, Desmond, Lester, Chet, Clifford Brown and others. Usually I would only transcribe the parts of the solos that I really connected with, or found myself humming along too... just a few phrases or lines. I did learn a few entire solos from Bird, Dexter, Hank Mobley and Paul Desmond but again, mostly just lines and phrases.

Sometimes when you spend a lot of time with friends or musicians that have a certain way of talking or diction you may find that you begin to talk a bit like them, maybe only subtly. This is similar to how I view influences in Jazz. For example, you may listen to Lester Young a lot and as a result start playing and phrasing a bit like him. Some times you may start deliberately using one of his ideas that you've taken the liberty to transcribe, sometimes you may start hearing and using his vibrato or a rhythm he plays a lot.

Depending on your practice approach, and how you learn in general, the way you are influenced by a given player will be different. I believe transcribing and memorizing material yields a slightly different result from singing along with solos or just listening intently. The differences may be subtle or profound depending on how well you can hear the material and than play what you hear.

Most of my playing in my early years was pretty unstructured and unfocused. I don't consider myself a gifted musician, and my ears developed really late, and I am still developing them now. Like many of us, I would learn the first part of a solo and be really inspired and than just improvise after that for a few hours.

Doug Yates had a big influence on me, and used to tell me to improvise within one harmony for a long time. I used to play one altered scale over a pedal or drone for hours, and slowly work that through the keys. I guess I was mostly playing harmonically, and not melodically at that point. It wasn't till much later that I really started hearing specific melodic ideas within a given harmony, and that process is still continuing today.

When I got a little older, in my 20's, I started to cycle ideas through keys in a more mainstream sort of way. This began the long journey of creating and refining a sort of musical vocabulary which is part of what I still practice now, 20 years later. Today, I really get a lot out of taking a small idea and singing it over a drone than moving it slowly through all the keys while I think of the fingerings. Originally I began this type of practice to stay of my hands, due to carpal tunnel syndrome, now I think it's become the best way to develop my ear and musicality.


DCV: Tell me about the LA Jazz collective. How did it start and what's your involvement been in it?

MO: I started the collective with Gary Fukushima, a great piano player and friend whom I met at Cal Arts while doing my masters. We loosely modeled our collective after the Brooklyn Jazz Underground and just changed the structure a bit to try and suit the LA area. We have 13 band leaders/composers as core members (who take on the most of the financial and bureaucratic responsibilities) and an open general membership that anyone can apply for.

We're hoping to contribute to the LA jazz scene in a positive way, one way or another, supporting musicians who write original material and bringing new music to the community.

As of now, we have about 25 members that have joined. We've put out a compilation CD and have had two small jazz festivals and started a Record Label (Jazz Collective Records). We are organizing our next 3-day Jazz Festival in November as well as having just sponsored the Angel City Festival on September 1st, which was a great success. For more information visit: Lajazzcollective.com


DCV: What do you tell your students when they ask about going into music as a career? Say you had a kid that wanted to be a Jazz musician, what you tell him?


MO: I always tell my students to keep there overhead low if they want to be an artist. I think by lessening economic compulsion (which is always there), you can go along way towards freeing up the mental and emotional space needed to stay with your craft for the long haul. I encourage students to take the plunge, because I don't know of any "career" that is as gratifying as playing music. I also enjoy teaching, so without that, I have to move to Berlin. Recently I've been fortunate enough to teach a 25-piece saxophone choir for the Arts Center of Los Angeles.

I've written some simple music for them and have been rehearsing for a performance at the Grand Avenue Festival. I recorded the pieces so the ensemble could hear them. Here are two of the pieces in truncated form:

Cellar Door
Risks on Gravity

It's this sort of teaching as well as teaching privately that I find inspiring and challenging. I enjoy it nearly as much as playing.


DCV: Do you have suggestions for ways to focus and calm the mind when preparing to play?


MO: I think that preparation promotes calmness. When I'm on my way to a gig where I'll be calling all the tunes, playing old standards that I've know for a while, I'm usually able to remain fairly calm because I know that at this moment I'm as prepared as I can be. It seems the less prepared I am, the less familiar with the material, the more nervous I can potentially become. Paul Bley, whom I heard isn't a big fan of rehearsals, might disagree, but it seems the more I've practiced the material, the better I'm able to focus on things that matter to me like listening and staying relaxed emotionally and physically. Generally speaking, meditation is good for focus and calm. Although I'm not of the belief that it can change the world or right social wrongs, it's definitely a good way to calm and focus your mind and body in spite of the chaos and competition in the world.

I've been sitting Zazen nearly every day since I was about 18 years old, my father got me started when he was fighting cancer, he's fine now, and I still enjoy sitting every day.


DCV: I hear that you recently sold your SBA and switched to a Yamaha, you also stopped playing a vintage Link right? Why the big change in your setup?


MO: Economic compulsion lead me to sell my SBA which I wasn't playing at all and couldn't justify keeping around on a shoe string budget. I still have my Mark VI, which is a great playing horn. I got the Yamaha an inexpensive back up to the Mark VI and I've really enjoyed playing on it. It's taken me about four months to get a workable sound out of it, but I'm really starting to like it. I had to switch up everything to get my sound out of it; from Rico's to Vandorens, Selmer S80 H to Jazz Cafe Espresso mouthpiece (which is a copy of a Selmer soloist), and Mark VI to Yamaha Custom Z with G3 neck. I've never been a gear guy, but I'm glad I've found something that isn't as expensive, as my Mark VI.


DCV: I was talking to Doug Yates last week and we started talking about reeds. He was saying that sometimes it's almost not even worth it to play a low paying gig because of all the bad reeds you have to go through just to find a reeds that plays. I'm having a terrible time with cane lately. On top of that the reeds that I play just went up in price by 30%!

How about you, what are you playing on? Do you work on them? How many do you go through?


MO: It's good to hear that even great players like you and Doug are having reed problems; it keeps me from becoming to self-deprecating.

I've been playing on Vandoren Blue Box 3's. I buy about 4-5 boxes per month and keep them in water and hydrogen peroxide or isopropyl alcohol. I think Dave Liebman said, "Sound dictates ideas", or something to that effect. I tend to agree with that basic idea. When I'm happy with the tone I'm getting I enjoy playing, and when I'm enjoying playing, I seem to have more emotional freedom and an easier time listening, the ideas seem to come back to back.

A bad reed makes it really hard for me to get a good sound and to keep my mind quiet and focused on listening. I'm not sure how it is for other people, but it's hard for me to stay in an active listening state continually while playing, but it's a lot easier when my sound is pleasing and draws my attention and focus in.

I have a few tricks I may have mentioned before. One is, I practice on Vandoren 2.5s and perform on 3s. This seems to keep my embouchure loose and give me a little extra resistance on the gig. Overall, I seem to get a better sound and can use more of the reeds this way. I tend to be happier with my sound in general by doing this, sometimes the thin soft reed sound I live with in the practice room makes me enjoy almost any #3 sound that I get on the gig.

The second thing I do is to keep cotton balls in my sax case. If I have a bad reed and have to play in public, I put a little cotton in my ears, just a little, and it really helps me deal with the sound being "less than" I'd like it to be, it's like having an EQ where I can roll off the highs. There seems to be some psychological element to sound or tone. The less I play my horn the more I miss it and enjoy any kind of sound I get from it. The more I play it, the more fussy and neurotic I get about it.

One way to look at it is that there are basically two aspects to tone, one is the actual sound and one is your relationship to the sound. If you’re really inspired, playing with friends and feeling comfortable and confident, then sometimes a bad reed won't be an issue. I used to go through more reeds, but since my daily routine involves more singing and visualizing then playing, I'm generally more accepting of my sound fluctuations, because I'm just happy to be playing and hearing the horn instead of my admittedly average voice.


DCV:Do you sometimes abandon your stance as a high artist in order to keep the crowd happy and the drinks flowing? Does being a minstrel ever win out over being an artist?


MO: I'm don't think I'm much of an entertainer, and although I'm working on my artistry. I doubt I'll realistically contribute enough in my life to qualify for the high artist category. I mostly feel uncomfortable and awkward while on the bandstand especially when I'm not playing.

I really enjoy improvising, writing music, and playing with people, I'm just not comfortable entertaining. When I was younger, I played in an "Acid Jazz" group and did a lot of gigs in Japan at dance clubs, and at that point I was more extroverted and would dance a bit on stage; the thought of doing that now makes me tense.


DCV:How do you deal with playing music for an unresponsive and unappreciative audience? Does it change how you approach your music?


MA: It's always a shock when you're playing and you realize few people are listening, or that a sudden applause was for something unrelated to the music. For me, it's both difficult and humbling. On one hand it's a testament to how low the musical training is in the general public. On the other, it shows just how addicted we are to being admired, respected and listened to.


DCV: You studied with Garzone for quite a long time. What attracted you to his playing? What sorts of things did he stress in your lessons? What about his whole triadic concept, how did that change your playing?


MA: George is in my opinion, one of the greatest living improvisers. He always stressed improvising and exploring your own musical language. He never once had me working on anything structured or We always played free and traded or played together during the lesson. Very rarely we'd improvise over a tune or form. In the 80's, when I studied with George at Berklee, I wrote down some of the lesson material. George used to say, "play in a circle" or "play a tree", or "play red". It was as if he was activator trying to keep me in conceptual and creative state of mind for as long as possible, knowing that eventually, I would integrate my intellect with my ear. Later he would tell me, "slow down just a little.", or "try a half size softer reed".

Anyone who has studied with him knows that he writes out these long intervallic sequences off the top of his head that are just note heads with no stems or rhythms. He gives you very little information about the lines. He just tells you to check them out. So you play through them in all the ways you can, and it's like they're little glimpses into the Garzone creative mind...they lead you towards improvising and inventing or discovering your own material.

Garzone’s triadic approach was, I believe, a way for George to help students get to free playing in a structured way. Some players/students need a more defined structure to learn to play free, and I think the triadic approach was Garzone's answer to that dilemma. The basic concept of the triadic approach is simple, you link triads of any quality together while ascending or descending in half steps, or any other root motion. The resulting lines are interesting to the ear and being based on triads, they have quite a bit of melodic and structural integrity.

After working with the triads for a while George has students add chromatic passing tones and eventually the whole structure falls away, leaving just and atonal cloud of sorts, which is the beginnings of some original shapes and vocabulary. In my opinion, Garzone is one of the great forward thinking and progressive improvisers and teachers.


DCV: Do you spend a lot of time each day hustling gigs or do you wait for the phone to ring? Any suggestions?


MA: I go through phases, since we formed the LA Jazz Collective; I've spent a lot of time working with those guys to set up opportunities to play, which is easier to do with a collective as it turns out. I do a lot of writing and playing and probably 2 or 3 sessions a week with friends and mostly let the phone ring, not that I'd ever recommend that as a career approach. Old habits die hard, and I really like the saxophone and music, but really dislike business, the free market, and competition.


I think the best way to work as an artist is to hang out and really listen to people play. It seems that there is a correlation between hanging out and working, the more you support the scene the more it supports you, assuming you can play a bit.


DCV: Did you know that Berklee costs about as much as Harvard? How can anyone justify that kind of expensive education for such a low paying career?


MO: I think going to school for jazz is becoming a questionable choice. Hal Galper once said to me, "save the tuition and use the money to study privately with your heroes for 50 years!"... He's right in a way, the cost of school and the job market that awaits the graduate are at odds. It might be wise to move overseas to become educated.


DCV: Do you think your post grad music education has been worth the trouble?


MO: Well, I only have a master's degree, which is the new BA. It seems that unless you have name recognition, you really need a Doctorate to compete for jobs at the University level. If you're well known you may not need even a masters. A good friend of mine just got a University position teaching jazz with a BA in economics, but he's fairly well known an plays and writes at a high level.


DCV: Tell me about your new CD project. Do you produce it yourself? Did you find a record label or are you releasing it yourself?


MO: The CD project I've done with Andy Ehling is really something I'm happy with. Andy and I have played together since the early 1980's and this is our first album. I had offered to write some material for the recording and he sent me a list of standard changes he liked to play on. So I wrote 4 contrafacts for the album plus a few simple originals. Andy also brought in a few ideas that we loosely played over Out of Nowhere and Old Milestones.

We spent a lot of time before the recording talking about and working on the material, I even worked out some ideas for parts of my solos, which I like to do if and when I have the time. The album is pretty simple, easy tunes, lots of blowing. I think of the music as a type of jazz folk music, it's pretty lyrical and simple.

Andy is a great improviser, he studied with Garzone too, he has a very melodic approach and an interesting sound. He rarely uses any vibrato. He plays a few amazing atonal lines on the album, which I believe came from his studies with Garzone. We lived together at Berklee in the late 80's and in the early 90's both lived in a Zen Dojo in Chiba, Japan. I think Andy is one of those rare quiet type players that isn't really up for the fierce competition that has become common is jazz today. In the future I hope he'll be considered innovative.

Returning CD sampler
mattotto.net
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The second half of this interview is coming soon!

Trane interviews

1963 Trane interview

1966 Tokyo Trane interview

Stockholm interview

Paul Desmond interviews Bird

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Ralph Towner Interview

Interview with Ralph Towner

Warne Marsh interview

Warne was a very, very bad man.

Warne Marsh interview 1
Warne Marsh interview 2
Warne Marsh interview 3

BopLand- automated BeBop licks!

An automated online Be-Bop lick search engine?

What is this world coming to?!

Is this some sort of Be-Bop Star Trek lucid dream that I'm having?

Have I finally flipped my wig?!?!

Hell no, this is the only true cool reality and the Bop future is happening right Fu&%$#g now! Kick A$$!!

Bop Land.org

Sonny's battle with Heroin

Faithful reader James Seaberry sent me a link to this great article in the Chicago reader about Sonny Rollins' battle with heroin.

In his six-decade career, legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins has claimed many a triumph. But his greatest may have come during a quiet period in Chicago.- By Neil Tesser (Chicago Reader)

A decade ago, on September 9, 1998, the YMCA building at 3763 S. Wabash became an official Chicago landmark. Completed in 1913, it gained an annex in 1945, and today it remains a hub of neighborhood activity. Stately on its quiet and well-kept Bronzeville block, it bears a plaque describing it as “an important center of community life” that offered housing and job training for “new arrivals from the South during the ‘Great Migration’ of African-Americans in the first decades of the 20th century.” In a perfect world, there would be a second plaque below it: “Sonny Rollins slept here.”

Another such plaque might adorn the considerably less well-kept Central Arms Hotel at 520 E. 47th, just east of Vincennes. Still another could mark an empty lot on the 300 block of East Garfield, where the Rhumboogie Club once stood, but it wouldn’t say anything about sleeping: Rollins played at the Rhumboogie with the man who would become Sun Ra, and nobody slept with Sun Ra around.

In 1955 Rollins was already a veteran of studio groups led by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and he would soon be acclaimed as the outstanding tenor saxophone voice of his generation. But for most of that year he lived in obscurity on Chicago’s south side, working menial jobs and barely gigging.

He still considers Chicago his second home, in part because the casual congeniality of the Bronzeville scene made such a deep impression on him. He also met his wife, Lucille, in Chicago; they got married in ’65 and stayed that way till she died in 2004. And it was here that Rollins joined the band led by Clifford Brown and Max Roach, one of the greatest jazz quintets of the 50s; when they passed through in late ’55, he left with them, returning to his native New York City. But the most important thing Sonny Rollins did in Chicago in 1955 was to reclaim his life from addiction.

Rollins, who’s a few days from his 78th birthday and makes his home in a small town in upstate New York, is often called the greatest living saxophonist in jazz. He opens this year’s Jazz Fest in spectacular style on Thursday, with a free concert in Millennium Park. In the 50s, like many of his peers, he extended and expanded upon the innovations of Charlie Parker, but it was Rollins who most clearly showed how bebop, a product of the 40s,

could respond to a new decade without losing its original soul. Like James Dean, his music spoke of cool rebellion; like Mort Sahl, it did so with wry commentary and wit. In the late 50s, working with such towering figures as Monk, Roach, and Coltrane, Rollins emerged as perhaps the genre’s most innovative structuralist.

But then he withdrew. In 1959, at home in New York City, he took a couple years off to woodshed and rethink his music. He was getting very famous very quickly, he says, and felt he needed to brush upon certain aspects of his craft. Though he returned to great fanfare in 1962, by ’66 he was chafing at the demands of the music business and dropped out again. Eager to study Eastern religion, he traveled to Japan and then India, where he lived in a monastery until reentering the public arena in ’72 with Sonny Rollins’ Next Album.

Since then he’s released nearly two dozen records; in 2006 he started his own label, Doxy, to put out his latest, Sonny, Please. In the past decade he’s won two Grammys, and last year the Royal Swedish Academy of Music awarded him the Polar Music Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of music.

For all that, his greatest triumph may have come when he left the narcotics hospital at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, and came to Chicago in the first weeks of 1955. “I’m not proud of many things in my life,” he says, “but I’m proud of that—of defeating the dragon.” The dragon, of course, was heroin; like many jazzmen of the 40s and 50s, Rollins had followed Charlie Parker’s example in more than music. Chicago was where Rollins proved—to his friends, to the authorities, but mostly to himself—that he could stay clean.

The feds had been experimenting since the 30s with treating addiction as a medical problem instead of simple villainy; by the 50s, Rollins says, the program in Lexington had become famous among musicians. “It was a big departure from the usual way drug addicts were treated at that time,” he says. “Different from the penitentiary. It was sort of like the Betty Ford clinic, a real hospital-like atmosphere.” He speaks in a sort of northern drawl, and its timbre comes as a shock if you’ve only heard his deep, dry tenor tone—his voice is thick and relatively high-pitched, with a touch of the “Fat Albert” character that Bill Cosby (a big Rollins fan) used to do in his routines. “I think the cure took four and a half months,” he continues. “You could leave before then, but most of the people wanted to get off drugs and stayed the whole time.”

Determined to make the cure stick, Rollins left Lexington and went not to his New York stomping grounds but directly to Chicago, which had appealed to him on previous visits. In fact he’d been here just before entering Lexington. “I was ‘carrying the stick,’” he says. “You know what that means? It means you’re homeless, like a hobo; I was sleeping in parked cars during the winter and all this stuff. I was doing very nefarious things.” But despite all that, Rollins says, “I loved Chicago. It was so earthy. There were a lot of musicians, a lot of music going on—24-hour jam-session clubs, all this kind of thing. I found a home there.”

Chicago, and Bronzeville in particular, had much to offer an African-American artist in the 50s, but what Rollins liked best was that it wasn’t New York. He sums up the reason with a story: “There was a place on 63rd and Cottage Grove, the Circle Inn, where you could just look in through the window and see the proceedings. One morning when it was just getting light, I walked by and Lester Young”—the influential saxist whose style presaged the cool-jazz school—“was on the bandstand, with a rhythm section, just jamming.

“You see, New York was more ‘sophisticated’; that was the difference. To have a club be open 24 hours, where you could look in and see people playing, that was not sophisticated enough for New York. But I gravitated toward that. It was so homey—it was terrific. And I wasn’t really ready to go back to New York. I had left a trail of destruction behind me there, in my personal relationships, in stealing—addict behavior. So I wanted to be clean from drugs and return victorious. I was clean when I left Lexington, but I had to sort of work my way back into society.”During his time here Rollins stayed first at the Central Arms, then for a spell with a fellow Lexington alum who lived at 69th and Marquette, trumpeter Robert Gay, nicknamed Little Diz—the brother of gospel star Geraldine Gay. Eventually the YMCA on South Wabash became his home and practice space. To pay the rent he took a series of blue-collar jobs. On the north side, most likely Ohio Street, he says, “I worked as a custodian at a typewriter repair shop. They had, you know, ten or fifteen people working there—it was more of a little factory than a repair shop. I don’t think they knew I was a musician. I worked at another place, on Madison west of Halsted, that was a restaurant-supply house. I worked on the trucks, delivering this stuff to Hammond, all over. And at that place I did get close enough to people to tell them I was a musician; in fact, when I came to Chicago to play some years later, a guy who had worked there came by to see me.”

Toward midsummer, Rollins says, “I finally thought, ‘I’m strong enough to go into the Bee Hive.’ And that’s where another vignette of my life was enacted.” No club’s name sparks more memories among Chicago musicians of the era than that of the Bee Hive. Located at Harper and 55th in Hyde Park, it was open from 1948 to ’56 and hosted not just locals—from traditionalists like Miff Mole to modernists like Ira Sullivan—but visiting stars like Charlie Parker, who played his last Chicago engagement there in February ’55.

“When I got there, I saw a lot of old friends, a lot of the guys: ‘Hey Sonny, let’s go get high,’” Rollins says. “I had to be strong enough to withstand that. And that’s where I faced my Goliath. It was hard, man, because some of these guys knew I was not that far from using drugs. It was one of these

biblical-like temptations. I resisted—my palms got sweaty and everything, but I resisted. I went back to my custodial job, but I thought, ‘I gotta get back into music.’ It was very difficult, because to tell the truth, I just escaped that first time; I just was able to resist all my friends offering these free drugs. But I thought, ‘I’m a musician and I have to be strong enough to be around drugs,’ because that was the scene.”

Rollins made his second trip to the Bee Hive in early September, when Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were headlining—a risky move because addiction, according to pianist Horace Silver, was “prevalent” in the band. “Bassist Doug Watkins and I were the only ones that didn’t have a drug habit,” Silver writes in his autobiography.

“I just remember sitting in the car with Horace, and then I went inside to pal around with Art and everybody, and I was able to withstand the temptation again,” says Rollins. “And eventually, I was able to go back and be less tempted each time I went.”

Confident he could stay clean, Rollins started gigging again, accumulating memories of people and places that are still strong today. He remembers players who are faint ghosts to most of us, like tenor men Linwood Brown and Alec Johnson, as well as better-known figures like Harold Ousley and John Gilmore, who would become a superstar soloist in Sun Ra’s Arkestra—Rollins figures he met Gilmore when they both played with Ra at the Rhumboogie, back when the soon-to-be-cosmic keyboardist was still known as Sonny Blount. He talks about pianist Norman Simmons and bassist Victor Sproles, both of whom would soon establish themselves in New York. “Eddie Harris and I used to drive out to the Selmer factory in Indiana,” Rollins says, “and bug those guys about what they should be doing on the horns.”

In November 1955, the group led by veteran bebop drummer Max Roach and spectacular young trumpeter Clifford Brown—a band that rivaled the Jazz Messengers as the leading hard-bop quintet of the day—came to the Bee Hive. But once they arrived in Chicago, the quintet’s tenor player, Harold Land, continued on to Los Angeles to deal with a family emergency. Someone remembered that Rollins was in town; he sat in with the band and clicked immediately. Roach offered to hire him before the band headed back to New York. “I was pretty close to going back anyway,” Rollins says. “I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. I could have gone back to New York on my own, but it was great playing with Max and Clifford, and that was a great opportunity. So I thought, ‘Why not?’”

The next time Rollins came to Chicago, in the summer of 1956, it was as a member of the Brown-Roach quintet. Clifford Brown and the band’s pianist, Richie Powell, were driving in from Philadelphia with Powell’s wife, Nancy, but they never made it; Rollins, Roach, and bassist George Morrow had already arrived here when they learned that the car carrying the others had gone over an embankment in the rain, killing all three. Rollins briefly stayed on in Roach’s band, then left to lead his own groups.

In short order, the clubs Rollins had frequented in Chicago—the Rhumboogie, the Bee Hive, McKee’s Disc Jockey Lounge at 63rd and Cottage Grove—all disappeared. Over the years many of the musicians he’d known here moved away: Sun Ra to Philadelphia, Ira Sullivan to Miami, Eddie Harris to Los Angeles. Most of his friends from back then have died. Contemporaries like Joe Segal, proprietor of the venerable Jazz Showcase, remember that Rollins spent time in Chicago in the 50s, but unless they lived in Bronzeville their paths didn’t cross.

Of all the people, places, and things from that era that have gone, though, one inspires no mourning. In 1955, Sonny Rollins buried his addiction to heroin on the south side of Chicago, once and for all.

Sonny Rollins' Home Page

Yusef Lateef- Quest for the Exotic

We can sometimes forget that there are many other scales we can use for improvisation other than the usual scales of Western diatonic harmony. There are exotic scales from other cultures that have unique and distinctive sounds that can be applied to Jazz improvisation with great results. Many of these exotic scales use different tuning systems, but they can be shoe horned into our equal temperament system while still retaining most of their distinctive qualities.

Yusef Lateef was one of the first Jazz musicians to incorporate exotic scales and modes into the Jazz idiom, years before Trane became interested in them. Other notable Jazz musicians later utilized exotic tonalities in their own ways, like Charlie Mariano and John McLaughin. The exploration by Jazz musicians of the musical traditions of India, Arabia, Indonesia, Africa, Asia and even ancient Greece has yielded many interesting musical discoveries. These exotic musical gems have broadened the harmonic horizons of the Jazz tradition.

I would guess that Yusef Lateef probably became interested with Arabic and Pakistani music as a result of his involvement and subsequent conversion to Islam. During the 1940's a Pakistani by the name of Kahil Ahmed Nasir was responsible for introducing many New York City Jazz musicians the Islamic teachings of the Ahmadiyya movement. Many of these musicians were more interested in the social aspects of Islam rather than the spiritual teachings. Some scholars actually trace the roots of the Blues back to Muslim West African slaves who adapted the call to prayer to their new environment. Some of these musicians who initially converted (or reverted as Muslims call it) did not remain strict followers of the faith, but many did. In his autobiography Dizzy talks about the Muslim Jazz movement:

"Rudy Powell, from Edgar Hayes's band, became one of the first jazz musicians I knew to accept Islam; he became an Ahmidyah Muslim. Other musicians followed, it seemed to me, for social rather religious reasons, if you can separate the two.

"Man, if you join the Muslim faith, you ain't colored no more, you'll be white," they'd say, "You get a new name and you don't have to be a nigger no more." So everybody started joining because they considered it a big advantage not to be black during the time of segregation. I thought of joining, but it occurred to me that a lot of them spooks were simply trying to be anything other than a spook at that time. They had no idea of black consciousness; all they were trying to do was escape the stigma of being "colored." When these cats found out that Idrees Sulieman, who joined the Muslim faith about that time, could go into these white restaurants and bring out sandwiches to the other guys because he wasn't colored, and he looked like the inside of the chimney, they started enrolling in droves.

Musicians started having it printed on their police cards where it said "race," "W" for white. Kenny Clarke had one and he showed it to me. He said, "See, nigger, I ain't no spook; I'm white, 'W.'" He changed his name to Arabic, Liaquat Ali Salaam. Another cat who had been my roommate at Laurinburg, Loiver Mesheux, got involved in an altercation about race down in Delaware. He went into this restaurant, and they said they didn't serve colored in there. So he said, "I don't blame you. But I don't have to go under the rules of colored because my name is Mustafa Dalil."

Didn't ask him no more questions. "How do you do?" the guy said.

When I first applied for my police card, I knew what the guys were doing, but not being a Muslim. I wouldn't allow the police to type anything in that spot under race. I wouldn't reply to the race question on the application black. When the cop started to type something in there, I asked him "What are you gonna put down there, C for me?"
"You're colored, ain't you?"

"Colored? No."

"Well, what are you, white?"

"No, don't put nothing on there," I said. "Just give me the card." They left it open. I wouldn't let them type me in W for white nor C for colored; just made them leave it blank. WC is a toilet in Europe.

As time went on, I kept considering converting to Islam but mostly because of the social reasons. I didn't know very much about the religion, but I could dig the idea that Muhammad was a prophet. I believed that and there were very few Christians who believed that Muhammad had the word of God with him. The idea of polygamous marriage in Islam, I didn't care for too much. In our society, a man can only take care of one woman. If he does a good job of that, he'll be doing well. Polygamy had its place in the society for which it was intended, as a social custom, but social orders change and each age develops its own mores. Polygamy was acceptable during one part of our development, but most women wouldn't accept that today. People worry about all the women with no husbands, and I don't have any answer for that. Whatever happens, the question should be resolved legitimately and in the way necessary for the advancement of society.

The movement among jazz musicians toward Islam created quite a stir, especially with the surge of the Zionist movement for creation and establishment of the State of Israel. A lot of friction arose between Jews and Muslims, which took the form of a semi-boycott in New York of jazz musicians with Muslim names. Maybe a Jewish guy, in a booking agency that Muslim musicians worked from, would throw work another way instead of throwing to the Muslim. Also, many of the agents couldn't pull the same tricks on Muslims that they pulled on the rest of us. The Muslims received knowledge about themselves that we didn't have and that we had no access to; so therefore they tended to act differently toward the people running the entertainment business. Much of the entertainment business was run by Jews. Generally, the Muslims fared well in spite of that, because though we had some who were Muslim in name only, others really had knowledge and were taking care of business.

Near the end of the forties, the newspapers really got worried about whether I'd convert to Islam. In 1948 Life magazine, published a big picture story, supposedly about the music. They conned me into allowing them to photograph me down on my knees, arms outstretched, supposedly bowing to Mecca. It turned out to be a trick bag. It's of the few things in my whole career I'm ashamed of, because I wasn't a Muslim. They tricked me into committing a sacrilege. The newspapers figured that if the "king of bebop" converted, thousands of beboppers would follow suit, and reporters questioned me about whether I planned to quit and forsake Christianity. But that lesson from Life taught me to leave them hanging. I told them that on my trips through the South, the members of my band were denied the right of worshipping in churches of their own faith because colored folks couldn't pray with white folks down there. "Don't say I'm forsaking Christianity," I said, "because Christianity is forsaking me - or better, people who claim to be Christian just ain't. It says in the Bible to love they brother, but people don't practice what the Bible preaches. In Islam, there is no color line. Everybody is treated like equals."

With one reporter, since I didn't know much about the Muslim faith, I called on our saxophonist, formerly named Bill Evans, who'd recently accepted Islam to give this reporter some accurate information.

"What's your new name?" I asked him.

"Yusef Abdul Lateef," he replied. Yusef Lateef told us how a Muslim missionary, Kahil Ahmed Nasir, had converted many modern jazz musicians in New York to Islam and how he read the Quran daily and strictly observed the prayer and dietary regulations of the religion. I told the reporter that I'd been studying the Quran myself, and although I hadn't converted yet, I knew one couldn't drink alcohol or eat pork as a Muslim. Also I said I felt quite intrigued by the beautiful sound of the word "Quran" and found it "out of this world," "way out," as we used to say. The guy went back to his paper and reported that Dizzy Gillespie and his "beboppers" were "way out" on the subject of religion. He tried to ridicule me as being too strange, weird and exotic to merit serious attention. Most of the Muslim guys who were sincere in the beginning went on believing and practicing the faith".

• (Note: Dizzy eventually became a devote follower of the Bahai' faith)

Yusef taught himself to speak and read Arabic and he also taught himself to play a whole range of instruments that had never before been associated with Jazz, like the sarwela, oboe, rahab, shanai, arghul, and koto. Yusef did years of extensive ethnomusicological research, including four years as a senior research fellow at the Center for Nigerian Cultural Studies at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria.

One of my favorite books to practice out of is Yusef's Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. This book is basically a Jazz version of Slonimski's classic Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns book. There are so many strange scales and patterns, such as bi tonal, hybrid hexachords, hybrid scales, Dolphy's synthetic formations, Hexadic, exotic scales, tropes, tone rows, cyclic inversions, asymmetrically expanded scales, quadritonal patterns, plural arpeggios. The thing that make the book so interesting and useful is that Yusef writes short Jazz etudes for most of the scales/patterns. Lateef's application of exotic scales and modes to the Be-Bop idiom was widely heard during his stint with Cannonball Adderley. There are several pages devoted to exotic scales from all of the world. I find the exotic scales more interesting than synthetic scales because they evoke moods of specific cultures, where a lot of the synthetic scales just sound strange.

Here is a link to a PDF that contains some of Lateef's exotic scales from his Repository book:

Yusef Lateef's Exotic Scales


I have taken a few of these scales from Lateef's book and noted some chords that each scale will work with. A helpful way to learn how to apply exotic or synthetic scales is to do what I did in this chart. Look at every note in the chromatic scale and try to figure out every chord quality that will work from that root. Not every scale note needs to fit perfectly over a particular chord. In fact it can be more interesting if these exotic scales sound a bit dissonant over chords. If you listen to how Yusef plays exotic scales on Adderley's Hard-bop tunes you'll understand what I'm talking about. These exotic scales have strong personalities that they retain their essential flavor even when played over many different types of chords.

Many of the new generation of Jazz musicians have incorporated highly advanced harmonic/melodic ideas into their music in order to create their own unique and personal style. Let's face it, if everyone only used traditional western scales and modes then modern Jazz would be a lot less interesting. I'm sure traditionalists would argue this point, but the tide of change is unstoppable. The world is so small these days and young musicians have access to so much music from all over the world. 20th (and now 21st) century Classical music has also had a powerful influence Jazz more in recent years.

Another modern technique is the creation of synthetic scales. These synthetic scales are created with the idea of creating an unusual and unique sound. They can be have any number of notes in them. They are created on a whim! When I studied with Joe Viola we worked out of an etude book by Guy Lacour, who played tenor with Marcel Mule's sax quartet. Guy's book had etudes that were each based on a different synthetic scale. Some of these synthetics seemed like they were just major or minor scales with added notes, and some were a little more unusual. The etudes sounded very cool. I know that this book significantly influenced Donny McCaslin, who also studied with Joe V at the same time I did. I saw it on his music stand the last time I was at his apartment. Donny creates his own synthetic scale modes and then works out snaky intervalic lines based on them.

Matt Otto just sent me one of his compositions based entirely on a synthetic scale mode of his own creation. The composition doesn't use chords taken from the mode (remember: the stranger the synthetic scale the more problematic diatonic harmony becomes), only a melody line, a harmony line and a bass line. The result is an eerily moody tune that sounds like nothing you've ever heard before, which I think is kind of the point. Otto was gracious enough to let me post a PDF and MP3 of his composition entitled Storm Song. [Keep posted, a new Otto interview is coming soon!]



Storm Song PDF
Storm Song MP3


Yusef Lateef: All About Jazz
Yusef Lateef: Roots and Routes
Yusef Lateef's home page
Yusef Lateef Biography
Ahmadiyya Muslim Community
An Africana View of Progressive American Islam
123 Jazz Duets for Treble Cleff instruments
Yusef YouTube interview