courtesy of Ray Anderson







Enja Records

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH RAY ANDERSON


The trombone is an instrument that has always fascinated me. Perhaps it is because I have always been attracted to that which the mainstream tends to ignore and the bone is ignored by all accounts. I don't think Ray Anderson minds do much though. He just marches on. That is why, by far and away, Anderson is one of the most exciting players on any scene. People criticize his flamboyance and critics rake him over the coals for his vocals. But in the end, who gives a shit? The man gets his audiences on their feet time and time again. He gives one hell of a show and when he is in So Cal, I clear my calendar. Simply said, I personally love his playing. Hell, I own every damn album Anderson has ever made, so I guess by all accounts, that makes me a fan. And I am damn proud to say I am. So I give you, Ray Anderson, my fav, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

RAY ANDERSON: I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, right in the shadow of the University of Chicago, in Hyde Park there. That was a place with a lot of music around. My jazz introduction came through my father's Dixieland jazz records. He's not any kind of big jazz aficionado, but he likes Dixieland. He had a couple of those Louis Armstrong records and he had some records of trombone players that were the dukes of Dixieland. So I picked the trombone based on the sound of it from those records. I started when I was eight years old. I just never stopped (laughing). I took lessons from the school and for a while, people at this university and I had regular classical lessons. When you're a beginner, there is no difference between a classical lesson and a jazz lesson. You are just trying to learn how to make the sounds that the instrument makes.


FJ: Coming from Chicago, you must have been up to your ears with the Chicago blues?

RAY ANDERSON: Yeah, one of the things about growing up in Chicago is you can't do it without hearing some blues. So I was very aware of the Chicago rhythmic kind of thing, Chicago blues thing. It is a wonderful influence. It is a great influence.


FJ: Who were some of the cats you were listening to?

RAY ANDERSON: The preeminent cats right then in Chicago were Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, all those folks. There is lots of blues in Chicago and we used to have some blues band of this or that kind play even for high school dances and these weren't people that we famous or anything. So it is kind of like an atmospheric thing.


FJ: Did you get an opportunity to listen to the AACM as well?

RAY ANDERSON: Well, I left Chicago when I was sixteen, so I hadn't really done much in the way of working or anything in Chicago. I had just that year started working with some regularity in a horn section in a blues band. I went to several AACM concerts. I remember going to hear Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell playing duos and there was also an AACM place out on the South Side, where I went several times and heard a bunch of people. I don't remember who, but the stuff just completely blew my mind. It was way over my head (laughing). I didn't understand it at all because I was in high school and in high school, my thing was Dizzy and Coleman Hawkins and even Coltrane was too much for me. I couldn't really figure it out. Coltrane started to go out there with Ascension and Om and even Countdown and records like that. I was like, "What is this?"


FJ: When did you depart the Windy City for the Big Apple?

RAY ANDERSON: In 1973.


FJ: Chicago being a real blue-collar town, was it a culture shock?

RAY ANDERSON: Well, it was tough in some ways, but I was really enjoying myself. You know, Fred, in '73, when I came, I was twenty years old so when you are twenty years old, you can do stuff like that, go to New York with three hundred and fifty dollars and a couple of addresses of friends of friends (laughing). But events transpired in a friendly direction and pretty soon I was driving a taxi to make money and I had a room to share and I started going around and sitting in. I was having a good time.


FJ: Seems like a simple life.

RAY ANDERSON: It was a simple life in some ways. That's true because there was nothing to do but play and you had to just make enough money to survive. That was easier in '73 in New York than it would be now. I lived on the Lower East Side and the rent was never more than a hundred dollars a month. You could have your own place for a hundred dollars a month. Now, this wasn't necessarily a luxury place or anything (laughing). Pretty soon, I was working a little of this, a little of that, a little bit of really old fashioned kind of music with a ghost band of Tommy Dorsey's. I did some of that and then I started getting into the Latin scene and I was doing a bunch of that and some funk bands and stuff and meanwhile we would just go out play all day, every day.


FJ: That has been the hallmark of your career, the ease at which you are able to transcend genres.

RAY ANDERSON: You know, Fred, that is a good point. I think it is really just a question of personality. I just had the kind of personality where I was fascinated by different sounds, different grooves, different forms, different styles and I also had the urge to fit in. I had to urge to be inclusive and to fit in. It kind of comes naturally to me. I didn't really know anything about Latin music per say when I got to New York. Of course, I had listened to some, but I didn't really know anything about it. I had never really been working in that. I had spent all my working time doing R&B and stuff. Once I started getting turned onto that, the trombone is such a prevalent instrument and there are so many beautiful players in there, I just got way into it. I just loved it. It just really absorbed me. I didn't find that it was any kind of conscious decision, but more just an affinity.


FJ: Are you just as much a student of the music as you were then?

RAY ANDERSON: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is absolutely true. It is sort of a platitude or whatever, but it is really true that the more you get into music, the more you realize how you don't know anything (laughing). The more you study it, the more you become impressed with your ignorance.


FJ: Let's touch on your work with Anthony Braxton.

RAY ANDERSON: I would say that Braxton is one of the really few and true geniuses of music in this whole period that we're in. And just relating it to that stylistic thing, Braxton is different than I am in that his position is all encompassing and he really has the courage of his convictions. In other words, he plays his music. It is not possible that Braxton would go and learn how to fit in perfectly with a Latin band or something. He is a cat that really has a lot of creativity and a lot of his own music and is one of the people that is willing to go down with the ship. He has that courage of artistic conviction and as such, he's just an unbelievable inspiration. I learned a whole lot from this guy, just really in terms of specific musical things, the way he has the different voices in the quartet that we were in and how to react and the book itself, just learning the book when I first got in the quartet expanded the technique and ability enormously because the stuff is really difficult, even trying to play it was a big learning process, but then to also be around Braxton. I spent about four years, more or less, with him and during that time, his music evolved enormously. He stopped doing the quartet thing with bass and drums and of course the audience didn't really like it. When we started, we did a whole tour with Anthony and I and Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizer. So no more swing based things and stuff. This was just out there in terms of its base and in terms of its rhythmic grounding, it was definitely in another place. It was not jazz. Of course, audiences didn't really like it, but that didn't bother Braxton at all because he was hearing this stuff. He liked that stuff. He was going in his direction and that is a wonderful thing.


FJ: Let's touch on the various bands you have led through the years, first, the Slickaphonics Band.

RAY ANDERSON: Well, it is a cooperative band and so I was never the band's leader. As a cooperative, it had a wonderful kind of just groove quality. It just grooved. We were hanging out and we had this little jam session going on every week in Jim Payne's apartment and gradually, that group of people that became the Slickaphonics were the people that were there all the time and it got to be really fun and then people started bringing in little charts and ideas and compositions and we started trying them. That was back in '79, around 1980, when we were doing that and there was this punk rock explosion in New York and a whole bunch of little clubs opened. So we got the idea of, "What the heck, let's take this in one of these. We could get a gig there. Why not?" We didn't even have a name for it then, but then we had to have a name so the Slickaphonics came from me from a composition I had written.


FJ: And did you get gigs?

RAY ANDERSON: Yeah! We started doing a bunch of gigs. And then two things happened. Somebody heard us and said something to somebody and we got invited to the Berlin Jazz Festival. That was one thing and then another thing is, we got connected to Enja Records, so suddenly, the thing got a lot more serious. We had this Berlin Jazz Festival gig and we had this Enja Records thing, so we made a record and we did this gig and it was really, really successful and then the thing was kind of off and rolling. It was my major commitment for quite a bit of the Eighties. We did a lot of touring and a lot of gigs. It was a wonderful band.


FJ: And the Alligatory Band?

RAY ANDERSON: When I quite the Slickaphonics, I made a lot of records and did a lot of work in the standard jazz quartet form, which is a form I still keep around to this day. I either use piano or guitar and then bass and drums. It is just a trombone led quartet. There is a bunch of records like that. It Just So Happens is a record like that and a few other people on it. Every One of Us is a record like that. Then there was Old Bottles, New Wine, that is a record like that. A bunch of these are not available anymore. So I did that for a while and then I got into the Alligatory thing. The first difference between the Alligatory band and the Slickaphonics thing was first, it was my band and so I was the composer, which gave it a lot more personal focus. The Slickphonics, everybody was involved in it. We had compositions that covered a really wide range of different concepts and for a while, that worked well, but eventually, people were just going in different directions. Compositionally, that is a big difference, but then the Alligatory with percussions as well as bass, guitar, and drums, and also trumpet with the trombone had a really different sound. The Slickaphonics was tenor saxophone and trombone and guitar and bass and drums and I played some percussion when I wasn't playing the trombone, but I was pretty busy in that band, so in the Alligatory thing, I had a full time percussionist, which gave us a lot fuller sound in terms of working with Latin rhythms or different kind of funk rhythms. I was able to do more with that stuff than the Slicks ever could do.


FJ: And the Pocket Brass Band, which has a new album on Enja, Where Home Is.

RAY ANDERSON: Lew (Lew Soloff) was in the Alligatory. I'm proud of it, actually. I really liked the way it came out. We were on tour when we made that record and that's a great thing because that band had been working every night for some seven or eight nights and then we went in the studio. It was recorded in Switzerland. We were on tour in Europe. So that meant that we were really, it was like a live record in some ways. We went in this little, tiny studio where we all just stood up and played in the same rooms without headphones or any of that kind of sound division stuff. It really has a live performance feel and that is a great thing.


FJ: Getting the material down on tour helps.

RAY ANDERSON: Yeah, it is great to do that because you can have a bunch of rehearsals and go into the studio, but when you've been playing this stuff for an audience every night, you know more about it. You know more about those tunes if you have been performing them. We were well rehearsed (laughing).


FJ: Your vocal escapades have been a lightning rod for much of your recent endeavors. The media seems to have a distinct problem with your singing.

RAY ANDERSON: Yeah, I find it really interesting that you would say that, Fred, because I haven't been able to figure it out either. It does seem that the media hates my vocals, not all the media of course, but it is true, by in large, I get really good reviews for my trombone playing and band leading abilities and really bad reviews for my singing (laughing). It is weird to me too because it always feels as if they feel that I'm not staying in the slot that I am supposed to be in and that is irritating because I do come from trying to express myself in whatever way I can. So I don't sing just to be singing, but because I actually have some lyrics that I want to put out into the world. I am taking it seriously. I'm trying to do something with that. I've never been able to quite figure it out. What's really funny about it is, that the audience just loves it. As much as the critics hate it, the audience loves it. The audience always comes up and says, "Boy, you really ought to sing more." "Boy, you have a nice voice." I don't know what to do with it to tell you the truth, Fred.


FJ: Always listen to the people.

RAY ANDERSON: OK, thanks, Fred. I appreciate the vote of confidence.


FJ: Your approach to the trombone is not limited to the instrument, but rather you have transcended it almost as if it were a saxophone.

RAY ANDERSON: Thank you, yeah, exactly. When I was a kid, and I was really a kid because I started when I was eight, so when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve, I was very into jazz and I just really wanted to sound like Dizzy Gillespie or Coleman Hawkins or somebody. I didn't really want to sound like J. J. (J. J. Johnson). As much as J. J. trombonistically is just unbelievable, incredible, monster, there was something about the fleetness of the way that Dizzy could just bounce and fly or the way Bird could, or Coleman Hawkins, or Sonny Rollins. I was more possessed by that stuff. And then the thing that was really a gift was, once I did grow up and learn some of what the AACM and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and those cats, where they took the music, to go open and freer like that enabled me to find a voice that I would never have found if I was still trying to play "Shadow of Your Smile" or something. If you can find a voice like that, then you can come back and play "Shadow of Your Smile" and make it your own. So it is true, now when I play the trombone, I don't think about the notes. It is sort of like singing, I don't think about the pitch. I just play.


FJ: And the future?

RAY ANDERSON: Well, I made a really wonderful tape with Matt Wilson on drums and Mark Helias on the bass and a guitar player that you don't know and I really want to put this out. It's a live record from a gig we did close by my house, here in Long Island. It is a gas. It is such a good band. That is recorded and I don't have a label for it. I am trying to figure out what to do and I haven't figured it out yet. I don't know whether to go one hundred percent my own route and put this thing out or whether I can link it up to some other distribution company. That thing will come out. We call it Bone Meal. That is on tap.

Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and Fire Starter. Comments?  Email Fred.