Das grosse Gespräch mit Noah Howard im Wire ist auch super – und steht sogar online:
https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/p=12096
What about when you went to Paris in 1969-1970? You worked with a few other people then.
Everybody had emigrated to Paris. I used quite a few French musicians also. But being away from home, everybody sort of bonded together. When they were in the studios, they all worked with people that they knew. Whereas I went off into a real strange thing, because when I got there there was Kenny Clarke and Art Taylor, who had been longtime residents. They had been there almost ten years before I arrived. The first person I got together with was Art Taylor. I called him for a session, because we used to all hang out together. So I said, ‚Look, I got this session tomorrow morning. You wanna hit it? We’ll go in, we’ll rehearse for five hours, then we’ll tell ‚em to turn on the machines and we’ll do it.‘ I wrote the music out, and we just did it. That was the Uhura thing that just came out on Verve. It’s got Frank’s name, but that’s my session. I did two sessions, Uhura and Space Dimension. I wrote all the songs. I also did One For John with Frank, with me, Frank, Bobby and Muhammad. Then in one of my crazy moments, I did Black Gipsy with Shepp. Beautiful, mad, mad session. It was really great, it was fun. The violin and the poets – Julio Finn and these guys from Chicago. Great stuff.
Why didn’t you record for BYG as a leader yourself? Was it because you could see that they were crooked?
That was the problem. I brought Frank, Bobby and Muhammad to Europe. We were supposed to do, there was supposed to be a Paris jazz festival. But the kids were rioting in the streets. So the governmental authorities moved the thing to the Belgian/French border, to a little village called Amougies – a farm, really, like Woodstock. Thirty thousand people, I’ll never forget that. But the problem was, BYG – I negotiated with them that we’d come in, play the festival and do two record deals, one for me and one for Frank. So they did the Frank thing first, and they didn’t pay him.
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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, #162: Neuentdeckungen aus dem Katalog von CTI Records, 8.4., 22:00; # 163: 13.5., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba