Por: Estefanía Romero
Instagram: @estefaniaromero_bop
Clifton got his first trombone as a gift from his uncle, Sonny Rollins. This would be the beginning of a long path of complete devotion to music.
Speaking to Clifton is to listen to Sonny’s advices, is to visualize the good old days of Harlem, the heart of the black intelligentsia; is to feel the presence of Dizzy, Mingus and Sonny in a living room; it’s also a guide into comprehension towards the meaning of jazz (as a word and as an art form)… it’s to become infuriated towards today’s music industry; and it is to be moved to the bones by knowing who Robyn was… the same who inspired the last single released by Clifton.
Dear readers, I’m sharing with you the lovely and intense conversation I had with Clifton Anderson, composer, trombone player and intellectual, whose work and words must be known by every jazz lover.
Music Can Be Powerful
Clifton: We tend to think about music as just pure enjoyment and entertainment, but it has more, deeper, value for humanity than that. I think that musicians who play this music, usually younger musicians, don’t get to this point, because they’re still learning, they’re still growing, they’re still bringing their life’s experiences into their music, but you get into certain point in your career where you have done that and you understand that you’re working with a format that has a lot of power, really, globally.
The music we call jazz is a universal language and you learn that it’s a tool, that can be used properly to help uplift people, to give people a sense of hope. You learn how be able to utilize music, that’s what my work is in music: to bring music that uplifts people, that gives people a certain sense of direction, and it’s not something that is done on the surface, it’s something that you get internally from the music.
You listen to the music and it gives you something, you’re absorbing it, and it’s very interesting because this is what happens with music most of the time. I have students that I talk to, and I say: “you know? You have to understand that ultimately we are scientists, and we are manipulating sound. You have to learn that there are certain colors, certain things, certain combinations of sound, of frequencies that affect the body in a certain kind of way; the people who we’ve called masters of this music, have learnt to do that, to create a certain kind of responses in the human body.
Many years ago, I went to Spain, and there was a great duo concert by the great Bobby Hutcherson, one of my dear friends, and the great Spanish pianist Tete Montoliu; they played ‘Round Midnight, when they finished that performance, I was in tears, that doesn’t happen very often to me. The point is that the music is so powerful when it’s done at a certain level, it can enlist in something so deep in people that causes them to maybe have a change of direction in their thinking, it directs them, it gives them some kind of energy.
My purpose right now is to evolve my music. The masters I’ve known, most of them are not here anymore, but that’s what they’ve given me: the understanding that music has to stand for something, it’s not just going up on the stage, and showing how much chops you got or whatever you can do, or to play something to get the audience right, that’s not what it is, it has to have a deeper, more substantial purpose. So, that’s were I’m coming from, musically.
Jazz VS The Music Industry
Clifton: There are a few of us here in the United States playing this music, that understand this [jazz music] very clear but it’s very difficult. We’re running upstream against the current, because the industry has become a very commercial capitalistic industry: everything is about money.
I understand that, I’ve been at the very bottom of this industry when I was coming up, learning this music, playing for free in places, in dumps; I’ve been at the very top of it: I toured many years with my uncle, Sonny Rollins, all over the world, and that was the highest level of this industry. He and Miles Davis were the top of the ladder.
I’ve seen the very top, the bottom and everything in between, but one thing that is consistent, in my experience, is that I know I was very blessed to come at that particular time because the people that were involved on the business and in this industry still had a real concern about the art form, they were concerned about preserving the [jazz] art form and I don’t mean that you have to sound like the 1940’s, or that you have to sound like the 1950’s, or that you have to sound like the 1960’s, what I mean is that in your music you carry the lineage of the art form in the music. Today, that’s not what I’m seeing.
My fellow colleagues around my age experience that this is problematic; it doesn’t’ mean there’s no great music being made by young musicians, is that the music does not have the lineage in it, it does not have the sense of tradition in it. It’s difficult, I also tell my students, I say: “Name some of the people that you really love”; you hear Miles Davis, you hear John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, people like these. I say:
“All these people you just named have something in common, what is that? It’s that they’ve written music that is timeless, it’s not that they just play great. They had a sense of being able to tell a story and one of the mechanisms we use to tell a story is melody”.
So… today! We have a lot of young musicians who don’t know how to tell a story, they don’t know how to write, or even execute a melody in their playing, it’s because we’ve lost that connection with the tradition, which is going to be hard to hold on to, I don’t know what the future holds with that. We can take a piece of music like the one we mentioned early: ‘Round Midnight is timeless! Do we have musicians today that are writing a piece of music like ‘Round Midnight? I can’t name one. I can name a lot of great young musicians that are here playing but none of them are doing that encompass, the comprehensive approach of music.
Some people involved in education are not going to like this, but I feel that jazz education is problematic in the way that it exists right now.
Estefanía: Music… the good music has saved me. Like the music you’re talking about: ‘Round midnight! I had the opportunity to rely on that music. I want this for people as an option! It’s difficult to talk about music education, but it’s a conversation that we all need to have.
Clifton: It’s very important because, in the one hand, academia is extremely important, there are things that you can get from academia.
I’m a graduate from a music conservatory, and it’s a well-known conservatory, here in New York. That conservatory didn’t want to know anything: if you mentioned the word jazz, then they looked down on you at that time, so I will say that my education in this music did not come from academia. Although I can say I learned many valuable things from studying in a conservatory.
Now, I would say hands down to my personal experience that you cannot learn this music [jazz] going to school. You can learn the superficial things you need to have: the vocabulary, the theory, these types of things, but to actually play this music [jazz]… this music is passed down, and it’s passed down through the life experience, and through the experiences of your elders in this music. In a way, I have sympathy for the younger artists because there are not many musicians left, guys to be around like me, for this music to be passed through forward to, and the younger musicians who are coming out of academia, that are considered great players and everything, they didn’t have a Benny Harris, or a Milt Jackson, or a Sonny Rollins… they didn’t have these people to actually being around.
Those are the people I had the opportunity to hang out with and to play with. You see? So, my education came through them, it didn’t come from academia. I think the approach to this music from musicians who are around my age, Donald Harrison, Steve Turre, people that you’ve met, we came at the tail end of how the tradition was continued. Once academia stepped in, it’s killed a lot of that path that is needed in this music, unless younger musicians spend time with guys like me and other musicians who have come through that period, they’re gonna be at lost for something in their music that’s what is kinda troubling to us, I’m not saying just to me, but to musicians of my age who’re out here, seeing what’s going on.
Right now, the young musicians are told in academia: “oh, yeah, you know, you can play great, you’re great, we’re gonna put you out there, you’re gonna play in this competition, you’re gonna get a record con’”. They go immediately into put out there, but they’re not gonna put out there ‘cause of the art, the expression, they’re gonna put out there because they can make some money for some people.
This is a conversation that people don’t want to have. I see musicians that are ‘round my age see that there’s something that’s going on… Some guys don’t wanna talk about it because they know it might be some type of effect with their ability to work, or somebody may take out some kind of response to them like not hiring them, or any of that. I don’t care about any of that, I’m an independent artist, I speak the truth about everything, from my perspective. You may not agree with me, that’s fine; and if you have a position about this music, that’s substantial, and you can convince me otherwise, I’m open, I’m always open. I’ve lived enough and I’ve done enough in this business music world that I know from my experience what I’m talking about, and I know what I see, what I hear and what I don’t hear.
Every recording that I’ve made has been self-produced. I never had a record company come to me, and say: “Hey, Clifton, we see that you’re doing some great stuff, we want to record you”. That’s happened to very few musicians of the great that I know. Many musicians that you see that have a “high” profile in the jazz world don’t have a great profile because they’re necessarily the best musicians, they have high profiles because the industry is able to utilize them to further a certain agenda. There are great musicians that people have never even heard of. When I was growing up there were musicians here in New York City that I’m sure you’ve never heard of, that were master musicians, they were masters of this art! And they came and they went, and people never heard of them. I was fortuned enough to be around some of them.
Estefanía: You were born in Harlem in 1957. This was a very important place for jazz music during the 20’s… I’m sure it has a lot to do with you as a person…
Clifton: Harlem was very different in those times. I didn’t live in Harlem for too long a period. I was born at the heart of Harlem, in a hospital that doesn’t exist anymore there, 125th Street is kinda what they call the heart of Harlem. That’s where you had the famous Apollo Theater and all these other places, but Harlem in the 30’s, the 40’s and the 50’s was really what we call the center of black intelligentsia, in the US.
It was a center where you had the minds of African Americans, people from the US, and they were concentrated in this area in Harlem, and it’s very interesting because not just in the creation of arts, in everything. You had people like Joe Louis, the boxer, he was living in. You had great musicians that came from other areas, all gravitated in the area… you know? Duke Ellington… everybody, practically everyone lived in Harlem at a certain time, and it is because of people like W.E.B. Du Bois there, famous scholars were there, famous writers, famous musicians, visual artists, the whole magnum of scholarship and intellectualism in the black community was in Harlem at the same time, living collectively in this area.
Harlem in the US, varies from what people consider, but if you come to New York, it stretches from maybe 110th Street going up to about 165th Street, and it can vary for a few blocks, and between there, and from the West Side of Manhattan all way to the East Side.
In that region you had different areas for Latin (I don’t know if Latin is the proper word to use), Hispanic people, of East Harlem, that is from Latin/Spanish people. So you had musicians like Tito Puente, coming out of those areas. There was always this mixture. All these musicians, these ideas and people thinking were mixing all the time, talking with each other all the time, interacting with each other all the time, that’s why you see such a flourishing production of art and thought… it was a different time and a different place.
Everything was not about money, it was about art, thoughts, social issues, things that concern people and expression and how to move forward as human beings, and all different perspectives of things.
I left Harlem. My family moved to the Bronx. Harlem at that time was really an unusual place. In later years it became a place where crime started coming in because there was an influx of drugs that was on purpose interjected into the Harlem community. My understanding is that the United States government had something to do with that because it was such a powerful centralized area of powerful people. A lot of heroin came in that time, that’s why jazz musicians living in those eras got hooked on drugs; Charlie Parker and all these people that were upgrading in around Harlem. They [the US government] made drugs available.
Several years after, Harlem had a bad rap because crime started to rise in the area and it was different. But at a different time, my mother, who was Sonny Rollins sister, told me when I was little, and we were there, nobody locked the doors. She told me a funny story: one time my grandmother came home, and there was a guy sitting there at the kitchen table, he was looking at her saying “who are you”; and she was saying “who are you?”. He was drunk so he thought he was in his apartment upstairs, but he walked there because the door was open; he just walked there and sat down in the kitchen table. It used to be a very open and safe place to be, full of energy.
Today Harlem still has that element to some degree, but it’s been subjected to a lot of capitalism, so you see a lot of corporations in Harlem, where you used to have a lot of mom and pop stores; you have large retail stores and there’s a lot of money coming on; Harlem is now a destination for people to go and live. The crisis of renting an apartment or buying a home in Harlem started to represent something a little bit different; but it has been always the epicenter of creativity in New York, and in the US, I would say, in certain perspectives.
About the jazz word
Clifton: You hear me using the word “jazz”. I don’t like that word, but I’m using it because it’s a word that people can relate to, they understand what you’re talking about; but it’s not a word that represents what I do, the history of that word is very questionable and really not helpful. This music was not named or categorized by musicians that created it with that word. That’s a word that was contrived by people who wanted to manipulate the music and make money and so forth. But I use it because it’s necessary at this point to describe what we’re talking about.
Estefanía: Is there any other word that you use for this music? For example, beboppers used “bebop”.
Clifton: Let me put it this way. When I was in the conservatory, and I had to do symphonic analysis, I had to study operas from Italy, France. Part of that teaching was what I needed to understand the music from the stand point of the artist who wrote their music, what their life was like, what culture they came out of, what was going on in that culture at that time, for me to try to getting and understanding on why their music sounded that way or why they created music in that direction.
When it comes to this music that we call “jazz”, people have to understand that this music comes from the black culture, it’s a folkloric music, and it’s an arm of a very large tree. Gospel, rock’n roll, all of these styles of music come out of the black culture, the black experience. As we are learning now, that black experience is not necessarily contained to the US, or the South of US, you have areas in the US when this music was evolving at the same time, this is not taught, and there’s still not enough information that we are gathering about this music to present it clearly in a way that everyone would get the correct understanding about it. For example, Kansas City is an epicenter area where the music was really evolving; at the same time, it was evolving in New Orleans, which is given the crown of where jazz started, but this is not necessarily the beginning of all that statement. You had master musicians in other parts of this country that were evolving this music at the same time; we had the great Louis Armstrong who was able to promote the music around the world, as the premiere and master, being that he was a genius, he was able to bring the music… It doesn’t mean that music started there and evolved there.
I’m saying that to be able to play that music, just like I had to understand the systems of Europe, and the systems of Europe where certain composers came from, I had to understand those cultures, and I had to understand those cultures ongoing. The same way I had to do that there, people have to do that here. They have to understand where the [jazz] music comes from. The best musicians that can play this music that are from other cultures than African American, can play this music because they invest in understanding that, and incorporating that into their development, into their personal evolution of playing the music and performing it and expressing it.
We have a lot of factions that try to say, which is true, that music doesn’t belong to anyone and it’s not a matter of saying where it belongs to, where it doesn’t belong to… the question is: what is the identity of the music? What makes the [jazz] music that music? And if you’re not willing to understand that it comes from the black culture, if you try to chip away and say “it’s European”… there’s a lot if things in it; but the essence of it is from the black experience. Once you understand that, you have a much better footing to be able to understand how to express yourself in the music.
That’s all it is. But we deal with a lot of racial issues in the US, and those racial issues impact into what people want to perceive what this music is about. I was fortunate to be around my elders who schooled me about that stuff, and what they had to go through. There was a great pianist, named John Lewis, the piano player for the Modern Jazz Quartet, he was an educator, great pianist, great composer, and he told me in his very early years, as a young piano player in the South, they were playing late night in the country side in the South, they had to chart a course home from wherever they were playing to the woods, because if they walked out at that hour on any main road they would probably be lynched. These are stories and these are things that impact the music.
This music [jazz] is very deep, you cannot approach it from a superficial place. That’s the point I’m trying to make. You have to have a certain level of technical ability; but, beyond that, there’s a depth you need to understand to make it substantial.
Estefanía: Was there a moment in which you started visualizing this? When did you start knowing you were a “grown up” in this music?
Clifton: It took me a long time. It took me longer than most younger players that are coming up. I come from a musical family, everyone in my family, my mother, my father were musicians, and maybe it’s because of their reverence for music that I felt this way.
There was a drummer still playing today, his name was Al Foster, he played with Miles Davis, he played with Herbie Hancock, he played with Sonny. When I was a young guy coming up, just trying to hang around my uncle, I would go to some of his rehearsals and Al Foster was the drummer in the group at that time. I had my horn with me because Sonny would say “Clifton, come on down, we’re gonna rehearse”, but I wouldn’t take my horn out and he didn’t ask me to take my horn out. Quite a few rehearsals I went down, and I just sat there, and I just listened to them play, and observed what they were doing, and it wasn’t for a while until I took my horn. Sonny said “you wanna play on this one?” or “try this one?”, and I took my horn, and I would play.
Al Foster told Sonny: “your nephew, man, he’s sounding good, you should put him in the band”. I guess Sonny was considering me playing with him at some point, but Al Foster kind of spared it along a little faster to make it happen. After I got in the band, I became very tight with Al Foster and he said “man, you should do your own record”, and I said “Al, I’m not really ready to offer something. Because I have this reverence for this music and the people who have made it”, and I had an understanding that this was such a high level I’m entering into.
Now, that’s not the attitude of most of the young musicians, if they want to do a record, they’re gonna make it whether they’re ready to make it or not; the industry is gonna be happy to put it out there, make some money of it.
I was in my journey, I was in my thirties before I made my first recording and even at that point I was very unsure if I was really ready to have something to offer that I felt comfortable about offering. Now, that record came out of a major jazz label at the time. They produced it, I picked it up. My elders are the ones who gave me this sense that I’m ready to…, it came from them telling me “do it, you’re ready, go our there and do it, you have something to offer”. That started that ball rolling.
Robyn’s Light: Clifton Anderson’s New Single
C: I should give you some background. I do everything with my music, with the packaging of CD’s, the manufacturing, all the aspect of the business there concerns me, I handle. I started a new label, which what handles by now is my own material, my own music, and this is the second single that I release.
I’m releasing singles to finance a full CD. The quality records I do is very expensive and it’s just too much of an expense to do right now, because the return is different from musicians. Listeners should know, those who are not involved in the music business should know that making a record of high quality is tens of thousands of dollars and the reward is not what it used to be. Once the format went digital most of musicians don’t get much money of the recordings anymore. Streaming services like Spotify or these other services, are making a lot of money on our product, but we get very very little money from a lot of streams, so it’s very difficult for us to produce records if there is no income coming back from the records.
Other thing that has happened over the recent years is that people focus on sitting down and listening to a whole recording for an hour doesn’t really exist anymore. People have their playlist, they like to listen to a couple of different tracks and then move on, so I decided just to do singles and to put out a single a year or slightly less than a year so people can feel focused on that one track, it’s what I can basically, honestly, afford to do right now, not to sign with a record label, and I have my reasons not to sign with a record label: because you don’t own your music anymore.
Robyn’s Light is a tribute really, I should say, of a friend of mine, her name was Robyn Vandeley Nash. We spent summers together on an island that’s well known right here, it’s become a famous island because the Obamas and the Clintons go there now. But in the times we were growing, it was quiet and isolated, it was named Martha’s Vineyard, and it’s in the North Eastern, on the coast, of The United States.
I met her there and we grew up kinda together. Her parents had a home there. My eldest uncle, who was Sonny’s elder brother, had a house there. Robyn was a very charismatic person, she was a dancer, and she worked with dance companies. I lost touch with her over a number of years and found out later, when I got back in touch with her, that she was diagnosed with cancer; and, when she got her diagnosis, they told her that she needed to put up her papers together because the cancer was so aggressive and it was already stage 4, that they gave her maybe four months to live. That’s devastating, but she was a fighter. So… to make the long story short, she lived for 14 years after that.
Not only did she live for 14 more years, but she became an inspirational figure for other people with the disease, fighting the disease, to fight the disease; and she ended up being an spokeswoman for an organization called The Jimmy Fund, here in the USA, That’s a carcer research organization.
Her work was so important for so many people and, as a friend of mine, I wrote a song for her a few years ago: Robyn’s Light. This was before Covid came. I called her up and I said: “Robyn, you know? I wrote this piece for you and I would love you to hear it. I’m playing at a venue in Boston…”. She was in Martha’s Vineyard. I gave her the date. She said “I’m going to be in Boston that day because I have to have some experimental procedures done, I want to go to the show”. She came to the show, and we played the song for her and about a year and a half later, she passed. She was able to hear the song.
Now, the song… Most of us are mixed background here in the USA, she may have had Hispanic background, I don’t know, for whatever reason her rhythm came to me as the rhythm we call cha cha, and it’s danceable. And this is what is fascinating to me. Mexican music is very rhythmical oriented; this music that we call jazz is very rhythmical oriented. There are very similarities amongst cultures, which make some of the music so universal. Rhythm is a very important part of all of this.
For whatever reason, don’t ask me why, music comes to me this way! I hear music all the time! [he points at his head]. Sometimes I hear things that stick in my head, sometimes I hear things that are just fleeting, they just go. This piece [Robyn’s Light] came to me, and it was sticking there. And I don’t know why because Robyn wasn’t Latin, she was an average African American person here. But there was something about this rhythm that got melted with here, and I think it was a dance rhythm because she was a dancer, and it was kind of a movement rhythm.
The preliminary response to it is that everybody loves it. Robyn loved it. And it’s being performed by my working group.
Clifton’s Band
Clifton: In a lot of records, I have a lot of my friends that are named musicians, that I’m very fortunate because they love my music, and they want to record my music with me. I’ve had Kenny Garrett. Wallace Roney, the trumpet player, was a dear friend of mine, that was in the early stuff [that Clifton recorded]; his brother, Antoine Roney, one of the great tenor saxophonist of our time, is on Robyn’s Light with me.
I have one of the very high sort bass players in New York, his name is Belden Bullock; the percussion is Victor See Yuen, who was with Sonny Rollins for many years, he was also with Ron Carter, and many others… he’s on most of my records; and the highly acclaimed Latin music jazz pianist, Edsel Gomez, he was the musical director for D.D. Bridgewater for 14 years, you know? And he’s with me. He’s well known in the Latin jazz community. There’s also the great Steve Jones on drums, he works with me and Andy Brecker right now. These are the guys in my band, this is my working sextet. These guys can play!
It’s not at the recordings… it’s at the band stand
Clifton: My first record, I would record with Sonny. I was so excited because “I’m going to the studio, I’m going to record with Sonny Rollins!”, you know? Wow!
On the history of Sonny Rollins there were all these musicians that I would revere on Sonny’s records, now is “I’m gonna be one of these musicians” and I was so enthus’ and excited about making this recording. And Sonny taught me, he was on the phone and said: “are you ready to go in?”. I said “yes, I can’t wait”. He said:
“Well you know? There’s nothing. You sound really excited about it… we just have this big recording. We have to do this to document ourselves, but recordings is not where it’s at. Where it’s at is at our bandstand. That’s where the music is really made. I don’t really care, If I didn’t have to record, I wouldn’t even record”.
That’s what he told me, and it really shocked me because I was in all this whole other mindset about recordings, records! I’m listening to Sonny, and I’m listening to all these great people, and I’m coming out at a period that guys that are just a little older than me –you know? Chick Corea…– are making all these big records, and I’m like “records, here’s where it’s at”. Sonny Rollins telling me: “that’s not where it’s at. Creating music in the bandstand, in the moment, that’s the essence of what this music [jazz] is all about”. That changed me.
I’m not usually excited of making recordings. I’m happy that I finish the process. There’s a lot of history with the recording of my last recording as well. And I was excited there, because I had a singer who was one of the institutions in modern jazz singing, that is not well known to the public, but he had a history with Horace Silver, other artists, and his own career, his name is Andy Bey. When you hear his voice is pure beauty. I was excited about that record, but the other records are like: “I’m documenting who I am now”.
I’m excited about this Robyn’s Light because it’s for Robyn, it has a purpose, it has a meaning, not just to bring her to people’s attention, but the idea to inspire one another, to help us meet our potential, that’s what I think life is about. We think we hit the ceiling, but there is no ceiling. The chances to live 4 months is low, and you live for 14 years! These people are telling you that you’ve hit the ceiling, but you say “no! I haven’t hit the ceiling! I’m gonna decide, I’m gonna go the extra mile as far as I can, as far as I can take it, and that’s my ceiling”. That was her inspiration and that’s for all of us. The music is great, but what it stands for is also a beautiful thing, so… here we go Robyn!
His First Trombone was a gift by Sonny Rollins
Estefanía: You were very young when Sonny Rolling gave you that first trombone… who old were you?
Clifton: I was seven.
Estefanía: Did you have any notion of who Sonny Rollins was at the time?
Clifton: Haha! When I was little my mother told me that I had a famous uncle. She said: “he’s a musician”. I might have been 5 or 6 years old, Sonny came, we had an apartment here in The Bronx, the doorbell ring. The kitchen was up there, in the second floor, but the entry was in the first floor; things were different in New York at that time. My mother went upstairs, she was cooking in the kitchen, and my sister and I were running around. The doorbell ring, and when the doorbell rang I went and open up the door.
I saw this guy, this big guy, standing there, and he had a mohican haircut, like the American Indigenous people, and it scared the mess out of me so I slammed the door and I ran upstairs, and I was like “there’s a wild man at the door”. She said: “why are you opening the door? You’re not supposed to open up the door, anyway”. So she came downstairs, she opened up the door and here’s this guy, and I see her giving him a hug, and bringing him into the house, and I was scared, I ran into the corner and I’m looking. It was my uncle, Sonny Rollins.
That must have been the first time that I can recollect seeing him or meeting him, I probably was around him before that, but I didn’t know.
Then he left. And then my mother told him: I went to a movie, it was called The Music Man (1962), they had a scene in there, where they had a song [he started singing and mimicking the playing of a trombone:] “76 trombones with the big parade”, it was marching and all these trombones playing and I saw that around 7 years old. In my family everybody played an instrument, so we had to pick an instrument.
My mother was always asking me what I wanted to play. When I sat that movie I said “I want to play that”. So she told Sonny and Sonny bought me the first trombone.
Of course, at that age I was not serious about it, I tried to blow through it and I was careless with the instrument, I didn’t really know what to do with it. I got to the age of about maybe 10 years and my mother took me to lessons, she took me to a guy here in NY who is kind of a well-known brass teacher and he told me “okay, can you put the horn together?”. I was able to put the horn together, but I was a little guy. With the trombone there are these positions, the slide goes out but I couldn’t reach. I was too young to reach the outside, so I used to hold it up over my foot. He told me “let me see how you hold the horn”. I held the horn. He says “can you blow into it?”, and I blow the first note into it, and he looked at my mother and said: “your son has to play the instrument, he can get a sound of this instrument that most of the kids at this age can’t get, he has a sound on this instrument”.
That was the beginning of my real studies with it. I found over the next years that I was able to play this instrument better than a lot of the young kids, I always had this leader kind of vibe in me amongst the kids around my neighborhood, we had little musicians, I was always the leader of the band, I put my little bands together when I was 12 years old.
Following the Path of the Music We Call Jazz
I had to do a path. I was also an athlete. I wanted to be a professional tennis player at one time. But I went to a concert at Carnegie Hall, Sonny was playing. I was about 14 years old by this time.
The great trumpet player Freddie Hubbard was at the top of his rise as the next guy on trumpet. Sonny had this concert, and he was gonna have Freddie as his guest.
We went to Carneggie Hall. My whole family went, we had a nice box sit. Before we went into the theater, we were in the lobby, there was an announcement that Freddie Hubart was sick, he wasn’t gonna be able to play in the concert. Some people in the lobby got their tickets back, but the majority of the people stayed, it was kind of a sold out concert.
We went in, we sat down, the show starts. Sonny was on the stage, and he says:
“Ladies and gentlemen, my man Freddie Hubbard couldn’t make it tonight, he’s ill. We had to call a couple of my friends to come and join me tonight, we didn’t want to disappoint everybody. Instead of Freddie we’re gonna have my dear friend Charles Mingus, and my dear friend, Dizzy Gillespie”.
This concert was pivotal for me because at the time, as I said, I was playing tennis, I had a very promising career, people thought I could take that route… There were not a lot of black players at that time, I was one of the few with the possibility of falling that path, but I could also play music.
I went to this concert, and it was so phenomenal, it moved me, just the concert itself was enough, but backstage we were with all the musicians, I met Charles Mingus, I met Dizzy Gillespie, and I met the other musicians, there was a great musician: Stanley Cowell. What got me! All these people that were in this backstage area, the feeling amongst these people!
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where I got this energy from people that was so… it was different than anything I’ve ever experienced, it was like you could feel, almost physically grab the love, the exuberance, the happiness, the sense of joy, in this room, from everybody that was in the room.
As a kid… on top of the music that I just experienced, this was something that I never experienced, and it freak me out. And I said to myself: I wanna do this, I wanna be able to do something that is going to make people feel like this and to me, between playing tennis, you can make people happy playing tennis, but this was something else! I didn’t experience this in any situation before!
When Sonny got me that instrument, I stayed with it until I was 14 and I realized… I made the decision that I got to stay with this.
The other aspects that took place kind of in between are when I went to high school, I went to a very prestigious high school here in NY, for young artists, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, and there were a lot of great people whose names you know, people like Marcus Miller, Steve Jordan (a great producer)… that also contributed to the idea that I had to stay with this music.
These kids were serious, and they could all really play, up to that point the baddest cat of the scene was me, and I went to that school. I heard this guy playing the tuba, he’s reading this music. I knocked on the door, he stopped… I said “I’m sorry, I don’t’ want to bother you but what is it that you’re playing?” and I introduced myself. He said “my name is Carlton”. He says: “these are violin concertos”. I said “you’re playing violin concertos on the tuba?”, I was like “oh oh. I’m not gonna be the top of the chain here”.
I came to find out here that this guy was the solo for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, that was Carlton Green, that’s the caliber of musicians that was on this school… that helped to trained me to get serious about music, hearing my uncle play, being around young musicians at the time, and the rest is history.