petals

not really, but as far as hearing your first jazz concert… it was a baritone saxophone player named Gerry Mulligan who I’ve since come to just love. He was the first person I heard, and I remember thinking about that concert- I guess I was about 17- when he played his soprano saxophone, it reminded me of a harmonica. I remember thinking that- “Wow, that’s kind of like a harmonica.” But that’s about all I remember from it. But then I was in New York and went on a… they have jazz cruises where they have jazz musicians perform for the week, and I was playing in a band called Diva, which was a women’s big band, and we got booked on the same cruise as Jerry Mulligan. I got really into this album he did, called Lonesome Boulevard, about my senior year in college- one of my trumpet teachers turned me onto it, it was a really nice album… and like, nobody knew about it. He was just kind of forgotten a bit- he did a lot of stuff with Chet Baker, he’s mostly known for that, but man, he’s an incredible musician. So anyway, I had this kind of modern style album of jerry mulligan- a beautiful album- it’s out of print, you can’t get it anymore. And so I saw him on the cruise and wondered “Wow, I wonder if he’s going to do anything from that album,” because he’d had other albums come out, and I noticed it was the same band as that album. So I went to see him, and he played everything off of that album- it was great. I’m in the middle of the Caribbean on a ship, in the bottom, listening to his concert, and he’s doing all my favorite songs from this album that I had listened to over and over- that was pretty cool. And I got to meet him and everything. It was pretty neat- I just keep gaining respect for him more and more. I also saw Freddie Hubbard once when he was really on. Never got to see Miles Davis… Dizzy Gillespie I got to play with, but he was kind of like, out of it and not too friendly, so that was not so great. Clarke Terry is always fun to play with but not, uh… not… no I don’t remember the concerts in particular… I’ll probably think of others afterwards and be mad at it.

SW: Okay… strange but true, someone once told me they took inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s paintings- do you have an opinion about taking inspirations from other art mediums?

CM: Oh, well, yeah, it’s great. I mean, wherever you can find it. I know I like to read the poetry of Roca, and see, I don’t know enough German- you have to know quite a bit of to read that sort of poetry, but Stephen Mitchell has done a series of translations of Roca that are really nice. And then I’ve enjoyed some novels… in fact there’s one- it kind of associates all this stuff- Somerset Maughan wrote one called, uh… I don’t remember what it was called, but it was based on the life of Gaugin, only slightly different circumstances. Like, Gaugin died of some kind of social disease or something, meteor or something, and the book, they gave him leprosy instead. Anyway but it was based on Gaugin. Yeah, and I’ve started paying a lot of attention to artwork of kind of innovative painters. I really like El Greco and then, of course, Van Gogh, I’ve gotten to see some of his stuff in person- that’s pretty intense. Not so much of the Monet, I didn’t really get into that too much. But