You’ve made a number of recordings as a solo unaccompanied artist, as well as performed solo and unaccompanied a number of times. Your recording, A Biography of the Rev. Absalom Dawe, is exceptional. As a solo artist on stage by yourself, how do you approach the performance aspect of one man alone on stage? (With a humorous lilt to his voice) I do my utmost to make sure the audience loves me. Is there a trick to this? You smile a lot, and carry a big stick (laughing). When you approach any audience there is a two-way sense in that any audience is expectant, and if it’s worth anything, they’re a little nervous in a let’s-see-what’s-going-to-happen mode. You can share that through the use of anticipation and work with that aspect. But the way you’ve phrased the question, it’s obvious you understand the audience is your partner in any solo concert. They always are, in any live situation, and it’s always more fun if you can involve the whole audience in the pleasure of the music. Now there are certain places, and we all know the Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard recording where the audience is all talking, and there are times when you just have to get on with it even if the setting isn’t right. But, if you’ve got an audience that came to listen, then it’s nice to get on with them. One thing you can do is share timing with them. Are they reacting to what you’re doing? What is coming off best in the room you’re in? What are the different acoustics of the performance space? Sometimes one of the horns will feel really good in a particular room, whether it’s lined with wood or stone or the sound system’s characteristics, so then you hang on with that one more than you normally would. You look for the features that are coming across. If you’ve got a room that doesn’t like the baritone, then don’t fight it, play one of the other horns. That sort of thing becomes more and more important in the solo concert, that you become comfortable. You’ve played in a number of big name big bands, so I was wondering what you think is the most important component a baritone saxophonist should bring to big band performance? I think the one that’s sadly missing with professional and semi-professional bands is tuning. When you’re at the bottom of the chord and if that bottom of the chord is out of tune then there is no way the sound will be good. If the baritone is out of tune, from the bottom up the band has had it. You know, no matter what kind of sound the baritone player has, if the baritone player is in tune, that’s going to really help whatever is going on. Then the next thing is tone quality and section work and here again we’re back to the boring idea of listening. You have to really listen to the lead alto player and notice how he is really phrasing. Then you become more akin to like a violinist in a violin section where the job is to be precisely and exactly playing like the leader. That holds true and up to a point that applies to the entire saxophone section, except of course for the early Duke Ellington band. But they were such wonderful musicians. If you have that kind of a section then you can take the enormous liberties they took with phrasing. They all phrased their broad individual lines differently. Now Ellington was writing for them and he knew each members individual style and therefore wrote with that in mind, that they wouldn’t phrase it all the same way. Carney and (Johnny) Hodges were such great individuals that Ellington was able to get a one-of-a-kind sound out of them. They would usually all phrase differently, but interestingly enough not when they were needed to phrase the same. Ellington was able to balance that, but that is far and away much more complex and you could spend months talking about that kind of thing. But then there is also block writing and that requires a more regimented approach. So the basic answer is tuning first and then sound. You played and toured with Gil Evans for a number of years. What was it like to play in that band? Well, it was certainly like no other big band. It wasn’t, in fact, like a big band. At times it was pure anarchy, by design. Gil wanted to break away from the restrictions. The great joy of working with Gil’s band was first and foremost, Gil’s presence. He had that feeling of being a guru and master teacher. Like most great teachers, and Gil was certainly one of those, he didn’t really say much. You learned by his body language and the pleasure he took in listening to the music. Just the fact that he was there, and the fact that everyone in the band loved him so much and had so much respect for him in the first place, that they would work for him. They knew what he was after. It was the largest group I ever worked with that could make free improvisation work with that many people. Sometimes it was like 17-part counterpoint, which is astounding. There were moments in that band when you would listen to the sound and wonder, “Is this really happening around me?” There were quite a lot of moments of that. I remember my first gig with the band, after 30 minutes of constant playing I turned to the saxophonist next to me and asked what we were playing and he said, “I don’t know,” to which he then turned back to his horn and continued to play. We were playing something. Then someone might propose a riff, or Gil might just start something, and the whole band would be become like one and launch into Boogie Stop Shuffle (Mingus) and sound like one player. It was quite astounding and a remarkable experience. I wish I could have done it more than I did. You have also been associated with The Brass Project big band with John Warren, whom you met first in the late 60s/early 70s. Could you talk about the Brass Project which goes back to 1981? That band was really like a choir. It started out with being music that was largely improvised by trio: me, (drummer John) Marshall and (bassist Chris) Laurence. But it would have harmony provided by a chorus of brass players. Now that was the starting idea. I wanted to get (composer John) Warren involved because I wanted someone else to give a different sound to the writing so it didn’t all become me writing different backgrounds for myself. I wanted to be pushed by someone else’s writing. John would bring things in and out. Now what actually evolved, the more we went on, was that it developed into more structured types of music and pieces that were virtually suites and sounded great. It turned out that there were so many great soloists in the band, in fact they were all jazz soloists, so I would say, “No, you play this one,” to different members. So what we came up with was actually much more collective. The original idea was one thing, but the result over the time it was together was another. This was great, the way the music and group evolved. The group, unfortunately, had to stop for financial reasons. It was large, and there is no real funding in England for these kind of groups with all the best players. It became hard, as time went on, to always get the best players when you’ve just got odd jobs here and there. So instead of allowing the group to become compromised with people I didn’t feel comfortable with we said, “That’s great, we’ll leave it now, bye-bye.” It might come back again. The music and my will is there. I’d love to do it again.

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