Interview
with Ron Horton about Genius Envy
by Frank Tafuri, part 2
Horton: And even, for Louie, in the '50s when he did the W C Handy album and he did another one (maybe a Fats Waller album), he was still playing his ass off and those albums (to me) still have that fire. "Blueberry Hill," "Mame" -- that doesn't do it. I'm so annoyed that people are enamored of people in the past that they fail to see that we're surrounded by [geniuses]. I mean, I don't really know what a genius is; I think I do. But I do know that there are some extremely gifted people all around me. So when we spend all this time praising people of the past, it's almost pointless because I think that the real joy is being immersed in [the music of] people around me. It means two things. The full title was supposed to be "Too Much Genius Envy" which meant people are just too much into genius envy. In a sense, my genius envy is the envy of all the people around me who I think are really the geniuses of our generation and are not necessarily being recognized as that. I don't mean just high profile people, but people who hardly anybody knows about.
Tafuri: But what you experience is not really "envy" as much as it is "appreciation."
Horton: Yes, that's true. And one more thing. My annoyance with people who praise people who are already dead is that the people who have passed on don't have the opportunity to come back from the grave and say the things that we were talking about, like "Man, you're still playing this?" It was scary when I first did the Andrew [Andrew Hill Project] that -- not only was Andrew still around and alive and performing and also had just moved back to New York and was good friends with Frank Kimbrough -- he was also going [around] to check out music and (I didn't know Andrew at that time) there was a possibility that he could come to the concert. [That] made me very uneasy because what [would happen] if he didn't like it? I also did a performance up at MoMA (New York's Museum of Modern Art) and Andrew was there and I was scared to death. Even though I'd known him a little bit at that point, I didn't know how he would take to my interpretation of his music. It was terrifying, actually.
Tafuri: Well, it seems to me like you always have to "hang it out" there sometime.
Horton: I guess so and he was thrilled.
Tafuri: And now you're in his band, talk about the payoff for being dedicated to someone's music.
Horton: Whew, it's the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me.
Tafuri: So, in addition to your tunes being really enjoyable and really engaging (and I'm a melodist at heart), the titles like "Genius Envy" and some of the others are really interesting. Like, for instance, there's this tune "Carla Blake." Now I know who Carla Bley is, but where to you come up with a title like that?
Horton: "Carla Blake" was written almost on the day I did a recording session with Michael Blake and there's a tune of his -- I don't remember the title of it -- which is a real slow, bluesy thing where the chords go "dah dah DAH dah" and, for some reason, that kind of germ was going around in my head. Also, in the last couple of years, I've been listening a lot to Jimmy Giuffre's Trio [album] that got rereleased on ECM --
Tafuri: -- 1961, the Thesis and Fusion albums --
Horton: -- right, and that tune "Jesus Maria" by Carla Bley is a beautiful tune. Somehow those two -- Michael Blake and Carla Bley -- came together for that tune like "What if they had collaborated on a tune together?" or something like that. "Might it be something like this?"
Tafuri: Cool! That's an interesting combination. You know what one of my favorite tunes is on the album? Another one with a fun title: "Claude's Petite Bicyclette."
Horton: That was basically inspired by listening to A Soldier's Tale of Stravinsky, Philip Johnston and Andy Biskin who I think have the funniest, most unique outlook on the world or the world at large, I'm not sure which. They both have a unique ability to capture something humorous. I call jazz pieces "miniatures," because they're not like symphonies or operas. You capture a feeling in a small amount of time. They both [Johnston and Biskin] both have the ability to do that. They're both wonderful composers. So, it was kind of a humorous piece. It has A Soldier's Tale kind of French vibe. I don't know what Soldier's Tale is really about, but it sounds funny to me.
Tafuri: There's another one with kind of a fun title: "Happy and Out of It."
Horton: It's kind of a take off on the Beach Blanket Bingo movies of the '60s with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. In my mind I visualized that kind of beach fun, kind of an "angular twist."
Tafuri: I heard the "surfing music" influence later. What I heard first was boogaloo thing. It was like from someone who had listened to a lot of Blue Note albums over the years.
Horton: And that was what we were talking about earlier with the Lee Morgan and "Speedball" and "Rumproller" -- all that kind of "funky butt" groove from the '60s. Still, even though its 30 years old, it still sounds really cool to me. I mean, it doesn't sound dated. When people listen to James Brown, it still sounds "bad." Nobody goes, "Oh, that old crap." It sounds really funky and I still feel that away about things like "Speedball." That's still sounding pretty funky.
Tafuri: Oh, yeah! Well, it's appropriate for your debut recording as a leader to have the obligatory boogaloo on it.
Horton: Yeah and a tribute to Lee Morgan. I think Lee was one of the "baddest" trumpet players. I went through a period where I had to collect every Lee Morgan album. Had I known -- it was probably in the hundreds, the record dates he did -- I wouldn't have pursued it as much, but I couldn't get enough of him.
Tafuri: And I especially love that stuff he did with Jackie McLean.
Horton: Absolutely. As a sideman, he was just as strong as a leader. It's amazing.
Tafuri: You have a couple of other tunes on here that I'm curious about: "Thumbnail Sketch."
Horton: That was inspired by a conversation I had with Ron Kozak. He's a sax player, composer from Cleveland and a friend of Joe Lovano and other people like that. He also writes very interesting music. It came at a period last year when I spending all this time writing tunes that were taking me forever. I was just agonizing over each tune, I worried about every note and every chord. And Ron said, "Man, you're not supposed to be doing that. You're supposed to be writing down as fast as possible and then fill in later because if you worry about every note and every chord, you're going to lose the whole feeling of the tune. It'll get away from you by the time you get to the second bar."
Tafuri: You lose the muse.
Horton: Exactly and he was right. So, I consciously sat down in a free-flowing kind of way and imagined what it would be like to write a tune as fast as possible. And I think that one ["Claude's Petite Bicyclette"] came about quickly -- an hour or two or something like that. Then I shaped it for a few days afterward.
Tafuri: You have two tunes on the album that have the word "memory" in them: "Long Term Memories" and "Short Term Memory." Are they related in any way?
Horton: They are related. The story about "Memory" in general is that for the last few years I've been totally obsessed with the fact that, like all of us, I'm losing my memory. I perceive that I'm losing it faster than everyone else. I don't know if that's true or not, but remembering names and remembering faces -- things that seem to be easier for other people -- are becoming harder and harder for me. So, I don't whether I thought of the title first or the tune first, but there was something [there] about losing memory that came about in ["Long Term Memory"]. "Short Term Memory" came about by taking the coda [of "Long Term Memory"], which came about spontaneously at the rehearsal when we were rehearsing the coda, and somebody in the band said 'You know, that sounds pretty good, slow like that.' And it reminded me of the recording session I had done with Ben [Allison] a few months earlier where he took a tune of his called "Hot Head" and almost the exact same thing happened. We were rehearsing a section of "Hot Head" slower and it had this kind of dreamy quality and he called it "Pot Head" on his Third Eye CD. It's the same thing, but it's done in a totally different way. I think on the album, he put them next to each other. For me with the "memory" theme, I put "Short Term Memory" at the end of the CD, "Long Term Memory" at the beginning and, assuming someone has listened to the CD straight [through], I don't know whether they'd associate those two things to know that's where that came from.
Tafuri: It's a nice coda to the album, in any event. And probably people are going to pick up on the "familiarity" of it, even though they might not tie the two melodically together. They'll kind of say "Ooh, that sounds familiar." And that's also one of the things I like about your compositions: they all feel familiar. When I hear them -- even when I was in the studio and I heard a couple of the pieces for the first time -- I felt at home. They sounded not like something I'd heard before, but they sounded like they were right at home, they felt very comfortable.
Horton: Man, that's great!
Tafuri: There's this tune on here, "Embrace."
Horton: That's dedicated to Reba and it simply captured a feeling I have for her, that we've known each other for so many years -- almost fifteen years -- of capturing that feeling that we still like to give each other a hug once in a while and it still feels (even if we haven't seen each other for all of three hours) as warm and inviting as the first time. It's amazing.
Tafuri: I particularly like your dedication on here for Tom Chapin.
Horton: Thomas was an amazing player. I only worked with him in one band and that was Walter Thompson's orchestra. You know Walter's band a little bit, don't you?
Tafuri: Yeah.
Horton: He always has just a crazy band of Herb Robertson and Frank London and Steve Bernstein -- maybe not all on the same gig -- but wild and crazy guys. So who can you call a "lead player" and who can you call a "section player" and who's a soloist? [Trombonist] Steve Swell, a bunch of crazy brass players [like trombonist] Bob Hovey, and then you get over to the saxophone section. When I started playing with them on a regular basis, it was Thomas Chapin, Michael Blake, Allan Chase, Michael Attias, Dave Casteglione, and Phillip Johnston, and all those guys are really strong individuals. But Thomas was definitely the section leader. He had a lead alto sound and he had a lead personality and that saxophone section sounded amazing. I was just amazed that he had such a beautiful sound that was so glorious (that's the only way I can describe it). Most of the band sounded kind of ragtag, but he managed to make the section sound like a section in the midst of all this craziness that was going on.
Tafuri: So out of the din, his sound shone forth.
Horton: And how! It was a beautiful, beautiful sound. When I heard that he had -- even before someone said leukemia -- I had heard that he had contracted some kind of blood disease when he was in Africa, then I heard leukemia and he just went downhill, then I heard a few stories like Walter had visited him in the hospital. I was shocked to hear that he was going downhill fast and that somebody who was in his early forties (maybe he was only 43) had passed away. He struck me as somebody who was really strong. He'd wear these sleeveless, tanktop kind of t-shirts with bulging biceps. I still imagine him as a strong person, but when he was reduced to being so weak, the image of that was really striking.
Tafuri: And that's when you wrote the piece?
Horton: Yes, right after I'd heard that he'd passed away.
Tafuri: Well, Ron, on a happier note, how to you feel about finally having an album come out with you as the leader?
Horton: I don't know how quite to put it into words, but I've begun several projects and have put them on the shelf for whatever reason -- mostly my own reasons, just not [being] satisfied. But this is the one project. I mean, a number of factors -- your enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of the people in the band for my writing, and seeing the project through -- was a big boost. It's hard for me to follow through on a project from beginning to end. This is the one, I think. The music, the compositions were finally coming together. The group sound came together. So, how I feel is I'm pretty ecstatic, actually.
Tafuri: It sounds to me like you got to the point in your playing and in your composing, in your performance and in your ability to pick a band and pull it together that the time was right.
Horton: I look back and I say "Well, shoot, when you're twenty years old, you wish you could have an album come out." When you're 23, you wish "Oh, gee, I wish an album would come out" or 25 or 28 or whatever. So I'm 39 now and I say it's a little late to have something come out, but if I made a recording (which I did) when I was 22 (with Jane [Ira Bloom] and Rich [Rosenzweig] and Ratso Harris), I would have been thrilled at the time, but then looking back on it, I think I would have been embarassed that that had come out.
Tafuri: But now you can feel confident and proud -
Horton: I feel that this [Genius Envy] is the best example of where I'm at now and, I mean, a recording is just a snapshot of where you are at a particular day or week or time or whatever. I think that this is the best example of who I am and where I'm at. I've been doing the "sideman thing" for so many years and I love that 'cause I love playing other people's music and I love playing with other musicians, but a lot of times I don't get to convey who I am and what I'm about. This [album] really says who I am as a composer and a player and a "leader."