Das hatten wir neulich anderswo auch schon, aber über Peacock äussert sich Shank ja im Interview, das dem Booklet der Mosaic-Box mit seinen Pacific Jazz Aufnahmen zugrunde liegt (die Buchstaben plus Datum entsprechen den betreffenden Sessions, F = Slippery When Wet, G = New Groove), H = Barefoot Adventure:
(F) APRIL 18, 1959
By this time, early 1959, his band had changed. Flores was back, but Williamson and Prell were replaced by guitarist Billy Bean and bassist Gary Peacock.
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He knows what happened to Peacock. Anyone who follows jazz does. He began playing bass when he was in the Army in Germany in late 1955. By 1957, he was good enough to play with Shank and Cooper on their first European tour. Peacock was advanced technically and harmonically far beyond the norm for the period. He worked with pianist Bill Evans for a time in the 1960s, and later with Paul Bley, Miles Davis, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Keith Jarrett and avant-gardes like Albert Ayler and Don Cherry. He is one of the giants of the instrument.
„His development,“ Shank says, „was phenomenal. He turned into one of the most creative bass players that ever happened.“
I asked Peacock about his experience with Shank.
„Because of his own presence and his own interest, it created a space for me to be very, very flexible. That was a strong component of our connection during that time. There was a much greater sensitivity to sound quality than there is now, and when we recorded, we were all in the same room. We didn’t get stuck in little cells or boxes. We played like we were playing a gig. I think that made an enormous difference in terms of the quality of the music. And Bud was – well everyone knows – the guy’s a master with the instrument. It takes someone like him to work in a framework like that. It was wonderful working with him.”
(G) May 1961Peacock stayed with Shank well into 1961. With Bean back in Philadelphia, Shank hired Dennis Budimir, as adventurous on guitar as Peacock was on bass. The three of them generated sparks of creativity. Shank’s music moved onto a new plateau.
„Dennis was another intellectual, like Gary. He was his own man. He was very young when we made this record, 22 or 23. He never wanted to travel. He was by nature an improvising jazz player, a very good one. Very creative. But, he chose to forego that so he could stay home, stay in L.A. He became an extremely successful studio guitarist, still is to this day, probably the first-call guy even now. Very successful, and deserved to be. Of the jazz recordings he has made, this is one of the few. He did a solo or duo thing, in somebody’s living room for Bill Hardy’s little label called Revelation. This is the band, with the exception of Mel Lewis, that was working at the Drift Inn in Malibu at the time we recorded this.“
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After we listened to NEW GROOVE, I asked him, „You said, ,same horn, same mouthpiece, but different.‘ How is it different?“
„I hear different things in my playing. It’s aggressive, different harmonically, by all means. Different notes, different parts of the chord changes that I’m playing in. And I think that working with Gary Peacock and Dennis Budimir probably got me thinking along those lines. I was becoming more adventurous. I was becoming a better musician, a better saxophone player. More confident. Getting away from the way I was playing eight years before. There’s a hell of an advancement between 27 and 35. I really broke through musically. I’m starting to get it together.“
(H) NOVEMBER 1961…
„The real thing was The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Then John came along, Coltrane. Things started to get so complex that it was difficult for the audience. And we were starting to get complex. I was. Nowhere near where John was, but in a club Gary Peacock was all over the place, way ahead of where Scott LaFaro was. And Dennis was also. We kept things under control on the record, but we were all getting more adventurous. I think we’d got to the point where as Coltrane became more well-known and going the direction he wanted to go, it became so complex that we not only lost the audience, but we lost the musicians because even they weren’t able to understand where it was going. That’s what drove the consumer, the audience, to the simpler music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and those things. They didn’t have to think.“
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2009/01/bud-shank-part-1.html
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba