I was wondering if you could tell the readers about some of the early rock work you did with a very young John McLaughlin? The funny thing is that when you’re in the middle of the action it seems like there are lots of people doing lots of one really big thing, but they’re not, they’re really doing lots of different things. John was special in that he was never really one of the guys who was playing in the clubs all the time. I actually met him in the studio when we were making a record with Georgie Fame, the pop artist. John was jamming in between takes and I thought, “Wow, this guy really sounds great.” I supposed John had heard me play and then invited me to come play on his first album. But the album was a shock-horror thing to me. It was full of monsterly-difficult time signature things. I can’t remember exactly what they were now, but there was some 11/8 and 13/8. I was still in the stage where a waltz was good enough for me in the sense that it was as tough of a time-signature as I got (laughing). John’s album was a ball-breaking experience and all of us on it were hanging on with grim-death for the material. He was a very ahead-of-it performer. Extrapolation was actually a very special recording session. As someone who really mastered the rock and jazz-rock thing early in your career, if you had suggestions for young musicians who wanted to go into these areas, what would they be? I don’t really have a special aid or suggestion to help people for this particular area because I think the preparation for getting into any kind of music is essentially the same, in the sense that you must listen to as much as you can and develop your listening abilities as much as you can. Once you’ve got that listening thing going you can go in almost any direction because you’re listening to what else is going on and that steers you into it. I think it’s listening to the music that interests you when you’re an up-and-coming player. Really the best way into it is to have as wide a listening program as possible. Nowadays if you want to get into jazz-rock you better get yourself a good microphone, especially as a saxophone player (laughing). But of course that’s a technical thing that’s addressed by most teachers. There’s a heck of a lot of information about those kinds of things available out there these days, where as there was less in the 60s. We didn’t have the kind of knowledge or back-up information youngsters have today. Was there a mentor, during that time period that helped you and “showed you the ropes,” as it were? No one person, it was really just all of the stuff that was going on around me. In the 60s and up until 1967 Coltrane was a huge figure, (Sonny) Rollins as well. The huge jazz figures are who we were listening to and saying, “This is incredible.” I don’t think it was until the 1970s when Weather Report and bands like that started to influence us. Soft Machine with John Marshall (an influential British psychedelic group) was happening at that time as well. I’ve never been particular about the genre of music I play in. If it’s good stuff I like to be in on it. I just like to play, so I’ve never really followed a particular line of action as it were. I’ve just gone where my fancy took me or where circumstances led. People would come along and say, “Come play with me,” and I would, no matter the style. This leads me to the thought of how, since that time, you’ve oriented yourself to explore a wide range of other musical venues. I was wondering if this was a natural progression in your development or did you make a conscious choice to leave the rock and jazz-rock area where you were so successful to explore other areas? I think what happened was that I found myself moving away from, in the traditionally widest sense of the term, the jazz music track and partly, when I started to work with dance in Paris with Barre Phillips and the dancer Carolyn Carlson. That really opened up some doors with synthesizers I hadn’t really explored before. I realized then that I had grown up with music that wasn’t really jazz music. I hadn’t become aware of jazz until I was 15, so there was a lot of music inside me that didn’t actually come from Chicago or New Orleans. There was this other music in me that was trying to come out. I had some melodic ideas inside that were trying to be expressed. I needed to find a way to play in other ways. Without making a conscious decision I just gradually realized that this must be what’s happening, namely that there is other music that wants to come out, so I just laid back and let it happen rather than made a conscious effort to go anywhere else, but the association with ECM records made this decision more straight-forward in the sense that the way in which I was heading was in line with Manfred Eicher and that company. He was enjoying the music I was proposing on my solo recordings. Let me touch on the electronics thing you brought up. To my ear you’ve really mastered the use of electronics in a totally musical manner. They, like any instrument, take a lot of time and energy to master. I was wondering if there were any parallels you found between learning the saxophone and learning the electronics? I will keep dragging the conversation back to the point about it being in the ear and what you hear and what you’re listening for. If it works it’s because I’m hearing in my head the blend between the electronics and whatever else I’m playing. I think it’s that that makes it work. Unless you’re looking for something in music that is full of contrast, a situation were one element is really fighting another element, I’m using my ear to find the sounds of the electronics I think compliment and integrate or set the saxophones in good relief and don’t eat up the saxophone’s quality. It’s a tone color thing that’s really like orchestrating. If you want to have a delicate flute melody don’t write a load of brass at fortissimo because it ain’t going to work (laughing). Certain things blend and other things don’t. For me, it’s an ear thing. It’s partly that, and partly as you’ve noted, I mess around with several different instruments and that curiosity about tone color led me to the synthesizer, and that’s the reason I play, or try to play, all these different saxophones. I’m sure I’d be technically a much better player if I stuck to one or two of these instruments and really concentrated on just them because each one of them require full attention but that’s not the way I’m made. I just love having all of these different sounds and tone colors.

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