Quincy is right about Jimi Hendrix. He was an incredible guitar player. But, session work is entirely different from what he did on stage.
It would be intimidating for anyone to walk into a recording session and play with the best session men in the business. Especially since Quincy wanted Jimi to collaborate on a project with them.
There’s a wonderful documentary, The Wrecking Crew that highlights this special group of musicians. They had very unique talents and could play flawlessly take after take. Very different work from performing on stage.
Jimi would have learned a lot by accepting Quincy’s offer. No one likes being the new guy making most of the mistakes. I’m sure the more experienced musicians would have ribbed him a little, and helped him through it.
Experiences like that are how you learn and get better.
Jimi just needed session experience. He certainly had the guitar chops.
The big Jimi Hendrix-Plays-Jazz project I’VE always heard about was Jimi playing with the Gil Evans Orchestra.
Gil was one of the greatest arrangers in jazz history *, and his bands were always full of excellent professional jazzmen — Lew Soloff, Howard Johnson, Dewey Redman, for example — but not the likes of Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis. I don’t see any problem with Hendrix matching chops in a session with the regular Gil Evans group.
Bill Barber! My hero! He was the coolest and his playing turned a lot of people into tuba players. Including me.
And I loved Gil too … spent a lot of Monday nights listening to Gil and them at Sweet Basil in the Village, the home of so much good jazz. I’m so glad I got to do that, it was a blessing.
The Gil Evans Orchestra is STILL playing those arrangements Gil wrote today.
You can only imagine what they would have been with Jimi.
I’ve always thought Michael Jackson was a great SHOWMAN. Not an original in his own right, but someone who was very good at taking stuff from other artists and packaging it into something very special.
That is in itself a talent and he should not be despised for it. He was a great entertainer that way. But he was not an original anything.
Have to say I really enjoyed the GQ interview with Quincy Jones. More informative, interesting and wide-ranging than the previous interview and more in keeping with Quincy Jones as I’ve always known him to be (in print, that is). Next up will be the 1990 Playboy interview if I can find it.
Well, not quite next up. En route I found this interesting interview with Jones in LA Magazine from 2015. Among other things is the fact that he has both a photographic memory and synesthesia, which he explains as putting colors to music. I have no idea how it works, but when composing film scores he apparently paints the music before or while he’s putting it down on paper.
I realize that the Taylor Swift, Marlon Brando, and Michael Jackson comments are getting most of the attention here, but it bears mentioning that at least one arranger thinks that the whole “Giant Steps” = 12-tone thing is off base. The author (and one of his commenters) leave some room to consider whether or not Ascension is a 12-tone piece, but “Giant Steps” really has very little to do with 12-tone music as it is usually construed.
I’m wondering if Q was just being provocative to be provocative. We all have a bit of the trickster in us, no?
Sorry to say, I’m beginning to suspect ol’ Q is something of a bullshitter.
He claims to speak 26 languages and to be able to read and write in many of them. He has lived or vacationed next door to an almost endless list of prominent celebrities, often during times when he wasn’t all that rich or well known. He claims things like being with Jay Sebring the day of the Sharon Tate murders and would have been there that night had he not forgotten Sebring’s invitation, etc. and refers to himself as the Ghetto Gump. He claims to be busier than ever, with more than a dozen projects going on, and under the care of a cadre of European doctors whose innovative treatments are sure to let him live to 110, yet recent photos of him in public appear to show a guy who’s vastly overweight and can barely get around.
My father once half-jokingly observed that sometimes it’s better to be an interesting liar than a truthful boor. Jones is undoubtedly a man of supremely gifted intellect and towering accomplishments, but I’m beginning to think he values being an interesting conversationalist over being a truthful one. Of course, if the things he claims really have happened or are happening, he would most certainly be one of the world’s ‘most interesting men’ ;).
Just remembered one of the other things that have caused me to question the veracity of some of Q’s claims. That being his story of having been in an automobile accident in his youth in which he was the only one of the car’s five passengers to survive and that when he touched one of his friends in the aftermath, the friend’s head fell off. I’m aware that people can be decapitated in automobile accidents but I’m having a hard time picturing how they could be decapitated in such a way that there’s no obvious evidence of it.
Yeah, it was in (iirc) a Guitar Player interview with Sonic Youth where Thurston Moore starts talking about making noises with a toy ray gun and Lee interjects to say something to the effect of “No such thing ever happens. I’m tired of talking to a French reporter four years from now and being asked ‘Are you ever going to do more work with zee toy ray gun?’, and having no idea what they’re talking about.” That was when I realized in a firm, clear way that sometimes reporters are just getting their chains yanked.
TubaDiva @126:. Thank you for the “Little Wing” link! Lew Soloff was the brightest spark in the Evans Orchestra of the ‘80s-‘90s, and I never thought he got the respect he was due. He passed away, what, last year? Rest In Peace, Gate.
Anecdote: Lew dropped into the studio where Laura Nyro was recording New York Tendaberry in 1968-69 to check out the talent. At one point the music director said “Laura, none of our trumpet players can DO what you want here.” Laura looked out into the dark and said “I see a trumpet player who can do what I want.” And that’s how Lew ended up sitting in on “Save the Country.”
Saw a picture of him just before the news broke; he was sitting in a restaurant with a bunch of other trumpet players … and it made me smile seeing it, that fraternity of musicians is so sweet. They were celebrating Warren Vache’s birthday (which by coincidence is also my birthday, it’s the only thing I have in common with Warren Vache, dammit! And also Larry Campbell from Bob Dylan/Levon Helm’s bands. Go wish them a Happy Birthday on Wednesday. Also Nina Simone and Tadd Dameron, though neither of them are able to appreciate it.) And then Lew went to the big horn section in the sky.
I realize this sounds like a broken record coming from me, but I adored Lew Soloff.
His talent … his incredible creative spark … his prodigious work ethic … his kindness to other musicians, to students, … and man, he could play anydamnthing anydamntime. I never heard a bad performance or a bad note out of Lew, and I listened to him a lot.
Like a lot of other people, it broke my heart when he passed. I still miss him greatly.
Here he is when he appeared in Atlanta …
And for those not in the know, the fabulous Warren Vache: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9xco0i1xeY
I can’t believe no one called him on this lie, when it was supposed to be “early 1969” when he saw a rough cut of Bullitt and thus missed the Tate murders. Bullitt had been in the theaters for three months at that point, plus everyone knows the Manson killings happened in August.
Yeah, he also said Manson’s followers castrated Sebring and that’s not true either.
From the GQ interview linked above:
I was suspicious of this claim because I recalled having seen photos of Sebring at the scene which showed him from the front and his pants were still belted and zipped up with no blood on the front. So I looked up crime scene photos and Sebring’s autopsy, and sure enough no such thing had happened. He was full of it.
So now we have an erroneous timeline, and claims of nonexistent wounds, to accompany Jones’ claims that Sebring had invited him there that night and that he escaped with his life only by virtue of having forgotten the invitation. He then goes on to thank his lucky stars that he’s escaped so many close calls, and styles himself the “Ghetto Gump”:
I am very sorry to have discovered this kind of stuff because I’ve been a fan of Jones for as long as I’ve known of him and have enjoyed all his stories about his experiences and the people he’s known. But once you find out that somebody lies or embellishes things, everything they say becomes suspect, and now I feel like I can’t take anything he says to heart anymore. Who knows if the reason he doesn’t drive is because he was the only survivor of a car crash that killed the other four occupants? Who knows if each of his two brain surgeries gave him a 1 in 100 chance of survival? Who knows if he really had his hand pinned to a fence by a switchblade when he was 7? Everything has become suspect. I am bummed.
I’m also disappointed in him as a person. Maybe he’s just trying to have things of interest to talk about with current day interviewers rather than prattling on about jazz musicians from 60 and 70 years ago which he knows will be a bore. But surely he’s had enough interesting real life experiences to relate that he doesn’t have to stoop to making things up out of whole cloth. I have a feeling he’s been getting away with this stuff for years and getting away with it because no one had the means or interest to look into them. Now, if nothing else, he needs to get with the times and realize that the things he says can be verified or debunked by a five second Google search.
I don’t invest that much energy in it. When I read the quote about the decapitation, I flashed on how that happened to Jayne Mansfield when she died and kept reading. And, in general, processed the fact that Quincy Jones had connections to that event in history, too, even if not to the degree he says. Whether he got Jay Sebring’s testicles incorrect is just part of learning how to listen with a grain of salt (and I am sorry that my sentence refers glibly to what happened - it was an awful tragedy and I am glad Manson is finally someone we can actively forget now.)
Overall, I tend to assume that he’s a storyteller and embellishing everything, but that there is a kernel of truth to some of the things he shares - e.g., Michael Jackson was very ambitious in his career and put his interests first. Do I need to hear Q say MJ would steal from anyone? Nah, but given that he’s telling his tales, I am happy to pull up a chair.
