Home » Jazz Articles » Interview » Charles Tolliver: Blowing Down The Walls Of Trump’s Jericho
Charles Tolliver: Blowing Down The Walls Of Trump’s Jericho
You have to run the table, like in poker. Finally, after four hundred and one years, we’re going to get there. We will win the Presidency back from this despicable man and the sycophants around him and we will take control. There’s no way in heaven we will not win the Presidency back. This will happen.
—Charles Tolliver
Charles Tolliver
trumpetb.1942
Connect is Tolliver's first release in over a decade and it is a monster. It finds him fronting a US quintet which brings with it the grit and groove of a classic Blue Note hard-bop band while also sounding totally 2020. The lineup is augmented on two of the four tracks by tenor saxophonist
Binker Golding
saxophone, tenorBorn into what he describes as "dirt poor" beginnings in Jacksonville, Florida, Tolliver moved to New York with his family at the end of the 1940s, still a young child. He was a high-achieving school student. After spending three years at Howard State University in Washington D.C., and diligently practicing his trumpet in the city's Rock Creek Park, Tolliver returned to New York in the mid-1960s. He burst on to the scene almost immediately, when
Jackie McLean
saxophone, alto1932 - 2006
Tolliver's recording debut was McLean's It's Time! (Blue Note, 1965). In his sleeve note, the critic Nat Hentoff wrote that in Tolliver, McLean had found "a new trumpeter of solidity as well as daring," a description which nails Tolliver's qualities to perfection. Tolliver wrote half the material for It's Time!, showing himself equally adept at burners and ballads, and shared the writing credits again on McLean's Action (Blue Note, 1967).
A year with
Gerald Wilson
composer / conductor1918 - 2014
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
Roy Ayers
vibraphone1940 - 2025
Horace Silver
piano1928 - 2014
Gary Bartz
saxophone, altob.1940
In 1971, Tolliver co-founded Strata-East with the pianist
Stanley Cowell
piano1941 - 2020
Gil Scott-Heron
vocals1949 - 2011
Brian Jackson
pianob.1952
By the end of the decade, Strata-East had released 58 albums of near-uniform artistic excellence, a remarkable achievement for an independent company run by two musicians with no previous business experience. Tolliver released several landmark albums on Strata-East, under his own name and with Cowell and other musicians.
In this interview, Tolliver talks about his childhood, key events in his career, the founding of Strata-East, Black Lives Matter and the abomination that is President Trump.
All About Jazz: Did you come from a musical family?
Charles Tolliver: It was a jazz loving family. My parents were super hip. We had one of those old victrolas. I don't know where they got the money to get the thing, because we were dirt poor. But they had these 78rpm records and they were all Jazz At The Philharmonic. Those recordings became my mantra at the age of 4 or 5 years old. I remember
Charlie Shavers
trumpet1920 - 1971
It was my grandmother who got me my first horn. Kids in the south tended to be brought up by their grandmothers, because their mothers had to be out doing maid work or something. So it was the grandmother who raised the child. She was the matriarch of the family. Normally you would call your grandmother "momma." My dear mother, my brother and I called her by her first name, Ruby.
When I was about 5, walking back from kindergarten school, I saw a cornet hanging in this dingy little pawnshop. I would see it there for about the next three years and I would say, "Momma, I would so like to get that cornet." And she saved her pennies and God knows how, somehow she saved up enough that one day she got this thing for me.
AAJ: When did you move from Jacksonville to New York?
CT: In 1947, my father decided to move to New York. When they were demobbed, a lot of the Negro soldiers emigrated north to other places. Chicago, Detroit, New York and so on. Then later my mother decided she wanted to go there too, to be with my father. My grandmother would have none of it. She said the whole family had to be together. So everything we owned was packed up in one of those long-bodied automobiles that belonged to one of her relations, and off we all drove to New York.
We were able to be housed in the same apartment building as my grandmother's son, in Harlem. He had all these great records because he was super hip too. One was 'Round Midnight by
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Clifford Brown
trumpetb.1930
During my teenage years I always made sure I was in contact with like-minded teenagers and we would get together and do jam sessions and talk about music. At high school I was in all the bands—the concert band, the marching band for the football games, and the dance band for the weekend dances.
AAJ: So when you left high school, how come you went to Washington to study pharmacy?
CT: That happened because in my last year I had a part-time job delivering medicine for our local apothecary. It was the only black-owned pharmacy in Harlem at the time. I watched him mix the medicines—this is before medicines came pre-mixed—and I got fascinated. I said to myself, if he doesn't do that right, people die. So after high school I applied to Howard University in Washington D.C. to study pharmacy. Not necessarily to make a career of it, but because it fascinated me. Music was always there though. In fact most of my time at Howard I was in the Fine Arts building.
AAJ: Within a year or so of graduating you were working with Jackie Mclean. You must have done a lot of practicing in Washington.
CT: Well, yes. Every day I was in Rock Creek Park practicing my horn. And one day in 1963 I realised I'd finally caught up with what I'd heard with Clifford Brown. So I came back home to Harlem.
I began doing jam sessions at a place called The Blue Coronet in Brooklyn. There was
Chick Corea
piano1941 - 2021
Jack DeJohnette
drumsb.1942
Larry Willis
piano1942 - 2019
Billy Higgins
drums1936 - 2001
At the studio there was Alfred Lion with his stopwatch and Francis Wolff with his camera taking pictures. And then arrived
Roy Haynes
drums1926 - 2024
Herbie Hancock
pianob.1940
Cecil McBee
bassb.1935
AAJ: Around this time you contributed a track to a live album Impulse! recorded at the Village Gate [The New Wave In Jazz]. How did that come about?
CT: That was through Leroi Jones—this was before he changed his name
Amiri Baraka
vocals1934 - 2014
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
For me the original Village Gate in Greenwich Village was the best of any venue for jazz. It was in this incredible art deco building. I don't know how Art D'Lugoff could have sold it to become a pharmacy. It was so beautiful. The street level had this wonderful café, and then you walked up a little bit of stairs and you had an incredible restaurant and nightclub. But in the basement was where iconic things happened. Miles Davis, John Coltrane,
Cannonball Adderley
saxophone1928 - 1975
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
Art Blakey
drums1919 - 1990
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
So anyway, Leroi Jones called me. And I thought, wow, why me? But he'd been listening to me and I guess he liked me. So I put a band together.
Bobby Hutcherson
vibraphone1941 - 2016
James Spaulding
saxophone, altob.1937
Archie Shepp
saxophone, tenorb.1937
Albert Ayler
saxophone, tenor1936 - 1970
AAJ: Did you know Coltrane well?
CT: Not really. See, we were in such awe of John Coltrane. Truly, if ever there was a God in jazz, like Beethoven in classical, Coltrane was and is it. Just his presence for me was awesome. A lot of guys, they'd go up and, you know, hey John, and want to shake his hand and everything. And he was very gracious about it. But for me, he was like God, so I didn't talk to him. Later, at the Half Note, I talked a little to him, just to say hello. I never said, I'm Charles Tolliver or anything like that. Maybe he knew who I was, I don't know. He was a very peaceful guy. He would always be reading a book and smoking his brown cigarillos.
AAJ: Then you moved to California. Why did you leave New York?
CT: Well, there was actually very little work in New York then. Every night we'd come out from Slugs and walk across the West Side to the Village Vanguard and if Sonny Rollins was playing there it was to five people, man, trust me. Not even the big names were earning anything. There was a dedicated audience, that has never gone away, and on the weekends there'd be a few more people, but on the weekdays they weren't there.
So in 1965 I used to practice with " data-original-title="" title="">Bobby Brown, a musician no-one knows about because he was never written about. We met at jam sessions and we became friendly. And one day he said, look,
Willie Bobo
percussion1934 - 1983
AAJ: Which is where you joined Gerald Wilson's band.
CT: When the tour was over I stayed in L.A. because one night a wonderful trumpet player named Freddie Hill, who had been playing in Gerald Wilson's band for a number of years, said, hey man, you're from Jacksonville, that's where I'm from too. And Freddie said, are you going to stay in L.A.? I said yeah, but I don't have any money, I'm broke. He said, let me take you to Gerald Wilson, see if I can get you in the band.
So he took me to Gerald Wilson's house and Gerald said, OK, but before we get you in the band I got to send you to my tailor. I had these tattered clothes on and Gerald was quite a dresser. It was a really high-end men's clothing store and the man was a really big jazz fan and benefactor of Gerald's big band. I got two wonderful suits, man, free of charge. I kept those suits for years because I wanted to pass them on to any children I had in the future. But eventually the moths got them. I stayed in L.A. with Gerald's band for a year and in 1967 we recorded one of my songs, "Paper Man," on Live And Swinging.
AAJ: Then you went back to New York and joined Max Roach.
CT: See, I knew Max Roach before I went to Los Angeles. I used to go and see Max Roach and
Abbey Lincoln
vocals1930 - 2010
Freddie Hubbard
trumpet1938 - 2008
AAJ: Given that he'd co-led a band with Clifford Brown, and you admired Brown so much, that must have been something for you.
CT: It was the end of the world. Man, you could have put me in a coffin and just laid me to rest. I mean, I'm good to go. So I found a way to get back home. In those days there'd be ads in the newspapers saying anyone who wants to drive a car to some place, come into our office and bring $50 deposit. You'd deliver the car and the person would give you the $50 back plus another $200. It was faster than using the Greyhound bus. That's how I got back to New York. That's when I met Stanley Cowell, who was on piano, who was to become my lifelong alter ego and partner in Strata-East.
AAJ: How did Strata-East come about?
CT: There were these guys in Detroit, they had a thing going. They had a corporation called Strata, and they brought us there to play at the Strata Concert Gallery. I made a great recording from there that I might bring out at some point. Anyway, they said, you've got this recording, why don't you become our Eastern Strata? Because they didn't want to put out records, they wanted to put on concerts, that was their thing. They were trying to sell stock to family and friends to raise funds to do that. And when we got back to New York, I said to Stanley, I'm not interested in selling stock to friends. But I incorporated the name Strata-East.
The musicians in New York loved the idea. We explained to them, you're not on any contract with Strata-East. You do your record and if we like it we'll put it out for you. The real impetus, the person who became our greatest ally, was
Clifford Jordan
saxophone, tenor1931 - 1993
Pharoah Sanders
saxophone, tenor1940 - 2022
AAJ: Strata-East was perceived as a politically orientated label. Was that intended?
CT: Our founding intention was more to give musicians a fair shake of the whip. You see, what is happening now with Black Lives Matter, it was already there, though that was not the term used. We'd all been talking about it since when I started to work with Max Roach in 1967. Max had already done We Insist! and he was always trying to have Abbey work out these lyrics when he had her performing with us. And from 1967 to 1969 I spent a lot of time at his house and I knew where his head was at. And, I mean, John Coltrane had already done "Alabama." The label itself was not political. But because of what was going on—the Voting Rights Act, the murder of Martin Luther King, and the riots—the musicians in our circle and the stuff they recorded, this gave it a political dimension.
AAJ: Like Gil Scott-Heron.
CT: One day a guy walked into our office. He said, my name is Gil Scott-Heron and I heard about what you guys are doing and I'd like to put out a record with you. I didn't know who he was, I didn't know he was an underground spoken-word person. But I said, OK, let's hear what you got. He'd already put albums out with Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman, of course, but he was unsatisfied with it. He knew that with the sort of royalties all those companies were offering, you're never going to get any money, you'll only ever get the advance.
The recordings Scott-Heron brought to us were not in all that great shape. They were on cassette tapes. But I thought they were good. So I said to Stanley, it's not jazz, he's a poet, you know, and Stanley listened and said, OK, why not, what the hell, he wants to put it out with Strata, fine. And we were smart enough to know how to get them mastered decently. So we put it out. And one day I got a call from a guy I knew at a record store in the Village. He said, you guys just put out a record called Winter In America, right? There's a track there called "The Bottle" and that's going to go. I said, go? What do you mean? He said, it's gonna be a hit, man. I said, OK, we'll see. And the rest is history.
AAJ: Can we finish with Black Lives Matter and the situation for African Americans in the US in 2020?
CT: I'll say it this way. Black Lives Matter, what they call it today, actually began in 1619 when the first slaves were brought to America by the British. But they kept it all out of the history books for centuries. We have to be thankful for this exponential explosion of gadgetry like smart phones, which allows anyone to film anything the moment it happens. Without that, we'd still be back in 1619. So now, finally, after four hundred and one years, I think we're going to get there. This could never have happened without black people and white people across this globe saying, enough, absolutely enough. So now I think we're going to be OK.
We in America, we will do this. We will get rid of this despicable 45th President and all the sycophants around him who want to "make America great again." America was never fully great, not with the way black people were treated. But I think we'll get there now. Those of us who grew up in New York and are the same age as Trump, we saw him get all this money from his father who was an out and out racist, and Trump grew up with that and it never left him. And any other person who was so misogynous, who went around grabbing women like that, he would never even have been made a candidate for President. That element of our society has to be culled, just like animals are culled when you get a bad litter.
You have to run the table, just like in poker. And we will take back control, take back the center, control the law making. And the world will be healthy again. This will happen. It doesn't matter if it's Biden or some other Democrat nominee. There's no way in heaven we will not win the Presidency back from this despicable man.
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Interview
Chris May
Charles Tolliver
Binker Golding
Jackie McLean
Gerald Wilson
Max Roach
Roy Ayers
Horace Silver
Gary Bartz
Stanley Cowell
Gil Scott-Heron
Brian Jackson
Miles Davis
Clifford Brown
Chick Corea
Jack DeJohnette
Larry Willis
Billy Higgins
Alfred Lion
Roy Haynes
Herbie Hancock
cecil mcbee
Leroi Jones
Amiri Baraka
Village Gate
Bob Thiele
John Coltrane
Cannonball Adderley
Charles Mingus
Art Blakey
Sonny Rollins
Bobby Hutcherson
James Spaulding
Grachan Moncur
archie shepp
Albert Ayler
Bobby Brown
Willie Bobo
Melvin Lastie
Freddie Hill
Abbey Lincoln
Freddie Hubbard
Clifford Jordan
Pharoah Sanders
Charlie Shavers
Jazz at the Philharmonic
Norman Granz
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