Couple uncomfortable silences in this one when Lester is asked what he thinks of “modern” saxophonists…and Coleman Hawkins.
Love his response: “Well, that’s incomplete.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W_I1mpDfJA
And as a bonus, here’s a blindfold test & interview he did with Leonard Feather in 1951:
Its funny I feel the same when I hear most of players coming out from BERKLEY.
The problem is that patterns and triads are not only excericeses but melodies and therefore music. If you practice hours those melodies they will eventually come out in your playing, and in most of student’s playing, therefore jazz school is becoming a sistematyc institution that creates jazz players. At the end of the cycle, they even tell you, ah boy you gotta forget everything we have told you and be yourself…..but then is just too late…
It might sound crazy, but I honestly believe that university should start at 25 and let the musicians create their defected language alone for a few years, because this will give them time to develop a pesonal approach to music and create a creative habit. Once you got that, you can go to school ans improve your own voice.
One of my fav musicians, Oteil Burbridge, said: “you gotta steal from others, but steal from 200 cats instead of one”. I think it’s about being inspired as much as possible by others then reassembling your own puzzle. Oteil is inspired from broad broad range of artists, as are all the best I’ve seen. I read somewhere that Bird was obsessed with Stravinsky. And inspiration comes not only from music, but from other arts, from philosophy, religion… from any idea, because ideas can change shape and form and morph with other ideas.
I think it’s also about an appetite for creativity. I recently saw an online guitar competition, 100s of guitar players who sounded exactly the same. Most of them played good, but the same. They don’t have an appetite for creativity, an ambition for having a voice of their own, they just like Steve Vai and guitar is a sport for them, even if they intend to live on it it’s sport, not art. An artists strives to say something, to bring perspective, to bring light to new possibilites.
Love the discussion here. Wish you guys had been at my UNT master class last week. I discussed influences from film scores to jazz to hip-hop, indie rock, r&b, jazz, and Kenny G.
I like the comment at the end of the interview 🙂 George Garzone talked about the phenomenon that Florencio mentions in his comment below: cats have tons of facility/technique, but no personal sound…
I love Coleman’s playing.. not sure what Lester meant, but I’d love to know, he was certainly a master of style.