WHEN I FIRST GOT INTO JAZZ IN THE 1970S, I QUICKLY REALIZED THAT THE DAYS OF SEEING A MUSICIAN WHO PLAYED BEFORE AND DURING THE SWING ERA WERE NUMBERED. THEREFORE, I MADE EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO SEE THE LIKES OF EARL HINES AND BENNY GOODMAN BEFORE “IT WAS TOO LATE.”
MOVE UP A GENERATION , AND TODAY’S YOUNG MUSICIANS AND JAZZ FANS HAVE TO SCOUR THE WORLD TO FIND ANYONE THAT CAN REMEMBER THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN JAZZ ERA. ONE OF THE FEW REMAINING GIANTS, TERRY GIBBS, IS STILL ACTIVE, SHARP AND STILL GETTING AWARDS. HIS LATEST ONE IS FOR HIS BIOGRAPHY, OF WHICH HE REFERS TO IN THIS INTERVIEW GIVING AN OVERSIGHT INTO THE MOST EXCITING ERA OF AMERICAN MUSIC.
LIVING IN SHERMAN OAKS CALIFORNIA, GIBBS BECAME A FIXTURE OF THE MUSIC SCENE HERE, STARTING WITH HIS FAMED TENURE WITH THE WILDLY EXCITING SECOND HERD OF WOODY HERMAN, TO HIS OWN BIG BAND, HIS TIME WITH THE STEVE ALLEN TV SHOW AND HIS SMALL GROUPS OF THE LATTER YEARS OF HIS CAREER WITH FELLOW BEBOPPER BUDDY DEFRANCO.
I STILL REMEMBER THEM PLAYING TOGETHER AT CATALINA’S 15 YEARS AGO. THEY DID A RAPID FIRE VERSION OF “JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS” AND CHANGED THE SCALES FOR EACH IMPROVISING CHORUS, MOVING UP A HALF STEP ALL THE WAY. IT WAS ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING PIECES OF MUSIC I HAVE EVER COME ACROSS, AND THEY DID IT EFFORTLESSLY.
FULL OF EXCITEMENT AND VINEGAR IN HIS 90S, GIBBS HOLDS THE CHAIR OF HONOR FOR THIS DISCUSSION. HOW MANY ARTISTS CAN CLAIM TO HAVE THEIR MUSICAL LIVES CHANGED BY THE NASCENT SOUNDS OF A NEW STYLE OF MUSIC? TERRY GIBBS HAS LIVED IT, AS WELL AS SEEING THE NEXT STAGES OF JAZZ TAKE THEIR PLACES ON THE THRONE. HERE SPEAKS THE HISTORIAN OF AN ERA GONE BY, FOR NOWADAYS, AS THE BIBLE SAYS “THERE WAS A GENERATION THAT KNEW NOT JOSEPH” AND THE AGE OF THE BEBOP APOSTLES IS FADING AWAY
From the Bebop Era, there are only two of us left from the original era. You have to be 90 years old or older, and only Roy Haynes and myself are the only two left. Buddy DeFranco died a few months ago, and he was a part of it.
I just went to Catalina’s for a birthday party for a guy, Van Alexander. He’s an old time arranger and did Ella Fitzgerald’s first big hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” He’s a hundred years old. Isn’t that wild?
YOU GREW UP IN AN ERA WHEN JAZ Z WAS THE MOST POPULAR MUSIC OF THE TIME
When I was growing up, the most popular music was from the Big Bands. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey…that was the “pop” music of the day. I was actually a classically-trained xylophone player. I played all of the percussion instruments; I had a scholarship to Julliard as a timpanist, which I never took because I wanted to play jazz. I played drums with a big band and all of a sudden I got drafted into the army like everybody else when they turned 18 years old during WWII. I was playing drums back then more than vibes because there were no places for a vibes player in bands. There was Benny Goodman with Lionel Hampton, but that was the only one. So, as a drummer I played around with local bands. I travelled around in Philadelphia with a band one time, with a girl band leader named Judy Kane.
I grew up with a guy named Tiny Kahn, who was more talented than all of us. He died at 29 years old. He took a lesson for about six months from my drum teacher. He was probably the best vibe player I ever heard in my life. He became an arranger for people like Johnny Mandel (who wrote “The Shadow of Your Smile”). We all learned from Tiny Kahn. When we were both six years old we both met in Brooklyn and lived right across the street from each other. Our windows faced each other; we both got into jazz and we both used to go down to my basement and I’d set up my drum set and we’d play Count Basie records and played along with them.
AND THEN YOU GOT THE CHERRY OF A JOB WITH THE TOM DORSEY BAND. YOU MUST HAVE THOUGHT YOU WERE IN HEAVEN
When I first got the job I thought I was in heaven, but I later quit. A lot of this is described in my autobiography, Good Vibes.
WHY DO YOU THINK JAZZ WAS SO POPULAR BACK WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG, AND IT’S NOW THE LEAST POPULAR MUSIC IN AMERICA?
The young kids don’t listen to it. It’s like (the late TV personality) Steve Allen commented to me about 25-30 years ago. He said, “You know what, Terry? The whole world is becoming incompetent.” And it’s just not music; think of anything that’s going on in the world. We just had better people years ago than we have now in everything, except electronics.
The thing is that the audience is completely different now. Look at the pop music today: rap music and pop things that once they’re recorded by one person will never be recorded again by anybody else. We don’t have George Gershwins and Jerome Kerns and Cole Porters or any great writers from those days to learn from and record.
YOU PLAYED WITH CHARLIE PARKER. WHAT WERE YOUR THOUGHTS OF HIM?
I literally had a nervous breakdown. There was an old movie about looking for Shangri La? Lost Horizon with Ronald Colman? Well, that’s what I found when I heard Charlie Parker. I had given up playing vibes and was just playing drums because I had all of this classically trained technique, and yet my idols in jazz were Roy Eldridge, Benny Goodman and Lester Young. They played simple.
So I had all of this technique and I didn’t know what to do with it. One day I came home on a furlough, and Tiny Kahn couldn’t wait for me to get home. We looked like Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet walking down the street. I was about four foot eight or nine, and weighed about 80 pounds, and Tiny was six foot two and weighed about 300. He was the best friend I ever had in my life. He died at twenty nine. He couldn’t wait for me to get home. By the way, there was a record ban in those days. We never got to hear anybody on records that was new.
He said, “There’s a new music called “bebop.” Now, that’s like me telling you “There’s a new music called “Shmagle-gaga.” That’s what it sounded like to me. I didn’t know what he was talking about ; what does “bebop” mean to me?
So, he took me to hear Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on 52nd Street. I didn’t believe what I was hearing. Even now as I’m talking about it, I get that same weird feeling in my system. Here was something that I had been looking for all my life, and I’m now hearing it! I didn’t know what they were doing!
As a drummer, it was easier for me to catch on to Dizzy Gillespie. Not musically so much as rhythmically. The syncopation; it was almost like if you took away all of the notes, it was like hearing a drummer, or a tap dancer playing all of those syncopated figures on the horn. And Charlie Parker was impossible; you had to be George Gershwin to beat Charlie Parker because everything he played was a song. Sometimes whatever song he played in the solo was better than the actual song he played! \
So, I heard him and had the breakdown. Everything stayed open until four o’clock in the morning in those days. All of the clubs. So, at 4:00 am I heard they were all going up to a place called Minton’s in Harlem. I told Tiny that I had to go there. He drove me there and said “I gotta go home.” So he went home and I went up to Minton’s and followed them from Minton’s to a place that was a supper club. About twelve in the afternoon I fell asleep on the doorway. Then I got up and hung around 52nd Street until it opened again.
Every night I did this for a week. My folks had the police looking for me. I come from an old time Jewish family. I was the baby, and I’m home on furlough from winning the war all by myself and here I am lost; my parents couldn’t find me! It was like a breakdown; I was following those guys wherever they went just to hear them play.
DIDN’T YOU PLAY WITH HIM ONCE?
Back in those days, if you won a Downbeat award, which I won five years in a row, you were given a plaque. If you won the Metronome award, you would get a record date with all of the winners. So I recorded that one time with him.
But I played with Charlie Parker. He came in once and sat in with me and I worked out this song . He had just gotten out of the hospital and he wanted to play with me so he came in to play with my band in a club that Harry James was playing with Buddy Rich. But he wanted to play with me, so I ended up playing with Bird a bunch of times. I worked with Dizzy Gillespie for ten days out here in California. I was conducting a television show called “Operation Entertainment” where I wrote all of the music and conducted all of the shows. We did four shows in nine days; we did four hour long variety shows. They were done like the Bob Hope Vietnam shows; we went to service camps. We’d rehearse today and do a show tomorrow, do another show and fly to the next camp. In nine days we did four shows, and if you know anything about television, to do an hour long variety show you rehearse all week and you don’t know what the heck is going on at all. But it was great; I worked nine days a week. I had an office that Chuck Barris gave me to write the music. I also owned a music store at the time; it was a drum shop in Canoga Park,
I got a call from Dizzy, and I knew him from a million meetings, but you really don’t know someone until you play with him. I knew what he could do because he was that amazing. He thought I was good, but he didn’t know how good I was, or bad I was, until we play the same songs every night. And every time we played it we’d play it differently, then you can hear if somebody can play.
So I was at the store one time; my partner would actually run it and I would just go there to hang out. I got a call from Dizzy; they were opening up somewhere in Watts. Right after the Watts Riots! He told me, “Look, we’re in trouble. James Moody just had a Bell’s Palsy stroke. You know what that is? You’re whole jaw goes down. It’s dangerous but you eventually get better. So he asked if I could come down and play with him for ten days.
I didn’t care what area it was, or how dangerous it was. To play with Dizzy Gillespie would be the greatest thing in the world. So for ten days I never had so much fun and never learned so much. And Dizzy loved me. He really loved me. And it knocked me out that he would call me instead of anybody else in California.
I also played for The Steve Allen Show for years, and had a great time. Have you ever seen the Youtube video of me playing vibes in 1953 with Terry Pollard? There’s probably not a young vibes player today who can play as good as that girl Terry Pollard played in 1953. It was on the Steve Allen Show.
ALICE MCLEOD PLAYED WITH YOU FOR AWHILE BEFORE SHE BECAME BETTER KNOWN AS ALICE COLTRANE. ANY HINTS OF HER FUTURE DIRECTION IN THOSE EARLY DAYS?
When she played with me, Alice was a bebop player. She recorded four albums with me. She played like Bud Powell. I introduced her to John Coltrane. We were working in Birdland opposite John Coltrane. John was going through a period where he was sort of not playing like he did with Miles Davis from a few years before. He was going through a period where he was maybe screeching a little bit more than playing straight-ahead. Alice heard something in that. What she told me later on was that he was sort of “davening.” You know what that means? That’s the Yiddish term for rocking back and forth while reciting prayers. Well, that’s what he was doing on the horn. She liked it!
They used to have a table at Birdland right on the way to the dressing room, back dining room and kitchen. That’s where the musicians would sit because they wouldn’t seat customers there as it wasn’t a good seat. You could only see the backs of everybody. We finished our set and a bunch of us would hang out outside. She’d stay there at the table and listen to John. She was hooked on him, so I introduced her to John and watched a love affair happen. It was beautiful.
Now, here’s the wildest thing about Alice. I taught her how to play vibes, and she was becoming a good vibe player.
Alice been playing with me for about a year. I had finally gotten to play in a club in Chicago called The London House, which was an all time class club. They usually only hired guys like Oscar Peterson, Errol Garner and George Shearing to p lay there. That style of music. I finally got a job there. My agent called me and said we were going to open there in two weeks. Alice came to me a week before opening and said “Terry, John wants me to go to Sweden with him. We’re going to get married.” If it was anyone else I would have done the old cliché’ and call my attorney Bernie. I would have sued! But how do you fight someone who’s in love with somebody?!? Especially a woman! A woman in love? Forget about it!
I got Walter Bishop Jr to play piano with me. He used to play with Charlie Parker, so he joined the band. She became one of sleeping drug. We were close all the way through. My son and Ravi Coltrane became roommates in New York City later on in life. Isn’t that wild?
Yeah, Alice Coltrane was a real bebop piano player, which nobody knows, because those records are out of print.
WHAT ADVICE DID YOU GIVE YOUR SON WHEN HE TOLD YOU HE WAS GOING TO FOLLOW IN YOUR FOOTSTEPS AS A JAZZ MUSICIAN?
Become a shoemaker.
Luckily, he didn’t play the same instrument. Ravi Coltrane was lucky because “Coltrane” is the most famous name in all of jazz. If you see a movie or TV show with jazz, you’re going to see John Coltrane. One time Miles Davis had that kind of fame all over, and then John Coltrane took over. So, it was a bit easier for Ravi to get work, but a bit more difficult for my son to find work at first.
I’m not a good writer, but I’m a good storyteller. My autobiography actually won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and we won the recording industry award the same year! It was the best book of the year.
IF YOU WANT TO EXPERIENCE THE JOY OF MUSIC, JUST GRAB HOLD OF A TERRY GIBBS SESSION FROM ANY OF HIS ERAS. HIS TIME WITH WOODY HERMAN AND BUDDY DEFRANCO ARE STANDARDS BY WHICH OTHERS ARE COMPARED. ONCE YOU GET INTO HIS MUSIC, YOU’LL UNDERSTAND BETTER THE MEANING OF THE TERM “GOOD VIBES.”