Carmen McRae – A Grande Dame of Jazz

Carmen McRae – A Grande Dame of Jazz

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There's always a tigerish feel to her best vocals - no woman has ever sung in the Jazz idiom with quite such beguiling surliness as McRae.”

- Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.

“Carmen McRae is the true grande dame of jazz. Like so many of the best women Jazz singers, including her friends Shirley Horn and the late Sarah Vaughan, Carmen is an accomplished pianist. This means she not only has a feeling for harmony, she has true knowledge of it. Carmen always knows exactly what she is doing.

The term ‘Jazz singer’ is a dubious one, and Sarah Vaughan objected to it. It means many things to many people, including merely a style that entails a certain indefinable jazz feeling. If it means anything specific, it surely denotes someone who can improvise with the voice. In a well-made song, the intervals of the music bear a significant relationship to the natural inflections of the words, and to alter the melody compromises the meaning and diminishes the dramatic effect of the song as a whole. Unfortunately, that is exactly what all too many ‘Jazz singers’ do. Carmen is a spectacular exception. When she changes the melodic intervals, she somehow, mysteriously, deepens the song, increasing the impact of the words.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz writer and critic

“No singer since [Billie] Holiday had been more adept at singing behind the beat than McRae, or more skilled at shifting from an intimate conversational delivery to hard-edged reconfigurations of melody and lyric.”

- Ted Gioia, A History of Jazz

“No singer was more stubbornly verbal than Carmen McRae, who inflected words as though she were giving them a tongue-lashing. McRae was famously outspoken and her songs had a similarly tart appeal. You didn't necessarily turn to her for profane insight into the songwriter's art, but you occasionally got it anyway. This is especially true of the numerous [Billie] Holiday tunes she covered.

If Holiday made the word ‘love’ shimmer with unrequited longing, McRae cast it in caustic languor. Consider her 1965 live recording of "No More": Holiday sang the line, ‘you ain't gonna bother me no more no how,’ as if trying to key up her resolve; McRae phrased those words as if she had a gun in her purse.

- Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz [paragraphing modified]

There was nothing quite like hearing Carmen McRae sing in-person.

To my ears, she was the epitome of a song stylist, but actually watching her shape a song in real time was a captivating and beguiling experience. I told her once that she was my “witchy woman,” to which she laughingly replied: “Be careful, or I’ll put a spell on you.”

Of course, she knew. She already had.

And it wasn’t only me. Carmen had a way of enchanting anyone who ever caught her in performance.

The reason was simple. She loved singing Jazz and she was good at it. She knew it, the musicians who backed her knew it and we the audience knew it. And if you were in her presence while she was doing her thing, you knew that you were in for the thrill of your life.

What Carmen served up during her performances was akin to a musical feast: phrasing lyrics with meaning and understanding; picking tempos that that were always just right; scatting – just enough – while employing the cleverest of harmonies; and just when you thought that you didn’t have room for dessert, she’d offered up a stomping version of “I Cried for You” or “Three Little Words” and leave you screaming for more.

I always sensed a great sadness in Carmen, too. The weightiness and gravity with which she handled certain ballads spoke of a life with its share of disappointments.

She was nobody’s fool, but few of us go through life without some emotional bumps and bruises and it appeared to me that Carmen had had her share of these, including some personal relationships that didn’t work out.

It was easy to catch the sense of this if you listened closely to her banter between tunes or observed her knowing facial or lyrical expressions when she sang romantic ballads.

Carmen brought the Jazz musician’s life to her music, a life which was never an easy one, even during the best of times.

I loved seeing her work at a club whether it was at Sugar Hill in San Francisco, or P.J.’s on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood or at Donte’s Jazz Club in North Hollywood, CA.

Can you imagine a rhythm section made up of Joe Pass on guitar, Jimmy Rowles on piano, Chuck Domanico on bass and Chuck Flores on drums backing Carmen at an intimate Jazz club located only a 10-minute drive from my home?

Welcome to my world in 1972 when Carmen worked a week at Donte’s.

The room was loaded with musicians during her appearance and Carmen was always gracious about visiting with as many of them as possible during the breaks between sets.

With her signature – “Hey baby, what’s happening?” – she came up to your table and there would be hugs and giggles all around.

She was a queen who deserved to be an empress. Those of us who understood this treated her royally and gave her the respect that she merited.

In return, she bestowed upon us a treasure chest filled with rendition after rendition of great vocal Jazz.

Thankfully, much of her gift has been saved on recordings.

While I’m grateful for the recorded legacy of her music, there was nothing quite like watching her weave her special charms into a song while sitting three feet away from her in a Jazz club.

When you were around Carmen, baby, it was always “happening.”

Here’s an entertaining interview with Carmen conducted by drummer Art Taylor that is very revealing in terms of her personality and character. When she came up in the Jazz World of the late 1940s, it wasn’t easy for a woman so perhaps one can forgive her for sounding somewhat sarcastic and cynical at times.

© Copyright ® Arthur Taylor, copyright protected; all rights reserved; the author claims no right of copyright usage.

"A bible for anyone who considers himself serious about jazz. It does for jazz what the Paris Review series 'Writers at Work' did for creative writing: It reveals the processes involved as well as the people."

—International Herald Tribune

"Anyone wishing to know what jazz musicians were talking about among themselves at the turn of an angry decade (and are likely talking about still) will have to look here. And what they have to say in these pages is certain to affect the way we listen to jazz and the ways in which we think (and write) about what we hear."

—Francis Davis, Philadelphia Inquirer

The following interview can be found in Arthur Taylor NOTES AND TONES Musician-to-Musician Interviews, Expanded Edition [1993].

Notes and Tones is one of the most controversial, honest and insightful books ever written about jazz. It consists of 29 no-holds-barred conversations which drummer Arthur Taylor held with the most influential jazz musicians of the '60s and 70s—including:

Art Blakey Ornette Coleman Hampton Hawes Max Roach

Betty Carter Miles Davis Freddie Hubbard Sonny Rollins

Don Cherry Kenny Dorham Elvin Jones Nina Simone

Kenny Clarke Dizzy Gillespie Carmen McRae Randy Weston

As a black musician himself, Taylor was able to ask his subjects hard questions about the role of black artists in a white society. Free to speak their minds, these musicians offer startling insights into their music, their lives, and the creative process itself. This expanded edition is supplemented with previously unpublished interviews with Dexter Gordon and Thelonious Monk, a new introduction by the author, and new photographs.

Arthur Taylor has drummed with Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and dozens of others. He has been called "one of the great drummers to come out of the fertile Harlem bebop scene" (The New York Times) and "one of the best bandleaders living or dead" (Stanley Crouch, The Village Voice). His band, Taylor's Wailers, has recorded several albums, and is based in New York City.

Please keep in mind as you read this that the interview took place in Cologne, Germany on October 30, 1970.

CARMEN McRAE - “We were happy in the days of Fifty-second Street."

“I imagine my interest in singing must have started when I was a baby. My father was a very musical man. Not a performer, but someone who loved good music. I don't remember this, but I'm [old that as a child, I used to know all the popular tunes of the day, like most children do today because of listening to music that's being played constantly on radio and television. I found out later on that there were two or three relatives of mine who were musically inclined. I mean musically inclined to the point of having good-sounding voices. They could have been singers if they had wanted to be, but I guess they never did. So maybe that's where whatever musical talent I have came from.

I'm the only one in my family who is in this business. I have been fortunate; they all wished me well and they might have wished me their talent. Their talent and maybe a bit of my own has helped me get where I am today. I had to become one of two things in life: someone who was musically inclined and good enough to be able to perform or else a good audience of music. I just happen to be a performer.

When I was still in my teens, I met a woman who became my idol. She was my idol then and continued to be my idol; though she is dead now, she still is my idol. That's Billie Holiday. I met Lady when I was very young, and she was one of the most impressive women I have ever met in my life. She really scared me as far as singing was concerned. She seemed so utterly perfect to me that I felt anything after her would be anticlimactic.

Consequently I was afraid of becoming what I had hoped to become at an earlier stage in my life. That was a very important phase to me. After that I had some minor experiences with Benny Carter's band, Mercer Ellington's band and Count Basie's band, just short stints which really couldn't influence me much because I was too young. What helped me was Billie Holiday, which happened at a very early stage in my life.

The next thing was going to Chicago [sings]: "Sorry that I can't take you." I'm getting carried away! Anyway, I went to Chicago and liked the city. In order to stay, I had to make a living. A friend of mine who was an ex-chorus girl knew I could play and sing, which I would do just for friends, not professionally. She said: "Why don't you take a job playing and singing?" I said to her: "Lulu, that sounds great, but I don't know if I'm capable." She said: "I know someone who wants a girl singer and piano player. If you go and you don't make it, at least you tried." I said: "It's hard for a woman like myself, who is an Aries, to take a defeat. I would rather hear nothing than hear no." She convinced me, I went, and the man there was beautiful to me. I will never forget him. He gave me a job for two weeks with a two-week option to play the piano and sing. He advanced me money to join the union. I stayed two weeks, and he picked up the option.

I realized that my piano playing was very limited, because I had never intended to become a real pianist except just to play for myself or to rehearse a tune. It became essential to play better. I stayed in that job for seventeen weeks. During that time I hired a piano, and as my repertoire was very shallow, I rehearsed every day until my repertoire grew bigger. I stayed in Chicago and worked there for three and a half years, which was the greatest experience I could ever have had. I don't care that it happened in Chicago. I don't care where it happened, as long as it happened. I found out I could make a living playing and singing. My idols were great pianists like Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum, so I could not be fooled by my own piano playing at all. My piano playing was just a means to get where I wanted to get as a singer.

How important do you think it is for a singer to know something about the

piano?

Going by my experience, it's one of the most important things. I don't believe I would have whatever reputation I have today if I had not had any knowledge of piano. That experience of studying music is what put me where I am today. Without it I would perhaps not even be singing, or if I had become a singer, it might not be as impressive as whatever it is I do now. I have said this for years, and I still think it is extremely important. It is important if you want to be a lasting artist. Any artist who really knows what he or she is doing musically will last. I think it's the nonprofessional professionals who fade out. They earn a lot of money in a minute, yet they don't make it somehow. After they're gone, people don't even remember who they were. That's why it's very important to know your craft.

What would you recommend to someone trying to start a singing

career?

There is no set example you can give anybody. It's a combination of luck, talent and being at the right place at the right time, with the right people listening. They should have some sort of musical knowledge. It doesn't have to be the piano. It can be a guitar or a harp, but I think piano is the simplest if you want to be a singer.

Are you religious? If you don't mind my asking the question.

If I didn't want to answer it, A.T., I'd say so. If being religious is believing in a Supreme Being and that all our lives are destined before we enter on this earth, and believing that fate has a lot to do with our lives, if that is being religious, then I am. If being religious is going to church or getting on my knees and praying to a Supreme Being every night, or reading any sort of Scripture in regard to a Supreme Being, regardless of whether it be Allah or God, then I'm not religious. I'm not an atheist. I was a Catholic as a child, and to me Catholicism is a farce! I gave it up. I have not found anything to delve into other than the Baha'i faith that Dizzy Gillespie talked about to me, but I don't know.

I feel very comfortable the way I am. Rather than get involved in something that is seventy percent good for me and thirty percent not right, I'd rather not get involved in anything. I would like to embrace whichever bit of each faith suits my way of thinking. My main concept of anything we can consider godly would be to treat my fellow human beings, regardless of what color or creed or religion they might practice, as individuals. Let me put it this way: A lot of individuals are not human beings. I'd rather treat an individual the way I get vibrations from him as a human being. Consequently I have to practice it myself. I cannot expect my fellow brother or sister to be decent if I don't try to be.

You do meet people you don't like and that you're not compatible with. People meet me and dislike me, too, for some reason. I think when people feel like that, they should avoid each other, because life is too short to have to tolerate someone just for the sake of tolerating them, I don't think it's fair to them or to their intelligence. If you cannot make it with someone, then you both should go your own way. You've got to be fair to yourself before you can be fair to anybody else!

When you are onstage, are you singing for yourself, for the musicians or for the audience?

I'm glad you asked me that. That's one of the most important things in the world. I can answer this question better than a lot of other questions. I have to sing for myself. Let's look at this thing in the proper light. I am involved because I'm the one who is doing what I'm doing. Right? I'm only doing what I do because I want to please the people who have taken the time to come and hear me. I have to do it for somebody, because that's the only way I can find out whether I was right or wrong to feel good about whatever I've been doing. Consequently I sing for the musicians, too, because I need them to play competently behind me, doing what I want them to do for the people that are sitting there. So it really is a combination of doing it for everyone. If the musicians are good — and they have to be for me to feel good — I'm going to do my best for the audience; so it's really a combination of musicians, myself and audience.

I want the musicians to like it, too, 'cause if they don't like it they're not going to be able to play for me, even if they are competent. If they don't like what I'm doing and if they're only playing for the sake of the bread [money], it's no good. They've got to dig me. I dig them, 'cause I'm hiring them. Right?

Of course, my main way of earning a living is pleasing my audience, so that I can pay the cats and get paid, too, so I can go home happy. Actually it's a combination of pleasing everybody. If you can start out onstage pleasing each other, ninety-nine percent of the time you please the audience, too. Audiences know who you are, they know what you do and they have come to hear you in person. You have those three things going for you before you open your mouth. You only have to do your thing, 'cause that's what they came for. If you do it well and you're not inebriated or under the influence of anything, you'll be sincere, which is all you need.

It's such a beautiful business we're in, A.T. I guess all the arts are beautiful, but I think we have a better chance of feeling good about ourselves, and we have more incentive to go on, because we get confidence from the people who come to listen to us. The music business is one of the finest businesses in the world. You make contact with people immediately, and they tell you what they like and what they don't like, and that gives you a sense of what you're doing. You might want to go in one direction and they say no, they like the other way, so you go in the other direction. That's what you're really there for, to entertain. If I had to sing for myself, I would never hear a note, because I'm not here for that.

Do you consider yourself a jazz singer?

That's a question I have been asked many times. I am jazz oriented; if it weren't for jazz I wouldn't be anywhere. I only want to be categorized as a good or a bad singer. I originally started as a so-called jazz singer. I was dubbed that somewhere along the line, and I never really thought about it. I really didn't start out to be a jazz singer; I just started out to sing. But it was awfully hard, as it is for any musician, to play and not to improvise in some sort of way on the melody. If doing that made me a jazz singer, then yes, that's what I am. I have also done many tunes that couldn't possibly be called jazz tunes and made many single records that were not jazz.

Either people like what I do or they don't. They can say: "She has a good voice, but I wish she wouldn't do ..." I don't care, but they must not categorize me. I know what people expect when you sing a song, and if you scat, that's jazz; that's understandable. I hear people who are not categorized as jazz singers, such as Ray Charles, Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and many others who are all making exorbitant amounts of money. I haven't heard them sing one song the way it was written yet. If they can deviate from the melody, which is what is categorized as jazz, where does it begin and where does it end? What makes one person a jazz singer and another one not a jazz singer? Is it a question of how much improvising they do? I don't understand it.

Today we have contemporary music, a lot of which is fantastic. A lot of it is also garbage. I'm very happy about contemporary developments in music, because to keep doing all the rest of my life eight bars and a channel and eight bars, and 4/4 time and 3/4 time, would have driven me crazy. I'm happy we have 7/8 time and 5/4 time; I'm happy we're saying something different than moon June and love dove. I love what I'm doing now. I do Beatles tunes. Incidentally, I think they are excellent songwriters. I don't think they are great at singing or doing their thing, but their songs are fantastic. If they want to call them jazz, I don't mind just as long as they call me to do it.

Have you ever had any bad write ups?

Well, you don't get all your write ups everywhere you go, but I don't remember having had a critic that really spoke ill of me completely. I've seen what I consider bad write ups. I have had critics who didn't particularly like a certain thing I did but who really loved something else I did. The only thing I find wrong with critics is that they are inclined to describe what the singers had on and what their hair looked like. I'm sure that's important, and I'm not saying that's not good, but I don't think it has anything to do with the music. I think it's the singing that should be described. If it's criticized it should be criticized by someone who is an authority on the music you're playing and not someone who comes up to you and asks you the name of your latest album. Then they tell you about an album they had ten years ago. How can they judge an artist if they're not aware of what he has accomplished up to that point?

Everybody in the world wants good write ups. If somebody is going to criticize, let him be someone who knows his subject. I'm sick of people who are critics for a newspaper and who don't know a thing about what the artist is concerned with. Everybody gets a bad writeup now and then, so at least let it be from someone who is really unbiased. It's not easy, because human beings have traits they cannot live without, and one of them is being biased.

Let's say I'm a critic and I've come to review you; before I walk in through the door, I'm in love with your playing anyway. So you're ahead of yourself, and that isn't truthful either, any more than when someone who doesn't like you walks in and you've got two strikes against you. It's awfully hard to find someone who is really down the middle and unbiased, walking in to do a

completely truthful criticism of someone's art. You also have to remember that however good or bad criticism is, it's only done by one person — his own opinion, that's all you'll get.

What do you think about the Black Panthers?

I have a second cousin, a young lady, who is a Panther. Oddly enough, I'm very proud of her, because she believes in what she is doing. If a lot of us believed in something, we would be better off. In my view, in my eyesight, in my opinion, the Panthers are young men who are trying to right a wrong that's been wrong for a long time. But they're trying to do it in the shortest space of time, which is fruitless. Now that's my opinion, but I think they are more manly than a lot of men I've met, because they are willing to either get things right or to die. There is nothing more beautiful to me than people who believe in something, who have been in slavery for so long and who want to come out of it, wanting to do it and getting what they want or else dying for it. There are a lot of people who want a lot of things but who are not willing to die for it. They'd rather compromise, and there is no compromise with the Panthers.

They have gone about doing a lot of things that I don't particularly condone, but then I say to myself, if I were their age, if I had their knowledge ... I found out that they were superintelligent young men when I did a benefit for them to help raise money for Panthers who had been arrested very unjustly and had not been given bail because of something they thought the Panthers were going to do.

These Panthers were indicted for planning to blow up something. Well, that's a lot of nonsense. Say the government was right to arrest them, but they left them without bail or with exorbitant bails. It was like they were complete saboteurs of their country. I don't believe that. They are only looking for their rights, because they know life is short and we all need to live as human beings. In our country, the country we're born in, the country we pay taxes in, the country they want us to fight and die for, it's only right that these youngsters and everybody involved who are Americans should all enjoy the same benefits, I don't care what faith, creed or color. Why should some of us be expected to die for our country and then live in our country and really literally die in it. A lot of young people tend to be violent and maybe they have a right to be; I am not here to judge them but only to judge what I feel is right for me. I can't say what's right for you. If you think you ought to go out and kill seven people and I can't talk you out of it, go ahead, as long as I'm not one of the seven! I think the Panthers were treated very unfairly, and I wanted to do something for them, however little. I did it, and I'd do it again if they were right. If they were wrong, I wouldn't do nothing! I wouldn't care if it was my mama. Wrong is wrong!

Do you find traveling for your work a strain?

Yeah, it's a drag. I'm getting tired of it now because I've done it for so long. I loved traveling when I first started, but it's like anything else. I don't want to sit home too long, either. You try to find a happy medium, which I guess doesn't exist, anyway. I like to travel and I don't like to travel; I do it and I don't think about it. After I get where I am going, it's all worth it if the music is good and the people like what I do.

Tell me your impression of Bud Powell.

It's funny, but I think I got to know Bud better in Paris than I ever did in America. I don't know why. In fact, I don't think Bud and I ever exchanged more than fifty words in the many years that we knew each other. Sometimes I wondered if he even knew who I was. It really didn't bother me, because I knew who he was. I always loved him, and I still do. He was a phenomenal pianist, a cat whose potential never really got where it could have gotten to. I think our way of American life has a lot to do with it. Bud was looking for something and he didn't find it. If he had lived a little longer, he would probably have found what he was looking for. His piano playing to me was always a little frantic, never relaxed. He never relaxed, as though he was trying to do so much and get it all out because he did not have enough time to fool around. Even in ballads he had to get in so many notes, as though he might not get another chance to play the same tune again. He always gave me that impression. Art Tatum, great as he was and 93,000 years ahead of his time, was always relaxed when he played a ballad, however many arpeggios he made. Bud gave me the impression he had to get it all in right now. Every time you heard him it was another artistry, something else. I loved him; I hear things of his today being played and I ask who it is and they answer Bud Powell, and I say yeah, that was beautiful!

What were your impressions of Charlie Parker?

Yard was without a doubt my very favorite musician of all time. My favorite musician now is Dizzy. But Yard, I still hear things of his today that are so phenomenal I don't believe it. If they could take the background out of some of the things he did with strings or big bands and just put in a really up-to-date group, it would sound as though he had recorded it last week. In my estimation no one has caught up with this man. If he were still alive and doing what he did some twenty years ago, even if he never played anything other than what he was playing then, he'd still be up to date. He was one of the biggest musical influences in the world.

We were talking about Muhammad Ali earlier, and you got excited.

Let me tell you about this cat. Muhammad Ali is one of the nicest men I've ever met in my life. I met him for the first time in London, when I was doing a show called the Eamon Andrews show. On the show were Lucille Ball, Noel Coward, Muhammad Ali, Tom Jones and myself. People in London love Muhammad Ali to death. He sat on the panel and talked and he was extremely amusing with his answers. After the show, when we all went upstairs to have drinks and eats, that's when I really got to talk to him. This man is not at all like his public image. It's like a play or a mask that he puts on for certain things and then takes off as soon as he can be himself. He is a beautiful, soft-spoken, humble young man, besides being one of the greatest athletes I've ever had the pleasure of feeling. I felt his arms and legs and I have to say it was out of sight. It was just marvelous! He was a beautiful man who first of all respected women and particularly black women, which I loved, I adored that. He was very attentive and not fresh, but just as a man and a gentleman should be.

And then I saw him again when I did a thing called Operation Breadbasket in Chicago for the Reverend Jackson. He was there and we talked. I'm so happy they agreed to let him continue to do his craft, which he does so well. He has always been the champion, as far as I'm concerned. When they took the championship away, it wasn't taken away by another man, so consequently he was still champion to me. I hope he can continue to do his thing, because it helps so much to see a black man be champion and honestly be the champion, because that's exactly what he is.

What did you think when I asked if I could interview you?

I was really very pleased to know you were into something that we needed. To do what you're planning to do is really necessary, so that people will be enlightened about us, the things we do and think. I don't give a damn about older people, because they're into their thing and their minds are made up. What I'm interested in are the kids. I find the kids today so beautiful; they fight for anything they believe in, they're in sympathy with all the minorities, which is what we are called. The young kids are for anything that's right, and they'll get out and help you fight for what is right, for what you believe you should have. They are the ones I'm trying to get to. One of the greatest compliments I've had in this business is looking up and seeing young people in my audience.

I have always thought of myself as being a very sophisticated type of singer, talking only to people who have lived a little bit. But sophistication, I found out, is not for those who have lived any particular length of time; some of them are the dumbest people in the world. Sophistication has to do with the way you think, the way you want to live. It has to do with people thinking the same way about the same things. If it happens to be a teenager, then right on!

I have done a lot of things where I've had college kids who were so together that I was curious. Let me give you an example: I did a couple of one-nighters in the Catskill mountains, which caters mainly to vacationers. When you work at one of those places, you have a captive audience; in other words, they come on Saturday night and that's when the entertainment is. They come whether they dig you or not. I got compliments, of course, from the mothers and the dads who were in their late thirties and so on. But the thing that thrilled me most was having their fourteen-year-old kids come up to me and say, "Miss McRae, I really enjoyed that. I have two of your albums," and they could name them. I wonder what I do at my level that can get to a fourteen-year-old. Today I do some rock things and what we call

contemporary music. I only do the ones I identify with. The kids say to me: "We love you because you're so sincere." I can't ask for anything more than that. I try to be sincere, but how do they realize that at fourteen? You see, that's the thing about kids today.

They come out of their mother's womb so completely together and so much more intelligent. Who knows; when we were kids, if we had seen what they see, we would perhaps be as active as they are. Times change, things change and people change. If we had not become aware of fighting for civil rights in 1954, which is not so long ago, who is to say that we would actually have felt so vehement about it. I think certain times breed certain things.

We were very happy in the days of Fifty-second Street. We didn't think of the things we think about today, did we? The one who really made it prominent was our Martin Luther King. He changed the whole economic structure of Alabama. That was the beginning, and it all stemmed from that. We all knew then that it wasn't right, the things that were being done to us. But nobody really got up and said let's sit in, let's picket here, let's boycott this. I'm sure we all thought of it, but we didn't do it en masse. It was never discussed like it is today. Today it's prominent, not only with black people but with every living human being. That's the trend. If it had been the trend of yesterday, we would be doing something else today; I just think it's the kids' world, really. We have lived in it and we have really done our thing in it, and we were lucky. Whatever we've done and whatever we're doing now will be somewhere in time, in a book of posterity, that we were alive and that we contributed something.

Today there are a lot of kids who have died for what they believe in, and you will never know who they were. They died valiantly, not from dope or somebody shooting them, but because they believed in what they were doing for this world. They either wanted to change the world or die, and they died. They really have beat the game.

What do you plan for yourself in the future?

I would like to do some acting. I would love to try something else that is still a part of what I do, only without music. I wouldn't particularly want it to be a musical — not that I would turn a musical down — but I would prefer something dramatic or in the comedy field. I don't know if I can do it, but I sure would like to try.

Singing is a natural road to acting, yet none of our great singers, including yourself, has gotten into acting. You should try.

A lot of people have told me the same thing. First I would like to convince myself that maybe I do have a knack for it, but I'll never know unless somebody comes along and offers me an opportunity.

Do you listen to music when you are at home?

Yes, I do. I listen mostly to instrumental music. Being a lover of the piano, Oscar Peterson happens to be my favorite all-around pianist. There are many other pianists I love, but I won't go into it because there are too many of them. Oscar is my favorite because he encompasses everything. There are pianists I like because of one thing and pianists I like because of another. But overall I like Oscar best.

Since we are talking about pianists, what is it you look for in a piano accompanist?

That's a hard question. Accompanying someone cannot be explained by a singer to a pianist. He either knows what to do or he doesn't. An accompanist and a guy who can play the piano are two different things. You have to find someone who is completely sympathetic to the soloist as a singer and not to a soloist as an instrumentalist. It's a completely different thing. Even if a guy can play his buns off, it does not necessarily mean he can accompany a singer. There are some guys who can accompany a singer and who can't play worth a damn as far as soloing is concerned. That is the difference, and it's a vast difference. A guy must really love to do it. He cannot do it because he has nothing else to do.

Getting back to the music you like: what else do you listen to?

Of course, I listen to John Birks Gillespie, and to the Kenny Clark-Francy Boland band; I listen to Miles, to Freddie Hubbard, to Cannonball Adderley and to Blood, Sweat & Tears. These are my favorite groups I'm mentioning to you, and I know I'm going to leave some out. I love music only when I can communicate with it. If I can't communicate with it, it leaves me cold.

You asked me about avant-garde music. Well, that's what the avant-garde does to me; I'm sorry. If there are six people in a group and all six are playing something different, there is no way for me to know who to concentrate on or what's going on. If I go to a club to hear somebody, I'm going there primarily because I believe that they're going to play the kind of music that brought me in there in the first place. I believe if it's more than one person, there has to be some kind of discipline. It mustn't get to the point where there is no discipline. If you're playing by yourself, right on, anything you want. But when you've got three, four or five people, you start off with a mode of some kind or a set pattern of chords for all of you to play for the first chorus; then after the first chorus what happens? Where do they go? Why do they all have to go in opposite directions? When I find out how I

can get some musical satisfaction out of it, then I'll say, great, avant-garde, I dig it. But for the time being, I cannot.

What do you think about the vast publicity surrounding the use of drugs by musicians?

Well, I'll tell you, you've got to use something to be in this business, It's very hard to get by without drinking or smoking or whatever people feel they physically need to make it. This is not always because they had a bad upbringing and their parents weren't this and their mother was a whore and their father a drunkard. You can come from a completely normal family and have had a very normal and beautiful childhood, and when you get into this business, it's like something else. I think it's foolish for someone to try to destroy himself, but I do believe some sort of stimulant must be used by those who feel they need it in order to survive. If I feel that I need something and somebody else feels that he needs something stronger, then that's his thing. I can't say it's wrong. I just hate to see people — and it's usually the ones with great talent — who utterly destroy themselves by wanting something to stimulate them; after a while it's not a stimulant, it's a necessity.

It becomes a sickness because of what it does to you physically. But I'm not thinking in physical terms. I'm thinking in mental terms. If you feel you have to do something, I think you must be stronger than the will to destroy yourself. You must try to find something that you can cope with, that you can rule, and not something that rules you. That something, just the will to get out of bed, you must have from the start almost literally before you take your first breath. If you can't rule yourself you should go and take a gun and kill yourself, because that is better. You're putting not only yourself but the people who love you through all kinds of mental anguish, and that is not fair. If you were only doing it to yourself and nobody else cared, then I'd say right on. But not when people love you and have to sit around watching you destroying yourself . . .

I'll tell you this in regard to drugs. I am so proud and happy and love the cats I know who were so deep into it and have come out of it and are beautiful individuals. Maybe it sometimes helped to make them the great individuals they turned out to be. So how bad was it? But they are exceptions to the rule. I have known too many great cats who have died from it. That's when you wonder how it can be good. Then you look up at a cat that's been through it and licked it and come through and been a better man than before he tried it, so what do you say?

Do you use the same technique if you're recording, doing a radio show, at a club or at a concert?

You have to change according to where you are. If you're doing a radio show and there's nobody there but you and musicians and technicians, that's one thing. If you're doing a broadcast or a TV show in front of an audience, that's another thing. Doing a concert with nothing there other than the people you're entertaining is still another thing. If you're cutting a record in a studio alone with just the musicians, that's another thing again.

First of all, TV I can do without. I never feel too comfortable on TV, mainly because I can't see all those twenty or thirty million people that I'm supposed to be singing to. Consequently it's like singing to the audience in the studio. Right? Which doesn't make up one iota of the people who you're being seen by and who are the real judges of the show; that leaves me cold. I don't mind because eventually I can sit down at the panel and talk, and I hope I can make up whatever I lacked while I was singing with some intelligence.

I really prefer to sing in concert for people who have paid admission to hear me. I think I do my best in that atmosphere. I never do my best recording, because I never know the song until I record it and start doing it, and six months later it's right. Somebody says to you two weeks from now or four weeks from now, we're going to do a record; here are twelve songs. You learn them and you learn them, and you really learn them, But you don't know them until later.

You've never tried to do the numbers long before, say, in clubs?

I've never had the opportunity, unless it happened to be a song that I did with my trio and that I decided to put in an album with a big band. Then I know the song and I can do my thing. But not the songs that we sit down and pick out two weeks before the session. Some of them are utterly unfamiliar. I've never heard them before. Some of them I might know but have never sung before. It isn't really done right unless I dig the song and take out the rhythm-section parts after the session. Then we'll start doing it in clubs, and by the time the record comes out, I'm doing it completely different.

Carmen, I think we have a beautiful interview. We've been talking for days,

A.T. Is there anything you want to add?

I think this is a fantastic idea of yours. I love to voice opinions and to be among such people as I'm going to be involved with in this documentary that you're putting down in book form. I'm very flattered that you chose to interview me. I just hope I will be worthy of all the other people that you've interviewed and that I'll have contributed something to somebody.

—Cologne, Germany, October 30, 1970