THE INDEPENDENT EAR
Insights, Reviews & Interviews
By Willard Jenkins
Vol. 1 No. 2
Independent Ear: Artist's P.O.V.
Stanley Clarke, bassist-composer-bandleader
|
The following interview fueled a retrospective piece contributed to the May 2006 issue of Down Beat magazine on the history of the important jazz fusion pioneer band Return to Forever. This session was spurred by working in production with Tami Willis on a new television series hosted by bassist-composer-bandleader and film score composer Stanley Clarke for BET J (airing as part of special Black Music Month programming in June) titled "On the Road with Stanley Clarke". Recalling college days as a fledgling jazz enthusiast enthralled with the compelling music being made by the late 60s-early 70s Miles Davis bands and Miles progeny - who became Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Return to Forever - I set out to interview the five members of the electric RTF, starting with bassist Clarke.
|
|
STANLEY CLARKE INTERVIEW
Willard Jenkins: Talk about origins of RTF
Stanley Clarke: When I met Chick I was playing with Joe Henderson in 1971. Joe hired me when I was playing in Philadelphia, my home... Joe tried to get another piano player that couldn't make it down so he said I'm going to get this guy Chick Corea. I had heard Chick on his album called "Now He Sings, Now he Sobs," which I was very impressed with. Chick came down, played the gig and basically me and Chick kinda took over the gig, we really musically locked up. I think Chick was the first keyboard player I played with that I really felt like I could do some things, that really was harmonically sophisticated. It was just a great hook-up, we could really experiment a lot… and we did in Joe's music.
It was one of those week-long gigs at a place in West Philly called The Blue Horizon, one of those organ-saxophone, chicken joints, it was greasy... (laughs)... I'm happy to say I've played a few of those. Chick came back to my apartment and I'll never forget we were listening to a Trane album called "Crescent" and I told him that one of my favorite tunes was "The Wise One". Right after that Chick started talking to me about wouldn't it be great to put a band together that could really communicate to people but that could still kinda play. I said 'yeah,' shit I'd love to do that.' So we talked about that the whole night and that was kind of planting the seed for the idea of RTF.
The first band that we put together was a trio: myself, Chick and a drummer named Horacee Arnold. We were kinda playing some old Circle music, still a little avant garde but we had some Bill Evans type of stuff. After that the band expanded; Joe Farrell came in the band and Hubert Laws was there. Then Horacee had to leave and Airto came in and that's where the Airto/Flora thing came in; now we're into late 1972. We did a few gigs at the Vanguard then recorded the album Return to Forever immediately. The band was me, Airto, Flora, Joe Farrell and Chick.
A friend of Chick named Neville Potter came up with the phrase Return to Forever, he liked the phrase and I think they just threw it up there. I actually think Chick wasn't sure what he wanted to do... he definitely knew it was his band but I think he was leaning towards the group thing, because in jazz there really weren't that many groups... the tradition was a guy: Miles Davis Quintet, blah blah Quartet. There was of course the Jazz Crusaders, Modern Jazz Quartet, but not really groups like you would see in rock, so Chick was entertaining that idea.
WJ: What brought about the evolution from the kind of Brazilian, gentler and more acoustic textures of the Airto/Flora band to the guitar band?
SC: I think that success was definitely a motive with Chick, he wanted to become successful and all the by-products of success... make money, live better, all that kind of thing. And at that time there was a band called the Mahavishnu Orchestra that had come out and these guys were electric, there was no doubt about it. Right around that time Flora was having some kind of problems with immigration and Chick wanted to change the band. He changed the band to Chick, myself, Stevie Gadd, a conga player from Santana named Mingo Lewis, and the guitar player Billy Connors. That band in a lot of ways sounded better than the later 4-piece... I would hate to tell Lenny White that but in a lot of ways it sounded better in that it had more... it was kind of like Santana with good charts because Mingo kept the thing... it was definitely that Latin sound. Steve Gadd wasn't as adventurous as Lenny but the band had this sound immediately. All this happened in a short period of time, like 1973. Billy Connors had this beautiful sound, just a natural, singing almost like a violin kind of sound. So we put that band together and we toured.
WJ: What about you as far as playing more bass guitar?
SC: That was a big issue with me, I was actually kind of pissed off because for the most part when Airto & Flora were in the band the whole set was acoustic and we had one song that I played electric bass on, the song "Return to Forever." Then when they left the band I still played acoustic but it became harder, especially with the conga and the drums...
WJ: The music compelled you to play electric?
SC: I had no choice or else my fingers would have been as big as my legs -- it was just massive. Actually it helped me to become a better bass player because I really had to play hard just to be heard and I got into amplification; I think I was one of the guys who was compelled to come up with some hipper amplification because pretty much everyone else was using these little Ampeg amplifiers. I went to the next level: I tried Marshall amplifiers like the guitar players were using; I tried everything just to be heard. I kind of gave up and Chick started writing tunes with more electric bass. When Stevie Gadd left, Mingo left, then we got Lenny, and Lenny played with me, Chick and Bill. Then the band changed, it became an electric band.
WJ: What brought that on?
SC: I think it was about wanting to be successful... Let's just put it this way: college audiences were really into bands that were loud but could play. We were the jam bands of the time. Out of all the 3 top fusion bands: Mahavishnu, Weather Report and Return to Forever we had the best compositions, we had real compositions. We played our compositions, the ensemble parts and the soloing went on forever. So for the most part we were really a jam band of the time. We used to do lots of gigs with Fleetwood Mac, Bachman Turner Overdrive, David Bowie, whoever was out at that time we played on shows with them. We were just as loud and we were more exciting, we used to blow those bands off the stage because people would hear all this stuff that they'd never heard; it was really new, the stuff that we were doing.
It was very intricate music, played with precision and everyone really playing together; it was really something. The rock bands used to come on and they never really played together, it was kinda communal, they were playing together but not really... we were really precise and I think, much like classical music and it was something new, they had never seen that in that genre of music. When that door was opened we walked through it.
WJ: How long did the quartet with Lenny and Bill Connors last?
SC: That lasted into the end of '74... That's when Bill and Chick kind of had a falling out... Billy saw the music going more... you couldn't really say it was commercial but yeah, you could... it had a rock sound but harmonically we were so far away from those other bands. But Billy wanted the band to become more adventuresome and experimental. I'll never forget one night in Germany he refused to play unless we got really experimental. So Chick said 'OK, let's play more experimental.' What Billy forgot was that Chick was at least ten years older than us and was an amazing musician and he took Billy to town, he wiped Billy all over the floor. I didn't like that sound because Chick's up here, Billy was over there and Billy was no match for Chick and because Billy played chords, melodies, and solos it just wasn't balanced right. Chick was smart by designing the band through compositions and structure so people could play together. Horace Silver used to do that, that's one of the reasons we have song and structure so you can take people with all different abilities and they can come in and within that structure it kinda evens it out a little bit.
If you look at some bands Freddie Hubbard was in, Freddie Hubbard when he played with all the bands he played with to me he was the superior improviser, Freddie was probably one of the most natural improvisers ever. But because of the songs when he was with Art Blakey those songs were so structured that when he came in he played the melody along with whoever else was there and then when the solo came he got his chance to shine but soon as that was done the song went back to where the shit was supposed to be at. I think Chick took that same concept -- I think that's what people miss in that band: he took the jazz concept, just like it was Horace Silver: melodies,, ensembles, solos; ensemble part, another solo, ensemble part, another solo, melody, tag, out... the same concept. People never really touch on that.
WJ: So you're saying Bill was kinda left of center from that?
SC: Yeah, Bill wanted to just go up and just play... I think he had heard Weather Report and WR's stuff was... they had form to it but very little and then they just kind of went. But that band was structured musically completely different from RTF; it was actually some genius stuff that they came up with... First of all they didn't play anything that was really hard, a lot of their music depended upon sound. Joe had all these other kinds of sounds, he was the guy... He picked these percussion players that were usually Brazilian or Latin and exotic. Their drummers -- Alphonse Mouzon, Eric Gravatt... and just the combination of things created this sound but it wasn't like a virtuosic band and I think Bill wanted to go more in that direction, but he was in a band with virtuosos...
WJ: Chick wanted to go the virtuoso route...
SC: Yeah, that was the way we were, I played a lotta shit on the bass... I didn't want to just come in and play a whole note and then have a saxophone on a chord... Weather Report's stuff was long notes... In our thing we played in one song more notes than they played the whole week [laughs] and that's just the nature of the way we were as players. Chick was a player like that, played a lotta shit. I thought it was brilliant that we could come up with some music that we could bring to the party and it would work and the only thing that could do that was that structure that I told you about, that original small jazz group structure... Chick loves Horace Silver and a lot of people don't realize that, that's his man because Horace was so organized.
WJ: So Chick and Bill Connors agreed to disagree... and along comes Al DiMeola…
SC: My wife at the time brought a cassette tape home one day from someone she had met, this guy 18, 19 years old from Bergenfield, NJ who played the guitar. The first thing I heard was that he could play a billion notes a minute on the guitar and we thought this guy could at least hang with us technically, but we weren't sure he could play. So he came and rehearsed with us, he had read all the music down and actually sounded OK. The first gig we played was at Carnegie Hall, he was about 19 years old, did the gig and I was personally impressed that after a couple of days of rehearsal the guy could actually hang at Carnegie Hall. We were kind of veterans at the time, I personally had played many years with many bands and I was checking Al out. Chick asked Lenny and me what did we think and I just kind of stepped up and said let's get him because for a guy to just come in and hit like that... I actually dug his courage more than anything else, so that's how that happened.
WJ: Backing up a bit because you did mention that you were opening up for major rock acts... Was it surprising to you when the band really took off and began playing bigger and bigger venues?
SC: Yeah, I was surprised at first. I think what happens with anybody in any band is that once you start growing the surprise goes away and the hunger comes in; so then you're always looking for that bigger place, the bigger dollar, more people, more excitement, all that stuff… We did a pretty extensive theater tour of the U.S. where we played to houses from 2500 to 4000 people every night. And then, jumping ahead all the way through the "Romantic Warrior" album… I remember we headlined the Spectrum in Philly - we were playing arenas! We couldn't fill arenas but we'd have like 7-8,000 people there, and we played the Capital Center in DC and it was the same thing, half a house, but shit there were a lot of people there. There were no in between theaters then - you either went from 4K up to what we used to call 'the big boy shit' [arenas], we were up there with the big boys, and it was great.
We played Central Park to 25-30K, that was the biggest thing we did. I remember Chick's mother on the side crying… we were out there playing our shit. Now that was surprising, that we could stand in front of these people and we didn't have to sing shit, all we had to do was play our instruments… we didn't even have to jump around and do flips and splits and whatnot… We had a few little extras onstage… I'll never forget we invested in this big lighting thing that was in back of us with Return to Forever in lights; we had some mirrors, one on top of the audience - huge mirrors so you could look from the audience and see down to what Lenny was doing; Lenny was scared shitless that thing was going to fall on him, and we had one in back of Chick and we had tons of amplifiers. We had a look kinda like a classic rock band but a little different. We had rock roadies… we actually helped expand the roadie business because not only did they have all the rock and roll bands to look after, now they had at least RTF, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, 11th House… And when these bands broke up they created 8 or 9 other bands, so we had roadies that worked with all kinda bands.
WJ: That became a requirement as you moved up in venue.
SC: Absolutely. For instance when I toured with Joe Henderson we didn't have a roadie, we didn't even have a mixer… I don't even remember even seeing a sound guy. You'd show up and you'd have your little amp and that was your sound, that was your PA. They'd usually have a mike for the horn player and one for the piano and that was it. Later on as the bands got bigger we had roadies… with early RTF we had one roadie, and then we had as many as 5 or 6 roadies.
WJ: So you got to the point where you could demand only the brown M&Ms backstage?
SC: [Laughs] That was Al DiMeola. Al DiMeola's thing - which he might not tell you - was that he had to have 12 shrimp, a chocolate cake and a bottle of champagne… and the cake he never ate, he just stuck his finger in it and that was it, but he'd eat the shrimp and it had to be 12. And that was all the way up to when we reunited, and I think Chick didn't like that shit. I don't think Chick ever liked that kind of stuff. Chick's reasons for doing this were for the most part genuine; he wanted to change music, reach a lot of people… He really wanted some music that would reach a lot of people.
You have to remember the religious angle. At that time it was real popular and fashionable to have a guru, to have some kind of swami cat [laughs]… Chick had Scientology, John McLaughlin had Sri Chinmoy, Wayne and Herbie had Buddhism… so that was pretty popular. The Scientology thing with Chick, the key word was communicate, communicate. If you check out almost every interview he did at that time I never saw a man talk more about communication. We used to sit there and go 'enough man…' He used to talk about it like it was something that no one else did but himself. He used to talk about communication like it was some rare food that he was bringing out of the deepest part of Africa. We used to say 'the Rolling Stones are communicating, we're all communicating… I would say that for the most part he was genuine, but he's a human being and I think the money, the fame and all that stuff became a part of it…
WJ: Did it spiral out of control?
SC: It always does, because the band broke up for the reasons that all the other bands broke up for: money…
WJ: There came a point when the other 3 of you [Stanley, Lenny and Al] began to get opportunities apart from RTF but as a result of RTF; began to get names, make records…
SC: That was 1974…
WJ: How did it play out as each of the four of you began to develop your own careers outside of RTF?
SC: I think what happened was, as Chick said to me one time - me and Chick were always very close and we'd tell each other about our problems because we did go all the way back - but I think what happened was again that jazz tradition came out. As you know better than anybody, Art Blakey would have a band with 5 or 6 guys in it but all those guys would make records. First of all it was because they wanted to make records but also because of the business. Say Art Blakey had a band and he had a fiery trumpet player there would surely be some lawyer sitting in the audience going 'don't you wanna make a record…' and that's what happened with me.
There was a guy named Nat Weiss that was sitting in the audience in the Vanguard and came up to me and said 'you know, you have a lot of charisma…' And I was young and said 'yeah?' 'Do you wanna make a record?' I said 'yeah', then the next thing I know I'm up in his office working on a solo record. [RTF] had these managers, Leslie Wynn and Neville Potter, and they were very much into making money. I think they saw that if they could get every guy in the band to make money and they'll get a percentage of each one of these records, and they'd have a conglomerate.
Nat Weiss was one of the lawyers for the Beatles and he had a record company called Nemperor Records. He signed me and I was one of the original guys on Nemperor Records. Prior to that I had made a record for Polydor that Chick actually encouraged me to do; it was called "Children of Forever," that had Dee Dee Bridgewater, Pat Martino, Lenny played on that record, and Andy Bey - a serious voice. So it was known that I was going to make records because I had been writing music and it had to go somewhere. When I got with Nat Weiss, then it became serious. [RTF's managers] could control the record on Polydor because the band was on Polydor. But my albums were on Nemperor and Nemperor was connected to Atlantic, which was a bigger company that could sell records a lot better, which started competing with [RTF]. Then Al started making records, Lenny started making records… I think Chick woke up one day and said 'shit, how are we going to organize all this stuff…' It got pretty complicated.
WJ: Did that evolution to where each of you began making records stimulate competitive tension within the band?
SC: I think the band always had competitive tension. I think when you have the kind of musicians that were there… the records just compounded it. There was actually a race between me and Al DiMeola; he'd make a record that was up here and I'd make another record… And then because Al was a guitar player… and at that time the whole guitar god thing was big - usually the white guy that played rock guitar and Al was very fast, had a lot of technique, so obviously he appealed to a lot of kids that wanted to play guitar.
WJ: But then your thing became something new… the bass god…
SC: Yeah, the bass god thing was a whole new angle… That was a surprise, that surprised me, my own success. When I made my first record for Nemperor, which was called "Stanley Clarke," they pressed like 3400 records initially because in those days an average jazz album sold 5,000 records - like if you were Art Blakey or Miles Davis, a top selling jazz artist - until he did "Bitches Brew." Then we made these records and all of a sudden they got orders for as much as 100,000 records for me. Atlantic didn't realize that I'd been touring year after year for 5 or 6 years before that, just year after year playing good bass, playing on shows and all these kids in the colleges said 'oh yeah, Stanley finally came out with a record!' and they'd grab it.
I remember this guy Ahmet Ertegun who was the head of Atlantic Records had to meet me because 'who is THIS guy…' I wasn't a great dresser in those days, I just came in there with some tired ass, torn up shit on and walked in there and he said 'is this you?' [laughs]. Yeah, it's me… Afro out to here, I looked like some ghetto kid off the street. He was a nice guy because he in about five minutes was happy because he told me 'our company was built like this, we started out with jazz music, just some guys playing…' He talked about Coltrane, Mingus and some other acts that he had and he said he was really happy, and from that point on we were really close. They [Atlantic Records] really did a lot for me, there was a belief, and that was really unusual for a jazz artist, it was great, that really surprised me.
WJ: What precipitated the change from the RTF quartet to the final larger ensemble?
SC: The big band with voice… that was late 70s, '77, '78… Basically Lenny and Al had left the band because there was a money dispute - normal, classic band stuff: a money dispute. Chick had told them that they owed him some money and they told Chick that he owed them some money…, some weird kind of thing.
WJ: Why was it just the two of them and not the three of you?
SC: Because I was always the mediator since I was there from the beginning. Chick would always come to me then I would go to them because they were the young guys, even though Lenny is older than me - young guys within Return to Forever. They left the band and it finally progressed into a law suit, they were suing Chick and then there was a settlement and of course they left. To be quite honest I wanted to leave then, but my loyalty to Chick and I said I was going to stay a bit longer. Then Chick put these bands together - I won't say I didn't like them, but I didn't care for them as much as I liked the quartet, because for me Return to Forever is that quartet, even more so than the Airto and Flora band. The reasoning was not musical but because of how hard we worked. We worked 10 months a year just slaving, working and working and working… We made a lot of money and a lot of it didn't come to us.
Al DiMeola was actually the guy who blew the whistle on the money. He used to come to me and say 'man, we're getting ripped off,' and I'd say 'what are you talking about man,' because I had money coming from other areas so I wasn't looking as hard as he was. But it was the classic band breakup, and then we got into these other bands and Gayle Moran came in. She was a nice girl, nice, OK singer; and we had different drummers: Gerry Brown was in the band, horn players… But the good thing about that big band was I could write different, I could write some other kind of stuff.
WJ: So it did kind of challenge your writing?
SC: Yeah, definitely; to write for all the horns and that kind of stuff…
WJ: Speaking of the writing and intricacies, up to that point jazz records were the kind of thing where you went over to New Jersey to Van Gelder and knocked out a session in a matter of hours and that was that. In the case of those RTF records it became almost like putting together a rock record.
SC: We had a system that was great. What we used to do is take off for a month just to write, like 2 weeks to a month. Each guy would go away and write, and you had to come back with something. You couldn't come back and say 'hey, nothing came to my mind…' Then we would go into a rehearsal period for like two weeks to a month, and then we would record. The early records took a week to ten days, and then "Romantic Warrior" took like three weeks. That was some very complex writing, and a very difficult record to rehearse.
WJ: Were the rehearsals extensive in preparation for tours?
SC: Yeah. We did it just like the rock bands. The only difference was they went in there to rehears whole notes and half notes, we went in to rehearse 64th notes [laughs]… it was the same thing but we just upped the game so much that it made us have to go in there and rehearse.
WJ: What compelled the music to become more and more intricate by the time you made "Romantic Warrior"?
SC: I think madness… I think this may be true with any artist: if you do something and you don't really care about what people think and you're doing your art, and you're successful, you're gonna push the envelope. I've experienced this from being involved with R&B musicians, and it's the only thing I don't like about R&B and rock musicians: they'll make their first, maybe their second record and it'll be honest, like this is where it's at; and if the guy can only play whole notes and sing about a dog, great. But by the third record they'll say 'well, it's gotta still have that quality, it's gotta still have whole notes and half notes and sing about a cat now. And they put a cap on the creativity… I hated that, there was a formula. We were lucky in that nobody said anything to us, even the record company [Columbia], because they didn't know what the fuck we were doing and they had already been fucked up by Miles Davis because Miles wouldn't talk to these people.
Miles in a lotta ways was like the real guru that was sitting behind all of these [fusion] bands, every single one of them go back to Miles. He truly was The Prince of Darkness. Chick and a lotta those guys maybe might not acknowledge it, but in a lot of ways because I was younger I was kind of an outsider and I could see it. But Miles was back there, and I remember talking to record execs and you'd mention Miles' name… what are they going to say to Miles? They knew, even though all the times I met him he was just a little cat and he didn't come off like he was Mister T or something, but they viewed him like that, like he would just come in there and just kill everybody. So I think some of that rubbed off on us; we were these creative guys, jazz guys, they don't quite know what the hell we were doing, and what we are gonna say…
When Miles made "Bitches Brew" that changed everything. You could write books about just that album because that album in a lotta ways was as important as "A Love Supreme." "Bitches Brew," even though it might not have been as beautiful as "A Love Supreme," [the Ashley Khan book about which Stanley was reading at the time], it was really important because you had people from all types of music focusing on that album and going like 'what the hell is that?' The album was very aggressive, Miles was very unapologetic on that record, it was raw, it was new… When I listen to ["Bitches Brew"] now I actually don't even like a lot of the record but at that time it broke so many rules, I think it was more of a social event or something.
WJ: Was Miles also looming in the background as far as musically influencing people like Chick, Zawinul, Wayne and Herbie, Mahavishnu…?
SC: Oh yeah… Miles saw that Tony Williams wanted to do A, B and C, and then John McLaughlin came in and he wanted to turn up to 20 with a distorted guitar and I think Miles just said 'yeah, come on and play…' It was a complete opposite concept to having a band than Horace Silver. Horace was a great bandleader at that time but Horace had the cap on the concept, it had to be this or that. Miles was never like that, his shit was totally open and I think that's the spirit that went through all that. He was always looming - he still is in my opinion, I still think of Miles at least once a week when I'm doing musically, sort of like 'Miles would…' at least once a week. I think everybody else does too.
WJ: Did Miles ever approach you about playing in his band?
SC: Yeah, I was in the Vanguard and he came in - that was a funny story - he came in and he had this red leather outfit on, with the hat and everything, it was like off a Sly Stone record. I was in there standing with Chick and [Miles] grabbed me from the back and I just had a feeling it was Miles. I turned around and he was all out of his brain [laughs], he said [whispers] 'why don't you come and play with me, fuck Chick, fuck that white motherfucker, you don't need to play with him, fuck him, come and play with me.' I was very much like 'well, Mr. Davis…' [laughs]… I was always fascinated by how he didn't care about nothin'; Chick would be standing right there and he'd say 'fuck that white motherfucker' [laughs]. Chick's standing right there, but what's Chick gonna do? Ike Turner was like that a lot [remember, Stanley wrote the music for "What's Love Gotta Do With It," the Tina and Ike film], not as aggressive as Miles. Ike was kind of a guy who would come off kind of peaceful then he would snap and go into some wild animal, kill shit. There was always a feeling of danger around Miles, you never knew, he was just always that way.
I told Miles I said 'I don't know, I'll call you,' and he said 'do you have Jack Whittemore - his manager's - number?' I said 'yeah, yeah I have it…' of course I didn't have it. That month was a really interesting month for me because I was playing with Chick, Miles wanted me to play with him, and then Eddie Gomez called and said Bill Evans wants you to join his trio because he was leaving. Bill Evans was the cake gig for every acoustic bass player because every song you had to play a solo, like Scott LaFaro did because after Bill would play somebody's gotta do something… and I really wanted to do that gig, that was the gig that I wanted to do. But because I'd heard that Bill Evans was involved in some other extraterrestrial activities I knew enough to see where that would end so I said no, and then Miles just looked crazy. But Chick - I could look at Chick and I could see a future with Chick, like there was something I could do, I could just write, I could talk to somebody that was going to talk English to me… It just seemed to be a cleaner situation and I actually think it was the right decision.
WJ: Talk about the final breakup of Return to Forever.
SC: I just got tired and I wanted to do my own thing. I had a long talk with Chick, it was a hard talk, I said 'man I've gotta go, I've gotta go and do my own thing.' That was the beginning of an end for Chick. I didn't realize until much later that really changed Chick's game tremendously because I was that other pole there, it was like me and him that was keeping this house up. Then I left and he really had to change his game, but in the long run it was good because it forced him to do a lot of other things that I don't think he would have done, like a lot of those records that he made with Stevie Gadd and Michael Brecker, a lot of those early records on Touchstone, he would have never done a lot of those things.
I think he was hurt. I think he envisioned us going down like the MJQ. One of the things I wanted to do because I'm African American I wanted to play funkier music, and that's not just necessarily about making money, that's just the way it is man. There's a blues element… We never played the blues in Return to Forever, not one fuckin' blues… I used to ask him 'let's play the blues…' With white guys, unless they have a reason… I don't know what their reasons are for playing the blues, but I know back in those times playing the blues was a much more visceral event for a black man than a white guy. I'm not white so I don't know, but we never played the blues. We never played the blues with RTF. With me it comes straight from the roots and Chick never understood that, I don't think to this day he understands that. I don't think he understands that that's a reality. I don't know what Scientology did to his head but… some guys just don't understand that that is a reality, that really exists and a black man standing, somewhere on earth, he's got an instrument in his hand, there are certain things that he's gonna feel that are going to come through him because of the way he was brought up, its in his DNA and it goes all the way back to the root, its just the way it is. Even social events encourage one to play the blues.
You go through racism in America that'll make you play something, that'll make you feel something. The other thing that is highly overlooked is experience in the church with gospel music that those people don't get, they don't get it because they weren't there, they had no reason to be there. I mean when is Chick going to be in a gospel church? He was eating spaghetti with Mama Corea; Catholics, and they were in the church very quiet, singing something, but we were doing some other things. I think it's a crime to suppress that. Me and George Duke talk about that all the time, it's a crime.
I wanted to do that [play the blues] and bring that element to my records. Me and Chick had one conversation about that and that's why I kinda just cancelled. He said something to me about 'why do you want to do that?', just a question… you know, cancel! I actually don't hold that against him; at first I did but now I don't. Its like me talking to some guy from Africa and he plays the drums a certain way and I want him to play like Mitch Mitchell or Buddy Rich [laughs] and I'm wondering why he plays this talking drum, he keeps gravitating to this talking drum, and I go 'why do you want to do that?' Why do you want to wear these clothes with orange and green… why? It's a dumb question, the question is out of ignorance. So basically there were a lot of forces that came together that went into me just leaving and it was a great thing for me. It was one of the few times in my life where you break away, almost like a divorce… I really exhaled after that, I felt a great sense of freedom after that. And then I went off and did some other music.
WJ: Looking back in retrospect how do you view those days and where does RTF fit in the overall pantheon?
SC: I think Return to Forever, along with those other bands but particularly Return to Forever, really changed how electronic music was played and is still played today. Definitely with the ensemble writing that we did and soloing. That band had a bunch of people in it whose technical expertise was at a high level and it was definitely a change, it definitely changed music. I've found so many musicians that would acknowledge that things changed for them once they heard that band. I think that Return to Forever was one of those bands that shook up the music business to some degree and gave people the opportunity to do other things.
WJ: You mean in terms of the level of acceptance that you reached for purely instrumental music?
SC: Yeah. I'll give you an example: I remember we went to an Earth, Wind and Fire concert and those guys had our record. We had a record with a song called "No Mystery" that won a Grammy for us and Earth, Wind and Fire used to open their shows playing that track from the record. I remember seeing Rufus and I wrote this track called "Dayride" that they used to play, as one of their interludes. Even to this day you go and see Prince and he plays one of my songs, "Lopsy Lu." Whenever he picks up the bass he plays one of my songs. RTF just gave people something else to look at, it wasn't the status quo, the norm. Even Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report, it was something a bit different, something for you to say 'Ok, I can do this…'
At the time when I came out with my first solo album Mingus obviously had records out, Ron Carter… there really weren't too many bass solo records and that was a thing. Now there's over 200 different individuals that play the bass that have records out, multiple records, so that was kind of nice. I feel the bass is completely liberated, finally.
WJ: So you think you had something to do with that?
SC: I was there at the beginning.
WJ: Looking back retrospectively there are some people that when its still kind of fresh they have difficulty looking back and seeing the value and impact of something. But then after the passage of time you can look back more intelligently at what happened then. Is RTF something that you find easier to discuss now than you might have, say five years after it happened?
SC: Oh yeah, definitely. Obviously I kind of focus a lot more on the positive sides of RTF, but there was some negative stuff there. The band RTF, we didn't just get famous just because we were nice guys who could play our asses off. A lot of it was that we were similar to rock bands, we had a lot of those trappings. To be quite honest we could have done the same things with all acoustic instruments; I think that's what Chick realized towards the end, that we didn't have to have all the heavy, loud amplifiers. We could have done it with acoustic instruments but we might not have had the size crowds we did. Just to achieve what we wanted to achieve musically we could have done that with acoustic instruments.
On the album "Romantic Warrior," there's the piece called "Romantic Warrior" that's all acoustic. That piece is very, very powerful, but it's acoustic instruments. We proved it with that. Also the piece we won a Grammy with, "No Mystery" that Earth, Wind and Fire used to play in front of their shows that was all acoustic. Towards the end our show was half electric and half acoustic. We'd play maybe three electric songs, then we would play a long acoustic piece, then each guy would take a solo, and that's where my soloing bass career really started. The inspiration for me playing bass solos was cultivated in Return to Forever but it came from Jimmy Garrison, who probably had the least technique on the bass. But Jimmy could get up on the stage and for 30 minutes captivate an audience and it had nothing to do with his technique, it had to do with the fact that he believed it.
He does a little bit of it on the "A Love Supreme" album. I don't think I've ever said that in the press but that's my guy as far as just playing alone on the bass, Jimmy Garrison. Ron Carter, even though he's a great bass player, Richard Davis and all those guys… But after two minutes of them playing alone… Jimmy Garrison had a way of painting because he believed, it was a very spiritual thing he was trying to do.
With RTF there were a lot of trappings; even just the fact that we broke up over money, when I look back on it… now I can talk about it, but it was so sad. Even the fact that there were power struggles in the band; it would be really interesting to see if Chick mentions that he got upset because our solo albums came out and it was a little pressure. Chick's a very smart guy, he'll probably have another angle on it. But at that time he was very upset about it and it was sad. I kind of look back and we were only human and we had all the trappings of being humans - ego, etc., etc., etc. all that stuff, but that's just the way it is.
I actually think that some of the success of that band is attributed to the fact that all the guys were different and there was tension. I think if we were all kind of lovey dovey and everything is beautiful kind of thing, the band might not have sounded as good.'
WJ: So that tension assisted the creativity?
SC: It always does.
WJ: How have you found that experience, and of writing and playing that way has affected your music since then?
SC: Sometimes when I have my own bands I'll have a piece that demands the guys in the band to stretch their technical ability, they'll have to practice something, they can't just come in and play it like a tune. In bebop and traditional jazz its pretty much based on guys getting a tune. Initially it was show tunes and this tune would have changes - usually an A then a B section, then it goes back to A again, guys would play the melody then guys would just solo. The genius stuff… mathematics are involved, like choices of notes that go over this chord in a sequence. Charlie Parker was like the best at it. He would just play over some stuff… I mean you could write it down and it was mathematically perfect, like Bach… [Parker] must have been from another planet or something, it was amazing.
What we added to the band was more like classical music. We'd have these ensemble things that you could re-arrange those things for full-blown orchestra, and then we had the solo aspect, which was over changes which usually had nothing to do with the ensemble section. For me it was like an expanded way of writing, you don't see a lot of that now. I remember when Wynton Marsalis came on the scene because the jazz critics - as Sonny Rollins told me once - they gave him the jazz flag to run with it. So he's running with it…
WJ: And then they beat him up for it…
SC: [Laughs} Yeah, and his mistake was that he was so vocal about what he was doing and he kind of cancelled on all the other stuff that was done. The big mistake that he did was when Ken Burns did that series on jazz and [Wynton] kind of left out… It was widely known that Ken Burns didn't know shit about jazz and Wynton was really the guy in the editing room throwing shit on the floor. Like there was all kinds of footage on Return to Forever, Weather Report, Joe Henderson, Chick Corea… all of these people that really were hardly mentioned on that series and that was a mistake that Wynton made. He actually could have done a really beautiful thing with that that actually would have educated people today on jazz. [Burns'] piece actually made the concept of jazz even more a museum piece than it is for people out there. What I was hoping to see was how jazz music and any of the music that we or whoever did, anyone that you could attach the word jazz to, how that music went into society and influenced whoever.
You could take something as strange as Steely Dan's music, the album "Aja"… there's a tune on there that has Duke Ellington changes in it. The guy is singing some crazy shit on top and they've got this dumb rhythm on top and it would have been interesting for [Wynton/Burns] to say 'check that out.' It just showed me that he was ignorant and - well obviously [Burns] was ignorant - and it was a shame because there was an opportunity to show how powerful the music that came from our greats - you know with classical music you've got Bach, Beethoven… our greats were like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, a few others… and you could say these guys are like the forefathers and everybody else that came after that were influenced. And then this seed passed through and it went here, it went there… so much popular music jazz has affected that and I was really waiting to see that and I was so disappointed when I saw [Burns]. That piece was so thin…
WJ: Yes, the film could have made those connections… and shown the possibilities of instrumental music capturing a broader public attention…
SC: …Yeah, and just where it went… Like even those guys… take Steely Dan, I'm sure those guys listened to - I've seen it in an article where one of the guys said he liked Horace Silver. He's a rock musician but he's able to pound out three chords that he heard from Sister Sadie or Song for My Father… Then he writes a song and he puts those three chords in there. Anyway on the records, Wayne Shorter's on those records - on the Steely Dan records - obviously they like jazz. So it would have been nice for [the Burns film] to show the influence of jazz. I still believe that to this day no one has really done the piece on jazz and its power, it is the most powerful music other than the blues - there's the blues and jazz, the two most powerful musical forces in music in this country. That music actually influenced classical music - Leonard Bernstein, Stravinsky… it went back and no one's ever done the piece on it, because I just think they couldn't hear it.
WJ: So have you been sampled?
SC: Oh man, I've been sampled a lot. Jay-Z sampled a song of mine and he said it was Isaac Hayes and he said he sent the money to Isaac. I said 'I don't care, good thing for Isaac, send me my money, and he had to… That's a whole other piece… For me, where jazz is today and its place in the world today, it's kinda weird, it's kind of gone backwards. It hasn't been presented properly and actually what jazz did, what did jazz do in this country, what did it do to other music, even hip hop… its all there.
- - - - - - - - - -
<<< Back to Independent Ear Vol 1. No. 3
- - - - - - - - - -
Check out THE INDEPENDENT EAR Archives:
Vol. 1 No. 1
Vol. 1 No. 2