|
GG: This is Gordon Goodwin and I’m here with Eddie Daniels at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California and we’re working on the Big Phat Band CD # 2, and I just have to ask you, man, I think the first time I heard you play was in ’72, or ’71, and how old were you when you first joined the bands?
ED: 25
GG: No way.
ED: Yeah, 25.
GG: Really? You weren’t 17 or 18…
ED: No.
GG: Oh, that was Tom Scott (laughs)
ED: (Laughing too) No but I was the youngest guy in the band. I was around 25 or 24.
GG: That was a pretty seasoned group of guys.
ED: Yeah, yeah…I was a baby.
GG: How long did you play with the band.
ED: About six years.
GG: That was a real springboard for you as a soloist.
ED: Yeah, it’s kinda like playing with Miles, you know, you get to know them over a period of time and being on those old records kinda makes me old (laughs).
GG: (Laughing) Do you find that people come up to you remembering those solos?
ED: No, people like yourself come and say “I was at the Vanguard in 1966 or 1967” and, you know, loved the band. It was a New York gut thing to go the Vanguard on Monday night.
GG: How long of a period of time did it take you to make the decision transitioning from a tenor player playing the clarinet to moving into clarinet more or less full time?
ED: While I was at the Vanguard Monday nights, I was getting a Master’s degree in clarinet at Julliard. So it was just on Monday nights. Mondays were hard because Tuesday mornings…at two in the morning I was just getting back to Brooklyn, then I was having to get up early and get back on the train to go back to Manhattan and up to Julliard. The clarinet was always looming. It started to poke it’s way through eventually, and probably it was that live recording at the Vanguard on Little Pixie. We each had 32 bars and at the last minute I decided to dive for the clarinet and it was live and there were no other takes, and so I played that solo on the clarinet, and for some reason I won the DownBeat “New Star Clarinet” for those 32 bars.
GG: Now urban legend has it that Thad Jones was less than enamored with the clarinet solo as a concept.
ED: As a concept, right. He wanted me to play the tenor. He thought the clarinet was a good filler, you know, in the section. I don’t know what he thought in other music, he probably liked it in other music, but in his own music he didn’t want clarinet solos. And I was at Julliard and that was the instrument that I was studying and I really thought there was an opening for a new sound on the clarinet. Moving in another direction. And me jumping out on that CD, well it wasn’t a CD then, it was vinyl…kinda made me think “hey maybe I can do this.” A couple of years later I got signed by Columbia, by CBS, to do an album, called Morning Thunder. They gave me one album to do, and it was mostly clarinet and I played some alto sax.
GG: Now, that wasn’t the record with Bucky…
ED: No, the record with Bucky was called A Flower For All Seasons Roland Hannah wrote me some stuff on that. This was a little bit later. The record with Bucky was about the time at The Vanguard with the band, and it was a duo album.
GG: Well, in fairness to Thad prior to that point the clarinet had a reputation for being just a swing thing and it didn’t have the same expressiveness that you can get on a saxophone.
ED: Yeah, and I mean Thad’s time feel and his gut bucket groove…I guess he just couldn’t imagine it on the clarinet. He was just like a tenor guy. He loved the tenor, the alto, the saxophone. That really hard driving, you know, passion. I think maybe today we got it on this album.
GG: Well, today we just recorded a tune in commemoration of that event, which is Thad Said No with you, Eddie, and I think it embodies all those things that we’re talkin’ about in terms of a range of expression on the clarinet.
ED: Right, and I heard later legend has it that Thad had said to Mel, “What the “F” did he do that for?” And I never knew it. He never said a word to me, but Mel said he said, “What the F*** did he do that for?” (Laughs)
GG: (Laughing) Did Mel answer him?
ED: No, and at one point years later, when Thad went away and it was Mel’s band at the Vanguard, he invited me back to do a clarinet solo with his band. It was Mel’s band Monday Night…The Mel Lewis Band. It’s a matter of getting used to it…the clarinet is not the instrument “du jour” and I think it can be. In a sense, I like that it’s not, because it leaves room for getting a taste of another sound of what the instrument can do and it requires players to play it in a different way from the old swing way. Just to play it in this new music, and I hear it on commercials and younger players starting to play the clarinet in a more contemporary way to fit the music of today.
GG: Do you have issue with amplification as bands are getting louder and louder and all the subtleties that we hear you do in this environment, are you able to do that all the time in every playing situation?
ED: It’s hard, it’s really hard, you can’t control it. But I like a little amplification and if the room is big enough, for instance, I’ve been playing with wind ensembles at universities…I’ve been playing with the Austin Texas Wind Ensemble at TME, Texas Music Educators, and I premiered a terrific piece for a full wind ensemble that had a big band inside of it, that Frank Porter wrote for me called Paganini in Metropolis, and it’s that theme “bum, da da dee dee, (etc.)” and it’s wild and out and having that amplification in that big room where the ensemble’s not amplified and there’s a lot of air around it, I can be natural and the sound can be pretty nice and the audience can hear me above it, and the microphone allows you to do something you can’t do acoustically, in other words play really soft, and then zone into that really soft sound in a louder situation, so it has a lot of possibilities and sometimes it doesn’t work and you can’t always control it.
GG: You know our ears nowadays have gotten used to what is not naturally acoustically balanced. When you listen to CDs and records now where, let’s face it, you have a soloist in front of a big band and it’s gonna dwarf them. And of course now with the DVD technology like what we used on our first record, I can take Eddie Daniels and put him up against a blazing trumpet section, and put him in a back speaker and it co-exists…
ED: Right, right…
GG: …in a way that doesn’t happen in real life.
ED: That’s right, that’s right. The listener gets a chance to enjoy the music on a level that you as a writer meant it to be as opposed to there are some record companies that are audiophile, Cheskie Records being one of them, and they don’t believe in any of this, and they want the sound of the room, and all kinds of space, they want the natural sound and some of it works, but some of it for me doesn’t work because the medium now is the message. The medium of the recording is part of the message of the music. Unless you want to go into a cave and hear a guy playing the flute in the cave then you can’t record it because if you want it natural, you’d have to have a microphone in that cave, and there were no microphones in that cave!
GG: The scientist doing the experiment affects the outcome…
ED: Exactly…exactly! Exactly!! That’s interesting that you said that.
GG: I’m deep.
ED: Well, that is a deep thing…because the observing of the experiment changes what’s being watched, because you are part of what’s being watched…so…
GG: Tell me a little bit about your thought process as you apply it to improvisation. I know you have certain devices that pop up now and then,
ED: Yeah, sure,
GG: but very rarely do I hear you repeat yourself and as I watch you play two or three takes on a solo, each one is unique and different and structured in a unique way. Now how did you get your arms around that?
ED: Well I took composition at Julliard with Victorio Giunini, a great composer, and Robert Sanders at Brooklyn College, and made me think about form and you know you don’t just dive into a solo out of nowhere, I was coming off of a trumpet lick, so sometimes I would let myself respond to something in the trumpets, or something that was leading up to it, so that I’m picking up the ball and taking it and then let it evolve. But I don’t always find the same thing, and I don’t always imitate it, like you have that lick “did a diddle dit a dit didda…” so I kinda took that, and I couldn’t quite play it exact, but I kinda like let it go in a certain way.”
GG: Well, actually Thad Said No was designed that way since you’re exchanging fours and eights with the section, and I knew that you would launch off of what the section would do…
ED: Right, right…
GG: In essence trading with the band.
ED: That’s right, but you know, I think part of it is I don’t have a great memory, and I never did. So I never memorized solos, so I guess I’m forced to make up a new solo each time, which is really good. A lot people, you know, are very organized. They can memorize stuff; they have tons of solos in their memory and I can’t even remember my own solos, which is good, I like that. I’m not trying to remember them; I don’t want to remember them. When I was younger I didn’t take Coltrane’s solos off the records. I took one, “Giant Steps.” That was the only Coltrane solo I ever took off a record. Most of my friends had reams of solos that they studied. And I felt, like, one was enough. I learned one Sonny Roland solo. I used to listen to Stan Getz. I just thought that that was limiting, in terms of too much learning the solo, and analyzing it and pulling it apart. I almost like being tossed into space and having to find something from my own devices, even devices that I may not even have, if I can get relaxed enough something will kinda propel its way out.
GG: Well certainly you have the vocabulary of the idiom…
ED: Yeah
GG: Do you think you gained that through osmosis, or through the limited amount of solos you did transcribe?
ED: Well, I mean, you go in an elevator, and we’re all part of the vocabulary, even if you can say what it is or not, we all hear the vocabulary all the time. So, you know, yeah, I got that under my fingers. I have that vocabulary…some of it…and some of my own. I started evolving my own vocabulary, in my own kinda kooky way of looking at something, and kinda, starting from zero in a solo, not with too much thought about it. And if you’re relaxed enough…not like on Cherokee, ‘cuz that was so fast, I didn’t have time to get relaxed enough on that take that we’re probably not gonna use on the record yet, we will get that happening…but if you are relaxed enough, something in you will come out that you don’t have control of, and that’s the key…not being in control of your solo…letting it come out of you. So, you know, so that you’re almost surprising yourself. Something comes out “oh good, how did I do that, I didn’t know I was going to do that!”
GG: Do you find that you can apply that to your composing as well?
ED: Well I will sit down at the piano and just let my hands go somewhere…let something start and let it unravel in a certain way. Now, I’m not a big composer, I don’t think of myself that way, but that’s how a tune will let it compose itself. It composes itself.
GG: I read a book written by a Disney animator, and he was talking about animating in really broad strokes, and not getting caught up in any of the details, on how do the hands look, and the eyes, because they’re really improvising with a pencil as they’re animating these scenes. He would do the same thing. He would just do a quick little sketch, you could barely tell what it was, but he would get through, you know, the big picture of it and then go back and not get bogged down with the details of it.
ED: Well I disagree on some level, especially with the clarinet. Certain little details. Certain of the little details are very very important like connecting notes and getting the subtlety, because you can’t get a beauty of connection, like you asked me to get that high note at the end of that thing…now if I hadn’t practiced certain details slowly, and there is only one detail in life…presence…being present when you’re doing it. So if you do it slow, you have a presence about it and you’re weaving this thing on this level, when you’re so present with it. And that’s what all details are…being present. So present in the detail that you…you do that with any detail so that you really are kind of cultivating the ability to be really present and focused. So then, you gotta have those little details, cuz if it’s too wide of an expression…with an artist, he can go back. We’re doing live solos here, so I can’t go back and say, “Well, I didn’t like that connection, let’s put that note sharp, let’s fix that…” then it’s not really a solo. I have to bring with me all the details neatly done, and that I can, even in the room there before some of the songs, I started playing slowly remember just the touch of the keys on a subtle level, a subtle level, I can play fast, but that subtle, soft level that really enables my body so that I can just let it go in a certain way and just be subtle with it.
GG: I guess my comparison there was in sitting down to compose a piece, especially a long form piece, it really helps me to do it that way.
ED: Oh yeah, well you do, you need the whole…the whole meal in front of you.
GG: Because it’s not really a real time experience.
ED: That’s right, that’s right and if you’re doing it in little pieces, you’ll get bogged down, you have to have the kinda of an overview then you fill in the pieces, but you have the time to do that. A soloist in a band where you’re counting off 1, 2, 1 2 3 4, “uh, could I just, I wanna work on my tone please,” you know. There’s no time, so I have to bring those details with me in every solo.
GG: I kept telling my clarinet teacher, “listen, I don’t have time to work on my tone!” So I paid for that later…(laughing)
ED: It’s interesting that you asked me this because I never really thought of it that way. That a good soloist, like a Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Chick Corea, you know, uh, Joe Henderson. They have those details in their pockets, all the time, because they’ve worked them out, so then they can bring those details and then paint a large picture with the details. So you can start with a large picture, basically, or a writer, you know, of a book. He’s got his novel, he’s laying it out, and then he kinda of then, evolves it. But live! You have to have your details, have all your stuff…your tone has to be good, your technique has to be good, you kinda have to know everything, and then you’re doing it live in front of someone.
GG: You mentioned to me, on a personal level, that you do some meditation in your personal life. Do you think that that has also allowed you to maintain that presence that you were talking about?
ED: Yeah…I think paying attention: presence of the moment. Just being present in the moment. Meditation really doesn’t mean anything if you’re thinking about what you’re gonna have for dinner after you meditate. But if you’re able to say, you know, “Shit, this meditation thing is difficult.” Well, let’s think about how…let’s feel this difficulty in the meditation, instead of trying to put yourself somewhere else, being exactly where you are. Being where you are, instead of trying to be somewhere else; “I gotta meditate, so I’d better do that.”
GG: Listen, I haven’t been listening, I’ve gotta go…I can’t stay in the moment here any longer, so…(laughing)
ED: (Laughs)
GG: Thank you Eddie Daniels, and your great work on this album.
ED: Thank you
GG: It’s been a real pleasure for all of us to experience you and work with you on this record.
ED: Thank you, thank you very much.
|
