Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, this is Sugar Steve from Quest Love Supreme. This March,
Speaker 2: we're celebrating women's history at QLs, something that we've done
Speaker 2: for years. Back in March of twenty twenty two, we
Speaker 2: spoke to Terry Lynn Carrington about her years as a
Speaker 2: jazz prodigy, some of the prejudice she faced as a
Speaker 2: young female drummer playing with elder males, and how she
Speaker 2: kicks down the doors for others as founder and artistic
Speaker 2: director of the Berkeley Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice
Speaker 2: as a jazz guy. I really enjoyed this episode. Whether
Speaker 2: you heard it when it was first released or this
Speaker 2: is your first time, we hope you enjoyed.
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, another episode of Quest Loves Supreme. I'm
Speaker 3: your host Quests Love. We got Team Supreme in the
Speaker 3: hit House Fontigolo. Wow new If Bill Sherman were here,
Speaker 3: he would notice that you're in yet another room in
Speaker 3: the house.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is my studio. It's just easier for me here.
Speaker 4: I normally recording my living room, but my.
Speaker 3: Son was going to school out uhstairs, so I just
Speaker 3: bring it upstairs to the studio.
Speaker 4: And do it here.
Speaker 3: Wait, virtual school is still going on or is it
Speaker 3: optional them as well?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's option.
Speaker 4: We did it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he'll be going back to classroom for the junior year,
Speaker 3: but for this.
Speaker 4: Year it was just the numbers around here were crazy,
Speaker 4: so we put him in virtual Smart. We gotta be
Speaker 4: smart man. Uh, Steve, where are you at right now?
Speaker 4: I'm where you are?
Speaker 2: In the sixty seven degrees at thirty rock.
Speaker 4: We're freezing in thirty rock right now.
Speaker 6: And yeah, keep that covid out.
Speaker 4: It's cold. I know. Yeah, I freeze the COVID out definitely. Uh.
Speaker 4: Where are you at with black part behind you?
Speaker 6: Lamert all day?
Speaker 7: That's where I'm Yoh yeah, I forgot to tell you
Speaker 7: was here.
Speaker 4: I took my first visit to Lahmurt Park.
Speaker 6: You know why I can't stand.
Speaker 3: I only had only had like thirty five minutes to
Speaker 3: run the Juneteenth.
Speaker 6: He was at the June teen festival.
Speaker 4: I think I was in a legit episode of Insecure. Yo.
Speaker 6: Somebody told me they saw black thought I thought they
Speaker 6: was lying.
Speaker 4: It was awesome. Yeah. I went to uh juneteen for
Speaker 4: half a second. Then I went to.
Speaker 3: Uh the Body Rule party like in another side of
Speaker 3: l a like Saturday.
Speaker 4: Man, it was.
Speaker 3: It was one of the nicest, blackest experiences I've ever
Speaker 3: had in Los Angeles.
Speaker 6: People don't know about that. I'm glad you said that.
Speaker 4: I forgot. Yeah, you're you're a Lamert Parker. Did you
Speaker 4: enjoy it?
Speaker 6: I loved it?
Speaker 7: This was an amazing Juneteenth weekend. I mean, thank god
Speaker 7: we came through. It was looking sketchy for a minute
Speaker 7: because of Walmart and then but it came through nicely.
Speaker 4: Damn ice cream.
Speaker 5: You know, Bill, you know Billy Higgins had the World
Speaker 5: stage there, so you probably if this is kind of
Speaker 5: a Lamert Park yeah, then you never experienced that. But
Speaker 5: that was really dope back in the day. I'm learning.
Speaker 3: I'm learning, well, you know, if we if we bring
Speaker 3: the festival back to Los Angeles, I think we're going
Speaker 3: to travel with it, so we're looking at like Texas
Speaker 3: and other spots.
Speaker 4: But I definitely want to do another student team. Oh god, yeah.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, did you did it?
Speaker 4: You did well?
Speaker 3: There's nothing exclusive about one in the spread the June
Speaker 3: teaenth love a Round anyway, y'all. As I was saying,
Speaker 3: you know, I would say that this year for me
Speaker 3: has been an awesome year for bucket listing, and I'm checking.
Speaker 4: I guess I could say I'm checking a lot.
Speaker 3: Of my musical heroes, bringing them on the show and
Speaker 3: neuro and out on them. And our guest today is
Speaker 3: absolutely no exception. I'll say that she's probably the first
Speaker 3: young person male or female, the first young person that
Speaker 3: I ever saw on a drum set. And I guess
Speaker 3: at the time when I first I forget the name
Speaker 3: of the show was like on PPS, like Rebop or
Speaker 3: something like that. I forget what it was, but it's
Speaker 3: definitely one of those like local Boston shows or whatever.
Speaker 3: And to see a young kid on a drum set
Speaker 3: definitely made an impression on me when I was a kid,
Speaker 3: I forget what year it was, like, I was like
Speaker 3: six or seven when I first saw you.
Speaker 4: I think you were like twelve, thirteen or whatever. But
Speaker 4: she's literally done it all.
Speaker 3: Grammy's college professor, two time late night band leader, activist, producer,
Speaker 3: collaborated with such luminaries like the great Clark, Terry, Wayne Shorter,
Speaker 3: Herbie Hancock.
Speaker 4: I know that you have to be in the meditation
Speaker 4: if you if you have.
Speaker 5: If you collaborate with those two, but I'm a bad Buddhist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's Ron's Spalding the whole mosaic project with you know,
Speaker 3: Diana Crawl and and and the likes al Ji Rose,
Speaker 3: Dan Gets Clark, Terry Wood he Shaw.
Speaker 4: I can go on and on and on. This has
Speaker 4: been a long time coming.
Speaker 3: Thank you for your patience, because this is one of
Speaker 3: these episodes where, you know, because of the courses and
Speaker 3: the events of my life in the last month or so,
Speaker 3: I've had to put this off at least three or
Speaker 3: four times.
Speaker 4: You've been very patient.
Speaker 3: Finally I can say, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Quest
Speaker 3: of Supreme Terry Lynn Carrington.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Yes, I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 4: How are you today?
Speaker 5: I'm great. This is my pleasure talking to you. I'm
Speaker 5: a big fan and I love everything that you do.
Speaker 5: So the aberration is mutual.
Speaker 3: We've never had an in depth, heart to heart like conversation.
Speaker 3: So whenever I hear through other people like oh you know, Terrrisis,
Speaker 3: what's up or whatever, you know it. Occasionally you've come by,
Speaker 3: like I've seen you play a few gigs or whatever,
Speaker 3: and I'm still mind blowing. Like there's there's always this
Speaker 3: thing where you know, jazz musicians are so not above
Speaker 3: the fray, but just like above whatever is below them
Speaker 3: as far as pop music concern is concerned or whatever,
Speaker 3: Like it's all one thing.
Speaker 5: It's all black music, you know, Like I mean, it's
Speaker 5: all comes from the blues. So there was something something
Speaker 5: would be wrong with me if I didn't appreciate what
Speaker 5: you did. You know, that would be like if any
Speaker 5: you know, if I had a jazz friend, you know,
Speaker 5: didn't appreciate you, I would be looking at them sideways.
Speaker 4: Well, I thank you for that. I appreciate.
Speaker 3: Where are you talking to this right now from you
Speaker 3: have a very interesting background. It looks like a mall
Speaker 3: in a prison. At the same time, I have.
Speaker 5: A few backgrounds. I'm at home, but that's just my
Speaker 5: Berkeley background. Here's another Berkeley background. Yes, here's an animated
Speaker 5: one with I don't know who's that, Chicak Yoh's red
Speaker 5: and Alice Coltrane. Just when I just want to see
Speaker 5: Obama drop the mic when I'm missing my grandmother. Okay,
Speaker 5: there's our slogan. You can't really see it, but it's
Speaker 5: jazz without patriarchy. Oh, and this one you might recognize.
Speaker 5: This is from soul because you know, I was a
Speaker 5: consultant on soul.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I know, like they went above and
Speaker 3: beyond the call of duty to ask every wow jazz
Speaker 3: Luminaria for their for their advice.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was fun doing that, was doing some meetings.
Speaker 5: The first one Herbie was that I was probably the
Speaker 5: only one in the room that you know, might have
Speaker 5: a difference in opinion, you know, with Herbie and be
Speaker 5: able to actually say it right, you know what I mean,
Speaker 5: because everybody gets scared. So yeah, wow, here's my biggest mentor. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So anyway, we.
Speaker 6: Just had him on the show shorter.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah cool.
Speaker 3: I'm going to say I was shocked at the amount
Speaker 3: of feedback we got for that particular episode, like a
Speaker 3: lot of heavy jazz heads hit us because kind of
Speaker 3: thank you for asking questions that we nor like aren't
Speaker 3: normally asked, you know, and other Yeah.
Speaker 6: Just letting him talk, That's what we did.
Speaker 4: We let him talk exactly.
Speaker 5: That's the right thing.
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna start with you, Terry, the way I
Speaker 3: always start the episode. Can you tell me what your
Speaker 3: first musical memory was?
Speaker 5: Wow, you know, they happened so long ago that it's
Speaker 5: kind of like a movie that I'm a part of
Speaker 5: that I watched and it feels real because I watched it.
Speaker 5: But was I really there? You know what I mean?
Speaker 5: Like I played tambourine when I was five years old
Speaker 5: on stage with Ross and Roland Kirk, and that was
Speaker 5: probably the first time I was on stage.
Speaker 4: How many saxophones did he play?
Speaker 5: Always at least three until he had a stroke, and
Speaker 5: then I'll see him after that, and then he played
Speaker 5: with one hand, one of the saxophone, but he might
Speaker 5: have even worked too with the one hand, right, No, any.
Speaker 4: Of that's surreal to you. I mean, I'm with the movie.
Speaker 3: Those kids that I see, especially kids that are I
Speaker 3: guess you could say progeny of like other I know
Speaker 3: that your father and your grandfather were musicians as well,
Speaker 3: so oftentimes you know, at least there's a realization moment
Speaker 3: of what you're really into, but that usually comes in
Speaker 3: your teens. But in the beginning, it's just like, Hey,
Speaker 3: this dad and this granddad and here's some musicians around
Speaker 3: the house. Like, but anything strike you odd about this?
Speaker 3: You know this this guy with dread or I don't
Speaker 3: know if he had dread locks back then, but playing
Speaker 3: three saxophones at the same time, Like, nothing seemed odd
Speaker 3: about that to you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but you know, when you're young, you don't really
Speaker 5: pay attention to all that, Like you're just doing you
Speaker 5: And I was having fun so and I was getting attention,
Speaker 5: So I knew I was different from the other, you know,
Speaker 5: elementary school kids that I was hanging out with, because
Speaker 5: Ebony came to school to take pictures of me, you.
Speaker 4: Know, I was affl after that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I mean from the black kids. You know,
Speaker 5: there might have been I don't know, six or seven
Speaker 5: in my class, so of course they knew what was happening.
Speaker 5: The other kids, I'm not sure they knew what evan
Speaker 5: it was.
Speaker 4: But where did you grow up? Where were you born?
Speaker 5: In Medford, Massachusetts?
Speaker 3: How far is that from Boston to anyone outside of
Speaker 3: New England, like Massachusetts, just like Boston, and then a
Speaker 3: bunch of suburbs areas.
Speaker 6: Where New Addition is from.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Roxburgh.
Speaker 3: Whoa, Oh damn, you grew up in Roxburgh.
Speaker 5: Oh hell, no, okay, you go to Roxburgh. But my
Speaker 5: dad would remind me, you know, you're from West Medford,
Speaker 5: but our area of town, West Medford was the most
Speaker 5: heavily settled black area outside of Boston. So like, for instance,
Speaker 5: in my high school's four thousand people in high school,
Speaker 5: close to four thousand, and at a time when I
Speaker 5: was in high school, there were three hundred and sixty
Speaker 5: five black kids, which is not quite even ten percent.
Speaker 5: But when we had lunch, you know, I'm sitting with
Speaker 5: two hundred black kids, So it felt like it was,
Speaker 5: you know, it was a black environment.
Speaker 4: You know, for our circle, it was Boston, the south
Speaker 4: of the North.
Speaker 3: Again, like I'm so triggered by anything to do with Massachusetts,
Speaker 3: I just naturally think that Massachusetts is just one of
Speaker 3: these states that escaped you know, the Confederate you know,
Speaker 3: just based on what we've learned about it. But like
Speaker 3: in your childhood, was it like that at all?
Speaker 5: Or I mean I came like right after the busing situation,
Speaker 5: and there was like a bit of a riot at
Speaker 5: my high school about you know, surrounded by some kind
Speaker 5: of race or about some kind of racial incident. But
Speaker 5: I haven't right before I got to high school, and
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, I was going into Boston weekly.
Speaker 5: At least. I got a scholarship to Berkeley when I
Speaker 5: was eleven, and I was going weekly.
Speaker 3: I got to say, you went to Berkeley while still
Speaker 3: in in junior high school?
Speaker 4: Correct, So I.
Speaker 5: Was elementary when I started, but that I went once
Speaker 5: a week. So it wasn't like that big deal. You know,
Speaker 5: I went after school once a week and took private
Speaker 5: lessons and ensemble deal special. But what I mean is
Speaker 5: it wasn't like stressful.
Speaker 4: Berkeley reject that's a big deal.
Speaker 5: Well that's their loss, right.
Speaker 4: Damn right. I'm not bitter at all.
Speaker 5: But what I'm gonna say though, is, you know, Boston is,
Speaker 5: in a weird way, is kind of the most liberal
Speaker 5: and conservative places you'll ever be. It's a total, you know,
Speaker 5: dichotomy of these things. And everybody hates the Celtics and
Speaker 5: all that, but you know, nobody ever talks about how
Speaker 5: we had the first black coach and one of the
Speaker 5: first black players. Hmm.
Speaker 6: I never thought that about the Celtics for real.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just saying, like, there's a lot
Speaker 5: of things wrong racially with what's happened here, but you know,
Speaker 5: there's it's it's not all bad. And there were, you know,
Speaker 5: places like where I grew up, I had heavily populated
Speaker 5: black areas, and it was very you know, rich in culture.
Speaker 3: All right, So if ever the Patriots or the Celtics
Speaker 3: went again, I'll add you to my new edition file. Like, Okay, well,
Speaker 3: at least you seven are happy.
Speaker 6: So universal health care? Mayor Massachusetts did that first too?
Speaker 6: Remember free health care?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, if you're from a place, there's
Speaker 5: got to be some love, you know, Like I used to.
Speaker 5: I used to hate to go to Philadelphia, but you know,
Speaker 5: I got happier as I went, you know, so as
Speaker 5: I learn more about the city. Really, you know, I
Speaker 5: used to not like Chicago, you know whatever. I'm like,
Speaker 5: you have these experiences, and it's just as you grow
Speaker 5: you have the other experiences that can make a place.
Speaker 5: I have some nostalgia at the very least you.
Speaker 4: Didn't like traveling in general or.
Speaker 5: Just yeah, I mean, well I liked it. Now I
Speaker 5: don't particularly care for it. I have a love hate
Speaker 5: relationship because I am happiest sometimes when I'm just in
Speaker 5: a hotel room and can close the shades and no
Speaker 5: block everybody out. I know, because I'm not dealing with Oh,
Speaker 5: I got to fix this in my house. You know,
Speaker 5: I come home and I get stressed. I'm like, oh
Speaker 5: my god, I got that paint the house, I need
Speaker 5: a new roof, you know, all those things start kicking in.
Speaker 5: But when I'm away, I can just I can just
Speaker 5: focus on whatever it is I'm doing.
Speaker 7: Can I ask a question, because I just want to know,
Speaker 7: you say, from the jump, jazz was in your life
Speaker 7: in the sense that like no other you weren't even
Speaker 7: as a kid in school, because I mean you said
Speaker 7: Berkeley when you were eleven.
Speaker 6: So I'm like, did anything.
Speaker 7: Else ever get into the household, er into your ears
Speaker 7: outside of the lot?
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, I mean I was. I mean I listened
Speaker 5: to the radio, and I listened to you know, like
Speaker 5: my father started me off listening to what he would
Speaker 5: consume more rhythm and blues, which at the time we
Speaker 5: were talking about the early seventies. But for him, like
Speaker 5: he played in horn sections with James Brown and Ruth
Speaker 5: Brown and people like that when he was in college,
Speaker 5: and so that's the kind of music he started me
Speaker 5: off listening to because he thought I would be able
Speaker 5: to relate to that, you know, more than John Coletrain
Speaker 5: and Miles Davis. So I was listening to lots of Oregon.
Speaker 5: You know lots of blues Jack McDuff, Jimy McGriff, and
Speaker 5: you know some rhythm and blues of course, James Brown,
Speaker 5: Ray Charles Raytha Franklin. And those are the records, you know,
Speaker 5: a lot of the records that I remember, you know,
Speaker 5: as a kid.
Speaker 3: Can you tell me the first out that you purchased
Speaker 3: with your own money? Not just that around the house,
Speaker 3: like oh, let me see what dad's James Brown's altmore
Speaker 3: into but like, yeah.
Speaker 5: You know, like I don't know if I purchased it,
Speaker 5: but I think I must have asked my parents to
Speaker 5: get get it for me, because I'm not sure they
Speaker 5: would have. For whatever reason, I was obsessed. And I
Speaker 5: remember I had one of those kids it was green too,
Speaker 5: one of those kids, uh phonograph players that had a
Speaker 5: little speaker built in.
Speaker 3: Right post preschool or whatever, Fisher Price record players. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I feel like I know what this record or what
Speaker 3: was the record?
Speaker 5: Oh no, it was the Fifth Dimension. It was. I
Speaker 5: was obsessed with Aquarius. H yeah, for some reason, the
Speaker 5: age of the Aquarius, Like are you one? No no, no,
Speaker 5: I'm a leo. Okay, I forget it for that being
Speaker 5: the record.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm just saying, no,
Speaker 3: it's for being a leo.
Speaker 4: Get extra points if you're in a query for drumming.
Speaker 3: Though, you know, I know that there's a sect of
Speaker 3: people whose opinions are like, you know, at least for
Speaker 3: ginger pairing, Like there are instruments that it probably deemed
Speaker 3: that men should use only as far as masculine or
Speaker 3: feminine whatever, like the women on drums really, in my opinion,
Speaker 3: like an adjustment pre nineteen eighties. But at all, did
Speaker 3: anyone ever discourage you, like, well, why don't you try
Speaker 3: the piano or maybe a guitar, violin, yeah, clarinet, Yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't you know, I don't know if anybody really
Speaker 5: ever discouraged me. And I was, you know, I was
Speaker 5: confident at a young age. So like, I think what
Speaker 5: tells us story about that? For me, the best is
Speaker 5: when I met Buddy Rich for the first time. I
Speaker 5: was ten. I was a guest with Clark Terry Nice. Well,
Speaker 5: that was the thing. Everybody said, stay away from him,
Speaker 5: he's in a really bad mood. And I didn't care,
Speaker 5: and I went up to him anyway, And so then
Speaker 5: somebody stepped in and said, well, let me introduce you.
Speaker 5: To young Terry. She's a guest with Clark Terry. And
Speaker 5: he said, oh, yeah, you better not be any good.
Speaker 5: And I just looked at him and said, well, who's
Speaker 5: going to stop me?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 5: And then he said he kind of took a step back,
Speaker 5: and then he said, you want to come play with
Speaker 5: my band? Oh? You see what I mean?
Speaker 6: Flax flax?
Speaker 5: No, but it well, it wasn't that it was beautiful flax.
Speaker 5: Well yeah, because I think it's how you're raised and
Speaker 5: I was raised that this is my music.
Speaker 6: Where did that confidence come from? Terry?
Speaker 7: Like, do you remember, like did your parents something say
Speaker 7: to you, like the impetus of that, Like, I think.
Speaker 5: It's who you are. And that's why I do so
Speaker 5: much gender equity work now because every woman shouldn't have
Speaker 5: to be like me. I would go ahead to head
Speaker 5: with any man, you know what I mean. And I'm
Speaker 5: not intimidated by anyone. I can be I can be shy,
Speaker 5: and I can be insecure. Of course, we're all insecure.
Speaker 5: If I was playing a gig next to you, I
Speaker 5: would be insecure, especially if I had to play the groove,
Speaker 5: I'd be like, oh man, he's sitting next to me.
Speaker 3: You're talking about sugar Steve and his engineering skills.
Speaker 5: What I'm just saying, No, I'm serious, and so I'm
Speaker 5: just saying that doesn't mean I think you can be
Speaker 5: confident and that be a part of your personality, which
Speaker 5: doesn't mean there's these other things that you know aren't
Speaker 5: there as well. But you shouldn't have to be like
Speaker 5: me to make it, you know, you shouldn't have to
Speaker 5: have that kind of personality as a woman to to
Speaker 5: have the opportunity or the access or mentorship or apprenticeships.
Speaker 5: And so that's you know, when I realized that. That's
Speaker 5: when I because I had been looking at women saying, well,
Speaker 5: what do you mean just do it? You know, like,
Speaker 5: what do you mean just later for them? You know,
Speaker 5: like something discourage you, that should give you more impetus
Speaker 5: to you know, And then I realized, you know, they
Speaker 5: have a nervous breakdowns and shit, you know, like so
Speaker 5: I had to look at it differently.
Speaker 6: Because everybody doesn't have a foundation.
Speaker 7: Because you still had some type of foundation to let
Speaker 7: you know that that is the way to think, and
Speaker 7: these women didn't have that, so.
Speaker 5: And they don't need to. That's the whole thing. We're
Speaker 5: all different. You know, we don't have to be I
Speaker 5: was nothing around nothing but men playing, you know, for
Speaker 5: a long time, and so I ended up kind of
Speaker 5: acting like them, you know, and not be you know,
Speaker 5: having a problem being around man all the time. So
Speaker 5: I think that, you know, we should celebrate our differences.
Speaker 5: And what does a woman's aesthetic sound like in the music?
Speaker 5: You know, I think that's the question we should start
Speaker 5: to ask.
Speaker 3: I don't think I've ever went public on record with
Speaker 3: In high school, I once had a masterclass kind of
Speaker 3: session with a well known patriarch of jazz music.
Speaker 4: I guess you could say he was a.
Speaker 3: Total dick, And you know, that's actually where I was
Speaker 3: leaning towards it. Like especially, there's a there's a generation
Speaker 3: of cats who were sort of in the game in
Speaker 3: the fifties and the sixties and the seventies, who you know,
Speaker 3: don't mince words at all. They don't suffer any fools.
Speaker 3: They're very blatant and honest or whatever. And this guy
Speaker 3: just tore me up, man like everything. I didn't even
Speaker 3: get on the set, and he just looked at the
Speaker 3: loud shirt I was wearing, look at my hair. It's like,
Speaker 3: oh see, I wouldn't hire you because your hair is
Speaker 3: just like a girl's right now, you know, with that
Speaker 3: with them snakes in your hair or whatever, and like
Speaker 3: he was just going in and I remember like after
Speaker 3: that day, that day, I like distinctively remember like I'm
Speaker 3: not going the young lion route because you know, I
Speaker 3: went to school with Christian McBride and Joey at Performing
Speaker 3: Arts High School, and so I was on that that
Speaker 3: sort of track every day trying to keep up with
Speaker 3: those two and become a young lion, like, you know,
Speaker 3: because all those cats in Philly were just like even
Speaker 3: in high school, like doing sessions and what I you know,
Speaker 3: I had the opposite reaction.
Speaker 4: I actually that kind of like just got in my.
Speaker 3: Head and you know, maybe like a year later, that's
Speaker 3: when I decided, Okay, I'm gonna go to the roots
Speaker 3: route because you know, he told me that I don't
Speaker 3: look like a serious jazz cat, and you know it's
Speaker 3: I'm I'm I'm glad you can buy him, right.
Speaker 5: I love to say, where was you?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 4: No this this?
Speaker 3: You know, this guy's a legacy god in the world
Speaker 3: of jazz right now, you know, no longer with us, but.
Speaker 5: You don't want to you don't want to name his name.
Speaker 4: You know, hey, dogs Marcellus, I'll just let it out.
Speaker 5: Well, I just mean, you know, he was, you know,
Speaker 5: very kind to me. Actually he coached us once.
Speaker 4: But I feel like you're a disarming person.
Speaker 3: I feel like at the age of ten, you were
Speaker 3: very disarming with anyone that you met, you know, that
Speaker 3: would encourage you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think that that's helped, you know, with
Speaker 5: the gender equity work now, because I'll get a lot
Speaker 5: of older musicians calling me saying, you know, I guess
Speaker 5: I've been an old fart or you know, thanks for
Speaker 5: pointing this out. But you know, the bottom line is
Speaker 5: he shouldn't have to be that, and people should recognize
Speaker 5: what they're doing. And there are a lot of older
Speaker 5: musicians that basically bought into this, you know, patriarchy and
Speaker 5: brought brought into the hyper masculinity. And what I'm finding
Speaker 5: is there's a lot of young musicians from teaching at Berkeley,
Speaker 5: a lot of young male musicians that aren't digging the
Speaker 5: hyper masculinity. So they actually come to our institute because
Speaker 5: some people get it twisted and think that our institute
Speaker 5: is for women musicians or non binary musicians. It's a
Speaker 5: space that they can come and make mistakes and learn
Speaker 5: the music without having their guard up. But we have
Speaker 5: about fifty percent young men in our institute as well,
Speaker 5: because they're rejecting the hyper masculinity in jazz as well.
Speaker 5: And I think that we're really seeing a turning point
Speaker 5: right now. It's starting to really shift, and I think
Speaker 5: that the music needs that for it to live up
Speaker 5: to its full potential.
Speaker 7: So let me ask you, as a professor, then this
Speaker 7: is about the patriarchy, because how do you since it
Speaker 7: was an art form built on that, doesn't it come
Speaker 7: to a certain point where you're at an impact ask
Speaker 7: and explaining and you know, because I feel like we're
Speaker 7: in this point too of sometimes either that's what it
Speaker 7: was and we're trying to change it, or how do
Speaker 7: we make that still legendary even though that was a problem,
Speaker 7: Like how do we keep that?
Speaker 5: You know, the patriarchy was patriarchy was never good. It
Speaker 5: wasn't good for anybody, right It's white, white male patriarchy
Speaker 5: to be specific. But you know, I think that the
Speaker 5: oppressed learned how to oppress without trying. It's just, you know,
Speaker 5: that's what happens. And I felt I feel like this
Speaker 5: was you know, this is just you know, my opinion,
Speaker 5: but I feel like jazz was a space for black
Speaker 5: men to uh, you know, really feel freedom, right black
Speaker 5: men exactly, you know, because I mean, well you go back,
Speaker 5: you know, I've talked to Angela Davis about this and
Speaker 5: different people, because when slavery ended, you know, black people
Speaker 5: couldn't travel, right, they you couldn't go anywhere. And then
Speaker 5: when slavery ended and there was a little bit of freedom,
Speaker 5: the first one I think that people took advantage of
Speaker 5: was being able to move, you know, being able to
Speaker 5: to go to another town and you know, whether you're
Speaker 5: playing on the street or in a juke joint or
Speaker 5: wherever you could bring your guitar and you could. But
Speaker 5: it wasn't safe still for women to do that, okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 5: And these places were not places respectable women should women
Speaker 5: should be in.
Speaker 6: But they were there enjoying the music though.
Speaker 5: They Yeah, but not all women, you know, brothels and
Speaker 5: the music was in these places. So yeah, so it
Speaker 5: was that's what the music kind of where it was birthed, right,
Speaker 5: So it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't spaces necessarily for
Speaker 5: women to discover their artistic uh you know, the discover
Speaker 5: that they could actually do this. So they were always
Speaker 5: off to the side in the house, in the church wherever,
Speaker 5: you know, and of course playing piano. And that's why
Speaker 5: I think that's so acceptable. You know, women always play
Speaker 5: piano in the house in the church.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: So then when women started traveling and getting into you know,
Speaker 5: music and the blues, a lot of it was as singers, right,
Speaker 5: as vocalist. Then you have like you know, Bessie Smith
Speaker 5: and Mamie Smith and you know, some of the first
Speaker 5: blues women my Rainy, but they became also like sexualized,
Speaker 5: and they had you know, they were entertainers. You know,
Speaker 5: it wasn't necessarily as considered serious work. Musicians were doing
Speaker 5: the serious. You know. It was like, let's commodify this.
Speaker 5: We can commodify this, you know, woman standing up front
Speaker 5: singing the blues more than we can commodify the dude
Speaker 5: with the guitar kind of singing the blues. So those
Speaker 5: blues singers, the women, they sold more records, you know,
Speaker 5: but Bessie Smith was selling yeah. So my point is
Speaker 5: it started off like that, and you know then later
Speaker 5: of course, in the forties when the war happened, all
Speaker 5: the women emerged playing because so many men were gone.
Speaker 5: What blows my mind is that when they came back
Speaker 5: from the war, it seemed like the women disappeared, you know,
Speaker 5: it came back to the you know, those practices, and
Speaker 5: none of this really you know, surprises me. Like when
Speaker 5: I look up, I was ignorant to the story of
Speaker 5: Liberia and I just kind of found out about that
Speaker 5: the return. Yeah. Yeah. And like when I saw some
Speaker 5: footage of all the black people with the top hats
Speaker 5: and looking trying to look British and then colonizing basically
Speaker 5: the Africans, I'm like, well, why would I expect anything
Speaker 5: different in jazz? I mean, you know what I mean,
Speaker 5: it's kind of we're in music. You know, it's like
Speaker 5: you're oppressed. You just like that, you take that nature, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 5: without even knowing it's wrong sometimes.
Speaker 4: So do you feel like the age.
Speaker 3: Of the abusive, like and where we are now, like
Speaker 3: hip hop is is changing where you know, there's a
Speaker 3: sort of like a slow seed change of a lot
Speaker 3: of toxic attitudes that were long associated with hip hop.
Speaker 3: You know, we're now just starting to see the seeds
Speaker 3: of it growing, and you know, I will will assume
Speaker 3: that if it's still a thing in the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 3: twenty fifties, twenty sixty, that we'll see a total turnaround.
Speaker 3: But like kind of the the age of the abusive
Speaker 3: actor and Whiplash.
Speaker 4: Oh whipla J K.
Speaker 3: Simmons, How abusive he was?
Speaker 4: Whiplash? When you see Matt it was? Was that to you?
Speaker 4: Was it triggering?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I didn't see Whiplash, you know what.
Speaker 3: Everyone when Whiplash came out, Literally everyone asked me about it.
Speaker 5: People one about the drummer too, right, the one that
Speaker 5: was lost his hearing.
Speaker 3: I didn't see that was the one with your boy.
Speaker 4: Uh about to say Freddie Mercury.
Speaker 5: Uh, yeah, but I saw that.
Speaker 4: The sound of metal, that's the name of that movie,
Speaker 4: is amazing. That is great.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I have so many thoughts, you know, about that,
Speaker 5: But the first one that just came to my mind is, damn,
Speaker 5: how do I say this politically correct? I just mean, like,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm not so attracted to uh, you know,
Speaker 5: white dude suffering from some drum lessons. It just feels
Speaker 5: a little like.
Speaker 4: This goddamn from the Book of.
Speaker 6: Trauma by trauma.
Speaker 5: I just mean, like, yeah, you know, so like for me,
Speaker 5: like there's a lot more suffering that I'm gonna focus
Speaker 5: on if I spend any part of my days dealing
Speaker 5: with that. I'm glad he made a movie and the
Speaker 5: drums are in it and that people liked it. But
Speaker 5: you know, he could walk away probably a lot easier
Speaker 5: than you know, somebody else. And he actually, if you know, historically,
Speaker 5: he has all the tools to you know, fight back
Speaker 5: a little more than some of us. So I don't know,
Speaker 5: but anyway, uh, just as far as that whole method
Speaker 5: of teaching, I mean, yeah, this this of course, like
Speaker 5: I had like a well known drummer who's passed away
Speaker 5: and who was my teacher, and he threw a book
Speaker 5: at me once, but he said, you know, he was
Speaker 5: frustrated with his career and he quit teaching right after that.
Speaker 5: He was teaching at Berkeley, and he said, you're playing
Speaker 5: my ship. You're not supposed to play my ship.
Speaker 7: And then he that yeah, you know, because I was
Speaker 7: just thinking that's got to be something for all these.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's okay because I saw him, and
Speaker 5: we you know, I had a beautiful time hanging out before,
Speaker 5: you know, shortly before he passed, and he was living
Speaker 5: in Europe and it was Keith Copeland. Uh, you know,
Speaker 5: so it's like I didn't even I loved him, and
Speaker 5: I felt like he loved me, and I never I
Speaker 5: think my parents were a little more upset about it
Speaker 5: than me, you know, because I just I shrugged it off,
Speaker 5: you know, that was I think that's been my way.
Speaker 5: And that's another thing I just wanted to point out,
Speaker 5: since we're talking about it, everything that's happened, like anything negative,
Speaker 5: I've had to shrug it off. For me, I had
Speaker 5: to just act like it didn't happen, to keep moving
Speaker 5: and you know, beating in my brain double that's not
Speaker 5: gonna stop me, you know what I mean. Like, and
Speaker 5: so then you look back and it's hard, you know,
Speaker 5: you start thinking, like when I started playing with Esperanza
Speaker 5: and Jerry Allen, they started talking about, Oh, this feels good,
Speaker 5: like this is a space where man, I can let
Speaker 5: my hair down. I don't have, you know, I'm not
Speaker 5: what's the word. Uh, you know, there's a like a
Speaker 5: protective layer face armor. Well, I was trying to think
Speaker 5: of how Es Browns will put it and she just
Speaker 5: started talking about an armor that she was able to
Speaker 5: let go of, and then Jerry was agreeing, and I
Speaker 5: was only once sit there saying hmmm, like really, oh okay, cool, Well,
Speaker 5: whatever works for you. It took me years after that
Speaker 5: to understand, oh, I have those issues too, but I
Speaker 5: just sweep him under the rug so well that I
Speaker 5: don't deal with it because it's just it's not useful
Speaker 5: to me.
Speaker 6: I thought you were like the most free individual I
Speaker 6: ever met.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I was about to say, this is very unusual. Yeah,
Speaker 4: what do you mean.
Speaker 3: No, I'm just saying, so many people plant seeds, and
Speaker 3: you know, they plant seeds of doubt in your head
Speaker 3: and you live with it. And I just love the
Speaker 3: fact that that wasn't even like you just duct it
Speaker 3: like a boxer.
Speaker 6: But it goes somewhere, exactly, it goes somewhere. And that's
Speaker 6: what she's saying. That's why I know.
Speaker 7: That's why I take back what I said, because I'm like, oh,
Speaker 7: she puts it somewhere. It ain't.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean I wasn't conscious of it though, because
Speaker 5: you know, you know what I'm saying, and so that's
Speaker 5: just a layer. That is the way I see it.
Speaker 5: It's just hard enough to learn how to play music,
Speaker 5: any kind of music, but jazz. I mean, it's really
Speaker 5: fucking hard, right, So who wants that extra burden? Who
Speaker 5: wants that extra layer of Oh? And I have to
Speaker 5: deal with this, you know, like somebody hit on you know,
Speaker 5: I don't. I don't get hit on a whole lot,
Speaker 5: you know, without wanting to. But you know, if a
Speaker 5: band leader hit on me in the middle of a
Speaker 5: rehearsal or you know, I would just be like, oh man, really, well,
Speaker 5: you know, fantasies are good, Let's go back to playing,
Speaker 5: you know whatever. And I never thought for one minute
Speaker 5: I'm thinking of somebody, and I'll say it, it was
Speaker 5: Stan Getz. And I never thought for a minute that
Speaker 5: it meant that I would lose the gig. And then
Speaker 5: when I start talking to these young people, all of
Speaker 5: that is going through their brain.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, all of us going through their brain. And
Speaker 6: they're not standing for it.
Speaker 5: Well no, but now, but I'm talking about five ten
Speaker 5: years ago.
Speaker 6: You know, we just had to suck it out. You
Speaker 6: just suck you just yeah, you just.
Speaker 5: They were wondering, well what do I do? Like, you know,
Speaker 5: am I going to lose the gig or you know how,
Speaker 5: and they start thinking. I realized, Wow, that never crossed
Speaker 5: my mind. I told him, you know how to let's
Speaker 5: go with rehearse, you know, and it never crossed my
Speaker 5: mind that he would hold it against me.
Speaker 7: So that means technically, you've never been disappointed by your
Speaker 7: heroes in that way.
Speaker 5: Oh maybe not in that way, you know, not. I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm sorry, I just had a flashback. But
Speaker 5: even that, you know, like if somebody, you know, you,
Speaker 5: you know, somebody's over your house, you come out and
Speaker 5: they're like sitting there naked or something, you know, even
Speaker 5: that would make me laugh, you know.
Speaker 7: I know.
Speaker 6: It depends on the legend. It could be real sad
Speaker 6: though Terry. It could be like, damn, come on man.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but you know, there's a lot of love, and
Speaker 5: I think that black women have historically taken in consideration
Speaker 5: all these things. And I'm like, as long as I
Speaker 5: don't feel like, you know, you're about to physically harm me,
Speaker 5: then I'm not really worried about it, you know. But
Speaker 5: what I'm what I keep trying to say is you
Speaker 5: shouldn't have to be that way. She shouldn't have to
Speaker 5: go through the extra burden, and that's what I will
Speaker 5: then take somebody down for. So I have to talk
Speaker 5: myself off a ledge now all the time. But that's
Speaker 5: for other people. For some of my students, I'm like,
Speaker 5: they say what, and I'm like, trying to go to
Speaker 5: the runt of the school and beat somebody down. I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 5: we can't do that, right, you know, I got to, like,
Speaker 5: now try to intelligently talk to this person or use language.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, Terry, I always wanted to know simply
Speaker 3: because I'm I'm I'm so drenched in hip hop.
Speaker 4: I have to be a shape shifter.
Speaker 3: In other words, any track I hear, my first question
Speaker 3: I'm asking is how would DJ Premier program this, or
Speaker 3: how would see FERRONI drum on this?
Speaker 4: Or how would Tony Williams play this or whatever?
Speaker 3: So oftentimes, you know, I'm shape shifting kind of in
Speaker 3: the name of being a human sampler. But when you're
Speaker 3: starting to drum, who is the who's the drummer? Who
Speaker 3: sound that you were most attracted to when you first
Speaker 3: started based on you know, you left Arcinio a thing
Speaker 3: in eighty nine, so based on your simple work, always
Speaker 3: thought that Tony Williams might have been in your north Star.
Speaker 3: But you know, for you, who were your three gods
Speaker 3: of drumming that you had in your mind when you
Speaker 3: were drumming.
Speaker 5: Well, at the end of the day, it became well,
Speaker 5: let me see, when I was eighteen seventeen, it was
Speaker 5: Jack de Jeannette, and he became my biggest mentor. I
Speaker 5: purposely stayed away from trying to mimic Tony Williams and
Speaker 5: Elsen Jones to a degree too, because their styles are
Speaker 5: so individual that if I hear somebody playing like them,
Speaker 5: it sounds like a caricature of them more than anybody else,
Speaker 5: I think, because their styles are so strong.
Speaker 3: So even when you're playing with Herbie or Wayne or Combo,
Speaker 3: it's the temptation to not.
Speaker 4: Go there doesn't.
Speaker 5: Hit you at all, no, it Unfortunately, when I played
Speaker 5: with Herbie, especially in the earlier years, well, see the
Speaker 5: thing is, you know I played in six or seven
Speaker 5: different bands of Herbie's, so you know he's supporting, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: So it was the first, the first long, you know,
Speaker 5: term gig I had with him. We were supporting this
Speaker 5: is the drum, and then I had to play these
Speaker 5: grooves like with uh, with computers, you know, which I
Speaker 5: had never done.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 5: And then uh, you know, Trio Quartet and then Gersha
Speaker 5: was well just those were more acoustic. But then the
Speaker 5: The Future of the Future, which you know, was more
Speaker 5: It had you know, some hybrid hip hop stuff in
Speaker 5: there as well, but it was all, you know, mostly grooves.
Speaker 5: So when I was playing straight ahead in the beginning, yeah,
Speaker 5: Tony Williams would creep out because I realized whenever I
Speaker 5: heard Herbie from all the records, it was mostly Tony
Speaker 5: playing with him. So that is the sound, you know,
Speaker 5: my spirit related to Hervey, which was interesting because he
Speaker 5: told me that Jack Deson it was his favorite drummer
Speaker 5: and that's like my guy, yeah yeah, back then, yeah,
Speaker 5: and that's my guys.
Speaker 4: So Tony.
Speaker 3: So Jackie's net was Tony's sort of north starts as
Speaker 3: far as.
Speaker 5: No, no, no, I'm saying, Herbie told me. Herbie said that
Speaker 5: that Jack was his favorite drama overt. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 5: he told me. Wow, okay to play with this is
Speaker 5: you know, after you know, many years after that plastic
Speaker 5: Miles David Quintest so he if you notice, I mean
Speaker 5: he hired jack On. You know, some of his records.
Speaker 5: But anyway, so I thought, oh, this that's my guy.
Speaker 5: So I'm good. You know, that's great, that's who that's
Speaker 5: my north star. But then once I started playing all this,
Speaker 5: Tony snuck in, you know, which is interesting just because
Speaker 5: having heard him with Herbie all those years.
Speaker 3: What is because a lot of the Jack stuff that
Speaker 3: I heard was more like fusing, like his seventies fusion
Speaker 3: work or whatever. How like for me, Tony is so
Speaker 3: heavy on symbol work that you automatically and his ability
Speaker 3: to stop time and just you know, for listeners today
Speaker 3: that you know, I guess you can say that sort
Speaker 3: of the way that Chris Dave's relationship with time, where
Speaker 3: you know, it doesn't exist in his world, but it exists,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't exist. Tony was sort of you know
Speaker 3: that way straight ahead. But what do you think that
Speaker 3: Jack's trademark.
Speaker 5: Was, Well, I think I disagree a little bit about
Speaker 5: Tony in the time existing and not existing because I
Speaker 5: feel like, you know, Tony's beat was pretty, it was beautiful.
Speaker 5: It was so beautiful his time feel.
Speaker 3: Oh no, he would say on rhythm, but do all
Speaker 3: these counter rhythms that, yeah, but.
Speaker 5: That's to me mathematics, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 5: the counter rhythms, it's polyrhythms. There's things that work within
Speaker 5: the structure of a beat. And so what attracted me
Speaker 5: to Jack was the opposite of that, you know, of
Speaker 5: the time being elastic and like hear him on this
Speaker 5: all it's slinky like a snake. You know, it's in
Speaker 5: his touch. You know, I can tell Jack within a
Speaker 5: second of hearing him, you know, on any recording, because
Speaker 5: it's his touch. Any great drummer, you're right, it's the
Speaker 5: rise symbol. You know, any great jazz drummer, their their
Speaker 5: identity lives in their rise symbol. Now, some people like Tony,
Speaker 5: like a lot of great drummers like Tony, like Art Blakey,
Speaker 5: Max Rusch. Also part of their identity is what they've
Speaker 5: you know, developed soloing, so their their licks. There are
Speaker 5: things that are signature, right, So there are signature licks
Speaker 5: that you can say that Art Blakey, or Tony Williams
Speaker 5: or Philly Joe Jones. But with Jack it's not really
Speaker 5: signature licks. There's no licks. It's like it's all more
Speaker 5: organic and the same thing. All my favorite drummers, Roy Haynes,
Speaker 5: it all begins and ends with Roy Haynes. He's the hippos.
Speaker 5: Jaz I was. I was so glad.
Speaker 7: She said that, oh God, my dad would be so glad.
Speaker 7: She said that, I just want to say this real quick.
Speaker 7: I'm sorry, I mean to interrupt y'all, but for some
Speaker 7: of us, eighty nine is when you ended our Senio.
Speaker 7: It's a whole generation of other folks that go from
Speaker 7: my father who go little Terry that was Rory Haynes's
Speaker 7: protag and all that. So it was just for me,
Speaker 7: I'm continue on Terry Ipoplois.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's beautiful, you know, just a sidebar. His
Speaker 5: son sent me a video last night of his granddaughter daughter,
Speaker 5: which would be Roy's great granddaughter. They had been asking
Speaker 5: if she had been asking for sticks, and he finally
Speaker 5: about this little kid. She's three little kids set and
Speaker 5: sticks and it was the first time you ever held
Speaker 5: a pair of sticks. And she was like and she
Speaker 5: ended and flipped the sticks and put him under her arm.
Speaker 5: He was like, you're the first person I'm sending.
Speaker 3: This to for our listeners that don't know. Roy Haynes
Speaker 3: is probably the the elder statesman I think between him.
Speaker 4: Roy's ninety seven or ninety eight, still playing, still playing
Speaker 4: like forty something. Yes, that's crazy, like it's nothing you know, and.
Speaker 3: You know and and with and his son Graham and
Speaker 3: and whatever like literally.
Speaker 7: Yes, just mentioned he taught my dad too. That's why
Speaker 7: he's so important to him to geniuses.
Speaker 5: Who's your dad?
Speaker 7: His name is Ron Saint Clair. But my dad had
Speaker 7: a nephew that he taught, named Dennis Davis.
Speaker 5: So we're just a fan. Oh yes, yeah, dunnis to
Speaker 5: play with Stevie.
Speaker 4: Yes self slaying me. Were you part of the in
Speaker 4: bass circle?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I was there when Steve named it, like he said,
Speaker 5: I came up with this thing, you know, macro dash
Speaker 5: basic Array of structural extis. I was like, good luck,
Speaker 5: let's see if that's going anyway.
Speaker 4: I did I know BASE was an acronym.
Speaker 5: What is it for macro ah Basic array of structural extemporizations.
Speaker 4: Deep?
Speaker 5: But yeah, we have a We did a record which
Speaker 5: I think was really the beginning of M BASE that
Speaker 5: never came out. It was for Gramma Vision. It was Graham,
Speaker 5: the horn section was Graham, greg osby Steve and h
Speaker 5: Whoman missed and it was four Robin you Banks and
Speaker 5: then the rhythm section was Vernon Reed, Jerry Allen, Me
Speaker 5: and Kevin Harris. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh man, you just opened up a door because I
Speaker 3: had a manager who was one of the top jazz
Speaker 3: DJs at Temple RTI in Philadelphia, and you know, in
Speaker 3: his mind, like m base was the future, which is
Speaker 3: the reason why like a lot of MBASE, including like
Speaker 3: Cassandra and everybody like was on our first view records.
Speaker 3: Did you at the time when you're in this movement,
Speaker 3: did you feel as though, like, Okay, we are the
Speaker 3: new generation, we're the native tongues, We're gonna you know,
Speaker 3: push forward. How much pushback at the time from like
Speaker 3: jazz traditionalists were you getting?
Speaker 5: H Well, you know when that started, Like I moved
Speaker 5: shortly thereafter to La to do the Arsenial Hall. So
Speaker 5: actually I was moving anyway, and then I got the
Speaker 5: show and that just made my move have to happen.
Speaker 5: In a week, I was out there looking for apartments.
Speaker 5: I was staying with Patris Russian And.
Speaker 4: What was the aficial process, Like, you just dropped a
Speaker 4: lot in that one sentence.
Speaker 6: You sure did. He has another former guest of Quest left.
Speaker 5: Spree right, Yes, yeah, yeah, So I was playing with
Speaker 5: Wayne Shorter at the time. So, and Diane Reeves was
Speaker 5: my best friend. She lived in LA. I met her
Speaker 5: at that same time when I Clarke Terry. So she
Speaker 5: was nineteen and I was ten. We were both guessed
Speaker 5: with Clark that time when I told you about the
Speaker 5: Buddy Rich store. So when I went to LA and
Speaker 5: you know, with hers, with Wayne we went to Japan,
Speaker 5: I would just stop in LA and stay for a
Speaker 5: while and stay with Diane and then in Patrise and
Speaker 5: Patrise she was on joy Rider, you know, with us.
Speaker 5: So it was around that time, and so the three
Speaker 5: of them convinced me to move to LA. So this
Speaker 5: was the end of eighty eight. So I went right
Speaker 5: around Thanksgiving to LA and looked for an apartment. And
Speaker 5: then somehow it was Nary, Michael Walden and Patrise maybe
Speaker 5: one other person that recommended me for the Arsenio Hall show.
Speaker 5: And so I went in and I just played a
Speaker 5: couple of tunes with them and I got the gig.
Speaker 5: But they were like, you got to be back here
Speaker 5: next week we start taping, you know, we start next
Speaker 5: week the day after New Year's Uh. So I had
Speaker 5: a week to go home and pack up in Fort
Speaker 5: Green and it was to Glendale, California. But yeah, I
Speaker 5: stayed with Patrise while I was looking. So the audition
Speaker 5: process wasn't very I don't even know how many drummers
Speaker 5: they had they had audition.
Speaker 4: Uh Sanders, okay, keep play funk, play jazz.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know, Michael Wolf was there. It wasn't
Speaker 5: it wasn't any heavy funk, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5: It wasn't any Yeah, but it was a good, great experience,
Speaker 5: you know, and I feel like it set me up,
Speaker 5: you know, more for doing the Vibe TV show with
Speaker 5: very filling games, and that was you know, more more
Speaker 5: of of a band that could play with anybody. So
Speaker 5: like we played with James Brown, we played with Aliyah,
Speaker 5: we played with Destiny's Child, we played with uh, I
Speaker 5: don't know, Rick, James, we played with you know, just
Speaker 5: a lot of It was an amazing experience playing with
Speaker 5: all those people, whereas the first one we didn't really
Speaker 5: play with that many people that came on. But you
Speaker 5: were saying something else I fell down. Uh. So what
Speaker 5: happened was they were moving on. And when I look back,
Speaker 5: and like when that record we made, everybody had to
Speaker 5: bring in a song and Steve had made this like
Speaker 5: kind of criteria for the music of it not being
Speaker 5: straight ahead and having you know, rhythms or grooves kind
Speaker 5: of from more modern because he was into James Brown,
Speaker 5: but you know, more modern grooves but with harmony and
Speaker 5: stuff moving like jazz but not necessarily in the traditional
Speaker 5: kind of two five to one way, and things that
Speaker 5: weren't in that kind of form, like no aaba forms
Speaker 5: and that kind of thing. Right, So what I wrote
Speaker 5: was more poppish, so to say, and if you if
Speaker 5: you would listen to it, like my song was the
Speaker 5: outlier on the record because I listened to everything he said,
Speaker 5: and I did everything literally in these little sections odd
Speaker 5: time signatures or whatever. But it really pointed to something
Speaker 5: more commercial, so to say, than they're writing and you know,
Speaker 5: I know so many it was like a potpourria music,
Speaker 5: which was probably good that the record never came out.
Speaker 5: But so I didn't feel so connected. I feel like
Speaker 5: I was there in the beginning, but I wasn't super connected,
Speaker 5: and I was playing with Wayne and I was really
Speaker 5: just trying to do that gig because I hadn't really
Speaker 5: played a fusion gig, like when I auditioned for Wayne
Speaker 5: it was fourteen drummers, and you know, I got the
Speaker 5: gig somehow, and that was my first real foray into
Speaker 5: just you know, playing group stuff. But I had been listening,
Speaker 5: of course, to Weather Report and all of that, and
Speaker 5: you know, coming up, I mean Earthen when the Fire
Speaker 5: was my favorite band. You had asked earlier if I
Speaker 5: was listening to all this other music. I mean, I
Speaker 5: remember the first place I was when I heard Go
Speaker 5: Go at a party. Excuse me, where'd you hear Go Go?
Speaker 5: At a party in West Medford? In Medford?
Speaker 7: Well, I said there was a black community. See it's not,
Speaker 7: but it's so go Go is so localized. That's why
Speaker 7: I'm like it made it up there.
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, of course, yeah, chuck frown. And then I
Speaker 5: remember the first time, you know, I was at another
Speaker 5: one of those parties. You know, I heard rappers Delight.
Speaker 5: You know, it was my first introduction to hip hop.
Speaker 5: I didn't know what was happening before that, but yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, so like I was listening to all of
Speaker 5: that stuff coming up, and you know, just as a sidebar,
Speaker 5: I was in B Street, so I feel like I was.
Speaker 4: Actually stop, stop, come back.
Speaker 1: You did know that, no, yeah.
Speaker 5: I'll say to a little clip. It was just like
Speaker 5: a quick cameo.
Speaker 4: But wait when they were doing the ballet thing on stage. Yep.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I was brought in from Medford, Massachusetts by
Speaker 5: Harry Belafonto to play like this little drum fill.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry, these sentences are so compound that you give.
Speaker 4: My hair.
Speaker 6: Belafonte for the Beach Street came.
Speaker 5: Because, yeah, because he was the producer of Beach Street
Speaker 5: and was playing in his band. So I had made
Speaker 5: an album that's actually gonna come out forty years now
Speaker 5: with Kenny Baron, Bussell Williams and George Coleman, and I
Speaker 5: was I was sixteen at a time, so we had
Speaker 5: just done it. So at this point now I'm seventeen
Speaker 5: and uh, Diane came to Boston with Harry. So I
Speaker 5: hadn't seen her since this Witchita vessel when I was ten.
Speaker 5: So we had a big reunion and she I gave
Speaker 5: her this tape of my album. It was a green
Speaker 5: cassette tap and she gave it to Harry and then
Speaker 5: out of the blue, he just called and we thought
Speaker 5: it was a joke. You know, there's a couple of
Speaker 5: people that called. We thought it was a joke. Benny
Speaker 5: Goodman call once too. We definitely thought that was a joker.
Speaker 5: It was, and them like yeah with Harry though.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we were coming from you are making the wrong
Speaker 7: movies around the wrong people.
Speaker 6: I'm like, when is this movie?
Speaker 3: Literally I'm literally okay, I'm watching the scene right now.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I had to pull it up with my monitor.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: No, I was talking about Terry lynk care into movie
Speaker 7: about her life because it's r never in my whole
Speaker 7: there's never been, never never.
Speaker 5: It's just it's funny. It's yeah. Yeah, So I feel like,
Speaker 5: you know, like some weird in some weird way, that
Speaker 5: was you know, that was the word I'm looking for it.
Speaker 5: I was kind of predicting. You know, I've always felt
Speaker 5: connected to all the genres. You I've always been a
Speaker 5: bit of a bridge, you know, with all the genres
Speaker 5: because I mean, I'm a jazz head, of course, but
Speaker 5: I mean I went through many years when I lived
Speaker 5: in La saying, don't call me a jazz musician. You know,
Speaker 5: I'm just a musician. Then you know, I had to
Speaker 5: come back, you know, like my dad was like, you
Speaker 5: can't run away from who you are.
Speaker 6: And also you stay collaborating with folks.
Speaker 7: So I'm like, I know you still got your ear
Speaker 7: to the streets because you know, you still got folks
Speaker 7: like Rhapsody on Records and whatnot.
Speaker 5: So yeah, I'm doing an R now for a Candid
Speaker 5: which is an old label that John Burke and the
Speaker 5: team that he's with, Acceleration Music. They're buying labels. They
Speaker 5: bought Alligator Records. They about Candidate about a hip hop
Speaker 5: label too. So I'm doing it, you know. So it's
Speaker 5: a dream that I always wanted. I always wanted to do.
Speaker 5: I read hit Man back in the day, and I
Speaker 5: wanted to do an R. And one day I was
Speaker 5: walking and I said, well that's.
Speaker 4: When you know you've read hip Man and then still
Speaker 4: wanted to be in the industry.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, that was what I wanted to do.
Speaker 4: Light to be like, nah, don't don't come here.
Speaker 5: I wanted to do you know, I wanted to be
Speaker 5: Clive Davis. I wanted to be you know, like and
Speaker 5: so I felt like, you know, there was only two
Speaker 5: black women you know that we're doing. We're doing that right,
Speaker 5: Suzanda Pass and Sylvia Rome. Yeah, so when people ask
Speaker 5: me about glass ceilings, that's what I say as a producer,
Speaker 5: as an R person, those are the places I felt
Speaker 5: more of a glass ceiling and playing the drums.
Speaker 7: Necessarily, like you ain't got the ears?
Speaker 5: Yeah, like like I've mean or like I'm in some
Speaker 5: little jazz box over here that you know, because I'm
Speaker 5: like all of those people were attorneys. They don't have
Speaker 5: no years on me.
Speaker 7: So what are you an r AND for right now? Specifically?
Speaker 7: Like what do you what?
Speaker 5: You Well, the idea with Candida, and it's all relatively new,
Speaker 5: but is to try to find people that are really
Speaker 5: merging jazz with hip hop. And that's fun assignment, yeah exactly.
Speaker 5: But it's a catalog label too, and we're not going
Speaker 5: to say no to certain cool records. So the first
Speaker 5: record that I got done happened to be a live
Speaker 5: record with Wayne Shorter, Esperanza and myself, and so that's
Speaker 5: gonna be coming out in September, I think. And then
Speaker 5: I have a new record that would be coming out
Speaker 5: on it too. And then the other person I signed
Speaker 5: was Morgan Garn who's been playing in my band. But
Speaker 5: he's like a program, dude. It's not necessarily hip hop,
Speaker 5: but it's like I don't know, it's kind of like
Speaker 5: if you took Wayne Shorter and had him like today
Speaker 5: and programming and using you know, all of the right
Speaker 5: things that are available today.
Speaker 4: You know, So I have so many questions.
Speaker 3: But since we're just going all over the place as
Speaker 3: a professor, coming full circle now back to Berkeley.
Speaker 4: Do you find yourself in a position?
Speaker 3: So the year that I left NYU, I did n
Speaker 3: YU for like four or five years, and my last
Speaker 3: year I kind of had an O ship moment when
Speaker 3: I realized that my students knew more than I did.
Speaker 3: You know, we were talking about I think my last class,
Speaker 3: I believe we taught about Thriller, and they had a
Speaker 3: lot of synth questions like synth choice questions that I
Speaker 3: had to do extra homework, and I realized, like, yo,
Speaker 3: these kids are smarter and shit like, they know more
Speaker 3: than I do as a professor, especially with where music
Speaker 3: is going. And now I don't know specifically the class
Speaker 3: that you're teaching at Berkeley, but you know, there's so
Speaker 3: many levels of musicianship as far as like gospel chop
Speaker 3: musicians and broken beat musicians. I guess now there's lo
Speaker 3: fi kind of that genre of music or whatever in
Speaker 3: your mind, not do you feel as if you have
Speaker 3: something to contribute, but do you sometimes feel like a
Speaker 3: stranger in a strange land With the way that musicianship
Speaker 3: is approached now. For instance, I have a member in
Speaker 3: my group right now who we don't know exactly how
Speaker 3: to describe what Stroe Elliott does where he plays a
Speaker 3: drum machine as if he is Taikowski, or like a
Speaker 3: piano player where he's playing samples and whatnot. So with
Speaker 3: this whole new generation of musicians there, like what is
Speaker 3: teaching a student at Berkeley in twenty twenty two henceforth,
Speaker 3: when it seems that now is the time when the
Speaker 3: rules are being just washed away and new rules are
Speaker 3: coming in.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean that's really interesting because that taps on
Speaker 5: a few things for me. I try to stay around
Speaker 5: young musicians. I mean, everybody in my band is younger
Speaker 5: than me, and people that wrote in a different way
Speaker 5: than than I do. And I'm talking about the Social
Speaker 5: Science band. So if you if you heard that record,
Speaker 5: I think it definitely pointed to something different than I
Speaker 5: would have been able to do on my own, you know,
Speaker 5: because of the writing and uh and the players you know,
Speaker 5: like Morgan and uh, and you know Matt and the
Speaker 5: ideas of mixing other genres, like you know, somebody like
Speaker 5: Matt Stevens mixes more indie rock, Aaron Parks is you know,
Speaker 5: like leads into classical composers. You know, Morgan's into you know,
Speaker 5: more of the kind of new school jazz. Uh. And
Speaker 5: then I had Casa Overall, who is not really with
Speaker 5: us any more. Kokaia's doing it, but Cosa uh, you
Speaker 5: know is definitely kind of into more cocaine, yeah, jazz
Speaker 5: me hip hop. So that I did was for me
Speaker 5: to recognize kind of like you know, Prince did, right,
Speaker 5: And Uh, that's my favorite part about Purple Rain is
Speaker 5: that Prince was like finally like, oh, like, you know,
Speaker 5: I need to in order for me to remain relevant,
Speaker 5: I have to let Wendy and Lisa write, you know.
Speaker 5: So for me that was kind of like my reckoning
Speaker 5: with I'm gonna do much better, you know, with this
Speaker 5: kind of collective. So I feel like I've always tried
Speaker 5: to keep my ear and my spirit to what's happening now,
Speaker 5: even though I can't do it like you know, like
Speaker 5: they do. You know, I never had gospel chops or
Speaker 5: something that I just never did it, never went to church,
Speaker 5: never you know, played in church, and never developed that
Speaker 5: kind of technique. And I don't really hear the drums
Speaker 5: like that. But I can't see how, you know, listening
Speaker 5: to this younger generation, how it has influenced me to
Speaker 5: some degree, you know. And so as far as the
Speaker 5: stranger strange land, I don't really feel that. I feel
Speaker 5: like I'm constantly being fed, you know, and it kind
Speaker 5: of you know, in the end, you know, comes up
Speaker 5: my way, and I still feel like I can comment,
Speaker 5: you know, on what they're doing.
Speaker 4: So you're still at Berkeley.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, I'm always a student, always a student. But
Speaker 5: you know, what that also taps on, though, is how
Speaker 5: jazz education has screwed up jazz because what I'm dealing
Speaker 5: with mostly are people that come out of jazz programs.
Speaker 5: And now the people in the jazz programs are mostly affluent,
Speaker 5: you know, from certain cities. So I don't know, like
Speaker 5: it's all over really, but people that had programs in
Speaker 5: school and jazz was kind of more street music, you know,
Speaker 5: I mean it was from the people and their experience
Speaker 5: academia exactly. So the academia they started, you know, they
Speaker 5: were able to codify it in a way and then uh,
Speaker 5: you know, uh, what's the word make money from it?
Speaker 5: Monetizer monetize, But there was another word modify, commodify. Yeah, ok, yeah,
Speaker 5: And I feel like now to get into a school
Speaker 5: you have to be on this certain level and have
Speaker 5: cone through this system, which is you know, is still
Speaker 5: dealing with you know, it's yes, it's prohibitive for a
Speaker 5: lot of people. Yeah, there's a racist, sexist system, you know,
Speaker 5: so income based what else what I mean, that's why
Speaker 5: it's racist. Yeah.
Speaker 3: There's a certain side of musicianship that I'm seeing now
Speaker 3: with younger people in which they're able to do whatever,
Speaker 3: fly to the bumblebee levels of speed and and literally
Speaker 3: just packing everything in the first one minute, whereas where
Speaker 3: I tell them to do something like my dad had
Speaker 3: a trick where he would make musicians just play a ballot,
Speaker 3: play something very simple, and man, they will all fall apart,
Speaker 3: one by one. They would just like fall this like
Speaker 3: if you ask them to play tea for two or chopsticks.
Speaker 3: It was like asking them to play rights to spring.
Speaker 3: So as as a teacher, do you find it that
Speaker 3: more students are now in this We're in an era
Speaker 3: now where like your Instagram stories is fifteen seconds, like
Speaker 3: your TikTok is thirty seconds, Like you got to have
Speaker 3: all the impact of an entire performance in thirty seconds
Speaker 3: with you know, they don't believe that much in space
Speaker 3: or quietness anymore, like have is there such a thing
Speaker 3: as a drummer who just plays straight ahead and gives
Speaker 3: what's required?
Speaker 4: Or are you dealing with like.
Speaker 3: More gospel chops people that have to like have bells
Speaker 3: and whistles and firing, eating and everything.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love it. Time field is the most important
Speaker 5: thing period right for a drummer, Like if you don't
Speaker 5: have a time field it feels good, then nothing else
Speaker 5: really matters, no matter what the genre, you know, and
Speaker 5: then it needs to be you know, I'm into playing
Speaker 5: free these days. You know, it's just kind of where
Speaker 5: my head is. But there's time in that, you know,
Speaker 5: it's not it's not like free means absolutely no time.
Speaker 5: And I think the people that play free the best
Speaker 5: of once they have good rhythm. But as far as
Speaker 5: the students are concerned, I don't teach drums anymore. I
Speaker 5: haven't done that in probably like six years or so.
Speaker 5: I just have ensembles and right now, I'm the artistic
Speaker 5: director of an institute, but I do have two ensembles
Speaker 5: in that institute, and so I'm just dealing with the
Speaker 5: overall sound of the of the group more than individuals.
Speaker 5: But it's the same thing with all the instruments.
Speaker 3: What you're saying, is that hard to convey now to
Speaker 3: a generation that feels like to me, all Star games
Speaker 3: are the most boringest games ever in basketball because you know,
Speaker 3: gonna try to show off, whereas a Golden State Warriors
Speaker 3: in Boston. Sorry, by the way, you know, it's literally
Speaker 3: about teammate and you putting in your twenty percent and
Speaker 3: him putting in his twenty percent and doing one hundred percent?
Speaker 3: Is that harder to convey on students now? As far
Speaker 3: as ensemble is concerned, well, I.
Speaker 5: Mean sometimes I'm actually asking them to play more because
Speaker 5: that's the part of me that is like old school
Speaker 5: and jazz, like you know, like you gotta like I'm
Speaker 5: finding that a lot of them can't play consecutive ace
Speaker 5: notes and construct lines that are interesting. You know, they've
Speaker 5: gone into this like moved into something else, and I
Speaker 5: think they're using too much space sometimes, Like what you're
Speaker 5: saying I would have thought, like a little bit back
Speaker 5: in the day where everybody was just blazing all the time,
Speaker 5: and yeah, that's tiring. I get tired of listening after
Speaker 5: you know, a minute or two. That's why. That's another
Speaker 5: reason why I don't really listen too much or prefer
Speaker 5: to listen to the gospel chops drumming, because I'm bored
Speaker 5: after I you know, it's just I get bored, you know,
Speaker 5: because I'm not a geek, a drum geek, you know,
Speaker 5: So I don't really care about that. And I think
Speaker 5: at the end of the day, that's what your job is,
Speaker 5: to make the listener care, right, what is it that?
Speaker 5: Why do we even do this? You know? So if
Speaker 5: you feel like it's to make them groove that they care,
Speaker 5: you know, that's a level of care, right. But I
Speaker 5: also feel like, you know, kind of coming out of
Speaker 5: the way short of in Herbie Hancock book, I think
Speaker 5: it's about touching the humanity and them, you know, exploring
Speaker 5: what it is that you share in common. So how
Speaker 5: do I inspire you? That's my humanity relating to your humanity,
Speaker 5: and so that's where my head is. And so sometimes
Speaker 5: when I'm listening to some of these young musicians, I
Speaker 5: can't get past their sound, let alone the notes, you know,
Speaker 5: because there's nothing in there sound yet there's no pain,
Speaker 5: you know, I don't hear the joy, you know what
Speaker 5: I mean. So I try to get them to, you know,
Speaker 5: go back to the beginning. Like I remember once being
Speaker 5: on some I got honored and there was a I
Speaker 5: can't remember who it was, but there was a pro
Speaker 5: ball player, must have been for the Patriots, and because
Speaker 5: it was in a Boston event, and he said, and
Speaker 5: I'll never forget this because this is how I feel
Speaker 5: too it in music. But he said, you know, he
Speaker 5: was all star in college and then when he got
Speaker 5: to the Patriots, they said, now let us show you,
Speaker 5: you know, how to throw the ball or how to
Speaker 5: catch the ball. He had to like go back.
Speaker 6: He played it a little bit and.
Speaker 5: Burn go back to the basics. So for me, that's
Speaker 5: the same with sound, you know, like why is it
Speaker 5: Dwayne Shorter could play one note and break your heart?
Speaker 5: Like it's about what you're projecting, you know. So the
Speaker 5: greatest compliments I ever get is when somebody said, damn,
Speaker 5: somebody else just played that drum set. But then when
Speaker 5: you played it, like wow, you know, the sound changed,
Speaker 5: and that's when I know that's right, that's what because
Speaker 5: it's the sound is your spirit, right, you know what
Speaker 5: I mean?
Speaker 3: I would say probably the Mosaic project is one of
Speaker 3: your most beloved projects. Could you tell me about just
Speaker 3: the whole concept of doing that album and and gathering
Speaker 3: these uh these women together to do this album and
Speaker 3: how it came to fruition.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I did gig in Israel. I had a gig
Speaker 5: in Israel called Esperanza. It was the first time, well
Speaker 5: the second time we played together, and she was still
Speaker 5: like she had come out of Berkeley and started teaching
Speaker 5: at Berkeley, and that's when I met her first year teaching.
Speaker 5: So I called her and Jerry Allen and a saxophone
Speaker 5: player from Hall and Tennka Postma. I realized I called
Speaker 5: three women for a gig just based on the way
Speaker 5: they played. I didn't realize that it was three women
Speaker 5: and this was going to be an all women quartet
Speaker 5: until after I had, you know, booked them. So it
Speaker 5: wasn't anything I was trying to do. I just wanted
Speaker 5: to play with the three of them, and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 5: this is a big deal for me because Throughout my
Speaker 5: whole career, people had asked me, oh, could you do
Speaker 5: this women's festival? Could he play with these women? And
Speaker 5: I was kind of like, you know, when I look
Speaker 5: at somebody like Mary L. Williams who didn't want to
Speaker 5: play with other women, she said, well, why would I
Speaker 5: want to play with them when I'm playing with the best,
Speaker 5: you know, And I.
Speaker 6: Was wondering how you felt about this?
Speaker 5: Yes, okay, yeah, yeah. And so I shot away from
Speaker 5: it my entire career, and there was always be somebody like,
Speaker 5: you know, I played with Ingrid Jensen or you know,
Speaker 5: Renie Robinson, with Wayne, with Bernard Wright, you know, Rest
Speaker 5: in Peace, and there was always a woman here or there,
Speaker 5: you know, Jerry Back with Mbase and before that actually,
Speaker 5: but never all together, you know, And I really shot
Speaker 5: away from it. So I did it, and then I said,
Speaker 5: this is a moment that I really want to celebrate
Speaker 5: and shine some light on. So I started with just
Speaker 5: the four of them, and then I just kept adding
Speaker 5: people and it just became like twenty one women and
Speaker 5: that's really just how it started. And I wasn't really
Speaker 5: trying to make any kind of political statement other than, oh,
Speaker 5: there are a lot of amazing women that play and
Speaker 5: let me just put through this record, you know.
Speaker 6: So this is how the sisterhood started?
Speaker 7: Then, because I want to ask you, is there a
Speaker 7: sisterhood in well, I was gonna say jazz. Really, of course,
Speaker 7: jazz when it comes to musicians, you know of a
Speaker 7: sisterhood that way.
Speaker 5: I mean, there is, But there's a lot of women
Speaker 5: that are playing jazz that still they think about it.
Speaker 5: How do I say, not as much like a sisterhood
Speaker 5: because you know, we're affected by the patriarchy too, right,
Speaker 5: So women are invested in it. Yeah, they don't want
Speaker 5: to play with other women because they feel like it's
Speaker 5: a step down. That's something.
Speaker 7: But as more greats are coming out of the fold,
Speaker 7: how does it be?
Speaker 6: How is it a step down? And to play with
Speaker 6: Terry Well.
Speaker 5: That's the well, I mean, that's the point that there's
Speaker 5: only going to happen. That's why I started apprenticeship program,
Speaker 5: the mentorship program New Music USA, because there's a lot
Speaker 5: of mentorship programs, but apprenticeship means you have to put
Speaker 5: them on the stage with you. And so we got
Speaker 5: a grant of one point two five million dollars to
Speaker 5: do this three year program. And we have a these
Speaker 5: six applicants this first year, and we picked seven and
Speaker 5: so like I did pairings and so some of the
Speaker 5: mentors are Bob McFerrin and Wayne Shorter and you know,
Speaker 5: watch of different people. But some of the apprenticeships are
Speaker 5: with Chris Potter, Linda Mayhanou Esmza, Marcus Miller. He took
Speaker 5: one Alexis, which is great. She's having a blast playing
Speaker 5: with him. So I just feel like, I thought, how
Speaker 5: do we get more men to hire women, because if
Speaker 5: they don't really do it on their own because they
Speaker 5: need to, you know, they don't necessarily know that they
Speaker 5: need to contribute to this the shift, how do we
Speaker 5: get them? So I said, pay them, you know, the.
Speaker 7: Men din women, then the women will start hiring women.
Speaker 5: You know what I mean is once you know, everybody
Speaker 5: has to be invested in gender equity because it's for
Speaker 5: the good of everybody. And I just felt like one
Speaker 5: way to get people interested is is have it affect
Speaker 5: their wallet. If they're getting a free musician and getting
Speaker 5: you know a little money on top of that, it
Speaker 5: might make it easier. And it's you know, so far
Speaker 5: kind of work. You know, this is our inaugural year.
Speaker 5: But anyway, I think that this last record, though, the
Speaker 5: Waiting Game is the one. It's the only one I
Speaker 5: can listen to. Let's put it like that. The other
Speaker 5: ones is I can't. I can't really listen to a
Speaker 5: Waiting Game. I could still listen to. So I think
Speaker 5: that's for me my favorite of all the elbows real
Speaker 5: because I don't cringe when I listen.
Speaker 3: So you're still like in your head about like I
Speaker 3: could have did that better, We could have did a
Speaker 3: big different take.
Speaker 5: Or yeah, or just sometimes like Mosaic Projects, the first one,
Speaker 5: I mean I like things on the second one too,
Speaker 5: but the Mosaic Project, I think that the playing is
Speaker 5: good overall. There's like some sound things, like you know,
Speaker 5: some production things that really both with me. But you know,
Speaker 5: playing is good overall, but it's a little bit far
Speaker 5: away from where I am as a musician. There's a
Speaker 5: little bit of my writing that bothers me. You know
Speaker 5: that I'm like, oh man, I could have really developed
Speaker 5: that idea much better, and I've improved as a writer
Speaker 5: since then, So that's what you know. But overall, I think,
Speaker 5: you know, the playing is okay.
Speaker 6: Oh so you're writing writing these lyrics on waiting game.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, you've been also singing on all of your records.
Speaker 3: That's you've sung on it since your first album, you've sung.
Speaker 5: Yeah, except this last one. I didn't, you know, way
Speaker 5: to give it, but I wrote all the lyrics, but
Speaker 5: I tried to sing a little bit.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 4: You you got to.
Speaker 3: I guess bucket List check a project before she died,
Speaker 3: maybe like six months before Amy Winehouse died, she was
Speaker 3: stalking me daily telling me that her and I were
Speaker 3: going to redo Money Jungle and yeah, the Money Money
Speaker 3: Jungle album from Duke Ellington and Max Wroton and Charles Minkus,
Speaker 3: the famous trio record.
Speaker 5: What I did that record?
Speaker 4: I know? And you wound up pulling it off.
Speaker 3: So we were planning me her and most Step and
Speaker 3: a few other musicians were going to cover.
Speaker 4: The entire album.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Right, and she passed away and ah, man, I was
Speaker 3: just heartbroken. And then a year and a half or
Speaker 3: for the for the fiftieth anniversary, you actually, what made
Speaker 3: you want to cover that entire album? Because when I
Speaker 3: see it, I was like, wow, what the hell? Like
Speaker 3: it came out, but I wasn't even mad at it.
Speaker 3: But what made you want to cover that album.
Speaker 5: You know, people ask me that all the time, and
Speaker 5: I don't know, it's just it haunted me. I don't
Speaker 5: know what made me choose it, other than it just
Speaker 5: kind of haunted me. And I started reading all these
Speaker 5: Duke Ellington biography books and and I was transcribing, you know,
Speaker 5: in the piano, and I realized these are all mostly
Speaker 5: blues based songs, probably the easiest stuff that Duke Ellington wrote.
Speaker 5: And I knew that it was as far as I
Speaker 5: could go, you know, like with transcribing Duke Ellington a trio.
Speaker 4: Record, you know, and that's the easiest.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this, and it wasn't complex, you know, in general.
Speaker 5: So uh, I kept flipping like, you know, some of
Speaker 5: the songs to the point it didn't sound like it
Speaker 5: so even you know, Christian said when he came in
Speaker 5: the session, he said, you know, you really could have
Speaker 5: just called most of these songs something else, you know,
Speaker 5: but you know, I just I wanted to make sure
Speaker 5: that I wasn't bastardizing, you know, Duke Ellington's music. And
Speaker 5: I read enough interviews, like he said, jazz, we stopped
Speaker 5: using that that word. In nineteen forty seven. He said jazz.
Speaker 5: That just means freedom of expression. And so when I
Speaker 5: realized that's how he felt, then I felt, okay, you
Speaker 5: know about changing his music to that degree.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: And at this phase of your career, and you pretty
Speaker 3: much have done everything. You've You've done scores, you've taught television,
Speaker 3: you've done everything. Is there something that you had yet
Speaker 3: to embarkle on that you wish to do for this
Speaker 3: phase of your career right now?
Speaker 5: Oh man, I'm just getting started as far as I can.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm doing I'm doing so much now that
Speaker 5: I'm a little pissed that some of these opportunities didn't
Speaker 5: come before. I'm you know, a little tired. I'm fifty six.
Speaker 5: I'll be fifty seven and two months on somebody's baby,
Speaker 5: thank you. So I'm a little tired, you know, and
Speaker 5: I wish that I had some of these opportunities earlier.
Speaker 5: Like right now, I can tell you a couple of
Speaker 5: things really right, really.
Speaker 3: Tell you about business in the fifties, Like I've been
Speaker 3: waiting for this at twenty.
Speaker 4: I think it's the time. You're at least forty one,
Speaker 4: at least thirty nine.
Speaker 2: Say that again now, because you're ready for it now,
Speaker 2: if you got any twenties, you would.
Speaker 4: Have sucked it up.
Speaker 6: Hello, well not maybe.
Speaker 4: A mirror, Yeah, everybody would everybody.
Speaker 6: He started so early.
Speaker 5: So I don't know, I know, but I hear you.
Speaker 5: I hear you, I feel you because I feel the
Speaker 5: same way. And honestly, I hear what you're saying. We're
Speaker 5: wiser and maybe we're doing it better or different, but
Speaker 5: I feel like I'm the same person really, you know,
Speaker 5: twenty years ago, I would have been going on thirty
Speaker 5: seven even fifteen years, have more energy, and I feel
Speaker 5: like I knew most of the things that I know now.
Speaker 5: I just have a little more confidence now because I'm older.
Speaker 5: But if I had gotten opportunity unities, because the way
Speaker 5: I see it is, there's a lot of and I
Speaker 5: say this when I talk to young women that feel like, oh,
Speaker 5: we're not ready to be in the if they're at
Speaker 5: North Texas or something, they say, we're not ready to
Speaker 5: be in the one o'clock band. I don't want to
Speaker 5: get the opportunity to play in the one o'clock band
Speaker 5: when I'm really two o'clock band material, you know, And
Speaker 5: I'm like, wait a minute. There's a lot of marginal
Speaker 5: white men that have hot have these opportunities, you know,
Speaker 5: like that weren't ready and why do we have to
Speaker 5: be like three times, Oh we have to be super dope.
Speaker 6: No, that's just the program that way, right, like right, So.
Speaker 5: That's what I resent. I resent not having some opportunities
Speaker 5: when I was in my thirties and forties when I
Speaker 5: really had the energy. But now I'm you know, I'm
Speaker 5: burning a candle. I mean writing, you know, projects, writing words,
Speaker 5: you know, like I'm writing the children's book, I'm doing
Speaker 5: some film for an exhibition.
Speaker 7: As anybody approach you about a something about your life
Speaker 7: because there is no one about you. There's nobody like
Speaker 7: you in the world, Like it's.
Speaker 5: Just nobody's nobody's approached me yet about that.
Speaker 4: No memoir.
Speaker 5: No, I'm just trying to get my dad. He's gonna
Speaker 5: like start because he has a better memory than me
Speaker 5: and he's eighty four.
Speaker 4: Interview your dad right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what I'm doing I'm currently in Yeah, I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: I'm going to interview my mom. Like just I think
Speaker 3: generally like everyone should just interview their elders and get
Speaker 3: all the stories out so that way that they're they're preserved,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 5: And I also want to say to you too, I
Speaker 5: use I tried to you might not hear the inspiration,
Speaker 5: but break you off. You know that end drum thing right,
Speaker 5: break you off, so like I have an end drump
Speaker 5: thing on a tune of mine on the second Mosaic
Speaker 5: Utrich Russian song when I found you, so that was
Speaker 5: like your inspiration. I'm going to break you off is
Speaker 5: what made me write that section at the end. But
Speaker 5: this is in fifteen, but I think it's fifteen. But
Speaker 5: if you check it out, I don't know, you know,
Speaker 5: I said once the Wayne Shorter, I wrote this, you
Speaker 5: were my inspiration. He was like, oh yeah, wow.
Speaker 7: We should have asked when we ever see y'all on
Speaker 7: a stage together on we Never damn should have asked
Speaker 7: that question because y'all never been on a stage together.
Speaker 5: Never too late.
Speaker 4: Now now, now's the time before.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna tell Christian. I'm gonna tell Christian make it happen.
Speaker 4: Here you go.
Speaker 3: This is long overdue. I thank you so much for
Speaker 3: coming on that show. You got to come back because
Speaker 3: I've skipped so many, so many questions I had about
Speaker 3: your career that I've skipped.
Speaker 2: Because about your fuller Lester Bowie, Diana Cross.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Jimmy jam episode, sure you like. Terry's actually like
Speaker 3: a four hour episode on the real So I'm at
Speaker 3: my day Jo sneaking on my lunch break.
Speaker 7: Thank you for existing, Terry, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 4: No, that's real like you.
Speaker 3: You know, I saw you drumming mad early and you
Speaker 3: know you were You were the first kid that I
Speaker 3: saw doing.
Speaker 4: What I wanted to do for a living. That was
Speaker 4: that was really inspiration.
Speaker 5: See and thank you pretty wild. I never would have
Speaker 5: imagined that. And really that makes me feel really good.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Alone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well on behalf of like Sugar Steve, Unpaid Bill
Speaker 3: and font Tickeolo.
Speaker 4: This is Quest Love and we will see you on
Speaker 4: the next go round on the next episode of Quest Supreme.
Speaker 1: Piece we'st Love Supreme is a production of iHeart New Radio.
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