This is New England Public Radio's Janz Beat. I'm Tom Rini with a podcast edition of my Janz blog, which you can find at n E P R dot net. This edition of Janz Beat is about to an interview with Benny Wallace. I spoke with the veteran saxophonist and band leader a few days before an engagement he was playing with the group he calls, Intribute to His Hero Coleman Hawkins, the disorder at the border orchestra.
Good morning Benny. Nice to see you. How you doing today? I'm great man.
It's been a real kick to hear you in recent years, Benny, with your trio with Carmen and Tori and Matt Dwanzig down at the integrity of music and at the Museum of Art in New Britain last summer. And I'm very eager to hear your is it a 10-10 piece band? It's a 9-10 piece band. 9-10.
Right. And what has occasion the convening of the band for these engagements later in the month? Well, I have two concerts a year to raise money for our statewide Bridgeport. We're bringing everybody in.
What is your connection with the Bridgeport Connecticut Public Schools? None. And I'm not a member of the communist party. But we have been active for working with Kim.
And at what point we were working with. But now it's slow. And actually, you know, like I guess to be fair, in the morning on Thursday. I see.
So this is really your initiative in the City of Bridgeport to bring the music into say an impoverished, culturally deprived city. Yeah. Well, you know, this all started in 2008. We went up there and played a concert with the same band at an arts center and then challenging to keep up with them.
What age range? Well, they started about the fifth grade through high school. Actually, we had. And as your approach to introduce them to what we would think of as sort of mainstream jazz?
Maybe not mainstream jazz. We try to hit her. Right. And I didn't mean mainstream jazz so much as a qualifying term.
As more the tradition of jazz. Yeah, yeah, you know, a bit. Well, I would say, Benny, that you've always impressed me. It was a saxophonist with the unique, highly individual, unmistakable voice on the horn.
And let's back up a little bit to your own origins in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I think of two major figures in music from Chattanooga, Bessie Smith and Benny Wallace. What was your? What was your background there?
I bet they have been. But don't forget Jimmy Button. Oh my god. That's right.
And that's the best band the guitar is. It's the most beautiful Bessie with the show. And it's on a beautiful Red Garland album. Oh, really?
I heard that. Early 60s. So one of my very first jazz records, this Red Garland date, with less band playing both fluting guitar. You know, you know, yes, I guess your afternoon, I got started.
When I was 11 years old, my mother bought it, started jazz band. But you could try to do something like this. Oh, do you remember the record? Oh, I've lived with it.
I'm still trying to do something like that. A record called Dizzy Gillespie, Doo Efte. Oh, yeah. Is that that tune something?
Yeah, I love it. About a club there, Efte. Our team is extremely lucky to have this teacher. So we're talking late 50s, 59, 60.
Yeah, I started listening to this music in 1959. Well, and Basie and Knoxville, well, that's amazing. Oh, it was Eric Dixon. Eric Dixon, yeah, and all the other music.
And you picked up on that? Oh, yeah. Cool. And then from Chattanooga, you went on to college right there in your home state?
Yeah, I went to, did he major in music? Yeah, exactly. The clarinet. Oh, yeah.
And from there was it a big leap to New York? Well, the summer I got out of high school, I was a scholarship to go to big York. And who was that? He was a Joe B.
Ola. Oh, sure. He taught a lot of really great stuff. There's a wonderful teacher and a wonderful man.
Yeah, very revered. Yeah. I was last lesson of the day. He taught me $5 and he would drive me home.
Wow. So you eventually got to New York. Was that it? Yeah, I was in Boston.
When did you transition from clarinet to tenor? Well, that was in the eighth grade. I mean, I gave me the saxophone, but I played both instruments all the way through college. It was a curriculum for it.
Yeah. More so than saxophoneist. Yeah. And you know, I went to how that related to.
Do I remember correctly that you made one of your earliest records with Flip Phillips and Scott Hamilton? Yeah. Mid-70s. Howl who was making a whole bunch of like that?
Well, I'm holding an injured record of yours right now called Sweeping Through the City that you made with Ray Anderson and John Scofield and Mike Richmond and Tom Williams and a gospel group called The Wings of Song. How did you know? How do you know the Wings of Song? How did that come together?
What the group at Knoxville tennis? Working on a movie. I needed a gospel group. Filled a life with a trouble.
Ray. And this is an album of your compositions and lyrics as well? Yes, that's what my only attempt it. Well, I love Trouble and Woah and to hear the Wings of Song joining you.
And I think of Ray Anderson, who's just like your perfect counterpart. He's like brothers from another mother. But how did you and Ray, the term bonus Ray Anderson, lock horns as it were? Well, that's an interesting.
That's a good question. Well, he's on the earlier recording he made with this order. Will he be with you this month? No.
He must be very young. He has somebody's guy from the band who's young after he's my great. Well, obviously, looking forward to hearing him. I know the name.
And of course, I know his father. But this will be the first time I've seen Corey. Oh, he really plays. You made an album of Thelonious Monks music, not long after Monks death.
No, no. Oh, you did, huh? Yeah. What inspired that album because I think this may be close.
Well, I know Steve Lacey made an all-monk album in the late 50s, but it was unusual for records of this kind to be devoted to the work of one composer. It's become much more commonplace, of course, since Monks passing and that of Charles Mingus too. But you know, when I knew you were like a lot of my contemporary, fortunately, I didn't get this. But John L.
Wilson in the New York Times said that you played Monks music in essence better than Charlie Rouse. Oh, not that you. Sure, John L. Wilson.
I love a line that Jimmy Roles has about you. He says, you're like Coleman Hawkins on skis. Yeah, and he actually drew up skis playing saxophone. Was Hawking an early hero of yours?
Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, my early heroes were. What do you hear in particular when you hear Hawk? Well, that sound.
You know, that sound. I love Ben Webster's ballet. Like a jazz musician saying to say, but the way that Hawkins did. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. Sure. You know, like I heard somebody say incorrectly one time that it totally never plays the melody. Yeah, well, certainly Hawkins, even before body and soul, he was embellishing, as you say, he was really creating something that sounded new and always fresh on fairly material, familiar material in that ballet.
Well, wasn't that one solo? That's the, like that. Even before that, I think it's 29. Yeah.
Yeah. With Red McKenzie and the Mound City Blue Blowers. Yeah. If I could call correctly.
Yeah, and then those things. I'm not sure about you. So. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I just got my favorite composer.
Sound like the guy who wrote that new book by Elton John entitled Me. I just heard it yesterday on NPR. Anthony is the guitarist who's worked with Diana Kroll extensively and is the son of the great and late arrangement composer, Gerald Wilson. How did you connect with Anthony?
I think of him as an L.A. musician. His mother brought him to here. I moved out there too.
And as long as you were out in L.A. at the moment, tell me how did you get involved in composing for films? A complete accident. First time film director heard that he wanted.
And what movie was that? Oh, okay. And Twilight Time was one of the albums you made in the mid-80s when you were with Blue Notes. Right.
Yeah, nice connection. Did you also do the soundtrack for the movie Blaze? Yep. Was that Kiwi Long?
No, no. Really quick. Early on. Okay.
With Paul Newman? Right. Wow. That was actually my first complete and I did.
You know, I wouldn't have been able to answer the question as to who composed the score for that film until just now, but I've always remembered that I like the music in that movie. And that was yours. Well, thank you. That was.
I did with Dr. John, who of course has passed recently. What was your connection with him and how did it begin? Well, I was making the Twilight Time right now.
The record company by Joel Doorn. It's a hardback to finish. And did you do work together subsequently? Oh, yeah.
We, from that relationship, you know, he played with me on a few gigs. I played with him in Heath. And that was a really good. Well, between Dr.
John and the meters and you mentioned Wendell Brunias earlier. Have you spent much time in New Orleans? You know, just when I would be down there for G8, Booker Treen, I had a very good one. What is it that attracts you to, I know you're going to work with your own compositions later this month, but what is it that it say attracts you to a song?
You've made some beautiful albums of ballads, of standards, the old songs, the nearness of you, George Gershwin album. It's the melody. And you know, if you think about it, I actually learned this by working with the vocabulary of jazz. I think both kinds of do have to go.
Can you remember a time in your life and your career, which I certainly do in mind, when the songs were sort of downplayed and the elevated status that inventive improvising jazz musicians gave them is what seemed to be most valued? Well, to study other contemporary and into improvising, in that I started listening to a rabbit piece of Ed Beach. It's been to hear just studying that music and kind of going. We probably heard some of those same Ed Beach shows back then.
He got picked up a station in Boston in the early 70s and I could pull them in just barely, but he was worth the effort of tuning a radio dial. And you mentioned Don Bias and I remember the shows devoted to Bias, Ben Webster, Hawk, and the orchestra, Jung, Chewberry, other players like that and have always just really savored that experience of hearing them. Did he have a great boy? Oh man.
That's right. That's right. I can't hear a speaker. I've heard some of those.
Did you know Mort Feager? You know that name? I know the name, but I did the name. Mort did radio around New York in the 60s and New Miles and all the cats and through a connection I had with Mort, whom I knew for a number of years.
He sent me some tapes of Ed Beach, some discs and it's been interesting to listen back to those from a 40 plus year long perspective. He was a great teacher and just the impeccable taste that I remember too was the last one on the topic. The Sunday New York Times ran a big feature on him. It was like Page 1 of the Arts and Leadership section back then and it had a picture of Ed standing before his record collection and it said something in the caption about how those records sort of defined his life or whatever.
I've held on to that now yellowed piece of news copy on Ed Beach these many years and wrote a little memorial on him when he died a few years ago. I was in the record signing writing on the back. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, you know, evidently he had to sell his records like that.
Yeah, he fell on hard times as I understand. He lived out there in Oregon. Yeah, okay. Oh, he was the other sarcastic.
You know now that you mentioned the back of the Teddy Wilson album, this person who had a personal connection with Ed sent me, so honored to receive this, sent me not only some taped archive of Ed, but also some of the notes that he made for himself and not on the backs of albums, but like the backs of envelopes and things. And the notes he would make on a playlist that he typed out and all of that, but I can see his very tiny script of his, as we mentioned him. Yeah, so you got that record. You're going to have Herlin Riley on drums with you.
Yeah, we've found it. You haven't heard him before. Nice. And you're the tenor man.
Right. Matt Dwanzig is a player whom I know and an aerial listener is sitting up in the know and enjoy seeing him come along and I've seen him with you now for the past two or three years. Tell us a little bit about this new and emerging bassist Matt Dwanzig. Well, you know, it's been a pleasure to talk with you today and I'm very much looking forward to hearing you.
I think it'll be done on Friday, your second night's there at the side door and wishing you the very best with the concerts this month and looking. I hope that you say you're going to record it. I hope it eventually meets your standards and that you'll release it. Yeah, well, you know that's better.
But you know, I would just like to say that. For Benny Wallace and the disholder at the Bora Orchestra's side door, Olan Connecticut Thursday and Friday, October 24th and 25th. Then we'll see you then, Benny. Thanks for that, Tom.
Always been a pleasure speaking with you. Oh, thank you so much. Take care. You too.