About fifteen years ago I was spending the afternoon near Times Square at the apartment of Frank Lowe, the onetime free-jazz saxophonist. By this time, though, Lowe was in his middle-aged, Lucky Thompson–worshipping period; all he wanted to do was play murmuring art-deco phrases on his tenor.
Let me briefly describe Frank Lowe. He was a black man with short dreadlocks, tall, skinny, broad-shouldered, and high-cheekboned; streetwise, charming, and slightly bitter. The late 1960s and 1970s had raised some very tough jazz players, who worked through the music’s hardest winter of audience neglect. As a result, Lowe had lived in a weird little underground economy for twenty years. He was considered to be on the sentimental and soulful end of the avant-garde, but much of his work still turned away from the mainstream of jazz.
The culture of jazz had changed since he had started performing in the late 1960s. At first he had been an extremist; one of his early records, Black Beings, is like drums-and-saxophone scream therapy. He then discovered a way to bring into his work the R & B of his hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, and his music warmed up. He became drawn to the authority and romance of older players in jazz: Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins. By his midforties, when I met him for the first time, I sensed two things: that he knew what kind of saxophonist he wanted to be; and that it might already be too late in his life to get there.
I was young, and he wasn’t working much. Both of us had time on our hands. Day turned into night. We went out for Chinese food on Ninth Avenue and came back. He wanted to share some music with me that he’d been listening to.
He dug up two cassettes of records that were new at the time: Abbey Lincoln’s You Gotta Pay the Band and Joe Henderson’s Lush Life. The Joe Henderson, particularly, because he wanted to listen to the tracks with Wynton Marsalis playing the trumpet. He’d been paying attention to Marsalis lately, Lowe said. He believed that Marsalis was starting to deliver on his promise.
If you listened to Lowe run down his own potted history, you might make a particular kind of assessment about him. That he rejected current mainstream jazz, wasn’t impressed by it anymore, was irritated by its slickness. I was interviewing him, writing about him for a little magazine, and if we had adjourned before just shutting up and listening, the article would have come out differently. The fact is that when we listened to music together, I saw what a shallow caricature that potential assessment was. Lowe had nice ears. I watched his instant reactions to Lincoln and Henderson and Marsalis—certain kinds of phrasing or harmony—and I was understanding him better than I had all day. We weren’t talking about the daily grind anymore, and I saw a great side of him.
One way to interview a musician, I have found, is to talk about subjects that don’t really matter, which could include his or her new record. I mean that they “don’t matter” if the resulting exchanges end up benefiting a lot of other people besides the musician: the employees and shareholders of the record label, the publicists paid to create an international “conversation,” the critics paid to review the record, the secondhand merchants who resell copies on eBay, and finally the operatives of the waste-processing plants who after some years must destroy the remaining, unsellable stock.
But I also mean “don’t matter” in terms of the level of commitment or excitement in the conversation. Sometimes a jazz musician will talk to a reporter about his or her own life in a way that mostly serves a product or benefits other people; the narratives are practiced and packaged so that readers of the article will pull the trigger and buy a CD. In these cases, the musician might use self-protective or self-aggrandizing language, keeping one eye on the main chance. Or the musician might turn the talk to the conceptual ideas behind each track on the new album.
The question, then, is how to bump a great jazz musician out of a mercantile or defensive mode. It can help if the musician’s own work isn’t at stake. And it can help if a CD player is nearby.
Why would musicians ever talk to a journalist about what really matters if it’s not in line with their professional interests? I don’t know. I try not to think about that. But none of my conversations over music have been unpleasant. Usually they are almost ecstatic. We get into it gently. I would never want to start a conversation with a musician—except Ornette Coleman—by turning on a recorder and asking: say, what is music for? In many cases I don’t really know the musician socially, so we need some kind of emulsion; this is what music does.
Listening with someone else is an intimate act, because music reveals itself by degrees. With a few people who have particularly high manners—for instance, Hank Jones and Dianne Reeves—sometimes, at first, it can feel a little too close. It’s a process of surprises and, because these are not visual surprises, the listeners tend to look at each other, determining whether they both understood what has just happened. It prompts confessions that cut against the grain of journalism and its system of cultural classification, the horrid little grid boxes (“postbop,” “avant-garde,” “romantic,” “cool,” “neoclassical,” and all their assumed traits of art or character) into which musicians are installed by their critics.
A lot of jazz musicians do not really like to take apart a work of jazz music and consider it from a distance, as a flattened whole: the mechanics of a groove, the logic of the composition, the symmetries of its structure. And many—perhaps even most—great jazz musicians are fairly uninterested in the history of jazz criticism, the historical consensus of written opinion about certain players or bands or records. Most of them believe that all this is somehow hostile to their enterprise. It’s playing with a good thing, pushing back against a magic concordance.
On the other hand, jazz musicians love to hear really well-played jazz as it moves along; they react and shout and laugh to it. Some of the musicians in this book have been trained academically, while others have been trained on bandstands. But they all make up their own terms of music criticism, which is one of the reasons that I get so much out of listening with them. The drummer Paul Motian shrinks from any kind of musical analysis, but loves it when the drummer in a band honors the melody and structure of a song. The guitarist Pat Metheny has no problem with analysis—he has a precise and empirical mind—yet he looks for a very un-precise quality in music, what he calls glue. The pianist Bebo Valdés thinks about making technical ambition shine through a modern-sounding arrangement. The singer Dianne Reeves is fascinated by moments of transparency in music, when a band or a performer brings the listener into its own closed loop, and the words take on an almost embarrassing directness.
Don’t get me wrong; “making up their own terms” is not some sort of metaphor for improvisation. These musicians don’t invent these concerns on the spot; they cultivate them over many years, as an outgrowth of their larger philosophy and cast of mind. They are true and personal and deep concerns. And if these encounters sometimes get away from music and spill over into character profiles, that’s intentional. I can’t get inside anyone’s head. (I am usually forbidden to; constructions like “he thought” or “she intended” are discouraged by the New York Times’s stylebook.) But I can try to reconcile the things each person said with the things he or she heard and triangulate a point of view.
My conversations occurred between December 2004 and March 2007. We ran them as a series in the paper and called it “Listening With.” I approached musicians who I thought were all either important elders in the music or making excellent work. (They also had to be people with whom I knew I would enjoy spending a long afternoon.) I asked each one to come up with a list of five or six pieces of music that he or she would like to listen to with me. Any kind of music was fine, as long as that musician hadn’t taken part in it. We spoke on the phone for a while to talk through any fears or inhibitions (there were many); then we got together, preferably and usually at the musician’s home, and spent three or four hours together. I asked simple questions and tried to let the ideas rise up on their own. It makes me smile to notice how, among all these hearings, certain people and notions make repeat appearances: Baby Dodds’s philosophy of how to play drums in a jazz band; Art Tatum’s keyboard runs; “inevitability” in a piece of jazz; the examples and never-ending lessons of Max Roach, Wayne Shorter, Charlie Parker, and Sonny Rollins.
There are various precedents for this kind of writing. One is the “blindfold test,” which Leonard Feather started practicing in Down Beat in 1946 and which has remained a regular feature of the magazine. He really did use blindfolds, at least at first, and played tracks to a musician for an attempt at identification and then an instant reaction. There was an element in this of catching musicians up short, like making them taste wine with blanked-out labels. It was meant to start a purer way of talking about music, without the usual prejudices and cliquishness, and sometimes it did. But I’m not interested in fooling people or exposing their weaknesses. Within reason, I insisted that the musicians choose the music. I was looking for the ongoing experience of being with them as we listened to something that they knew well.
The other precedent—closer to what I have done here—was that of the visual-art critic walking through a museum with an artist and documenting the resulting conversation. Michael Kimmelman at the Times did this very elegantly in the mid-1990s for his book Portraits. He recorded several different reactions: the artist’s reaction to the work itself, along with his or her built-in feelings about spaces in which to experience art and how best to contemplate it. My conversations tended to be looser by necessity. We weren’t looking at a fixed object or image; obviously, music keeps wriggling on, and you try to keep up with it. Often the musician and I would listen to a piece of music again, to catch something interesting that had moved too quickly the first time around. We usually weren’t in neutral locations; most of the time they listened the way they normally listened, through their own equipment, with their own lives poking in: phones ringing, babies crying, dogs barking.
What really matters, I think, is how musicians hear. What are the things they notice? What are their criteria for excellence? What makes them react involuntarily? The answers indicate what a musician values in music, which connects to what a musician believes music is for in the first place. And that is the big thing, the big question, from which all small questions descend.