The Randy Resnick Interview

Bad jazz is when people are playing real hard and nobodies listening. Lagos used to call it "Bar Mitzvah Jazz." No matter what kind of music you play people kind of expect a show. There's so much offer on cable, concerts are huge and the magic of ensemble playing which is people who can play even if there just playing chords behind somebody else. Even when it's a singer it can be smokin" if its ensemble playing and people are listening to each other. Don't get me wrong, we practiced for hours. It's not a question of practicing, what it is a question of is hearing the other person. Getting off on backing up, you don't have to take a solo to get off. It's not like watching a porn movie. Your part of it. If your playing rhythm guitar behind Sugarcane, your part of it. Paul (Lagos) knew so much. He used to study Joseph Schillinger compositions. He and Cane used to play duets that would just fly off, you can hear that on the recordings but we did that all the time. Sometimes that's shit would last 15 minutes. We do the intro to the song, Don would sing a couple of versus, he'd take a solo, sing another verse. The bass player and I would stop and he and Paul would play for 15 minutes. When we came back in it was knowing when to come back in. This isn't to say that Victor and I were so brilliant we just came in at the right time. No one ever said, "I needed you cats to come in later or early because their was no later/earlier it was just so obvious from the ensemble playing that we were doing. We would bring it down to a certain level and come back in and that's called music."