Got it.

Here we go.

So this is the get you some productions podcast episode.

Shit, I don't even know what episode this is.

93, 94, 95 maybe.

We're gonna.

They actually say that you don't even have a podcast until you've gotten to your 100th episode.

So I'm sorry to say that you've.

You're joining when this podcast is not official.

Okay.

But this is a get you some productions podcast where we discuss everything music related from the first note to the last fan and everything in between.

So we discuss, you know, appropriate gig attire.

We discuss whether you can curse out your fans.

We discuss composition techniques.

We discuss improvisation.

We discuss micro dosing.

Whatever.

Whatever it takes to get to the end result of a good composition or something.

I don't know.

So before we go on, if you want to support the show, you have to do the things that everyone asks you to do on every single show, which is like subscribe, leaving, rating, review, all that crap.

If you want to.

If you want to support the show monetarily, you can do so by clicking the very first link in the show notes.

That is our reverb affiliation.

Reverb is an online marketplace for music gear.

And you can go click that link, buy something for yourself, no additional cost to you, and it will support the show.

Dan, did I miss anything?

I don't think so.

Your name is Keith.

Shit.

I missed the basic stuff.

So my name is Keith.

And my name is Daniel.

Okay.

I'm John.

All right, John.

That's John.

So our special, very special guest today is John Esposito, a jazz pianist extraordinaire who was actually a very important figure in mine and Dan's musical development, because we studied with John 25 years ago or so, and he showed us.

He showed us that there was a level above the highest level we had thought possible in terms of musicianship.

He showed us that there was a level above that.

And I don't want to go.

We're going to go into John's whole story, and we'll let him talk a lot more.

But I can tell you that we did a workshop with John up in the Catskill Mountains, and I had diarrhea before those workshops pretty much every time.

So without further ado, let me pull up my.

Let me pull up my notes.

Okay, so John Esposito, you know, so the first thing we always ask everyone to do is tell their superhero origin story.

So basically.

And, you know, and so it's actually kind of shameful that.

And maybe we Just maybe I don't remember.

Maybe Dan remembers, but maybe we don't know your entire story in music and, you know, and also, like, where you grew up, because this is a very human thing that we do here, like talking to people.

So, you know, and, you know, I think people will want to know, like, who you are.

So you can start all the way.

You know, you can start from diapers if you really want to.

And if we don't get to something, we'll just do another show, you know, so you can be as verbose or not as you want, but just tell us, be succinct.

Don't do that.

All right, well, in that case.

I grew up in a family that was musical and artistic and kind of on both sides.

My mother's parents immigrated from Avellino 1918.

They were farmers.

My grandfather had survived the trench warfare in Austria on the Austrian front.

They got here in 1918.

They had six kids.

Six kids all died in two weeks from the scarlet fever epidemic.

In the 20s, they had six more kids, gave them the same names as the first six.

Those kids grew up to be go through the Depression, the Second World War.

My mother is a visual artist.

She graduated Pratt in the early 50s.

Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Her brothers, two of her brothers became graphic artists.

My mother started out as a graphic artist.

She ended up as a painter.

Hudson Valley landscape were kind of specialty.

I was born in Brooklyn.

We moved up to Marlboro, New York, which is just north of Newburgh on the west side of the Hudson, in the mid-1950s, when I was in, you know, three or four years old.

My mother loved music When.

When she was.

Her final illness in her mid-80s, I was visiting her in the hospital for a couple days, and we were just chatting about, you know, life in general, our lives in general, kind of summing up.

And there was a silence.

And then she said, do you ever find that you really like African music and African culture?

And, you know, I laughed and said, yeah.

Why do you ask?

And I was ready for some kind of embarrassing answer.

And she said, well, because when I was pregnant with you, that's all I was listening to was African music.

And I was trying to Picture her at 22, she was about 4 foot 11, this little girl in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, going to the library and taking out records, okay?

At that time, the only records you can get of African music were Library of Congress, you know, French musicologists, field recordings.

I was in my early teens.

I had started listening to a lot of music from all over the world.

And there were a number of records again, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institute, at the local library.

And I went and took them out and I would listen to them over and over again.

There was one in particular, which I was obsessed with.

It was a particular piece, and it was a village song.

Just sound like a whole village.

And there were whistle flutes.

It was called Whistle Flute Song.

The Yargam Tribe, Warat, Nigeria.

And there's drumming and singing.

And it just somehow it just made me feel great, that particular piece.

And it had a kind of an unusual.

The end phrase thing is in four, the, you know, or two over three.

That's lot of West African music is the end was 556 was the figure and which was kind of unusual.

Right.

And so years later, I had to write something really quickly.

I was doing a record for ESP.

But 556, that's just four.

Four John.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, but thank you.

That's what I'm.

That's what I'm here.

I'm just a.

I'm just a fact checker.

It's good to have a musicologist on the board here.

So anyway, I ended up writing this.

I was doing this record for esp and we ended up doing a concert at the Knitting Factory in New York.

And it was a large group, and there's about eight or nine musicians.

And there was a piece I'd written called.

Which I called Borat.

Right.

It's from the Borat, Nigeria, Yergam tribe.

And I cured that last phrase and I developed it into a whole piece.

We go in to do the concert and these two bard alums come up.

She had been a dance student.

He was a music student.

I had, you know, hadn't seen them in a while.

They come up and they have this guy with them.

And they introduce me and they.

To the guy and they say, well, he just arrived, you know, and he wants to hear jazz.

So we.

We saw you replying.

I said, okay, great.

So I'm in a hurry.

I go up, start the set.

We.

I announce the tune.

And I basically say, you know, I need to give credit for this piece to the Yergam people in Warat, Nigeria.

I have no idea where Bharat is, whether it's a small place or big place or if it's still there, if the people are still there.

But this piece somehow, really I always connect with.

All right, we play the piece, finish the set.

I come off, the guy comes up to me, he's crying, and he says, I thought my friends were playing a Joke on me.

And I said, what are you talking about?

He says, I'm from Bharat.

Wow.

And.

And he says, I just got off the plane.

This is the first place I came.

Wait, this was a bard student?

No, this was a guy from Africa who had just gotten off a plane that my bard friends introduced me to.

Got it.

Never met him before.

And he.

I said, well, is.

Is Barrett like a city or is it a town?

He goes, no, it's a tiny village, Right?

So it was just this wild, pretty amazing, you know, So I.

Synchronicity, you know, And I just said, well, welcome to America, you know?

So all of that I realized later.

I went back to the record, and I realized, oh, my mother had taken a library record out and was listening to that for whatever nine months.

I heard.

I must have heard that piece in utero.

And when I went to the library to take music out, which, you know, is like 1906, early 1960s or mid-1960s, I was hearing the same record.

And that was why the connection.

What is really interesting was the connection with meeting this person from Bharat.

I think it was just a confirmation on the importance of music for connecting everybody on the planet, how visceral it is.

And this is way before, you know, this is before current, you know, Internet, you know, and all of that.

So this was.

Well, this was in the 90s.

So in any case, that's my origin story on that side, the importance of my mother in terms of music.

The other side.

My father's family immigrated from Naples and Rome.

My great grandfather, who was a sculptor, who I did meet.

I did.

I do remember, also named John.

His son Salvatore.

My grandfather was a violinist.

I thought classical violinist.

And he made violins.

So I used to watch him make violins as a little kid.

And when I got to be 17, I went.

Went to college in Albany.

He lived in Catskill.

They had moved up from Brooklyn.

And so I went to visit, and he said, oh, I hear you're studying music.

He said, yeah.

He says, so you want to be a musician?

I said, yeah.

He says, what kind of music are you playing?

I said, jazz.

And he said, you're not playing that bebop, are you?

And so I thought, okay, he's a classical guy.

He doesn't know, you know, bebop is.

He doesn't know it's a style.

He thinks it's a general term.

All right, so years pass.

He passes.

My father drops off an envelope full of photos, and I've got all these, you know, photos of my grandfather at 18 and, you know, like the old bathing suit at the seashore, the full, you know, bathing suit.

He was born, like, 1900, right?

So then I come to this photo, and it's on my website.

And it's a jazz band from 1921.

And it's the drummers, like, you know, holding the sticks like this with the snare.

It's outside, and it's at White Lake, New York, where the Woodstock Festival was, right?

And it's a resort.

They're obviously playing a resort gig.

And he's got the snare drum.

He's got the sticks up like this.

And there's, you know, trumpet player, and there's.

There's a clarinet player.

And I look and.

And it's my grandfather playing.

I forget what it was.

Maybe it's maybe a soprano saxophone or clarinet.

And there's some other instruments on the ground.

There's a violin, a C melody.

I go, what the hell is this?

I turn it over and it's.

His name was Salvatore Esposito.

Sal and the gang, 1921, White Lake, New York.

So I go, I call my father, and he says, I don't.

I don't know.

You know, when you're at the funeral, I'll introduce you to somebody.

So we get to the funeral, this guy comes up.

He says, my father says, this is so.

And so.

He knew your father, your grandfather, since they were little kids.

And I said, well, can you explain this photo?

He says, oh, your grandfather was a jazz musician?

And I said.

I said, what?

He was, you know, he's classical musician, violinist.

He says, no, no, he played all kinds of.

Played lots of instruments.

He played all kinds of music.

And then I think at that point, either he gave me, or I found his resume, which included the Paul Whiteman Orchestra from 1921.

Right.

Which is kind of a seminal big band, I think.

I asked him about Paul Whiteman.

He says, yeah, yeah, he was with Paul Whiteman for a while until he got fired when he told them.

Told Paul Whiteman that he was a shoemaker, not a musician.

So.

Which hilarious.

Grandfather's lack of tact was classic.

I like how he didn't even bother to mention to you any of that in the midst of a conversation.

Yeah, it was.

Yeah, he was somewhat eccentric.

But what he.

I realized that when Charlie Parker hit.

My grandfather was 40, and he was a traditional jazz player, like a Dixieland era player.

So it must have been like, you know, Satan had arrived with an alto.

And so that's why the comment, you're not playing that bebop, are you?

That's what that was.

So in any case, yeah, he, he.

He hung around I think in.

I think maybe I got my first record out and he was still alive at the end.

But anyway that, so that's, that's kind of the.

The background on that side.

I'm not going to go into my grandmother's mafia connected family and the getting ready and the.

It's another show.

The funeral home and the getting rid of bodies for the mob, that's a whole other show.

You know, when you're a jazz musician you have to diversify sometimes.

So disposing of bodies may have been an actual.

A little bit of a side gig, you know.

Yeah.

After the gig, 3am Right.

So anyway, that was my family.

We moved up from Brooklyn.

My father was policeman at various points.

He.

He ended up superintendent of police for Metro north.

So he ran Grand Central.

He was a.

Had a private investigation business and he was also chief of police in the town.

I grew up in Marlboro and my mother taught, you know, privately and substituted in schools.

Taught painting and.

Yeah and then I had one sister who was a.

Also piano player.

She.

She worked.

She was an administrator for Metro North.

She didn't make it through the.

The COVID pandemic and that's.

That's pretty much it.

So you know, I'm.

I'm in good shape.

My new family is my.

My partner who's also teaches at Bard, she's a photographer, video artist and our 10 year old daughter and still playing music.

Have a little record company we're putting out.

Still putting out records.

I'm up to number 23 and 24 will be coming out in the next few months.

I just got three out this year which was kind of a reboot after the pandemic.

I think I had about two years of like no work.

None for the first year and probably not more than a dozen gigs for the second year.

And I think I had gone from, you know, probably playing 150 gigs a year or something like that.

So it was kind of.

It was weird to go to nothing, you know.

Yeah, it is definitely weird.

You.

You just.

It's like you have to sort of like re.

When you get back into it, it's a big.

It's kind of a.

Not.

Probably not for you as much as it is for me because I was going from no gigs to an occasional gig to no gigs to.

Now I'm thinking oh shit, I gotta start gigging again.

Yeah.

Tell us about you.

So you know, I really want to hear about all the different bands you were in and a lot of the different projects you were in, you know, like, especially like, I don't know, like the real, the real like heavy hitting jazz stuff.

Because when I knew you, I don't know if like it was around the time that Eric Persson CD came out.

Yeah.

Which I was a big fan of.

And I'm also, I don't know all of your stuff, but I was also a big fan of your trio.

The reimagined standards one.

Yeah, but, but you know, but those are relatively recent, you know, in the grand scheme of things, you know.

But like.

So I don't really know.

I don't think we, we know much about what you were doing in like the early days of your music career, you know, up until we met you in the two.

In the late 90s, you know.

So I guess my, my, my career started as in high school.

I, I had a few years of piano lessons probably when I was, I don't know, 12, something like that.

And I think I got like up to like Michael Aaron Book two or book three.

But I was very unsure of myself.

Shy, very uncomfortable that with the teacher.

It was an old lady.

I think she was probably maybe 45 and terrified of the, you know, the, the performance at the end of the year and all of that.

So I felt like music was not for me.

But I really love to listen to music.

So I was listening to a lot of 20th century classical music I really liked.

And then, and then I discovered blues.

And so I was listening to a lot of Delta blues and you know, Robert Johnson and all of that, Skip James and then a lot of Chicago blues.

And I really got into, I wanted to play, but piano seemed.

I didn't see how I would be able to do it, you know.

And so I, I started playing harmonica and at 16 I ended up being invited to join a blues band with a guitarist named Steve Jurassi who just passed recently.

At my age there's like just passed recently ends almost every story, every, every sentence.

So we do.

Doing a lot of memorials but you know, we were 16 and, and had this blues band which became.

I think he got married at 17 or 18 and we became, we ended up being an everything rock band.

So initially the switch to.

From blues harp to keyboard was because he was interested in this young lady and then a heroic effort to get into her drawers.

He, she was a classical flute player.

And he came to me and said she's joining the band and we're not going to be a blues band anymore.

We're going to be a jazz band.

And you can't have jazz harmonica.

And he didn't know about Ted Steelman.

And.

And you can't have class, you can't have blues flute.

So we're going to have to be a jazz band and you're going to have to play piano.

So I, you know, being.

I think he did you a favor.

So he says, you know, I can.

I can get you started.

So he's trying to get me to play C major 7 to D minor 7 in time on the piano.

And after about 20 minutes of that, he gives up and he's screaming at me that he could teach a chimpanzee to.

To play that more quickly.

So I.

I stuck with it, I think.

And I had like an organ and I.

We ended up.

Actually, she ended up not joining the band and he got married and then we.

We formed a band.

Let me see.

I guess I went away to college for a year.

That was SUNY Albany.

I was listening to people.

I was learning.

I was teaching myself how to play in the basement of the dorm.

And I was trying to copy probably Coltrane's Equinox and thing, things like that.

I was listening TO this is 1970.

I was 17 when I went to college, 7071.

And I was listening to the current music, which was brewing, and Freddie Hubbard, Straight Life and Red Clay.

And I had been listening to a lot of Coltrane, I think maybe a couple years before.

I had gotten, you know, vinyl was really cheap because the record industry was crashing, burning the jazz industry.

And so I had gotten a Coltrane compilation with Giant Steps and Equinox and Central Park West.

And I had gotten kind of Blue, of course, and a Cecil Taylor record called.

Which was called Air, it's the World of Cecil Taylor is what it is.

And those three records I listened to intensely and they got me into.

So that kind of range of sort of mainstream, late 50s, early 60s music, plus more avant garde music, plus fusion was typical for people my age because it was all still happening at once, right?

So jazz starts 1920, basically.

And some of my first gigs, I ended up playing with people who had played in the 20s and 30s, you know, like people my grandfather's age.

So I kind of.

So it was all.

It was all good.

I listened to James P.

Johnson and Sidney Bechet and really loved it.

But I also love Coltrane's Transition and Sonship and Sun Raw and Cecil Taylor and all of that.

So what was available to play In Albany.

Like, that was a stone bebop town and some fusions.

So I started that first year.

I was just practicing.

My sophomore year was interrupted by the Vietnam draft.

And so I lived with.

I lived in a dorm suite.

There were six of us.

And it was.

This is 1970, right.

So you have to remember America had.

Was an apartheid country until maybe 60, mid-60s, late-60s, right.

And so I'm in school with sort of the first generation of African Americans who are like, getting student loans and basic educational opportunity grants and everything like that.

So I'm in the integrated dorm, right?

Which they said without.

With straight face and not.

Not embarrassed in any way is the integrated dorm.

They wanted to see if we would kill each other or not.

And so that we.

We got along great.

You know, it was like, basically me, three African Americans, a Puerto Rican and a French Canadian, and some of us were musicians.

I ended up living later on, living with musicians from.

From that.

From that dorm suite.

Three guys got drafted the first year.

It was the first year of the cancellation of college deferments.

This is maybe 71, but I was 17, so my draft number didn't come up until the spring.

And of course, it was like a really low number, right.

33.

So I go to go.

To get.

You know, so my.

My idea of, like, oh, I'm gonna play music.

And so everything is, like, off the table.

I'm planning on going to Vietnam and getting killed.

So I do the.

Do the physical.

I try to fail it using various substances and pretty much destroy my health for the next few years.

In that month leading up to the physical, I passed the physical because basically, if you could crawl in, they were taking anybody at that point, and they said, you know, you're going to be drafted in November.

So November rolls around.

November 14th, I get a notification that there are negotiations in Paris between Kissinger and Lee Ducteau.

Nixon is the president.

And we're on.

I'm on hold.

Don't do anything.

Your.

Your.

Your certification is now one H1 holding.

We could call you with two days notice.

So I didn't bother going back to school.

And so my.

What would have been my sophomore year, I worked as a private investigator for about nine months for my father, which was a real nightmare, which I won't go into.

That sounds fascinating, by the way.

God, it is, but it's brutal.

Okay.

It's the.

It's the dark underbelly of American life and law enforcement, and it's.

Yeah, we can talk about that another time.

Yeah, I want to depress myself.

And so at the end of that, after my nervous breakdown, I quit that and I joined a rock band with this guy Steve De Rossi again.

And it's an everything band because he's now married and he needs to make money and he tells us all it's going to be the blues band again.

And then he snookers us into joining the band and it's, you know, Rolling Stone medley, Beatles medley, Steve Wander medley, Jimi Hendrix, et cetera, et cetera, Brothers Johnson, James Brown, and it's like 150 tunes, right?

And exactly what I needed to do because I had to play in time.

I didn't know anything.

So I had to figure out these very basic tunes.

I had to be able to play basic harmonies and.

Which was a struggle because I wanted to play jazz, right?

And I thought, well, jazz is complicated, right?

I'm 18 and I'm playing these gigs, you know, and we're doing sort of regional tours, New England down to Pennsylvania, new all over New York.

Platform shoes, shiny satin pants, Star Trek shirt, you know, kind of long hair, beard and, you know, piles of women and drugs.

And so that that went on for about nine months.

Then I went back to school and that when I went back as a sophomore, I decided that I really wanted to play music.

I had originally gone as a political science major because my parents wanted me to me to be a lawyer because that was the next step up from being a cop, basically.

And so I bullshitted my way into the music program, which was divided between, seriously divided ideologically and by inclination between classical, very conservative classical music and electronic music.

So this is State University SUNY Albany.

The electronic program is run by a guy named Joel Chad, who's like serious, you know, committed electronic composer.

Like, his claim to fame was he had two computers with random number generators talking to each other, synthesizing sound.

And then he was just agonized over how he could remove himself from the process even more by not having to make the decision to hit the on button.

This is like again, 1970 people, you know, smoke a bone, listen to drones.

This was, was the whole, the whole thing.

But I did meet like sort of John everybody from John Cage on down in terms of the whole electronic music world.

And I made some of that music.

And this is the era of, you know, a closet with oscillators and two tape decks and razor blade and tape.

So while I'm doing that, I'm now playing with on campus band called Skytrain, which is.

I'm the white guy in the band and we're playing really the music of that era, like RB, sort of Les McCann lover, some sort of Bitches Brew sounding stuff.

Red Clay, you know, Donnie Hathaway, Roberta Flack, you know, it's kind of R and B.

Well, there's a vocalist.

There's about not 10 people in the band.

They all play like really great drummer and bass player, minimal piano player, guitarist, who really was figuring out how to play the guitar, but made great sounds.

Some conga players, a saxophone player.

And very 19, as you can imagine, very 1971, whatever it was.

Afro thing.

And so that I did that for a couple years and I started playing with singers, playing standards and then kind of established myself on the scene in Albany.

And by 76 or 7, I started playing with some of the.

More the older generation guys.

So those would have been Junior Montrose, who was in the Mingus band in the 50s.

He's a tenor player on Pithecanthropus Erectus, which is the first free music he's recorded.

And then he had a band with Kenny Durham.

So I think there's one Blue Note record and there's some other records from the 50s.

He got strung out, moved to Europe, spent most of his career in Europe.

He had moved back to Albany and he had a couple of, you know, places that he played steadily.

So I worked with him.

And then there was this multi instrumentalist named Nick Rignola, who was basically a baritone player, but famous as a baritone player.

Like he.

He won the Downbeat Critics Award every year for like, you know, lifetime on baritone.

And then as multi instrumentalist and very technically incredibly proficient and that kind of any tune, any key kind of kind of thing.

And fast and aggressive and all of that.

And I didn't like it, but I felt like all of the thing.

What I really wanted to play like was I hadn't figured out, but I knew I wanted to play music like Coltrane, like Miles, like Herbie Hancock, like Chick Corea, like Keith Jarrett.

I have his granddaughter in my class right now.

And who?

Keith's.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

And.

Which is funny.

So I.

I was doing a lot of copying people at that time or, you know, trying to emulate them.

And while I was playing with those people, Nick every once in a while, Junior.

I actually ended up in his band and played probably for about a year and a half, a couple nights a week.

I had my own little quartet with drummer Jeff Segal, bassist Otto Gardner, and guitarist named Kevin McNeil, who's in the.

In the City Steel still.

And I had a gig at A place called the Gemini Jazz Cafe, owned by this couple.

He was a convicted.

He had done time for bank robbery.

And they financed the whole thing.

They were coke dealers.

And it was a great club, as most clubs financed by coke are.

And so I had a gig there, like, probably for about a year.

Like, when I was 26, I think maybe a year and a half, playing three or four nights a week solo and then two nights on the weekends.

I had to put a band together.

So that was great because I would just call, you know, friends from Boston or New York City, like a headliner to come up.

And then I would have the local rhythm section.

And so I learned a lot doing that.

And then at the time I was writing and I did not know.

I didn't really know standards very well.

I was still arriving at.

I think I was still learning things sort of like phrase by phrase or chord to chord.

I didn't really have, you know, an approach.

I knew that there was an approach because I would talk to, you know, some of these old piano players that would, you know, just play tune after tune, you know, standards.

I would say, how many tunes do you know?

I don't know.

A thousand, fifteen hundred.

How can they do that?

You know?

And I eventually figured out.

I think I probably told you this at one point because torturing you guys with playing tunes through keys.

I think I basically gave up trying to sound like it, like Herbie Hancock or whoever.

I felt like I could wiggle my fingers fast enough, but I couldn't make it sound like I wanted it to sound.

Which was close to them, those models of Herbie and McCoy, Tanner and from the fif.

From the sixties and all that.

And so I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll learn some.

They're all.

They all play bebop before they got in Miles's band and, you know, before they.

I see these early records, they're all playing bebop.

So that's obviously what's missing, you know.

And I didn't really understand enough how to make that, how that works.

So I said, well, so what I'll do is I'm going to learn some bebop tunes.

I pick half a dozen, some Charlie Parker tunes.

And I didn't read very well.

I barely read.

So let me learn the heads and then.

Then I'll have some licks that'll make it be authentic.

And then I learned.

So I learned the licks, the heads, and I was like, well, I'm gonna have to play those licks.

And other Keys.

So I started learning the tunes through the keys, which necessitated numbering the chords, which I had been resistant to doing.

And all the things that I had resisted doing because they weren't expressive turned out to be the things that made everything a lot easier and allowed me to get to the kind of expression I wanted.

So probably did like three or four tunes.

And then I finally.

I tackled Donna Lee, which was really challenging.

And I got Donnelly.

This is like massive headaches, right?

I finally get Donnelly to about the fourth key and lightning bolt.

Oh, you could number the chords.

It's helpful.

Oh, his melodies is based on our.

Is like.

And based on inversions of the chords.

But like his F7, it's like it's F7.

It's like it's A C, E flat, but not just F.

It's like G sharp, G natural, G flat and F.

It's all the nines, it's all in.

And what scale has all the.

Not none, not.

Oh, so he's clearly thinking of the chord and then using the in between tones, you know, 9, 11, 13.

And he's putting them together any way he wants.

So I ended up going back and rethinking tunes and learning to arpeggiate the chords.

And of course I should have paid attention.

Nick Rignola when he had to learn a new tune.

I watched him one time like having to learn a new tune and he was going through and just like arpeggiating, playing all the seven chords on the alto, one after the other.

And then right after that he was, you know, blowing and so the basic framework, so.

Oh, so you have to know the basic framework, harmonic framework of a tune.

And learning it in keys would probably be smart because then you need.

You might need to play it in another key.

And also it's the same progressions show up in a lot of tunes.

All right, so anyway that I start that process.

I'm playing this gig 26, I get pneumonia, like really bad and almost die.

And so I takes me the whole year to recover and I recovered.

And I remember thinking as I was lying there, like, if you survive this, you better do what you want to do because this could be over in a minute.

And this is also mid late 20s.

I was starting to lose friends to.

To drug to ODs and suicides and like kind of in a real noticeable number of people.

And so I hit 27.

I decided to move to New York.

And I got there and I was kind of standing here and there in Manhattan and Brooklyn and finally ended up with an apartment on 122nd in Harlem, 122nd in Amsterdam and got settled, didn't quite know how to get into the jazz scene.

I started doing, ran out of money, started doing a part time office job like temp job, which gave me a steady paycheck.

And I started working with singers.

And there were these things called showcases that soap opera actors were doing, which was.

I randomly had done one with somebody and then I started getting calls to do it, which is basically you're, you're putting together a show of several or a set, an hour long show with a soap opera performer who is doing these showcases for industry people.

And so, so the has to be like, you know, you have to know how to do the introduction, a company, do the ending and keep the whole thing in your head and you know, all that.

So I did, did that.

So about six, seven months in, it would be eight, eight months, it would be July.

I get a call from this friend, Steve Jurassi, the same guitar player from high school who was teaching chimpanzees how to teach play piano at that point.

And he, he says I'm doing a record, I want you to be on it.

And said okay.

And he's writing the music.

So he introduces me to the, the, the promoter and a guy named Bruce Calabresi.

And Bruce, this is money.

He's technically, he's a student at SUNY New Paltz, but he's running guns and drugs from Fort Lauderdale to Manhattan and actually New Jersey and New balls.

He's, he's dead odds.

And so Bruce, like, you know, most of the record, I, I don't think people understand this.

Most of the recording industry is, was, and I'm sure is mob connected.

And like Hollywood mobsters like to be surrounded.

They, they like to go out at night, you know.

And the jazz scene was very much that way.

And most of the major labels had the sudden.

And certainly the small ones were connected that way.

And so in any case, he has this label called Beat City.

And so I start meeting this group of musicians.

One of them is Michael Sangita, Michael Berardi, who I later had a working relationship with.

And he's there maybe five records of his on my label.

He, he worked a lot with Rashid Ali, Mario Pavone, people like that.

And there, there were some.

Mario Pavone was on that label, Steve De Rossi's on the label.

And so we go, we get ready for the record date and Steve is trying to line up musicians and it's kind of a power struggle between you know the producer and Steve over who's going to play on the record.

And I recommend John Stubblefield, who I had met.

He had come up to Albany to play and he had stayed at my apartment for a couple days.

And I think I was rehearsing a tune with somebody and he heard the tune and he offered to take me on the road.

And he.

And I said no, because I wasn't ready.

And this was in Albany.

I was probably 26 or something like that, or before that, probably 24.

And I said, oh, maybe I'll run into you.

I'm someday I'm going to move to New York.

Maybe I'll run into you.

So we go to do the record date and it's in the Brill Building, which is like, you know, Tin Pan Alley.

It's like where all the so songwriters are and it's sound mixers, which is, you know, premier studio, New York's and probably most of the country at the time.

And David Baker is the engineer who's like, big deal engineer.

Did all the Brecker Brothers stuff.

And, you know, and I walk in and there's like a pile of coke on the board that looks like K2, right?

And go in and I'm trying to figure out the piano is wrapped in gym mats, right?

Strapped.

And I'm playing.

I can't.

I can't hear anything, you know, so.

And I've never been in a studio before.

So the engineer comes out, plugs in the headphones.

Oh, you can play with the headphones.

And then the drummer, Steve was unhappy with the drummer, who was.

Happened to be Rashid Ali from Coltrane.

Span, and not good enough.

Not good enough.

So he.

So he asked me if I could recommend a drummer, which I did.

Jeff Siegel.

So Jeff Siegel gets a call, you know, 10:00 at night after the first day of recording, and makes a run, shows up the next day at noon.

And we had to do this suite, which actually Jeff was much more appropriate for than Rashid.

And.

But Jeff is in tears because there's David Baker putting duct tape on every resonant surface of the drums, including the cymbals.

So everything is just clicking, right?

So this is 1980, so engineers could use triggers and just use other people's sound.

So he had, you know, he liked so and so snared sound, and he liked so and so's bass drum sound, so and so.

So that's what he was going to do.

But it was.

Would have been impossible for Jeff to say.

So I go, this is my first production Credit.

I go talk to the producer and I explain it and everything.

And, you know, we.

That gets resolved and the rest of the band had walked in and it's John Stubblefield.

Total coincidence.

You need to stop and let me know when.

No, actually, but is this a jazz date?

Yeah, it's a jazz date.

Yeah.

Because.

Okay, it's on my label, actually.

I ended up releasing it 30 years later.

What's the name of the record?

Alika Song A L I Q A, E.

Okay.

I think you can find it on.

On YouTube.

Eve Jurassi.

G E R A C I.

And so John Stubblefield walks in.

So, wow, what a coincidence, right?

And as I go in the tracking room, there's this skinny kid sitting at the piano, like, playing the keys off the piano.

I'm just standing there kind of dumbfounded, and I think, well, okay, so they got, you know, they found like a really good piano player.

And I just get ready to go home, you know.

And as I'm leaving, John goes, where you going?

I said, you know, they got a piano player.

He goes, no, no, no, that's the alto player.

So that was Arthur Reams.

And so that was my introduction to Arthur R.

Was hearing him play the.

Out of the piano and having to follow that, which is what I spent the next five years doing following him, playing piano while he played saxophone and.

Or guitar.

And so he played alto on the session.

And it was like a three or four day session.

We hit it off, exchange numbers.

And I was working with a singer from New Orleans in New York City and a few things up in the Hudson Valley and another set of clubs, following the coke, the cocaine trail.

And she calls me and she says, I have this gig in Montreal for two weeks at a place called Le Temps.

Can you do it?

I said, yeah.

Can you put a band together?

Sure.

What do you want?

Drums, bass and saxophones.

Okay, do you want like a saxophone player?

Just kind of fill in behind you?

You want somebody who can carry a show or what?

And I asked because she had a repertoire of maybe 15 tunes and she was a really nice singer, but not, you know, not very experienced.

So I said, sure, you know, yeah, I can get.

I have a saxophonist in mind.

So I call Arthur.

He says, yes.

And so we get to Montreal and I.

And the.

The Jeff Siegel and Otto Gardner, who I played with in Albany, I had called.

We're all taking the bus to Montreal, you know, which involves dragging a drum set, acoustic bass, and everything on the Trailways, right?

And we get there and there's no Arthur, right?

And so we're about to start the gig, and just as a.

Just as I'm about to start, he walks in, breaks down the horn, puts it together, and says he got stopped at the border.

He had to wait.

You know, it was this whole nightmare and everything.

He's.

He's clearly pissed off.

He goes, all right, Here we go, Mr.

PC 1, 2, 1, 2, 3.

Right?

And we're off to the races.

I felt like I had been standing too close to the tracks when the caboose came by and grabbed my coat and.

And took me away.

When we finished the first tune, as I'm catching my breath, he says, can you play in keys?

And I thought, oh, he wants to play a call of Tune in a different key.

And I said, sure.

He says, impressions, right?

He says, up in fourths.

Every chorus up a fourth, right through 12 keys.

And, you know, this was like.

I was a young player.

Impressions.

I was still getting lost, you know, like leaving an A off or something, right?

So we get through impressions, and I have a migraine coming on that lasts for two weeks, and we finish that tune.

And then after that, it's all these other tunes, you know, do you know Minority.

Okay, Minority and minor thirds.

Cherokee and whatever it was.

Minor or major thirds.

By the end of it, it was giant steps.

Your keys.

And he became the.

The gig was his.

Essentially.

She would get up, do her 40 minutes, and then he would do these monumental sets.

And, you know, I could go into, like, a whole thing.

I think we need to do another.

I think we're gonna have to do another one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But let me.

I can say that that was the beginning of my working relationship with him, lasted pretty much to the end of his life.

So he was 21, died, I think, at 31.

AIDS epidemic.

And I think I was working with.

He had a band for probably three years.

We worked together consistently for about five years, and then.

And then his life kind of fell apart, and I moved on doing.

Just doing my own band.

Second sight at that point with ultimately with Dave Douglas, Jeff Marks, Jeff Siegel, Alan Murphy, who just passed this year.

And we.

So that was about five years of that band.

During that time, I was working with Carter Jefferson, who connected me with Woody Shaw.

This was at the end of Woody's life.

He was a mess.

But Carter set me up with the.

You know, an audition.

He wanted me to be in the band, so he set me up.

And I didn't want to be in the band because they were all strung out.

I'm Sorry, but did you.

You said you played with Woody Shaw.

No, just privately.

I did not.

Okay.

We had another guest on the show who's a guitar player who recently made a record like a tribute to Woody Shaw.

I knew very little about Woody Shaw until we talked to this other gentlemen.

Yeah, Woody was actually a big deal.

In the 70s, when disco hit, all the record companies canceled out pretty much everything.

But disco.

Right.

They were making money hand over fist.

You just needed a producer and a singer.

That's right.

Everything was electronic.

And the only working bands, literally.

Literally, there were two that were on American labels.

You have to remember Blue Note was closing down.

ESP was closing down Atlantic.

They were all.

The arrogance.

Were retiring.

Everybody was retiring.

They were all aging out.

They had been in the business since 1940.

So by 1970, you know, their early 70s are closing and.

Which is why you could get records for two or three bucks or buck and a half, you know, in bargain bins.

They were called cutouts.

And this is just before CD technology in 79, 80 and recordings were done in Europe.

American bands could only record in Europe.

And they were re.

They were imported, Polygram Special imports.

I was friends with the guy who did promo for that, John Newcop.

And Woody had a band and Dexter Gordon had a band.

He had returned from Europe.

Those two were the only bands literally in the United States recording on legitimate labels.

Unless you were, like, recording something and making your own little label.

That was it.

Until Winton Marsalis and the Young Lions came in, which was a function of CD technology and Sony needing to record some, to have something to put on CDs.

That was probably.

Was that the 80s or was that even, like, later than that?

No, it's 1980.

Oh, 1980.

Because wasn't Witten was in with Blakey.

Yeah, originally.

Right.

But yeah, he was with Blakey while he was in college.

Probably 78, 79.

Something like.

In the 70s.

Yeah, it was in the 70s because he was even doing.

He even did a record with Herbie Hancock's Ron Carter and Tony Williams in Japan.

This is an era when Herbie Hancock with Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams and Ron Carter could not get recorded in the us.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

So there's a series of VSOP records on Japanese labels.

Wow.

Because of that.

And Winton is on one of them when he's.

And I actually went to hear that band.

And probably in 70 or 79.

Yeah.

So.

So in any case.

Yeah.

That.

I think we hit so many different things there.

I'm not quite sure where we are.

I'll tell you what.

Yeah, so.

So I'm impressed that we spent, like, an hour and we got up to, like, 19, so we still have, like, 40 years to go, which is great.

I mean, it's like, this is.

You know, this is what we wanted to do, and I'm so grateful to you to spend the time.

So, you know, usually.

So I do have to wrap up pretty soon.

So usually what we do is we do, like, the pod, the official podcast thing, but it doesn't seem like it's appropriate now because I feel like we sort of have to take a break.

We said we already talked about how we wanted to stop and do the whole, like, do a whole Arthur Rheims thing, because we really want to, like, sort of pick up the mantle sort of and maybe become, like, historians of Arthur Rheims a little bit.

So if you don't mind, maybe we can do another show where we just pick up and do the rest of your career.

Yeah.

But also.

And then maybe even do a third show where we do Arthur Rheims.

I don't know.

I don't know how much.

I don't know how much.

You know, it's like, you tell me what you think is appropriate, because maybe there's enough for two more shows or maybe there's enough for just one.

It sounds like there's probably enough for, like, 10, but.

And actually, I don't want to take advantage of you, because I'll do a mil.

We can make this the Jonas Bezier show for the next, like, 10 episodes, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I'll tell you what.

Why don't we try to conclude me next time.

Yeah, fine.

And.

And, yeah, I could talk for 10 shows, but, you know, I'll save that for my book and.

Which I always use when I want to make the administrators and the people in the music program at Bard really uncomfortable.

I mentioned in passing that I'm doing a memoir, and that really shuts everybody up really quickly.

Yes.

They're afraid they're going to be included, but Arthur, I'm actually getting ready to do a double album of his music from that era.

Wow.

The beginning stuff that we did.

And then I have.

The second half of my work with him was really electron, electric was more fusion.

And so I have a bunch of recordings of that, but the issues are everything was recorded on cassette back then.

Yeah.

And so that I'm dealing with, you know, the technology keeps changing, and we're finally getting to the point where maybe a lot of that can Be kind of resuscitated.

So, in fact, probably doing the first cleanup session on that next week.

I have everything.

I even have like the liner notes done and the.

And the album covers done.

But we're cleaning up the recordings.

That's exciting.

That's exciting.

And we do like to use the podcast too, as opportunity to promote.

Yeah, yeah, all that.

So that's gonna dovetail nicely.

We should definitely do John Esposito Part two.

Yeah.

And use that opportunity to promote your own.

Your own work.

And then that will dovetail nicely to Arthur Ames.

Yeah.

Want to focus, but we'll stay focused on you for now.

All right, that sounds good.

Yeah.

So here's what we need to do now.

So we're going to post in the show notes whatever you want us to post, like socials, website links to streaming, all that junk.

So as a follow up, send me that stuff because people will know that they'll be able to find way after they watch the show, they'll be able to find it.

I also promote pretty actively up until the show release.

Whatever.

Whatever stuff you want me to promote.

Okay.

Because I have a decent, you know, Facebook sort of thing going where there's a lot of people who sort of see my posts on there.

So we'll follow up.

You'll send me everything.

You could send me all the links that you want people to hit, any promotional photos you want people to know about, and then I'll just make a.

Make a thing.

This show, we have one in the can that's going to come out two weeks from now, approximately.

And then this is going to come out a month, approximately.

And then.

So if we do another one, maybe we can do it next week at the same time if you have time, then that one will come out six weeks.

And then, you know, but all along we'll just be promoting all your stuff anyway.

Yeah, so that's.

That'll be our follow up for this.

Yeah, this is.

This has been great.

I love this.

I love just hearing all the stories because this is like a heyday of, you know, jazz in New York that, you know, I mean, people tell the stories, but, you know, it's like it's.

There wasn't a time.

Who knows if there'll ever be a time like that ever again, you know, There won't.

It's something that I used to work with this trumpet player named Bobby Johnson Jr.

Whose first gig was Christmas 1929.

And he.

He was from.

From Pensacola, Florida.

He was in.

He.

He integrated the big bands.

He was the First African American and a lot of the white big bands and lovely guy.

I worked with him probably from the time he was in his mid-60s till he was in his early 80s when he's.

When he passed.

And his music.

He had retired to the Catskills.

Retired.

He was still working seven nights a week, something like that.

Yeah.

At the hotels up there.

And he would talk about the, you know, I would ask him a lot of questions, like, because it was like a walking history book.

He was the first black band leader to, to lead a band downtown at the Savannah Club, Sheridan Square, and was with everybody, with Duke Ellington, you know, with.

I mean, just like every band you could.

Big band you could name.

And he used to say, this is Johnny, this is that music.

He says that was an incredible time, but it will never, ever happen again.

And now that I'm 71 and I'm looking back on, you know, even just the times working with Arthur, which was an incredible scene, everything that made that music happen, and I think this is true for every generation.

Everything that is a part of what makes us be who we are changes.

And you see it when you teach.

You know, I've been at Bard for 20, it'll be almost 25 years.

And I've watched it go from, you know, how media, social media has changed and use of the Internet, you know, all of the implications of that.

And you know, my 10 year old having all kinds of screens and, you know, and a kind of tech proficiency that people did not have 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.

The reality, the paradigm changes with every generation.

And in America that is always extreme.

So my, my great grandfather, who was born in the eight, probably late 1880s, saw the Wright brothers, the last of the Indian wars, the Wright brothers, couple of world wars and the first moon landing.

Wild.

And wait, oh, yeah, I was going to say automobiles maybe too.

No, earlier.

I mean, you figure all of the technological changes from 1890 to 1970.

I think he made 88, something like that.

So maybe it's a little earlier than eight.

Then 18, 1880s, mid-1880s and maybe into the early 70s, whatever that period was, what the technical, technological and social changes were within that period.

That 100 years is kind of mind blowing.

100 mind blowing.

Yeah.

And we don't think of it so much because we're kind of used to, you know, we're doing something that we would have seen in a Buck Rogers movie.

Right.

Like where they had t, you know, TV, like movies that were made in the early 19 or mid-1930s.

Right.

Science fiction movies.

Who's the other one?

Buck Rogers and.

Well, the Jetsons.

Flash Gordon.

The Jetsons by itself was like the first to have the video calls, right?

Or maybe it wasn't.

No, no, it was.

It was actually in Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in the 1930s.

Oh, in the 30s, 1930s.

Those were serials.

Now.

TV actually was invented, I think, in the late 20s, but the technology was.

But it didn't become anything, right.

Until the late 40s.

So it took 20 years for it to get in the.

In the manufacturing cycle.

Things probably move.

That cycle is probably shortened now for a lot of technology.

But we're doing something that basically was thought of 100 years ago, and the basic technology was in place 100 years ago.

But it's taken until recently for, you know, when did Zoom become universal?

It was like, well, 20, 21 Covid.

Just a few years ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's kind of like how I do a lot of business.

My, you know, most of my meetings with students are on Zoom because it's just easier than trying to be in the same space at the same time.

Right.

So, anyway, yeah, it changes.

I just curated a jazz festival in the Hudson Jazz Festival.

They had headliners, was two weeks ago, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

And they wanted some music during the day.

They wanted a bard connection.

And I put together a bunch of different groups where I contacted a bunch of different groups, you know, kids who.

Living in the Hudson Valley, and.

And then current students.

And they all played during the days, you know, so it was like 25 different kids, probably 10 different groups.

They were in a couple different parks and a couple different breweries and restaurants, and they all.

None of the music was the same.

It was great.

It was all really good.

But as I was listening to it, I was like, oh, this is really cool, because it's really different.

Had I done this in 1975, the music wouldn't have been any.

You know, most of this music wouldn't have happened, you know, and most of the music, pretty much all the music that the headliners played.

I don't know how to put this.

It's a different point of view about what making music is from the music that made me want to play.

So it was not music that's coming from, you know, kind of the ecstatic music tradition, like Coltrane or Cecil Taylor, and it's not coming from the.

Whatever you want to describe Miles Davis's music in the 60s and early 70s.

All of the elements that make that music, which.

The expressiveness, again, there's sort of almost an ecstatic music tradition, you know, informs even that music and the internationalism of it and the.

The openness of it and the complexity of it.

That's not really what is going on so much in the, you know, the jazz.

The jazz mainstream is much more kind of reiterating the 1950s or maybe early 60s at best.

And that's a function of.

The musicians are all going to college, right?

They're all learning to play in college because you can't really learn on the gig.

And, And.

And the music is much more uniform in certain.

Certain ways.

So those are just generational changes.

Some people are not happy with that, I think.

It's just every generation is different, and now everybody brings who they are, you know, to the table.

They do what they.

What they can do and expresses their reality, you know, So I don't feel like I'm going to happen again, you know, where I'm coming.

I don't think so either.

John.

So gone a little bit over, but I'm fine with that.

Okay, thank you.

And I would love to do this if.

Wednesday.

Wednesday I have all from work, so I'm.

I'm pretty much free on Wednesdays, so we'll.

We'll text and let's pick up part two.

Sounds great.

Yeah, dude, excellent.

Great seeing you again.

Thank you so much.

Great seeing you, too.

All right.

All right, take care.

Bye, guys.

Bye.

Bye.

Thanks, man.