The clubs you played are integral to the history of jazz. Talk about the clubs you played at.
When I came up, clubs were the only place to play; and so I played in a lot of clubs, and clubs are great. Eventually, my wife and I decided…my wife was brilliant, she started out, she wasn’t into music; she was working in the Physics Department at the University of Chicago, but she was brilliant, super-intelligent. I told her that clubs were okay, I love clubs; but we were trying to raise the image of jazz. You know, clubs: everybody drinking whiskey, cash registers going ching, ching. As a place where people in the nightlife met…the image of nightclubs and jazz needed to be separated.
So finally, when I go to the point in my career where I could do concerts, we decided we were not going to do any more clubs. So we stopped doing clubs a long time ago.
But there’s no getting around the fact that a club atmosphere is really great, because you’re very close to the people, and the people give you something back when you’re playing. It’s just fantastic, and you can’t get that – it’s a different kind of relationship with the audience in a hall. You have to try to cultivate a different thing. But in a club it’s so easy and so close, and the people are there and they influence what you play. So I still love clubs.
I had a chance to play in many clubs in my life, some of the famous ones – of course the Village Vanguard, I lived in there, and Birdland, numerous clubs around the States.
I remember seeing you in Paul’s Mall, in Boston, early 1970s. I think it cost $3.50 to get in.
That was a great club: Paul’s Mall and the Jazz Workshop. Everybody played there. In fact, one of the owners of Paul’s Mall is still there in Boston; I had played for him recently. Then I worked another place in Boston called Lennie’s on the Turnpike.
Yeah, clubs are great, and all over the country. I was talking to Jack DeJohnette, and he had just played at the Drum Boogie in Woodstock. Jack is from Chicago, and I said there used to be a club there called Rum Boogie in Chicago. And he said he remembered that. And I played there a long time ago with Sun Ra, when Sun Ra was just starting…So many memories of clubs…
So what was that like: working with Sun Ra, before his cosmic…?
Before he left, before he went up in his spaceship? Well, his name was Sonny Blunt, and at that time, he was playing piano and he was good. He was a nice guy, and that was one of the first jobs I had in Chicago, probably in ’49.
Of course Chicago was a great, great music town. When I went to Chicago in ’48 originally, I was just blown away. There were jazz clubs 24/7; you’d walk down the street, and guys were in there playing. I’ll never forget coming home one night and it was about four o’clock in the morning and I came to 63rd Street, where I was living, in Cottage Grove – which, by the way, is decimated now; the University of Chicago has flattened that whole area. So I’m coming home one night and there are these guys and they’re playing at a club called the Circle Bar. And it’s right on the corner and you can look in there at the bandstand, and there’s Lester Young, the great Lester Young, at four o’clock in the morning, just jamming. And that was so inspiring to me; it just showed what it was all about…
These guys were about music. Six o’clock in the morning they’d be playing, and that meant so much to me. I mean, I knew it anyway; it wasn’t like it was a revelation. But just seeing Lester in there playing at four o’clock – wow, it was so great. He was such a giant. But that’s the type of town Chicago was: South Side, West Side, there were jazz clubs, there were people playing.
I was around 18 or 19 when I first went to Chicago.
You were a New York kid?
Oh, yeah. I was born in Harlem, you know, a Harlem boy. But I went to Chicago really soon after I got out of high school – Benjamin Franklin High School. And I was right out there playing. I went to Montreal and met a bass player who lived in Texas and was going right by there, and he said, “You want to ride with me?” and I said, “Oh, yeah.” So that was my first experience in Chicago. I think that was ’48 or ’49. I didn’t stay long.
