Courtesy of Gary Burton







Concord Records

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH GARY BURTON


It is a difficult thing to juggle careers, but Gary Burton seems to be holding his head above water quite respectably. Running the day to day operations of Boston's Berkelee School of Music, recording steadily for Concord, and performing regularly as well, the vibraphonist has his hands full. Burton's Atlantic and ECM recordings are, as a rule, significant. We spoke about his hectic schedule, his latest recording, Libertango on Concord, as well as his extensive collaborations with Chick Corea, all unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

GARY BURTON: Well, I started playing the marimba and vibraphone at age six and people have always said that that was a strange choice and how did you happen to do that and it was simply because when my parents wanted all the kids in the family to take music lessons, there did happen to be a woman in the neighborhood who gave lessons on the marimba and vibraphone in this town in Indiana where I was growing up. So that's what I started with and it wasn't a choice that I made or any great insight to what my future was likely to be. And after the typical experience of being a kid who plays an instrument like many others, I discovered jazz when I was getting into my teens, maybe I was thirteen or fourteen or so, and that's when I started getting serious about music because I really was inspired by this. I think the first jazz record I heard was a Benny Goodman record of some kind and shortly after that I started looking for jazz records and discovering the major stars of what was then the Fifties, Erroll Garner, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck were all people that I discovered first. As I got a little bit more sophisticated, I started finding Miles Davis and Charlie Mingus and so on.


FJ: What was it about the music that struck your fancy?

GARY BURTON: The improvising allowed a kind of freedom to play more personally. I really enjoyed the fact that I didn't know how that it was going to develop, each time I started playing a song. There would be this great discovery process with each performance of a piece that you would see your solo develop and take shape and it was kind of a challenge to try and follow the changes, not get lost, not make mistakes, and to keep continuity going. In a way, it had a game-like quality to it that tends to be a fascinating thing for a lot of teenagers if they can master something that requires you to use your instincts and responses and so on. I think playing music offered that element for me.


FJ: Let's touch on your collaborations with Mike Gibbs, recording "Sweet Rain" on Duster.

GARY BURTON: Well, Mike and I were fellow students at Berklee at the beginning of the Sixties, which is how we met. He was a wonderful talent of a writer. He still is. For me, it was a perfect match because I was a player who did some writing, but as I got into forming a band of my own, I need lots of material and Mike was a true original and a very good fit with my perspective on jazz and on composition. As the years went by, I played and recorded a couple of dozen of his songs, not as much in recent years because now he writes mostly film scores and larger works. In the Sixties and into the Seventies, he wrote lots of songs for me. They were a really good fit for my group. It was just a coincidence that we happened to go to school at the same time, same place. Otherwise, I don't know when our paths might have crossed. He originally was from Africa and ended up settling in London, where he continues to live.


FJ: And then you were with Stan Getz during the height of his popular appeal.

GARY BURTON: Stan was a real episode in my career, in that I was twenty-one years old and back in New York after a year with George Shearing's group. I was wondering and thinking, "Where do I go next?" It turned out that Stan was looking for a piano player. He didn't have anyone that he could find and was getting desperate and so somebody told him that there was a vibraphone player who your might try. He plays with four sticks and could maybe substitute for the piano. It turned out that the bass player in the group, Chuck Israels, was a friend of mine and Chuck called me and said that Stan was interested in this. I went down and sat in with them at a club in New York and it didn't go well. I didn't know their arrangements. It was a lot of standards and some originals, things I could sort of play along with, but there were lots of reharmonizations and little subtle changes in the way that they played the tunes and so it was hard for me to spontaneously join in without rehearsal. I didn't do very well and Stan, obviously, wasn't too inspired by it and so that was the end of that. About a week later, Chuck called back and said, "Well, we still haven't found anyone. We don't know what else to do. Will you do this three weeks in Canada that is coming up right away? Get us through that and we will move onto something else." I said, "What the heck?" I had nothing else to do and so I did it. Stan, in those days, had a severe alcohol problem and spent the first week mostly drunk. He played the first set and would just sit in the audience the next set and let us play. He wasn't in any shape to function. But by the second week and third week, we had moved on from Montreal to Toronto and to another club and the music started to come together. I started figuring out how to play with him and what he wanted for accompaniment and by the end of the three weeks, I had found a groove. He said, "Do you want to stay on for another few weeks of concerts?" That just led to me being in the band for three years until I was ready to start my own thing. I learned a tremendous amount from Stan about melody, about how to communicate with audiences, and it was a great business experience. He was having a real huge success. Stan was at the peak of his commercial success at that time. "The Girl From Ipanema" was a hit record and we were playing every major hall in the world, making movies, and I was sort of there at his side through all this and making all these contacts with club owners and concert bookers, and record company people and so on. So it provided a terrific footing for me to go ahead with my own career. And Stan was wonderfully generous with featuring me and really opening doors for me and so on as well.


FJ: You have been fortunate enough to work with two of the most influential pianist of their era, let's begin with Keith Jarrett.

GARY BURTON: Well, the Keith episode was somewhat brief. Keith had started a band. I had known him since we were just getting out of high school and I would see him briefly on the road. He was with Charles Lloyd at the time and I was out there with my first group. He had come back from Europe. I saw him playing with a group of his own and he some really interesting songs I thought. I told him that when we got back home that I was interested in recording some of his songs. It turned out that he had given up that first band project and hadn't really decided what to do next. So he said he was interested in not just having me play the songs, but actually playing with me. He was added to my quartet for a summer. We did three or four months of gigs together, all sort of leading up to then making this record, which came out on Atlantic around 1970. And then over the next few years after that, we continued to share concerts. He started working as a solo artist at that point as well and he would frequently open for my group. I think later when he had a band with Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden and those guys, we would take turns opening for each other in concerts. We had the same agent and manager at that time, so it was nice. It was convenient just to do it and so it went on for a few years. We didn't continue actually playing together after that initial period.


FJ: And Chick Corea?

GARY BURTON: With Chick, we first played together in 1969. I hired him to play piano in my band after Larry Coryell let the group. Steve Swallow was in my rhythm section and we all thought that Chick would be the perfect guy to add to the group. We played together for about half a year. For some reason, Chick and myself, we just didn't seem to figure out how to play together. It felt like we were in each other's way all the time. After touring for a while, we had a break in the schedule and we were sitting, I remember still, it was backstage at the Village Gate club in New York. It was the last gig we were doing there for a while and we were talking about it and we both kind of concluded that it just wasn't working as well as we thought it was going to and that maybe I should go back to a guitar in the band and so on, which we did. A couple of weeks later, he called me back and said that he had just heard from Miles and was going to join his band, was all excited, which was a great thing for him. I think we both assumed that that would probably be the end of our attempts to play together, but a few years later, we were on a jazz festival in Munich and the promoter wanted some kind of jam session number at the end of the night and typical, as it often is, no one wanted to do it. There were a lot of other European musicians who were on this gig and they in particular were like, "We don't do jam sessions. We only play our music." So finally, this poor guy was begging people to do something at the end of this concert and so finally, Chick and I agreed that we would play a duet together because we were the only two that were agreeable. So he taught me one of his songs during the sound check. It was "La Fiesta" in fact and we played it that night and it was a big hit with the audience. His record company guy was there. It was Manfred Eicher, who had started this new record company called ECM and he said, "Oh, you have got to record this stuff. You have got to do a whole album of duets." And we thought he was crazy and that no one will want to hear a whole hours work of music with no rhythm section. It will never get played on the radio. You can't sustain that for a whole hour. But he kept pushing it and pushing it and calling us up and persuading us to do it and so finally, we said that we would do it and that we would come back to Europe and go to the studio and record this thing. They actually turned out really nicely. It was Crystal Silence, our first duet record.


FJ: Having recorded over ten albums for ECM, is there such a thing as an ECM sound?

GARY BURTON: Yeah, Fred, I do. It is a combination of recording approach, which you have to remember that in the beginning of the Seventies, the technology for jazz recordings was somewhat modest. These were projects that tended to be done real quickly, in a day or two, and there wasn't a whole lot of attention to getting the ultimate, best sound and the best quality mics and recording technology and so on. Manfred came along and took more care with that aspect of it, recording his records in Europe at just a couple of different studios with two of the best engineers you could find and did them at a very high quality. People, at first, loved ECM Records, even if they didn't care who the players were and often didn't know the names. They liked the certain quality of the productions that the records had. There was a certain style range that they were in. They were introspective. They were acoustic. They were less bombastic than a lot of the typical jazz records of the day. It reminded me of the stylistic transition that happened in jazz piano when Bill Evans came along. The standard for jazz piano up to that time were players, Oscar Peterson and Horace Silver and so on, players that were pretty percussive players. And then came Bill, who played lighter, more introspectively and played longer flowing melodic lines and not with a steady, pounding 4/4 quarter notes and rhythm section beats, but with a more broken, spacey kind of rhythm section approach. This was a real revelation to us in the Sixties, to us young players coming up at that time. So Bill Evans, in fact, was a big influence on all of us. Similar things seemed to me to be happening with ECM when it came along. It kind of influenced a lot of jazz recordings from that point on. It introduced another niche or jazz styles to the community of jazz possibilities.


FJ: As much as Bill Evans changed the perception of the piano in jazz music, you did the same for the vibraphone. A player like Lionel Hampton played in a very percussive fashion, but you broke the mold, playing in a much more lyrical manner.

GARY BURTON: Hamp was and is a very percussive type of player, played with fairly hard mallets and with a great emphasis on drum-like rhythm patterns in his playing and not much variety and phrasing, volume levels or dynamics, or the lengths of the tones and so on. Milt came along and played with soft mallets and played very melodically and lyrically, a softer sound and a lot of us of phrasing with he pedals so that there was a much more staccato, bright sounding runs than that Hamp would play. Milt was the first one to show us that the vibraphone could be this mellow, smooth sounding instrument. My approach was a mix. In fact, if I was going to describe my approach compared to Milt's, mine is pianistic and his is single line like a horn. His playing to me emulates a single line singer's voice or the way a saxophone or horn might play a jazz line. My approach is more like a piano. I use more harmony and I phrase more like keyboard instruments do. I did pioneer that particular approach to the vibraphone because I could hear that my concept to doing the music was in a more harmonic context. I heard voicing and chord support for what I was playing like a pianist does, as opposed to a single line.


FJ: Let's touch on Like Minds with Chick, Holland, Roy Haynes, and Pat Metheny.

GARY BURTON: Yeah, that started because Pat wanted to play with Chick. Pat has this list he goes down of all the players that he would love to play with and one by one comes up with projects to do with them. He emailed me and said, "How about something with Chick? And why don't you ask him if he would be interested and the three of us do something." And Chick said yes and the next question was who else should be in the band and very quickly we all knew it would be Roy and Dave. All of us played with Roy in many different settings throughout the years. I hadn't played with Dave except for a quick jam session at a festival once. The others had played with Dave and knew that Roy and Dave played together real well and was a good match for what we wanted to do. The biggest challenge was finding a time that we could all find a week off to do it. It took me over a year ahead in the calendar to finally find a period we all were not touring or had commitments. It took a long time to finally get it done. I knew it would be at least an excellent record. What I didn't know was if it would rise to the expectation of what happens when you get five players who are more established and who also have a long history together. All assumptions would be that this would be an excellent record. I worried a little bit that it would just be OK. There would be nothing wrong with it, but it wouldn't really have the spark and success that you would be looking for. But after the first day in the studio, I knew it was working fine because the first couple of tunes that we did felt so comfortable to play. Everyone was just fitting together so well. It seemed easy. Even though we would do two or three takes just to make sure that we had some variety, in almost every case, we used the first take.


FJ: All-star groups often fall into the trappings of a lack of continuity.

GARY BURTON: Yeah, the biggest challenge with all-star groups is how to make them a group as opposed to a bunch of people taking turns doing their thing. That tends to happen when you have all-star players. They are not used to playing together so they revert to doing their own individual thing in turn and you end up not getting a group sound or a group cohesiveness. I think the big advantage I had was that even though each of these players had established their own career, we had collectively spent a lot of time playing together over the years, so we had built up a far amount of report and insight into each other as players. And then I think another thing I did helped cement it, which was I chose music that was written by Pat, by Chick, and myself. I chose something old, something new, something old, something new. That was the concept that I came up with. I think that if I had just gone out and collected a bunch of new music or played tunes by other people or any other concept that I could have thought of, it wouldn't have brought us together as much as the choice of material that we did have. I think that helped us also find our group identity.


FJ: Let's touch on your latest Concord release, Libertango: The Music of Astor Piazzolla, Piazzolla records are the rage these days, why revisit tango at this point in your career?

GARY BURTON: I first heard Astor Piazzolla play live in 1965 in Buenos Aires. I was there with Stan. We ended up sharing the bill for three nights at a club with his group. I had never heard of the guy. I had never heard of tango music. It was 1965, who knew about this thing? Here was this amazing music that was extremely evolved and developed and demanding and technical prowess of unbelievable skill level and compositions that were very sophisticated. I was blown away by it and became an instant fan. I went home with an armload of Piazzolla records and was constantly driving people nuts playing these records for them and raving about it. I never expected to ever play with him, but I was a fan of his music. About twenty years later, in the mid-80s, he showed up to a concert I was playing in Paris with Chick. He said hello and asked if I remember him and I said sure and he asked if I would be interested in doing a project together. About a year went by and he got in touch with me again and said that he was ready to start writing something and was I still interested. It turned out that I was on my way to Argentina for a month or so on a tour and we agreed to meet and talk further. By the time I got there, he had already written all the music for us and was very excited about it. So we planned a tour for about half a year through Europe, Japan, and some dates in the US and for me to join his already established quintet. In setting it up, my manager also organized a record deal with Atlantic, with Warner Bros. and so that record came out in 1986. It is called The New Tango and that launched my life in the tango world. We planned to do some more touring over the next few years, but soon after that, he became ill. He had a stroke and passed away. I sort of assumed that that would be the end of my tango experience, but someone suggested a few years ago that I reunite his band for the past fifteen years ago before he died. Reunite his group and do a record of Astor's music and arrange some more of his songs. He had a huge repertoire and so I did, two or three years ago called Astor Piazzolla Reunion and that went so well that when I was on tour again in South America, we decided to record some more of his tunes, which is this record. This is my third Piazzolla record. I have been deeply connected in his music for about fifteen years. There is quite a bit of history there. I am playing a big tango project at Carnegie Hall on June 17.


FJ: When did you join the staff at Berklee?

GARY BURTON: About thirty years ago in 1971. This is my twenty-ninth year.


FJ: You should get a watch.

GARY BURTON: (Laughing) I get dinner with the President, who had lunch with every week anyway. I started out as a professor for the first fourteen years. Then I became an administrator. I became the Academic Dean for ten years and for the last five years, I have been the operating officer, the Executive Vice President. So I now run the school.


FJ: What is your vision of the school? And any advice for students that are planning a future in this music and entering the Berklee School of Music is part of their path?

GARY BURTON: If they have a talent for music, yes, of course, they should have the opportunity and encouragement to try music. One of the challenges of the young people growing up today is that the music education in the schools is less readily available than it used to be in my youth. In fact, it was offered in every school in the country in those days and now it is about sixty percent of schools that have some kind of music program and forty percent have none. There are a lot of potentially talented musicians that are not getting the same kind of access to instruments and to instruction at that really important early age, between six and fifteen. That is the best time to get started with music. Hopefully, that will continue to come back and improve. There has been quite a campaign going on in the last five to ten years to restore music education in schools and is making some progress. My vision for Berklee and you can say Berklee's collective vision as an institution is to certainly make use of all the technology that is available, which has had a huge impact on how music is made, and produced, and distributed to society. The more we understand it, the better we use it, the more effective we are going to be as musicians as we go forward in this century and to expand the respect for contemporary kinds of music in society. The more people are educated about jazz music and the value that it has for us as an art form, the healthier we will be culturally and the better off musicians will be.


FJ: Is this a government responsibility or does the burden fall upon the private sector?

GARY BURTON: Well, perhaps a combination of both, Fred. Certainly, let's ask that same question about science. Is that a government responsibility or do we leave that up to the private sector to promote? I think the answer we would say is that is an essential item along with English and math. The debate is whether people see music as an essential part of an education or not and the same debate goes on about physical education. That is another area that schools with major financial questions have given up on. Schools often have no sports programs and I am sure that people would argue that there is an essential maturing process that is being denied. We learn algebra and geometry, but how many of us are actually going to use it in our daily lives or our careers? And yet it is considered part of our learning experience. We are learning more and more that music has a fundamental effect on a young student's learning process and the ability to organize information and the discipline to work with an issue that has multiple levels of challenge. These are things we have discovered that music students do better on if they encounter these experiences. It is better for building a whole range of neuro-pathways in the brain. It is increasing being seen by educators in general as an essential learning experience. More and more the feeling is that it should be available.


FJ: With all the hats that you wear, is there enough time in the day?

GARY BURTON: Not enough. That is the big issue and of course, one has a personal life as well. I have two kids who are now twenty-one and nineteen and they are at the point of starting their own adult lives and I feel like over the years I have had to make a lot of sacrifices in my personal life in terms of time and to be with family because I had these commitments to two careers that I loved dearly. Every time I think it is too much and it is time to let something go, I end up saying that I can't stop it now because I am at a great period here. This is not the right time to take a break. I do feel that the time will come where I will start doing less. I feel like I am one of the luckiest people in the world to have gotten to do two really fulfilling, challenging, and enjoyable types of work. Each compliments the other and benefits the other. I have learned tons about the music through my students and through my school experiences. My teaching career has been a terrific source of inspiration. There is very little I would change.


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and the voice of Buzz Lightyear. Comments?  Email Fred.