A Conversation with Gary Burton – HuffPost 10.11.13

Mike Ragogna: Hey Gary, how are you?

Gary Burton: I’m doing fine, getting ready to start the tour. Tonight’s the first night.

MR: Congratulations on that and speaking of tours, I see that the new album by the Gary Burton Quartet is titled Guided Tour. Do you want to take us on a little guided tour of the album?

GB: This is a band that started three years ago, originally just for one tour. I had just finished a two year long world tour with Chick Corea celebrating our thirty-five years of playing together and decided to get a band together again and do just a tour for fun. We did a month in Europe. This particular group had such a great chemistry, the balance of personalities and styles and everything. You don’t get that ideal blend that often with groups, so I was really excited about it and we came back and recorded our first record together and then turned off and on during the year that followed. It was time to do a new record and do some more touring, so as with the first record, the emphasis was on making it a very shared experience with the band, so everybody writes and contributes music for the group and we recorded it in December and it came out in Europe in May because we did a month tour in Europe first, and now it’s been released here in the States as we begin our US tour.

MR: Hey, let’s get a little tour of these titles. My favorite one is “Jane Fonda Called Again.” What the heck did she have to say?

GB: [laughs] Well, you know, I don’t know Jane Fonda at all, and she didn’t call, that was just a funny phrase I came across reading a magazine one day. I notice phrases and buzzwords and things that I think, “Oh, that might be an interesting title for the right tune someday,” and I keep a running list of tune titles. In fact, Guided Tour was one of my titles on my list. Every now and then, I find the right song or the right occasion to use one and I’ve been wanting to use the “Jane Fonda Called Again” title for a while but I needed a sort of whimsical, light sort of tune for it, and this one finally filled the bill, so now I’ll spend the next two years explaining it, unfortunately.

MR: [laughs] You’ll also have to explain “Monk Fish.”

GB: That was Antonio [Sanchez]’s song, he’s our drummer, and I believe it’s a play on words between Thelonious Monk and the fish called the “monk” fish. I haven’t actually asked him for sure, but that’s what everybody assumes, and I know that several interviews have mentioned it as a tribute to Monk and I thought, “Oh yeah, that’s probably what he had in mind,” but I haven’t actually asked him. I just assumed that was the case.

MR: And we had another beastie appear, the “Jackalope!”

GB: Yeah, now that’s written by a friend of mine, Fred Hersch, a wonderful pianist. I heard the tune on one of his records and I liked it and decided to do it. There is an actual animal called the jackalope, it lives in the desert or something. I guess since the tune has some odd time signatures in it, it sort of feels like it’s jumping around some. I guess that’s what the connection is with the title.

MR: How do you work with the band creatively? Is it that you have the framework for the song and then everybody adds their parts or is it written out?

GB: Both of those things happen, depending on the song. In some cases, somebody will bring in the song and have it all written out, the whole song, all the parts for everybody. In other cases, we start with what we call the lead sheet, a single sheet that just states the melody and the harmony but no arrangement, no separate parts for each player, and then we all run through it and start making up our own parts and suggesting ideas for an ending or an introduction or how to turn it into an actual arrangement. So it depends on the song. For instance, on this record, the first one, “Caminos,” was pretty much all written out by Antonio; on the other hand, “Jane Fonda,” I just wrote the lead sheet for the tune and then we played it and then we came up with the format and the choice of what to do for an ending and so on.

MR: By the way, another song that appears on this album is the song you did with Michel Legrand, “Once Upon A Summertime.”

GB: Yeah, there’s an old arrangement that Miles Davis recorded on an album called Quiet Nights back in the mid sixties, with Gil Evans’ orchestration. I’ve always admired that arrangement of it and I was just thinking about it and picturing it with our group and picturing that we could do this by adding a second guitar part to add more “fill-in” sound, the acoustic guitar that Julian [Lage] plays as a second part underneath the melody that he also recorded. So that’s the one standard or tune written by a major composer that’s not affiliated with the band, but I said, “Let’s try it and if it doesn’t seem to work, we’ll do something else.” But it came out quite nicely.

MR: Nice, and I also wanted to ask you, who is this “Helena” Julian contributed to the tracklist?

GB: [laughs] Well it’s actually Helena, Montana, and he wrote it while he was out there playing a concert with somebody, so he was there for two or three days, and for someone who lives in New York, to suddenly find himself in Helena, Montana, looking at the mountains and whatever, it was kind of a dramatic thing and he ended up writing this song. He kept calling it “Helena” and wondering if it should have another title, but eventually it just became “Helena.” He just identified it as, “Well that’s where I wrote the song.” So it actually wasn’t a person, it was a state capitol.

MR: I’m going to be facetious again by asking you about who’s being remembered in “Remembering Tano”?

GB: Ah, well, actually somebody corrected me; it should be “El Tano.” That’s the nickname for Astor Piazzolla, the master of tango music, because he was of Italian heritage and they called him “The Italian,” which they shortened to “Tano.” So he was “El Tano,” “The Italian.” That was his nickname that his musicians called him. When I played with him back in the eighties and toured with his band, somewhere along the way, one of the musicians was talking about him and called him that and I said, “Oh, okay, it’s a nickname.” So when I wrote this tango for the record, I had him in mind and in fact I heard a tango on the radio when I was in a restaurant having dinner one night and I’m guessing it was one of his songs. The bass line of the song stuck in my mind and a few days later, I was sitting at the piano playing around with it and turned it into this song, so I decided I should dedicate it to him, so it’s “Remembering Tano.” It should be “Remembering El Tano,” as an Argentine friend of mine pointed out, but it’s too late now, I named it in my own Anglo way, I guess.

MR: One of the songs on this album is called “Legacy,” but that brings us to your own legacy, Gary, and therefore your new book Learning To Listen: The Jazz Journey Of Gary Burton. For me, one of the most interesting stories was “The Girl From Ipanema,” your playing that song in the movie Get Yourself A College Girl with Astrud Gilberto. Will you tell that story?

GB: “The Girl From Ipanema” became a huge hit and that meant that Stan Getz got hired in not only every concert hall and jazz club in the country, but even was requested to appear in two movies, one of which was this definitely second-rate movie they only ran in drive-ins called, Get Yourself A College Girl. We shot it on an old Elvis Presley movie set in Los Angeles. We were supposedly at a ski lodge and there was fake snow falling through the set window so it looked like we were in the mountains somewhere, and we played “The Girl From Ipanema” with Astrud singing as the stars of the movie, Chad Everett and Mary Ann Mobley, two names from the past, walked into this ski lodge and sat and watched us a little bit and then started a conversation with some of the other characters that were there. For someone like me, this was a pretty bizarre setting to be playing music in.

MR: And possibly the most memorable moment from that movie.

GB: [laughs] Well it might have been. There was almost no plot to this thing. Stan and I actually went to see it at a drive-in in Denver. We’d never found it anywhere but then I found it in a paper and it said it was playing at this drive-in. We had a night off so we drove the rental car out there and sat in the dark watching this thing. It turned out to be kind of a promotional thing for a lot of artists from the same record label. There were like ten different bands each featured at some point in this movie, each with the thinnest of plot lines and we were one of the many. It still runs on late night TV from time to time and people call me up and say, “I saw you with Stan Getz last night” and I know immediately what it was, it was College Girl.

MR: Well, I’m definitely going to go get the Blu-ray of Get Yourself A College Girl when we get off the phone.

GB: [laughs] I did finally buy one just to keep it in my collection. A few years ago, I decided to track down every record I’ve made over the years and make sure I have copies of the old ones and so on. I found most of them available on eBay as it turns out. All the early ones I could buy them for a dollar or two each, so I got the DVD as well.

MR: I can’t believe that you’d ever let your Gary Burton Quartet records with you, Larry Coryell, Roy Haynes and Steve Swallow go away!

GB: That was the start, and you know, I keep coming back to it as the instrumentation that is the most flexible, adaptable, and so on. I’ve occasionally had piano players instead or horn players instead; I had a quintet for a couple of years at different times. But I just keep coming back to that same line-up that has worked so well for me. So when I was forming this current group, the reason I called it The New Gary Burton Quartet is that I hadn’t had a band for a couple of years because of touring with Chick, so it felt like I was making a fresh start. I called it “new,” although it’s not so new, now. I’ve been doing it for three years with this group. So I guess the next record we make sometime next year, I’ll have to just drop the “new.”

MR: Speaking of “new,” when you play live with those guys, isn’t it always like a work in progress on stage? Isn’t always kind of new?

GB: Oh yeah. This is true of all jazz performing. You’re always reinventing the song each night because you’re making up new solo sections. But yes, definitely with this band because it’s so interactive and there’s such a high degree of rapport with each other, we can pull surprises on the other guys, you can change the normal flow of the arrangement sometimes and surprise everybody and they can roll right with you with no problem. That’s one of the beauties of this particular quartet; it’s so easy to play together.

MR: Yeah. Now speaking of “very easy to play together,” obviously you have this longtime relationship with Chick Corea. Tell us about that. It’s at least thirty-five years now, right?

GB: Actually, with Chick and myself now, it’s forty-one years. We play every year, we do some touring every year and make a new record every five or six years or so. We’ve won six Grammy awards together for our records. I used to think we would eventually get tired of doing it and it would start to get boring or repetitive and we’d move on to other things in our career, but after we passed the twenty year mark and then the thirty year mark and so on, I sort of changed my mind and said, “I guess this is just going to go on until one of us falls over.” It always seems fresh and exciting and fun, and as long as that’s the case, I’m sure we’ll keep on doing it. We’ve already booked our next tour, which is a big tour of Asia and Australia in next June. That’s our big project for 2014.

MR: Now, 2013 also includes the release of your book Learning To Listen: The Jazz Journey Of Gary Burton. Let’s talk about that. That’s actually the key, isn’t it, “learning to listen”?

GB: Yeah, that became the central theme. I have three storylines in the book–my jazz career, my voyage of self-discovery you might say, finally figuring out that I’m gay, and then my emphasis on trying to discuss the creative process, how people have asked me for years, “How do you know what notes to play when there’s no music up there? How do you know what the other musicians are doing? How does this work? I don’t understand it but it sounds fascinating!” I’ve learned to talk about that and explain it to students over all of these years and I wanted to include that as a section of the book as well. They all relate to the title–learning to listen to the music, learning to listen to your inner person, and learning to listen to this creative ability that we have inside us. That’s ultimately how I settled on the title. I didn’t have a title for a long time and then it finally hit me one day that this sums it up.

MR: There are various pictures of you through the years on the cover. My favorite is you as a would-be young toreador.

GB: [laughs] Yeah, I was about eight years old then and my mother made the costume for me. I was only eight or nine, but by then, I was starting to play gigs, first on my own and then gradually with more members of my family. So that’s how I started out. There was always a little bit of show business involved.

MR: And just for those three or four people who don’t know, yet, what got you into vibes as opposed to the trombone or ukulele?

GB: [laughs] Mom and dad. They wanted all us kids in the family to take music lessons just as something to round out our lives growing up, and my older sister had already started piano lessons. My parents looked around and I was six and they discovered that there was a lady in the town we lived in at that time who played the marimba and the vibraphone and gave lessons, so that’s where they took me. I didn’t know one instrument from another at six years old so it was really coincidence that it was available and that’s where the folks took me. We moved a couple of years later to another part of Indiana and I was on my own from then on. There was no teacher available, but I had learned to read music and I could get around on the instrument, so my father would just buy piano sheet music of songs he heard on the radio that he thought were nice and I would work out how play it on the vibraphone. I just kept doing that and giving performances for local churches and clubs and things until I discovered jazz, and that’s when I got serious about the music. That really grabbed me and I was so excited about it that I really started working harder at it.

MR: And it had to be awesome to have George Shearing as one of your first encounters.

GB: Yeah. Imagine, I was nineteen years old and that was my first job. I had played a lot of local gigs and had even started making records by then, but I was still in school. So when I left school at nineteen, that was the first touring band I was able to get into, and it was one of the few bands that had a vibraphone in it, so it was, I guess, a natural that I would end up there. But it was a great introduction to the big times, as it were. George was a wonderful musician and ran his band in a very class way, very upscale. We played all the best places, the best clubs and concert halls and so on. So for that first year–which I was on the road with George for three hundred and twelve days that year–I’ve never had a year as busy as that in my whole life since. That was, in a way, a great introduction. I really got to see how it works.

MR: Was it just around the country or did you tour the world?

GB: We did a month and a half tour in Japan but the rest was all USA. George didn’t like to fly, so he preferred playing in the US where he could mostly drive from city to city and only occasionally, he would have to fly, and he always hated having to do it. Somehow, he had gotten a fear of flying. But I started touring the world more when I moved on to Stan Getz’s band after George. Then we toured Europe as well as Japan again and South America and of course the US as well.

MR: Right. And you’re on early classic Stan Getz albums.

GB: I’m on some, but the biggest one, Getz/Gilberto, I joined the band about three months after he recorded that. Then the next few years, there’s one called Getz Au Go Go that I’m on. I’m on the ones that were made between ’64 and ’66, but I missed the two big hit records he had, Jazz Samba in 1961 and then Getz/Gilberto in ’64.

MR: Can you go into a couple of your favorite pieces that you’ve recorded? As you’re casually thinking of your catalog, when do you go, “Ah, yes, THAT one!”

GB: In my history? There are two things that come to mind. I was asked this question not too long ago by someone and I had to stop and think for a minute. The first record I made with my first band. It was called Duster and that was the beginning of a whole genre of jazz first called jazz-rock and later fusion. It’s a genre that sort of continues even to this day and my band was sort of the beginning of that. I get credit for that often. It’s not often you get to start a new genre of jazz. There’s only a new genre every decade or so and I was instrumental in that. My other record that I’m sure will be considered a classic if it isn’t already is the first record I made with Chick Corea called Crystal Silence in 1973. Again, it was the launch of a new trend in jazz, which was playing duet format. We weren’t the very first to do it, but somehow, our record popularized it and it’s now increasingly common for major musicians to just play as a duo instead of with a full band. For Chick and I, of course, we’ve continued this on now for four decades and it’s continued to be one of the mainstays of my career. But it was that first record that introduced it. Certainly, at the time, we thought it was just a one-time project and when the record came out, it was just on a little German label that didn’t even have distribution in the US. You had to import it.

MR: That was ECM, right?

GB: Yeah. They were just getting started. It was either their third or fourth record they had made. So we didn’t really expect there to be a huge response to it, but the record came out and we started getting calls to our agent and our manager saying, “We want to book this!” So we started playing concerts. I still remember the first one was at Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University of Michigan. It had a surprisingly big turnout, and I said, “Wow, this thing is catching on!” Within a year or so, we were touring regularly with our duets, ultimately, all over the world as the years have gone by. So those two records probably stand out. They’re a little bit like your children. I’ve made sixty-six records so far in my career as a leader, and there’s something personal about each one of them that I feel nostalgic about. But in terms of impact and staying power, those two records, I’m sure would be singled out by somebody reviewing my lifelong output.

MR: I’m also curious, did you and Chick ever discuss being in Return To Forever?

GB: No, he had Return To Forever before we met. They were in like ’70, ’71, ’72, and we did our record in ’73 and by then, he still had the band, but they had now been together for a while and actually gone through a couple of configurations. One of the reasons I think it didn’t occur to me to be in the group was that Return To Forever was a very electric band, very loud volume, amplified and all that. The vibraphone is not a very loud instrument. Because of the disparity of volume levels, it never occurred to either of us that the vibes would work in that band. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that I didn’t continue very long with the new genre of jazz-rock and fusion; it kept getting louder and louder as more bands became more rock-ified and everybody stepped up the volume. Even the rock bands weren’t that loud in the beginning, but by the end of the sixties and going into the seventies, everybody had cranked up the volume to the deafening levels that we have today with pop music. But in fact, I remember the rock in the sixties when The Beatles first arrived and so on; it wasn’t that loud. I saw many rock bands in small clubs before the big stadium concerts were a common thing and they were loud-ish, but it wasn’t deafening yet. That came later.

MR: Do you have any advice for new artists?

GB: Well, yes. First is to not get discouraged easily. The music scene is in many ways a bigger market, a bigger industry than it was in my youth. There are more people following music and buying records and going to concerts and so on and it’s also big around the world and not just in a handful of big cities here in the US. It’s much more widely distributed. At the same time, the discouraging news is that the industry is going through a major upheaval on all stages, whether it’s jazz or pop or rock or classical or whatever. The whole music industry is trying to figure out what the new business model is going to be. Just selling records is no longer the main avenue of people getting music. Downloading is increasingly common; iTunes has entered the picture, thank goodness. It’s kind of kept the free downloading from becoming overwhelming. But getting your music to the public is a new kind of thing and we’re all struggling. We’re now using Facebook to try to get the word out about our records and our gigs and so on. I’ve got fifteen thousand followers on Facebook, for instance, and I know some other jazz people who have four or five times that many. I feel lucky to have fifteen thousand, frankly. But that’s for people that get their information less from reading music magazines and more from looking at things online. So we’re all having to learn of the new ways to get our music to the public. There’s a public out there who loves the music! It’s like all entertainment–whether you’re planning to become a movie actor or whatever–not everybody makes it to the big time. But if you’re truly inspired and can just feel it in your blood, that this is what you want to do, by all means, go for it. That’s my advice.

MR: What’s up with Gary Burton in five years?

GB: People sometimes ask if I have any more big projects that I haven’t got checked off my list yet and that I’m anxious to do. I don’t think so. I may stumble into something that I haven’t thought of yet, but at this point, I’ve been asking myself, “Now that I’ve turned seventy, where do I go from here?” and I feel like I’ve built up a really great body of work and reached high levels of my career and I’ve been really fortunate to have accomplished all this. My goal now is to make sure I maintain it and I make the best of it and keep playing with the best players and make the best records I can make for as long as I can. There will come a time when I won’t be able to function at the levels that I have gotten used to and I hope I’ll know then that it’s time to step back. I don’t think that will come in the next five years, but you never know.

MR: Hopefully, that won’t come until you’re around ninety, maybe ninety-two.

GB: [laughs] Well my mother’s ninety-seven, so chances are I’m going to be around for a while.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne