4 It was 1997 when the unthinkable happened to David “Fathead” Newman and his wife and manager, Karen. Four years after leaving New York City for a less hectic life in a bucolic, wooded area just a few miles south of Woodstock, New York, they lost nearly all of their possessions in a fire that engulfed their home. “It burned right down to the foundation,” says Karen. “The most important things we lost were all of the memorabilia and two saxophones and a piano,” adds David. “My favorite tenor saxophone. It was on the main floor. I was tinkling around on the piano and had the horn out, and for some reason the instrument was lying out with the case open. So I lost that one.” “We started from scratch,” says Karen, who does most of the talking for the couple while David mainly listens and agrees. “It’s stressful building a house from the beginning because we didn’t agree on every single thing and we were fighting constantly over the most absurd little details you would never think about: you have to pick the doorknobs. I would never want to go through that again.” In the end it all worked out. The rebuilt house is a stunner, a three-story, 3,600-square-foot structure set back from the road at the end of a long driveway and surrounded by trees. In the back, a spacious yard welcomes all manner of wildlife. In the garage sit two nearly identical black Subarus, one a 2005, the other an ’08. (“Mine’s a stick shift,” says Karen, proudly.) Inside, the rooms are warm and inviting, filled with attractive furnishings, whatever few possessions the couple—married 28 years—was able to salvage, and reassembled souvenirs of a life. A visitor would never guess that another building, and another set of belongings, once sat on the same spot. On the refrigerator door are dozens of photos of David with fellow musicians: Dr. John, Lonnie Liston Smith, Pharoah Sanders, Hugh Masekela, Herbie Hancock, Johnny Griffin and many others—they call it their Wall of Fame. The laundry room doubles as a veritable gallery of posters announcing gigs now in David’s past. In a large back room, overlooking the yard and opening onto a deck, sits a row of David “Fathead” Newman vinyl LP covers, albums recorded during the 1960s heyday of Atlantic Records and since. Of course there are reminders of the many years that David—only those in the music business, it seems, actually call him “Fathead”—spent in the employ of Ray Charles, and of his long tenure as a headliner. Proclamations, awards, certificates, even an old issue of JazzTimes with David on the cover, supply the visuals—Newman’s 60 years as an in-demand saxophonist and flutist, both as leader and collaborator, have earned him a commendable array of honors. A bookshelf reveals Karen and David’s eclectic reading tastes: a row of John Grisham novels; volumes on politics and history; two rows of jazz biographies. “I’ve thought about writing an autobiography,” David says, “but it’s pretty hard to think about writing about yourself. It’s a little naïve. It’s more something for other people to do.” David and Karen met while she was waitressing at the now defunct Sweet Basil jazz club in New York. During the ’80s and early ’90s they shared an apartment in the Village but, says Karen, “It got dangerous after a while and we really had to get out of there to save ourselves. We escaped. We survived.” Their growing dissatisfaction with city life led them to the hipster enclave of Woodstock, which still bears signs of its association with the 1969 rock festival, although that storied event actually took place in nearby Bethel (Karen was one of the half-million who attended). Now, when they’re not on the road—Karen accompanies David on all of his trips—they enjoy a leisurely lifestyle. “We used to sleep late,” says Karen, “and if anyone called before noon, I would think, Oh, my God! Now if somebody calls after Jeopardy! I find it annoying. I’m home all day—why are you calling me at seven o’clock at night to talk about this?” Now that he’s turned 75, “and my body is slowing down,” says David, the touring occurs less frequently. When he does need to get someplace, or lands a Manhattan recording date, New York and its airports are only two hours down the road. “Sometimes we’ll play in the city and come right back but most of the time we’ll stay overnight,” he says. Either way, once they park the car and hang their coats in the “mud room” that serves as the entrance to their home, David and Karen Newman are in their element. “When we pull up the driveway,” says Karen, “every time I go, ‘Yay!’ I really do.” The Personal File Down in the Dumps Karen: David likes to go to the dump. I mean, he really loves the dump. David: I don’t really love the dump but it’s something I look forward to doing. Jazztimes: What do you find there? David: Absolutely nothing. We don’t have trash pickup at home so I drive the car to the transfer station and I look forward to going to the different areas and sorting out where the garbage goes and where the glass goes and the brown paper bags and all the junk mail. I think Karen thinks I get more out of it than I actually do. Karen: Well, he comes back looking rather satisfied, I must say. He has a big grin on his face. The Greening of Fathead David: I never experienced anything like this before moving to this area, but I love the plants. I developed a green thumb. We grow indoor plants and outdoor plants, mostly perennials. I’ve come to realize that they’re living things and it’s good to watch them grow and go through changes. Karen: In the wintertime he’ll bring a lot of stuff in and it’ll grow all year ’round, like geraniums. Then he’ll let them out again in the summertime. It’s a ritual, bringing the plants in and out. He’s very caring about that. When we’re away on a road trip, we have neighbors who water the plants, and as soon as we set foot in the house he looks at the plants. The plants are a serious matter. Talk to the Animals Jazztimes: Do you ever go out in the yard and play music for the birds and the deer? David: Very seldom. Sometimes I take the flute. Karen: But he listens to the birds and whistles to them. Jazztimes: Do they whistle back? David: Yeah, they do. They listen and see me imitating them and then, pretty soon they recognize it’s not another bird and they have a little fun with me. Karen: The squirrels talk up here too. Early Thanksgiving Karen: One time David and I kept hearing this banging in the back of the house and we couldn’t imagine what was going on. There was this turkey banging his head against the door. He saw his reflection and he thought there was another turkey inside the house. He was showing that it was his turf. It was hysterical. true 10422 2008-12-10T14:37:55-05:00 false 20909 129 200812 true 79 2008-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

A visit with the saxophone legend, months before his death

35748 2009-03-24T09:45:30-04:00

4 Chico Hamilton pauses during a conversation, turns to Jazz-Times and asks, “How old did you say I was, man?” It’s not that he’s forgotten, because his mind is as sharp as a direct hit on a snare. Hamilton is just seeking confirmation because, despite some significant setbacks during the past few years—heart problems, the death this past April of Helen, his wife of 67 years—the renowned drummer and bandleader, who hasn’t held a job outside of music since he was a shoeshine boy in his native Los Angeles, doesn’t feel old. “Yeah, OK, 87,” he says. “And at 87, man, I can play all over the world and I don’t have to play anybody else’s music. I play my own. I don’t have to play Duke or Basie, which is cool. That’s my reward. I’ve been blessed because I’ve been able to make music, and I make music for music’s sake.” Hamilton is seated at a table in his penthouse apartment, a block away from the headquarters of the United Nations on Manhattan’s east side. Small and cozy, the apartment has been home to Hamilton since the mid-1960s. On the walls are numerous photos, including Helen and daughter Denise, who lives downstairs in the same building. Several paintings, and a blown-up letter from President Bush, congratulating Hamilton on being named an NEA Jazz Master in 2004, also vie for space. The bookshelf is well stocked and diverse: bios of Bessie Smith and Dr. Martin Luther King, James Michener’s fiction, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, The Magic of Black Poetry and a volume on sailboating, among many others. A stack of New Republic magazines rests on the glass coffee table. “Reading is a luxury,” says Hamilton. There are two keyboards on which he writes new music, one in a tight space adjacent to the kitchen (“Check out the dirty dishes,” says Hamilton, a self-described gourmet specializing in Mussels Italiano) and one in the bedroom. A small drum kit sits by a door that leads to a terrace that wraps around the apartment on three sides. Outside are potted plants of various sizes and shapes that do their best to survive New York’s erratic weather. Hamilton’s once-clear view of the East River is obliterated now, and several blocks to the north rises one of Donald Trump’s monstrosities. “When I first moved here, this was the only apartment building on this block,” he says. “Now I can’t even park my car in front of the house anymore. But hear how quiet it is now? It’s always like that.” And when he wants it even quieter, Hamilton drives the hundred miles to East Hampton, Long Island, where he has a second home, one he built himself in the early ’70s. He may appear frailer than the image peering from so many familiar album covers, his gait is slower, and the docs have him on all sorts of medication, but he’s not letting any of that stop him. Just a few nights before this interview, Hamilton played a gig at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. “That was the first time I’ve played a club in New York in, shit, years,” he says. “What I’ve been doing is I play Borders bookstores, which is dynamite, man. We do a 45-minute set, sign autographs and they buy all my albums.” If ever proof were needed that maintaining an active lifestyle is the key to a long, happy existence, this guy is it. In a few minutes he’ll welcome a young drum student into his home and, as he has for more than 20 years, Hamilton still teaches two classes at the New School University Jazz Program: rhythm and ensemble playing. For that he’ll now need to acquaint himself with the Mac laptop that sits near the table. “I just learned how to turn it on,” he says. “I gotta get into it because the school says no more paper. I’m getting it. “This is my way of giving something back, man,” he says. “Music’s been very good to me all my life.” That life is being documented in an autobiography. “I’m up to the Lena Horne chapter,” says Hamilton, which means he has roughly 50 to 60 years of experiences left to tell. Not a problem—work keeps him going; leisure time is not in his lexicon. “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “What’s that? That’s for when I’m sleeping.” The Personal File Close Encounters of the Presidential Kind, Pt. 1 “I worked for [President Nixon’s Chief of Staff and Watergate figure] H.R. Haldeman. I was doing commercials for him when he had the Ford account. [Ed. note: Haldeman worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency prior to meeting Nixon in the ’50s.] I used to do all the music for the Ford commercials. When [Haldeman] decided to go with Nixon, he made everybody join [the Republican Party]. I met Nixon and all those guys, but let’s put it like this: I’ve never been a starfucker. I’ve been a Republican all my life, and I’m still a Republican, but I’m very disappointed in the directions they’ve turned in. I’m an independent now but I think it’s about time [for an African-American president]. It’s past due. I hope [Obama being elected] happens, because we, as a nation, got a lot of undone things to take care of. ” Close Encounters of the Presidential Kind, Pt. 2 “When I was with Lena [Horne] we played for President Truman and I’ll tell you something funny. On the dais, they must have had a hundred people sitting there, and the stage was in the opposite direction. I was standing in the wings and looking out at everything and Mrs. Truman had to go to the bathroom. Everybody stood up. I was wondering how she must feel walking to the bathroom and everyone is standing up as she passes.” Built for Speed “I drive a small SUV now. I love it, man. Matter of fact, the first day I got it, I was coming back into the city from Long Island and I got a ticket! I was doing 80 miles an hour! I didn’t even know I was doing 80. I had my special Suffolk County PBA badge and the fuckin’ cop took it, man, and still gave me a ticket. I told my friends and they said he was really wrong.” Two Things You Never Knew About Duke Ellington “Number one, man, he was the only person I know that sent his Christmas cards out in July. And the other thing is, you’ll be talking to Duke and you’ll want to say no, and he’ll make you say yes. If you want to say yes, he’ll make you say no.” true 10422 2008-12-03T15:12:00-05:00 false 20786 128 200811 true 79 2008-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Chico Hamilton pauses during a conversation, turns to Jazz-Times and asks, “How old did you say I was, man?” It’s not that he’s forgotten, because his mind is as sharp as a direct hit on a snare. Hamilton is just seeking confirmation because, despite some significant setbacks during the past few years—heart problems, the death this past April of Helen, his wife of 67 years—the renowned drummer and bandleader, who hasn’t held a job outside of music since he was a shoeshine boy in his native Los Angeles, doesn’t feel old. “Yeah, OK, 87,” he says. “And at 87, man, I can play all over the world and I don’t have to play anybody else’s music. I play my own. I don’t have to play Duke or Basie, which is cool. That’s my reward. I’ve been blessed because I’ve been able to make music, and I make music for music’s sake.” Hamilton is seated at a table in his penthouse apartment, a block away from the headquarters of the United Nations on Manhattan’s east side. Small and cozy, the apartment has been home to Hamilton since the mid-1960s. On the walls are numerous photos, including Helen and daughter Denise, who lives downstairs in the same building. Several paintings, and a blown-up letter from President Bush, congratulating Hamilton on being named an NEA Jazz Master in 2004, also vie for space. The bookshelf is well stocked and diverse: bios of Bessie Smith and Dr. Martin Luther King, James Michener’s fiction, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, The Magic of...

2009-03-02T00:28:02-05:00

4 Plenty of jazz musicians and fans have pictures of Sonny Rollins hanging in their homes. Very few of them, however, choose to hang the legendary saxophonist’s junior-high class photo. But for trombonist Clifton Anderson, the Saxophone Colossus is also known as “Uncle Sonny.” That childhood snapshot (in which Rollins is instantly recognizable) hangs above an earlier class photo in which sits his sister, Anderson’s mother. Anderson’s apartment, the upper half of a Bronx duplex, is peppered with photos of Rollins and mementos from their travels together. His coffee table sits on a rug bought in Istanbul, while a didgeridoo from Australia sits propped in a corner. Most prominent are artifacts from numerous visits to Japan, where audiences revere Rollins and his band. “The first time I went to Japan with Sonny was an amazing experience,” Anderson recalls. “I wasn’t prepared for the 15-hour plane ride, so when I finally got there I was really discombobulated. I didn’t really know his stature in Japan, and when we got off the plane it was like the Beatles had landed. There were four television cameras, 30 or 40 photographers, all these lights flashing off. They followed us through the entire airport. We got to the hotel and I’m exhausted, flipping channels looking for an English channel, and I came upon a news broadcast and there we are.” Anderson’s parents bought the house in 1967, when he was 10 years old. They gave him the house in 1988 and he’s lived there since, renting the ground floor to a pair of ex-singers for flamboyant televangelist Reverend Ike who don’t mind him practicing at all hours. He shares the apartment with his girlfriend, cellist Nioka Workman, daughter of bassist Reggie. Anderson describes himself as a homebody when he isn’t touring, and the two generally cook for themselves. “I usually eat in because I try to watch what I eat,” he says. “I was a full-blown vegetarian for eight to 10 years and then I drifted back into fish. So I’ll usually cook fish with different vegetable combinations. My girlfriend says she can’t eat anywhere else because she likes my cooking.” Though the house is a short walk (albeit one involving a steep concrete staircase) from the Grand Concourse, the Bronx’s busy main thoroughfare, Anderson calls the quiet, family-oriented block an “oasis.” Inside, he’s created a further oasis, the windows crowded with plants that provide an idyllic scene blocking out the urban landscape. Over the small back courtyard hangs a flourishing grapevine, which Anderson insists yields delicious grape juice (he’s given up the more demanding ritual of making wine). “I was born in Harlem and I’ve been living in New York City all my life,” Anderson says, “but at this point I’d like to make a move outside of the city. I used to spend my summers on Martha’s Vineyard with my other uncle, and I got used to being in the country, by the seashore. So I’d really like to get out of here and transition into a more country kind of scenario.” One remnant of Anderson’s childhood on the vineyard sits on a shelf above his piano: a tennis trophy earned in a junior tournament. “I actually wanted to become a professional tennis player,” he says. “There was a point when I had to decide between playing music and playing tennis, and music won out.” Anderson suffered from asthma as a child, so his mother took him to Martha’s Vineyard for the sea air. Every summer, he would sit at the tennis courts and watch the players. When he was 11, a woman approached who had noticed him there and took him under her wing. “She happened to be the wife of a prominent doctor and they started sponsoring me,” he says. “Tennis was a pretty expensive sport.” The Vineyard being the playground of the rich and famous, Anderson had a few encounters with celebrities during his youth. “I saw [former New York City mayor] David Dinkins a few years back at an awards show,” Anderson laughs, “so I went over to him and said, ‘Mayor, I know you don’t remember me but we used to play tennis all the time up on Martha’s Vineyard. I was a young guy and used to beat you all the time.’ He kind of brushed me off. I guess I shouldn’t have said that.” Anderson doesn’t have much time for tennis these days. Besides his busy touring schedule with Rollins, he’s now running his uncle’s recently launched Doxy Records label, for which he’s been compiling live tracks for Road Shows, a new release spanning concerts from 1978 to last year’s landmark Carnegie Hall show. He’s also preparing to release his own new CD, Decade, and hoping to do more touring under his own name. All of this happens in a narrow home studio that’s part recording studio, part design workstation and part business office. “Everything converges here,” Anderson says. “It looks calm in here right now, but believe me, it gets crazy.” The Personal File The Naked Truth “There used to be a nude beach on the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard called Zack’s Beach. They had these multi-colored dunes that would come down right onto the sand, green and brown and red clay. We used to put the clay all over us and bake in the sun because the clay had such good properties for your skin. Then we’d just run into the water and wash it off. But like everything else people abused it and started having orgies or some crazy stuff, so they closed off that section.” German Engineering “I like to drive. I’ll drive upstate, where the roads are nice and picturesque. I have a 1999 [Volkswagen] Passat, but I had some work done on it so it’s pretty fast. I also have a BMW that was my aunt’s car, and when she passed Sonny asked me if I wanted it. But the Passat is my baby. I’m a German car fan: Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, Mercedes, BMW. They make great cars.” Bemsha Sweat “I have an exercise room in the back. I used to do bodybuilding with Thelonious Monk Jr. Gale Monk, his wife, is itching to play me in tennis. As I slacked off, she started getting her game together, so she’s trying to hunt me down now to kick my ass.” Jazz Ambassador “Since I travel, I have a lot of friends in different parts of the world, and everybody’s got opinions about the United States and how things are unfolding around the world with different governments. I always find myself having to explain what’s going on in the U.S. and the American perspective on things. But there’re so many similarities from country to country and we all get caught up on the differences. It’s a funny path that humanity is on.” Newk: The Movie “Something I learned from observing Sonny is that you have to live outside of music in order to bring something to music. I don’t think you can keep having fresh ideas if you just stay dealing with music without experiencing other things. I joke with him because he’s very private; I tell him that people love that Ray Charles movie, so if they ever did a movie about his life, could you imagine what that would be? The bridge is one thing, but what about his spiritual ventures into the East? It would make an incredible film. He’s just like, ‘Oh, yeah, right.’” true 10613 2008-09-25T13:36:36-04:00 false 20386 127 200810 true 79 2008-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Plenty of jazz musicians and fans have pictures of Sonny Rollins hanging in their homes. Very few of them, however, choose to hang the legendary saxophonist’s junior-high class photo. But for trombonist Clifton Anderson, the Saxophone Colossus is also known as “Uncle Sonny.” That childhood snapshot (in which Rollins is instantly recognizable) hangs above an earlier class photo in which sits his sister, Anderson’s mother. Anderson’s apartment, the upper half of a Bronx duplex, is peppered with photos of Rollins and mementos from their travels together. His coffee table sits on a rug bought in Istanbul, while a didgeridoo from Australia sits propped in a corner. Most prominent are artifacts from numerous visits to Japan, where audiences revere Rollins and his band. “The first time I went to Japan with Sonny was an amazing experience,” Anderson recalls. “I wasn’t prepared for the 15-hour plane ride, so when I finally got there I was really discombobulated. I didn’t really know his stature in Japan, and when we got off the plane it was like the Beatles had landed. There were four television cameras, 30 or 40 photographers, all these lights flashing off. They followed us through the entire airport. We got to the hotel and I’m exhausted, flipping channels looking for an English channel, and I came upon a news broadcast and there we are.” Anderson’s parents bought the house in 1967, when he was 10 years old. They gave him the house in 1988 and he’s lived there since, renting the ground floor to a pair...

2009-03-02T00:27:48-05:00

4 Tucked away in the scenic Hudson River Valley, about an hour drive from Manhattan, lies Villa Paradiso, the lush, four-acre home of saxophonist Joe Lovano and his wife of 24 years, singer-flutist-educator Judi Silvano. For big-city dwellers used to cramped conditions and precious few connections to nature, this place is indeed a paradise. But Lovano and Silvano were both Manhattan residents long before moving here. For nearly 20 years they lived together in a loft on 23rd Street that was party central for the jazz community. All that changed in 1998 with the fire. Lovano was on the road with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell and Silvano was also away when the flames hit. Irreplaceable family pictures were burned, saxophones charred, gongs and cymbals melted into twisted metal sculptures, a lifetime’s collection of LPs destroyed. “It was challenging,” says the onetime Judi Silverman, a dancer and classical singer from Philadelphia who met her future husband at an impromptu jam in that very same loft they would later share. “It could’ve been tragic if we had to escape the fire. And because we had this little house already, we weren’t homeless. So in a lot of ways we were really fortunate.” Picking themselves up from the ashes, Lovano and Silvano reinvented themselves as a country couple. Judi has become an exceptional gardener who rejoices at every new leaf, every new bud that pops up in any of her seven well-kept gardens. And Joe takes great pride in pointing out the gravel paths and sandstone patio that he’s built, the barn and the three tool sheds he’s painted and the stone wall he stacked down by the creek. “Yeah, I’m getting back to my Sicilian roots,” he laughs as we stroll past his wife’s vegetable garden. “Working is definitely a beautiful, meditative state and it feels great to be involved in nature in that way, where you feel really connected with your life.” Two cardinals swoop overhead as we stroll past stalks of brilliant orange Asiatic lilies near the swimming pool, which is also a prime CD-listening area for sun-worshipping Lovano. “This is our new project for this season,” he says, pointing to the beginnings of a wooden pergola overhead. “It’s been fun working on that because it brings out some carpentry skills that I experienced growing up. My uncle Sandy had three acres out in East Lake, Ohio, and as a kid I’d help him do all kinds of stuff around his place. So this brings back a lot of memories for me.” Silvano and Lovano acquired the property in 1993 from their longtime friend, alto saxophonist Dick Oatts, and for the first five years they used it strictly as a getaway pad. Since 1998, it’s been their only residence and they’ve invested huge amounts of time, energy and money into adding on to the original building and maintaining the property. “Sharing our space and property has always been a part of our life together,” says Lovano. “Our loft was a real center for our New York community and now we have little impromptu gatherings throughout the year out here.” “People come up from the city with their families,” adds Silvano. “They bring their babies, their kids, their dogs ... it’s like the company picnic.” Each year, Lovano and Silvano plant a new tree on their property to commemorate another anniversary at Villa Paradiso. And now, after 15 years, they have their own little New York Botanical Garden. “Those are the three tenors,” laughs Judi, pointing to three gigantic white evergreens that they planted during their first year on the property. Huge willows, dogwoods, blue spruces and rose trellises also dot the grounds. And Silvano has arranged it all with a keen eye for composition, color and a touch of feng shui. Inside their home one gets a sense of the importance that family plays in their lives. Framed photos adorn the walls: portraits of Judi’s parents when they were courting, a picture of Joe’s mom as a vivacious 14-year-old with a ’40s hairstyle, their wedding picture from 24 years ago. An office space down the hall from the kitchen is where Silvano and Lovano conduct business for their JSL Records label, now celebrating its 20th year. The office doubles as a guest room where a 1930s mirror from Lovano’s grandmother hangs on a wall near an array of his fedoras and stingy brims stacked on top of a dresser. The spacious, soundproof music room, a fairly recent add-on to the original house, has been the scene of numerous rehearsals, jams and even a few recording sessions. A beautiful old set of Slingerland drums occupies a prominent place in the space. “After the fire, Paul Motian gave these drums to me,” says Lovano. “He played them on Bill Evans’ Sunday at the Village Vanguard and on all those Keith Jarrett Impulse recordings. He told me he also played them with Coleman Hawkins, so you know those are some magical drums.” Maintaining Villa Paradiso seems like an all-encompassing full-time job, and yet Lovano has found a balance between his country life and his jazz life. “To go out on tour and then to come home and have this scene that Judi and I have developed and nurtured together ... it’s so gratifying,” says Lovano. “We’re so lucky to have so much around us. And we give thanks every day.” The Personal File His Other Car? A Tractor Silvano drives a 2003 Nissan Maxima. Lovano drives a 2001 Cadillac Eldorado and is also the proud owner of a John Deere tractor. Hobbies Lovano harbors a lifelong love of golf, going back to his boyhood days in Cleveland. “I always played with all my uncles. Later on, when I was in Woody Herman’s band, we used to keep our clubs with us. If we had a travel day, we would fly ahead or rent a car and go play golf before the gig. That was always fun. There were years when I fell out of touch with golfing, so coming back to that now has been really great.” Flicks The last movie that the couple saw together, at the nearby art house in Newburgh, was La Vie En Rose, the biopic of famed French singer Edith Piaf which earned a Best Actress Academy Award for Marion Cotillard. Tubin’ Silvano enjoys Law & Order while Lovano tends to be more of a news junkie. “I kind of lay up for Nightline,” he says. And together they get a kick out of CSI: Miami. Food “We love cooking ... together and for each other,” says Lovano. “A lot of the things that we cook, we took inspiration from other places that we’ve been to ... simple things like pasta with beans.” Adds Silvano, “In Rome, we had bruschetta with white beans and garlic mashed like a paste on the bread and drizzled with olive oil. Unbelievable! That was back in January and we’re still talking about it.” true 21 2008-08-12T19:26:25-04:00 false 19906 126 200809 true 79 2008-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

Tucked away in the scenic Hudson River Valley, about an hour drive from Manhattan, lies Villa Paradiso, the lush, four-acre home of saxophonist Joe Lovano and his wife of 24 years, singer-flutist-educator Judi Silvano. For big-city dwellers used to cramped conditions and precious few connections to nature, this place is indeed a paradise. But Lovano and Silvano were both Manhattan residents long before moving here. For nearly 20 years they lived together in a loft on 23rd Street that was party central for the jazz community. All that changed in 1998 with the fire. Lovano was on the road with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell and Silvano was also away when the flames hit. Irreplaceable family pictures were burned, saxophones charred, gongs and cymbals melted into twisted metal sculptures, a lifetime’s collection of LPs destroyed. “It was challenging,” says the onetime Judi Silverman, a dancer and classical singer from Philadelphia who met her future husband at an impromptu jam in that very same loft they would later share. “It could’ve been tragic if we had to escape the fire. And because we had this little house already, we weren’t homeless. So in a lot of ways we were really fortunate.” Picking themselves up from the ashes, Lovano and Silvano reinvented themselves as a country couple. Judi has become an exceptional gardener who rejoices at every new leaf, every new bud that pops up in any of her seven well-kept gardens. And Joe takes great pride in pointing out the gravel paths and sandstone patio that he’s...

2009-03-02T00:27:25-05:00

4 In a sense, the South Philadelphia rowhouse that Pat Martino calls home is a reflection of the dramatic schism that brought him back to it, at once a reminder of the past and a blank slate which he’s laboriously rebuilt from scratch. Martino’s parents bought the house in 1959, just six months before the 15-year-old guitarist struck out to make his fortune in New York. Other than occasional family visits, he stayed away until forced back to recover from the 1980 brain operations that saved his life but virtually erased his memory. That rehabilitation took eight years, after which he left twice more, to Amsterdam and Kyoto, Japan, both times returning when his mother fell ill. “After the second time,” Martino recalls, “she became bedridden and I remained here until both of [my parents] passed away. I then decided to move again, but I changed my mind. My end decision was to finally reside here.” Immediately upon making that decision, he impulsively made another: to completely gut and reconstruct the interior of the house. “My decision to do so was at random,” he explains. “It wasn’t really a thoughtful commitment. I didn’t even count the money that I had. I don’t think about the future. I think about now, and I have faith in what comes next. So I don’t worry about whether I’m not going to able to afford it somewhere down the line, whether I’ll be in debt; it comes to pass. And that’s what I believe faith and hope are all about.” Martino describes a process of sitting in the emptied house, newspapers on the windows, and meditating on the form it should take. The contractors would arrive early in the morning and he would talk them through his ideas, with no master plan. Unconventional though the approach may have been, he laughs at the suggestion that his contractors may have balked. “Of course not,” he says, “because there was no limit on how much was going to be spent. You can hardly argue with that.” The house changed again, though in far less drastic fashion, upon the arrival of Martino’s wife, Ayako, whom he met in Kyoto in 1993. “When she first came into the house,” Martino says, “she said, ‘This feels like a museum.’ I said, ‘Thank you, I’m impressed,’ and she said, ‘No, that’s not what I mean.’ Then she gave it life. In Japan, there’s a humor in that culture that is lacking in our culture, and it’s just priceless. She brought an ability to enjoy the house for what it is and not so much on the basis of the profundity of its architecture and what it contains.” During the periods that Martino is in residence at the house, which is increasingly rare given his hectic touring schedule, he spends most of his time in the second-floor room he refers to as his study. Occupying the space formerly taken up by one-and-a-half bedrooms, the study has a comfortable couch on one end and a workstation on the other, including a keyboard and Gibson Pat Martino Custom guitar within easy reach of a home recording studio. Shelves along one wall are lined with vinyl, with stacks of CDs laid out on the floor below. Another four or five guitars sit in a rack alongside a portrait of the guitarist leaning against the wall. While the study is a definite workspace, Martino has difficulty addressing the concept of downtime. “I’m never not working,” he insists. “To me, work is play. Creative productivity is the most playful, childish state of mind that I reside within on a constant basis. I can’t relate to vacations, because I have nothing to vacate. I’m alive and I’m happy. And, thank God, I’m less occupied with thoughts about the future, which doesn’t exist, or memories that are weighty.” Martino will soon have a second home within the city. There are plans afoot to open a new “top-name, full-blown jazz club” in partnership with the owners of Philly’s Chris’ Jazz Café. While the club will bear his name, it won’t lead to a lessening of his travel plans. “I’ve always avoided and will continue to avoid ever being referred to or considered to be a ‘local artist,’” he says. “I love motion. Nothing can be judged if it’s constantly in motion, and I would rather not be judged or categorized.” While that schedule and the new venue are evidence of Martino’s continued success, he takes such concepts in philosophical stride: “I don’t really consider myself to participate and occupy a position referred to as a ‘career’ or a ‘profession.’ I’ve chosen not to participate in that any longer, even though it automatically takes place. I remember a time when that was my priority and my intention. But after the operations, I personally don’t really have to indulge like I used to. Now I just take it moment to moment and do the best I can under any circumstances.” The Personal File 15 Items or Oneness “When I walk out the front door, whatsoever catches my attention is what I’m focused on. The only thing that focuses me on music is when an instrument is in my hands, or when, soundwise, I’m being enveloped by its presence. So it’s very difficult for me to relate to being separate from music or separate from anything that is surrounding me at the moment. When I’m at Whole Foods, for instance, I’m surrounded by that. I am that. I’m part of that.” What’s Cooking? “The only thing that is cooked in this house is pasta, or possibly risotto or some soup. But me and the missus are vegan, and we avoid the temperature of the food because the nutrition is lost through the heat of it. We normally eat raw vegetables and raw fruits and we both make tremendous salads all the time, but we enjoy and indulge in some fine pasta.” Pieces of Mind On choosing a single ideology: “I can’t. I would find that confining. I was born into and raised Roman Catholic, but that became confining, at least its rituals. Spiritualism became much more broad and expansive, and then even Christianity in general became confining. Then theosophy took its place, all religions as one. Whensoever I get involved in terms of stimulation, that seems to be the main focus of interest for me. It may be Lao Tze or Christ or Buddha or Eckhart Tolle. Who knows? It may be the smile on my neighbor’s face.” Getting Better “One of the biggest issues in terms of the medical industry is recovery. Recovery is, in my opinion, a loss. Refinement is a gain. To recover something is to return to the way it was prior to what takes place in full change. Refinement is metamorphosis. I think we’re brought up to hope to recover if we’re out of control, when in truth it’s the way we were that caused what happened.” Instrumental Ideas “I would be short-minded and shortsighted if I were to consider the guitar my instrument, because I should then be considered a guitarist when the same fluidity and precision that utensil demands of me comes into play with my own penmanship. It goes into fashion when I dress. It goes into the way I drive an automobile. It’s exactly the same force. So I dislike confining myself to any one of the tools that I use. Dedication to self-esteem is something that transcends its application to any tool that’s necessary to bring it to fruition.” true 10613 2008-07-09T18:28:55-04:00 false 19428 125 200808 true 79 2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

In a sense, the South Philadelphia rowhouse that Pat Martino calls home is a reflection of the dramatic schism that brought him back to it, at once a reminder of the past and a blank slate which he’s laboriously rebuilt from scratch. Martino’s parents bought the house in 1959, just six months before the 15-year-old guitarist struck out to make his fortune in New York. Other than occasional family visits, he stayed away until forced back to recover from the 1980 brain operations that saved his life but virtually erased his memory. That rehabilitation took eight years, after which he left twice more, to Amsterdam and Kyoto, Japan, both times returning when his mother fell ill. “After the second time,” Martino recalls, “she became bedridden and I remained here until both of [my parents] passed away. I then decided to move again, but I changed my mind. My end decision was to finally reside here.” Immediately upon making that decision, he impulsively made another: to completely gut and reconstruct the interior of the house. “My decision to do so was at random,” he explains. “It wasn’t really a thoughtful commitment. I didn’t even count the money that I had. I don’t think about the future. I think about now, and I have faith in what comes next. So I don’t worry about whether I’m not going to able to afford it somewhere down the line, whether I’ll be in debt; it comes to pass. And that’s what I believe faith and hope are all about.” Martino...

2009-03-02T00:27:05-05:00

4 To find Charles Lloyd, the veteran saxophonist and survivor of the jazz wars, proceed 3,000 miles west of the jazz mecca of NYC, turn right at Los Angeles and proceed up into the affluent wooded Montecito, by Santa Barbara. There, in a rustic yet sprawling hilltop property, Lloyd and his wife/manager Dorothy Darr—who also designed the large, villa-like house—have lived a relatively quiet and charmed life off to the left of the typical jazz musician’s life (if there is such a thing). When Lloyd isn’t out touring the world, he returns to this house on the continental fringe with a panoramic, Pacific view—pacific in more ways than one. A brief itinerary of Lloyd’s life and GPS coordinates: born in Memphis, he headed to Los Angeles to study at USC in the late ’50s and had early sideman gigs with Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley, which brought him to New York City. There, he formed a quartet, featuring visionary youngsters Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, that became a million-selling cultural phenomenon, appealing to both jazz and rock audiences. After a few years in an increasingly hot spotlight, he jumped off the bus—or crashed and burned, depending on the source—and hightailed it back to California to “regroup,” in Malibu, Big Sur and, finally, Santa Barbara for the past 25 years. Lloyd headed west at a time, in 1970, before other well-known jazzers followed suit. “I remember when I came back to California,” he says, “Herbie, Wayne, Miles, Zawinul, Horace—none of those cats were out here then. I remember everybody said I was doing a dumb thing coming back to California. I was up at [Bob] Dylan’s place in [Woodstock, N.Y.]. We were standing around and his manager, Albert Grossman, had a pool, with cracks in it, and Dylan said, ‘Man, why are you going out there?’ I said, ‘I gotta go back to heal a little bit. I went to college out there and I’m gonna go be by the sea and not wear any clothes and become a fruitarian.’ He said, ‘Man, that place will fall into the ocean.’ I said, ‘Yeah, so be it,’” he laughs. Sitting in his kitchen, slowly ingesting an organic lunch, Lloyd welcomes the visiting journalist, commenting, “I’m just up here in my think tank. I’m trying to get this ship out to sea.” He’s referring to the latest release in his 19-year association with ECM Records, Rabo de Nube, the first with his new pianist, Jason Moran. “I like to eat with wood,” says Lloyd, wielding a heavy-duty pair of chopsticks. “I don’t like to eat with metal utensils. I’ll do it if I’m out there and traveling. But when I left New York and came back to California, after I disbanded the group in ’69, I lived in Malibu. And I started eating with chopsticks. I also went into a serious detoxification thing.” Lloyd and Darr spent much of the ’70s in Big Sur, in a humble Japanese country house that was Darr’s first architectural project. But the idyllic, inherently secluded haven of Big Sur had its drawbacks. “When Charles had a health crisis,” Darr comments, “when he nearly died in ’86, we realized that we needed to be closer to doctors. We actually were here when that happened. Had he been up there, he would not be here now. So that was how we shifted permanently down here.” Speaking of Darr’s design for the house, built in 1998 on property they held since 1982, Lloyd says, “She has had architects want to come and see her house. These guys are supposed to be doing this for a living. She’s a renaissance woman. “My grandfather’s property was in Mississippi. I grew up there, on his place. He had 1,600 acres, really beautiful land. Orchards for days. You could get lost there. “After we lived in New York in lofts, I still want to live in a loft, you know? [Darr] lived in Florence. From Florence, she says, ‘OK, he needs a loft and I need the gentility of an Italian, Moorish house.’ We had this land and she built this space. The beautiful thing is that you don’t hear any sounds and you don’t have people bothering you. I think it helps me to aerate, to go for hikes in the mountains and go swimming in the water. All of that stuff is still important to me.” In the large, high-ceilinged living room, one’s eye naturally falls on an historic original model of the Theremin—the model used by Miklos Rosza in the score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and used by Lloyd on his quirky ’70s album Moon Man. Next to that proudly sits a seven-foot Steinway B grand piano. It is, Lloyd explains, one of “the good ones that had the warm sound but that are modern instruments. This instrument belonged to a guy named Keith Hardesty, who was the master piano technician on the West Coast. It has accelerated action and it’s just so wonderfully built, and the sound is incredible. Michel [Petrucciani] has played it; Bobo [Stenson] has played it. Everybody has played it. Look how pristine it’s built and all. It’s pre-CBS.” As we tour the downstairs area, now packed with electronic keyboards, a Baldwin studio piano and other sonic implements, Lloyd explains, “Dorothy was going to have a studio down here, with the booth in there.” He points to a room now housing tape archives going back to the 1960s. That in-house studio plan has stalled, but Lloyd’s house was the site of one renowned “home recording” so far: Which Way is East?, the two-disc duet between Lloyd and drummer Billy Higgins, made shortly before the drummer’s death in 2001. Those recordings were made in the warmer environs of the living room upstairs, Lloyd says. “Higgins and I loved it upstairs, plus there was the fact that he was not so well.” Of the house, Lloyd beams, “She made this full of light. When I was in New York, those guys who ran the music business, there was always talk about artists being downtrodden and living beneath the sewer. I didn’t think that was right. I thought that if a tree can’t get water in its roots, how’s it going to have wonderful blossoms and such? “All of this is to say that the spaciousness of what happens when I can live in Dorothy’s world here is that I’m able to move all around and be on the outside and the edge. I can go exploring on tippy toes and then come back over here and get a bit of B-flat. It’s like a lot of different options. But the options will close down on your ass if there’s too much humidity and racism and too much B.S.,” he says, referring to life in Memphis. “I don’t know how I got to be so blessed. I came around in the old days and it was a simpler time. When I lived in New York, my first apartment at 1 Sheridan Square was $98.75 a month. I was a composer and I had my publishing. They said it was ‘semi-professional. You have to qualify for this apartment.’ So I brought my royalty statements down. Different journey,” he says, shaking his head gently, “different journey.” Audiophile Anyone? A tour of the house reveals an impressive collection of high-end speakers and audiophile equipment, a long-standing interest of Lloyd’s, nurtured by such sound gurus as Joe Harley from Audio Research. Scattered throughout the house are speakers made by Vandersteen, B&W, Tannoy, ADS, Krell and Snell, and turntables by Macintosh and Thoren. His audiophile passion began innocently enough, back in the day. “When I was in college,” says Lloyd, “these guys in the dorm would have these Heathkit things.” Fast forward to now, and Lloyd notes that Harley “hooks me up with these audiophile people and they make this equipment available to me. I’m on a pilgrimage.” Bookish Impulses Sitting on his bedside table is a small pile of books, including beat poet Gary Snyder’s Back on the Fire and the late, great violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s Unfinished Journey: “He was a special guy. He had this universal love for music. I like the guys with the universal thing.” Lloyd also recommends Indian Tales, by Jaime de Angulo: “It’s about the indigenous people who lived in our area in Big Sur, the Esalen tribe. Down here, it’s the Chumash, but up there, it’s the Esalen. Marvelous stories about them. And on our property, there grew this plant, this datura. It’s like a trumpet flower and a vine. It had medicinal purposes. They could brew a tea with it. It was a hallucinogen. They would have ceremonies up on this part of our land. I got the hit from it.” Eastern Spirits Calling Lloyd has explored Eastern spiritual paths for many years, and has settled on the Vedanta faith, which landed him in this corner of the planet. “I was drawn to this hill because of the Vedanta Temple [down the road]. Vedanta essentially teaches the harmony of all religions. They don’t have lines of demarcation.” true 34 2008-06-12T21:29:51-04:00 false 17991 116 200806 true 79 2008-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

To find Charles Lloyd, the veteran saxophonist and survivor of the jazz wars, proceed 3,000 miles west of the jazz mecca of NYC, turn right at Los Angeles and proceed up into the affluent wooded Montecito, by Santa Barbara. There, in a rustic yet sprawling hilltop property, Lloyd and his wife/manager Dorothy Darr—who also designed the large, villa-like house—have lived a relatively quiet and charmed life off to the left of the typical jazz musician’s life (if there is such a thing). When Lloyd isn’t out touring the world, he returns to this house on the continental fringe with a panoramic, Pacific view—pacific in more ways than one. A brief itinerary of Lloyd’s life and GPS coordinates: born in Memphis, he headed to Los Angeles to study at USC in the late ’50s and had early sideman gigs with Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley, which brought him to New York City. There, he formed a quartet, featuring visionary youngsters Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, that became a million-selling cultural phenomenon, appealing to both jazz and rock audiences. After a few years in an increasingly hot spotlight, he jumped off the bus—or crashed and burned, depending on the source—and hightailed it back to California to “regroup,” in Malibu, Big Sur and, finally, Santa Barbara for the past 25 years. Lloyd headed west at a time, in 1970, before other well-known jazzers followed suit. “I remember when I came back to California,” he says, “Herbie, Wayne, Miles, Zawinul, Horace—none of those cats were out here then. I remember...

2009-03-02T00:26:10-05:00

4 Irvin Mayfield is an animated, supremely self-confident 30-year-old with an easy laugh, a growing command of the trumpet and a soul-deep commitment to all things New Orleans. He lives in New Orleans’ uptown sector, in a comfortable yellow frame house with his wife and two young sons. Over the last few years he’s extended his reach beyond music to the cultural politics of his recovering city, and the push and pull of Mayfield’s civic profile continues to broaden. Pulling up in his black Range Rover, he was a bit late to our meeting, having been summoned to an assessment confab on homelessness. Ever since the calamity, which New Orleanians refer to as “the storm” (rarely “Katrina”), homelessness has been a mushrooming crisis; many people have taken to a growing encampment under the freeway overpass at Claiborne and Canal Streets. “We’ve created so many homeless people post-Katrina,” says Mayfield, who lost his own father to the storm, an apparent drowning victim whose body was found weeks later on Elysian Fields Avenue. “So we were talking about mounting a campaign to really fix at least the outside homelessness because there are at least five different homelessness situations. So I may be a spokesperson for the effort.” Mayfield’s other current civic passion is the New Orleans Public Library board, which he joined in December 2006. “My mama has always been a big literacy advocate and I learned how to play jazz a lot from the library. I would go to the public library and get all these jazz recordings to transcribe solos. After the storm the mayor tapped me for the library. I was more interested in the main branch and its proposed national jazz centerpiece downtown. I really didn’t want to get involved with the whole city system; I thought that was above my skill level. But the mayor said, ‘If you’re gonna do one piece you gotta do the whole piece.’ If you’re going to fix the culture of New Orleans, the library system was number one.” Talk of his library board work turned to the stack of books in the room adjacent to his living room, which appears to have been transformed to a listening/rehearsal room encompassing his stereo rig, piano with a bass alongside, and a small set of covered drums. “I’m reading at least seven books; there’s a great book called Good to Great [by Jim Collins]. I’ve given it to all the board members of the library,” he says. “When I became chairman I implemented a new rule that at every board meeting everybody gets a book. Paolo Coelho’s book The Warrior of the Light is a great kind of follow-up to The Alchemist. And I just finished Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. I’m reading [Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s] Made to Stick, which is another kind of marketing book, and I just read Madeleine Albright’s Memo to the President Elect; that was a phenomenal book. I’ve got this other book called Architecture as Experience [by Dana Arnold], which tells me why architecture is important.” Pointing to the art on his walls, in particular five pieces that appear to be a series, Mayfield says, “Those are by a guy named Charles Palmer out of Minneapolis. Every piece has a spiritual designate. The closer you get to these pieces there’s so much hidden on the inside. Over here you’ve got ‘Bush destroyed democracy’ and if you look closer you see a slave ship in there, then you see old articles about slaves running away. I just love the power of his pieces.” Regarding a vivid piece with musicians on the bandstand: “That’s a piece by a guy named Frenchy from New Orleans. He shows up and paints pictures on the gig; this is actually Los Hombres Calientes at the Howlin’ Wolf with Jason Marsalis, Bill Summers and Donald Harrison. Sometimes you can get caught up in the technique and forget the purpose.” Los Hombres Calientes, a group Mayfield founded with Summers in 1998, was and is ambitious for combining Latin-jazz with NOLA music and postbop modernism, but in his solo work Mayfield appears to think even bigger. Check the trumpeter’s large-scale Strange Fruit album and recent post-Katrina requiem (both performed by his New Orleans Jazz Orchestra), as well as the Louisiana Philharmonic’s presence on some tracks on his current Basin Street Records collaboration with mentor Ellis Marsalis (Love Songs, Ballads and Standards). But as it turns out, the new release, whose masters were damaged in the flood but thankfully preserved for release on Mayfield’s iPod, is the end of a cycle. The trumpeter yearns to return to the small group landscape, “getting back to the art of the quartet or quintet, a little more playing.” He elaborates: “I’m going to be looking for some energetic players. I want to get people who really know what they’re doing, who want to come together and make something happen. It’s harder to do it with a small group because everybody is so important, whereas with an orchestra if somebody has a weakness somebody else can make up for that.” There is one key obligation Mayfield requires: “If you want to be playing part of my vision, you’ve got to respect New Orleans. You’ve got to know it, you’ve got to own it. That means you need to come and spend time here or start to investigate what it’s all about. I can’t have a band full of people who can’t see the New Orleans vision because it’s so important to me and so much of what I’m about. That’s what’s missing about a lot of jazz records.” The Personal File Sounds I’ve got this big system I spent probably $15,000 on, and I almost don’t use it anymore. I’m actually about to get rid of all of my equipment. I’m going to a simple stereo: It looks like it costs about $900, it’s got great sound, it’s sleek, and I can plug my iPod into it. The iPod has changed the game up so much you don’t need all that stuff anymore.” Flicks “I saw Ratatouille the other day, all about the rat that could cook [laughs]. Man, that was one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen!” says Mayfield. “There Will Be Blood blew me away! I thought American Gangster was good too, especially the opening scene where they’re talking about the great American decline. We’re in a good period for movies.” Eats Life in the Crescent City is a constant gastronomic bouquet, hazardous to those watching their weight but not to the compact but physically fit Irvin Mayfield: “Unfortunately I don’t cook,” says the trumpeter, “but as far as restaurants are concerned, Emeril’s would be my favorite; barbecue shrimp, gumbo and their bread pudding are the dishes I prefer.” It’s a Chopper, Baby Mayfield, one of jazz’s few bikers, says, “Motorcycle riding is all about freedom. A lot like jazz, it requires a lot of form, structure and deep understanding before you can truly unlock the secrets of its freedom.” Holy Horn “I had this trumpet made by Dave Monette called the Elysian Trumpet made for my dad and the other victims of Hurricane Katrina. It travels with two full-time sheriffs, it’s insured for $1.3 million. … It’s more important than me! You can’t bring it around just anywhere and I don’t keep it at home—it’s kept in a vault at a church. The whole idea is that the trumpet is only to be played for spiritual reasons or in spiritual places. ... I like the idea of having an instrument that’s based in that, and also keeping in mind that jazz came out of the church.” true 17 2008-06-16T19:29:47-04:00 false 18112 117 200805 true 79 2008-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

Irvin Mayfield is an animated, supremely self-confident 30-year-old with an easy laugh, a growing command of the trumpet and a soul-deep commitment to all things New Orleans. He lives in New Orleans’ uptown sector, in a comfortable yellow frame house with his wife and two young sons. Over the last few years he’s extended his reach beyond music to the cultural politics of his recovering city, and the push and pull of Mayfield’s civic profile continues to broaden. Pulling up in his black Range Rover, he was a bit late to our meeting, having been summoned to an assessment confab on homelessness. Ever since the calamity, which New Orleanians refer to as “the storm” (rarely “Katrina”), homelessness has been a mushrooming crisis; many people have taken to a growing encampment under the freeway overpass at Claiborne and Canal Streets. “We’ve created so many homeless people post-Katrina,” says Mayfield, who lost his own father to the storm, an apparent drowning victim whose body was found weeks later on Elysian Fields Avenue. “So we were talking about mounting a campaign to really fix at least the outside homelessness because there are at least five different homelessness situations. So I may be a spokesperson for the effort.” Mayfield’s other current civic passion is the New Orleans Public Library board, which he joined in December 2006. “My mama has always been a big literacy advocate and I learned how to play jazz a lot from the library. I would go to the public library and get all these jazz recordings...

2009-03-02T00:26:14-05:00

4 “I’m not a superstitious person, by any stretch of the imagination,” insists Gerald Veasley, a claim borne out by the fact that immediately upon taking a seat on the large, comfortable green couch in the bassist’s living room, I’m greeted in rapid succession by his two black cats. Of course, no one feels the need to offer such a disclaimer without some tale of the supernatural to relate. Veasley lives in a cozy corner row house in the mostly working-class Overbrook section of Philadelphia, the type of neighborhood where people tend to live their whole lives, and leaving home rarely means moving farther than the next block. The previous owner of the house, Veasley explains, had grown up right around the corner. “When he got married, his wife said, ‘If you buy me that house, I’ll make you the happiest man in the world.’ That’s all a man needs to hear, so he hustled and got his money together and bought her this house.” Sadly, the wife passed away prematurely, but the house’s owner stayed on and raised the couple’s two children. But shortly after Veasley and his wife, Roxanne, moved in 12 years ago, he began noticing strange movements out of the corner of his eye. “It always felt like somebody had just walked in or out of the room,” says Veasley. “I never wanted to share it with my wife because I felt like she’d be a little freaked out, but we were on vacation with another couple, trading stories, and when I brought it up she said, ‘You know what? I always saw the same thing.’ Rather than running out and hiring an exorcist, the couple took a strange comfort in the presence, which they assumed to be the former owner’s wife. “It’s the opposite of what you think about when you hear ‘ghost story.’ The house always had the feeling of a home where people were happy, where this woman really wanted to raise her kids and her husband had so much love that he kept her memory alive.” That sense of dreams expressed but unfulfilled recurs when Veasley is asked about the large painting that dominates the dining room, opposite the “out-of-tune” upright piano and catacorner from shelves holding decorative bowls and vessels. The painting is an abstract piece comprised of blocks of solid earth tones. It’s the work of the mother of one of Roxanne Veasley’s best friends. “Her mom’s dream was to move to Paris and to pursue her art, and she never made it—she was killed,” Veasley relates. “There’s something about this painting that looks so unfinished, but I may be reading into it because I know about her life. But it feels like there was more to do, and for her, there was more to do.” As full of such personal reflections as the house is, the original deciding factor in its favor was much more practical. Built on a slight hill, it has an above-ground basement with a separate entrance, which until recently was Veasley’s home recording studio. “My wife was out taking a walk and she saw a ‘For Sale’ sign,” Veasley recalls, “and when she came back to our two-bedroom apartment to tell me about it I was ticked off, because I had my equipment set up in a little nook and my friends and I were in the middle of recording. She showed me the basement and was like, ‘You can bring your musician friends in without them coming through the house.’ That was the appeal of the house.” The studio is currently in the process of being converted into a den, partly because of a general stripping-down of Veasley’s musical process, but mainly because, he says, “I’m feeling a desire for home to really be home. I just put a small set-up in the spare bedroom, so I have a sketchpad, but I want the house to really be a private place.” That desire to simplify his life may also be inspired in part by his wife’s interest in feng shui. “I owe her a lot in terms of her desire to declutter and to simplify,” he says. “In some ways, I’m a person that makes things too complicated. But she’s always cleaning out and getting rid of. We’re the family that has the garage sale. My wife’s mindset is if something’s not important to your life, why are you holding on to it? I won’t even go into how powerful a metaphor that is.” Veasley is prone to drawing such philosophical parallels from everyday conversation, a result of reading he’s been doing recently into the creative process. While he refers to himself as a “greedy” reader with wide-ranging interests, his main objective in picking up a book is inspiration. “Not just inspiration for my musical life, but inspiration for my broader life. Sometimes just an idea is enough to make you a better person than you were a day before. A powerful idea can change things.” The Personal File By the Numbers “Sudoku is a guilty pleasure. It’s interesting in terms of using logic [and] linear thinking, which is a little bit different than the right-brain thinking that we do as musicians and artistic people. But sometimes I feel like I’m just goofing off. It’s so addictive. The other day I sat down and figured I’d do one and ended up doing five. The real trick for me is to try to stop.” Weather Retort On Joe Zawinul: “We always teased Joe about his constant use of the phrase ‘It’s good to be…’ That was his way of being at peace with whatever the situation was. We’d be walking down the street in the pouring rain and he’d say, ‘You know, Gerald, it’s good to walk in the rain.’ Or you’d be complaining about riding all night from Venice to Copenhagen and he’d say, ‘It’s good to be tired.’ He had this strong-willed approach to life. Bring it on and he could not just deal with it, but embrace it.” Strike Out “The original owner of this house was a Phillies baseball player [Art Mahaffey], and the story was that when he moved here, the kids from the neighborhood would come by, ring his doorbell and ask for his autograph. So of course I’m thinking a celebrity lived in this house, a pro athlete. I imagined these kids lined up like this miniature Hollywood in working-class Philadelphia. I asked a friend of mine if he was a good player, a star, and he said, ‘No, not really.’” Odyssey “I’m reading Homer, because we all have our list of things we’ve never read but should have. I hope I live long enough to make up for all these deficiencies in my education.” There Goes the Neighborhood “What I liked about this neighborhood is that it was very quiet. Of course I didn’t respect the fact that it was quiet before I got here and I brought the noise with me.” Tennis, Anyone? “I’m a really bad tennis player, but it’s one of my passions. What I noticed is that if I go out to a public court somewhere wearing just the right gear, I can assure that nobody will play with me because I look like I’m so good. But when they actually see me play a little bit, they’re more than willing.” Rose Encounters “I have five rosebushes on the side of the house. Roses are very forgiving. If you have a lot of sun and you keep the bugs at bay, they just do their thing. There was a period where I couldn’t really get motivated to write anything and I had a record due, so I would just dig, like I was digging for ideas and motivation. It wasn’t quite Close Encounters of the Third Kind digging, but it was close.” true 10613 2008-06-17T19:10:24-04:00 false 18235 118 200804 true 79 2008-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

“I’m not a superstitious person, by any stretch of the imagination,” insists Gerald Veasley, a claim borne out by the fact that immediately upon taking a seat on the large, comfortable green couch in the bassist’s living room, I’m greeted in rapid succession by his two black cats. Of course, no one feels the need to offer such a disclaimer without some tale of the supernatural to relate. Veasley lives in a cozy corner row house in the mostly working-class Overbrook section of Philadelphia, the type of neighborhood where people tend to live their whole lives, and leaving home rarely means moving farther than the next block. The previous owner of the house, Veasley explains, had grown up right around the corner. “When he got married, his wife said, ‘If you buy me that house, I’ll make you the happiest man in the world.’ That’s all a man needs to hear, so he hustled and got his money together and bought her this house.” Sadly, the wife passed away prematurely, but the house’s owner stayed on and raised the couple’s two children. But shortly after Veasley and his wife, Roxanne, moved in 12 years ago, he began noticing strange movements out of the corner of his eye. “It always felt like somebody had just walked in or out of the room,” says Veasley. “I never wanted to share it with my wife because I felt like she’d be a little freaked out, but we were on vacation with another couple, trading stories, and when I brought...

2009-03-02T00:26:18-05:00

4 Unless your visit to the spacious and spectacular Wilton, Conn., home of Dave and Iola Brubeck takes you to the back rooms that most guests never have reason to see, you’d miss it. So when your eyes happen to gaze upon a particular piece of art hanging on a wood-paneled wall near a staircase, you can’t help but do a double take. “I guess you recognize that painting,” says Iola, Dave’s soulmate since the day the couple met in Stockton, Calif., shortly after the dawn of World War II. What jazz fan wouldn’t? There in an obscure corner of this house so filled with history is the original Neil Fujita artwork used for the cover of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s landmark 1959 Time Out album. The abstract is nearly as iconic as the music—“Take Five” and “Blue Rondo à la Turk” both premiered on this, jazz’s first million-selling LP—and it looks even more vibrant in this context, considerably larger than the square-foot cardboard canvas on which so many first saw it. But at some point during a conversation with the Brubecks it strikes you as ironic that the piano giant’s most famous creation bears the name it does, because one thing Dave Brubeck never does is to take time out. Even at age 87, he and the former Iola Whitlock, his bride of 65 years—engaged on their first date, their marriage itself is now old enough to collect Social Security—are constantly working. This year’s touring and recording plans are already locked down, and a question about retirement is met with a bewildered look. “This’ll be a very short interview if we’re gonna talk about spare time,” Dave says as we sit down to chat. He has just moments ago extricated himself from a workroom where he was composing a new piece. Iola still handles much of Dave’s day-to-day business. But on this December afternoon they have other business as well: Soon they will be packing up for their annual winter stay in Sanibel Island, Fla., where the extended Brubeck clan—Dave and Iola did find time to raise a daughter and five sons, four of them professional musicians—will gather for Christmas, grand- and great-grandkids included. The holiday may be as close as they come to getting rest, however. “People think it’s a vacation,” says Dave, “but we go down there and work from morning till midnight. We’ll never finish what is unfinished.” While they look forward to the southern warmth, they admit it’s often difficult to leave Wilton. Dave and Iola moved here 45 years ago, long before Fairfield County was regularly listed as one of the wealthiest places in the United States. From the road the home doesn’t look like much, but once entered, the interior—three stories filled with treasures and personal memories—is a visual feast. Designed by California architect David Thorne, who had built the Brubecks’ previous home in Oakland, Calif., the sprawling Wilton palace looks out through a series of Japanese-inspired sliding glass doors at more than 20 acres of pristine beauty. “He brought with him a lot of that California influence,” says Iola about the architect. Two streams, surrounded by tall trees and meadows, flow downhill and converge in a pond, over which a bridge leads to a small island retreat where Dave often composes. Wild turkeys, turtles, fish and even coyotes sometimes listen in. When the Brubeck kids were young, they had all the space they needed to sled and play football. “We just loved the land and the beauty of the streams,” says Iola. “Those rocks out there,” adds Dave, pointing to a cluster of large jagged boulders in the stream, “were the reason we bought this land.” The imposing main wall of the cavernous living room is erected from stones found on the land, taken from fences that kept the livestock in place when a dairy farm operated here, before Dave and Iola bought the property. “Just what the glaciers left behind,” says Iola about the stones. Nature was second nature to the couple when they chose this setting for their home. Both were raised in central California, where Dave spent his youth helping his father run the family’s 45,000-acre cattle ranch. Dirt poor at first, the couple struggled until fame found Dave in the early 1950s. “I’m embarrassed at what I put my wife and my kids through,” says Dave. “A cabin with no floor, just dirt, and no toilet facilities. I would wash the kids in a stream. That was a low period. We were broke all the time.” Their present home, of course, reflects a half-century of international recognition, but they remain humble, proud and good-natured people. There are no airs about them as they explain the origins of the paintings, sculptures, tapestries, collections and antique furniture acquired throughout the world. Asked about the dozens of awards displayed, the old family photos, the many keyboards that are fixtures throughout the house (including one on a portable platform over their bed), Dave and Iola expound happily. But they never lose sight of what their lives are about. There are no high-def TVs, only vintage sets, because they rarely stop long enough to watch a program. No state-of-the-art sound equipment, because there’s no time to listen. Bookshelves are few because most of their reading is confined to airplanes. Movies? Haven’t been to one in years. The Brubecks didn’t get to be such healthy senior specimens by sitting around all of the time using their brains though. Both Dave and Iola have always been, and remain, avid exercisers. Until recent years Dave walked five miles daily and Iola kept up with him. Despite a triple bypass several years ago, he hopes to get back up to a mile and a half a day in Florida. Here in Wilton there’s a pool and an exercise room downstairs—and a ping-pong table that has fallen into disrepair. “We used to have wild ping-pong games here! Oh, God, we became vicious,” says Dave. And there’s an exercise bike, with a portable electronic keyboard above it so Dave can play while he sweats. “Every room is a workroom,” reminds Dave. “This is a music factory,” confirms his wife. “It isn’t a bad place to practice, looking out the window,” Dave says. “It’s one of my favorite places to go.” The Personal File Dave Rocks On Frank Zappa: “You don’t want to be putting down rock musicians when you’ve got guys like that. I respected him.” Dave Rocks, Take Two “One morning I woke up and I heard somebody playing Beethoven on my piano, by memory. It was a roadie for my son Chris’ band. I said, ‘My God, this kid who’s a roadie can play better classical piano than I’ll ever play.’ Just looking at these kids kind of turned me off but I started thinking, don’t judge people by their hair and how they’re dressed. Pretty quick I had long hair.” Sometimes Dave Doesn’t Rock On Liberace: “He could play. His technique was like iron, just clean and strong.” A Political Statement, of Sorts On a pair of hanging lamps in the living room: Dave: “Iola, did I bring these from Iraq or Iran?” Iola: “From Iraq but they’re falling apart, like Iraq is.” It’s All About Who You Know Dave: “There are great restaurants all around here. The Mediterranean [Grill] in Wilton is the one we go to the most.” Iola: “That’s your favorite because they immediately bring you cushions for your back.” In Praise of Collectors Dave: “We’re always getting [unreleased recordings] that we didn’t know about, things that I had no idea were ever recorded. There are groups of guys that collect these things.” Iola: “Thank goodness for them. There’s one great one with Gerry Mulligan and Dave.” Dave: “You forget about it, and then you say, ‘That isn’t bad.’ I can’t believe that I played that well!” Motivation Iola: “I was a stay-at-home mom until everybody was out of the nest. But I also worked with Dave. When he was traveling with our sons, I did all the booking for traveling and took care of the business. Some people give me credit for getting Dave started [playing on] college campuses. I don’t think it was that I was so smart. I like to eat!” true 10422 2008-06-18T19:21:00-04:00 false 18383 120 200803 true 79 2008-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Unless your visit to the spacious and spectacular Wilton, Conn., home of Dave and Iola Brubeck takes you to the back rooms that most guests never have reason to see, you’d miss it. So when your eyes happen to gaze upon a particular piece of art hanging on a wood-paneled wall near a staircase, you can’t help but do a double take. “I guess you recognize that painting,” says Iola, Dave’s soulmate since the day the couple met in Stockton, Calif., shortly after the dawn of World War II. What jazz fan wouldn’t? There in an obscure corner of this house so filled with history is the original Neil Fujita artwork used for the cover of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s landmark 1959 Time Out album. The abstract is nearly as iconic as the music—“Take Five” and “Blue Rondo à la Turk” both premiered on this, jazz’s first million-selling LP—and it looks even more vibrant in this context, considerably larger than the square-foot cardboard canvas on which so many first saw it. But at some point during a conversation with the Brubecks it strikes you as ironic that the piano giant’s most famous creation bears the name it does, because one thing Dave Brubeck never does is to take time out. Even at age 87, he and the former Iola Whitlock, his bride of 65 years—engaged on their first date, their marriage itself is now old enough to collect Social Security—are constantly working. This year’s touring and recording plans are already locked down, and a question about...

13607 2009-03-02T00:26:23-05:00

4 The two-car garage isn’t the first thing a visitor notices upon entering the suburban New Jersey home of Bill Charlap and Renee Rosnes. It’s the two-piano living room. The Steinways cuddle in the center, leaving little space for furniture or much else. The majestic instruments draw the eye immediately. They—not Rosnes’ small but carefully tended garden in back, not the kids’ game systems, the artworks or the handsome wood details that give the interior of the home a somewhat rustic look—are the tip-off: Something happens inside of these walls that doesn’t take place in the other homes strung along the sprawling road connecting West Orange to other municipalities. Both Rosnes and Charlap, who were married last August, were already living in the area before they bought this four-bedroom colonial-style house, built circa 1925, nearly two years ago. Their children’s other families also lived nearby—Sophie, age 10, Dylan, 9, and Vivian, 8, are from Charlap’s and Rosnes’ previous marriages. The location, says Rosnes, is perfect for everyone: “close enough to Manhattan but far enough away that we can live in the lifestyle we’d love to. Having children it’s wonderful to have a yard and be close to parks and good schools. And it’s a pretty neighborhood.” Unless they are jazz fans, chances are that the neighbors would never guess that the well-dressed, 40-ish couple in their midst are internationally renowned musicians. But the pianos are only the first clue that this is not a home occupied by stockbrokers or marketing executives. The next is the small room adjacent to piano central, where Charlap keeps his impressive collection of vintage vinyl LPs. There’s a wall-length shelf full of them—jazz, classical and theater, mostly—sectioned off by genre and subcategorized alphabetically. Charlap delights in showing off obscurities to the visitor, while confiding that he’s not much of an audiophile—to him it’s the music that matters, not what it’s played through. (At present, the turntable isn’t even functioning.) There’s more music in the attic. Hundreds of CDs line up under a small window that, Rosnes happily points out, on a clear day reveals the Empire State Building some 20 miles to the north. Directly across from the CDs is a wall of music books and sheet music, some of which belonged to “Moose” Charlap, Bill’s late dad, famous for writing much of the music for the timeless musical Peter Pan in the mid-’50s. And there’s a smaller keyboard, a digital model that Charlap brands a “workhorse.” He leaves no doubt that it’s a second-class citizen compared to the two beauties downstairs. Charlap and Rosnes, who pronounces her first name ree-nee, were married last August, at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola at Lincoln Center. “It wasn’t huge,” says Charlap, “but it was nice to be at a place that was centered around our musical lives. Freddy Cole sang us down the aisle.” “And your mother sang at the reception,” adds Rosnes, referring to cabaret singer Sandy Stewart, with whom Charlap has recorded and performed. Both Rosnes and Charlap played at the wedding as well. For the event, Rosnes wore a sari, in honor of East Indian heritage she was unaware of early in her life. “Renee was adopted and raised by an English mother and Norwegian father in Vancouver,” Charlap explains. “She discovered her birth mother about 15 years ago.” “I’ve been getting into the culture,” adds Rosnes. “I have a whole new family. I have five new siblings and we’re very close and they have children, too.” Both her birth family and her adoptive family attended the wedding. The couple had known each other peripherally when they toured Japan in 2003, as part of a program featuring 10 well-known pianists. During the tour, Charlap says, “We got to know each other just as friends, but we really got to care about each other as people.” It took a couple of years until their relationship flowered. Now that they’re settling into their new lives, juggling schedules—theirs and the kids’—is more time-consuming than before, but, says Charlap, “We improvise and we work together. It’s a balance.” That planning also includes finding time to rehearse. “From 3 o’clock on today,” says Charlap, the time the kids were due home from school, “this is not going to be a quiet house.” But they wouldn’t want it any other way. “In many ways being at home is kind of like a vacation for us,” says Rosnes. “Not that we wouldn’t enjoy traveling, but those are times to come.” Adds Charlap, “I know it’s boring, but when we’re asked what our hobbies are outside of music … music is our profession, our love, our spiritual quest.” “Our life journey,” says Rosnes. “Our life journey but also our hobby,” continues Charlap. “I can’t remember a weekend where I ever said, ‘Get my pipe and slippers, Eliza. I’m gonna turn on the fire.’ It doesn’t quite work that way.” Fuhgeddaboudit Says Charlap: “We have a lot of DVDs and one of the things we like to do, because we don’t have the time to regularly watch HBO or anything like that, is to discover some series that we haven’t seen. We don’t have TiVo or whatever that is. We may be the only two people in America who had never seen The Sopranos. We’d never seen it until a month ago. In one of the episodes there was a scene at the Ritz, which is a diner near here. In the diner they have photographs of all the actors on the wall.” Why Professional Recording Studios Still Exist “We don’t have a home recording studio. We’re acoustic piano players, so if we made records here, you would hear the cars go by,” says Charlap. “That’s true. I didn’t think of that. But it would be nice to record at home,” says Rosnes. “We’d have to do it in the middle of the night and block off the street,” says Charlap. Bada Boom “I read very strange things. I’ve been reading biographies about the wives of King Henry VIII,” says Rosnes. “Unfortunately, those biographies get cut really short,” says Charlap. Cookin’ Says Charlap: “Renee’s a great cook, and I like to eat, so it’s a perfect combination. We’ll go to a restaurant and I’ll say, ‘I really love this,’ and she’ll say, ‘Oh, I think I can make this.’ And she can. Recently we went to one of our favorite places, Dévi, on 18th Street [in Manhattan]. It’s an Indian-based restaurant. They have incredibly great lamb chops there and Renee came home and just made them.” Unplugged Says Rosnes: “When I first met Bill he didn’t have a computer.” “I didn’t have a cell phone, either,” says Charlap. “My press agent used to get furious with me and said, ‘Get a cell phone!’ I bought one in Chicago and called him and said, ‘I got a cell phone. What do you think of that?’ And he said, ‘Hallelujah.’” true 10422 2008-06-19T19:08:56-04:00 false 18490 121 200802 true 79 2008-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

The two-car garage isn’t the first thing a visitor notices upon entering the suburban New Jersey home of Bill Charlap and Renee Rosnes. It’s the two-piano living room. The Steinways cuddle in the center, leaving little space for furniture or much else. The majestic instruments draw the eye immediately. They—not Rosnes’ small but carefully tended garden in back, not the kids’ game systems, the artworks or the handsome wood details that give the interior of the home a somewhat rustic look—are the tip-off: Something happens inside of these walls that doesn’t take place in the other homes strung along the sprawling road connecting West Orange to other municipalities. Both Rosnes and Charlap, who were married last August, were already living in the area before they bought this four-bedroom colonial-style house, built circa 1925, nearly two years ago. Their children’s other families also lived nearby—Sophie, age 10, Dylan, 9, and Vivian, 8, are from Charlap’s and Rosnes’ previous marriages. The location, says Rosnes, is perfect for everyone: “close enough to Manhattan but far enough away that we can live in the lifestyle we’d love to. Having children it’s wonderful to have a yard and be close to parks and good schools. And it’s a pretty neighborhood.” Unless they are jazz fans, chances are that the neighbors would never guess that the well-dressed, 40-ish couple in their midst are internationally renowned musicians. But the pianos are only the first clue that this is not a home occupied by stockbrokers or marketing executives. The next is the small room...

2009-03-02T00:26:27-05:00

4 Bobby Hutcherson loves the simple life. Golfing. Fishing. Chopping wood. Hanging with his family. Playing ballads at sensuously slow tempos. He’s always been among the most physical of vibraphonists, often delivering notes with a flourish of body English. Offstage, the 66-year-old is just as animated, an engaging raconteur who punctuates stories with sweeping gestures and a vivid repertoire of facial expressions. Laughing easily and often with undisguised pleasure, he likes to answer questions with stories, wringing deep truths out of small details. The quintessential postbop vibraphonist and an inspired composer, Hutcherson has frequently chased big ideas in his music. Since his recording debut in 1960 with pianist Les McCann on a Pacific Jazz compilation, he’s produced one of jazz’s richest and most rewarding discographies. He made many of his most celebrated albums during an explosively creative streak for Blue Note in the mid-1960s, though he recorded for the label through 1977, longer than any artist besides Horace Silver. His latest CD, For Sentimental Reasons, on the Swiss-based label Kind of Blue, is an exquisite quartet session with pianist Renee Rosnes, bassist Dwayne Burno and drummer Al Foster in which Hutcherson lavishes attention on familiar melodies, a rare project devoted almost exclusively to American Songbook standards (besides ringers by his late musical partner, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, and Benny Golson). “My wife Rosemary has always said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a recording of ballads? Because you really take your time when you’re playing ballads,’” says Hutcherson. “I’ve done all these albums where there’s crazy things going on, a lot of different time signatures, a lot of keys, taking on crazy theories and trying to make it sound like falling on my head. I said, ‘Let me go back to the really simple melodies.’ Those are the hard ones to get your personality through.” It’s not hard to get a read on Hutcherson in the living room of his ranch-style house in the hamlet of Montara, set back a few hundred yards from the gleaming Pacific Ocean, about 20 miles south of San Francisco. His three sons all live within minutes, and just about every wall holds family photos, including one taken around 1906 in Georgia of his father as a youth surrounded by his formally dressed parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. A shrine with four lit votive candles occupies the fireplace, and a full-length window looks out back at a well-tended garden and 18-foot powerboat. Surrounded to the east by pines festooned with Spanish moss, the house sits on an acre of land that he bought after the release of San Francisco, his 1970 album with Harold Land, when Hutcherson found himself with a tidy sum in his pocket from his minor hit “Ummh.” At the time, the area was completely undeveloped. “I’ve been to a lot of beaches around the world and to me this is the most beautiful,” he says. “It’s really long, panoramic. It’s got this really clean, granite sand. Everybody’s fishing and surfing. I used to come here all the time because I was living in the Haight. When ‘Ummh’ became a hit, I thought, what am I going to do with this money? I came down here, bought an acre of land for $10,000 and I built this house for $30,000. I’m 20 minutes from San Francisco, and about 20 minutes to the airport. For a long time I kept saying, ‘I think I made the right choice.’” Born and raised in Pasadena, Hutcherson has been drawn to the beach since he was a kid. He first gained exposure in a combo with his high school buddy, bassist Herbie Lewis, when they landed a gig at a Sunset Strip coffee house called Pandora’s Box. At the end of the night, he’d drive the old family Cadillac west on Sunset to the Pacific Palisades and set up his vibes in the sand. “I’d sit there and play to the waves,” Hutcherson recalls. “I thought that was great. Then I started getting pulled over by this one cop. You could hear the car coming down the street, and he stopped me, saying, ‘Kid, what are you doing in this part of town?’ You know there’s no young little brothers who lived on that side of town. I said, ‘I’ve been to the beach.’ ‘Doing what?’ I said, ‘Playing my instrument, the vibraphone.’ ‘The what? What is that, like the saxophone?’ ‘No, let me open up the trunk and I’ll show you.’ So once a week I’d go to the beach, and I’d set the vibes up in the sand and play. The cop would always be at the same spot waiting and after a while he got used to me coming by. It would always be three o’clock in the morning and I’d wave and he’d wave, ‘Hey, yeah. Keep moving. Go back to Pasadena. Don’t make any stops.’” MUSIC @HOME “I don’t listen to very much music, but if I do, I’ll listen to Ravel or Renaissance composers. Hardly any jazz. I don’t listen to myself at all, because you get programmed. You hear something [and think], ‘Oh, I like that,’ or, ‘I don’t like that.’ So every time you get to a certain point, you’ll find yourself playing those ideas. I want to keep it open.” The Pen is Mightier Than… “I’m computer-illiterate. I’m still with the pen, piece of paper and a paper clip.” Vacation Destination “We go to Lake Berryessa, about 35 miles south of here, four times during the season, from May through September. When the movie Zodiac came out, we said, ‘Look, one of the killings took place right there.’ My wife said, ‘Do you think he’s still alive?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, but that was in the ’70s. He’s probably using a walker now. I think we have a chance.’” Biggest Catch “I don’t know if it was the biggest, but a few years ago I got a 75-pound albacore. I caught him about 50 miles out. He fought me for about an hour. You just put your lines out, and I came back with a whole bunch of them. We barbecued them up and the kids just ate and ate.” The Links “We love golf. We’ve played the Monterey Jazz Festival tournament every year since the beginning, and one year we won it. Rosemary’s my manager, so a lot of times when we travel, she’ll make sure the itinerary includes a game of golf. We’ve played at some really great courses.” Heart of a Poet “Paul Laurence Dunbar’s writing has meant a lot to me. I read a lot of his poetry. When I first came to New York, it became very important. We’d be traveling to a gig, driving down the highway and all the guys in the car would be reciting the poetry and you’d get these great rhythms, and the poems would have a lot of fun in them.” true 290 2008-06-26T16:41:47-04:00 false 19203 124 200712 true 79 2007-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

Bobby Hutcherson loves the simple life. Golfing. Fishing. Chopping wood. Hanging with his family. Playing ballads at sensuously slow tempos. He’s always been among the most physical of vibraphonists, often delivering notes with a flourish of body English. Offstage, the 66-year-old is just as animated, an engaging raconteur who punctuates stories with sweeping gestures and a vivid repertoire of facial expressions. Laughing easily and often with undisguised pleasure, he likes to answer questions with stories, wringing deep truths out of small details. The quintessential postbop vibraphonist and an inspired composer, Hutcherson has frequently chased big ideas in his music. Since his recording debut in 1960 with pianist Les McCann on a Pacific Jazz compilation, he’s produced one of jazz’s richest and most rewarding discographies. He made many of his most celebrated albums during an explosively creative streak for Blue Note in the mid-1960s, though he recorded for the label through 1977, longer than any artist besides Horace Silver. His latest CD, For Sentimental Reasons, on the Swiss-based label Kind of Blue, is an exquisite quartet session with pianist Renee Rosnes, bassist Dwayne Burno and drummer Al Foster in which Hutcherson lavishes attention on familiar melodies, a rare project devoted almost exclusively to American Songbook standards (besides ringers by his late musical partner, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, and Benny Golson). “My wife Rosemary has always said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a recording of ballads? Because you really take your time when you’re playing ballads,’” says Hutcherson. “I’ve done all these albums where there’s crazy things...

2009-03-02T00:26:54-05:00

4 I moved here in 1998,” said drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. “I was working a lot, still in Wynton Marsalis’ band, and my manager at the time told me, ‘It’s time for you to invest in some property.’ I saw an ad on a Sunday for a 1,300-square-foot loft in downtown Brooklyn, called and saw it on Monday. It’s the only place I looked at.” On a busy stretch of Atlantic Avenue, between the picturesque brownstones of Boerum Hill and the grittier commercial streets of downtown Brooklyn, Watts’ apartment is close to Manhattan and an easy stroll from a jumble of antique stores, restaurants, clothing and furniture shops. Inside it is large and light, decorated in an eclectic and unpretentious style. Drummer figurines abound, as do mementoes from Watts’ career: gold records with Wynton and Harry Connick Jr. by the front door, a Grammy on a bookcase, a shot of Watts with Jay Leno in the kitchen and in the bedroom a poster from Mo’ Better Blues. Throughout are photos of musicians: heroes like Monk and Bird, friends like Kenny Kirkland, and those others—Billy Higgins, McCoy Tyner and Max Roach among them—who have been both. His favorite image is a fiendish-looking shot of Elvin Jones in action during the Coltrane years. “The Great One,” he said, smiling. When Watts isn’t on the road with Branford Marsalis or his own group, Tain and the Ebonix, he’s here with his girlfriend, trumpeter/arranger Laura Kahle. With two busy musicians in residence the household is obviously set up for two things: comfort and making music. On the kitchen side of the main space is a sink-in leather sofa and chairs facing the stereo and television. The rest of the room is filled with instruments: traps in the center of the room; upright and electric basses standing ready; a pocket trumpet, keyboard and laptop on a desk; and, against the bedroom wall, Watts’ prized Baldwin piano. “It’s a concert grand piano, nine-foot, made in 1918,” said Watts. He picked out a few chords to demonstrate its sound. “Even though I don’t play well, I use it to write.” The piano, which Watts got just over a year ago, could be a symbol for this phase of his creative life. Having long ago established his drum credentials, he’s become increasingly interested in composing. “When I first got into writing it was kind of a hobby. But now I’m starting to enjoy it almost as much as playing. I really am just writing all the time. It’s a cool environment because if I get an idea, I can try it. So I just kind of sit and think about music.” In September, Watts released Folk’s Songs, the first CD on his label, Dark Key Music. “A lot of my tunes end up being about people that have been really cool to me, giving me some positive energy.” Seven of the 10 tracks are originals, played by a quartet that includes Marcus Strickland, Christian McBride and David Kikoski. Among the guest musicians is Juan Tainish, the enigmatic vocalist and MySpace presence who is never seen in the same room with Watts. “He’s a dude I met in Japan,” said the drummer cryptically. When he’s not making music, Watts says he can be found on the couch. “It’s all simple,” he says of his downtime. There are sports—“football, tennis, basketball”—but Watts is also a film buff, with, according to Kahle, an encyclopedic memory for film trivia and completely undiscriminating tastes. “He’ll go see anything,” she teased. “He went to see The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl—with the 3D glasses.” And then there’s food, or the occasional absence of it. “I kind of have this thing with beans. I just think beans are the greatest food,” said Watts. “If I was on a desert island, if I could just have a pot of greens and a pot of beans, some cornbread or a biscuit, I’d be fine.” But as he spoke, Watts was on day seven of a 10-day fast he does once a year to keep his weight down, subsisting on a mixture of water, maple syrup, lemon and cayenne pepper. As he talked about his beloved beans, he seemed to roll the words around in his mouth as if sucking the flavor out of them. “I have an appreciation for most beans. You know, the black bean has a vibe. There’s nothing like a nicely cooked red bean. A butter bean is your friend. A navy bean is a thing to behold,” he laughed. “Black-eyed peas—it’s cool. Kidney bean—very fine. I already told [Kahle], I’m going to start soaking my beans and getting everything ready to start cooking on Monday. “We have some friends that really, really like to cook. We have parties once in a while and they’ll come over and bring food or cook. People will come and play music and hang out. I recorded my CD on the 21st or 22nd of December. I finished a session and we had a party that night. It started at 8:30 at night and there were still people here at 5 p.m. the next day, playing,” recalled Watts with obvious delight. “That’s why they want to kick me out of here!” Neighborhood “I really like Brooklyn ’cause it still feels like a neighborhood. Manhattan—I still enjoy going there, going to the clubs, going to see music, but it feels more touristy than Brooklyn. The other feature of this neighborhood is the Nets are moving right down the street. We can walk three blocks and go see LeBron or somebody like that. How bad could that be?” Local Characters “Taurus Mateen is right around the corner. David Gilmore is not far, Ravi Coltrane, Richard Bona. JD Allen is right down the street. I can walk to all those places.” Local Eats “La Petit Café on Court Street—nice brunch, nice lattes and pancakes. Downtown Atlantic—that’s pretty regular fare but it’s good. Also, they specialize in these really deep cupcakes. Junior’s—beautiful family restaurant. Bar Tabac on Smith Street.” Hobbies “Besides sleeping? I think film is my hobby. Football and film. I dig Scorsese, Kubrick, [the] Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam. I also have a great big taste for stupidity: Anchorman, Bad Santa. Bad Santa’s one of the stupid classics. Norbit, for some reason. Little Man.” The Small Screen “We were really into Big Love. We got way into it this year.” Sports Allegiances “Pittsburgh—unshakable.” Listening Pleasures “[Ornette Coleman’s] Sound Grammar was in some heavy rotation. Always Coltrane. Always classic stuff like Coltrane and Hendrix and Monk. James Brown—it’s never far away. P-Funk. Paul Motian with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell—that’s a really musical group. I really dig that. Steve Kuhn with Andrew Cyrille and Henry Grimes doing that Coltrane celebration—that’s some of the best music I’ve seen in New York in the last few years, definitely.” Cars “I haven’t had a car since I lived in L.A. But I rent a lot.” true 311 2008-06-25T14:51:01-04:00 false 19033 115 200711 true 79 2007-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

I moved here in 1998,” said drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. “I was working a lot, still in Wynton Marsalis’ band, and my manager at the time told me, ‘It’s time for you to invest in some property.’ I saw an ad on a Sunday for a 1,300-square-foot loft in downtown Brooklyn, called and saw it on Monday. It’s the only place I looked at.” On a busy stretch of Atlantic Avenue, between the picturesque brownstones of Boerum Hill and the grittier commercial streets of downtown Brooklyn, Watts’ apartment is close to Manhattan and an easy stroll from a jumble of antique stores, restaurants, clothing and furniture shops. Inside it is large and light, decorated in an eclectic and unpretentious style. Drummer figurines abound, as do mementoes from Watts’ career: gold records with Wynton and Harry Connick Jr. by the front door, a Grammy on a bookcase, a shot of Watts with Jay Leno in the kitchen and in the bedroom a poster from Mo’ Better Blues. Throughout are photos of musicians: heroes like Monk and Bird, friends like Kenny Kirkland, and those others—Billy Higgins, McCoy Tyner and Max Roach among them—who have been both. His favorite image is a fiendish-looking shot of Elvin Jones in action during the Coltrane years. “The Great One,” he said, smiling. When Watts isn’t on the road with Branford Marsalis or his own group, Tain and the Ebonix, he’s here with his girlfriend, trumpeter/arranger Laura Kahle. With two busy musicians in residence the household is obviously set up for two things:...

2009-03-02T00:26:49-05:00

4 Graham Haynes doesn’t own an iPod or even a cell phone. Most of the CDs and DVDs on the shelf in his comfy apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a block from the northwest corner of Central Park, belong to his girlfriend, Lincoln Center lobbyist Melissa Thornton, with whom Haynes shares the space. The dog, an amiable black poodle named Niko, lived here with Melissa before Haynes arrived six months ago, but doesn’t seem at all put off by the new roommate. It’s not that Haynes doesn’t like to hang onto things; he just tends to leave them scattered around. He’s lived something of a nomadic life, and the various moves—he spent time in Paris and Westchester County, due north of New York City, prior to coming here—combined with the relative lack of space in his current abode, simply don’t allow for accumulation. If you watch a lot of movies—and Haynes does, though he prefers the classics and foreign films to current multiplex fare—you might not believe it, but his cozy, unadorned one-bedroom is more typical of an NYC dwelling than those ornately appointed drive-through palaces Hollywood seems to think a struggling waitress (or even a nonstruggling musician) could afford. Haynes’ kitchen is barely large enough to fit one cook, let alone two, there is no art on the walls of the apartment and the furnishings are utilitarian, not something out of a fancy-schmancy showroom. There is no home recording studio in sight and although there’s a small room that Haynes uses as his office/workspace, the only visible musical instrument is a basic electronic keyboard, presently propped up against the wall in a corner of the living room. But there is no denying the apartment’s homey appeal, and Haynes enjoys the quietude—during weekdays, the building’s relative stillness allows him to write music, which he does in longhand, directly from head to paper. And therein lies the irony: The man living this relatively low-tech existence is one of the most cutting-edge, gizmo-happy musicians on the scene. Haynes’ spartan domestic life and soft-spoken manner are a complete 180 from the dense, sometimes manic music created by the 47-year-old cornetist, composer and sound manipulator. Haynes’ newest album, Full Circle (RKM), is a progressive explosion of post-electronica, searing Fillmore-era Miles/Mahavishnu fusion, radically deep funk, free jazz and a general spaceyness that early Pink Floyd and King Crimson would have envied. One of the eight other musicians on the record, Leon Gruenbaum, doesn’t just play standard keyboards; he plays something called the Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee, a complex MIDI controller that utilizes a modified ergonomic keyboard to trigger changes of pitch. Clearly, Haynes tips toward the avant-garde end of the spectrum, but on the rare occasion he listens to recorded music at home—he much prefers the radio—it’s more likely to be a vinyl opera LP caressing his ears than anything remotely designated as jazz. Reaching toward the floor next to his sofa, he retrieves three vintage albums. He picked them up recently from a sidewalk seller not far from home. “This was like a dollar, this was five, this was five,” he says. “They’re in really good shape.” And what’s got him excited this day is that on the following evening he will be in the audience at Lincoln Center to take in Siegfried, one of the four operas that make up Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The German composer looms largely within Haynes’ psyche: His last album, 2000’s BPM, crossbred jazz, dancefloor rhythms, world music and sampled opera—the opening track was called “Variations on a Theme by Wagner.” “I don’t know why I like opera,” says Haynes at first, and then he considers. “The voice and the magnitude of it; the bigness of the orchestra and the set design. The whole grandeur of it, the spectacle of it. I studied a little bit of classical music theory and history at Queens College, and that’s when I got really interested in classical music and opera. I’ve just stayed a fan and tried to listen to as much as possible.” Although Haynes relishes the culture that New York has to offer—he spends a great deal of time at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library and at museums—he also likes to get out of the city. For that purpose, he does own a car, but he keeps it in Queens, the borough where he was born the son of legendary jazz drummer Roy Haynes. “Mostly we drive my girlfriend’s car around here,” says Haynes. “I drive mine if we’re going out of the city or back to Long Island, where my dad lives. So the car thing works a lot better if I keep it out there. It’s ridiculous here,” he says, “because you have to move it every day [to comply with Manhattan’s alternate-side parking regulations]—except for Wednesday.” The car is, in fact, registered in Seattle, so every couple of years Haynes gets behind the wheel and drives cross-country. “Last April was the fourth time. I drive it out there, get an inspection and drive it back. I take the main highways, but I always try to stop and go sightseeing somewhere. Besides, I’m starting to dislike flying. There’s a lot more turbulence; with the climate being what it is, there’s a lot of crazy stuff now.” What Haynes does enjoy, risky as it might seem to some, is riding his bicycle around the city. “I ride around Central Park,” he says. “The cool thing now is the bike lanes. They’ll take you all the way down [to Lower Manhattan], so sometimes I’ll ride to the Brooklyn Bridge. If you pace it, if you ride from here to the end of the city once a week”—for the benefit of non-New Yorkers, we’re talking several miles of dodging traffic and pedestrians here—“after three or four weeks you can do it straight without stopping.” The Personal File Architectural Epiphany “My parents took me to see Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. That’s a major historical point for me. It was long and I was a kid so I don’t particularly remember much about the music, but the cathedral was impressive.” Technology Overload “I like the computer. I’ll travel around with a laptop, but I won’t travel around with a cell phone if I can help it. I need to be able to hear myself think. There are too many products coming out and too many people buying them, people using them while they’re driving and getting in accidents. I heard on the news that they’re trying to pass a no-texting-while-driving law. To think that you would have to do that…” Tied Up at the Moment “I have a bag of bowties that I’ve been wearing. I don’t know how I got into it—maybe something I saw in a magazine. These are the real ones that you tie yourself. I had to buy a tie and then ask the guy to show me how to tie it. I have about 20 of them now. They’re a lot of different colors and designs, like paisley. I don’t wear them when I play and I don’t wear them when it’s hot. I don’t like to have a shirt buttoned tight in the summer.” A Spiritual Being “I didn’t grow up in the church, but I went through a period of about three years where I went to church and I was also performing a lot in church. Then, when I was about 35, I started to read a lot of books on metaphysics and Eastern religions. One of my favorites is called I Am That: Talks With Sri Nisargadatta [Maharaj]. It’s on Indian philosophy. They ask the guru questions and he answers them; that’s the whole book.” Woodshedding in the Wilderness “I play my horn in the parks all the time. I play in the tunnels. My favorite place to practice is Riverside Park. I like to watch the [Hudson] river when I play my long tones. I go out there and spend hours watching the river and practicing, and then I go in the tunnels. I like the sound in there. Sometimes people throw me money. The other day I was in Central Park and somebody asked to play my horn—‘Can I blow that?’” The Diving Dollar “I like staying in those hotels where you have a little kitchen. I buy a large amount of groceries and bring them back and eat that way. I like eating out in most of Europe. But now stuff is more expensive than it used to be. In Italy I used to eat out for $8 and get a three- or four-course meal. But I can’t do that anymore. Now that’s almost $30. I don’t splurge as much as I used to.” true 10422 2008-06-26T15:14:14-04:00 false 19103 110 200710 true 79 2007-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Graham Haynes doesn’t own an iPod or even a cell phone. Most of the CDs and DVDs on the shelf in his comfy apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a block from the northwest corner of Central Park, belong to his girlfriend, Lincoln Center lobbyist Melissa Thornton, with whom Haynes shares the space. The dog, an amiable black poodle named Niko, lived here with Melissa before Haynes arrived six months ago, but doesn’t seem at all put off by the new roommate. It’s not that Haynes doesn’t like to hang onto things; he just tends to leave them scattered around. He’s lived something of a nomadic life, and the various moves—he spent time in Paris and Westchester County, due north of New York City, prior to coming here—combined with the relative lack of space in his current abode, simply don’t allow for accumulation. If you watch a lot of movies—and Haynes does, though he prefers the classics and foreign films to current multiplex fare—you might not believe it, but his cozy, unadorned one-bedroom is more typical of an NYC dwelling than those ornately appointed drive-through palaces Hollywood seems to think a struggling waitress (or even a nonstruggling musician) could afford. Haynes’ kitchen is barely large enough to fit one cook, let alone two, there is no art on the walls of the apartment and the furnishings are utilitarian, not something out of a fancy-schmancy showroom. There is no home recording studio in sight and although there’s a small room that Haynes uses as his office/workspace, the...

2009-03-02T00:26:51-05:00

4 There are only two residents of pianist Michael Wolff’s Greenwich Village household you might not ask for an autograph. One is E.T., the family’s appropriately named French bulldog. The other is Wolff himself, who, despite a five-year, high-profile stint as Arsenio Hall’s Los Angeles-based bandleader, doesn’t quite have the star quality of his actress-director-producer-wife Polly Draper or his sons Nat and Alex, who are featured on Nickelodeon’s cable-TV hit The Naked Brothers Band. For Wolff, raised the son of a Jewish doctor in Memphis and New Orleans, this is a far cry from what he first experienced as a young musician settling in Manhattan in the 1970s. “I never thought about the future. I just thought about the music. I just figured I’d play piano and see what happens,” he says. “It wasn’t like now, where musicians seem to know about business and have a business plan. I didn’t even have a plan for the next month. I was just trying to figure the music out. I would stay home and practice and go out about midnight and listen to music until about four or five in the morning, because everything was open late.” Wolff’s scuffling days in New York eventually led to a gig as Nancy Wilson’s musical director, during which he roomed with a comic named Arsenio Hall, who was her opening act. The two bonded and the young Hall offered that if he ever made it big, Wolff would be his bandleader. He was right and the Hall gig introduced Wolff to Hollywood and, in 1989, the woman who would eventually become his wife. Draper starred in the television series Thirtysomething. The living room of Wolff’s large but unpretentious lower Manhattan home features a Naked Brothers pinball machine, a CD jukebox stocked with Beatles tunes, a television entertainment center, some small chandeliers, a Steinway piano, a set of drums and a mini basketball hoop. Talking to Wolff you sometimes have to wonder who gets more pleasure out of all the toys. The things around the house are a reflection of Wolff’s belief that the children should be raised as “normal” as possible. “The kids got into [acting] because they grew up in our household, where they just assumed everybody’s a musician or an actor or something like that. They see Polly either doing a movie or a play or a television show and then she might go away for a couple of weeks. Then mommy comes home, then daddy goes on the road and then he comes back. Or dad’s playing a gig and they come to them,” he says. When Draper was pregnant with Nat and Alex, Wolff said, he would play music up against her stomach. “I was playing Thelonious Monk CDs on her belly and all that kind of stuff: Ravel, and my stuff and Miles. I started them early. I ruined them, man. But, to their credit, at a certain point they said, ‘Dad, I’m not doing that jazz stuff, I’m doing rock and roll.’” Wolff said that since he and Polly are both in the business, they’re really not stage parents. “No way. I don’t want to be hanging around. That’s why we have to do it like this. Basically, my wife said, ‘You want to act? I’ll write you a movie. Let’s just do it as a family, get it out of your system.’ “They go to a really hard [private] school. They each take three music lessons a week. They’re on basketball teams. They do their stuff for the show. They’re writing music. They have promotions. They’re really, really, really busy, but they dig it. They’re happy. We’re not stage parents. We’re not running them out there to make money on them. We’re just like, ‘Hey, you want to do it, let’s have fun. As long as it’s fun, you can do it.’ “My oldest son [Nat] is just an amazing singer-songwriter, amazing pianist. When he was about four or five years old, he just started playing. He learned all the major and minor chords on the piano. I said, ‘How did you learn them?’ He said, ‘Dad, they’re right here.’ I said, ‘What are those chords?’ He said, ‘These are my proud chords.’ And he could just do it.” Wolff’s own father encouraged his son to follow his muse, he says. “He grew up in the same town as B.B. King, Albert King and Muddy Waters and he loved the blues. When I was about four he taught me to play ‘St. Louis Blues’ on the piano. My dad was really hip,” Wolff says. “He said, ‘Look, man, don’t be a doctor, don’t be a lawyer, do something hip. Be a golf pro, be a jazz musician. I did it, you don’t have to do it.’” Working With a Spouse Wolff has Tourette syndrome, a condition that, depending on severity, can be manifested in uncontrolled physical tics and swearing. In his case, it can be detected in a mild vocal “hmm.” Otherwise, the condition is undetected. His wife, though, saw an opportunity to alert more people to the condition, and thus wrote and produced the movie The Tic Code. “It’s a pain in the ass sometimes for me, going to a play or a movie and trying not to bug people,” he says. “ I know I make some noises sometimes. But my wife was able to take that and use that in a dramatic way. It was Gregory Hines’ last film and he’d always wanted to be a sax player. So that worked out great. It was a great experience for us. It was our first feature film we worked on together.” Local Restaurants “One of my favorite places is Il Cantinori, an Italian restaurant over on 10th Street. I love the Union Square Coffee shop. A friend of mine owns it. It’s a really great restaurant. It’s open 24 hours. I go there a lot with a couple of the other fathers who drop off their kids at school. We call it ‘the breakfast club’ ’cause it has all the pretty waitresses, so it’s all these old guys going, ‘Hey…’” Favorite Flicks “I love Five Easy Pieces,” he said, breaking into an impression of Jack Nicholson. “I love Jack. I like that era of movies, the 1970s, all of those. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I love anything that Julie Christie was in. … I just like a lot of old movies. Sports “I’ve been playing a little bit of golf lately. I’m not good, but I play a little bit. It just takes too long. Golf takes forever. Golf is very, very Zen-like and my father was a great golfer. He won the Memphis pro-am when I was a kid. Two days before he died, he shot a 74. I was never like that.” The King “My father, when we were in Memphis, was an internist and he was Elvis’ mother’s and aunt’s physician. Of course, he wouldn’t tell me that when Elvis was alive, but he told me after. He said that Elvis would come by and pay the bill. He said he was a really nice guy; he’d just come in the office and pay him: ‘Hey, doc, how much I owe you?’” true 159 2008-06-24T15:29:07-04:00 false 18860 123 200709 true 79 2007-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

There are only two residents of pianist Michael Wolff’s Greenwich Village household you might not ask for an autograph. One is E.T., the family’s appropriately named French bulldog. The other is Wolff himself, who, despite a five-year, high-profile stint as Arsenio Hall’s Los Angeles-based bandleader, doesn’t quite have the star quality of his actress-director-producer-wife Polly Draper or his sons Nat and Alex, who are featured on Nickelodeon’s cable-TV hit The Naked Brothers Band. For Wolff, raised the son of a Jewish doctor in Memphis and New Orleans, this is a far cry from what he first experienced as a young musician settling in Manhattan in the 1970s. “I never thought about the future. I just thought about the music. I just figured I’d play piano and see what happens,” he says. “It wasn’t like now, where musicians seem to know about business and have a business plan. I didn’t even have a plan for the next month. I was just trying to figure the music out. I would stay home and practice and go out about midnight and listen to music until about four or five in the morning, because everything was open late.” Wolff’s scuffling days in New York eventually led to a gig as Nancy Wilson’s musical director, during which he roomed with a comic named Arsenio Hall, who was her opening act. The two bonded and the young Hall offered that if he ever made it big, Wolff would be his bandleader. He was right and the Hall gig introduced Wolff to Hollywood...

2009-03-02T00:26:43-05:00

4 John Abercrombie had spent time Pearl Harbor Day in 2003 digging his car out after one of the heavier snows that hit the hilly area where he lives, about 35 miles north of New York City, when he decided to pause from his labors and go inside. That’s when he smelled smoke. “From where I was, I didn’t see any smoke or anything. When I walked into the kitchen entrance to the house, I saw that the smoke was halfway from the ceiling to the floor. I said, ‘This wasn’t an egg I left on the burner, something’s going on here.’ I walked further into the house and I saw the smoke was everywhere.” His wife, Lisa, who was in the bath, noticed the smoke at the same time and ran out of the house, in her own words, “buck naked.” Abercrombie went back into the burning structure, he said, hoping to grab some instruments, but more importantly to find their cat. “But I couldn’t find the cat, and all of a sudden I saw flames, besides the smoke,” he recalled. The flames started shooting over my head. So I said, ‘I think this might be a time to leave the establishment and get the hell out of here.’” Fire crews arrived in time to make sure they were safe, but too late to save the structure. Their Putnam Valley, N.Y. home was totally destroyed. “I went back to the house the next day with my friend Bob and we took flashlights to look around, to see if we could find any cat remains and just to see what happened. It was really awful,” he said. “The firemen had put all my guitars out in the front yard, what was left of them, under the tree. It looked like a Picasso; they were all melted. “The guitars were the thing I thought about the least, in a way,” he said. “Actually, one of them made it through: an old Les Paul, which maybe goes to show you how strong Les Paul guitars are. These things are built like Buicks. That one they had gotten out of the house and it was in a hard case. A lot of them I leave out on stands, so those were all like firewood. They went up instantly. A couple of guitars weren’t in the house. One was in the shop being repaired, one was with a friend who was considering buying it. And I had a couple of little electric mandolins that were in the garage. They weren’t touched because the fire didn’t take the garage.” Later, authorities determined that it was an electrical fire, Abercrombie said. “It started in my attic, which I didn’t even go into. I didn’t know what was in my attic.” After losing their home of only six months, the couple settled into temporary digs at the nearby Peekskill Motor Inn while they waited for the insurance settlement. That period showed Abercrombie how many friends he had. Before the insurance company kicked into action, bassist Todd Coolman took up a collection where Abercrombie taught, at the State University of New York—Purchase. Abercrombie said Coolman showed up in the hotel lobby one day with a bag filled with several thousand dollars in checks and cash, and with notes of encouragement. “This guitar company that I endorse, Brian Moore Guitars, they called me up, and the guy actually showed up at my hotel and said, ‘I’m going to take you out to dinner and give you a guitar. He gave me one of the Korean models and then he said, ‘We’re making you another guitar, starting tomorrow,’” Abercrombie said. As the days went on, Abercrombie said, “I started getting phone calls from people offering me instruments. Pat Metheny called and said I could have anything I wanted. I should have said, ‘How about giving me a couple of million dollars?’ “The interesting thing was the guitars didn’t upset me that much,” he said. “Because I knew that they’re pieces of wood with strings on them and I would eventually have guitars that I wanted to play. This wasn’t going to stop me from playing, not having a guitar. “I was just getting over the trauma of the whole thing. I think I was more concerned about what had happened to the cat and that we were ensconced in this Peekskill Motor Inn. It had a beautiful view overlooking the [Hudson] river and they had a wonderful bar. I made really good use of the bar. They had single-malt whiskeys, fish and chips and English ale.” Before the final settlement, the insurance company allowed them to rent a rural house on 65 acres whose owner kept horses on the property. “I really felt I was on the Ponderosa. It was this gorgeous setting,” Abercrombie said. They eventually purchased their current home, a ranch house on a wooded lot also in Putnam Valley, near Bear Mountain, N.Y. The home features a fireplace on the main floor, a deck above the backyard and a modest above-ground pool off to one side. There’s a spacious music practice room downstairs for Abercrombie’s instruments. It’s the kind of place that can be a comfortable retreat in the summer as well as cozy on cold winter nights. To the uninitiated it may seem like a schlep to get to New York City from where Abercrombie resides, but, “If you know how to go, you can get to Manhattan in about an hour and 10, 15,” he said. “In midday, I can actually get into upper Manhattan in 50 minutes. It’s closer than it seems.” Abercrombie had given up his 18th Street loft in Manhattan to move “upstate” (a misnomer to all but those living in New York City, who consider anything north of Gotham “the country”) about 10 years ago. Their first upstate move was to a rented house near John Scofield’s home, just to see if they liked the idea of being away from the city, Abercrombie said. Having lived in the city for a long time, Abercrombie had one minor problem: He hadn’t driven in years and his license had lapsed. Scofield’s wife also had had the same problem, so she was instrumental in helping Abercrombie find a driving instructor so he could brush up and get his license. Scofield helped too. “Sco took me one day, he said, ‘Come out to the parking lot with me. Get behind the wheel.’ I said, ‘OK. You’ve got to be crazy. This is your car.’ He got me comfortable with the idea again. Then I took lessons and I learned to drive again in Manhattan, which, of all places, is pretty off-the-wall. But it came back pretty soon.” When going through the wreckage, Abercrombie found some items that, although severely damaged by the fire, he had to keep. One was a photo album that included some of the couple’s earliest pictures together, as well as shots of friends. “That was pretty charred up, but I refused to let it go,” he said. Also among the losses from the fire were some teddy bears from a collection John and Lisa had started years earlier, when she sent him a musical bear. But one charred and torn member of that collection was still recognizable, so, “We actually took it some place and had a woman stitch it for us. ... This thing survived the fire. My little mandolins survived the fire. We were all survivors.” The Personal File Books “I’ve always been a big fan of mystery novels, so I’ve read everything from [Sir Arthur] Conan Doyle to new guys like Jonathan Kellerman and Jeffery Deaver,” Abercrombie said. Paul Auster and Michael Crichton are also among his favorites list. “I like to read good authors like that. I used to like to read Truman Capote.” The Modern World “I find the computer something that’s necessary. I have a real cheap eMac. I only use it for what I have to use it for: communicating about gigs. I’m not really into it. I don’t use it for music. I still do music the old-fashioned way: I sit down at the piano or at the guitar. If I get ideas, I write them down with pencil and paper. I don’t even use a tape recorder. I used to use a little cassette just to record ideas. But I don’t even do that now.” Favorite Real Food “I like Italian food and French wine. I went through a phase where I thought French food was fantastic and every time I’d get extra money I’d go to an expensive French restaurant.” Favorite Junk Food “Hot dogs. Nathan’s hot dogs. With mustard and sauerkraut. That I can find up here. There’s a Nathan’s not too far away.” Family Pet Al, the white family cat. His name is short for Albino. “He brought another cat in today. I’m sitting here on the telephone and all of a sudden I saw a gray-and-white cat walk across my living room. I said, ‘That’s not Al.’ Then I saw Al right behind him,” Abercrombie said. “He’s a hunter, too. He brings little gifts in from time to time.” Favorite Venues As far as clubs go, “Birdland I find to be a very enjoyable club because they treat you nice. It usually gets a pretty good audience, and I like the sound in there. That and the Jazz Standard are the two clubs in New York that I feel most comfortable in.” On-the-Road Keepsakes Abercrombie’s wife, Lisa, gave him a plush bear many years ago, which became the start of a collection. “So occasionally I would take a small travel bear, I guess it would be a pocket bear.” Cars At about the same time he learned how to drive and moved up to the country, Abercrombie bought a 1987 Mercedes 300E. “It just finally fell apart and became too dangerous to drive,” he says. The Abercrombies now own a brace of Subaru Imprezas: one blue, one red. true 159 2008-06-24T16:08:40-04:00 false 18881 111 200708 true 79 2007-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

John Abercrombie had spent time Pearl Harbor Day in 2003 digging his car out after one of the heavier snows that hit the hilly area where he lives, about 35 miles north of New York City, when he decided to pause from his labors and go inside. That’s when he smelled smoke. “From where I was, I didn’t see any smoke or anything. When I walked into the kitchen entrance to the house, I saw that the smoke was halfway from the ceiling to the floor. I said, ‘This wasn’t an egg I left on the burner, something’s going on here.’ I walked further into the house and I saw the smoke was everywhere.” His wife, Lisa, who was in the bath, noticed the smoke at the same time and ran out of the house, in her own words, “buck naked.” Abercrombie went back into the burning structure, he said, hoping to grab some instruments, but more importantly to find their cat. “But I couldn’t find the cat, and all of a sudden I saw flames, besides the smoke,” he recalled. The flames started shooting over my head. So I said, ‘I think this might be a time to leave the establishment and get the hell out of here.’” Fire crews arrived in time to make sure they were safe, but too late to save the structure. Their Putnam Valley, N.Y. home was totally destroyed. “I went back to the house the next day with my friend Bob and we took flashlights to look around, to...

2009-03-02T00:26:44-05:00

4 Cuban émigré Paquito D’Rivera said he came to find his stately three-story brick home in North Bergen, N.J., with the view of the Hudson River and Manhattan, “thanks to my love for old cars. I was riding my Volkswagen ’62 around [John F. Kennedy] Boulevard East and I saw a lady in a beautiful 1960 Mercedes two-door—sporty. Then I make a U-turn, I almost cause an accident. It was a Cuban lady. I said, ‘You want to sell me that car?’ She said, ‘No, but I want to sell you a house.’” The woman, it turned out, had been hoping to meet D’Rivera to show him the house, while at the same time the musician had often admired the property during drives past it. The home had formerly belonged to a Cuban doctor who was also a conga player, D’Rivera explained. The doctor had died, and his widow found the place too big for her needs. Then came the chance meeting on what locals call “Boulevard East,” the thoroughfare that winds its way along the top of New Jersey’s Hudson County Palisades. For D’Rivera and his wife, Brenda Feliciano, “the house is not too big, not too small. I have a space for my music upstairs, and playing pool downstairs. And I have my swimming pool when I’m here in the summer ... and I have a beautiful view of Manhattan, close enough to the jungle. Very convenient.” The couple had been living in a modest home in Weehawken that boasted an all-weather pool table in the backyard. And some time before that, D’Rivera, like many other musicians, had been living in Manhattan Plaza in Midtown Manhattan. “I was really happy in that building, but it was too small for me,” he said. However, his love of cars had D’Rivera relocating to nearby New Jersey. “If you like old cars, or new cars, if you own a car, New York’s not the place for you,” he said. It’s probably no coincidence that D’Rivera’s home is also near Union City, which has one of the highest concentrations of Cuban émigrés north of Miami and where it’s not unusual to see New York Mets pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez visiting local restaurants along Bergenline Avenue (“Bergenline Avenue is like Miami with snow,” D’Rivera said with a laugh). “When I came to this country, my first residence was in Union City. More than 20 years later, they gave me the key to the city of Union City, which is like a temporary key to the city of Havana.” D’Rivera’s love of cars is evident when you first enter the solidly built 80-year-old house, where a large collection of toy Volkswagen Beetles is in the alcove. A comfortable sunny living room with a baby grand piano and a fireplace mantle adorned with Grammys are just steps away. The home, though, is not without its quirks. “We have problems,” D’Rivera said, pounding a hand against the living room’s striped wallpaper, “putting the frames there, because this is concrete. Solid. To put a nail there, you have to call a specialist. They come with their drills.” If the house is from another era, so is D’Rivera’s taste in cars. “I love cars in general, especially old cars,” he said. “I love the [Chevrolet] Bel Air ’57. My father took me to Amber Motors, when Havana used to be the beautiful city that it was, and they had this big window on the corner. And they had this blue Bel Air ’57 there. And I said, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Two doors, no post. Baby blue and a white top—what you call a hard top.” On the other end of the automotive spectrum is D’Rivera’s love of the original Volkswagen Beetle. “It’s contrast,” he explained. “I like contrast, you know. It’s like playing the saxophone and the clarinet. Same thing ... the Volkswagen, you love it or you hate it, the same thing as the clarinet. “I always loved the design of the Volkswagen. It fascinates me for some reason. I like the sound: eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. Only the engine of a Volkswagen sounds like that. I wonder why,” he said. Even with the toy VW collection, and a lamp in his music room that features a model of the beloved Bel Air and makes the car’s sound when being lit, D’Rivera’s auto fanaticism isn’t too extreme, he pointed out. “A friend of mine is so crazy about cars that he bought a repairman’s shop with the mechanic inside,” he said, adding that the terms of the purchase were explained this way: ‘I’m going to buy this from you, but you’re staying. You work, you can use my space now, but you have to take care of my cars.’” The Personal File Favorite Foods Besides the obvious Cuban cuisine, with an emphasis on fish, D’Rivera said, “I like Indian food. Every time I go to England, where the food is absolutely terrible, we look for the Brazilian food or the Indian food, because they have a lot of Indian and Pakistani people there. I love hot, spicy food.” Read any good books lately? “The Kite Runner [by Khaled Hosseini]. What a fantastic book. It is the best portrait of contemporary Afghanistan. It is a beautiful love story, but a love story between two men, two friends. You can have an idea of how people live there, how they have been at war for so long. First the Russians, and then the Taliban. I read the book in one day.” Written any? If he couldn’t play music, D’Rivera said he would be a writer. When traveling, “I write on the plane. Usually I write funny stories and things like that.” An example of his skill with the pen can be seen in My Sax Life: A Memoir ($29.95/Northwestern University Press), a meandering anecdotal collection of his experiences that was originally published in his native Spanish and then in English with the help of editor Ilan Stavans. “You’ll notice, the book is written in a very jazzy way, a very improvisatory way, swinging back and forth, the same way that we play,” D’Rivera said. “Sometimes, I was so far away, that I didn’t know how to come back. “ Favorite Cities “Madrid. I love that city. Well, I love the country [Spain] in general. I am very well received there. I love the food and the friends and every city has something enchanting. Even the small towns. Really, it’s many countries in one.” Favorite Threads “Jeans. Any jeans. Plus, what they call the Moody suit. The jogging suit. We call it the Moody suit because [James] Moody travels with that only. I gave to him once a guayabera, a Cuban shirt. Then he sent me back a Moody suit. He looks so good in that [Moody suit], it looks as though he was wearing it all his life. Even on the stage. He wears those on the stage and he looks elegant.” If you could say anything to Fidel... “I don’t think you can publish that.” true 159 2008-06-27T19:40:21-04:00 false 19387 122 200706 true 79 2007-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

Cuban émigré Paquito D’Rivera said he came to find his stately three-story brick home in North Bergen, N.J., with the view of the Hudson River and Manhattan, “thanks to my love for old cars. I was riding my Volkswagen ’62 around [John F. Kennedy] Boulevard East and I saw a lady in a beautiful 1960 Mercedes two-door—sporty. Then I make a U-turn, I almost cause an accident. It was a Cuban lady. I said, ‘You want to sell me that car?’ She said, ‘No, but I want to sell you a house.’” The woman, it turned out, had been hoping to meet D’Rivera to show him the house, while at the same time the musician had often admired the property during drives past it. The home had formerly belonged to a Cuban doctor who was also a conga player, D’Rivera explained. The doctor had died, and his widow found the place too big for her needs. Then came the chance meeting on what locals call “Boulevard East,” the thoroughfare that winds its way along the top of New Jersey’s Hudson County Palisades. For D’Rivera and his wife, Brenda Feliciano, “the house is not too big, not too small. I have a space for my music upstairs, and playing pool downstairs. And I have my swimming pool when I’m here in the summer ... and I have a beautiful view of Manhattan, close enough to the jungle. Very convenient.” The couple had been living in a modest home in Weehawken that boasted an all-weather pool table in...

2009-03-02T00:27:00-05:00