Interview with Jim McNeely
(by Frank Tafuri)
Tafuri: It's a great way to start the album.
McNeely: Then I reach back, and there's a little bit of kind of Tadd Dameron-kind of stuff, and there's this cascade at the end —it's really just a cannon —at all different kinds of pitch levels. It's the melody, but the melody has this [sings first 6 bars of melody] real up-and-down shape to it, and you get everyone playing it out-of-phase and at different pitch levels. Finally, it all congeals together at the end.
Tafuri: Sometimes, you take a commission to do a project, like you did the Benny Goodman project a few years ago for the Carnegie Hall band. But, when you're just freewheeling, when it's your decision, what draws you to tunes ... to make the investment to arrange them?
McNeely: It can be several things. Sometimes, it can just be a song that impresses me as being particularly beautiful ... like "In the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning," like I did with the Vanguard Orchestra, and that I based on the way I used to play it with my trio. There's just something about the melody and the atmosphere of the lyric —that's what I call an "adult song": "In the wee, small hours of the morning, that's when you miss her most of all." When you're twenty years old, you don't know what that feels like; when you're 45 or 50 and you've been though that, then that song takes on a depth —the same with "Body and Soul." For me, the two most "adult tunes" I play —as just a jazz musician —are "In the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning" and "Body and Soul." "I long for you ... body and soul."
Tafuri: Right, right.
McNeely: I didn't know what that meant when I was twenty years old. (I was just trying to get laid and stuff...) When you get to the depth of that lyric —and "Body and Soul['s]" a tune I've been working with for a long time with all kinds of different bands and people, it was something I felt really strong about. Sometimes, it's this atmosphere (maybe I've created it myself) about the tune, but it has an intrinsic atmosphere (or maybe it's both), buy there's something about it that really attracts me to it.
Other times, it might not have much to do with that; there's just something that I see potential for development. I think that's what gets me about "The Fruit" and I started to play the tune. I love the line, but, too, there's just the idea that Bud Powell to me has been...Tafuri: Right.
McNeely: Everyone acknowledges him as a great father of bebop piano —or, maybe, he's the second-generation, but he's really the guy that codified it. But his tunes have very interesting stuff about them.
Tafuri: And you don't hear them with big groups very much...
McNeely: No, people do small group versions of them...
Tafuri: "Head arrangements"...
McNeely: So, to me he wrote some tunes that are very interesting. They're definitely of the time and bebop-kind-of-oriented. Sometimes the form takes a little bit of a left turn, sometimes the melody has a little bit of a funny angle to it, and so "The Fruit" just attracted me.
Tafuri: So, we know you're motivation now of writing an arrangement on "Body and Soul," as an "adult tune" —
McNeely: It was expressing, for me, the meaning of that song. And then, at the same time, there's the musical thing of knowing (when I wrote the arrangement) that Dick Oatts would be playing. Having worked with him for a long time, I know his [musical] voice and sound, so I wrote that for him; his sound inspired that, too.
Tafuri: What motivated you to do an arrangement of "Silent Night?"
McNeely: [Laughs.] Well, you know, it's funny.
Tafuri: Because I love that arrangement. I remember that when I was in the studio —and I didn't know all the tunes you were doing —and you called "Silent Night," I thought, "Oh, this is an original composition that just happens to have the same title." Then, I'm listening and listening, and it takes a while to pick up on the actual Christmas carol.
McNeely: This'll be my 51st Christmas coming up. You know, I've been singing "Silent Night" every year, and I have to admit I'm an old sap when it comes to Christmas songs. It's a very simple song —three chords —with very simple harmony. And, again, the spirit of the song —it's a quiet atmosphere, the Virgin and all that —it always gets to me in a way that a lot of more sophisticated Christmas tunes don't. So, a few years ago, I had it in my head that instead of sending Christmas cards to musician friends of mind, I would do a reharmonization of "Silent Night." I was playing around with it and thought, 'I'll just fax this to my friends.'
Tafuri: [Laughs.]
McNeely: So, I did it, and I got a lot of nice feedback.
Tafuri: You sent lead sheets?
McNeely: Yeah, I faxed lead sheets to people, you know, musicians who could play through it.
Tafuri: I love it. It's a great idea.
McNeely: You know, and I put "Merry Christmas to You" on it. So a month or so later, Steve La Spina was doing an quartet or quintet album for an Italian label...
Tafuri: Red?
McNeely: No, not Red. Gillalupi or something...
Tafuri: Oh, yeah, Raimundo Meli Lupi —RAM Records.
McNeely: Yeah, RAM records. So, he said to me and Steve, "You know, it'd be nice to do a trio tune, if you'd want [to]." So, Steve said to me "Do you have anything?" and I said "When we come back tomorrow, we'll do something." So, I printed off on the computer this thing of "Silent Night." That's when I first started to play it, and I thought, "Yeah, this is really nice ... the way the harmony is." We play it very simply. Then, a couple of years ago, I was doing a gig with the ten-piece band —I had three Sundays in December at Birdland —and I thought, "You know, I'm gonna do a little thing on that harmonization of 'Silent Night.'" So, I got into it and I knew that Scott [Wendholt] would be playing trumpet on that gig, so I thought, "Yeah, let's see what we can get into." Then I found this [sings first 6 notes of vamp] little bluesy, kind of Miles-Davis-kind-of vamp. [I] incorporated that into it, and it kind of grew. What's on the CD is kind of the present state of it.
Tafuri: It sounds like it took on a life of its own, almost.
McNeely: Yeah, it really did, but I really tried to keep this pastel, kind of subdued atmosphere that I've always associated with the song.
Tafuri: Well, it's interesting to hear —with such a simple tune as that —the kind of [harmonic] suspensions that you use. They really keep things nice and open.
McNeely: It's also interesting, too, that after we recorded it, I had a cassette of the thing and, so, I'm taking my kids somewhere one day, and I said, "Tell me what the name of this song is." They're hearing all of the piano solo and then Scott Robinson, and they had no idea. Then they hear this [sings last 7 notes of the melody, as arranged], and that started to ring a bell. And you could see that with each section of the tune —and there's a little more of the tune that's in there —they'd start to guess "It's a Christmas song, right?" "Yeah, right," and I'd just keep driving. And finally, at the very end, "Aw, 'Silent Night'!" And that's what I was going for: at first, you have this set of changes and a lot of three-bar phrases that could be some original tune and "Silent Night" kind of grows out of emerges out of that, so at the end we're hearing "Silent Night." But you're really not aware of that at the beginning.
Tafuri: That's great.
Well, let's talk about the title track. Talking about "episodic," that's quite an excursion. Where did "Group Therapy" come from?McNeely: Sometimes the title comes to mind before I write something, sometimes in the middle of it, and sometimes it takes months for me to finally come up with the title. This was in the middle category. I wanted to write something new for the recording session, because most of the music had been written a few years before. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to write something that was fresh and that kind of reflected where I am now with compositional stuff. Then, the other thing is that, when I'm left to my own devices, I want to start writing things that employ groups of soloists —not the thing of where a soloist plays, then there's another solo. I mean, that's fine, it's worked for years, but I wanted to start getting into things where there might be two soloists playing together or three, so my job as a composer isn't to write melodies, it's to write form. It's to provide a structure for those little solo groups to happen in a particular order —to be an organizer of the freedom of the soloists.
Tafuri: It's very Cageian.
McNeely: Yeah, sort of. A lot of times when I compose something from scratch, I'll just write a one-word description of the piece and, with this, I just wrote "groups." There are groups of people playing melodies, there are groups of people playing solos. And I didn't ever want to have just one person playing a solo; at the least, there were going to be two people playing together. Then, I had this chorale that I know I wanted to have in there, and I started to play around with some different vamps. I wanted the whole thing to build in a particular order. Then I started to write it, and I started to make lists of who would be playing. The reason that so-and-so is playing with so-and-so isn't an accident; I was kind of thinking about who the guys were going to be and 'this person would sound good with this person.'
Tafuri: You were thinking of actual players, not just the instruments.
McNeely: Yes, I was thinking of the players, the real people, because by that time everyone had signed on-board to be part of the project, so I knew who was going to be doing it. I know that one of the first things that came into my mind was just Scott Robinson and the drums, to see what they would do together.
Tafuri: [Starts laughing.] I know we had a lot of fun in the studio with that.
McNeely: Yeah, right. So, all those groupings were determined beforehand. And I began to see I was taking this group of people and kind of organizing how they were relating to each other. In the middle of writing the thing, all of a sudden, I had this image of a group of people sitting around, and each one is throwing out experiences that have happened, and maybe two of them are talking at once, and maybe the therapist comes in and tries to restore some kind of sense to the situation —those are the melodic passages. And then it breaks off, and another group starts talking. And, finally, I wanted the whole thing to go into this kind of nasty groove, this 7/4 thing. It's a real simple idea: the vamp is composed of six notes and the melody is just the other six notes. There's this conflict between the melody and the vamp and, at the same time, the notes that were left to make the melody —they were in this order that was this kind of bluesy kind of sound. It made sense as a melody; it's just that it didn't make sense with the vamp underneath.
Tafuri: Right.
McNeely: But if you do both of them with absolute conviction, they're gonna work —the clash works between the two of them. So, the whole idea was this group behaving in a certain way and acting out things and working out things and, finally, at the end, the chorale melody that started off the piece is back, but everyone's kind of doing it their own way. And it ends in an unresolved way, so they're going to have to come back next week ... for another session, I guess.
Tafuri: I guess that's what music's all about, too: you keep comin' back until you get it right, and you never get it quite right.
McNeely: Yeah, yeah.
Tafuri: "Lost" is another one of those amazing pieces. You have a lot of long tunes on this album. Is that a sign of maturing as an arranger or composer?
McNeely: I don't know what it is. I think part of it is I wanted to give ample solo space to the soloists. One of the things that I like about this size group is that there're enough people to write for, but, on the other hand, I like to have it a little more open-ended, like a small group. So, I like the sense that the soloists really get a chance to work on some things and really play a meaty solo.
Tafuri: It's not just eight bars —
McNeely: Yeah, and I realized that with both "Lost" and "Cranky" and, probably, "Silent Night," we could have cut the solos down to make the pieces shorter. That was my call; I just wanted to keep them in this kind of natural-feeling length. That's all I can say.
Tafuri: And that, in and of itself, bridges the gap between the big band thing and the small group thing, because that's one of the beautiful things about small groups: guys can really play a longer solo ... within reason.
McNeely: And sometimes I'll hear that happen, too. It depends on who the soloists are. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Tafuri: [Laughs.]
McNeely: There's a lot of writing in some of the pieces, and I wanted the solos to balance that writing. So, the result is some long things which might not be that radio-friendly. To me, the music was served by the lengths of the pieces.
Tafuri: As one of those extended tunes, "Lost" is a piece with a lot of music happening.
McNeely: There are a couple of different background things and, the thing is, the chorus ends with a vamp —especially behind the alto solo —the vamp keeps going and going and going and building up, so that even adds to [the complexity]. I like to write in a way where you don't just have chorus after chorus. Even if it's a tune that's based on a chorus-type structure, there's more of an organic flow to it. So, when the music's ready to depart from that format, why not? And let's go see where else it can go for a while. Then, maybe it comes back to the chorus. The chorus becomes a structural device that we can either stay in or veer away from for a time. And then, when you come back to the chorus format, then it kind of picks up and moves along again.
Tafuri: The chorus becomes the touchstone for the piece.
McNeely: Yeah, right. So, instead of coming back to a melody, you're coming back to a form that acts like a jazz tune versus some, maybe, free-composed kind of sections.
Tafuri: When you were coming up, how much of an opportunity did you have to play in big bands?
McNeely: I had a lot. Starting in high school, I played all four years in what they called "stage band." In fact, the first one I played in was the "B" dance band, and then I got bumped up to the stage band. It took me eight years to get through college, not 'cause I was necessarily dumb. I dropped out for a while and played country and western for six months —that was a learning experience. But when I was in the university, in those times, I was always in the big band there.
Then, when I finally got through with college —the first few years I was in New York, I didn't play any big band —but then I joined Thad and Mel [the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra] which was really the only big band that I ever wanted to play with. None of the other big bands really appealed to me that much except, maybe, Basie or Ellington —the real classic groups that killed me. In terms of the bands that would be available for me to play in —maybe the piano player in Buddy Rich's band would get to play two choruses at the beginning of the tune and then the rest of it was comping —so Thad and Mel was the only big band that really appealed to me because of Thad's writing, first of all, and then the writing of other people like [Bob] Brookmeyer, especially.
And the role of the piano was a real pivotal role in that band; it wasn't just playing a solo here and there. I learned a lot about structuring an arrangement, because the piano solo in Thad's music was always in a key place where it was usually some kind of transitional element. It was a bridge that you built up into the next thing that was coming up, or you built down into the next thing, or there was something really big happening, and it was your job to play one chorus to let the dust settle before something else happened. So, it was rare that you just had 'Hey, it's your solo —blow!' It's usually not like that.Tafuri: There was a purpose.