A Love Supreme -- Part II

Branford Marsalis on the 60th Anniversary of John Coltrane's masterwork

In a previous blog post I catalogued a dozen interpretations of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, his masterwork released on Impulse! Records in January, 1965 — 60 years ago. One obvious omission from that list was Branford Marsalis, who recorded all four movements of Coltrane’s suite twice — first on 2002’s Footsteps of Our Fathers and again for the 2004 DVD, A Love Supreme: Live in Amsterdam. I decided to separate Branford from the pack and showcase him separately in this column, which includes our freewheeling chat about Coltrane’s powerful devotional work.

Recorded in just one evening session between 7 pm and midnight on December 9, 1964 at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, A Love Supreme has long been regarded as being at the apex of Coltrane’s massive oeuvre as well as among his best-selling albums (over one million copies to date). here was no written music prepared for the session and no spoken directions from the leader — the quartet of Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones collectively carved out the 33-minute four-part suite by improvising together. And it was in that spirit of collective discovery that Branford and his working quartet (pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts) carried on in tackling this imposing work…not once but two times!

Bill: I was just watching the Live at the Bimhuis DVD that you did 20 years ago. It's really an amazing document. So strong.

Branford: Yeah, it was the culmination of a lot. I had to learn a lot in preparation for that.

Bill: And of course, Footsteps of Our Fathers was another incredible document a couple years before that.

Branford: That's what I'm saying. We learned a lot between those two things.

Bill: How did it evolve for you?

Branford: I had to just think about it and reassess what A Love Supreme was. And there was an moment where I told the guys, "We've been spending too much time trying to play like them and not enough time trying to sound like them." That was a big breakthrough for us.

Bill: I noticed that in watching the DVD after listening to Footsteps of Our Fathers that the live version felt much more liberated with more abandon in the soloing. It doesn't strictly adhere to the map of those pieces, whereas, the studio version did.

Branford: When you decide to record a piece that's a classic, you kind of tread lightly into it. And we tried. But then we started playing it live and very gradually it went from 35 minutes to 45 minutes to an hour and five to an hour and 15. Because then we had kind of crossed the threshold where how it sounds is more important than what it is.

Bill: I remember seeing you guys perform this music at The Bottom Line, and I don't know if that was before or after this Bimhis gig.

Branford: Yeah, that was after the Bimhuis gig.

Bill: I just remember it being so organically in the moment and full of conviction. And you really opened it up and took it even further out. And so intense! I mean, Tain’s shirt was soaking with sweat at the end of that performance.

Branford: Yeah, you just stumble into shit when you play that music live. You read some of the early reviews of those performances and the writers were universally saying like, "Nobody's ever done this before." Well, given the limited vocabulary that a lot of those guys had, sure. It's a reasonable assessment. They grew up in New York, generally in secular environments. The keyboard in my R&B band (Buckshot LeFonque) was an organist in a Pentecostal church and I was talking about this music to him one day, and said, "Man, this shit's almost like Pentecostal music," because that's how they play all the time, with that flying fire. Clearly, no one had done that in jazz. But the problem with those kind of statements is that it reeks of the belief that there was a strategy involved. And I think that's a big problem in jazz is that all of these conversations about innovation are often strategic conversations rather than embracing the idea that 'the new thing' is a natural outgrowth of the musical experience of the people who are doing the changing. And once I got to that place with A Love Supreme...you know, none of us are Pentecostals but we know intensity and we know that the heat is more important than the data. We can play whatever the fuck we want, but if we play with a certain level of intensity, then we will start to achieve sounding like they used to sound.

Bill: Yeah, and the “Acknowledgement" section sounds so connected to a black church experience.

Branford: Oh yeah, man. The whole thing is one of the easiest hard songs ever. First movement is one chord, second movement's a blues, the third movement's a blues, the fourth movement's one chord, really. And when you juxtapose that, ironically, to like "Giant Steps" and "Countdown," which everybody shat themselves over...I mean, A Love Supreme is way harder to play than "Giant Steps" is. Which is why a million people will play "Giant Steps" online now and none of them ever play A Love Supreme. It requires more than knowing, which is ultimately why Coltrane probably stopped playing “Giant Steps.” But one easy argument to make is that had he never spent all that time working on the ‘Coltrane changes,’ he wouldn't have got to where he got with A Love Supreme. That's a fair argument to make. But still, two years after he started it, he stopped doing it. And he learned all this information and he had a lot of great technique. And he tried the Ornette Coleman way but he's too linear for that way. So then he settled on this thing where he would play songs that just had an open sound, a lot of vamps, a lot of minor tunes. And he cracked that fucking code.

Bill: And when you play with the urgency of "Pursuance," it's just so intense.

Branford: It's hard to get there. Like the first time we kind of got there, I bit through my lip. I was playing this silver mouthpiece and at some point I looked down and the mouthpiece was brown. And I'm like, 'What the fuck? What happened to my mouthpiece?' There was dried blood all over the mouthpiece. And then I realized I bit through my lip but didn't even know that I had. Because it just kind of transcended us to a place where we were just playing the sound. And wherever it took us, we were just going on with it. We weren't encumbered by changes. Because even on a blues you could basically just play the sound of a pentatonic scale and it works across the blues. You don't have to sit there and worry about playing a IV chord or a V chord. Which is kind of like the way them boys did it in Mississippi. I mean, they didn't play IV to I to V to IV to II to V to I. They get to V eventually, but it was when they felt like it.

Bill: Like John Lee Hooker.

Branford: Yeah. And he played in one key.

Bill: With a drone going on.

Branford: That's right. I love that fucking drone. So you know what I mean? It was like a lot of these things. If I didn't spend all that time listening to the Mississippi Delta blues guys, who's to say I would have got there? But there was a very kind of gradual arising, because it certainly wasn't strategic. It wasn't like: "How to Play A Love Supreme, Step 1 — Listen to Delta blues." It's just all these things happened organically to get us there. When we were in Wynton's band in the mid '80s, we played at the Montreal Jazz Festival and it was all new to us. So I was always wandering around checking out musicians. And we had the 7 o'clock show but the 4 o'clock show was Willie Dixon. And that shit fucked me up.

Bill: So why does this piece of music continue to resonate over time and connect with new audiences?

Branford: Because of how it feels. The emotional impact of music is the thing that allows it to sustain itself over time. There's a reason that people keep buying Kind of Blue. And it's not because they necessarily love Miles Davis, because why don't they buy his other records? That record, Kind of Blue, has a fucking thing about it. And you can't teach it in music school, you can't explain it on a video. It's just a thing. And things that endure, it's a combination of the sound of the music and the collective charisma of the people that are playing it. And A Love Supreme is one of those records that has that thing. Art Blakey once reminded me when I was listening to Coltrane, he said, "You never gonna learn how to play like Coltrane by listening to Coltrane." And I thought that was the dumbest shit I ever heard. I’m like, “Really? So how am I going to do it then?” And he says, "When Coltrane was your age, what the fuck do you think he was listening to? Magical tapes of himself in the future?" And that was this great moment where I had to realize that if I really want to play like Coltrane, I need to study the people he studied to become what he is. Now, it doesn't mean that I'll be that, but if I don't study it, I'll definitively never become that. I'll just be another one of those guys who studied linear Coltrane licks in books.

Bill: That’s some wise counsel from Bu.

Branford: You know, Coltrane played in R&B bands, he played in dance bands, he played in big bands. He did all of these things. Charlie Parker was a big band musician. Art Blakey was a big band musician. Max Roach was a big band musician. First generation post-Charlie Parker cats, they didn't play in big bands. And all the big bands were dead after World War II so not only did they not play in them, they couldn't even hear them. So then all they wanted to do was to play like Bird. First time I heard Charlie Parker with Stringswhen I was 16, I said, "I want to sound like that dude." I didn't necessarily want to play like him because I was strictly R&B at that point, but the sound of his instrument fucked me up.

My dad used to play those Charlie Parker Dial recordings and I wasn't really moved by that shit because I was really not into all that highly evolved, complicated stuff. But when I heard Bird with Strings, I mean, that just...I froze. When I first heard it in my mind, I still remember this...and I don't remember much from my high school years...but I remember thinking, "I would really like to sound like that. But in order to sound like that, I'm going to have to stop listening to Grover Washington and David Sanborn. So I guess I'm just not going to sound like that." Because I was committed to that other stuff. So what I'm saying is that all those things from Trane’s past went into him doing “Giant Steps” and later creating A Love Supreme. There’s a recording from 1954 of Coltrane playing the Johnny Hodges R&B tune "Castle Rock," where he's playing the dance theme.

All of that is in "Giant Steps" and all of that is in all those other things. So I think the thing about it is that Trane got to a place and the band got to a place where it was true collective improvisation. It was not, 'You play then I'll play, then he'll play," but a true collective experience, like chamber music. Like a string quartet. Like collective improvisation in the energy that they had a whole system for.

Bill: And you felt like you got there with your quartet over the course of touring and playing A Love Supreme live?

Branford: We did the best we could do. The whole thing was that we have to have a collective mindset when we play this music. It's not a bunch of changes. It's not, "OK, Joey, you play your solo and I'll go get a beer, then I'll come back when it's my turn to solo." Or like, "When you're playing, I'm just going to look at my shoes or my nails or look out in the audience and see if there's a fine chick out there I can identify with it and maybe hook up with after the gig.” That shit doesn't work with that band. And I remember little things like my dad telling me about the John Coltrane Quartet. My dad wasn't an emotional person, really. He was a highly intellectual guy and emotion wasn't really his bag, 'til you talked to him about that band. Then his eyes would light up. And when he talked about them, like every other musician, he would talk about what he heard. He had this saying: "One of the things you have to get used to in music is that 90% of the audience hears music with their eyes," which he found distasteful. But he was acknowledging the reality of it. But whenever he talked about Coltrane's band — the one time that he saw them, the one time they played in New Orleans — he exclusively spent minutes talking about what he saw, not about what he heard. And he said, "Man, I ain't never going to see no shit like that again in my life." Which is not him. He's not the "I'm going to see" guy, he's the "I'm going to hear" guy. But when he talks about that band, he talks about the whole experience of being in the room with that sound. So it was clear to me, from listening to my Dad, that we were missing something. It's clear we weren't doing that thing that he heard and saw when he caught Coltrane’s quartet in New Orleans. So then the next question was, "How do we get to that?" And the solution wasn't the length. Like some people say, "Man, it was only 18 minutes long and that song has to be longer." And I'm like, "No, man, that wasn't the problem." Once we figured out what the problem was, we could play it for five hours. But if we had the same mindset that we had when we first attempted this music [a truncated version with pianist Kenny Kirkland for the 1994 Impulse! compilation, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool], longer would have just made it worse because then people would just leave. And some people want to glom onto the spirituality thing and that's fine, because there is a spirituality that is involved. But to me, it is the spiritual connection that those four men had between each other. And Trane may have been giving it to God but like I said, Elvin never reminded me of that dude, in my dealings with him at any point. But when he talked about Trane, there was reverence in his eyes.

Bill: You talked about your reaction to hearing Charlie Parker with Strings for the first time. What was your initial reaction to hearing A Love Supreme?

Branford: I was in college and I had a lot of shit coming at me. I didn't really spend a lot of time with it. I listened to it, but with the limited opinions of people around me: "Yeah, man. You gotta check out A Love Supreme. It's Coltrane's tribute to God." and I’m like, “OK, great.” So I listened. "Yeah, it’s spiritual alright." And then they're like, "You gotta check out Ornette Coleman's music, man. The shit is really out." So I did, and four months into listening to Ornette I realized that at least half of The Shape of Jazz to Come is standard song form. So it's not really out at all. So I’m always leery about people telling me to check out this or that. The first Coltrane Quartet record I heard was that Impulse! album called Coltrane (from 1962). Because Bill Pierce, who was my ear training teacher at Berklee, was talking about "Giant Steps" and I'm like, "Yeah, whatever." And after class he says, "I'm not surprised that's really not your thing. Have you ever heard the Coltrane Quartet?" I'm like, “No.” He said, "Well go around the corner to the used record store." So I went to the record store around the corner and the only record they had was Coltrane with "The Inch Worm." So I heard that and said, "Oh my God, this is more like right up my alley."

But once I got old enough and was successful enough to buy a lot of records, I strung all those records together -- John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, Live at Birdland, Coltrane Jazz, Crescent. A Love Supreme was just like the logical next step in the evolution of that group. It was clearly going in this direction because Trane was never looking at music commercially. Maybe he had an idea that he was dying as well and this was just shit he wanted to do. He was never the person to stand pat because something worked, he just kept going. And when you string all those records together, then you look at A Love Supreme and you think about what else was going on in the '60s…Man, that thing is stunning. It's stunning.

Bill: The first time you recorded A Love Supreme was 30 years ago, back in 1994.

Branford: We did a version as a lark for that compilation album, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool. It was the band with Bob Hurst on bass, Kenny Kirkland on piano and Tain. And how that came about was, we were essentially just talking about A Love Supreme in the kitchen at the Village Vanguard one week that we were playing there, and Bob says, "Hey, man, let's just play it." I said, "When? Now?" He says, "Yeah!" I say, "All right, cool." And Kenny says, "Man, we haven't rehearsed it." And Bob says, "How many times you listen to this record? Do you really need to rehearse this shit?" And Kenny goes, "Ah, I guess not." Now, the funny thing is, on that particular version we recorded, the first chord we played was totally the wrong chord. But we got the point across. But the rest of it, yeah, we knew how it went. And it was just like one of those things where we just sort of did it off the cuff. I mean, that’s what I liked about that band. We didn't come up there with a prepared set list and work really hard on our solos. We were just like...whatever happens. And that's kind of how we got to the place where we were doing A Love Supreme. It was a challenge. But it was really more of an emotional challenge than a technical challenge. I mean, "Countdown" is a technical challenge. But this was an emotional challenge. And it kind of ratcheted my understanding of using sound to create emotion to a different place.

Bill: Another profound rendition of A Love Supreme was one I saw at Damrosch Park during the summer of 2014 as part of their Lincoln Center Out of Doors series. It was with the Campbell Brothers, who are part of the Sacred Steel tradition that comes out of the House of God Pentecostal church. They were commissioned by Lincoln Center and the vibe that they created with lap steel and pedal steel guitars on that Coltrane masterwork was completely amazing.

Branford: Yeah, they shouted me out when they started doing those interviews around that time, because they had read an interview where I was talking about the power of the Pentecostal sound in the creation of A Love Supreme. Because the Pentecostals bring that heat when they play. A lot of gospel music today is kind of harmonically complicated and overwritten, emulating jazz as much as possible. But when you go to a gospel church, it's the heat. And it's stunning. There's a church I used to go to in Durham when I lived there. They would do four-hour church services but the first hour and a half is all music. And I went five or six times and every time when they got about the hour mark, I just started crying.

Bill: I had a similar experience when I lived in Jamaica, Queens and I used to go to this nearby church called the Tabernacle of Faith where Apostle Johnny Washington presided. And by the first hour, people were fainting and crying and speaking in tongues.

Branford: Yeah, I never bought into the speaking in tongues thing. One of my students was a drummer from Korea and I said, "You need to come to this Pentecostal church with me." And he goes, "Well, I'm Catholic." And I said, "So am I. I'm not trying to convert you." So we went, and I told him, "We're going to leave after an hour and a half because then the sermon starts and that's not where I'm taking you." And when he walked out and he says, "I've never experienced anything like that." And I said, "That's kind of what jazz at its best is, in that space." He said, "Yeah, maybe jazz is not the music I should be playing." I'm like, "Yeah, probably not." And then he says to me, "Do you believe in the things they were preaching?" And I said no. He says, "But you were crying." And I said, "Yeah, I was moved by the power of their belief." And I think that that's the way we need to play. Clearly, not all the time, it'd be too much. But if we can get to that place where people are effected emotionally by what we're playing...and A Love Supreme is that piece that really forces you go there. Because you can't really play it if you can't get to that space. It's just not possible. You can't harmony-or-intellect your way to the emotional conclusion that is required to make that thing work. And the way as musicians we had to involve to get there, it stays with you. It don't go nowhere. We often tend to rely on our intellect more than we rely on our our emotion. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, especially when you watch the dangers of emotion in politics. But you have to allow the power of that music to get inside you emotionally. That's the energy. That's the thing that you have to get to when you're playing. And that's helped me a whole lot. Now we play ballads and I can use that energy to create a similar thing without the loudness. I remember sitting in on an interview that Blakey was doing and this guy asks the typical dumb question: "If you had to describe jazz in one word, what would it be?" So Blakey says, "Intensity, intensity, intensity, even on the ballads." Now, I'm 20, 21 at the time and I'm going, "That shit makes no sense at all. How are you going to have intensity on a ballad?" But after dealing with A Love Supreme, now I know how.

Bill: More great advice from Bu.

Branford. Definitely. Because when we think intensity...I was doing a a masterclass with a young classical saxophone player in Ottawa and he's playing this piece, a provenance, a really happy piece. And I said to him, “All the notes are right, son, but you gotta learn how to play happy." And he said, "You mean faster?" And I said, "No, I didn't say brisker, I said happy." And he had no mechanism for that. And to be fair, he's only 18 after all, but no one's ever brought the question to him. No one had ever said that to him before. So I just said, "Look, I'm going to send you pieces of music that exhibit happiness and singers who exhibit happiness, and maybe that'll help you understand." And months later, he wrote me and said, "Man, thank you so much. It took me a while but this is going to transform the way I think about music." And I said, "Good, now get to work." And it was like when Blakey said that to me about playing a ballad with intensity. It didn't make any sense to me at the time, but then nobody was sending me music and giving me examples of what he was talking about. This is one of those things I also learned from Billie Holiday because I was 20 and people were telling me her music was so depressing, that when she sang “Gloomy Sunday,” people were jumping out of buildings...probably lies. But you're 20 and you got musicians telling you this bullshit, and why would they lie about it? I don't know. And it wasn't until a decade or more later that I heard those Billie Holiday recordings she did from the 1930 through 1937. And man, there ain't nobody in the world who sings happy shit happier than she did. And that's when I realized like, "Now I understand what her power is.” Her power is she can use the sound of her voice to create an emotion regardless of what the emotion is. And while most people can find a way to happy, very few can find their way to sad. And that's why the sad shit has more power. But she could do both. She wasn't a one trick pony. So all of those things contributed to preparing me to play A Love Supreme.

Bill: Which was quite a daring move.

Branford: Well, I don't say no to challenges, that's for sure. And I'm not afraid to sound like shit in front of a bunch of people if it's going to get me to another place. I don't have that fear. Like I noticed when I got to New York and I'd go to the jam sessions, the musicians were always trying to find songs I couldn't play and play them in strange keys. Like they thought that was going to intimidate me or something. A guy did it one time and I just walked off the stage. I mean, why would I spend four months of my life learning a song I don't like in a strange key when audiences don't give a damn about any of this? Whatever the song was, I don't like it to begin with. Now I'm gonna learn it in B? For what? To impress y'all? Man, I'm going to go out and try to learn how to play jazz, I don't have time for this shit. This is all math anyway." Like, you know, it's going to take me for months to learn how to play this, and then I could just basically learn one chorus, play the same chorus all over, over and over again. And y'all be like, "Man, that's killin'!". No, it's not. It fucking sucks.So a lot of guys get caught up in this thing. For me, it's just math. Meanwhile, I love the way Sonny Rollins plays because the shit is actually spontaneous. It is not overprepared, it is completely spontaneous. And that has always been, to me, like the North Star. Stand up here in the moment and making shit happen, not sitting here calculating. Some young person I won’t name made a record where he did "Giant Steps" in the key of B and in seven, and he asked me what I thought. And I’m like, “Who's this for, bro?” I mean, I'm trying to understand what the thinking is. I mean, who's supposed to buy this?

Bill: That kind of thinking reminds me of the plate spinners on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Branford: Wow. Good job. Well said. And I'm old enough to know what you're talking about. Yeah. But at least the plate spinners have an aesthetic value, like to watch it. You're like, "Wow, that's pretty impressive." But when you’re playing music, the people listening don't know what's impressive or what's not impressive. One time Blakey told me, "You should never play two songs in the same key." And I'm like, "Why not? That makes no sense. I played in an R&B band and the singer only sang in two keys. And in the five years I played with the band, not one person in the audience said, 'Can y'all pick one of the other keys?” So our cult had all these made up rules that we made to exist inside of our cult. Some of it was like show business stuff -- always end with a fast tune, always start with a fast tune, you got to play one ballad. And then there were things like, never play two songs in the same key and you gotta to do this and that. And there was never an intelligent answer as to why. It's kind of like what I find in a lot of the classical saxophone world. They have just given up on the idea of playing for larger audiences. So there's this whole subculture where they just play pieces that sound good in a small room and they play for each other, and jazz has been that kind of thing. And this started in the bebop era, where the idea was, “This is our music. We just gonna play for us.” And Dizzy and them mocking Louis Armstrong. Really? That's where we gonna go with it? But it was that time. It was a lot of shit. I mean, it was hard to be black in this country in the 1940s and you had young kids who were sick of the status quo and trying to figure shit out, and the music became representative of this inner rebellion. So you had all this shit that was going on. But musically. I mean, all the music I like speaks for itself. My dad's favorite Louis Armstrong story is he was playing in Chicago with Al Hirt someplace and Pops was playing at some other place. So he went to the gig and it was pretty much sold out. So when he got in, there was only one table left with one dude sitting there. So he said, "I'm gonna go sit with that dude." And the dude turned out to be Miles. He said, "You mind if I sit here?" Miles said, "Be my guest." And they didn't say a word to one another, they just sat there and checked out Louis Armstrong. And this is like '67, '68 when Miles had already switched over to the other thing. But Miles knew what the lineage was. I mean, when I was a kid, you think I listened to Louis Armstrong? Fuck no. Wynton didn't start checking that shit out until his late 20s. That's how it was. Very few people played jazz and all the people that played were hip and they're like, "Yeah, man, check out Stitt, check out Clifford Brown/Max Roach. Gotta learn ‘Giant Steps,’ bro. Yeah, that's what's up.” But all of the stuff that created all of that, we just ignored all of that. But then with Blakey dressing me down a couple of times, I had changed my view on it. And the more I listened to it, the more sense the modern stuff made because all the modern stuff we like came out of the old shit.

Bill: And now you’ve tackled another iconic album on your upcoming Blue Note debut, which is a a full album reinterpretation of Keith Jarrett's 1974 ECM album Belonging with his Scandanavian Quartet (saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christiansen).

Branford: Yeah, we re-recorded that Keith Jarrett record. I used to listen to that record a lot and I thought that there were a lot of ways that that record could be Americanized. Him switching gears like he did made a lot of sense to me, because he couldn’t find the musicians who could play his music without any real understanding of what the music was about. And the Scandanavian guys weren’t killer soloists but at least they understood what the music was about and how the music needed to be expressed. And he could not have done that with the guys that were living in the United States at the time, coming out of…the Swing era was a potent era, man. I mean, swing is the thing in jazz, period. I know other people say, “No, it’s not.” And that’s fine. But when you talk about playing for human beings and getting paid to do it, the lynchpin is the dance beat. So I figured that there was a lot of ways that we could play those songs. And we didn’t have to re-arrange them, re-harmonize them. All we had to do was interpret them differently. Any time we play anyone else’s music, our inclination is we need to find our own voice in it, which means getting rid of the shit that’s there. Blakey ripped me for that too. I was re-harmonizing a Gershwin tune and he says, “George Gershwin wrote oratorios, he wrote a piano concerto, he wrote some of the best pop tunes in the world. What the fuck have you done to make you think you should be changing his tunes?” I said, “Man, I’m just trying to make this shit hip. You want me to do this.” He goes, “There is nothing hip about you. George Gershwin’s already hip. He don’t need a sorry motherfucker like you to be hip. Play the music as is!” I was pissed because I knew I was going to suck. But then after a while, I realized, “Oh, this is the only way to get better, to suck for a little while.” So Blakey hooked me up. He basically gave me a template on how to act and really become what I consider like a real jazz musician.

Bill: He must’ve been kicking your ass around the time I saw you with Blakey at 7th Avenue South back in the early ‘80s.

Branford: It was the entire fucking time. He never let up on me. And I’m thankful. Because I was an R&B sax player, man. And you listen to other people who were saying, “Yeah, man, just keep to your identity.” And he’s like, “Your identity sucks. Get a new one!” And it was just all these little things. When he ripped me about the Coltrane thing, I went to him a little while later and said, “Alright, man, you’re probably right. Who should I check out?” And he said, “Call Golson. I don’t have time for you.” So I called Benny Golson and he said, “Oh man, I’m glad Art told you to call me. Funny you should bring that up. I bet you can’t even imagine who Coltrane’s first influence was.” And I said, “I can’t.” It was Johnny Hodges. And then I was like, “Fuck, now I got to go listen to this shit.” So I had to go to the store and find Johnny Hodges recordings with Duke Ellington, circa 1940. Hard to find. But there was this one record and it was a radio broadcast from Fargo, North Dakota from 1944.

I started listening to it, you know, rolling my eyes…“This shit’s corny.” Two weeks later I’m like, “Ah, it ain’t as bad as I thought it was.” A month later I’m like, “God damn! This shit’s incredible!” And the deep part was that when I went back to the Coltrane shit, it sounded completely differently to me. It sounded more approachable because I wasn’t approaching it from a mathematical perspective, I was approaching it from an aural perspective, a sonic perspective. And I could hear how listening to Johnny Hodges influenced the way he played. So I owe Blakey a lot.

Bill: No doubt.