Julian "Cannonball" Adderley

[Dr Dave]

One can't have too many posts devoted to an alto saxophonist who absorbed Bird completely and still had enough personality left over to make himself beloved of audiences. Can one?

Sorry for the length (what are scroll buttons for?), but I thought this interview, which I did 35 years ago, might interest some of our fellow posters.--Chris

Cannonball Adderley
Interviewed at the Plaza Hotel, NYC - November 14, 1969

JA: The first time I ever heard anybody use the term “soul brother” it was Milt Jackson, who said he always referred to blacks as soul brothers—many years ago.

A lot has happened since that concept of “soul jazz” and “Soul music” came into existence, we got credit for being a “soul jazz” group—it was very interesting, because we’d go to play places and people would say, “Well, when are you going to play that ‘soul jazz’…let’s say that soul has developed the way it should have, I guess according to his (Bill Grauer’s) concept and according to the way I thought it was going to be. It has developed along the lines of the old things, it has developed utilizing elements of contemporary beats and stuff like that—the blues, the same old blues that we loved 25 or 30 years ago. It’s a big thing and it’s called soul music instead of the blues—BB King is a lion after so many years of being just BB King, and I think it’s beautiful.

We may segue from a very modern piece of music to something that is very basic, and we play it all with the same sort of enthusiasm and integrity, because we love it all, and I’ve been trying to put together a record that has all these elements presented that we doo on stage, so overdubbing is a device that’s utilized in recording these days, that we’ve never used before. But I’m hoping that we’ll be able to successfully do this kind of thing, because I’ve used some extra musicians who are, I guess, quite soul, quote unquote, musicians, in order to get the atmosphere just right. I think it is criminal to not utilize all the things that you have at your means to do. Granted, the Beach Boys had a great record a few years ago, called “Good Vibrations,” it was a major production of overdubbing and all sorts of stuff, but by the time they got ready to play in public, they couldn’t reproduce that, so the Beatles have acknowledged that they can’t make public appearances based on the things that they do in the studio, but still I think that they should be done. It’s just unfortunate that things have changed as far as being able to reproduce in live performances…that the same thing cannot be reproduced in live performance. Somebody is going to come up with a way of using the tapes, etc. The people who buy records kind of expect to hear what they heard on the record, so, if you don’t come close, they feel a draft.

CA: How do you feel about your earlier recordings?

JA: The old records? Well, I’m very happy with some of them. Like everything else, some of them were a lot more satisfying than others. There are some records that I made that I never listen to, there are others that I feel that I refer to constantly, for nostalgic reasons, and so forth, but…and then other things that I refer to simply for musical reasons. I think that the Tadd Dameron-Blue Mitchell album [Smooth as the Wind] was quite a beautiful thing, I’m sorry that it never got any further than it did, it was really a great work of art.

CA: Has your audience changed?

JA: We have a broader audience now. You said something that’s very interesting. Ten years ago, kids were listening to that music, but those kids are now ten years older, and we were secure enough to think that kids who listened to rock would grow into jazz. I think that they do, but they do not lose their enthusiasm for the music that they enjoyed in the first place, because that music, too, has grown and become sophisticated, musically. It’s a major production putting together a big thing by, say, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles or Blood, Sweat and Tears—it’s no accident that the music is happening the way it is, those guys are working at it the same way that the older guys worked at putting together a big jazz production or…remember Manhattan Towers? Now that was a hell of a production and there was a lot of work involved in putting it together…the same thing exists today, it’s a lot easier to make a pop record, in many instances, if you just get a pop singer, a good one, and say, “Well, Dean, we’re going to record.” It’s a lot easier for him to go into the studio and make a record with a first-class arranger, than it is for a group like The Band, Bob Dylan’s group. It’s tough for them, because they have to work at it, it takes them a long time to get it just so.

CA: There’s a lot of jazz in Blood, Sweat and Tears.

JA: You know, I have never felt that from Blood, Sweat and Tears, I hear that said often. I look at BS&T as another institution, another music altogether. I don’t feel that they bridge any gap. I think that they utilize jazz elements in their presentation, rock elements…it comes out something altogether different, because they don’t have the spontaneity that jazz players have…they have it all figured out and worked out and written out. I don’t mean that it’s over-arranged, but it’s another musical concept that I think is a great one. That group is one of my favorites, in fact, of the current groups around. Blood, Sweat and Tears and Sly and the Family Stone are my favorites.

It’s really a beautiful group; they came to visit us in Chicago, recently. They came to The London House after their concert, and it was beautiful meeting the guys.

CA: Talk about your current group.

JA: It’s the finest group I’ve ever had. I don’t put it on a man to man basis, like one guy is better than the other guy, but this group, the whole concept of the group is much more unitized—we all think alike, musically, we’re beginning to really get a groove that is…it’s fantastic. Joe Zawinul, Nat Adderley, Roy McCurdy, drums, and Walter Booker, bass…which is also a kind of groovy irony, when you get around to it.

CA: And your own playing?

JA: I think it kind of follows the lines of the way that my band sounds. Frankly, years ago, you know I never dismissed the avant garde…I was confused by some of the elements of it, the first Ornette Coleman record I ever heard, but I’ve always liked advanced music and I never knew how to apply it, you know, a personal application. The playing thing is much freer. I play everything more freely than before—that is, I don’t have the concept of, “Well, I’m gonna play this tune, I’m gonna have to play it this way.” I’m going to play the same tune differently the next night, my own solos…I don’t mean different notes, because that’s almost automatic, you know, you just play a different solo, but I mean a different concept. I might apply my information about how to play the old way, I might approach it like Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges, or Charlie Parker, because that’s an old way. You might ask, “What is you own way?” My own way, which is a collection of all the knowledge that I’ve ever had—the same way that everybody else’s way is—except that when I directly try to emulate somebody, it takes a great amount of summoning information that I have accumulated, you know, to try to play something just like Johnny Hodges simply because you can’t and I might want to hear it that way. If I want to hear it that way, I play it that way. And I’ve begun to play the soprano saxophone, which is a total new experience for me, because it is not lije the alto sax or the tenor sax—it takes another kind of technique to play it well. I have much more admiration for Sidney Bechet than I ever did, though I always loved him, musically. The technical aspects of being a good soprano saxophone player are frightening, you have to use what we call a tempered intonation concept, because you just can’t find one that is really built in tune. So, as you play, you have to make adjustments.

PAGE 3 of the transcript IS MISSING, I'll have to dig out the tape.

JA: A pure jazz point of view and say, “Well, this week we’ve got Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, next week Horace Silver, a week after that, Miles Davis, a week after that, Gerry Mulligan and the quartet, etc., because the same people are required to go back over and over and over again, because the audience is smaller, there’s a cult, almost, and we don’t have the youthful following that we used to have, because rock has become interesting to people, so we have to rely on the people who have been coming all the time. So, to try to operate a club based on having the same people come over and over and over again, is kind of difficult, because there are not that many people…so

CA: Do you think jazz is taking a back seat to rock?

JA: There’s no question about it, but everything else is, not just jazz. We found that we get more bookings these days on the same program with a symphony orchestra, we’ve just begun to get music together and to get them to condescend to allow us to play with them, you know, but we get bookings on programs with symphony orchestras simply because they need the help, they’ve been dying on the vine, and there’s no reason for that—there’s no reason at all why an orchestra, Cleveland, Boston, New York and Philadelphia orchestras are ok, but the San Francisco Orchestra is in trouble…they don’t draw the way they should. When I say “draw,” I don’t mean that they have seasons Philharmonic Hall, or whatever, but these orchestras have to exist for twelve months a year, the musicians can’t make it on a six-month season—what the hell are they going to do for the other six months? They go on the road, they make college tours, and they go to the boondocks, and travel, and they don’t draw. The people in Dubuque won’t come out to herar the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra with Ramsey Lewis, and that is weird, but that’s the kind of thing that’s going on.

CA: Why?

JA: I do think that it is exposure and promotion. Kids don’t know anything about jazz, because a whole generation hasn’t heard it. We’ve got a decade of people who have been constantly exposed to rock, you know, all their life—they’re 20 or 25 years old, since they were 15, they have been listening to radio and watching television, and, in that length of time, they never heard of Thelonious Monk, they don’t know what it means at all. An example of what I mean by this promotion and exposure is this sudden popularity of the blues, that’s because it’s being exposed, they got endorsed by the lions of rock, all of a sudden, the Rolling Stones said, “BB King is the greatest,” BB King, Chuck Berry, they run these names down, and so the kids say, “Well, who is this?,” and when they hear it they love it. So, we have recently played a few psychedelic-type clubs, we played the Kinetic Playground in Chicago, we played the Fillmore West, and we played some place like that in Philadelphia—and we were very well received, the kids really enjoyed it, and the more far-out we played, the better they liked it. If we played a traditional Monk-type tune, it would go over like a rock, but if we really got into other things, expressionism, they called it “doing your thing.”

Today, John Coltrane would probably be bigger than bubble gum, he’s probably be a big man in the business—Charles Lloyd has a big kid following. I think, though, that it is largely a matter of exposure. I’m going to tell you the thing about this business—if we got strongly endorsed by BS&T or Sly, and an interview in two or three of the major pop publications, our records would sail…they would just sail, kids would want to know, who is this Cannonball? If Blood, Sweat and Tears dig him, he must be beautiful. For instance, Pharao Sanders has an album on the Impulse label, he’s made three or four albums, I know, that were just Pharao Sanders albums, then one of the guys in the Stones said in a British magazine that Pharao Sanders knocked him out—man, they sold forty thousand Pharao Sanders albums, and his total production before had never equaled forty thousand in sales, simply because of an endorsement, you know. I don’t particularly care for an artificial endorsement, you know, I’m not looking for the money—I’m not sure I could stand being the kind of thing that the Beatles are—no privacy—but I would like to have all the kids hear what we have to say, and make up their own minds as to whether it has some validity, because, man, the more colleges we play in these days, and the more we get into with our programs. And so forth, the more interest we provoke. And they really go away shaking their heads, guys who have always played rock suddenly come around—guitar players are guilty, they feel bad because they can’t come to our clinics, we don’t have a guitar player to run a clinic, you see. Aah, but the saxophone players and the trumpet players, and even the Fender bass players are thrilled, because they can work with Booker and he tells them, “Well, you should do it this way and you should know how to play the acoustic bass.”

I have this protectionist attitude about the music, because we have been told in print and over the air that, by and large, the music is dying—jazz is dead and dying, and I resent it, because there’s a lot happening—there’s a lot happening musically and there’s a lot happening for the groups that are out there; most groups that are working groups are doing better than they ever did. I know we are, Miles is, MJQ is, Sonny Rollins has a resurgence of popularity that’s unbelievable. Then, of course, there are the Jimmy Smiths and the Ramsey Lewises, and everybody is doing relatively well. We have become alarmed because of this thing about jazz dying—about the rumors becoming reality—so we want to do something about that. A couple of years ago, we went down to Georgia and spent a week in residence at Albany State College during Black Heritage Week, and we found out that the kids there—all black kids—had no concept of what jazz represented. They knew who we were because we had a record called Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, and they identified us as Cannonball Adderley Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, and that was the limit. So I did a little inquiry and discovered that not only did they not know anything about jazz, but they didn’t know anything about the music that they danced to, sing. They take for granted that there’s going to be a new James Brown record, they take for granted that there’s going to be a good choir at the church—that will provoke certain things for them—they take it all for granted, that BB King is going to come out with a new record, and it’s all going to be beautiful, but why??? What is it? And they’re all wearing dashikis and natural hairdos, and stuff, saying, “I’m black and I’m proud,” but proud of what? Are you proud because your skin is black? Is that the reason you’re proud? I don’t think that skin color is any reason to be proud, or be sorry, I think that the person should be proud of himself—for whatever he is—if he has a reason to be proud of himself. He should not be ashamed of himself unless he has a reason to be ashamed of himself, you see. So, you’re walking around and saying you’re black and you’re proud, but do you know anything about black? So, they can run down things to you like Malcolm X or Stokeley Carmichael, or everything that’s recent, or they can even get into something about Africa, “Well, we know that the slaves came over here, and so forth…you know, generalities. And I say, well, you know, you have a lot of things that are a part of your everyday existence that you have reason to be proud of—you should be proud of this music that is black-oriented, that was begun, nurtured, and developed by black people, in essence. And you don’t know anything about it. Why don’t you? If you’re really proud of being black, why don’t you know something about it? You should.

So we undertook to do research and to, at the same time, develop interest in jazz for the Chauvinistic reasons that I mentioned earlier, about the propagation of the aart, the jazz art, and also to instill information in people’s minds of what this music is and why this music is the same music they dance to—why it’s all fragmented, and so forth, but why it is the same music. And that’s essentially what it’s all about. We went down there in 1968, the first time, but this year we went back and conducted the seminar workshop. We had lecture demonstrations on jazz, styles in jazz, and why jazz is a little bit different—the jazz way of playing a march was different from the traditional march figure. We also went into the sociological aspects of jazz, why we talk black—we don’t talk black about militancy or any such thing, we never suggest that there is anything wrong with any other music. You know, it’s ironic that one of our teachers and members is Joe Zawinul, who’s white and has a great concept of expressing this black-oriented music, not because of the fact other than that anybody can do it if they love it, and get involved in it. Racial orientation has nothing to do with the performance of the music. We talk about its origins and development on the basis of its blackness, simply because of it being the way that it got to be, but we don’t discuss it in terms of saying, “Well, this is something that is peculiar to black people, because that is ridiculous!

CA: Does your group perform at these workshops?

JA: We play to demonstrate the music, we haven’t used records yet—our equipment situation is poor right now, but we’re planning to tape all these things that we utilize as research vehicles ourselves, records that we use. We’re planning to tape examples and use them in our lectures. We do have a discography and a bibliography that we recommend to people, and we have developed a syllabus—that will be in print the first of the year—that’s only concerned with our program and elements of extractions from things that we use. Last year, for instance, we played forty college concerts—this year we have already been booked for over sixty, and we haven’t begun to stop accepting things…I say “this year,” meaning the school year, from September to June. We offer the seminar workshop along with any concert bookings we get. We have mailings to schools to tell them that we do this, they can buy us for a concert, but we don’t charge for a seminar. Of course we charge for our concerts, because that’s our means to an end.

CA: How has the response been?

JA: It has been fantastically received, it’s apparently been provocative. In the various schools that we have visited so far, we have been invited to come back. There are people who want us to expand the program, in fact, we’ve been asked to teach a course at UCA, which is very interesting—we are going to be in residence there next week, just floating around with the kids and doing our seminar, and we’ll play a concert next Friday.

CA: Has there been any interest from other musicians?

JA: Yes, most people want to know what we’re trying to do, and we tell them. It was a secret for a long time, I guess, but then John Wilson did a piece in the New York Times and I started to get phone calls from colleges in New York, etc.

CA: Where do you live now?

JA: I live in Los Angeles. I just finally got tired…I lived here fifteen years, things here were beautiful for me and I didn’t have any axe to grind, but I just got tired of being a New Yorker, and I wanted to relax a bit more. I find it a lot more relaxing in California, where I’ve been for two years. Nat lives in Teaneck, everybody else in the band lives in the New York area.

CA: Are most of your workshop held in black schools?

JA: No, no, no, most of our bookings are in the large state universities, We’re going to the University of Massachusetts, to Perdonia, Rice, Bailer, University of Oklahoma. In fact, we have only one booking for a black school, so far—Kentucky State College. The music director is Edward Louis Smith, who was a trumpet player with Horace Silver for awhile, he is…we are working on something called the Southern University, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is a black school, too. You find very few young people interested in anything old, unless it’s new.

CA: Did it bother you to be referred to as “the new Bird, in the early Fifties?

JA: That was something I had to live down, because people kept associating it with me, somehow—as if I were calling myself this. “How presumptuous of him to be the new Bird,” and I’ve never felt that way about it. I loved Charlie Parker and I still do, he’s still my all-time favorite saxophone player. I’ve never heard anybody play more than he played, yet, including John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and some of the great players of today. I haven’t heard anybody play more than Bird, yet.

CA: How about Albert Ayler?

JA: I haven’t heard enough of him to make an evaluation. I have heard a couple of things that I liked very much, there are some things by Archie Shepp that I like…there are some other things that I don’t understand, I don’t understand why he takes a tune like The Shadow Of Your Smile or The Girl From Ipanema and plays the melody and then plays free, I don’t know why he would use that as a vehicle for release. But I like the way he plays, generally, I like the sound very much and I like him very much—I really like his attitude as a new musician, meaning not as a kid or someone new on the scene, but the new concept of how a musician should be expressive—whatever you feel like expressing, express.

CA: Miles told me that he doesn’t like the term, “Jazz”—he thinks it’s derogatory.

JA: Well, he must have been upset that day. I do think that, under certain circumstances, that term is limiting to certain music and, in other instances, it is not altogether accurate. For instance, you have been a jazz enthusiast, a collector, and a research person for many years. Well, you have a concept of what jazz is. Similarly, I have been a jazz musician for many years, and I have a concept of what jazz is—we can all stretch a point, it’s hard for me to take the Ebony Concerto as jazz, even though it was performed by Woody Herman, and at the same time, some of the records that have been released, I think, are masquerading as jazz. So, you take a jazz artist and give him a rock tune and let him make his so-called “jazz version” of the rock tune, and that’s jazz. Like years ago we came up with This Here, it’s Bobby Timmons’ tune, we played it as jazz in every respect, we have never covered any rock tunes. Every tune we have recorded that became popular started out the same as every other tune does: somebody brings in a tune and, if the band likes it, we play it, we’ve had a lot of material from guys in the band that we ddon’t play, some things that are obvious attempts to make money. Nevertheless, I do resent the concept of somebody saying if you play a tune and it becomes popular—whether it’s Worksong or This Here or Sack O’Woe, or whatever—that you have compromised in some way, because that way my compromise would be to play something far out…it’s like trying to get justification for what you do, and all we’ve ever done is play what we’ve enjoyed. We’ve had a helluva lot more misses than we’ve had connections, you know. There was a story about black music in Ebony magazine, which was…made mention of musicians, but not the music—really. Whoever the writer the writer was, he said “The Cannonball Adderley Quintet is a great group, though they play a lot of popular songs.” I said, I wonder which song he’s talking about, Worksong or This Here, because, if it’s popular, it’s because we made it popular—see what I mean?

CA: What do you look for in the future?

JA: There are some things we’d like to see. I would like to see more places like this, like the Plaza Hotel, presenting Les McCann, George Wein, Cannonball Adderley, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson. I’d like to see more rooms willing to bring in groups on the basis of, well, this is our attraction, we don’t have a jazz room, we have a room that presents people who have something to say—and then we don’t have to go into whether or not Joey Bushkin is playing jazz.

© 1969 Chris Albertson

[Dr Dave]

long ago and far away...thanks, Chris, that's beautiful stuff...

[stonemonkts]

That's great stuff, Chris. Thanks for going to the trouble of posting it.

[hornplayer]

Thanks, Chris! most enjoyable.