Further musings about the late, great keyboardist-singer with Pat Martino, Jaco Pastorius, the Gil Evans Monday Night Orchestra, Bushrock, Sting and others
In my previous post, I paid tribute to Delmar Brown on what would’ve been his 71st birthday. I got to know Delmar in the early ‘80s through his work with Jaco Pastorius’ Word of Mouth Septet and Quintet. But I first became acquainted with his phenomenal keyboard work and audacious vocal talents on the 1977 Pat Martino album, Joyous Lake. Ten years later, I pinned Delmar down for a Downbeat profile. What follows is a complete transcription of our chat from 1987 which took place at a cafe across the street from his residence in the Manhattan Plaza, the federally subsidized residential complex on 43rd Street and Ninth Avenue that opened in 1977 and was mandated to maintain 70% of the tenants from the performing arts fields. A long list of notables who lived in the Manhattan Plaza over the includes musicians Muhal Richard Abrams, Woody Shaw, John Hicks, Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Jack Walrath, Ricky Ford, Alicia Keys and actors Larry David, Giancarlo Esposito, Terence Howard, James Earl Jones, Colman Domingo and Timothée Chalamet
It sounds like you have a seriously trained voice with all that octave leaping that you do.
Yeah, well, I'll tellya…my mother’s a gospel singer in Bloomington, Illinois who comes from Louisiana. And my father sang some too. But they were raising kids so they didn’t have time to be professional singers or anything. So I have a natural talent for singing. Gospel music was the first thing I ever sang. I sang in the church…was a choirboy with the robe on Easter Sunday. That was mandatory. “The Promise Land” is coming out of my gospel experience, definitely.
Then after gospel I got into blues from records and I decided that I wanted to be a musician. My older brother is a musician and I got a younger brother who’s a musician as well. So I kept developing myself. Started playing piano when I was five, taking lessons from my cousin who was a pianist in the church. I took piano lessons from other people until I was 12. Then I heard Jimmy Smith and that blew me away…changed my whole idea. My uncle used to buy his records. I heard this guy playing the bass with his feet and all this stuff and I really got excited by it and immediately switched over to organ. Then I went through a period where James Brown was a real big influence on me. “Cold Sweat,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”... I had all his records. And at the same time I was into the Beatles. I even had me a Beatles wig, man! I even bought one of those. Everybody laughed at me but it was great, ‘cause I was always one for a laugh. Makes life a little easier.
Who else became a musical influence on you at that early age?
After Jimmy Smith it was Ramsey Lewis. Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner came a little later, along with Oscar Peterson. But then I heard Keith Emerson from EL&P and that kind of sent me further into the rock organ type thing. So I was listening to jazz guys and rock guys and playing gospel music in church. So I’m kind of influenced by all these things. As for my vocal thing, I was singing through the whole period. I always had my own band. In a little town like Bloomington, Illinois, there’s no promotion for anybody, you promote yourself. So I hustled up high school dances and stuff for my band. I was playing a little Farsisa organ at first and we’d do tunes like “Wooly Bully” Sam The Sham & The Pharoahs.
I finally got myself a Hammond B-3 organ and we started playing more blues. In the Midwest you get a strong blues thing filtering into the music. At age 15, I was playing with Luther Allison, the great blues guitarist out of Chicago, and my brother, Robert was playing drums for him in that band. We’d play these clubs but I was under age, so my father would have to come along to the gigs. So he was always around, pushing to get me out there with music. And to have people see me play…I didn’t understand everything that was going on, I just loved to play. So I was playing with Luther in a little club in my town, and then he wanted me to go out and do some things on the road with him. But my mother and father just said, “School first,” and that was that.
Were you reading music at that time?
Reading was not my forte. I read OK. I know what’s on the paper but I can’t sight read like some people. My memory thing is what I’m good at. I’m good at memorizing a lot of music. Like in Bushrock there’s no charts waiting for the band when they get to the gig. We just live the music together and play.
Did Pat Martino use charts?
No, his thing was based on memory too. He reads music, of course, but he prefers to work on memory. He had charts there, but not on stage. Pat don’t want no music on the stage when he plays. No charts on his stage. If you don’t have the music down by the time you hit the stage with Pat, you don’t need to be there. He memorized the music, all of it. Miles don’t have no music on the stage. You start looking at the music then you ain’t looking after what’s going on. You get caught in it.
What about with Gil Evans?
Now with Gil it’s a different thing. Gil’s music is so involved. The first day I got on the gig with Gil, his music was written so differently — section A to section C to section such-and-such — and you don’t really know what’s happening until after a couple times on the gig. And you start to understand that you’re just supposed to interpret this music. You supposed to play what’s there, but you have to interpret it. That’s why the thing is so open. He just gives these cues that sends you to a certain part of the music and you remember that. And my whole development as a musician comes from all these experiences…’cause I’ve played with a lot of different people since I was young.
What did you do between the Luther Allison and Pat Martino gigs?
I had my own groups. The very first group I had in high school was a garage group called Little Brown & The Boss Sounds. I had a leopard skin over the front of my organ in that band. After that I had Band X, which was a horn band that did covers of Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears tunes. Then I moved to another group called Antelope Freeway. After I got out of high school, I went to Illinois State University and had an experimental group called Crossings, which was named after that Herbie Hancock record. We had a trombone player and a steel guitar player who doubled on bassoon. This was my avant garde garage band, ‘cause no one would give us a gig. This stuff was dance and funk but it was kinda ‘out’…the melodies were definitely gone, you know. We did mostly originals but we’d slip in a James Brown tune here and there. I was also working with a group there called the Black Performance Arts, which I ended up directing at one point. We mostly did music for theater performance. I was writing charts, bringing songs to the group. It was a multi-media experience with dancers and everything. I was there for a few years until I got fed up with Illinois (in 1973) and said, “I gotta get outta here!”
Where did you go from there?
I sent out a couple of applications to schools and got accepted at Juilliard in New York City and the Berklee College of Music in Boston. For Juilliard I had to work up Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, so I learned it and memorized the whole thing. Once I got it down, I just played it. So I sent a tape of me playing that to Juilliard, and I also sent one to San Francisco Conservatory and to Berklee. The classical thing came when I was in high school. I sung in all the choirs in high school. I was first tenor, singing Hindemith and Messiah and that. I was also first tenor in a barber shop quartet at the same time that went to the state tournament. We sang “Sweet Adeline” and all that stuff. Great singing, man. You gotta really hit the notes right on the nose in that shit, man. And what that really did was add another tool to my arsenal. The gospel thing gave me the imagination and the power, the barbershop thing helped me tune my instrument, because you have to sing from a low register and jump octaves and nail the note. You can’t just slide up to it or around it, because the instructor…he would be totally out on you. He took it very personally. So I did that in the high school years — singing classical music and barbershop. Then after that when I got into college I started hearing scat and thought maybe I could do that too. So I started experimenting, singing along with my keyboard solos as a practice. It also helps develops your pitch. And I was also starting to get more octaves going with my voice, trying to go up further and further. Like some of the notes on my record State Of Mind are like two octaves above C. With enough sleep I can hit it every time. And after years of practicing this, you develop it. Like calisthenics. And you keep it in tune.
So you had three offers on the table from three impressive institutions.
Yeah, but I decided I was gonna go to Berklee. I went to Boston on a bus and came to Berklee on wearing a top hat, ‘cause I thought everybody in Boston was wearing top hats. I was just totally ignorant to what people looked like in Boston. That’s how country I was. So there I am on my first day with my top hat and purple sun glasses. I was trying to be cool. So I got there and nobody looked like me at all. And it immediately opened up new grounds for me.
What did you learn at Berklee?
I enrolled at Berklee as a piano major and only stayed for a semester. But one of the main things I learned there was some writing techniques, specifically how to write my music down faster. Harmony class was one of my favorite classes. It gave me more understanding about what I was already playing. Arranging was good. Some of the other classes I wasn’t really too happy with. I guess at that time I was fed up with being in school. I had been in college already. I just wanted to take certain courses but I’d have to take these mandatory classes that weren’t challenging to me. But the protocol was, “You gotta do this first.” Berklee is a great school, though. The atmosphere is great there and a lot of musicians who are doing things in New York now were there at the time, notably Mike Stern and some other cats. In Boston I put together a group called Oncoming Horizons, and a lot of music that I later did with Bush Rock came out of that group. We had 18 people…a lot of mouths to feed, lot of attitudes to deal with. I got a couple of grants from National Endowment For The Arts to record and videotape that group, which is in my archives now.
Although your time at Berklee was brief, you had one very memorable playing experience there.
Yeah! During that period at Berklee I got a chance to play with Elvin Jones at a seminar. You wanna talk about a nervous individual?! I came to see him play at a club, now I’m being dragged up onstage. So I got up there, just me and him, and Elvin says, “Were gonna do a blues.” And he took it at a hundred miles an hour. I’m playing one of them Jimmy Smith bass lines in F, then Elvin starts to open up, man...it was like holding onto a wild horse. 1-2-3-4 went out the window. He’s like looking at me with a cigarette in his mouth, going, “Yeah! Yeah!” And I’m just holding on, couldn’t wait ’til the song was over. I mean, polyrhythmic on top of one, implying two and three. And I said. “Well, I just gotta go for where I think it is.” And I made it! Sweat was coming down. I came off the stage, had to go to a bar and get a beer. But that was a great experience. It gave me a lot of confidence. Elvin was always one of my big inspirations. Him and John Coltrane.
How did you end up going to New York after that?
What brought me to New York was Pat Martino. What happened was, I was getting ready to go to Europe with trumpeter Hannibal Marvin Peterson. He asked me to go for three months. Marvin had seen me playing at a club in town with a band I had up in Boston called Kaluha, which was the vehicle I was using to get my music out to the people at the time. So Marvin came to see us and I was set to go to Europe with him, but then I got a call from Pat Martino. He had a deal at the time with Warner Bros. Records and was getting ready to record his second album for the label, which was Joyous Lake. And he called both me and Kenwood Dennard to come down to New York to audition. Me and Woody were on the same floor in the dormitory at Berklee, so we got on the train together and did the audition along with the bass player Mark Leonard, who also came down from Boston. I wrote two songs on that album, “Mardi Gras” and “Pyramidal Vision.” Woody wrote one song on there, “M’wandishi.” And it was really a band. And that band was together for two years. That was the beginning for me of getting documented on record. We did three US tours, we did France. Then Pat decided he wanted to change the band. Pat is a great musician and one of the best guitar players in the world. His interpretation of color and sound and light is very sharp. I have deep respect for him. He’s demanding, and that’s what makes you sharp. Just like my instructor in the barbershop quartet was demanding. If you’re gonna be out in this competitive industry, it’s better to be sharp.
What happened after you left Pat Martino’s group?
After Pat there was High Life, with me, guitarist Daryl Dobson, bassist Rael Wesley Grant and Kenwood on drums. We did an album, which was really strong but is still sitting in the can. We played at Seventh Avenue South a few times and people really dug it. Dobson’s a metal player. He used to play with a stack of Marshall on the stage at Seventh Avenue South. He would definitely stir up the situation. High Life was like a funk-metal-rock band. We were the first ones that invented this Black Rock thing that you see around town now with BRC (Black Rock Coalition). That band was around from 1978-1979 before it disbanded. And at that point I formed a trio with Rael and Woody. We did that for a year or two, playing around New York. We later went to Israel and played to big audiences, like 6,000 every night. We burned it down, man! Then we went to Italy. We even cut a record at the Power Station and had a lot of interest from record companies but we couldn’t get it sold.
When did Jaco come into the picture?
Sometime around ’81-’82. Bushrock used to play at 55 Grand, where Jaco and Mike Stern hung out. I had met Jaco there. Stern had told him to check out my band. But at that time, everybody was like in another zone, cocaine-wise, so trying to hold onto information was real difficult, to put it nicely. Nobody had a Rolodex. Everybody was on a roll, but nobody had a Rolodex, if you know what I mean. It was a great time, though. Crazy but great. That place, 55 Grand, had the potential to be the greatest club in New York. There has been no club, to this day, that has had the energy when that place was cooking. I mean, on any given night you might hear Jaco and David Sanborn jamming on “All Blues” for two hours. Everybody was digging it. Each bridge was different. Or you might see Bob Moses jamming with Stern or John Scofield or Barry Finnerty. It was a total scene! And in the midst of all that craziness, I went out on tour with Jaco. He was actually going around telling people I was his keyboard player before I was even in the band. But I ended up going on the famous tour with him to Italy…the one where he fell off the balcony at the hotel in Rimini and broke his arm. That was my introduction to Jaco overseas. I’ll never forget that night. He was actually cool that night. It was amazing. We had a great gig and a great dinner afterwards at this Italian restaurant, and everything we cool. But that all changed the next morning. Next morning I woke up in this beautiful hotel on the sea…I remember seeing Jaco running down the hall with a towel around him, going, “Yeah, we got ‘em now!” And I’m like, “Wait a minute! Come back! What’s happening?” But he disappeared around the corner. Meanwhile, the gig that night is already sold out. In fact, the rest of the tour is sold out. All we gotta do is make the dates. But there’s some nervousness in the air. The phone in my hotel room rings. It’s Michael Knuckles, Jaco’s road manager for that tour. And he says in a kind of solemn voice, “Well, our flight’s leaving at three o’clock. So be ready.” And I go, “What do you mean? We’re playing tonight, aren't we?” He says, “Oh, you don’t know? Jaco fell off the balcony last night. The tour’s been canceled. And I’m like, “No, no, no!” And he says, “Yes, it’s true. Jaco was playing Superman last night and he missed.” Later on, I asked Jaco about it and he told me, “Well, man, I was out on the balcony, man and, you know, I just slipped.” He was tight-rope walking on the railing of his balcony up on the second floor. And it had been raining for the railing was wet, and he slipped off. He was hanging from the balcony and calling people but the music in his room was too loud. Nobody could hear him. So he decided to try and take a jump for it. Alex Foster went out on the balcony to check on him and he’s like, “Hey, where’s Jaco? He was standing right here a minute ago.” Then he looked down and sees Jaco laying there on the ground below, shouting, “Will somebody come down here and get me?” Meanwhile, everybody thinks he’s playing a joke. You know, he always plays these pranks. So we go down there and pretty soon it’s clear that he’s hurt. Ambulance comes up to the front of the hotel and they carry Jaco in there. I look in at Jaco lying in the back of the ambulance with his arm twisted and I say, “What are you doin’, man? What is this? You’re not faking this are you?” And he goes, “Delmar, get me a cognac.” So they took him to a hospital in Bologna, they put a cast on his arm and the tour is cancelled — 3,000 seats a night. The promoters had to give all the money back.
I remember seeing Jaco shortly after that, back at the 55 Grand, jamming with his arm in a cast and his fingers sticking out.
Yeah, he got right back at it. Then we went back on tour, first to Japan. Jaco was real cool on this tour. It was with Kenwood on drums, Don Alias on percussion, Othello Molineux on steel pans, Alex Foster on saxophone, myself on keyboards and Ron Tooley on trumpet. Then after that we did the European tour with Stern. That, to me, was the best band that Jaco ever had. That band was killin’ every night! Jaco was playing great and behaving himself. He was really on the verge of making a leap to a big comeback. A record company was on his side and everything. Then, I dunno what happened. They did an American tour, but I wasn’t on that tour for some strange reason. I didn’t know until the day they left for the tour. And there were a lot of problems with Jaco from that point on. It’s hard to explain.
So you got Bushrock going again after that?
Yeah, with Ricky Sebastian on drums and Yossi Fine on bass. We went to Italy and had a good audience reception in Israel. This band has a broader appeal than the previous incarnation of Bushrock. I made it a little more commercial, in a sense. The other band was so burning that nobody could walk on the stage after we played. We was trying to play everything every night. But with this new record I’m trying to take this thing that people have been calling fusion for years to a new level by incorporating the vocal thing. It’s different. Well, if it’s not fusion, then what is it? Well, it’s Bushrock. Music of the 21st century. You can interpret it anyway you want but it’s that idea of blending rock and jazz with African percussion. We’re mixing all these musical elements — African, rock, funk, jazz, pop. Remember the broad audience that Sly Stone used to have? That’s the kind of appeal that I want. I’m talking about Bushrock being a music for people, and still feel good about what I’m doing. I have my usual keyboard setup but I also designed this instrument, The Wings, which straps to my body. And I have a wireless headphone mic go I can walk around on stage or even out in the audience to have more contact with the people. Plus, I like to dance. I wanna get close to the people, bring the music closer.
You also continue to play with the Gil Evans Monday Night Orchestra?
Yes. I’m going on tour with Gil in May, doing his 75th birthday in London. Gil and me have a very good relationship. He respects my music and he loves it. It’s an honor to play with him. I did two tracks with Gil for the soundtrack album of The Color Of Money, that movie with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. He gives you freedom in his music. He’s amazing. He walks to the gig at Sweet Basil every Monday night from his house uptown. So we’re doing a three-week tour of Italy with him, including ten days in Perugia at the Umbria Jazz Festival in July. Bushrock did that festival in ’85. We were like the house group there for the after-shows, starting at midnight. After everybody was done playing, they’d come by. So everybody would come by ‘cause there was nowhere else to go at that hour in Perugia. So we was in there trying to give haircuts.
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