A new project supported by the Newark Arts Council entitled "Black Newark" has launched a new public mural that stands tall at 1020 Broad Street at Newark Symphony Hall in Newark, New Jersey, paying homage to iconic figures who have shaped and impacted the city's rich cultural history, including a wall-sized piece dedicated to late trumpet innovator and Newark native Woody Shaw®.
The mural coincides with Newark Symphony Hall's 98th anniversary and is a celebration of Newark's artistic heritage as well as a tribute to the indomitable spirit of Black artists who forged new paths as American visionaries and pioneers of the 20th century.
The mural honors other musical legends like Sarah Vaughan, whose centennial will be celebrated in 2024, Jimi Hendrix, who performed a concert in Newark following the passing of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, as well as Queen Latifah, a Newark native, Henry Lewis, the first black conductor to perform at Newark Symphony Hall, opera singer Lyontyne Price, Salsa queen Celia Cruz, and poet and activist Amiri Baraka, all of whom have either performed at Newark Symphony Hall or contributed significantly to Newark's rich historical and cultural heritage. This mural isn't just art; it's a symbol of unity, community, and the power of collaboration. The mural was done by artists Ernest Shaw (no known relation) and GAIA.
The mural comes behind the reinstatement of the street sign for Woody Shaw named "Woody Shaw Jr. Plaza", which is located on the same street at Broad Street and William Street, near Newark City Hall, Woody Shaw's alma mater Arts High School, and the Grammy Museum Experience.
It also comes as a timely compliment to the reissue of Woody Shaw's groundbreaking debut album Blackstone Legacy, which Shaw "dedicated to the freedom of Black people all over the world.... and.... to the youth who will benefit mankind," to be released September 15, 2023.
The legacy of Woody Shaw is overseen by Woody Shaw Legacy LLC. All cultural and educational efforts are administered by The Woody Shaw Institute of Global Arts. For music business related inquiries, please contact us at licensing@woodyshaw.com. For technical or sales support, email us at support@woodyshaw.com
Craft Recordings and Jazz Dispensary will be reissuing Blackstone Legacy, the long out-of-print 1971 debut from influential trumpeter Woody Shaw on vinyl on September 15. Showcasing the musician’s virtuosic talents as a bandleader, composer and improviser, this politically charged, postmodern classic also boasts impeccable performances by Gary Bartz, Lenny White, Ron Carter, Bernie Maupin, Clint Houston and George Cables.
The latest release in Jazz Dispensary’s acclaimed Top Shelf series, Blackstone Legacy has been meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed on audiophile-quality 180-gram vinyl at RTI. The 2-LP album is housed in a gatefold tip-on jacket, featuring faithfully reproduced designs, as well as Nat Hentoff’s original liner notes.
A pioneering figure in modern jazz, Woody Shaw (1944–1989) was revered for his unique harmonic approach and innovative technical abilities on the trumpet. Raised in Newark, NJ, Shaw began performing as a teenager, gaining formative experience as a sideman for the legendary saxophonist Eric Dolphy and spending over a year in Paris, where he honed his craft in clubs across Europe.
In the mid-’60s, Shaw returned to the US, where he worked alongside such greats as Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Andrew Hill, Max Roach and Art Blakey. By the turn of the decade, however, Shaw was eager to branch out on his own.
Balancing the past with the future, Shaw sought to honor his bebop roots, while embracing the avant-garde. His debut as a leader, Blackstone Legacy, embodied that stylistic bridge. Recorded in December 1970 and released the following year on Contemporary Records, the album featured some of the era’s most exciting talents, including funk-jazz icon Gary Bartz (alto and soprano saxophone), veteran bassist Ron Carter and fusion pioneer Lenny White (drums), plus such innovators as Bernie Maupin (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet) and Clint Houston (electric bass), as well as the esteemed keyboardist George Cables, whose work as a composer is also highlighted on two of the LP’s tracks (“Think On Me” and “New World”).
In the album’s liner notes, Shaw spoke to Hentoff about his intentions behind the record. “We’re trying to express what’s happening in the world today as we—a new breed of young musicians—feel it. I mean the different tensions in the world, the ridiculous war in Vietnam, the oppression of poor people in this, a country of such wealth. . . . We’re all also trying to reach a state of spiritual enlightenment in which we’re continually aware of what’s happening but react in a positive way. The music in this album, you see, expresses strength – confidence that we’ll overcome these things.”
Shaw added that the album was dedicated to the era’s youth, as well as to “the freedom of Black people all over the world.” He continued, “The ‘stone’ in the title is the image of strength. I grew up in a ghetto . . . I’ve seen all of that, and I’ve seen people overcome all of that. This music is meant to be a light of hope, a sound of strength and of coming through.”
The six tracks on Blackstone Legacy are expansive, allowing each of the musicians to embark on heady, improvisational journeys. The album opens with the dynamic, 16-minute-long title track, during which Shaw shines as a leader, as he confidently guides the septet through the energetic composition. Another highlight is the free-bop “Lost and Found,” which boasts several impressive drum solos by White, as well as the joyful “Boo-Ann’s Grand” (dedicated to Shaw’s wife, Betty Ann). The Cables-penned “New World,” meanwhile, offers phenomenally funky interplay—particularly between the electric pianist and Houston, who delivers plenty of groovy wah-wahs on the bass. The record closes on a reflective note, with a tribute to Shaw’s late mentor, “A Deed for Dolphy.”
In his liner notes for the album, Hentoff extolled that Blackstone Legacy “is going to be a milestone, as it were, in a singularly influential career.” The critics agreed with that assessment. AllMusic declared it to be “a landmark recording, and a pivot point in the history of post-modern music.”
Blackstone Legacy launched a new era for Shaw, who would go on to release more than two dozen albums as a leader, including the Grammy-nominated Rosewood (1978). Throughout the rest of his life, the prolific trumpeter, flugelhornist and cornetist continued to perform regularly as a sideman, appearing on records by Azar Lawrence, Bobby Hutcherson and Dexter Gordon, among many others. Dubbed “The Last Great Trumpet Innovator” by NPR, Shaw also dedicated much of his time to educating and mentoring others, while his work directly impacted the “Young Lion” generation of horn players, including Terence Blanchard, Wynton Marsalis and Chris Botti—the latter two of whom studied under Shaw in the ’80s.
In addition to multiple Grammy nods, Shaw was universally respected by his peers, heroes and fans. Dizzy Gillespie said “Woody Shaw is one of the voices of the future” while Miles Davis declared “Now there’s a great trumpet player…He can play different from all of them” and Wynton Marsalis said “Woody added to the vocabulary of the trumpet. He was very serious, disciplined, and respectful towards jazz.”
(Originally published at uDiscover.com).
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To kick-off Jazz Appreciation Month (aka Woody Shaw® Appreciation Month), we take a moment to remember Woody Shaw's classic recordings as a featured artist on Blue Note Records from 1965 to 1985.
During the early stages of his career, Woody Shaw collaborated with some of the greatest bandleaders in jazz history, showcasing a rather broad range of versatility and musical ambition as a young and up and coming "sideman" that would foreshadow his later emergence as the two-time Grammy-nominated trumpeter, composer, and highly influential musical innovator of the 1970s and 80s.
Building upon the lineage of bebop and then what became known as "hard bop" of the 1950s, Woody quickly adopted the modern innovations that began to flourish during the 1960s, proudly following in the footsteps of his predecessors, most notably frontline virtuoso trumpeters such as Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. Over time, Woody came to inhabit the top tier of leading jazz trumpeters of his generation, working closely with many of jazz's most adventurous and experimental musicians and appearing on some of their most groundbreaking albums.
Throughout this month, we pay homage to some of Woody's collaborations as a featured artist on Blue Note Records with such trailblazers as Larry Young, Horace Silver, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Andrew Hill, Booker Ervin, Bobby Hutcherson and Freddie Hubbard. These recordings not only showcase Woody's immense talent, but also serve as a testament to his influence and impact on the jazz world.
To help you get started, we've put together a special Spotify playlist featuring 'The Complete Woody Shaw Blue Note Sessions' as a featured artist. We recommend listening to this playlist in shuffle mode to fully appreciate the versatility of Woody's output as well as the breadth of his contributions to the Blue Note canon of recorded music.
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An official street sign has been reinstated to commemorate the legacy of legendary jazz trumpet icon, innovator, bandleader and composer, Woody Shaw Jr. (1944-1989).
Through the coordinated efforts of Shaw’s son, Woody Shaw III and The Woody Shaw Institute of Global Arts, and with help from the City of Newark, NJ, on May 19, 2021, the 96th birthday of Malcolm X, the street sign was erected at the corner of Broad and William Street in Newark, New Jersey across from Newark City Hall, and has been named:
WOODY SHAW JR. PLAZA
Broad Street is of particular importance to the Jazz legacy of Newark and of America in that it was the location of many famed clubs frequented by the world’s most renowned jazz legends and performers, such as Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as many local legends such as Sarah Vaughan, James Moody and other Newark greats.
Broad Street is also where young Woody Shaw first began sitting in with his heroes, which launched his first foray as a teenaged professional musician and as an up and coming trumpet prodigy before finally being discovered by Eric Dolphy at age 18.
The street sign, reinstated on May 19, 2021, went up at a fortuitous time when the city of Newark has begun to relax its restrictions on attendance at culinary and commercial venues. Mayor Baraka officially began allowing the expansion of outdoor activities and eateries in the city on May 20, 2021.
We encourage local media, Jazz fans, students, and historians to take pictures of the sign, post to social media, and help commemorate the artistic legacy of Woody Shaw and his contribution to the rich musical and cultural heritage of Newark, New Jersey, a.k.a. Brick City.
For all inquiries please contact:
Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III
The Woody Shaw Institute of Global Arts
Email: ws3@woodyshaw.com
Website: woodyshaw.com
The Estate of Woody Shaw would like to thank New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and Newark, NJ Mayor Ras Baraka for issuing these two Official Proclamations (see below) to honor the 75th Birthday Anniversary of late trumpet legend and composer Woody Shaw (1944-1989).
This year, on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2019, Woody Shaw would have turned 75 years old. While he lived only 44 years, he left a tremendous impact on the world of music and blazed a trail forward that opened the path for countless musicians who continue to benefit from the sacrifices he made on behalf of his art, the trumpet, and music at large.
In the unfortunate absence of wider recognition for the invaluable contributions of many of our lesser-known but undeniably important musicians to this country's cultural heritage, I am proud and honored to see that the importance of Woody Shaw's cultural and musical legacy has been so eloquently articulated, and by two of the most prominent public servants of his home state of New Jersey.
Let this be a call to action and statement of pride to those of us who understand the intrinsic value of art in enriching the collective human experience during these often socially and spiritually trying times. And let it be a reminder of the need for us to defend, protect, and preserve the resounding sacrifices of our heroes and those who gave their lives to the vision of a more just and beautiful world.
Beyond All Limits,
Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III
The Woody Shaw Institute of Global Arts
ws3@woodyshaw.com
Dear Friends,
It is my pleasure to honor and recognize the 75th Birth Anniversary of the legendary trumpeter and composer Woody Herman Shaw, Jr.
Proudly raised in the City of Newark, Woody Shaw cemented his place in the pantheon of New Jersey's most distinguished and beloved musicians. From a young age he studied classical trumpet among some of jazz's most influential mentors and musicians and quickly grew to be a virtuoso respected around the globe. With every note and chord played, Woody touched the hearts and souls of people from all walks of life and inspired all of us with his love of the art. Although his life ended far too early, his legacy will continue to live on through The Woody Shaw Institute of Global Arts and through the deep and undeniable impact of his music.
I am humbled to join with Woody Shaw's family and friends in commemorating the 75th anniversary of his birth and to recognize the rich cultural legacy of artistic excellence he left behind.
My very best,
Phillip D. Murphy
Governor
WOODY SHAW, JR.
December 24, 2019
WHEREAS: WOODY SHAW, JR. was born in on December 24, 1944, in Laurinburg, North Carolina. He grew up in Newark, where he began his musical career as a bugler in the George Washington Carver, Junior Elks, and Junior Mason Drum and Bugle Corps in the 1950s. He studied classical trumpet under Jerome Ziering at Cleveland Junior High School and went on to attend Arts High School, playing in the local jazz scene; and
WHEREAS: WOODY SHAW, JR. left Newark in 1964 and moved to Paris to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, Eric Dolphy, with whom he had made his first recording debut. Shaw lived and performed actively as a working musician in Paris at the age of 19, performing with Nathan Davis and working with legends such as Kenny Clarke, Donald Byrd, Art Taylor, Dexter Gordon and other musicians living in Europe.
WHEREAS: WOODY SHAW, JR. received awards for his work as a Columbia Recording Artist, which included two nominations for Best Jazz Album and Best Trumpeter of the Year in DownBeat Magazine in 1980. Shaw gave lectures and master classes around the world, was nominated for two Grammy Awards for his 1979 “Rosewood” album, was widely acclaimed for his revolutionary jazz trumpet style, and is considered to be one of the last major innovators in jazz history. He died on May 10, 1989; and
WHEREAS: WOODY SHAW, JR. was one of Newark’s greatest musicians, an exemplar of our city’s long history as a center for music and jazz. He was described by WBGO CEO Cephas Bowles as “the patron saint of Newark” and he remains a role model, exemplar, and inspiration to new generations of jazz musicians, both from our city and across the world; and
WHEREAS: As Mayor of Newark, I salute WOODY SHAW, JR., as the City of Newark joins with his son, Woody Shaw, III, and his entire family to celebrate the 75th birthday of this talented and creative musician and Newark native.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, RAS J. BARAKA, MAYOR OF THE CITY OF NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, do hereby recognize:
WOODY SHAW, JR.
and I urge all residents, employees, and visitors in the City of Newark to join me in this special tribute to WOODY SHAW, JR..
SIGNED,
RAS J. BARAKA, MAYOR
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Source: The New Yorker. Published August 29, 2017
It's always terrific news when great music that has been hidden in the vaults is brought to light, but the excellent new release “The Tour: Volume Two,” featuring live European performances from 1976 and 1977 by the crucial modern trumpeter Woody Shaw, is shadowed by sadness: the label that released it, HighNote, lost its founder, Joe Fields, last month. Fields, who was eighty-eight, had been, for half a century, an important producer of modern jazz recordings. One of his labels, Muse, gave birth to many of Shaw’s best albums, starting with “The Moontrane,” from 1974, and also went back and released a wonderful, previously unissued session from 1965, “Cassandranite,” Shaw’s first date as a leader, recorded when he was twenty-one.
When Shaw made his first recording, as an unknown eighteen-year-old, in 1963, while a sideman with Eric Dolphy’s band, some listeners speculated that the name was a pseudonym for the trumpet hero Freddie Hubbard (and perhaps a ruse to get around contractual obligations). It was no such thing, and I confess that, though I’m a fan of Hubbard, I’d never have mistaken one for the other. Shaw’s tone is broader and grainier; his harmonic world is twistier. Shaw worked as a sideman for many of the great musicians of the time, including his longtime friend Larry Young (I wrote last year about some of their collaborations), Art Blakey, and Dexter Gordon; he also led his own bands, which included some of the younger great modernists, including Anthony Braxton, Billy Harper, Geri Allen, and Arthur Blythe. For the quintets of “The Tour,” Shaw was also officially a sideman—the group was nominally led by Louis Hayes (one of the most prominent modern drummers, who, happily, still records for HighNote), but Shaw is its dominant musical personality, and his improvisations shift the music from the delightful to the sublime.
The crucial tension in modern jazz is the one between sound and sense—between, on the one hand, harmonic structures that approach the breaking point of atonality and, on the other, the jettisoning of them altogether in favor of melodic (or non-melodic) impulses and extremes of sonic and textural experience. Shaw, who died in 1989, was poised at the boundary of this conflict. Though, as in “The Tour: Volume Two,” he performed many Great American Songbook standards and bebop classics, he infused them with a rhythmically asymmetrical freedom and a torrential imagination that launched phrases of a high-relief density that also reveal the composition’s hidden intricacies. He was a classicist with no nostalgia or academicism; he saw the forms of post-bebop jazz as vital because he transformed and extended them, made them the springboards of new and unexpected jolts of musical imagination.
The first track of “The Tour: Volume Two,” is the Jerome Kern song “All the Things You Are,” long associated with Charlie Parker (the introduction of the theme is a direct Parker quote). Shaw starts his extended solo lyrically and tints it with exotic harmonic colors before taking off into stratospheric profusions of notes too fast and too many to count, phrases that dart and dip up and down with a sharp sculptural spontaneity. In the bop anthem “A Night in Tunisia,” another Parker specialty, Shaw trims the music down, punctuating the rapid silence of the famous four-bar break with a puckish and perfectly placed handful of notes that leap out in unexpected directions. (Throughout the disk, Shaw’s key counterpart is the pianist Ronnie Mathews, with his whirlwind sense of sudden velocity.)
In this clip, Shaw takes on what is perhaps the supreme challenge for a trumpeter: “ ’Round Midnight,” which was composed by the pianist Thelonious Monk but raised to its apotheosis by the trumpeter Miles Davis, whose performance of it, at the age of twenty-nine, at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival definitively relaunched his career and heralded his enduring new style. It takes nerve for a jazz trumpeter to take it on, and the thirty-one-year-old Shaw rises to the challenge. He doesn’t attempt to match Davis’s gaunt yet monumental spareness. Shaw’s statement of the theme already packs a few quiet surprises, and he quickly builds his solo to a brashly florid intensity, setting off lyrical phrases with a percussive attack and building dramatically, as if line by line, to explosive, keening, expressionistic outbursts of a seemingly self-surpassing urgency.
P.S. The first volume of “The Tour,” from 2016, is also terrific, but different—it’s a recording of a single concert, and, though it offers fewer soloistic high points from Shaw, it’s an inspiring display of a band kicking up a fine rhythmic fury.
Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard."
In this installment of what was originally billed as the “Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet featuring Woody Shaw,” we get a glimpse into the band’s effective treatment of the standard repertoire — with the full scope of what the group brought to the table in terms of stylistic nuance and its unique adaptation of the traditional jazz canon.
This set is a compilation of performances recorded in different European cities during The Tour, which took place between 1976 and 1977. Following Volume 1, it offers a welcome shift in the narrative arc and trajectory of the band’s development — as well as a kind of a portrait or snapshot into the historical development of jazz at this particular time.
Much is to be gleaned from the masterful treatment and sense of ownership over these compositions exhibited by Woody, Junior, Louis, Ronnie, and Stafford. The seasoned, almost seamless manner with which these pieces are covered speaks masterfully to a level of reverence and unrelenting commitment to tradition that belies all claims (by omission) of deceleration concerning jazz’s momentum during the 1970s. As Woody put it in an interview referencing this very group — “by no means is jazz dead.” Clearly, this CD proves him right.
The set begins with Jerome Kern’s All The Things You Are. Woody Shaw takes the lead on the melody while Junior Cook ad-libs freely behind him in full fledged conversation that solidifies the authenticity of this cut - and the ongoing musical conversation shared between these men off the bandstand.
The one element that never fails to qualify the distinction with which Woody Shaw so boldly declares his presence on the first note of virtually every opening melody — is his tone! So much history can be heard in Woody Shaw’s tone even at this ripe age of 32 years old, still two to three years from what might be considered his prime emergence as the Woody Shaw of the late 70s and early 80s, that one could arguably teach a course on the entire history of jazz through his sound alone. No doubt, this was no accident.
Woody’s commitment to the sonic evolution of the trumpet was guided by an almost deep religiosity for the cultural history of the instrument that is as well-documented in text as it is audible on this recording. Upon first hearing his sound on the melody of All The Things You Are, one wonders if he wasn’t meditating deeply on the likes of Louis Armstrong just seconds before he stepped on the bandstand. Suffice it to say, the tradition is always present, and always felt.
The band is then heard covering Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night In Tunisia. Always an ode to Dizzy and Art Blakey, this piece evokes all that is integral to the essential feeling, mood, memory and nuance of what jazz is to the extent that any set covering standards without it would simply feel incomplete. The same can be said of the next composition, Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk. These two compositions, heard back to back, provide a beautiful time capsule in sequence through the bidirectional lens of these musicians’ masterful interpretation — simultaneously looking back to the forbearers of tradition while urging the progression of their culture forward, towards better hopes for the future. The love for history is as self-evident with every beat as is the vow to the music’s preservation so easily audible with every unfolding improvisational expression. Always in real time, it is, quite literally, history in the making. The future, ever growing more and more present. That is, “jazz” — the verb, not the noun. You dig.
The selection follows with John Coltrane’s Some Other Blues. This cut features Rene McLean on alto as the recording itself was made following Junior Cook’s departure from the group, which resulted from a little skirmish between Woody and Junior that won’t be delved into here. Rene was to become somewhat of an understudy of Woody’s in much the same way that Woody had played alongside Rene’s father, Jackie McLean, just ten years prior. The influence of Jackie on his son is easily apparent, and so too is Rene’s grasp of the idiosyncratic language once shared by Woody and Jackie when they played together. Louis Hayes brings to fore and to mind the regality of Art Blakey and Kenny Clarke with that reverberating bass-drum tone and accent that is so unmistakably his own.
Following up is perhaps one of the group’s most frequently performed compositions, Invitation by Bronislaw Kaper. The one striking distinction about this particular performance is that it covers the tune at break-neck tempo. There is a relentlessness to the swing that speaks to the temperament fueling this band’s mission and sense of purpose. An assertion and proclamation of jazz’s formidability and presence in spite of all that might suggest otherwise. Woody and Junior are heard playing their hearts out as if it wasn’t the one thousandth, but the very first time they ever played this tune together.
The CD concludes with Bob Haggart’s What’s New and features an elaborately constructed melodic masterpiece by Woody that closes with a cadenza exhibiting elements of the innovative intervalic language that he has long since become known for. The perfect closer. Carrying an entire tradition across each melodic line, illustrating for us not just where the music came from, or simply where it was, but precisely where it was headed.
The shared commitment that musicians have not only to the material, but to each other, is always one of the determining factors in the longevity any band's legacy. And in a wake of nearly 40 years from this particular band’s original inception, this group and these recordings remain as fresh and as relevant to what jazz truly is, as anything heard on the jazz scene then or now.
[Interview conducted by Maxine Gordon who was the road manager for the Louis Hayes-Woody Shaw quintet on their tour to Europe in 1976-1977].
LH: At the time we first formed the band [1970s], Junior lived in Brooklyn and I lived in Brooklyn and we had been together in Horace Silver’s band and were good friends. Cedar Walton came back from a tour of Europe and he said that there was a person in Holland who was bringing groups to Europe and that he would like for me to bring a band over.
I told him that I didn’t have a band that I was really working with at the time, but I thought real fast, and since there was this opportunity, I told him I would put a band together. Junior and I had a friendship personally and musically so the timing seemed right. He wasn’t committed to a band at the time and neither was I so he agreed to the idea. I hired Ronnie Mathews who was also in Brooklyn and a good friend, and could play on the same high level, and then we got Stafford James to play bass.
Woody Shaw was on the scene and playing great and he was glad to have the chance to work with us. It just seemed to work out perfectly. The idea of working in Europe and doing a tour was just what we needed. We came together as musicians who already knew that we could play together. We knew it was going to be a great band before we even played the first gig together. We had the right combination.
I knew Ronnie Mathews from Brooklyn. We would go to his mother’s home and she would cook for us and we would sit out in the backyard and enjoy ourselves and get a break from Manhattan. That’s when I first started knowing Ronnie. We were all playing a little before Ronnie but he was determined to catch up and he really wanted to play and to be recognized as one of the cats and he accomplished that very quickly. Ronnie was a very important member of the group he went on to be a very important person in this art form.
We spent a lot of time in the club Boomer’s which was in the Village on Bleecker Street. It was a very important place for the music in the 70s. You don’t hear too much about it or that period but there were lots of musicians working in there and lots of musicians in there to hear them. Cedar Walton worked there with Clifford Jordan, Sam Jones, and Billy Higgins. Bobby Timmons played in there. George Coleman played in there all the time with is quartet and his octet. In those days, musicians went to hear other musicians. The place could be packed with musicians and people who stayed all night to hear them. Serious jazz fans were there.
Woody would sit in with everybody. He would show up and take out his horn and he knew all the tunes and would play all night. The sets didn’t have any set time limit like now and I don’t remember how late we played but it was probably 4am before we got out of there.
Bob Cooper was the owner and he was so cool and welcoming to the musicians and the bartender was Bill Cherry. I don’t think there were too many black jazz club owners at that time. They made an atmosphere that made us want to play there and hang out there. That’s where I put the band together. I remember telling George Coleman that we needed someone to help with the band and he was the one who said, “Get Maxine.”
MG: One thing about Boomer’s was that it attracted a lot of women jazz fans because it was so cool and didn’t have that men’s club vibe that some places had. I remember that Pauletta Washington worked there as a waitress before Denzel [Washington] began his career.
LH: Woody Shaw was one of the chosen musicians of that time. Woody was making big history and we knew he was coming right behind Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. Everyone knew that Woody had something special to say. Woody was younger than us but he never seemed to be a young cat. He fit right in with everybody.
During that time in the early 70s, the musicians around us were all working on their craft diligently. It was a very creative time. No one felt comfortable just playing pretty good. Guys were practicing and were trying to raise the music to the highest level they could. It was a very creative time and we wanted to prove ourselves in order to be the musicians who could play with anyone and be ready for anything musically.
Woody had a sound and style that you knew that it was him in the first few notes that he played, that really makes you stand out, and makes you very important. Woody was a wonderful friend.
I’ve had the opportunity to play with some of the best trumpet players in my era. I had the opportunity to play and record a little bit with Dizzy Gillespie, with Kenny Dorham, with Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, and some others. The way I played with Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw was the same. We were strong, and healthy, and playing on a very high level.
We had a compartment on the train with six seats, the band plus Maxine as road manager. When the train stopped for a very short amount of time at our destination, we had the drums, the bass, the luggage and could get it all off the train (some things passed out of the window) before the whistle blew to announce the departure. We never missed a gig. We would arrive in a town and go to the hotel leaving Maxine with the equipment and luggage. She would have whoever met us at the train pack everything into a van or cabs and bring it to the hotel.We put the band together and went on tour for [promoter] Wim Wigt [pronounced Vim Vict]. The first band was called the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet featuring Woody Shaw. The first tour was six weeks and then we came home for a week and went back for another six weeks. We traveled by train and played gigs in Holland, Germany, Austria, and Belgium.
We worked six nights and had one night off to rest and recuperate. On the train, I would practice and keep my hands loose and Woody would be doing exercises with the mouthpiece or sometimes he would be writing music. Maxine was always reading those train books and working on the travel. We had lots of laughs about the expression on the conductor’s face when he would come into the compartment and see our group and Max would hand him the Eurail passes and the passports.
We would have dinner together most nights but Junior wouldn’t eat with us. He would go to the restaurant with us but then ask for a table alone. He said it took too long to get served when we were all there and he didn’t like to split the check. Junior carried his own black pepper and hot sauce with him and knew what he wanted to eat before he saw the menu. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the rest of us, he just had his way of doing things. Junior Cook was one special human being.
MG: I remember, we would get to the airport and stand at the counter, they would look at these people with the instruments and the tickets, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, just go ahead. [Hayes laughs] Just go ahead, whatever, just go ahead.’ They never looked at the passport and the ticket together. Ok, six passports, six tickets. Go ahead. That wouldn’t happen now.
LH: Yes, that’s why it was magnificent that you were there with us and with you handling the business part, that made it comfortable for us, and it made it work, and that was so important that you were there.
MG: What I recall about hearing Junior Cook every night for so many weeks is that on his studio recordings you never really get to hear how great Junior was, because he had claustrophobia and he had a thing about the microphone. But live he was so creative and so interesting and so funny and clever, and so different every night after night, that these live recordings will let people know, really, what a great player he was.
LH: I agree, Maxine, totally.
MG: In reflecting on this band and this music, I realized how different you all were from each other. Individually, no two were at all similar but together, you were another entity. When you came together to paly music, the understanding and communication was so fantastic.
One night in London at Ronnie Scott’s Club, Junior told us that he wanted to form a band with Blue Mitchell after the tour. (fill in year) When we got back to New York, Woody suggested Rene McLean and we went back out on the road to Europe. Now the band was called the Louis Hayes-Woody Shaw Quintet. Some of the music changed but the band stayed at the same high level. I don’t think young musicians now can even imagine what the touring was like and how we traveled all day, got to the hotel, took a shower, got dressed, and went to the gig and played our asses off.
One of the reasons this band is so good is that we worked so many days in a row in so many different countries and so many different situations but we always came to play no matter what. For all of us, it was about the music. We really helped each other. We wanted to play together and we wanted to play on the level that we thought was the highest level.
MG: So I guess we do owe our gratitude to Wim Wigt for booking that many gigs for that many months and years.
LH: He could find a gig anywhere.
The music on these CDs reflects what we were all trying to do and how far ahead Woody Shaw was and still is. This music sounds like today or maybe like tomorrow. I have so many great memories of this band and this time with Woody, Ronnie, Stafford, Rene, and Junior.
Four years in the making, Grammy© Award winning trumpeter Brian Lynch’s “Madera Latino” (Latin Wood) project, exploring the music of jazz innovator and master trumpeter Woody Shaw in a Latin Jazz format, is finally ready for release on Hollistic MusicWorks!
The music of the late, great Woody Shaw (1944-1989) - an innovative and highly individual musical lexicon, expressed through both his chosen instrument of trumpet and his equally distinguished compositions - set a standard of excellence and modernity for Black American Music that has not been surpassed in the 50 years since he first came onto the jazz scene. Madera Latino is an exploration of this giant’s music as viewed through the lens of authentic Afro-Caribbean rhythm and framed by the loving treatment of his compositions in virtuosic Latin Jazz style by Grammy© Award winning trumpeter Brian Lynch. It is also a heartfelt tribute to the genius of Woody by a all star lineup of today’s top trumpeters: Lynch, Sean Jones, Dave Douglas, Diego Urcola, Michael Rodriguez, Etienne Charles, Josh Evans, and Philip Dizack.
In trumpet combinations from duo to quartet, these eminent horns explore Shaw classics including In A Capricornian Way, Tomorrow’s Destiny, Zoltan, Song Of Songs, Sweet Love Of Mine, and more, along with two original pieces - one a extended suite - written by Lynch in salute to the profound influence Woody has had on him as a player and composer.
The band for Madera Latino fulfills the promise of Lynch’s audacious concept with élan, precision, and joyous creativity. Percussionists Pedrito Martinez and Little Johnny Rivero, along with bassist Luques Curtis, were integral to the success of Lynch’s 2006 CD Simpático, a Grammy@ Award winner in the Latin Jazz category. Add drummer Obed Calvaire, percussionist Anthony Carrillo, and pianist Zaccai Curtis, and a mighty rhythm section emerges to spur and challenge the trumpeters to their utmost efforts in praise of Shaw.
Producer, Brian Lynch
Associate Producer, Woody Shaw III
Watch the EPK For Madera Latino: https://youtu.be/QzHc6HZuBEQ
Preview a track from Madera Latino here: https://soundcloud.com/hollistic-musicworks/zoltan-feat-douglas-charles-urcola
]]>The legendary drummer and composer - and perhaps one of Woody Shaw's favorite musicians that worked in his band - is receiving an Honorary Doctorate degree from University of Nebraska—Lincoln - right in his home state.
Doctoral Ceremony Webcast:
To view the hooding ceremony and a concert by the University of Nebraska Jazz Orchestra with new arrangements of Victor Lewis' compositions, go to this link on December 8, 2016, at 7:30pm CST / 8:30pm EST —
Thursday, December 8th, 2016.
7:30pm CST / 8:30pm EST
On a personal note, having known Victor for more than 30 years, I simply can't express how happy I am for him that he is being recognized by his community for his longstanding contribution to music. In my estimation, there are few musicians who have been as devout, humble, and respectful to the legacy of this music and to those originated it, than Victor Lewis. Victor is currently instructor at Rutgers University where he teaches drums and composition.
Here is a rare recording of the Woody Shaw Quintet performing the Victor Lewis composition Why? in Seattle, Washington in 1979.
—WS3
]]>Here is an extended track of Woody Shaw playing Ah-Leu-Cha (by Charlie Parker) as a guest with the Archie Shepp Trio in Hamburg, Germany in May of 1976.
Recommended Article: Archie Shepp Interview - Knowing The Life
Concert Details:
May 21, 1976
Hamburg, Germany
Woody Shaw, tp
Archie Shepp, ts
Cameron Brown, b
Bearver Harris, dr
1. Ah-Leu-Cha
2. Solitude
3. Along Came Betty (1)
3. Along Came Betty (2)
4. Spain Street
5. 52nd Street Theme
Nearly 40 years ago, trumpeter-composer Woody Shaw and a number of other leading jazz musicians were signed to Columbia Records (1977) by then label President Bruce Lundvall. This new roster of artists signed to the label at the time suggested new hope for the genre and the possibility of broadening its reception through heightened record sales, wider publicity, international tours, increased airplay, and through critical recognition (validation) of jazz as a commercially viable genre.
It was during his tenure with Columbia that Woody released his most musically ambitious and commercially successful recordings, working with larger instrumentation and bringing to life many of his broader visions for his music. Albums such as Rosewood (1978), Stepping Stones (1978), Woody III (1979), For Sure (1980), and United (1981) became, and have since become, staples of devoted listening and advanced study among fans, enthusiasts, and students of jazz and of the trumpet all over the globe.
However, this was a time in which the broader eco-system and infrastructure of jazz as a whole was in one of its steepest periods of decline. And with the exception of publicly funded radio and college programming - disco, fusion, and pop predominated the urban airwaves. Meanwhile, the majority of musicians not prepared to acquiesce to the dual pressures of economic scarcity and artistic conformity found themselves without work, publicity, management, and with fewer and fewer resources and outlets to showcase the music they had spent most of their lives struggling, fighting, and in some cases even dying for.
Woody Shaw had himself endured many years void of proper recognition due to these conditions, and to his unwillingness to forfeit his own musical convictions. As such, the signing of Woody Shaw and others to Columbia Records represented a mild victory not only for jazz, but for the individual artists who had endured their fare share of rejection and criticism for their unwillingness to conform (a "victory" that quite literally set the stage for Columbia Records' subsequent renovation of their historic jazz roster in favor of their "Young Lions" campaign of the 1980s). Woody's debut album on Columbia, Rosewood, received two Grammy nominations (Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist: Rosewood and Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group: Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble, Rosewood) in 1978.
The United States was also recovering from a recession (1973-1976) at the time, most major cities were wrought by urban decay. The NYC fiscal crisis, which nearly resulted in the city's bankruptcy, led to budget cuts that depleted cultural funding, artistic programming, public transportation, and the public education system. Police corruption was rampant, violent crime had increased by 51% over the previous decade (from 1967), the Vietnam War had ended only two years prior in 1975 leaving the country in a $54 billion dollar deficit ($238 billion inflation-adjusted).
Organized crime, drug distribution and mass addiction had reached epic proportions throughout the inner city (i.e. particularly in East Harlem and the South Bronx in NYC). The summer of 1977 was also the time of the legendary NYC blackout, which unfortunately coincided with the emergence of an infamous figure known as the "Son of Sam." And all the while, the United States had just inaugurated its 39th President, Jimmy Carter.
Yet in spite of this thick cloud of existential uncertainty and moral degradation that hovered over and across much of the country, there remained a few glimmers of hope. As it turned out, those who possessed the intestinal fortitude to thwart conformity and forfeiture by maintaining their loyalty to the promise of creative music would soon help reinvigorate the entire jazz scene.
One of the more intellectually aggressive, outspoken, and articulate representatives of this constituency was a 33 year-old trumpet master and composer from Newark, New Jersey named Woody Shaw. Woody's music was unique in its ability to deliberately convey the necessity of artists to confront and reconcile with conditions that remained hostile to their creative existence — and particularly to those among them not willing to accept the dominant cultural and political narratives of their time.
40 years after his first emergence into wider public recognition, it is evident that the critical messages of artistic freedom, integrity, truth, and self-determination expressed within his music were as reflective of the conditions that he and his contemporaries faced then, as they are relevant to the very conditions that we face right now.
[Written on 10/31/16 - one week before the 2016 election, two months from the 2017 inauguration of the 45th POTUS, and nearly 40 years after Woody Shaw signed to Columbia Records and his first Grammy-nominated album, Rosewood, was recorded.]
As it turns out, three Woody Shaw-related projects have been submitted for Grammy® Nominations this year. To be honest, this is not something I normally pay particular attention to, but since it is a rather rare occasion to see even ONE project of Woody Shaw's submitted for consideration, I thought I would mention it.
So here they are:
Woody Shaw III
Associate Producer and Author of Liner Notes
Grammy® Nomination Submission: Best Album Notes (Category 67)
Resonance Records
I was very honored to have had the pleasure of participating in the production of this illustrious 2-CD boxset as Associate Producer and Author of CD booklet notes.
Larry was an elder mentor and contemporary of my father's. They both grew up together in Newark, New Jersey and it was to Larry that my father attributed the basis of his style on the trumpet. Because of their association, I have always been very mystified by Larry and have always admired what he accomplished in music. In many ways, like Woody's, Larry's legacy has not been given the true respect and recognition that it justly deserves. There is no dispute that - again, like Woody - he was a creative genius, an innovator, and an absolute visionary of a musician.
Thanks to Resonance Records, however, more people will now be able to learn about Larry's early explorations with Woody Shaw (and Nathan Davis and Billy Brooks) during their residence in Paris, France in the mid-1960s. This was a period in which many of the stylistic traits that both Woody and Larry would later develop - took shape, and as such this CD set is also the veritable precursor to Larry's 1965 Blue Note album, Unity, with Elvin Jones and Joe Henderson.
Woody Shaw's 1964-65 journey to Paris, France at age 19 (and his subsequent invitation to Larry Young and drummer Billy Brooks to join him) was actually the subject of my research colloquium as a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University in 2015.
If you enjoy the essay and are a member of NARAS (Grammies®), please feel free to vote!
Woody Shaw III
Producer and Author of Liner Notes
Grammy® Nomination Submission: Best Historical Album (Category 68)
High Note Records
“One of the most electrifying acoustic jazz albums of the 1970s.”
—Marc Myers, JazzWax
Another project that I am glad has seen the light of day is this 1976 recording of the Louis Hayes—Woody Shaw Quintet entitled The Tour (Vol. 1).
This recording predates my father's signing with Columbia Records and, to me, it captures him at the cusp of an important transition in his musical development prior to becoming a bandleader and focusing on his own music.
The band features Louis Hayes on drums, tenor legend Junior Cook, Stafford James on bass, and Ronnie Matthews on piano. Hayes, Cook, and Woody all played with Horace Silver and shared common bonds through affiliations with many of the same bands and musicians.
The CD documents a certain attitude that Louis Hayes and Woody Shaw shared about the state of jazz during the mid-1970s that helped spawn the creation of the group. Woody discusses it in this interview.
High Note Records, owned by Joe Fields, also happens to be the modern incarnation of the once legendary Muse Records of the 1970s, where Woody recorded many of his classic albums such as The Moontrane (1975), Love Dance (1975), Little Red's Fantasy (1976), Live at the Berliner Jazztage (1976), and Iron Men (1977).
Wall Street Journal writer and jazz blogger Marc Myers has written a great review of the recording on his blog JazzWax, which helps clarify and contextualize its importance for listeners.
One Shaw enthusiast on Facebook even remarked that the CD is "one of the best Woody Shaw recordings I've ever heard."
Woody Shaw III, Associate Producer
Grammy® Nomination Submission: Best Latin Jazz Album (Category 35)
Hollistic Music/Works
Last but not least, after 5 years since it was first recorded, trumpeter-composer Brian Lynch has finally released this ambitious passion-project dedicated to one of his major trumpet heroes. The project is a 2-CD set that includes a wide selection of Woody Shaw's original compositions arranged for large latin jazz ensemble. Brian orchestrated some of Woody's most notable compositions for groups of trumpets, along with latin percussion and jazz rhythm section.
While I admittedly did little more than co-sign the project and discuss its trajectory with Brian over the years since its inception, this project has a certain sentimental value that is often lacking when it comes to musical tributes and which thus warrants its validation from the Shaw family. If you know Brian Lynch, you know the depth of his reverence for all the great musicians, and especially historic trumpet players, who have preceded and inspired him. He has always shown a great deal of respect to the predecessors that set the stage for subsequent generations of jazz trumpet players, so as far as I'm concerned, this project should be recognized for its respect alone - but also for the discipline, effort, and labor invested into the commemoration of one of the trumpet's last true innovators — by no means a simple task.
Plus, from what I have seen, few other musicians as of late have taken the liberty of adapting Woody Shaw's music into a whole new style or new instrumentation. Until someone else steps up to the plate, Madera Latino holds that torch.
Musicians on the recording include:
Brian Lynch, trumpet
Sean Jones, trumpet
Dave Douglas, trumpet
Michael Rodriguez, trumpet
Etienne Charles, trumpet
Diego Urcola, trumpet
Josh Evans, trumpet
Philip Dizack, trumpet
Bryan Davis, trumpet
Zaccai Curtis, piano
Luques Curtis, bass
Obed Calvaire, drums
Pedrito Martinez, timbales, congas
Little Johnny Rivero, congas, percussion
Anthony Carrilo, bongo, campana
Produced by Brian Lynch
All music arranged by Brian Lynch
Associate Producer: Woody Shaw III
]]>
by Linda Reitman
In a recent interview with Leonard Feather, Miles Davis laid to rest all myths about who's really playing the trumpet these days. Asked about Freddie Hubbard, Miles responded, "All technique, but no feeling." On Wynton Marsalis: "All the [young] trumpeters copy off of Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Dizzy...."
How about Woody Shaw? ...Miles Davis replied: "Now there's a great trumpet player. He can play different from all of them."
Dexter Gordon summed up Woody Shaw's trumpet prowess succinctly: "The thing about Woods is he's done his homework. He’s hip to Louis Armstrong, plays intervals and runs backwards so to speak. He breaks it down, plays atonal, and then comes back and plays real trumpet. Woods covers the whole spectrum."
Shaw's conception of music however does not stop with the trumpet, and Shaw is quick to emphasize that he has listened to and learned from many saxophonists and pianists. He credits John Coltrane with leading him into the pentatonic scale and to the use of wider intervals. And with McCoy Tyner, Shaw gained experience and found the music to be “wide open, leaving room for you to express yourself."
A look at Shaw’s musical association serves to illustrate a background which is both varied and colorful. His father was a member of diamond Jubilee Singers, a gospel group which toured extensively across the South and through parts of the East. Woody first picked up the trumpet in the sixth grade in Newark, NJ, and studied with Jerome Ziering, who taught him privately as well. Shaw later made all-city and all-state orchestras, and found himself playing in the school bands during the day and gigging at night with Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Tyrone Washington, and Larry Young, the latter providing him with challenging harmonic concepts.
In the early '60s, Shaw played with Eric Dolphy, and later in Paris, with Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell, Donald Byrd, and others. He replaced Carmell Jones in Horace Silver's group in 1965; jammed with Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, and Jackie McLean from 1966-67; and played with McCoy Tyner on and off from 1968-70. He performed with Gil Evans in 1972 and Art Blakey in 1973, before joining the Louis Hayes/Junior Cook Quintet where he assumed co-leadership with Hayes after Cook's departure. In 1976 Shaw started leading his own bands.
Although recent years have seen Woody Shaw take on the role of jazz clinician, Shaw is quick to dispel any rumor that he is eager to set aside his trumpet for a textbook. Shaw's image reveals him as a trumpeter and bandleader of considerable stature. He prefers to inspire prospective musicians with the message inherent in his music. thereby "making them aware of what is possible in the creative process."
The current Woody Shaw Quintet represents a culmination of Shaw's growth, and he emerges as a bandleader to be reckoned with. Arguably, this is his finest band and certainly it's one of his more unusual, as evidenced by the all-brass front line. Shaw is heard primarily on trumpet and flugelhorn, occasionally on cornet: with Steve Turre on trombone (and conch shells), the band is rounded out by pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist Stafford James, and drummer Tony Reedus. On United, Shaw's fifth (and last) LP for Columbia, their group chemistry was exhibited in full force. Sadly, the record industry's economic woes prevented the album from receiving the support necessary for its success. With Master of the Art the Woody Shaw Quintet has reunited with former CBS Records executive Bruce Lundvall on his new jazz label, Elektra Musician. The album features the quintet augmented by vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, recorded in performance at New York's Jazz Forum. Shaw speaks enthusiastically about this live recording of the group. And the fact that it succeeds in capturing the band at the apex of its performance level is yet another source of satisfaction to Woody Shaw.
Woody Shaw: It's been a challenge of mine for the past few years to get the band to such a level on record. After our six-week European tour together, we had worked up our creative capacity and technical ability to a high. It went down so smoothly and was so enjoyable. In fact, that I forgot it was a recording session.
Linda Reitman: By what criteria did you choose your present band members?
WS: I chose each member on the basis that I heard their potential, the fact that they believed in me and respected me as a leader, and the fact that I could learn from them as well. That was the key to the success of musicians like Art Blakey and Horace Silver. As a leader, you acquire and use the knowledge that you've experienced. So I go on the basis that I can teach a musician, if he lets me, but I also have to get something in return and learn from him. That's one of the keys to being a bandleader. You surround yourself with musicians who inspire you. Many people have mentioned that each member of my band is uniquely qualified to distinguish himself. Now that's something that I also demand of my musicians. I have found that the acceptance of my quintet has been overwhelming, and I believe that's partly due to the blend of trumpet and trombone. It's a very unique and innovative sound for today.
LR: Your trombonist, Steve Turre, appeared on several of your past albums before becoming a member of your present quintet. How did you find him?
WS: I met Steve in 1972, when I was residing in San Francisco, and we struck up an immediate rapport. Although he wasn't quite the player he is now, I could see it happening. Steve has been very instrumental and influential in the music that I write and record, and he’s one of the few people whom I will allow to arrange my music. I've watched this band grow during the two years it's been in existence. My pianist Mulgrew Miller is growing into a very brilliant player; Stafford James is one of the major voices of the contrabass; and I've watched Tony Reedus grow to become a phenomenal drummer. One of the characteristics of my band is that we play in many varied styles. We play in the mainstream tradition, the avant garde tradition and we play in the bebop tradition which is the basis of modern jazz. What I'm doing now is a culmination of all the experiences I acquired during my 10 years as a sideman to try to use whatever I feel at the time, as well as what is apropos to the audience before me. The audience plays an important part in a musician's development, and after a while he's able to develop a rapport with them.
LR: Many people are of the opinion that bebop is old-fashioned. Do you think that your association with bebop is preventing you from being accepted by a larger audience?
WS: No, I don't, because bebop is the foundation of modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie is still here, alive and well, to attest to that. And many of his innovations that went on with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach are still being practiced today, but in a different form. The music still lives. Although I'm not a bebop musician per se, I respect all of the transitions that modern jazz has gone through. And the catalyst for my whole conception was Louis Armstrong, because he was one of the pioneers of jazz — period! I draw my needs and inspiration from the music that has happened before me as well as what's happening now.
LR: How do you manage to keep coming up with fresh musical ideas?
WS: Again, it comes from my respect for tradition. I admire the innovations of today, but at the same time, I'm aware that there were others before us. I consider myself a contemporary musician but many times I find myself running into obstacles, whereby I'm unable to compose and my playing seems stymied to a certain level. I go back and listen to the music that came before me like Clifford Brown and Louis, and I'm able to go forward. The trumpet is the prince of horns, and I have a high esteem for it. It's a very sacred instrument. So I find that at times I have to go back in my history to find new things. A lot of musician’s have forgotten about that. We are all linked to a legacy.
LR: Do you anticipate at some point experimenting with more commercial forms of music?
WS: It's like this; if I stick to my convictions, I can work for the next 20 years. If I change now, I could ruin my career. I've seen it happen to others, some of my contemporaries who are just a little older than me. By sticking to my beliefs, I'm even more strongly convinced I'm going in the right direction. As I see it, the position of jazz in the record industry is a position of longevity. It's not something you can make a quick profit from.
LR: Are you of the opinion that today's younger musicians would learn more from listening to the early innovators than they would by reading the various technical books that have gained popularity recently?
WS: Jazz, to me, is an expression of what the American black man has experienced. In recent years jazz has acquired the academic respect that it lacked some 20 years ago, but it was developed from experience. Jazz is a life style — you have to live jazz. Some of the jazz clinics that I've been involved with, with David Baker and Jamey Aebersold, have helped to introduce jazz to the layman, and it has probably been very helpful to him. But a lot of musicians find that after they've left the various institutions - Berklee or whatever - they’re very frustrated. This music is based on paying dues; there's more to it than just going and acquiring knowledge academically. When young musicians ask me, "Where did you learn to play jazz?" I answer, "I grew up with it." A musician is very fortunate to be able to go to some of these institutions to learn the music from a technical standpoint, but it's not all based on technical and theoretical knowledge. Its value is also very esoteric, and deals with the development of American culture. Jazz is a very highly developed form of classical music.
LR: It's interesting that you use the term "classical music" to connote jazz, because many young people are critical of the intellectualism usually associated with classical music. I've heard some of them; in fact pass jazz off as "chamber music."
WS: When you sit down and listen to a Beethoven symphony, you're listening in an intellectual capacity, yes? And it takes a certain amount of intellect to listen to what I'm talking about, the classic jazz which may be contemporary or traditional. It takes a certain amount of intellect to listen to jazz but at the same time it's highly emotional and expressive of various roods. It draws from the Afro-European experience - and that's what makes it unique - yet it's an American art form. My concern now is with promoting the legacy of the trumpet. I've tried to pass on my experiences to young musicians like Wynton Marsalis and his young man has greatly inspired me by combining the experience of New Orleans with his academic background of Juilliard. I have a need for a young man like that. because there's a certain rivalry that goes with playing the trumpet; somewhere out there, there’s always a challenger. It's a very difficult instrument to play and it takes a certain personality to play the trumpet. I always keep my ear open for new trumpet players.
LR: Would you elaborate on what this "certain personality" is?
WS: Check out the personalities of the better trumpet players. There has to be a certain amount of confidence that goes with playing that instrument. In general, good trumpet players usually have fiery personalities, and they're usually in good physical condition, cause it takes a lot of physical prowess to play the instrument. I've been studying a form of Chinese exercise called Tai Chi for the past two years, and I've found that it helps enhance my physiological power on the instrument, and it also gives me better concentration. You need certain mental characteristics to play the trumpet. It takes a strong constitution, because there are many physical handicaps to playing the trumpet. You have to have both mental and physical prowess to play this instrument.
LR: Do you view the trumpet as more of a physical instrument or a mental instrument? Do your experiences with Tai Chi allow you a greater freedom and flexibility on the trumpet?
WS: It's a very physical instrument. It has only three valves as opposed to 88 keys on the piano and 22 keys on the saxophone. So it takes a great deal of mental concentration to play it, and to play in all of the chromatic keys in the 12-tone theories. After practicing Tai Chi, I have found that I'm able to apply different methods for concentrating mentally and physically. I'm always searching for different venues to express myself. And you have to have a certain amount of discipline to reach that, a certain peace of mind. I haven't found it yet, but I'm looking for it. Each time that I come across it, however briefly, my creative output increases.
LR: How do you view your role as teacher, via your jazz clinics held here and in Australia?
WS: In recent years since I've become a bandleader. I've gotten away from the teacher-clinician role. I'm aware of the fact that I did inspire many young musicians coming up to learn about jazz. But I think most of the musicians who have met me or heard me are inspired by the fact that they see what I'm doing both as a leader and as a trumpeter, through my musical repertoire. My contribution is to be able to inspire and leave a message; I'm not interested in being a teacher. I'm still trying to develop as an artist myself, and all of my energies of late have gone into being a bandleader. When I leave the bandstand, I want the audience to be aware, and not forget me.
LR: Your sound on trumpet is big, with considerable flexibility. Do you still practice various exercises, particularly the more difficult ones, or do you find that your practicing is done when you perform on-stage with your band?
WS: The latter is more suited to me. I've seen some musicians who practice all day, but when they get on the bandstand, they can't play a thing. Practice is essential definitely, in developing any particular craft, but I find that it's best for me to play with my band as much as possible. Even when we're off, I try to rehearse this band at least twice a week, to keep in good shape. If the need arises where I'm unable to execute a phrase on-stage, I'll go home and practice it, but I don't want to practice to the point where I sound mechanical. Playing with my band is like roadwork - it keeps me in shape. My thing is being able to take what I've learned through observing and practicing, and apply it to my role as performer and bandleader.
LR: How would you describe the Woody Shaw sound?
WS: I think I'm a very intelligent, cerebral type player, insofar as the notes I choose or the harmonic daring I use, but I also try to play with a pretty sound. Some of what I've done on trumpet has been associated with the innovations of John Coltrane, because I use more of a saxophone style, as applied to the trumpet. Saxophone players can identify with what I'm doing, because I use intervals of fourths, fifths, and pentatonic scales. I don't have a saxophone in my band now - nothing personal, it's just that I think it's time for the trumpet to be considered the major, innovative instrument. It's the prince of all horns, the most pronounced and most profound-sounding instrument. If anything is to be announced or introduced, it's usually the trumpet that does it. There is a certain royalty associated with the trumpet and a regal quality to its sound.
LR: In an interview with Nat Hentoff conducted at the release of your Blackstone Legacy album, you indicated that you were trying to express what was happening in the world, and that you hoped to reach a stage of spiritual enlightenment, whereby your music would become "a light of hope, a sound of strength." That was 12 years ago. Do you still hold such views?
WS: Yes, I do. I haven't found it yet, but I'm still looking. You must always maintain a certain level of awareness of what is happening in your environment, and in the universe itself. And you must also maintain hope when observing the state of affairs in the world, because, as in all forms of art, it comes out. It comes out in the music. I just want to make my contribution to the art form and express my musical feelings and thoughts through my music. And that comes from my awareness of what is happening around me. Once I get on the bandstand - it's like the altar - it transcends all negative feelings. One-hundred percent of me goes into being a creative musician, because I want to contribute to this beautiful art form called jazz.
]]>
Here is an excerpt from a selection of reviews written by late New York Times music critic Robert Palmer in December of 1977, which included new album releases as eclectic and varied as the works of Ludwvig Van Beethoven - performed by the London Symphony Orchestra - and the latest recording to date by Woody Shaw entitled Love Dance (featuring Joe Bonner, pn; Billy Harper, ts; Steve Turre, tb; Cecil McBee, bs; Victor Lewis, ds). The title of the article could be taken as more than just a mere reference to the primary subjects of review, but perhaps also as an inference to the underlying continuity and quality shared by the two legendary artists whose names he chose to highlight: Beethoven and Shaw.
As many of Palmer's reviews of Woody Shaw often were, this article is rife with references to Woody's overt respect for the aesthetic tradition of acoustic improvisational music ("straight ahead" jazz), which faced the growing threat of obsolescence and almost total commercial abandonment during the (mid-)1970s. In addition to his many other contributions to the music by way of his innovations on the trumpet, as composer, and as bandleader, Woody Shaw's impact on the up-and-coming and aspiring jazz musicians of his time - and on those who succeeded him - was largely shaped by this steadfastness in character and by his total commitment to authenticity, individual craftsmanship, and artistic integrity - persistent themes throughout his highly active and prolific two-and-half-decade-long career.
—
by Robert Palmer
Album Review: Love Dance (Muse Records 5074)
27 Dec 1976
Amplified, rock-influenced, "cross-over" music dominates jazz record sales these days, while critical attention is often focused on the avant-garde. But some young musicians are still working in the jazz idiom of the 1940s and 50s, and one of the best of them is a trumpeter in his early 30's named Woody Shaw.
Mr. Shaw is not an archivist. His influences include Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane, two of the more advanced musicians of the 1960s. But he chooses to work out his ideas in the context of popular song forms, and the choice is a wise one. Mr. Shaw is blessed with an exceptionally lyrical and inventive imagination and a sophisticated harmonic intelligence, which would be largely wasted in a more avant-garde context. He is also a very personal player, whose big but slightly bitter-sweet sound is unmistakable.
"Love Dance," Mr. Shaw's second album for Muse, is a very nearly ideal showcase for his talents. The assisting musicians are excellent, especially the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, and the composition, voiced in bright, ringing harmony for four horns and a five-man rhythm section, are substantial. The album's fault is that Mr. Shaw does not feature his own playing enough. It is to be hoped he will record soon with a smaller group and give an even better indication of his abilities.
Love Dance
]]>Robert Iannapollo
Cadence Magazine
Independent Journal of Creative Improvised Music
(Oct 2012): pp 68-69.
Woody Shaw's neo hard- bop albums for Columbia [Records] in the late 1970s were highly regarded and paved the way for Wynton Marsalis and his young lion cohorts' hard bop revival. But Shaw also had a sense of adventure. Early on he recorded with Eric Dolphy and Archie Shepp. As late as the mid-1970s he recorded an album with Muhal Richard Abrams and Anthony Braxton in the lineup. He even played on Pharaoh Sanders' Deaf Dumb Blind album. The strength of Shaw's later albums derives from his experiences with these players. Because of these experiences, his brand of hard bop never felt stale or like a retread. Woody Plays Woody is a curious reissue/compilation. It consists of six lengthy (all over ten minutes) live tracks that were composed by Shaw. They were all previously issued on a series of 4 CDs called Woody Live, released by High Note between 2000 and 2005. The original recordings were done between 1977 and 1981.
These were prime years for Shaw and his groups were at their best live. And it's nice to showcase compositions by Shaw. Several of those featured here should be much better known and played. "Stepping Stone" is a particularly fast and feisty line that opens up a lot of possibilities. But what's a bit disappointing is that all of this material has been made available before. And the original Woody Live recordings are not that difficult to find. All of that said, there are several things to recommend about this compilation. The music here is superb and his groups (particularly the one with Carter Jefferson on soprano sax) sound as if they're on fire. The choice of compositions is a good cross section, from the carefree jaunt of "Organ Grinder" to the maze of "Stepping Stone." Also there are illuminating liner notes by Shaw's son. So, if you have all of the original recordings, you don't need this. But if you're looking for a good summation of Woody Shaw at the peak of his powers, check this one out. But let's hope there's more archival material waiting to be issued (especially from his earlier years as a leader around the time of Blackstone Legacy.)
by Robert Palmer. March 30, 1977.
In the modern jazz mainstream, an area bounded chronologically by the hard bop of the early 1950's and the Modal playing popularized by Miles Davis and John Coltrane during the early 1960's, Woody Shaw is the reigning trumpet king. Freddie Hubbard is stiff competition, but Mr. Hubbard is mining the disco vein, leaving Mr. Shaw to explore a purer vision.
During the last few years Mr. Shaw has worked mostly with a quintet that sounds like an updated version of the Jazz Messengers, but recently he has been performing odd engagements with his Concert Ensemble, boasting four horns with a rhythm section.
The music this group plays bristles With energy and has a more contemporary slant than the Woody Shaw‐Louis Hayes Quintet. A number of the tunes have a Coltrane‐influenced harmonic flavor, and the close voicings played by the horns, which give the group a big‐band sound, are beguilingly reminiscent of the sort of charts Booker Little and Eric Dolphy used to turn out.
At the Village Vanguard on Monday evening—the group will be performing there again April 12 through 14—Mr. Shaw proceeded from strength to strength. His gently bittersweet, deeply personal sound and fertile melodic imagination were matched by some superb improvising from Rene McLean on alto saxophone and Ronnie Mathews on piano.
Wilby Fletcher was an intelligent powerhouse on drums—a rare combination — with Buster Williams prodding aggressively on bass. Carter Jefferson on reeds and Steve Turre on trombone took solos of their own and rounded out the ensembles.
]]>These recordings are of particular significance given the deep history that Larry Young and my father shared coming up in Newark, New Jersey. Knowing what we know of Newark as a hotbed of indigenous talent and the incubator of so much musical innovation, having produced artists like Wayne Shorter, Sarah Vaughan, Grachan Moncur III, James Moody and so many others, it is clear that Woody Shaw (1944 – 1989) and Larry Young (1940 – 1978) were destined to achieve something significant by the very shape and fate of their geography.
However, there is more to this than the simple hometown cliché of dreams fulfilled by two young visionaries on the quest for self-realization. This recording is, in fact, the precursor to what we know of as one of Blue Note Records's more eclectic iconographic masterpieces, an album that crosses all seeming boundaries of musical taste and generational identity: Unity. And while the CD (or perhaps LP) that you have before you exists in most part due to the towering status of its lead subject, there were in fact a number of other characters who helped orchestrate its existence, and that of its later offshoot.
As legend has it, it was Dr. Nathan Davis who sought out Woody Shaw in 1964 in fulfillment of the echoing last request of the great multireedist and composer Eric Dolphy (1928 – 1964), Nathan’s close musical friend and mentor, who had intended to put together an “all-star” band in Europe with a number of U.S. musicians including Woody, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis, and Billy Higgins. Due to Eric’s untimely passing, however, this was a dream that remained largely unfulfilled, if only posthumously and partially so following the request of Nathan to bring Woody out to meet Eric’s last musical wish.
As Nathan recounted it to me once, Eric told him enthusiastically, “Man, you got to hear this little trumpet player, Nat. He knows all my music. . . And as crazy as my music sounds? You know he must be special to know all my music.” It was true, as Woody Shaw often boasted in his interviews, “I memorized all of Eric’s tunes. . . Eric’s music helped me find my own approach to the trumpet.” Woody was 18 years old when he made his first debut on Eric Dolphy’s 1963 masterpiece, Iron Man. So it was within this context of transition, discovery, and exchange that Woody Shaw arrived in Paris in 1964 at the invitation of Nathan Davis.
Not too long after gigging with European musicians, however, my father apparently “had enough” and soon became musically “homesick,” longing for the edification and camaraderie that he shared with musicians that he knew and grew up with. Chief among those musicians was a drummer named Billy Brooks and an organist named Larry Young, Jr. (Woody Shaw was also a “Jr.” at the time), both of whom he played with regularly in his hometown of Newark, NJ where all three attended the "infamous" Arts High School.
Woody’s insistence that Nathan help bring Billy and Larry to Paris was supported by impassioned references to the uncanny musical mastery of Larry Young and his development of a whole new style of organ playing, one that was both highly personal and unprecedentedly uncharacteristic of the instrument’s idiomatic conventions. Yet such was the attitude of these musicians in valuing the cutting edge and in championing each other’s courage to venture “outward” towards the musically uncharted. As Nathan stated, Woody told him, “Man, you got to hear this guy, Nat. He plays organ, but it don’t sound like organ. . . He plays the organ like a piano player.” “I don’t know, Woody,” said Nathan. “I don’t really dig organ, man.” Woody then replied, “No, Nat. . . This organist plays like McCoy [Tyner]!” So there you have it (“Trane of the organ”).
The camaraderie built around shared meanings inherent within a sound, a sound lived each day not simply in music, but in the everyday interactions, reactions and impressions of a youthful musical life in Newark, NJ, are what these young men would soon craft together and elaborate on across the stages of Paris, France. These were musicians still freshly under the influence of the climactic apexes of John Coltrane’s revolutionary Quintet, particularly in the exploration of new intervallic and harmonic possibilities, stylistic personalization of the “standard repertoire,” and the investigation of new altitudinal sounds and expressions that sprang forth from the growing ethos shared among young Black artists in the pursuit of a much broader and more liberating harmonic “existence.” And thus, with this growing sound came a broader sense of humanity, one inclusive (think, “Unity”) of sensibilities beyond the aesthetic criteria of America and Europe, and which could be expressed as articulately and individualistically, and with as much beauty, force, and deliberate vengeance as possible. Suffice it to say, these were not young musicians who simply “played” for fun. These young musicians played as much for the love of the music as they did for the affirmation of pride, respect, and self-empowerment. “Unity” meant Brotherhood.
As Nathan recalled it, the three Newark natives would often declare to each other as they walked down the streets of Paris, “Straight ahead, Nat. . . Straight ahead, Larry. . . Straight ahead, Woody. . . Straight ahead, Billy. . .” An affirmative mantra and reminder of who they were, where they came from, and where they intended to go. The mindset of musicians so young and yet so eerily on the prodigious verge of self-mastery is something not to be taken lightly. Looking back, Larry Young was but 24 years old during these recordings (possibly 23 on the octet recordings included here). Woody Shaw was only 20 (possibly just 19 on the octet material).
And thus, Newark, once again, being what it was, as one of the more culturally dense and historically tumultuous capitols of African American revolutionary and creative thought, exists as much in this recording in sound, feeling and volition, as it does in its anointed sequel, Unity. The orchestrated delivery of juxtaposed attitudes and self-summarized situations, of the natural and narrative shapes, harmonic logic, the vernaculars “spoken” and un-spoken amongst these three men and their honorary elder, Nathan Davis, speak to a certain counterassault to contrivance, pretense, and to the clichés of social indifference and apathy towards injustice, discrimination, and segregation, all of which would have been normal features of any sudden kaleidoscopic snapshot taken during the period in which this recording was made. Just shy of Kennedy’s assassination, the Civil Rights Act, and the subsequent assassination of Malcolm X, this recording is as indicative of where jazz was going as it was deadly serious to young Black musicians of a certain radical persuasion, and to the individual formations of identity being experienced across continents of thought and culture by young musicians who unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly, made history that year (1964-1965) in Europe.
Unity is, in fact, the outcome of this extended experimental period, a period in which these musicians took all liberties to broaden their creative and intellectual horizons (studying everything from Eastern philosophy to meditation, yoga, and martial arts, and listening to everything from Indian, African, and Eastern European folk music to 20th century European Classic) while saying as much as could be said about the world in which they lived. As with Unity, a number of the compositions included here were written by Woody Shaw, all of them bearing idiosyncrasies of a burgeoning style, a new way of speaking to the tradition of jazz while pushing the limits of the music to new heights, meanwhile establishing a point of departure for new discoveries that would long succeed them. And while the direction in which this music was headed is often overly-characterized as avant-garde due to its implicit evasion of categorization (that’s kind of the point here, folks), everything about it is idiomatic and indigenous to the historical tradition of jazz. A tradition built upon the circumstantial necessities for ingenuity, self-empowerment, and transcendent self-realization of human potential is perhaps most iconized by the expression of those very elements, those very principles that first commanded its existence.
These are the original “Young Lions,” forging new ground and taking irredeemable risks, daring to face the consequences of individuality with few ambitions other than those invested in the advancement of the music itself. Such was the badge of courage, integrity, and loyalty that these young men sought, lived and played by, while still barely out of their teens and entering into their twenties.
Fifty or so years after the fact, we have a gem in our possession, and what better time to release a prequel than during the 50th anniversary of its canonical epic (Unity, 1966). And as with all great stories and all great works of timeless art — the saga continues. So with that continuum in mind and on behalf of my father, Larry Young, Nathan Davis, and Billy Brooks, I leave you with two words: Straight Ahead.
Written by Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III
Copyright 2016 © Woody Shaw Legacy LLC
Published in Larry Young In Paris: The ORTF Recordings
Feather: For one thing, I would like to make it clear that I don't think I understand (short pause) as a musician you know certain things I don't understand about what you are doing and I am, I would like to maybe get them clarified in my own mind so that I can make it clear for the average reader too (ED: uh huh) you know (longer pause) (garbled, unclear) what is happening and what people like you are doing harmonically. It's very hard to explain, very hard to analyze. Can you put it into words?
Dolphy: Well, it, you know, it always depends on the subject of what you're improvising on of course, (cough, LF: Yeah.) and then, uh... (pause) what, you know, the subject you are improvising on. Of course if you're playing freer forms and the harmon..., improvisation is much more freer and you have much more things that you can play. More than.. more more the line is not, er er, the lines are not held to no chord patterns, harmonically.
Feather: No, but...
Feather: No, but, what I don't understand is what ARE they held to? I mean what is, what is the difference between the limitations, there must be some limitations otherwise it, you would be arbitrary, you could just play any notes that you like.
Dolphy: Well that's the idea you CAN play every note that you like. Of course, you only can play what you can hear, and quite naturally... more or less I guess what I hear is not to your hearing, to what you're hearing. So quite naturally, I hear, uh, more notes on uh, on the same thing that's been said before.
Feather: Yeah, uh...
Feather: Well, if your foundation is not a chord sequence, which is what the traditional basis of jazz was, then what is the foundation?
Dolphy: Well it - it - you see, some things like you play are not based on chords, they're based on freedom of sound, you start with one line and you keep inventing as you go along, line-wise -
Feather: Yeah -
Dolphy: - And you keep creating until you state a phrase. And quite naturally you, ah - what is the word, intuitive?
Feather: Yeah -
Dolphy: -whatever's around you, or with you, working together. Course, ah, then there's another thing that you play, in the modes, and then even though you're in the mode, you play outside of the mode, coming in and out of what you're playing. So harmonically, uh, it's not held down to the old thing of where you have a seventh chord and you- you ah, keep running the chord. Quite naturally, you run the chord, but you use other - other notes in the chord to give you other certain expressions to the song, otherwise you'd be playing what everybody else is playin'.
So if I have an F7, I'd most likely play F-sharp! Which is nothing but a flat nine - I'll play an F-sharp chord against that.
Feather: Yeah.
Dolphy And ah, I'm not sayin' I would play an F-sharp chord just to play an F-sharp chord, I would - I could play F-sharp chord and, and, and - and it would sound - to me it would sound okay with that F7.
Feather: Yeah.
Dolphy: You understand what I mean? And uh [pause] it's hard to say at the moment, as I'm sittin' here, because you know, ah, improvisation - the thing only happens at the moment when you do it-
Feather: Yeah!
Dolphy: And quite naturally it might change. And uh.
Feather: Let me ask you this:
Feather: You've mentioned the fact that this is greater freedom than for the earlier forms. Do you think that in these terms that Charlie Parker or Dizzy, or the earlier school, lack freedom, or sound old-fashioned as a result of the developments that have taken place?
Dolphy: No, it's a funny thing, man, I'm glad you asked me that. See, I'll even go farther than that. I had an experience, I played at a festival in Washington, D.C. and I got a chance to hear the Eureka Jazz Band. And, you hear them play, you just hear the band and you hear the lead trumpet player's playing the melody, and probably more or less you hear the other sounds, the undertones sound. So, I had a chance to get right, I stood, they were standing one time, and I stood right in the midst of them.
Feather: Were these old men from New Orleans?
Dolphy: Yeah. And listened to them play, and I couldn't see much difference between what I was doing to what they were doing, and the fact that they, more like, they were more tonal, of course, but they had a lot of freedom to what they were playing, because I could hear notes that they were playing, and, they didn't have any, you know, very strongly, right into, strong chords, like a G chord, or a C chord, they were playing F-sharps, and C-sharps, of course they were passing tones, but they were improvising. And so, they were, I think they were the first freedom players.
Dolphy: [?] and what I could say on that [?]. And uh. I think, as music has progressed, and guys are finding... The more knowledge, as music progresses, it just has led musicians to play this way, to use different forms. You have more to play.
Quite naturally, a musician coming up now, he has had more training. Not to say he's better, I'm not saying he's much better. I'm saying he has training, better equipped, that he has a little more technique, so he doesn't know what to do with it. In the case of myself, I had to find something what to do. Not to say in the sense of finding something to do just to exhibit my technique, but to find something to do to enhance some kind of musical, make some kind of musical sense, and I found that within my playing that I could play notes, not at first, because at first I couldn't hear these notes, so I wouldn't play them. But as I play more and more I hear more notes to play against the more common chord progressions. And a lot of people say they're wrong. Well, I can't say they're right, and I can't say they're wrong. To my hearing, they're exactly correct. For my hearing I'm right, and...
Feather: Yeah.
Feather: You think it's just a matter of the listener becoming accustomed to it?
Dolphy: Yeah. And, it just, it makes everything much more broader. To me, it gives me a much more broader, it gives me more things to play, it opens up a whole different type of hearing. Now, and, a lot of things, a lot of knowledge I have about, I knew about this quite a while ago but I couldn't do it because I couldn't hear, you know, and it's not a case of just like, going out and you say "Well, I'm just gonna play anything". I couldn't make any musical sense out of it. I mean, to spell a line against what I hear. So that's what I came about it.
Dolphy: You know, like music contains like, rhythm, and pitch, time, space, and all these elements go into [?] improvisation, improvising, you have to take that into consideration. It's not a question of just running notes. And so, a lot of people say they hear guys playing, they say "He's just running notes." Just to be running notes at random. But that isn't true, because he has something in mind. And then he's bending notes, and all these things. All this goes into this, this type of playing today.
Feather: What about the harmonic point that has been made against, particularly against Coltrane, that he'll play for 25 minutes on just 2 chords, and that this is actually retrogressive in terms of harmonic development in jazz?
Dolphy: Well, I can't speak for what Mr. Coltrane would say, but I can speak as far as what I could think. I know from listening and working with him, that he is, he plays SO much, and he has, a big, as we say, a bag, not a bag of tricks, but a bag of ideas that he has. And he gets, he has that moment, if I've noticed, he's never said anything to me, but I've noticed from listening, that he doesn't, he'll play long sometimes, he can play long anyhow, he has such a thing that he can go through, sometimes he'll get inspired at that moment, he'll carry himself over, and I've seen, it is true of other players,
Feather: Do you think he has enough to say on a limited number of chords to compensate for the lack of harmonic variation?
Dolphy: Do you mean... Let me see if I've got that question right. Do you mean that he could say the same thing in a shorter length of time?
Feather: No. I mean, that he's saying the same thing on a very limited number of chords. He will very often play a number that is based only on 2 or 3 changes actually, 2 or 3 chords. Which is monotonous compared with the considerable harmonic complexity of say an Ellington thing, or even a tune like All the Things You Are. In other words, he doesn't rely on changes.
Dolphy: Yeah, well that's... You see, that is another complexity in itself of playing on 1 or 2 changes. That is I think,
Feather: It's a challenge?
Dolphy: It's a challenge, and it's, not even more of a challenge, but it's even a, where a creative musician, if he IS creative enough, is to create on that limited an amount of, how should we say,
Feather: foundation?
Dolphy: something to work with. He doesn't have but so much to work with. He creates out of that amount.
Dolphy: This automatically gives him a little more time to think, and he can play, I'm sure that he can think, and it gives him the chance to unfold a lot more, a little thing, and basically ... if music... Not speaking about Mr. Coltrane, but speaking about music in general, of all types of forms, like in Indian music, they only, if we listen to their music, they only have usually 1, in our Western music we can usually hear 1 minor chord, but usually they call it a raga, or scale, and they'll play for 20 minutes.
Feather: Yeah, that's true.
Dolphy: So, with them, like in talking to Mr. Shankar, Ravi Shankar, they study for quite a while to get enough material to even work with. So, like, not to say that the musicians are just doing this to keep up with the Indian musicians, but I think that it's a little connection there, because, classical Indian music is the Indian music of the people, and jazz is the music of the American people, especially the American Negro, and it's their music, so quite naturally, there's something of a connection there, of people expressing themselves in the same way.
Dolphy: And not only, I can't say if Indian music and jazz, but to even go into other folk forms of music. I've noticed, I've heard it said that Bartok and Kodaly collected many folk themes on, what is their music, I forget their music, their particular music and where they're from, their land...
Feather: Yeah, Hungary.
Dolphy: Hungary! I've heard records by them where they do things, and you hear them playing, this particular thing goes over and over, and to the listener that doesn't pay attention close to the notes, the typical sound will get monotonous. But to the person that listens to the actual notes and the creation that's going on and the building within the players and within themselves, they'll notice that something is actually happening. So actually, I think that all this in a way has a connection with the artist over here, and everywhere; it's not a question of anybody trying to outdo them and stuff, it's just the fact that they're just going through the same development. And out of this I'm sure will come something else, it just has to go ahead, has to go [?]
Interview Source - adale.org
In order for me to be consistent as a trumpet player, I try to practice every day, for at least two or three hours. Oh, I’ve been in certain grooves when I said: “Well, I don’t need to practice”, and I rely on certain professional tricks, that I can get by with. But my creative mind tells me that getting by isn’t enough. So I do my chromatic scales and the little exercises. Then I have some symmetrical exercises of my own that I’ve developed. I‘m hoping to write a fundamental book on some of the exercises that I use to attain the concept that I have. A lot of trumpet players have been asking me to put out a book; so I'm working on it.
Definitely, every register is important. As for when they get hung up with the upper register—that turns me off. Because the beauty of the trumpet is in the middle and lower register, you know; I use the high register for excitement, and for effect.
For fingering, the difficulty is in middle register, from middle C on down—that’s why they play so high! I’m going to see if I can have a trumpet designed where I can go even an octave lower than the concert E that it goes to right now. I hear something else; to do what I want to do, the conventional trumpet is not enough now. I need another register—where am I going to get it from? I think it’ll have a fourth valve; I’ve seen a German flugelhorn like that—it goes down to four octaves.
Woody Shaw teaching at SUNY Brockport, NY. 1978-79. Photo by Tom Marcello.
I have played the flugelhorn at times, but I like the trumpet. The flugelhorn is purely incidental to me; it’s effective and pretty in certain things—but I can get just about the same sound on the trumpet. I have a very well–developed low register, with a very big, dark sound; so I don’t worry about the flugel. But—I’m going to get a flugelhorn ! Now, that instrument fits Art Farmer perfectly; you could have no better choice to play the flugel. It fits his style, his whole musical personality—he’s a very lyrical player. I heard him recently; he sounds beautiful.
Talking of trumpet players like Art Farmer—it’s so refreshing to hear him. I mean, I don’t want to hear Freddie Hubbard play rock, man, but that’s what he’s doing—he’s too good a player for that. But I heard Benny Bailey not long ago—he just knocked me out. Where are all the good improvisers that I grew up on? I look around, and it seems like I’m the only one out here. I still get an occasional chance to hear Blue Mitchell. But I don’t hear any young guys that impress me at all. I was twenty when I was with Horace, and it took me a while to get where 1 am—I’m thirty–one now. You always look for a young demon on the horizon—I haven’t heard him yet.
I think I can claim to have one of the newest approaches on the trumpet. I know some very good trumpet players out there, but they’re just not playing what I want to hear. It’s something that comes with a lot of study and practice. See, to be a good improviser, you’ve got to know about music, to know what you’re doing.
You have to know a certain amount about the keyboard harmony, and playing in all the keys. I think that’s another point, why all the free musicians shy away from learning bebop things—it goes through all the keys. And to play all the keys is very difficult——to get your technique in D flat equal to your technique in C, D equal to E flat, and so on.
By no means is jazz dead—that’s essentially why Louis Hayes and I formed this band. We really enjoy playing. Ronnie Scott’s is a nice club, but the only drag about playing there is that we only have forty–five minutes for each set. We’re used to playing an hour, or an hour–and–a–half—maybe even two hours. So we’re getting our show–time technique together.
AUDIO CLIP: Louis Hayes—Woody Shaw Quintet : "Bilad As Sudan" (Land of the Blacks by Rene McLean) (1977)
You do a record date, you have to take shorter solos—I think of this gig like a record date. We did pretty good towards the end of our engagement last August: we were getting in three tunes per set. If it became a little more expressive, we went back to two again. Which is all right; if we can get two good tunes into a forty–five minute set, I don’t think anything’s lost.
The thing I like about New York: I can go all over town, and hear some good music. When I used to be in San Francisco, guys would say: “Ah, nothing’s happening in New York.” I said : “Nothing? I can’t believe that.” I came back, and sure enough, it was happening. Jazz went through its little down trend, but it’s better now.
For one thing, I blame the musicians for nearly killing the music. I mean, some of the rubbish that they call jazz in the States is not jazz.
George Wein puts on what he calls the Cool Jazz Festival—with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ramsey Lewis. That’s not jazz! We were thinking about suing this cat for degrading the name of jazz! And we had a whole nest of noisemakers misusing the word also. We said : “Wait a minute—we gotta change this a little bit !” It was time for us to get together. We used to watch Cedar Walton’s band, with George Coleman, Sam Jones and Billy Higgins: they seemed so happy up there when they were playing—and they work all the time. They stay busy. We said: “They’ve got a quartet. Let’s get a dynamite quintet, with trumpet and tenor.” Well, I was complaining before because I wasn’t working that much: I’m complaining because I’m working too much now.
People who’ve never even heard jazz can really enjoy it, if they’re given a chance to. The presentation of it is very important. There are a few of us; I can name Cedar’s band, McCoy Tyner. the Heath brothers. Art Blakey.
Horace Silver, Bobby Hutcherson—he’s still playing. I learned a lot from him when I was in school. We’re the ones out here who still believe in the music.
Mentioning McCoy reminds me: I used to play with him, and he was a very strong influence on me. He used to tell me: “Woody, you’re going to be the next great trumpet player out here. Just keep going straight ahead. Do what you have to do, and believe in the music.”
I watched him, and now the same things are happening for me. This was a few years ago when he said this; I was with him in the late ‘sixties. I talked to him again recently; he said: “Hey—I told you.” Now, I’m just starting to gain some of the rewards of playing the music, I think. That reward is to just let me play—make a decent living, and be happy. I really don’t think a creative musician belongs with a lot of money—it stunts his growth. They do deserve their full rewards for their contribution. But a musician—once he starts earning a lot of money, man, his music gets corny; I don’t see why that has to be the case, but it usually is. Some kind of line has to be drawn, that’s all.
Mind you, now—I want as much as I can get! But I really can’t complain. Specially when I remember that around two years ago I was sitting depressed in San Francisco. Nobody seemed to be paying me any attention; I couldn’t get a decent gig anywhere. I even started considering : “Man, I can’t even play this thing any more.” I felt in myself that I wasn’t playing anything. I changed my environment and now the ideas are just brimming over in my brain. I think environment has a lot to do with it. Me, I’m from the city—that stimulates me.
This group is going to stay together, keeping working and making records. We have one out on Wim Wicks’ Timeless label, which is based in Holland. And I myself have exclusively signed with Muse Records. When my record “The Moontrane,” came out in ‘75, it was pretty controversial—I think because they were surprised that somebody came out with a hard, smashing, swinging jazz record. I believe I kinda restored the faith in a few people, with that; I got a lot of very nice reviews on it. I have a more recent one that had the same effect; it’s called “Love Dance”. Now, I’m finally starting to record some personal ideas that I want to put down; I’m going to show different aspects of my playing. One of these ideas is a brass record date, with three trumpets, four trombones, one reed and a rhythm section—maybe some miscellaneous things here and there. I’m very wrapped up in writing something for brass.
I stay fresh by doing different things —now that I’m finallv getting a chance to record my own material—I made a lot of records as a sideman, and I used to ask myself: “How come I can’t get a record date?” I know now—it wasn’t time. Very simple. To my record now I have four albums out: “Blackstone Legacy” is a double record set on the Contemporary label; I have another one called “Song Of Songs”, which is out of print right now, also on Contemporary, and the two Muse records. So I hope to be recording some interesting things.
Something else I must mention is that we have very good management. Maxine [Gordon] is doing a very good job; she really loves the music—we need more people like her in the business. She knows what the musicians go through, what we have to do to get where we are. I think if we had some more sympathetic management out here, you would see a lot more groups.
Photo by Tom Marcello.
The beautiful thing about this group is : everywhere we go, they love us. The worst gig we did was in Italy; we played on this concert that had a lot of the free music on it. Before we went on, Sam Rivers had the people in an uproar, really roused; he plays the flute for a minute, goes into his whooping and hollering sounds with his voice, sits at the piano and bangs on that for a while, then runs over and grabs the saxophone—a frenzy of activity. The people were banging chairs and everything. When we played, we had a completely calming effect on them; we turned them right back into conservatives. So that was an experience. I mean, we go out there, too, sometimes—but we know how to get back, though. I’ve got my feet on the ground—or at least I’ve got my parachute on!