A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH JOE GIARDULLO


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

JOE GIARDULLO: I was seven when I heard Sam "The Man" Taylor. At nine, I started playing and then at thirteen, I am working in New York and I met Henry "Red" Allen and I got to hang out with "Red" Allen for a month. I didn't know anything about jazz at all until I heard Gene Krupa and Charlie Ventura. These guys were on their last legs, but not to me they weren't. I had never heard anything like it. Then I heard Miles and then I heard Trane and then I went, "Whoa." Then I had to deal with that. You can't forget what you know. You can't just decide that you don't know it. So everything changed. Then Braxton and Braxton hands me a record and says to listen to it. It was a guy that I had never even heard of. I had no idea who Stockhausen was. And then that changed everything. Dave Burrell turned me onto Jelly Roll Morton. I knew Jelly Roll Morton, but I never listened to him. He made me listen to it. So it changes everyday. All the ideas that I had two years ago, they are not worth too much right now, which is really the beauty of it for me. It is always an adventure.


FJ: Playing soprano will draw the obvious comparisons to Evan Parker or Steve Lacy.

JG: Oh, yeah, Lacy's sound, that is the thing about Lacy's music. Lacy has this sound. It wasn't John Coltrane's soprano playing, even though, I love it. It was Trane's tenor playing, not his soprano. It was Lacy's sound, especially the early sound when he played on the little Conn horn before he got into his newer horns. His sound and the sound that I get from mine, I think it is the closest, not so much in conception. Lacy is definitely the guy.


FJ: What is the most rigorous aspect of playing creatively improvised music?

JG: I go back and forth between the idea of saxophone playing because that is a craft. Then, there is the art of producing something that has some artistic merit, which nothing to do with saxophone playing. You can spend an awful lot of time working on the craft and there is a lot of great players, but they never produce anything that has any artistic merit to it. By that I don't mean in the music world. Art doesn't exist in one world. It exists in the entire world. It needs to be about something. So the big struggle is why am I playing and what is it that I want to communicate and what will that take? When the music was really loud and hard and raucous, there was a message that wasn't being sent. When the music is too precious, then it can mask some other important things that need to be said. I try to be specific and I am not always successful. I try to be specific about my intentions, even though I am not very specific about what it is that I am going to play. That probably takes the most work.


FJ: A large percentage of your recorded documents are collaborations with Joe McPhee.

JG: All the work with McPhee, we can divide it into three. The Bluette things with Dominic Duval and Mike Bisio on CIMP, those are Joe's. Those are Joe's concepts, so I come and try to approach those concepts and bring those elements that are required to make those things work. You make up your own parts, but the concepts are Joe's and the nature of the music is definitely coming from Joe. The duo we did on Boxholder, Specific Gravity, that was the first time, recording wise, that seemed to be a meeting of our music in a way. That was a real watershed for our playing together and that was probably after about five or six years of doing a lot of work together. Then there is the stuff with my quartet with Tani Tabbal, Mike Bisio, and Joe and that's different. Those are circumstances that I developed and by that I mean, I wanted the music to be different and everybody to have an equal voice in it. So that is a whole other story.


FJ: It is certainly advanced citizenship to listen to a Joe Giardullo/Joe McPhee recording and you are both playing soprano saxophone.

JG: Yeah, the CIMP recordings, the way they record just makes that happen. It is not designed to isolate the voice in anyway and it really doesn't give a whole lot of attention to individual voices and that is the nature of that. Most sopranos when they record them, they mic them at the top, kind of at the middle of the horn. That is where the microphone usually goes. My horn, I play an old King, the same model that Sidney Bechet played when he came from New Orleans. Mine needs to be mic at the bell like a trumpet. No one ever did that and it was always recorded all right, but I never felt like it was clearly my voice. So this last time, I said that that was what I was going to get and I would take as much time as I needed to do it and so it didn't take long. I am very happy about that. That is another thing that I won't have to worry about again.


FJ: How is the work?

JG: Well, it's better. It has been better for a while, but there is not a lot. Right now, I am concentrating on recording projects. It is hard work to get gigs. I am playing more now. I am playing in New York more. I live a couple of hours north of New York City and so I am playing in New York more. And I am playing with great guys. That's the biggest change. But nobody has a lot of work. Another place just closed in New York. It is hard. I don't know how guys do it. I am going to Portugal. I did a lot this spring. The first half of this year has been really tremendous. The summer will be slow, which gives me a chance to concentrate on a couple of projects. We will see what the fall does. But the first half of the year, I started out playing a duo with Milford Graves, which was unbelievable. What a way to start the year. Working with Marilyn Crispell is just a joy. I have been working in Montreal a bunch and some college dates. I was out in Seattle with Mike Bisio, Rob Blakeslee, and Billy Mintz, a Los Angeles drummer. The first time I played with Billy, what a great band that was. What a wonderful recording we did that I know Mike is shopping it around. Work comes in spurts. I don't play other types of music anymore. I don't do club dates and I don't do shows. For better or worse, I never even thought about doing that stuff. I never even considered that that was what I did. I really think I am more of a painter than a musician.


FJ: Rob Blakeslee is an underground superhero.

JG: Oh, man, Rob Blakeslee, I don't know who doesn't know about Rob, but whoever doesn't know ought to know. He is the purest trumpet player and flugelhorn player I know. Bisio said he wanted to get this together and I had met Rob out on the West Coast, but we hadn't played, but I had heard some of his music and I just loved his playing. So Bis decided to put this quartet together and we hit it off right away. I don't really work with too many trumpet players. Joe McPhee plays the trumpet, but it is more of a sound generator. It is a different way of going about the trumpet. I play with Roy Campbell a lot and Roy is serious trumpet player, but Rob has this clarity to his playing and his thinking without being boxed in and we hit it right off. He reminded me that the first time he heard me play, it reminded him of Charles Brackeen. I hadn't thought about Charles Brackeen in twenty years. I hadn't listened to any of that music in twenty years. I started talking about the Charles Brackeen music that I really liked and he had it all and we listened to it. It brought me back to Charles Brackeen's soprano playing. It is not the sound of his playing, but his conception. I told Bis that this band should work without a doubt. I will go back to the West Coast to play with Rob anytime. I loved him and Billy too.


FJ: Give me some more insight on McPhee's approach to the trumpet.

JG: Joe really treats his instruments like sound generators. He would be the first to say that. I have heard Joe play guitar. It is really wild. He doesn't really think about them as this, that, or the other. They are sound generators. I saw him do half a gig just with his voice. It is about sound. Joe is really about sound. It is not about the instrument, which is a big liberating thing for me. So that is how he deals with his instruments, even though he is a studied trumpet player. The sounds that come out of Joe's instruments, you couldn't say that that's a trumpet half the time.


FJ: Playing this music, one will certainly never see fame or fortune, but the listeners of this music are proactive and with their support comes a responsibility to propell the music forward.

JG: Without a doubt. That is very well said, Fred. That is the difference between being a craftsman, not that I think of myself as an artist, but you can think about playing music as a craft and those responsibilities don't come with that, but if it is not a craft, if it is not about playing that same thing, no matter how many different variations on it, that same table you make is still the same table. But if it is something else that compells you to play, that responsibility comes right away. It is right there. That is the biggest. That is the one. When you come off the bandstand and everybody says how great it was and you know you didn't get there, you are appreciative of what they say, but you know in your heart that it didn't get where it had to go. On the other hand, if it gets where it has to go and you know you did it and people say that that was an awful set, you can't listen to that either. You have to be your own judge as to when the painting is done. Playing the music is important to me. I know it makes me feel good, but I don't know that it is important to anybody else.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is Wang Chunging tonight. Comments? Email Him