Teo Macero – Jazz and Classical Music

It’s not progressing at all.  What happens with most of the jazz musicians, you listen to them, they rise to a level and that’s why when I get in a studio I’m a sonuvabitch!  I mean, I don’t take anything for granted and I don’t take any lip from anybody.  I know if you go up here that most of the jazz musicians will get to a level and feel comfortable and that’s what they’re going to do.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But what I want them to do is to rise above that.  But, you know, it takes a helluva lot of guts to sit there and tell them, you know, there’s something beyond that and they can be a little freer.  You know, and now there’s contain.  I mean, if you’re going to worry about, if I’m going to get to the keyboard, worry about the chords and everything else, you’re lost.  You’re dead in the water.

I mean, look at all of the great artists that have done that and they have moved this music forward.  The bebop moved it, what, maybe twenty years forward.  But after that it started to regress.  I mean, and everybody now wants to be a bebop player.  But not everybody can be a bebop player.  You know, and I try to tell them, you know “Go beyond that.  Take another step up the ladder.  You know, two or three steps.”  Cause when I was playing, I was trying to destroy the blues.  People say, “Are you crazy?”  I mean, I said, “I don’t want the twelve bars in my head all the time.”  I mean, listen to the radio, you listen to the movies and what do you hear?  The 12-bars. The 12-bars, the 12-bars, the 12-bars.  And they put all kinds of nonsense stuff above it, below it, whatever.  Now you can take the 12-bars and say, “Okay, I get the 12 bars.”  But manipulate the 12-bars so that you go somewhere.  You just don’t just go from the tonic to the sub-dominant back to the tonic, to the dominant back to the fourth and then… I mean, what you do, you go to the tonic, maybe to an e-flat and maybe to an a-major!  And then before you get back, you know, you’re into another… and then don’t extend it, and then change the meter.  How many people have ever changed the meter in the track?  I mean, we did it many times in the past.  But you know you can be (sings rising and falling melody) you know, to create the excitement.  But they don’t do that.  They just go (sings flat melody) which is nice!  It’s a groove.  I like the groove.  But is you go 1-2-3, da-da-da (sings melody) you know, create the emotion so that it’s like listening to a piece of Schubert.  You don’t hear Schubert doing the same thing.  He’s all over the place.  I mean, rhythmically not so much but harmonically he moves!  And that’s what I try to do harmonically because I know it’s very difficult to do the things that I want them to do, you know, in a short period of time so you make it easy on them.

I love classical music.  I’ve studied Schoenberg.  I’ve studied Bartok.  The twelve tone technique.  Vabern.  I mean, I’m a freak for tonalities and seeing what they do.  I’m recently studying the Bartok string quartets.  I mean, it was when I was working on this thing… I was working on a string quartet and I was saying, “Jesus, you know, I just would like to look,” I just pulled out the score of the Six String Quartets of Bartok and I saw at a glance the mind at work.  And it was really wonderful to see.  And I said, “Jesus, I should try this and maybe try what he did plus something else.”  And I did.  But I’m a freak for classical music.  I love great things.  I mean I studied it while I was at Juilliard for four years and that was enough.  Because when I went there I didn’t know anything about classical.  I didn’t even know what a trio was!  I remember taking, they said, “What is a trio?”  I said, “Uh.. what… three musicians.” Laughs.  And it was the wrong answer.  A trio is like with a, you know, a different movements and laughs.  I remember, somebody asked me that question, I think that was for the entrance exam.  That was before I changed my major from diploma to degree.  Then I studied very hard.  I studied privately for four years at Juilliard.  And I studied privately after I left Juilliard with a great composer.  In fact, we, this piece which I told you about which is called Areas now the foundation for this teacher.  That’s all he does now is does is does Area-esqe kinda pieces with maybe 15 orchestras.  Forty trombones.  Eight barges with musicians with musicians on eight different barges.  Cacophony.  Now, after he heard this piece of Areas where I split up the orchestra, I was studying with him at the time.  And his was the teacher and I became his assistant in his class.  Now it’s the only kind of music that he writes, is Areas.  He writes, Jesus, he just won the Pulitzer Prize this past year.  His name is Henry Brand.  I don’t know if you know Henry.

But I love good classical music but there’s nothing being done.  Nobody’s recording anything new.  And I used to have all of those records.  And I had all of those scores.  Because when in doubt I would buy the score, study the score, and my greatest pleasure is to sit home and to put one of these classical records on.  Stravinsky or whatever and look at the score and study it.  And I try to conduct some of that stuff.  I started conducting when I was at Juilliard.  Now I can’t conduct unless I sit and conduct which is very hard for me to do.  Because I get emotional.  I think a student who is in music should learn how to conduct.  Should learn how to be able to take over a band and tell the players “this is what I want.”  You know, I remember doing this when I was fourteen.  Jesus, at fourteen I had some top notch guys in the band in upstate New York.  I mean, they were much older than me, they were in their 20s.  And we used to play for dances.  Gave a concert when I was fourteen with a big band up at my high school.  But you know, I like all kinds of music.  I’ve written operas.  I’ve written some operas.  I’ve written all kinds of banjo music.  Done string pieces galore.  Jesus, I’ve done so many string pieces.

I did a big ballet for the San Antonio exposition.  This is about five, six, seven years ago.  I wrote this piece.  It was done here in New York later but it was premiered in San Antonio.  It was all, I mean, the scores were this big.  People said, “You wrote all those notes?”  I says, “Yes. Laughs.” 

And I did a piece with Leonard Bernstein which is kind of interesting because he said, “Do you have any music you’d like me to look at?”  I said, “Yeah, I got a couple of pieces.”  I showed him two pieces and said, “Which one do you want to do?”  We’ll do it with the New York Philharmonic, you know, this season. It will be three performances.  I said, “Look it, how bout this piece, it’s sort of an antithinal piece for jazz quintet and symphony orchestra.”  I said, “But we have to put the quintet in the balcony.”  He said, “No, we can’t do that.”  I said, “The parts are completely improvised.”  He said, “No.”  Laughs.  I said, “Okay, you tell me what you want me to do.”  He said, “I want you to put the band on stage and I want you to write the parts out.  Write a new score.”  I said, “How the hell do I do this?”  Now these parts were all written that were supposed to be improvised because the original performance was at Columbia University many years ago.  So what I did, I put the band on stage on riser.  And then I conducted the small band on my knees.  I mean, I can’t get on my knees otherwise I won’t be able to get up.  And I’m conducting these guys.  I mean, Art Farmer.  We had Donald Porter.  Oh, I can’t think of who else.  And Shaughnessy on drums.  It was a helluva band.  But I wrote the thing and I said early, you take the texture, even with Miles’ stuff.  Maybe that’s where I… this was in 1957 I think it was, and I took and I wrote the parts so that there are no bar lines.  There are no bar lines in the score for the orchestra.  So Lenny really had to be on top of it.  I mean, as he was going through it he said, the strings started it then the woodwinds would come in no bar lines, the percussion would come in, no bar lines.  And I’d point because I didn’t write a new score.  I would just point where the jazz band would come in.  And I gave a separate score for the parts.  For what they were playing.  And it proved very successful.  I’ve got this on tape and it’s a helluva performance.  You hear all these things. 

You don’t know quite, it’s a saxophone player, what the hell is his name, Benny Goldson.  If you ever see him, ask him about this story.  He was driving along and all of the sudden he heard the broadcast.  He almost ran off the road.  Laughs.  He pulled off the road and stopped his car and said, “What the hell?  Is something wrong with the radio?”  Laughs. 

And it was Bernstein playing a thing called Fusion.  And it was a meshing of all these elements together.  I mean, that’s why looking forward.  I mean, Lenny made me do it.  I mean, I didn’t really want to but I had to and then we did three performances, and I’m on my knees.  We’ve got pictures of all of this.  It was very funny.  And I’m trying to conduct it and then laughs it was a helluva racket.

And then I later did it with the London Philharmonic.  I did the track in London.  Myself conducted.  And then I got the Lounge Lizards and I took them in the studio.  I’ve got a whole tape of the Lounge Lizards.  It is the greatest thing they’ve ever did.  He won’t put them out and I’m not going to give it back to him until he puts it out.  It is the greatest album he ever made.  And at the same time I made the track, and the track is the way I wanted it done originally, improvised.  And so, their track.  I mean, I gave them a little clue as to what to do but the track is all improvised.  And it’s on a record and I have that.  I mean, I have both versions so you can hear the original as opposed to the one I did with the Lounge Lizards. 

And then I did a concert with them up in Canada at Quebec, with the Quebec Symphony.  I got them on the program.  They called up and wanted me to come up and conduct the orchestra.  I said, “Well, If I could get the Lounge Lizards to do a little part of the program I will write a new piece for them and we’ll do the concert.”  We did all the music.  We had eight thousand people there at night in the summertime.  Eight thousand!  I mean, I couldn’t draw flies here in New York!  I mean, forget it.  You couldn’t get three people to come and hear you play.  And they wouldn’t let us off the stand!  And they made, and I wrote a piece for his brother, and it’s only two pages long.  And it’s all this sort of ad-lib.  And I said, “Look it, what you do now, you start playing.  I will bring in the orchestra and I will listen to you and when the element is right the percussion will come in.  When the element is right, and the score is only, I think the string parts are twelve bars.  The trumpet parts is two bars.  The woodwinds are two bars and the percussion, I think, is maybe I think eight bars.  And then there was one… But, when I did it, I’d listen to him and what he was doing.  And he would get more excited (claps).  I would bring in the trumpet (bah-wah).  And I would repeat them, you know.  And I had two that were all done with cues.  One, two, three, four, and the fifth one was the whole orchestra.  And it was a helluva noise maker.

They wouldn’t even let us off the stage!  I tell ya.  And we got a great review for two days.