THE INDEPENDENT EAR
Insights, Reviews & Interviews
By Willard Jenkins

Vol. 1 No. 3

Lenny White, drums

WJ: What were the circumstances and how did you come to play with Return to Forever?

Lenny White: I had played with Chick on "Bitches Brew" and I had played with Stanley with Joe Henderson's group. I had gone from playing with Miles to doing a record called "Red Clay" with Freddie Hubbard. Joe Henderson was on that record with Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter. Joe Henderson called me and said he was putting a band together and would I like to play in it. The band was Joe, Woody Shaw, George Cables and Reggie Johnson. Reggie Johnson had decided that he was going to move to Europe, so we didn't have a bass player. I went to Slugs to see Horace Silver and Stanley was playing with Horace. I said 'man, this cat's great.' So I walked up to Stanley during the break, introduced myself and said 'listen, Joe Henderson needs a bass player, give him a call. He called Joe and he played with Joe, and that's where we hooked up -- like '70-'71. I played with Joe for about 18 months then I went and played with Freddie and Chick came and played with Joe, so Chick and Stanley met up in Joe's band. From Freddie I went out and played with this band out in California called Azteca -- with Paul Jackson, Tom Harrell, Mel Martin, Pete & Coke Escovedo, and Neal Schon -- a whole bunch of guys. I was in San Francisco at the time and Chick and Stanley were in Japan at the time. I got a call from Chick and he said 'listen, we're going to play at the Keystone Korner and we'd like to know if you could come and play because Airto and Flora can't make the gig, they have to go back to New York.' I said sure, so just the trio played at the Keystone Korner for a week. This was around '71, I actually have tape of that -- it was some amazing music.

Chick was playing electric piano, Stanley was playing acoustic bass, and I was playing drums. We played all of that music from the "Captain Marvel" record, and from the very first "Return to Forever" record. We also played some things from the "Light as a Feather" record. I had known all those guys from Santana and Malo out there, so the last day Mingo Lewis, the conga player who was playing with Santana at that time came and sat in, and two guitar players -- Bill Connors and Barry Finnerty. At the end of the night Chick said 'I want to start an electric Return to Forever and I really would like for you to be in it.' I said 'I don't think so man because I'm out here with this band Azteca and I think I'm going to stay and do this.' So they went back to New York and Steve Gadd played [RTF] for a bit. Then Steve decided that he wanted to do studio work and Chick called me again. By this time I had decided that I was going to come back to New York. Actually I had been asked to play in Journey but I didn't do that I went to play with Chick and that was how my tenure with Return to Forever started.

WJ: What was your sense of RTF at the time you joined the band?

LW: I knew that it was something new. The fact is there was this new movement happening; with "Bitches Brew" the music changed again. It had gotten electric... The difference to me in that music -- the true fusion music -- and what it is today or what it became was that you had these primary musicians that had played this post-bop music and they took all of those sensibilities and amped it up with electric instruments. It wasn't a thing like you were playing licks, you were playing the same thing that you were playing when you played jazz, but it was like this was jazz on steroids. It was like the drums got bigger you were hitting them harder and it was electrified. Tony Williams to me is the true father of fusion.

WJ: Even more so than Miles?

LW: Miles definitely gave it the presence, but Tony was the guy that took it and moved it into a space that was totally different than what everybody was playing. I think Miles saw that because John McLaughlin played with Tony first and then he played with Miles. When they did "In a Silent Way" that pre-dated a lot of things and I just think what Tony did was he took it into a small group space where just like your trios, quintets and quartets that played jazz in the clubs. Tony was doing this with a trio and it was totally different -- it was a paradigm shift because of the volume and the mass of the music that was being played. He was still a virtuoso drummer so he was doing the same thing he had done with Miles, it was just in a different coat. It flipped everybody on their ear.

WJ: This beginning of RTF as a quartet was an interesting time because there was the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report...

LW: If you look at the true lineage Mahavishnu Orchestra was together, RTF was together at the same time, Larry Coryell's 11th House was a little bit after Mahavishnu and RTF had been established, then after that the Headhunters happened. But most of the principle people that were in the seminal fusion bands were on the "Bitches Brew" record -- Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter...

WJ: Since those bands all came out of that same root and all were born at the same time, did you feel any competition?

LW: Yeah, of course! It was healthy, just like with bebop. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie decided to make a music that was going to be on par with any virtuoso music on the European classical side. I believe the same perspective was occurring in the early fusion music because it wasn't rock & roll it was way more complex than rock & roll but it had -- a lotta people think to the detriment -- it was basically something that was based on virtuosity.

WJ: One reason I asked about that competition is because when I talked with Stanley and Bill Connors they talked (separately) about how they felt that when Chick upped the electric ante from the Flora/Airto band to the quartet, then the quartet with Al DiMeola, that Chick was heavily influenced by Mahavishnu's success/example.

LW: Yes and no, only from the standpoint that when you're in it you're always influenced by the people who were getting accolades and getting the dap at the time. Mahavishnu was getting accolades at the time; RTF had just started to get those accolades. Weather Report was getting accolades but WR had a saxophone and we had guitar. I was heavily influenced by listening to Yes and King Crimson and I was into art rock in terms of the sound. Chick was a great composer and I thought the compositions in RTF were excellent, I just didn't think it had the depth of sounds that it should have. I thought RTF should be on the same par as these bands like Yes that had this orchestrational outlook on rock and roll and I thought that we could bring all of those same sensibilities into our music and take it to the next level. I'm not saying that we were NOT influenced by what was happening with Mahavishnu...

WJ: I'm not necessarily saying YOU -- meaning the aggregate you -- but I mean Chick in particular.

LW: Chick is a great composer and I think that he always looks at whatever units he has as a vehicle for his compositions. If you listen to a tune like "The Gamemaker," that was influenced by Mahavishnu, but "Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy" and "Captain Senor Mouse," those things were unique to RTF.

WJ: Originally the band was billed as Chick Corea and RTF then it became simply RTF, as all four of you began to exert yourselves and your influence upon the music, what were some of each band member's responsibilities approaching a record date?

LW: This is a very interesting point. It was the first time in the history of recorded music that you had four individuals in a band that were signed to one particular label that also had four individual recording contracts with other labels.

WJ: That's exactly how Al DiMeola characterized the uniqueness of that situation.

LW: Historically speaking that had never happened before. I had a discussion with Chick back in '95-96 and he confided in me -- he said 'listen I had started this band and it got bigger than what I expected it to be and so I had to break it up.' I think the fact is... it was never a co-op band; Chick was always the leader of the band... because if it was a co-op the band would have never broken up.

WJ: That's true but when I look at it in terms of a cooperative I'm factoring in what you said about the fact that all four of you had evolved into recording artists in your own right, and in a sense being leaders at a certain point, so obviously the other three of you had your own ideas, I'm just wondering if at that point did the RTF records become a kind of cooperative responsibility?

LW: Chick had delegated powers; Chick had given everybody the opportunity to write the music and when you write the music you bring your own influences into the collective of what the band's viewpoint is. I was the first guy to announce a tune [onstage] other than Chick, so when everybody got comfortable with that then everybody started announcing pieces of music onstage and it was cool, it became a BAND in the eyes of the public because everybody had their own followings. When people went to see the band they said 'oh yeah, this is an actual band...' It wasn't just Chick Corea, this was an actual band. I had gotten heavily into sounds and uses of synthesizers and getting this kind of sound and that kind of sound and I kind of brought that into the band. When we did "Romantic Warrior" Chick mixed it, and nobody liked it. So I was chosen to go to London and re-mix the record. The record that you actually hear, I mixed that record along with Dennis McKay.

WJ: How did things play out with the overall band dynamic and the interpersonal relationships once the other three of you began to be recognized on your own and began to make your own records?

LW: I think that kind of bothered Chick to the point where he felt he had no control over the band anymore, he felt he had to disband -- or at least change the dynamic so he would have control over it again, hence Al and I were out.

WJ: What precipitated the breakup of the quartet?

LW: At the time it happened we were in Kansas City... Chick thought that Al was too loud, I don't know what the scenario was, but Chick said to me 'I think I'm going to have to make a change.' He said he was going to go write a piano concerto and I said 'look, you can go do that but what you've accomplished with this band is something that all artists really want to be able to do and if you need to let's go on a sabbatical, take a year, whatever you have to do, but don't break the band up.' That fell on deaf ears; he didn't hear that at all. So he broke the band up in '76. We had gotten into some contractual problems so it got to be a whole ugly legal thing; there were legal issues that led to money issues. I think to this day that's the reason the band hasn't gotten back together. Al, Stanley and myself have talked about it, and I've actually talked about it with Chick. Four or five years ago Chick and I were together in Perugia for about four or five days and we sat together and talked about it, ironed out whatever problems we had, and he said 'yeah, let's do the band again,' and everybody was into it.

WJ: Stanley mentioned that some promoter had offered you an opportunity to go on tour for a year or something. Then Al mentioned that he at one time shared an agent with Chick and he asked the agent and Chick said he simply wasn't feeling it spiritually...

LW: Let me put it in perspective: When the band broke up in '76 we hadn't played together until 1981. In 1981 I called Chick and Stanley to be a part of a record I produced with Chaka Khan, Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard called "Echoes of an Era." That was the first time we had played together and we had a really nice experience. So we decided that maybe we should put the band back together again, henceforth we did. In '83 we did a tour and we got together and said 'where should we play?' I said 'listen man, we haven't played in over 10 years, everything is going to sell out.' So we booked these venues and sure enough everything sold out so we had to do two or three shows. It was great, it was a nice tour, we went to Japan, and it was a great success. We had decided that we would do a tour of the states and then another tour of Japan and a tour of Europe. In mid-stream Chick decided that he didn't want to do it again, so we didn't do the other part of the tour. As I told you, years after that he confided in me that the band got too big.

WJ: Stanley said something like that; basically the band had become a runaway train in Chick's mind.

LW: Chick couldn't control it and with the fact that he couldn't control it, he couldn't handle it.

WJ: What were some of the highlights of your RTF days?

LW: Playing music at that level, consistently every night... I don't know if you'd look at it as highlights, because what happens when you do something that is that powerful and it has a powerful effect on other people... There have been so many people of different walks of life that have come to me and said 'man I saw you guys and it changed my life.' One major point was -- I believe it was 1975 when we played at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in L.A. and it was sold out. The highlight of the whole night was Stevie Wonder was going to bring the band on, which he did. And he came and played with us. At that time I had never experienced -- you know how they say in the bible where people were ripping their clothes off? -- I had never experienced that for real. People were actually doing that, they were actually ripping off their clothes, they were going berserk, and they were going crazy over Stevie Wonder and Return to Forever together onstage. We played "Living for the City" and "Superstition," and it was really incredible. I actually have a tape of it. And then we played at the Wollman Rink in Central Park, summer of 1975. I think it held something like 7,000 people. We played there and they broke the fences down and it was an overflow crowd -- something like 10-12,000 people. After that point I think they stopped having concerts there because it was total overflow. That was a real high point because it was just pandemonium.

WJ: In retrospect 35+ years later, what is RTF's place in the pantheon?

LW: It's the top. Of course Joe Zawinul would say that Weather Report was... Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter were consummate improvisers; Jaco was a great bass player but I don't know if he could improvise at the same level, and they had different drummers in the band. Take Weather Report, whichever lineup you want; you take Mahavishnu's best lineup, and you take RTF... you take those bands out of the context that they were hugely popular, put them at the Vanguard and let them play some improvised music... and we'll see [laughs]. Take the 20 paces, let's play some "Cherokee" and let's go. And of course Wayne and Joe are going to be cool, but you're talking about a BAND now, 4 guys, 5 guys, put all those bands up there and let's do that. It's cool to be in the comfort zone and playing the fusion, but let's take it out and let's call a tune, let's play a set of purely improvised music, let's play some changes. So in the pantheon of improvising bands, its top 3, I don't know the other three. Don't make people hate me now [laughs]...

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