You have a new big band project with The London Brass and Jack DeJohnette. How has your concept of the big band evolved to today? I think I’ve learned a lot through writing for the brass. But this is different because it’s built around the idea of the duo of Jack and I together without a bass player. Ever since we first got together over 20 years ago and working in the duo situation for so long, we find other ways of adding to our duo. We add basses, drones, synthesizer patterns, by having me playing bass patterns underneath or Jack playing solos on percussion or piano - this project is built around the duo of Jack and I playing together. We had tried before to extend the music by adding a string quartet. It worked well enough musically, up to a point, but lacked power. It’s very nice if you can let Jack loose and play all of the things Jack can play on a full-size drum kit, if you do that then you have to amplify the strings to a ridiculous degree, and it sounded a bit silly. So I felt that if I was going to do another project with Jack I wanted to use some more powerful instruments, but I hadn’t thought of any group as big as London Brass. I was really thinking more along the lines of a quintet: two flugelhorns, a couple of trombones and a tuba. Suddenly this proposal came up to use a lot of brass and I thought, “Oh God, can I do this?” But I gave it a try and that was that. It’s turned out to be great and we’ve given several performances of it and they’ve all been really exciting. More performances are planned, but not for at least 18 months. Once again, they’re very expensive to do. There is another orchestra in the U.K. that is interested in this, the Bourmouth Symphony Orchestra. We hope be doing this with a number of different symphony orchestras. You and Jack have a long history of both duo recording and concertizing. How did you and Jack meet? Jack was in London in the 1960s playing with Bill Evans, when I was still living there. Jack would come down in the afternoon to where all us musicians would be. You know, I’ve got a feeling that Dave Holland was playing opposite Bill Evans in a quartet with John Marshall accompanying a singer during that gig, but Jack would come down and say, “Hey, let’s jam.” Well the grapevine was swiftly in action and I was there immediately with my horn (laughing). Jack had his melodica and all the gang of the time would drop in to jam. I supposed I must have bumped into him subsequent to that on a few gigs around Europe. Well I went up to Woodstock USA and lived there for 6 or 8 months in the early 70s.Amongst other things, I played some gigs with Jack and hung out there. That regenerated our friendship. We’ve always gotten along together well socially. We share a similar sense of humor. He’s an Anglophile when it comes to humor. He likes my funny voices. So we just get on very well. One thing led to another and he proposed I should play on Mick Goodrick’s recording with Eddie Gomez called In Pas(s)ing. I think by that time we were making our Simon Simon recording. We’ve always played live together through the years, even though our recording together took a 20-year break. There were just other things going on, each of us had other things going on. About five or six years ago we were playing in our duo and we said that we really had to do some more recording, and so we ended up doing Invisible Nature, which is recorded live on the road. Sometimes we only discover things about ourselves musically when we play with others. I was wondering if there was anything you’ve learned about yourself through playing with Jack? He taught me to trust my instinct. When you work with Jack, one of the strongest things about him is his complex rhythmic abilities. He’s a monster and quite terrifying, up to a point. It took me quite a few years to be able to stop playing and then start again, because once you’ve stopped you’ve got to start again, and the rhythmic things Jack was doing were so complex that I would say, “My God, where’s the (beat) one?” He taught me to trust my own sense in that I was feeling things the right way. Also, he is such a listener that he told me wherever I come in is the (beat) one. “I with you,” he said. There is a certain elasticity playing with Jack, as opposed to everything being very tight rhythmically when you play jazz. And indeed, much of the time it is very tight. But there are also certain flexibilities that are there if you, and here we are again, just listen very carefully. Just listen and trust. He showed me that if I took a jump, held my nose and took a dive off the diving board and jumped in I would be fine. It wouldn’t interfere with his flow. I’m not afraid of being wrong. As an improviser, if you’re afraid of being wrong you’ll never learn to improvise anything. That’s a given, taking risks comes with the territory. With Jack it’s all about leaping in, you can’t be wrong, if you listen. I have learned many many things about life from him, but trust is the first. You’ve composed many pieces for ballet, with works for the Paris Opera being just one of many examples. How do you approach composing for ballet? You really need to know what the dancers are looking for. If I say ‘listen’ again, you’re going to be bored. I guess the thing here is listening and watching. Try to see what it is the dancers are trying to convey. Sometimes, if they’re trying to convey a great deal of energy, it’s useful to them if the music doesn’t have a lot of its own energy. The music might need to be strong, but a lot of rhythmic energy may not be good if they’re trying to get their rhythmic energy across. They can drown in the musical energy. Conversely, sometimes if they are trying to convey things with lots of long lines it works well to have contrasting music. The whole concept of contrast in dance and music takes a while to learn to be able to handle. I’ve learned a bit about that. I’ve also learned that tempo is something you can’t mess around with. I’ve done some things that are semi-improvised, but if you’re doing things with five or six dancers then you need to have something like a synthesizer background that is substantially the same every night because the piece would be based on the tempo and feel of that, while I might take my horn and play quite differently and focus in on one or more of the different dancers on different nights. Solo sections are also sometimes totally improvised with the dancer. As a composer, how do you handle making the transitions from group to group, because you’re associated with so many wide and divergent groups? The fear factor comes to play. I’m currently writing a piano concerto that is a scary challenge. I sit down to play it and think, “Who is going to be able to play this, except for (Thelonious) Monk?” Before you start writing you’ve got to be able to hear the sound in your head, at least in general terms. It’s all about slowing down what you do when you improvise and trying to get it down on a piece of paper. What do I hear here? What do I imagine? What can the instruments do? I often start from the point of, what are these instruments really good at doing? For me the hardest thing is to actually start the composing. I’ll take anything, any musical idea as a start. I’ll do almost anything in the world to get out of starting a new piece. There’s nothing like starting a new piece for me to make sure there are no clothes in the laundry basket (laughing). I’d rather clean up the house than write that first blasted note, but once I start then I have to hang on because it’s so exciting. You’ve given a number of clinics to collegiate students. I was wondering if there is a main point you like to impart to today’s youth? If I’m talking to young musicians who are interested in jazz music as improvisers, I try to tell them to keep challenging themselves aurally, and not to rely on the published transcriptions of the great soloists. Now-a-days if you want to learn about a Horace Silver tune you can buy the book. A lot of us, who wanted to figure it out, learned the music by working it out for ourselves. I can remember, very vividly, Dave Holland roaring in to my flat in London saying with great excitement, “Listen to this! What McCoy Tyner is doing here are these fourth chords!” By working and finding it out for yourself, that's truly the way to develop. Spend quite a bit of time, if you can, not doing what it says on the piece of paper, if you know what I mean. As busy as you are, do you still find time to practice? The reason I was, earlier, able to tell you which instruments and mouthpieces I play so quickly is because they’re all laying here in my practice room and open and I’ve been practicing them. Today was baritone day. I’ve been fighting with the big mouthpiece because I haven’t played it in a while and it’s very good to practice on. When I put the smaller one on the instrument is so much easier to play, because I’ve been working on the large mouthpiece. When I was younger there were times when I didn’t practice as much, but I think that was because I was playing so much. But now that I’m older I’m practicing all the time. With old age and the joints getting a little bit stiff you have to do just that much more to stay in shape. Equipment Soprano: Yamaha WSS with an old Selmer E mouthpiece and Rico Royal #4 reeds. Baritone Saxophone: Selmer without a low A with two Berg Larsen mouthpieces (a 105 and a 125 depending on what he’s playing) with Rico Royal #5 reeds. Alto Clarinet: Yamaha with a very wide Yamaha mouthpiece and Vandoren #3_ reeds. Bass Clarinet: Noblet, but only down to D-flat, with two mouthpieces (an old Vandoren Crystal mouthpiece and an old doctored Noblet) and Bari plastic tenor saxophone reeds medium to hard. Contrabass Clarinet: Leblanc with a Leblanc mouthpiece and Vandoren #2_ reeds. Wind Electronics: Yamaha WX11 wind controller and a Yamaha VL70 tone generator.

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