Interview with Jim McNeely
(by Frank Tafuri)
McNeely: There was a purpose, and one of the main jobs of learning the music wasn't learning the changes, it was learning the role of the solo in each chart. To me, that's very important, and I carry that over [not only] into my big band writing, but also in this ten-piece writing. Maybe there's more of a small-group feeling to it sometimes, but still I'm careful about who's gonna play where —especially when you're going to use a piano solo and a bass solo, because they have specific effects on the whole motion of the piece.
Tafuri: That's why I asked the question about playing in big bands, because it's been interesting sitting here listening to you talk about the role of the drum and what happens when you have a drum solo and how music is treated for various sections and how solos work in and out. It seems to me like a lot of what you've talked about is the result of experience, of having done it the other way and saying, "Now"—
McNeely: I mean, it's hearing it the other way. To me, one of the most important questions a composer asks is "What if?" Hearing things the other way, [I say] to myself "It doesn't have to be that way —what if?" And you hear something that would happen in some of Thad's writing or Brookmeyer where they had paid special attention to the fact that 'this guy plays now' —not some other guy —'this guy plays now.' A solo isn't just an open field to play your "thing" on; you've gotta shape it a certain way, because compositionally what's coming up next needs some kind of lift or needs some kind of coming down.
And, I should say, the other big influence on me in terms of all this kind of thinking is reading plays. When you think about it, let's say, I have a ten-minute piece on this album. Tennessee Williams wasn't dealing with ten-minute lengths, he was dealing with two hours. He didn't have a melody. He had a plot, but there might have been two or three streams happening in that plot and characters coming in —major characters, minor characters —who would have an effect on the action. To me, one of my favorite Tennessee Williams devices is what I call "the young stud." There's some play set in the South where everyone's sweating, and you can just feel all the suppressed sexual energy.Tafuri: Well, I'm seeing scenes from [A] Streetcar [Named Desire] for sure or Cat on a Hot Tin—
McNeely: Or even Orpheus Ascending, the play that Maria [his wife] and I saw a few years ago with Vanessa Redgrave, where there's this Southern couple. You know, the guy has been very sick, and he's non-functional —and he was just a good ol' boy who drank with his buddies. Vanessa Redgrave played a woman who is Italian —God knows why this Italian woman came over from Italy —it's this kind of suspension of belief. So, here's this hot-blooded Italian woman who's now been living with this kind of schlub for some years, and she's kind of suppressed everything. Their life is set a certain way, and life is going on. Then, all of a sudden, midway through the first act, the "young guy" comes to town. And, all of a sudden, the men don't trust him, and the woman is feeling stuff she hasn't felt for years.
That thing of the third character —when you've got a comfortable balance between two and then you bring in the third, and you see how that third character disrupts the relationship between the two characters plus creates another relationship with each of those two characters plus affects the outside stuff —the way a playwright will deal with all that motion and movement to a climax over that length of time, to me, ten minutes is nothing. A lot of it was at the end of my college days. I was taking a couple of drama, play-reading classes; I really got into it and just how these characters worked.
So, I like to think of that when I write. The more forces you have at your disposal, the more you can express this. Sometimes the musicians themselves are characters in the play, sometimes it's musical ideas that are characters in the play.
Another one I like is the end of Macbeth where everyone's dead. I've written a few things where the two ideas that are both conflicting, finally they both blow up and kind of die. And, finally, just another little character, that we've never heard from, just sort of comes in from the end and wraps up the piece.Tafuri: [Laughs.]
McNeely: Yeah, and someone's gotta come in and sweep off the stage at the end; it's like a stagehand coming in.
Tafuri: That's great.
McNeely: Yeah, to me that's had a big effect on my thinking about it.
Tafuri: Well, that's the storytelling element, for sure, and that comes through. It comes through in "Lost" and, how about, "A Perfect Six"? That's a tough tune.
McNeely: That's a hard one. That, again, started out as a tune I wrote for Phil Woods that we used to play with the Quintet. When I did the arrangement for the larger group, I had this idea again of the "What if?" I'm thinking, "Well, what if, after the piano solo, it goes into a bass solo, kind of an open thing" —I just wanted, again, the dust to settle.
Tafuri: Yeah. A transition.
McNeely: Everything just lays low for a minute. So, Cameron [Brown] is the eye in the [middle of] the storm. And then he comes out of that, and it goes into this whole other vamp, again, where this is "other character" coming in. The vibe most of the time is this [sings the portion of the piece before the vamp], this 12/8, almost "Better Get Hit in Your Soul" Mingus thing, then that breaks. The bass solo cools everybody out, and then you've got this more Afro groove. I was thinking that the bass and piano together are kinda like a great big thumb piano.
Tafuri: Oh, far out!
McNeely: I used to play —not very well —a thumb piano and listen to a bunch of recordings of kalimba music. It always fascinated me, the way the harmony was so simple the way they did it, and they'd get a little bass thing with the other stuff. So, I tried to reflect that.
Tafuri: How interesting. That's very interesting.
McNeely: Just to have it be a different kind of texture than bass and piano chords.
Tafuri: Were did the title come from?
McNeely: I wrote the tune, originally, around the time that some Olympics were going on. Some little gymnast was a perfect 6, and the tune was in 6/4, and I say "OK, so that's really what that's about."
Tafuri: [Laughing.] Cool.
McNeely: Maybe I'll re-title it some day, but I think it's too late. So, I wanted to create this other zone for the trumpet solo, then [the 6/4 theme] finally comes back. The thing that occurs at the beginning, the [sings the opening notes] —we never hear from that again —that's part of the piano solo. But then, I thought, 'We don't need to hear that again.' If the opening "stuff" are A, B then [sings some notes] is C, after then trumpet solo, it's just B then A.
Tafuri: I remember the first time I heard it, it reminded me of some Woody Shaw things.
McNeely: There was that, too. It's interesting. I wrote about two or three tunes at this one time, and I was thinking about Woody. It might have been around he died—
Tafuri: And we didn't even talk about this—
McNeely: Yeah [laughs], we didn't talk about it. It might have been around the time he died or, maybe, I had found out he was very sick for some time before he died. For some reason, Woody was on my mind. He's a guy I got to know, just by hanging out at the Vanguard, and he was such a great player. To me, he took the Freddie Hubbard thing and then took it even farther. He had such an amazing way to play on changes —this kind of "crackling" energy that he had —and then his tunes had a very special feeling about them. I remember I was thinking about him when I wrote that and a couple other things at that time.
Tafuri: That's cool. Well, there's one other standard —well, standard for a jazz musician, but you don't hear it that often, and I love it —that Coltrane Jazz album is one of my favorite Coltrane albums —and that's "Village Blues." How did you arrive at doing an arrangement on that one?
McNeely: Well, you know, it's a real simple tune, just a three-chord blues. When I was in college, it was in Champagne, Illinois, which was an interesting town, because here was the University of Illinois, about 30,000 students and all the faculty and all that —that's in the middle, they're two twin cities, Champagne and Urbana, and the university's right in the middle —and then there was the town surrounding it. There was a black community with a lot of good musicians. Jack McDuff is from there. The Bridgewater brothers, Ron and Cecil, are from there. And there were a number of other guys whom I would play with because, you know, some of the local guys would play in bars on campus, and I got to know them, and they'd hire me for gigs, and I'd play in clubs in their part of town. And this one guy named Tony Zamorra, a tenor player, he used to use "Village Blues" —because I'd heard it on the album first, and I dug the whole album at the time, but I didn't think much of it —he used to play it as a break tune [sings first three notes] with organ and tenor. And I though after all the other stuff you go through with the gig, it was so hip —just this simple little tune —and it's always stuck in my mind. So, in the early '80s when I used to play trio gigs, I'd use that as the final tune of the night, especially at some of these clubs where you'd play three sets, and now it's three-in-the-morning, and everyone's dead [sings fist 6 notes]. So then, when I was putting the music together for this band, I thought "Yeah, after all this kind of esoteric stuff," I wanted something that was just real loose, and I could open it, and people could play on it. Just write a couple of backgrounds people could play on. Essentially, it's just an orchestration of the head in the beginning, I just kinda re-did it, and the out-chorus a little more raw. Just have some solos and have it be a kind of loose kind of thing. When we did it in the sessions, it was the last thing we did. I remember that last day of recording, I thought it was going to go really smoothly and we'd be out of there in a couple, three, hours, and we had all kinds of stuff with "Silent Night" and all kinds of stuff with "Group Therapy," which took a lot, of course, to put together. I remember that by the time we got to "Village Blues," I was burnt and I think the guys were, and it felt so good to just play some 4/4 [snaps his fingers] like this. I think the real relaxed nature of the thing comes through.
Tafuri: Now I understand, when you tell me the history of this, why what I heard at the rehearsal —the original ending —was [sings the old ending] that was so corny.
McNeely: Well, you know, when you hear it out of that context. When I rehearsed it with Cameron and he just busted out laughing, I though "Well, this has gotta change."
Tafuri: Well, you did it at the rehearsal, too, and I hadn't heard any of this stuff, and I started laughing, too, and even the guys in the band started laughing. But now it makes sense.
McNeely: And last night, at this duo gig I did with Don Thompson, it was the same thing. We rehearsed on Tuesday afternoon, and we were running through that, and I had the old ending, and he busted out laughing.
Tafuri: [Laughs.]
McNeely: We ended up not doing it last night on the gig. So, I re-did the ending, and I'm a lot happier with the ending that we came up with.
Tafuri: Yeah, well, you've got a lot of new things on this album, but there's something to be said for those good old motifs.
McNeely: They work, I guess, but, as a writer, I like to spin it several different ways. I feel I've spent a lot of time learning about a lot of traditional stuff and I can do that. But, at the same time, I've got all this other kind of stuff that I've been doing over the years, drawing on a lot of different sources than the old, straight-ahead jazz. But there are times when I still feel so comfortable just writing some old, kind of straight-ahead stuff. Sometimes I think I gotta be careful about how I use that because, like in the case of Maybe It's the Last Tune of the Night, maybe that ending on "Village Blues" works, but, in any other context, whatever happened in this arrangement, it's kind of like 'Aw, screw it, it's kind of a joke.' I don't want to be too —to use that word you used —"campy" about it. I don't want it to go on and then, "Hey, guys, it's just a joke."
Tafuri: That's like kids in elementary school writing stories. Then they don't know where they want to go with the stories, so they just write "And then they lived happily ever after."
McNeely: Yeah, right, and I guess that lick is the musical equivalent of "Then they lived happily ever after" ... yada, yada, yada, fill in the blanks [sings the lick again].
Tafuri: I haven't heard everything you've done —though I've heard quite a few things —and it feels to me like Group Therapy is really something new for you, that you really stretched out with the flexibility of the group and the standard tunes and the originals.
McNeely: I agree. It's stuff that, on the one hand, it represents ideas that have been kicking around in my head for a long time, and, on the other hand, like it or not, I haven't really gotten those [ideas] out there, so this is a chance for me to get certain things going, certain things expressed that I haven't [expressed] before. It's not like I'm abandoning anything else I've done or trashing anything else I've done, but I feel like, in general, what I've written on this album is really me. I'm very, very comfortable with everything I hear on the album. I like to think that, on the one hand, I have the ability to do something very tradition and, on the other hand, go pretty far off the cliff ... and then mix the two together.