My name is Monk Rowe and I am off camera, in Greece, New York, right?
We're in Greece?
GM: This is Greece.
MR: Yeah.
I'm pleased to be speaking with Gap Mangione today.
And I've been looking forward to it, because I love talking with working musicians.
GM: I'm working.
MR: It's interesting because, you know, when you think of Rochester you think of Kodak
and Bausch & Lomb and Mangione.
GM: Wow.
Okay.
MR: And I know you and your family have been a very familiar name in the area.
I'm also curious about the, you know, in Utica, where I live, you have Mancuso and Montalbano
and Caramanica.
And here we have Ruggiero and Mangione.
Now what is it with the Italian - GM: I'm going to feel badly about not remembering
his name, but there was a fella who wrote the liner notes for the "Hey Baby" album,
the second one that we did on Riverside with the Jazz Brothers.
And he made note of that.
He said much like Russians and classical violinists - of course this was a long time ago, there
are a lot of other ethnic groups that are spectacular violinists - but at the time,
much like Russian violinists, upstate New York Italian jazz players are a wonder.
And at the time we were talking about Sammy Noto, Don Menzo, Larry Covelli, Sal Nistico,
Steve Gadd's mother is Italian, my brother, myself, Joe Romano, Sal Amico the trumpet
player from the Utica-Albany area.
Well nonetheless I'm sure that the idea - MR: Larry Covelli.
GM: From Buffalo, yes, he was among them.
And I don't know quite how to explain it, but the thing that I find interesting is how
many people credit the Eastman School of Music with the idea that there's a lot of jazz in
Rochester.
That may be, they certainly may have contributed to the continuance of the jazz that was here
from the beginning.
It was very much, I remember the reason we grew up to be the musicians that we are, and
I mean from the time we were kids, is that we had these kinds of people to be associated
with directly and often.
By the way, Vinnie Ruggiero was from the New York City area, and he came up here at my
invitation.
MR: Is that right?
GM: Yeah.
There's another fella, Frank Pullaro, who is a bass player up here, and of course Tom,
another bass player from Buffalo who's a knockout.
Can't remember his name right now.
But anyway, large groups of Italian jazz players.
MR: Well did you have, were your parents into Italian folk music, like mandolin type?
GM: No.
MR: No.
That's interesting.
GM: Yeah, Chuck and I were the first in the family to have any extensive - now we had
two uncles on my mother's side, one of whom played the clarinet and the other the violin
in the high school band and then stopped.
They both sang in the choir.
But that was it.
There was really nobody before us in our family who had that kind of influence on us.
But the fact was that at the time music generally played a large part of my parents' social
life.
They would get together and as often as not sit around and sing songs, whether or not
they were accompanied, they would sing.
Or dancing.
A group would get together, even at our small house, and clear a rug from a room and turn
the radio on, where there was a lot of good music, and they'd dance to it.
MR: And would it be the swing?
GM: It was, at the time.
The sort of music represented by Nat Cole, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and of course
the big bands at that time.
And as we went along there still was this real ear for quality music.
The great thing about radio at the time, which I'm not sure how many histories of music cite
this, but at the time you could, on the same radio station, hear some pop music at the
time, the vocalists that I mentioned; they'd always have a classical half-hour or an hour,
almost every day; and then you know there'd be country music.
There'd be all sorts of different music on the radio.
And as far as the alternative to that it was mostly kind of radio soaps.
So we were happy to turn the music on.
MR: I noticed that in looking at the "Billboard" number one charts from - some of those years
are so interesting in the early fifties.
Because you could have Mitch Miller, followed by Elvis Presley, and then Sinatra, as if
you're saying you had fewer radio choices then like it or not you were going to hear
it.
GM: Right.
Interestingly enough, the street that we lived on is called Martin Street.
And a block up from where my father's grocery store, was a street called Elmira Street.
And on Elmira Street was Mitch Miller.
And his family lived there.
And he of course, by the time I was around to any extent he had become successful and
moved away, but his mother was still there.
MR: I didn't know that.
GM: Oh yeah.
And I'm pretty sure a sibling or two lived in Rochester.
I'm not sure that they were, but his mother was there.
MR: Now I've read that your father in particular was very supportive of you and Chuck.
But did your interest come first and then he picked up on it?
GM: I think two things happened, one of which is he was interested in music in the ways
that I've described.
Then when he saw our interest in music, and our interest in specific sorts of music, then
he made a truly special effort.
And I shouldn't say just my father, my father and my mother.
They were both - I can remember my mother driving us around with my accordion, which
was too heavy for me to carry but not too heavy for her to carry, to whatever musical
things we were doing.
The other thing was that, and I always mention that we do usually a half dozen or more outdoor
free concerts every year, mostly with my big band, but as often as not, with a smaller
group.
My father used to always find something of that sort, whether it was a concert in the
gazebo or a marching band at a parade, we always got to hear - there was a country & western
band who had a kind of flourish around Rochester and we got to hear them a lot.
But we were really exposed.
And I think, and importantly, excited by that.
I can remember, it was usually on a patriotic holiday sort of thing, where there was a band
of some sort playing, whether it was marches and the usual mazurkas and waltzes that come
from playing with a concert band, or something special.
The services even then were sending out representative bands.
The armed services I should say.
MR: I think it's so interesting because compared to now, you might consider those days low-tech,
yet you were exposed to so much music, and live of course being the best.
Did you guys put in hours in the grocery store?
GM: Very reluctantly.
We did.
We did.
We were I think not very good assistance in the grocery store, although the returned bottles
that needed to be sorted and the stock for the shelves and all that sort of thing.
So we did do that yes.
But we were never enthusiastic.
I think that's one of the ways that we kind of got encouraged to practice.
Because there certainly were some other things that they were willing to have us do, i.e.
work in the store.
MR: Right.
I'd rather go play a gig for sure.
GM: Or even practice inside.
My father's grocery store was on the corner and through the back door of the grocery store
and up three steps was our home.
So there was a constant connection.
We were never far from our folks when we were home.
MR: And was it like a Little Italy where you lived?
GM: Oh, no.
As a matter of fact there were a lot of Italian families in the area, but it was about as
mixed as you could imagine.
I mean if I took a few minutes I could probably name you all the people who lived in the various
houses, from Polish, German, of course Italians and Spanish, eventually it became more Spanish.
But it was a very cross-section of people who lived in the neighborhood.
And interesting enough, I don't know if you can hear this, but one of the reasons I like
living here is because I hear that train go by with the whistle every so often.
MR: Really?
GM: Yeah.
It's a sixth chord.
MR: It's a sixth chord.
Yeah but have you ever gone to the piano to see which sixth?
GM: Oh what key it's in?
MR: It's not important.
I don't either.
GM: But growing up we lived near enough so that we could hear the New York Central main
line regularly.
This is a side track if you call it, and they do blow the horn when they come past the intersection.
But back on Martin Street we could hear it.
And of course there was no air conditioning so the windows were always open at night.
And that would bring a lot of imagination about travel here and travel there.
MR: Oh.
When did you first discover like chord theory?
GM: It was kind of the other way around.
I discovered things to play, whether alone or with a group, and then later found that
there was some formalization description of what this was all about, and then of course
the combination of the two became most important.
But most of what we learned in the early days was from doing it, and sometimes terribly,
but sometimes not so bad.
MR: Do you remember the first paying gig?
GM: Oh no.
I can't remember that.
But there's picture, as a matter of fact if you go on to my web site, GapMangione.com
- MR: I've been there.
GM: And click on something called Photos, just a little ways down in the first, second
or third row is a combined photograph, half of it is Chuck and I playing at an awards
dinner, fairly recently, maybe four years ago.
The Italian-American Club in Rochester gave us some sort of an award and we in turn played
a couple of Italian songs including "Bellavia" which Chuck wrote.
Next to it is a picture of Chuck at ten and I'm not too far from that, playing for my
uncle's wedding.
So a paying gig is another - we were playing out quite a bit.
MR: Syracuse University, did that come before the Jazz Brothers or after?
GM: Well we had recorded, I was there for a year, got an invitation to join the Salt
City Six, which if you go find that on line and hear some real knockout songs.
I'm still amazed at what a truly excellent group that was.
And then I had finished with them and come back to Rochester and Chuck and I had started
out the Jazz Brothers thing.
I went back to Syracuse University and we had recorded one album as the Jazz Brothers,
the first one on Riverside.
And then, oh we had recorded the first two, both the "Jazz Brothers" album and the "Hey
Baby" album were recorded.
Went back to Syracuse University and during one Thanksgiving break we recorded the "Spring
Fever" album so that it was kind of intermingled.
MR: I'm a huge fan of Cannonball Adderley, so I saw that right away, and I wondered how
did that come about?
Was he playing in town?
GM: Not to take up the entire time, but one time, it was a night before a New Year's Eve,
and I was old enough to drive but not old enough to have a car.
But I had a girlfriend who had a car, and she was old enough to drive at night.
So we were out, the night before New Year's Eve, and heard that there was some really
good music, a band, near Geneva.
And that was kind of like all we really knew.
So we started over toward there and ended up on Route 414, which if you look at a map
is a farm road.
Even now it's not - and we drove along this road and we were asking directions and all
this and all that, and found this house that was at an intersection, but all the rest of
the intersection were fields.
And this house was one of those places that had become a bar.
You know how you walk in the front door and there's a bar and then in the back room there's
a place where they serve sandwiches.
We went into this bar, this girlfriend of mine and I, thank you whoever you were, and
there were a lot of obviously local people drinking beer.
And it was wintertime.
And in the back, where they served sandwiches, I heard this really wonderful sound.
And I looked and there were people dancing to this music.
I went back there and there was Sonny Clark, Paul Chambers, Philly Jo Jones and Cannonball
Adderley, and that's how we met.
I mean out of the sky, right?
Well I dropped a dime, and we must have had twenty or thirty of our friends there within
an hour.
And one thing led to another.
And he asked us to sit in.
So Chuck and I and this friend our ours who played saxophone, Benny Salsano, who's still
in New York and still plays but not to the extent that we've been playing, sat in.
And years later - oh well and subsequent to that I got a phone call at the Pythod, like
he didn't even know where to find me.
I came off the bandstand and they said, "It's for you."
And it was Cannonball.
He says, "Can you get out of the recording contract that you're in?"
Well at the time we had put out a single on the Manco label.
We made that up, and I said, "Yup we can get out of it."
But much later subsequent to that I remember asking Nat, I said, "How did Cannon know about
us?
The record?"
He said, "No," he says, "he remembered you from that session."
MR: Oh that is just a great story.
How do you suppose they ended up in that place in the middle of nowhere?
GM: Oh Philly Jo Jones owed some money to this fella who owned the club.
And I'm not going to say anything else about it than that.
But essentially it was Miles' band without Miles.
And they went there and played the weekend of New Year's Eve.
MR: Cannonball was quite a guy wasn't he?
GM: Oh just as special and as, you know, I know that the word beautiful has gotten to
mean a lot of different things, but he was all of that.
He was really as caring and as warm and as conversational and always jovial.
Some of the funniest - and we could tell stories for a very long time.
But those kinds of times together were just so spectacular.
And then of course certainly turned our musical career around.
We had the opportunity to have dinners together on occasion.
Very quickly again, we were in Canada, in Toronto.
He had played a place, La Cout d'Or, The Golden whatever.
Golden chicken or something, anyway, finished over there and we went to a restaurant that
was open later called the Town Tavern, where Oscar Peterson was playing with Ray Brown
and let's see was it Dick then or was it still Herb Ellis?
I can't remember that part.
But we sat and ordered dinner, and of course listened to Oscar, as incredible as he always
was.
And Cannon ordered like a steak and potatoes and salad and so on and so forth, and we had
dinner.
And quite some time later the waiter came around and asked, he was about to pass out
the dessert menus.
He says, "Can I bring you anything else?"
And to Cannon, he says, "Yeah, I'll have another."
Another what?
He had the whole thing again, and finished it rather casually.
Then we ordered dessert.
So his name was - MR: His name was Cannibal wasn't it?
GM: I remember.
MR: Wow.
Well let me fast forward a little bit.
GM: Please.
MR: Was there a point where you made a conscious decision that I think I can make a living
in music, or did it just sort of fall into place?
GM: As a matter of fact I think Chuck and I both, although he did teach for a while,
both in terms of semi-private or private lessons, and then of course he started the jazz program
essentially at the Eastman School of Music.
I think both of us had the idea that we would play until it didn't work out so well, and
then we would get a regular job.
So far so good.
There was never a, okay we're going to go for this or we're going to do that.
The kinds of things that happen when you have a recording session and when you have the
kinds of recordings that we did, we ended up doing the Randall's Island Jazz Festival
opening for a program that included Miles and Coltrane, and Duke Ellington.
And we didn't know enough - we were too young to know enough to be scared.
We shouldn't have been there.
But of course we were with Sal Nistico, Roy McCurdy, the band was not shy.
MR: You had some horses there.
GM: Yes.
MR: And as far as writing, you did some band writing early on.
Well how did you figure out how to do that?
GM: Frankly, trial and error.
The simpler things, and I say simpler only because there were fewer instruments, came
reasonably easy.
You would just decide the line you wanted and then have the horns play it, whether in
unison, in octaves, or perhaps with some little harmony thing.
But the big band capability that I've come to have and love, I get such joy out of working
with that band, as you can probably hear from the CDs that we've done, that came a lot later,
and again by the sort of informal mentor, or what do you call it, where you put yourself
next to somebody who knows how to do it, and most of the time they were kind enough to
tell me how.
MR: Who would you be referring to?
GM: Just people in Rochester who knew enough to voice five saxophones like this, and trumpets
like that.
But that was the extent of it.
The coloration and all that sort of thing came later and, again, by trial.
MR: So you had the score paper and you'd work with the pencil?
GM: Score paper, it never got that formal.
MR: So you just wrote the parts.
GM: What you'd have is a pad and you'd write kind of everything as you went along on two
staves or maybe three staves if they got in the way, and then remember how you had decided
- and most of the time writing parts from that.
Very seldom was there - Chuck did that much more formally, formal scores and all.
But of course a lot of the writing he did was for an orchestra, and that makes it mandatory.
MR: There's always that moment when you've written something new, and you're about to
hear it, you know, and I've got my fingers crossed that this is going to work.
GM: Oh at the time, doing everything by hand, how about wrong notes, just as a kind of nonchalant
sideline?
But more recently of course you do it on the computer and at least I know that the notes
and the rhythms are correct now, and whether it'll work.
MR: Do you use Finale?
GM: Yes I do.
MR: I do too and sometimes you have to be careful that you don't start writing something
that's not friendly to the instrument.
GM: Or to the players.
I remember not that long ago the "Family Holidays" CD that we did has a track called "The Christmas
Waltz."
Well I decided to write a kind of Stevie Wonder "Sir Duke" shout chorus for that.
It had a lot of notes.
And the computer did it just fine.
We got to the recording session and it took a while, but that's about the only rehearsal
that we've ever had with the band.
The rest of the time, I mean these guys are really such honchos, the guys in the band.
MR: Yeah, I was going to ask this question later, but let me ask it now, when you look,
when you put a band together and you're looking for sidemen, I mean you obviously want people
that can play.
Is there other qualities you look for in your people that play with you?
GM: The main thing is that they're spectacular players.
And I've been so fortunate to find a number of them that I've been able to use.
And the other is I really need a kind of special instrumentalist who can play in a variety
of styles.
Because if you listen to any of the recordings that I've ever done, you know the Jazz Brothers
was pretty straightforward jazz.
But after that it always went in a number of different directions so that there's some
pop orientation, there's a lot of straight eighth rather than swing time.
There's a whole lot that I'm asking of each of these players, not only in the rhythm section,
which is where the main capability needs to come from, but stylistically in the horns.
Now I know who to call on in the saxophone section to play a solo on a particular piece,
from the kind of special capability that they have.
On the other hand, on every one of these CDs Gerry Niewood played.
In that case I didn't have to decide.
MR: No worry there.
GM: And when I ended up with just a saxophone section, Pat LaBarbera and Andy Weinzler from
Buffalo, who is our main guy, Gerry Niewood and either Nancy Boone, or Ed Xiques played
on one of the CDs, and just great players.
And I have the good fortune to have Steve Gadd come and play most of them.
MR: Okay so the stuff, the music that happened, that you helped out with Chuck and, when was
this now, "Friends and Love."
GM: Uh huh.
1970.
MR: That was pretty thrilling I would guess.
GM: Thrilling?
MR: From an observer.
I mean I was observing some of that at the time.
I was jealous as all get out.
I mean was it thrilling?
GM: Oh first of all, way beyond that.
I mean thrilling is too mild an adjective.
And the other thing is this time we knew enough to be scared.
We were going to play with an organized - in other words we didn't hire all these people,
this was an orchestra.
And at the time there was a kind of attitude that came from a lot of orchestras, and they
weren't interested in this.
I don't know, where did these guys come from you know.
And the music was written at the time, to the extent that we were still copying parts
and never completely rehearsed the program.
We played some music on that "Friends and Love" concert that nobody - we hadn't run
through.
And that was a time again, when we were writing the parts by hand, with all the scary things
that can happen with that.
MR: I can just picture you writing the viola part.
You know, what is it like alto clef or something?
GM: Yeah.
For one thing.
And then, bless you mom I'm going to tell the story.
It was three days before the concert and it's hard to describe the house that we lived in
on Elmira Street, but it was really small.
And we were putting pages and pages that hadn't been taped together, and oboe this and bassoon
that.
Fortunately you could sometimes tell the viola part by the clef but try to tell the difference
between an oboe and a flute part by that.
But anyway, to make a long story shorter, there were some people coming over and she
decided to tidy up.
So she put all the music in one pile.
And actually we never said anything we just kind of looked at each other and said oh my
goodness.
And we were disoriented and trying to put it back together.
But she did.
MR: Well the planets aligned.
GM: And to go back to that performance, there were things that happened that I still can't
believe happened at that performance.
I mean the kind of truly spectacular playing that went on.
We had brought some of our henchmen with us, Al Porcino played the trumpet, Bill Reichenbach
was in the trombone section and of course Gerry Niewood, Steve Gadd, Tony Levin, these
were not - what would you call it - medium players.
They were all killers.
And of course combining the music that Don Potter and Pat McGrath represented, plus everything
in between that went down.
And again, this kind of turned in another direction.
Prior to that, aside from "Diana in the Autumn Wind" album, all of what we had done was pretty
much either the straight ahead big band or jazz quintet kind of style.
Now in '68 we recorded an album "Diana in the Autumn Wind" with - a kind of traditional
big band, three trumpets, three trombones, four saxophones who doubled marvelously, and
a couple of French horns, vibes, Mike Mainieri, and Tony Levin and Steve Gadd met for the
first time in that studio.
And there was a real change in terms of what the music was.
They weren't like jazz straight ahead people.
This was something quite different.
And it included some straight ahead playing.
And of course the "Friends and Love" concert and album two years later just exploded and
completely went to these different directions.
So the whole idea that quote third stream jazz, which was around for a while, that was
represented by Gunther Schuller and the Modern Jazz Quartet on occasion, trying to merge
these two different musical forms, came together in a way, and with some musical forms that
they never even thought about.
I mean they were thinking about straight ahead classical music and straight ahead jazz playing,
and kind of like mingling them.
This was like let's do anything that comes through our minds.
And some of the things that came to Chuck's mind were really marvelous.
MR: Do you know where the song "She's Gone" - how did that evolve?
That's a beautiful, intense composition.
GM: Yeah.
Chuck wrote that in the mid to late - no, oh goodness, I remember playing that in about
1963, 64.
So it was substantially before we recorded it.
And again I can't come up with a particular date, but he was involved with a program that
they had at Eastman School every summer called the Arranger's Workshop, Rayburn Wright conducted
it.
And as an assignment he had to write a strong orchestra piece.
So he used to melody of "She's Gone," which we had been playing for a while.
Joe Romano played it on tenor saxophone.
And then he wrote that spectacular string arrangement for it.
Later words came, Don sang it and again with the string orchestra.
It is very intense.
"How could you not be what I dreamed you would be?"
MR: Wow.
How could you?
So as musical styles changed, and you're a working musician, how much do you have to
be aware of that and sort of buy into it and figure out how to stay with the current tastes?
GM: A couple of things, one of which is the buying into it and staying with the current
taste has never been part of what I had in mind.
I have, over the years, discovered some music that I find truly attractive and like to play,
one of which is a style, any style of music that has to do with a shuffle kind of feeling.
You know, shuffle me for the rest of the afternoon and I'm good, right?
So from there, into Motown, into all kinds of blues orientation and all that, that's
the thing we're doing now.
But it wasn't a long stretch for me to get into a lot of what was fairly popular music
outside of jazz.
But I try to bring to that the same kind of creativity and inventiveness and muscle and
joy that I was involved with in playing jazz or playing the things that "Friends and Love"
represented.
So I don't think we've ever played something that I really don't like, but I am always
open to something that is attractive.
And it's been good for us.
I think that whatever reasons that my tastes have gone where they have, fortunately it
seems a lot of people are attracted by that sort of music.
And this is the twenty-fifth year that I've been at the same place where I'm playing now.
I started there in May of '87.
MR: That's a steady gig.
GM: Yeah.
It's getting to be a steady gig.
MR: Did you ever - I do some of that myself, and one night I kept track of all the songs
I played, just to see what it was looking like.
Have you ever done that?
I mean what kind of, what's your repertoire mostly like when you play solo?
GM: Oh wow.
It's really, again, a cross section of things that I've recorded, which in many cases is
a cross section of musical styles that's pretty wide open - to play the Great American Songbook
and then to play some kind of - "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" or something
that's really way inside, and then do a medley of Simon & Garfunkel tunes, which I recorded
and I love, or The Beatles things.
We still do, not the original way, but we still do "Up, Up and Away," that Jimmy Webb
thing.
That's got more changes then "Airegen."
This is a very hard song and it goes so many places.
Often we've gotten it together with a quartet but if there's a guy sitting in during the
middle of the song - "I think I'll pass."
So it's not simple or unchallenging music.
And I love it.
A quick story.
We were hired recently to play for this fella's 90th birthday party, with the big band.
So I naturally went through the charts and got everything, the old Ellington things,
the "Mooch," "Jeep's Blues" and, you know "Sentimental Journey" - all the older songs
that I could find in the book.
And we started the first half of the thing, while they were having dinner, and then some
of them came out to dance.
And then about that time this fella's six granddaughters from California, all of them
taller than me, blonde, beautiful, what's the word, stacked?
MR: Okay that'll do.
GM: And drunk.
"Don't you guys know anything fast?"
Well we hit with "Sir Duke," "Knock on Wood," you know, and bang-bang-bang, and they were
yelling and dancing and having a great time.
Total success as far as I'm concerned.
Because I love to be able to, in a - when we play the Glenn Miller style thing, or the
Duke Ellington or whoever, we play it right.
When we play that other stuff, we play that right too.
We're not like a bunch of guys who got the charts out and tried to make it sound like.
You know what I mean?
MR: Yes I do.
GM: And that's where it's at.
I take great joy and pleasure and pride.
I mean we played a - not a bar mitzvah but a Jewish wedding.
We not only played the horas but the woman who sings with us sings it in Yiddish.
You know but that's the same kind of focus we applied to the Miles things, to the Blakey
things, to the Cannon things that we were doing as kids.
So if you're going to be intense, yeah, let's be intense, let's get to what needs to be
done and do it marvelously.
MR: Well said.
And thus your successful career.
GM: Well I still make a living.
MR: Has it gotten harder over the years?
GM: Oh I would not want to be starting out now.
Oh goodness no.
A lot of the reasons we get considered for important engagements is our reputation and
of course the fact of our music.
But if I were trying to create that now from start, the music business has just so exploded
in some good ways but in too many not-so-good ways, and become fragmented.
At the time that we were coming up there were five, six major jazz labels, and that was
it.
And if you got involved with a jazz label, an important jazz label, you were okay.
You'd be signed and paid for and all.
A lot of them were for scale, but nonetheless they were for scale.
There is so much going on now where there is no fees involved with too many of the performances,
there's no fees involved with too many of the recordings.
And so therefore how else can you make a living playing music, if not by performances and
recordings?
And that's being shoved into the dustbin by the majority of the people who are going out
there and playing for free or recording for free.
MR: Is technology, the Internet and so forth, partly responsible for that?
GM: Sure.
On the other hand, how would I have distributed those three albums successfully?
The first two are paid for completely and we're well on the way to doing that with the
third.
Nobody has taken a bath because of one of my recordings.
MR: That's saying something.
GM: And everybody got paid, and you know, a full boat - for doing it.
MR: I read that you also did a bit of TV work.
GM: Oh that was a while back, yeah.
When I came off the road and came back to Rochester I settled into a couple of pretty
steady jobs.
The TV station here talked about a series.
It was called "Gap's Generation."
And again, the cross section of people that played for that, from rock bands to Chuck.
That's from one side to the other.
Catherine Moses, who is a wonderful flute player from Toronto, had a group.
Duke Jupiter, a really rocking band from Rochester.
And we did a series of, oh my goodness I guess there were as many as ten or a dozen of them.
And it was fun.
And my man Ramone Santiago, he's the fella who has done the artwork for the covers of
the last three CDs, he would have done the cover for all of my CDs except that until
the last three I wasn't totally in charge.
He's a wonderful artist whose artwork it's important to note.
MR: Do you listen to a lot of music?
GM: Yes.
I listen to lot of music that I don't perform, so that I'm often listening to a classical
station.
I mean there's so much of that that I love, and I don't want to be without.
And again it's a cross section of styles from piano music generally, to orchestral, and
I'm only sort of into opera on occasion.
But aside from that, classical music, yes.
And then it's always fun, especially when you're driving, to see what's going on these
days, find a station, although it's harder to do, find a station that's playing not only
the most recent releases but some of the classic releases.
And of course there's my own collection here.
MR: Are you a practicer?
GM: Am I a practicer?
MR: Yeah.
GM: Na.
MR: Well you play so much.
GM: I do, yeah.
I mean I'm not going to get stiff or forget what I've remembered over all these years.
MR: What's it like to try to work on new big band charts?
Do you literally take new stuff and sight read it on a gig?
GM: Oh yeah.
We've never had a rehearsal with the big band.
I know that doesn't sound - MR: No but it's got to be hard to get all
those people together in one place.
GM: Oh for one thing.
The big band was predicated - there was a date here in Rochester that turned into two
dozen dates the first year, on Monday nights, at a dance club, and when I say dance club,
I mean that kind of dance club.
And I decided that I would put the best musicians that I could possibly find together and that
I would be the least talented in the group - going way - let's see who I can find, who's
the best.
And that included people from Buffalo, from Syracuse, and the surrounding area.
I think even now only about half of the band is from Rochester.
So oh and Toronto.
Of course Pat LaBarbera would come down very often to join us.
So that's how I organize it.
But not in terms of writing, I write what I feel like writing.
And often it's not a jazz thing.
But it's always fun.
MR: What do you hear on the radio now that might make its way into your playlist?
GM: Good question.
I'm not apt to find it from the radio.
Somebody will mention - my daughter, you know, has been a great influence, and of course
she's quite a few years younger than I am.
But those are the kinds of - my wife has wonderful suggestions, either people or particular songs
or albums.
And that's the sort of thing that's apt to work its way into the book.
On the other hand, if we're doing something, and we often do, an important event where
somebody would like to hear a song that we don't happen to have, a lot of things have
come in to the book through that.
And I have a good time, that "Sentimental Journey" chart that I remember mentioning,
came because a guy who owns about fourteen hotels in the area had his fiftieth wedding
anniversary and that was their wedding song.
And I have a really fun chart on "Sentimental Journey."
I would never have played it with the band, but I do now.
MR: Earlier today I had a pretty intense interview with Bill Dobbins.
GM: Ah yes.
MR: And he talked about chord substitutions some.
And it's something that I struggle with, how to hear them, find them.
Do you have any methods you use to just like spice things up?
GM: In the context that I usually play - and that is my new blues band, which is a guitar
quartet, the guitar, piano, bass and drums.
And two of the guys sing.
We do a variety of standards, some others, but I mean blues and that sort of orientation.
And spicing it up is part of what I have in mind.
I mean I often do it if I see a musician that will play "Ain't No Sunshine" when she's gone,
and we have some really interesting harmonies for that, and with that particular format
I have the freedom to kind of nudge in different directions.
So chord substitutions, there's a kind of modal thing that I find very interesting,
and that's one good example of it, extending the harmonies modally as opposed to, you know,
doing something that goes up a half-step and then comes back down or turns around to a
different chord.
Just the kind of overall sound is different when I'm - I mean these guys play jam sessions
and play a lot of gigs in different situations where I'm not the keyboardist, and I can promise
you it sounds different from when we do it.
And I don't do that to in any way show off, but just to kind of add to or color or, in
a very subtle way, reorganize this music that everybody has heard a thousand times in their
life.
And I think that's a very gratifying thing, for me, it's a very gratifying thing to be
able to do.
Bill, as you said, in an intense and in a much different kind of context does that to
an extent that, you know, is quite farther out and more than I would ever be involved
with.
MR: Do you have any opinions or a take on jazz education?
GM: Oh I think it's fantastic.
For fifteen years I gave one course a year at Syracuse University, the History of Jazz.
A lot of people thought I was teaching piano.
The History of Jazz.
And during this time I've brought up - the subject of jazz education comes up.
And first of all I don't think that anybody can teach jazz as such.
You can't find somebody who's just not a jazz player and make him a jazz player.
Now you can give this person the tools, the comprehension of music generally, the capability
to play an instrument or instruments, and then explain how the techniques for playing
jazz.
But I think that if you're a good player you'll become a good player.
And this will help you do it faster.
But I don't think it can create it.
The other thing I explained to these people was that I said, "Do you know how lucky you
are being even here at Syracuse University in the jazz band."
They had the jazz band and they did this and that.
And of course at Eastman or at some of the other major schools with jazz programs, lucky
to have this sort of opportunity.
First of all, it came about with Stan Kenton and his jazz summer camps, where he would
take the band, probably because they didn't have that many gigs, bring them into a college
and hook up a performance, a person-to-person connection with the guys in the band and the
students, and make a tour out of it.
The other thing is that when my brother was a student at Eastman School of Music - and
I was not so I didn't have any risks - but we used to get together on Saturday, write
some big band charts, get enough guys and play in one of the large practice rooms at
Eastman.
And believe it or not, we had to be careful not to get caught.
Because if you were caught doing that at the time you might well be subject to expulsion.
I mean they just didn't want to know about - it was bad for everything, including your
embouchure, and astounding.
As I was saying, fortunately I was not at risk.
But all the rest of them were.
MR: "He made me do it."
GM: Yeah, right.
Well and then of course coming out of there, people like Lew Soloff, Allen Vizutti, I mean
people that could absolutely play the best of anything that they might ever have mentioned
over there, including jazz.
MR: I know Don Menza said a funny thing about Fredonia.
He said, "Playing Dixieland was a misdemeanor and playing bebop was a felony."
GM: Yeah, it's not always had a big welcome mat, at least as things went along it changed.
But there was a time, as recent as the middle sixties - now that might sound like the stone
age to some people who might be watching or listening to this - but it just wasn't that
long ago.
And then of course almost within the same breath I would mention - this was in about
1985 or so.
So it was only fifteen or twenty years earlier that I was talking about.
But then I would mention some spectacular and wonderful from Louis Armstrong to Duke
Ellington to Nat Cole, all of whom had major run-ins with racism that included guns and
bombs.
And I said, "Do you realize how recent this is?"
And at the time - do you know that only, I mean it couldn't have been only five or ten
years, at that time, that they had made - it used to be against the law to have a mixed
marriage in Mississippi, right?
And that, recently did they change that.
In the sense of history it's so very, very important to understand not only the music
that was created.
And some if it is - most of it is miraculous.
But under the circumstances.
MR: Did you ever run into any racial issues?
GM: Yes.
Yeah.
I was at Syracuse University, early on, this was the first time I was there.
And a group, bass player, drummer and a singer came through to play at a club in Syracuse,
heard about me and hired me to play the gig.
They were going up to a place along the St. Lawrence, I think it was Malone or Potsdam
or somewhere up there - and - the following week.
And since it was the break, the semester break, they asked me to come up.
And I did.
And the first thing we did was try to find the hotel.
And we kept getting turned away.
One of the times, and this was not that long ago, one of the times the fella says, "If
you want to stay okay, but - " and we ended up staying in Canada, and had to come across
the border to play the gig.
Now fortunately that happened a short time.
But on the other hand, a whole lot later on, well, I don't want to talk about incidents
but fortunately never professionally.
It never came up again that you can't come into the club.
Finding accommodations could sometimes be a little bit of a dance, but even at that
we always did.
But of course we got away with it.
We were the next generation.
The older guys faced that all the time.
MR: Did you ever have any trouble as far as being a leader?
GM: Yes.
MR: Trouble with a capital T. Club owners?
GM: Well I interrupted your question.
MR: Well I wasn't sure how I was going to end the question, but just being a band leader
can be a chore.
GM: Oh not only that.
It's hard to explain how complicated it is, especially if you're essentially, I'm it.
I get the phone call.
Salesman.
Negotiator.
Legal guy who sends out the contract, collects, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
It's mind boggling.
Oh and then, a big band might have, as mine does, fifteen or sixteen players at a time.
Sometimes a little bit more.
But they're not always the same people, so that there might often be as many as twenty-two
or twenty-three people on the itinerary, and I have to make sure that the right people
- only once did I foul up.
I had too many saxophone players at a job - the Newport Jazz Festival comes through
and used to play at Canandaigua, nearby, and that was - but, so far - and it's not easy.
And then, on the bandstand, I have to try to play well.
I have to be sure that what we're going to play is the right thing to do.
I have to conduct or, most of the charts that I write and that we play don't have, you know,
front, middle and end.
It has front, solos with middle, so that those solos are assigned at the time.
And I also mic the band and here is the mixing board.
MR: On your left is the mixing board?
Now who moves the gear?
GM: Oh who moves the gear?
No that's the one thing.
I always said that I would consider myself a success when I didn't have to move that
damn piano anymore.
Now this is after the second hernia operation, right?
Fortunately we've gotten there.
I can't do that anymore.
MR: Yeah.
It gets heavier every year.
GM: But there's so much to do.
And not to say anything about the interaction among the players in the band, which miraculously
I've never had a problem with.
But I know that in other groups there certainly have been.
MR: Yeah.
You don't have to be a den mother on top of everything else.
GM: Right.
MR: Wow.
GM: And of course you always want everybody's cell phone number in your pocket just in case
they don't remember.
MR: Some things have gotten easier to help out.
Yeah, there's nothing like that feeling of, where's the drummer?
Gee.
And interestingly enough, you've been sampled.
GM: Oh yeah.
It's hard for me to even talk about that because I don't know all of the music that I'm sampled
on.
But on at least four or five of the most famous ones, I can't play that for anybody.
I mean it's filthy.
MR: Oh I see what you mean.
GM: Well what happened was that it started with this guy called Jaylib.
I think that was his name and he got into using a piece of my "Diana in the Autumn Wind."
But what he did was he took a thirty-second piece and looped it so that in the case of
that track, my music was on the entire track.
Now Chuck has been sampled by a lot of very famous rappers, used by Snoop Dogg and that.
They usually take a small, maybe fifteen seconds, and tuck it in somewhere and then that's the
end of that and it's small, comparatively small.
But that makes the track half mine when I'm on the whole thing.
So and then this fella, his name was Talib Kweli.
And I have to admit I never even had heard his name before.
But I find out he's famous.
He's - Mos Def and to make a long story short - he did the same thing, took a short section,
made it underneath the entire rap, and his organization called and asked for permission,
and we worked out a deal.
And then I didn't hear anything for four or five months, I figured I probably missed the
cut.
Thank goodness for the Internet.
I looked up the most recent Kweli album and guess who's on it?
Call the New York lawyers.
So we got that straightened out.
But then he went out and sold a half-million of those, and then Guerilla Black and "People
Under the Stairs" and I love that T-U-T-S and Ghost Space Killah.
There's at least six or eight of them that have sampled substantial portions of "Diana
in the Autumn Wind."
Now why that one?
Who knows?
MR: That was just what I was going to ask.
GM: Well the even wilder thing is that that was something that I kind of organized and
recorded and put out.
And there weren't more than 500 copies of that LP printed, let alone how ever many years
later somebody found one somewhere, but they've gone from being maybe fifty or sixty or a
hundred dollars a copy, the originals.
Oh yeah.
MR: Do you have any yourself?
GM: I do.
MR: That's good.
I think that song, that version of it, captured a moment.
I mean it captured a sound that was happening in that time.
GM: Oh the Diana?
Oh absolutely.
MR: I think it did and I would guess that has something to do with why they've zeroed
in on that.
GM: Well they use at least four tracks from the album, one of which is "Boy with Toys,"
which I think is one of Chuck's best.
That's the one with Jerome Richardson on soprano saxophone, and just great players.
MR: Does that go back to that thing he did with the Paul Klee paintings?
GM: Yes.
There was this fellow, his names was Roger Karshner, who was a fairly big deal pop producer.
He had a group called The Outsiders, and Chuck did a lot of the horns and stuff behind that.
Those were some fun dates.
But he asked Chuck to do a group of songs that eventually had words to them.
It was a vocal group with kind of folk music, drums and bass behind it, and a guitarist,
called the National Gallery, which existed only on that album.
And Chuck wrote a group of songs, including "Diana in the Autumn Wind," "Boy with Toys,"
"Pond with Swans" and "Long Hair Soulful."
Those are the four that I remember vividly.
And Paul Klee.
And subsequent to that he did it, in a different style, for the recordings that we did.
MR: Right.
I actually have that record.
GM: Oh you do?
The Diana?
MR: Both.
GM: Oh.
Subsequently four of those tracks from the "Diana in the Autumn Wind" album came to be
part of the "Sing Along Junk" album that was my first on Mercury.
But how lucky can one get?
We talked about players.
That band consisted of Snooky Young, Lew Soloff, Jon Faddis.
That was the trumpet section - oh and Marvin Stamm.
That was the trumpet section.
Paul Faulise, Tony Studd, Wayne Andre, that's the three trombones.
And then Frank Wess, Joe Farrell, Jerome Richardson, Mike Mainieri, Tony Levin, Steve Gadd - oh
and Jimmy Buffington and Earl Chapin, two of the best horn players that ever existed.
And I remember we were worried about - we actually hired this guy that was a special
flute player because we thought we would need it because some of those parts were really
hard.
The whole section played the flute parts, they were doubling up with the other parts.
Great players.
And of course, the thing that I love so much is the kind of respect that they show.
Now whether it came from hearing the music, but you know, we walked in there as kids with
those guys.
Oh Clark Terry was on the thing too.
I have him as a soloist on one of the charts.
They showed us the respect that the did.
And we were children compared to these honchos who had come up, the Ellington band, the Basie
band, and all the rest of that, and played their butts off for us.
And I remember one time, and I've always been a kind of nut about timeframe and all that
kind of thing.
We were running out of time for this - we did all of that in two three-hour sessions.
Yeah.
Those were the miracle days.
But we were kind of bumping against the timeline and, you know, wanted to do one more take
and then said oh gee.
And I can't remember who, one of the honchos in the section -
MR: Wow, what a memory.
That was in a New York studio?
GM: Yeah.
Oh I do remember Ray Alonge.
He's another incredible horn player.
Yeah.
"Go for it."
MR: Nice.
Yeah those are the - you had quite the ensemble there.
Wow.
GM: Well the other thing there is I find, and I never thought this would be happening
to me, especially as I've been around as long as I have, but there are many times, especially
in concert with the big band but other times as well, where I really get that tingling
feeling, yeah.
I say wow.
Okay that'll go away.
But I think it's part of the reason that I've been reasonably healthy and joyful through
my life, of course family and other aspects, but nonetheless from the music part.
MR: Did your kids feel there was something special about you making a living as a musician?
GM: Oh yeah.
Well there was a time when they were let's say five and seven years old and their mother
and I had parted.
So there were regular kind of weekend visits, but there was always that time in the summer
when we'd spend a month together.
And it was during that time that I was either on the road on tour with my own group or with
Chuck and an orchestra, and they of course were there too.
Never did I hire a babysitter, find somebody who would look after then.
Non mai as they would say in Italian.
Not never.
There were so many concerts that they spent with their chair right next to the piano up
on the top.
In Las Vegas, at a one o'clock in the morning concert and my son was there and he actually
nodded, but that's okay, and see the world.
I mean there aren't too many places in the United States that I would say gee you should
have seen this and didn't.
And then the other thing of course it was a fairy tale, but I says, "You're adults now,
five and seven or whatever it was, six and eight, and you can certainly handle your own
luggage and your own air ticket and all that kind of thing."
And of course I was always there.
They couldn't see me watching to make sure.
But they were, "We're ready."
Yes.
Check into a hotel, do what needs to be done.
MR: They became worldly.
GM: Well they certainly had an experience that not too many other people have had.
MR: Wow.
Do you have any immediate goals?
Keep doing what you're doing?
GM: Frankly, only better.
Yeah.
I've gotten to play a lot more solo piano lately.
It's been a comparatively short time that I've liked to do that.
And I do like to do that.
It's a certain kind of freedom and capability in terms of not having to worry about who
else might know what I'm about to do or be familiar with what I'm about to do.
And the other thing is the reaction to it.
I think that there is, in the situations that I get to play solo piano, there's a kind of
recollection of people playing solo piano in social situations and an appreciation for
the kind of playing that I do in the situation that - there's a place here in Rochester called
the Valley Club.
It's been around since pre-1900, once in a 1910 encyclopedia.
A 1910 encyclopedia.
I looked up Rochester, New York.
Well first of all the encyclopedia had nothing on air travel, jazz, cars.
Rochester, New York, Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, the Valley Club.
That's how august it is.
So I played there, a series of solo piano things this past summer.
And it was astounding.
A. The cross section demographically, I mean there were people who really have been around
for a while.
And there are a lot of their grandchildren.
But you know formally there was something different and unique about this experience
of being at this really elegant place, dining usually.
But to have the kind of music that's not just part of the wallpaper but works in that context.
And the feedback, and of course you get that kind of feedback and it can't help but make
you feel joyful, especially when you're playing something worthwhile.
MR: That's a real skill, to be able to play artistically and yet fit the venue.
GM: Um hum.
Be interesting, be exciting, but you don't have to be loud.
I mean that's a lesson that the quartet that I play with - I mean there are times, let's
say on a Friday night, when there's a wedding at the hotel Saturday, and Friday night everybody
has come in for the wedding.
And about an hour before we finish playing they're ready to go, right?
And we'll knock their socks off and set their ears back.
Because we can get heavy and loud.
That seems to be part of it.
But for the longest time they would serve dinner to these four tables of people who
were on the same platform, same bandstand next to us, no problem at all.
This was of course earlier in the evening.
But to have that capability.
I think that so many important aspects of - I don't know what you would call the course,
like "how to make a living as a musician."
But things that people just don't take into account, things that I learned from Dizzy.
I mean oh man.
I always knew that he was having a great time, because he would let you know that he as having
a great time, by what he said, by the way he acted.
And I'll think of at least three other examples of that.
But the idea that you're going to kind of like have this here I am, either too quiet
- in terms of your demeanor - it's just the music that matters.
Well not if people are looking at you.
It's just the music that matters if nobody's looking.
But you have to convey the music visually.
And I don't mean that you're going to do a Jerry Lee Lewis and dance around.
But just the idea that you're enjoying what you're doing might be an important aspect
of what you're trying to present.
MR: Those are words of wisdom.
That's exactly the kind of thing I was hoping you might talk about.
Because it's hard to teach that in school.
And it is important that things look as good as possible, to go with whatever you're playing.
GM: Well the other thing is there's this kind of attitude maybe - the concept that I shouldn't
be talking about that, because that's non-musical, you see that's not part of the music education.
At a concert, and I won't say who or when or where, but we played a concert with an
orchestra within the last five years, and it was obviously my brother's group and all
that.
And I took one of the guys, a new guy on the band, aside.
He had been with the band a bit but it was the first time that we had been on the bandstand
together.
And I did it casually, you know, just to say a few words.
And I mentioned to him, very specifically I said, "You know you're a spectacular player,
and I'm knocked out with what you're doing, but there are a lot of people out there that
don't know that you're as spectacular a player as you are, because you're not conveying that
at all."
And so let's say for instance that your customers, your audience, whatever it is, the people
who make it possible for you to do this might have ten percent of them aware of what you're
doing musically.
But then again listen to Grant Geissman or Larry Carlton or Robben Ford - all wonderful
players, and anybody who ever sees them play would know that.
Anybody who hears them play would know that too, but seeing them, that's another exponential
aspect of what they do.
Anyway.
MR: Well said.
GM: Preachy, preachy, preachy.
MR: No.
Very well put.
Very important.
And we're just about running out of time here.
Anything that you want to add that I didn't really ask about?
GM: Well just what a lot of people don't see and what exists in a way that's too hard to
explain is family.
And I mentioned my kids and folks, and my wife, who whenever I'm writing a chart hears
it the first thousand times that it gets played, right?
And then later on at dinner says, "You know I liked the changes you've made in that."
But way more than that, the kind of family support, love and all that kind of thing,
that's where the music comes from.
MR: Like "Bellavia."
GM: Well, or if you get a chance listen to Gerry Niewood play a song that I love, a song
that I wrote for my wife called "Bellezza."
It's a ballad.
It's a saxophone ballad.
And everybody's got something to say.
MR: Well on that note, thank you very much for your help today.
GM: Oh you're welcome indeed.
MR: Very enjoyable.
GM: I enjoyed it as well, thanks.
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