To those listening closely, Bob Brookmeyer, the trombonist and composer, has become both the mature conscience and the hectoring elder of contemporary jazz. A fine and fizzy improviser in his youth, with a fascination for bebop and Kansas City jazz, he is now known for late-period writing that deals with the truculent and complicated emotions of living, and for raging in interviews against business-as-usual in the jazz world. Yet Brookmeyer has largely absented himself from that world.
He lives in Grantham, New Hampshire, with his wife, Jan, and when we got together in 2006 he was composing long-form pieces commissioned by European jazz orchestras, in his basement studio, which overlooks a wooded slope. He was also bearing up well—with a mixture of general cynicism and specific tenderness toward the people he loves—in a long battle with lymphoma.
Jazz trombonists can be odd or antic people; it’s something to do with the smeariness of the instrument’s sound, the ungainliness of its size, the pathos of its second-class status in jazz. Brookmeyer is more than that, almost Lear-like. Six foot three with an actor’s baritone, he is candidly boastful about his own brilliance as a musician but insecure about his place as a composer; he is a recovering alcoholic with unresolved regret and anger about many things, from his country’s foreign policy to his childhood.
Brookmeyer’s close listeners include his students and colleagues in jazz education, as he has become a kind of guru at the New England Conservatory; those who knew him as a brilliant foil in Stan Getz’s popular quintets of the 1950s or as the formidable intellect of Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band and the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Orchestra in the early and mid-1960s; and the dedicated ones who seek out his newer work, despite the fact that he is seldom invited to perform it in America. (There is so little demand for it—as he will be the first to tell you—that he doesn’t have a booking agent.)
The first track on his 2006 album, Spirit Music, recorded with his largely European, eighteen-piece band, the New Art Orchestra, is called “The Door.” It begins almost primevally, with a gravitas rarely encountered in jazz. First there is a single, deep, sustained tone, played on synthesizer and piano. It lasts for a full minute before leading into two seesawing chords among four trombones and five woodwinds, an E minor and a D minor. After that, the record keeps opening up different vistas, areas of tightly written, color-sensitive arrangements.
Brookmeyer is the composer and conductor of the music, and only occasionally takes a trombone solo, such as on the track “Alone”; with his first notes, a dark jollity suddenly enters the picture, a well of accumulated life experience. His sound is broad and emotional, roomy enough for old-fashioned song and tonal abstraction. His music sounds tense and stubborn and extremely tender; his talk, too, falling out in complete paragraphs, is full of these tempers.
He does not give up easily, though at various times he has been tempted. In his forties, while living in Los Angeles and working in recording studios, he reached a protracted bottom point with alcoholism, almost dying from it. Soon after, in his fifties, he nearly quit jazz altogether to become a classical composer. Along the way, he has wondered whether his time would be better spent as a counselor to alcoholics.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1929, Brookmeyer endured an unhappy early youth that coincided with the high period of Kansas City swing, when Count Basie was the North Star. He first heard Basie at the Tower Theater in 1941, on a Sunday matinee in between showings of western movies, with his father.
“I melted,” he declared, in his low, rumbling voice. “It was the first time I felt good in my life. I was not a very successful child. This was the first body thrill I ever had. I just said, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to do this.’ It completely overwhelmed me. I went back several times.”
Sitting in his studio, surrounded by piles of CDs, we first listened to Basie’s “9:20 Special,” from 1941, and his hearing clamped on to the piece’s details, particularly the ensemble work. “You hear the sax background?” he remarked, under Buck Clayton’s trumpet solo. But when it came to Basie’s own contribution, he had too much to say. We stopped the piece to talk.
“New Orleans was a whole other feel, but Kansas City was concentrating on the smooth, rhythmic 4/4,” he said. “That was everything. There was what you might call a coolness—that’s an awful word—a subtlety, and a strength that didn’t hit you over the head.” This applied to rhythm sections, too. “Long beats on the bass. Drums really concentrating on cymbals, making a smooth patina.”
Basie himself was key to all this. “He had supernatural powers,” Brookmeyer said. “He didn’t evince a lot of effort. Whereas other people seemed to take music and pound it into the ground—or bounce it off the earth—Basie came from under the crust of the earth and through your feet.”
Talking about Basie led him back to the story of his own maturation. “My mother and my father were both teachers, and the Depression wiped them out.” His father reinvented himself as an accountant, but Brookmeyer was closer to his mother.
“There was kind of a gang of two, my mother and I against him. There would be quarrels during dinner, and I’d get up and leave the table, say, ‘The hell with this,’ and go for a walk. Also, for some reason, I was mistreated in grade school. Beaten, insulted by strangers. For some reason I didn’t fit in.
“It got better later on when I was in music. We moved to a better neighborhood and a better school, and I could now play trombone in a dance band. I was, sort of, somebody. I got pledged to a fraternity, and all that nonsense. But the early damage was done. So music saved my life.
“Hearing Basie gave me a direction. We were friends. Amazing, that a little trombone player from Kansas City could be a friend of Bill’s. I got to play with him one time—at Town Hall, with Coltrane, Pepper Adams, Art Taylor, and George Duvivier.”
How did it feel to be playing in a small band with Basie? “It was like the first feeling I had when I was eleven, only you add twenty tons of cocaine. I could understand now, finally, viscerally, how the other guys in the band felt playing with him.
“But, my one regret . . . ,” he said. “I never wrote him a letter. About two years before he died, I wanted to write him a letter, and tell him how much he meant to me.
“I did write Dizzy a letter and thanked him, because Dizzy was very kind to me,” he continued. “I’m trying to make that a habit—to write to people in and out of music that have meant a lot to me. I’m getting ready to write my third one now, to a friend of mine, a priest in California, who’s getting old.”
A year after Brookmeyer’s Basie epiphany, Charlie Parker left Kansas City, about to help invent bebop, and jazz changed. Brookmeyer was working in the city’s black clubs, first as a trombonist at age fifteen, then as a pianist at seventeen. “Kansas City was so segregated that I didn’t know it was segregated,” he remarked. “We lived six blocks away from a black section, on the other side of Prospect Avenue. I drove down Prospect to get downtown, and I’d be passing black churches and gospel music—which left a very strong impression on me. When I began to play in clubs, I was getting to the point where they thought I might try to drink. So I was not really welcome, but in the black section I was. Often, professionally, I was the only white guy in the band.”
Parker made his first significant bebop records in New York City, and these were critical for a young musician to absorb. Brookmeyer listened to them repeatedly at 16 RPM, on a navysurplus phonograph, transcribing Parker’s lines by ear.
The exercises did him good. “At that stage of the game,” he said, “bebop was such a distant language, that what I learned, I owned.” But he preferred to play in swing bands. “They were more fun for me,” he explained. “Some of the beboppers played very well, but they seemed to imitate the worst parts of progress: heroin, bad attitudes, cliquishness.” (He was also viewed as a square, he suspects, once he started attending the Kansas City Conservatory of Music.)
In 1951, he endured six months of army service in Columbia, South Carolina, under the scorn of an officer who looked unkindly on aesthetes in general, particularly white ones with black friends. Trying to defend himself, Brookmeyer recalled, he was publicly dressed down for being prone to “homosexual fits.”
“The upshot,” he continued, with acid relish, “was that my last three months in the army, I was ‘gay,’ with two friends who were black, and—ha ha!—I was a musician.”
He was given an honorable discharge.
Back in Kansas City, he found a job with Tex Beneke’s orchestra, which eventually led him to New York City. “I had to go to New York,” he said. “I was getting nibbles. Stan Kenton called when I was asleep. My mother said, ‘By the way, Stan Kenton called last night.’ I said, ‘What did you tell him?’ She said, ‘I told him you were asleep.’ I thought, I gotta get out of this place.”
By then Brookmeyer had switched to the valve trombone—a variation on the instrument’s better-known form, with valves instead of a slide. (It has been his principal instrument ever since; the piano has returned only off and on.) He worked with Stan Getz in various small groups, and in 1953 took Chet Baker’s place in Gerry Mulligan’s quietly intricate quartet and sextet for a few years.
At the time, he basically idolized only tenor saxophonists, not trombonists. Lester Young represented his ideal. The only exception was Bill Harris, who played valve trombone in Woody Herman’s orchestra. Harris influenced Brookmeyer’s decision to move toward that instrument in 1948. “I didn’t want to play slide trombone in the first place,” he grumped. “Who wants to play slide trombone? If I had a kid who wanted to play slide trombone, I’d ground him for a year. Play piano, play saxophone. Anyway, I couldn’t do what I wanted on slide trombone. I sounded like Bill Harris. If I played slide trombone now, I’d sound like a combination of Earl Swope and Bill Harris, drunk.”
Harris disguised himself for the normal world with hornrimmed glasses and a light mustache; he looked like a midlevel bank functionary. He was a brilliant, natural musician, a practical joker, and an alcoholic. According to legend, he once checked into a hotel after a gig by driving his car up the steps and into the lobby.
“I was in love with Bill Harris,” Brookmeyer remembered. “He was, hands down, my hero. He got a plastic mouthpiece; I got a plastic mouthpiece. First time I saw him live was down at the municipal auditorium [in Kansas City]. I stood in front of the band for the first set, just staring at him. I’m walking around during intermission, and PoPsie [Randolph], the band boy, was taking Bill out to the bus, ’cause Bill would get drunk.
“I think it had to have been strange for Bill,” he added, sympathetically, thinking about how he quickly eclipsed him on their shared instrument. “I came to New York and three years later I was placing second to J. J. Johnson in the [Down Beat magazine] polls, and Bill was way down there somewhere.”
As with Basie, Brookmeyer never got to know Bill Harris well or tell him how much he liked him, and this has become a source of acute regret. “Man-to-man emotion was pretty scripted back then,” he explained. “Men didn’t say ‘I love you’ to each other until ’65 or ’70.”
These furtive role models meant a lot to Brookmeyer, who was looking not just for musical guidance but for a sort of rule book about how to be an adult. “When you get early success after a failed early childhood,” Brookmeyer said, “you’re told by the world, ‘You’re successful, you know what you need to know.’ Inside I was five years old; I always had to ask people, ‘How do you do that?’ ” But outside of specific musical matters, “you couldn’t emulate Bill,” Brookmeyer said, plainly. “He actually traveled with a mannequin, when he was with Woody’s band. He had a fourth-trombone seat, for the mannequin. This is a man who had very loose boundaries on what was permissible.”
Brookmeyer chose a 1952 live version of “Lady Be Good,” performed by one of Harris’s small groups, a quintet including Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis on tenor saxophone. Harris’s improvisation is extravagantly musical, bursting with melody—forcefully, he yanks it out of the instrument—in a tangle of swing and blues and bebop phrases.
Harris had an overpowering voice on his own, I said. Was he too large a presence for a big band, too disruptive?
“I wouldn’t say disruptive,” Brookmeyer corrected. “He was influential. His sound was highly emotional. His personality was so strong that he guided the band a lot. As a trombonist in a big band, you’re in the middle of everything. You learn how things are made. My old joke is that saxophonists get all the girls, trumpet players make all the money, and trombone players develop an interior life.”
In the 1960s, Brookmeyer’s ambitions began to struggle against the conventions of jazz, the aspects of composition or improvisation or performance he has come to call, with derision, “rituals.” Increasingly he turned to composing. “Playing is easy for me,” he said. “It’s fun. It’s a nice hobby. I can pretty well turn it on and off. I can’t do that with writing. A blank piece of paper is a great leveler.”
What interested him most was overturning the consensual hierarchies in jazz. For a while, in the early 1960s, he played with the Jimmy Giuffre Trio—Giuffre on clarinet, Brookmeyer on trombone, and Jim Hall on guitar. They wanted to write music that balanced composition and improvisation, each crisscrossing with the other. Giuffre was interested in American themes—music that evoked big spaces, dance-band ritual, and spiritual loneliness—and Brookmeyer was perfect for him, bringing his Kansas City blues and mother-wit to the project. The record Western Suite, especially, functions outside of jazz’s prescripted boxes.
His work later that decade for the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis band—such as his own canonized “ABC Blues,” which used a twelve-tone row over blues changes—was intellectually rigorous. But when he returned to the band as its musical director, after a decade in Los Angeles that ended in two hospital rehabs, he really started pushing the band to its limits.
He had quit drinking for good and changed his musical focus. He was studying composition with Earle Brown, the modern classical music composer. “I kept meeting these classical composers who were jazz fans,” he said, uncomprehendingly. “I found that depressing.” He became interested in the most aggressive kinds of modern music—“music to make your teeth hurt,” as he put it. He set about crafting pieces for the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra (Thad Jones had left by then) in which, as he explained, “solos became the background to the background.”
This was an idea he first woke up to while arranging and composing for Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band in the early 1960s. “I realized that the soloists were necessary to add decoration to the backgrounds, because the backgrounds were really swinging,” he said. “That could be an idea from Kansas City; Basie’s band had great backgrounds.” In short, he believed that the theme-solos-theme construction of the standard jazz piece had become normative and dull. Instead, he wanted to experiment with making solos secondary to ensemble passages. This was a major reversal, which would influence Maria Schneider and Jim McNeely, two current composers for large-ensemble jazz.
Back in New York in the early 1980s—which was also when he started his teaching career in earnest—he began to question the entire established language of jazz performance, but especially solos, which he had come to regard as “ritual gone mad.” “My first rule became: the first solo only happens when absolutely nothing else can happen,” he explained. “You don’t write in a solo until you’ve completely exhausted what you have to say. If you give a soloist an open solo for thirty seconds, he plays like he’s coming from the piece that you wrote. Then he says, ‘What the hell was that piece that I was playing from?’ And the next thirty seconds is, ‘Oh, I guess I’ll play what I learned last night.’ And bang! Minute two is whoever he likes. Which is probably Coltrane.” (When Brookmeyer talked about Coltrane, he growled; he admired his musicianship but hated the form his influence took on others.)
He developed a severe impatience with the jazz band’s predictable workplace routine. He proposed evenings of music that would overturn the basic rituals of jazz-club presentation and decorum. People approaching the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue would pass actors and jugglers; once inside the club, music would come at them from all sides. “Someone’s in the kitchen, playing,” he imagined it. “Someone else is playing in the bathroom, someone in the hallway—not listening to each other, but each playing music I wrote, music with instructions.”
This never actually came to pass. But Brookmeyer’s last two pieces for the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis band were indeed semi-theatrical, involving composed sections in which musicians turned to each other and talked. He finally left the band in 1981, after two years. “I wrote myself out of the band,” he said.
One of his heroes at the time was Witold Lutoslawski, the Polish composer. In the early 1980s, he bought all of Lutoslawski’s available records and scores; he dreamed of becoming his student. A friend of his, the jazz singer Nancy Harrow, found out the name of the composer’s assistant and sent a message to Lutoslawski on Brookmeyer’s behalf. A telegram eventually arrived at Brookmeyer’s house, reading, “Witold Lutoslawski awaits your call.”
“I had the number on my desk, and I waited three weeks,” Brookmeyer remembered. I finally called, and thank God it was busy. I would have sounded like a three-year-old.”
It’s strange to hear you say that, I said. Look at whom you’ve worked with!
He frowned. “Yeah, but this is a whole other world. This is a world that’s sophisticated and skilled beyond my wildest dreams.”
We listened to Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto, a nearly twenty-five-minute piece finished in 1970, as performed by Mstislav Rostropovich. It begins with a series of short D’s played by the solo cello; after some side roads and confrontations between the cello and the orchestra, the repeated note comes back.
“Interested?” Brookmeyer said, grinning. A little later, the woodwinds and harps go up and down, in thirds. “It’s so lovely, and so subtle,” he enthused. “It’s like a rainbow shooting up. That gets compressed into a chord, later on. And becomes a melody, also. He uses material that’s so beautiful, and makes it happen again, so he raises expectations.”
Slowly and repeatedly, the piece opens up new areas of sound and timbre. “The stagecraft is great,” Brookmeyer said. “He referred to himself as a stage director rather than a conductor. He doesn’t make mistakes, theatrically. I mean, the cello on the high A, sobbing at the end? The piece is supposed to be a good guy–bad guy thing, where the cello’s the good guy and the band is the bad guy. It’s a battle, somehow, and obviously the cello ascends and wins.”
Brookmeyer talked about the qualities of music that are important to him. “How do you begin to speak to the listener?” he asked. “The listener doesn’t have to like the process, but he needs to be in the process, to make the trip with you.
“In the eighties,” he continued, “I began to wonder how long I could extend my musical thought and still not break the relationship with the listener, not put the listener to sleep. When I became a teacher, I realized that everybody writes too short. You’ve got to finish your thought. If you’re gonna take a chance, take a chance on being boring.” He added, quickly, “This is as a composer. Not as a soloist. Many young composers, under sixty, worry about being boring. But you’d be surprised; the listener wants to know who you are, where you’re coming from.”
His new music for large ensembles doesn’t make anyone’s teeth hurt. (He gives Jan, his fourth wife, some credit for cooling him out.) But he still has a problem with solos, even in his own orchestra, his continual source of pride. “Musicians will go on for hours and ruin a piece and make it boring; they have no idea how to play from the piece,” he complained.
He watched me as I tried to think of a way to disprove his point. “I’m right,” he said, evenly. “I’m very careful in my band who I give solos to. I never think about a soloist when I’m writing a piece. I just think about the piece and say, ‘Okay, maybe it would be a good place to have a little release.’ ”
Brookmeyer’s advice to jazz composers: Keep your hand on the soloist, somehow—with long tones, chords, punches. Keep your hand on him, because he needs it.
Set List
Count Basie Orchestra, “9:20 Special,” from America’s Number One Band (Sony Legacy), recorded 1941.
Bill Harris, “Lady Be Good,” from Live at Birdland, 1952 (Baldwin Street Music), recorded 1952.
Witold Lutoslawski, Cello Concerto, performed by Mstislav Rostropovich (EMI), recorded 1974.