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Richie Beirach: Indelible Memories and Thought-Provoking Reflections on a Life in Jazz, Part 1
Richie Beirach hovers somewhat mysteriously in the pantheon of the great modern jazz pianists. Some of the others in that category from his generation (coming up in the 1960s/'70s), like
Herbie Hancock
pianob.1940
Keith Jarrett
pianob.1945
Chick Corea
piano1941 - 2021
Kenny Barron
pianob.1943
A centerpiece of his career has been an ongoing collaboration with NEA Jazz Master saxophonist,
Dave Liebman
saxophoneb.1946
Beirach lived and worked as a prodigious sideman in New York at the height of the 1970s jazz scene through the 1990s. At the start of the New Millennium and in the wake of the 911 terrorist attacks, he shifted his home base from New York to Leipzig Germany, where he taught and mentored young pianists for fifteen years. Today, he continues performing and teaching worldwide while residing in Hessheim, a small town not far from Frankfurt and Mannheim, where he values his privacy and freedom. Beirach is a wonderful conversationalist, so relax and enjoy this extensive autobiographical excursion by a jazz master.
PART 1: COMING UP IN NEW YORK AND WORKING WITH DAVE LIEBMAN
All About Jazz: Let's get started with the desert island question. What would be the recordings that you would take there?Richie Beirach: I would take Kind of Blue,
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Lennie Tristano
piano1919 - 1978
Paul Bley
piano1932 - 2016
Steve Swallow
bassb.1940
Pete La Roca
drums1938 - 2012
AAJ: Your taste is very eclectic. And your love of Bill Evans is obvious.
RB: Evans, Miles and Trane. And of course
McCoy Tyner
piano1938 - 2020
Wayne Shorter
saxophone1933 - 2023
James Brown
vocals1933 - 2006
Emergence: From "Chopsticks" Onward
AAJ: I myself, and I assume a lot of readers, don't know a lot about your coming up, before you hooked up with Dave Liebman and those guys. When you were a kid, how did you get interested in music, the piano, and jazz? And what turned you on about all of it?RB: OK. Let me go back to the very beginning. Here's the story. I'm five years old, and I'm with my parents who are vacationing in a bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. One day, I'm walking with my parents, my mother's got my left hand and my father's got my right hand, and we're walking by a gymnasium, and there's a sixteen year old kid, a camp counselor, playing "Chopsticks" on an old upright piano. It was the first time I ever heard a piano! And I let go of my parents and started walking towards the sound of the piano. I walk in, and the kid looks at me, and I said, "What is that?" And he said, "It's a piano." And I kept repeating the word "piano." And the kid picks me up, and puts my fingers down on the first two notes of "Chopsticks." F and G. So he's teaching me to play "Chopsticks," and my father walks in and has no idea what's going on. I'm sitting this guy's lap, and my father was a badass who was a combat medic in WWII, where he landed in Normandy in the second wave. And he looks at this kid suspiciously, and says "What's going on with my son?" So the kid kind of apologizes to him. But I go, "Daddy! Piano! Piano!" So he sees that the kid is cool, and I keep saying the word piano a hundred times.
The summer is over, and we get back to our home in Brooklyn, and the first thing I say is "I want a piano!" So to shut me up they bought me a shitty little white spinet piano, not even an upright. But it was fine for me. So then I need lessons, and they take me to the local music teacher on McDonald Avenue. Her name is Mrs. Schindleheimer. She's German or Austrian, came over on the boat. She's six feet tall, she's got a bun on top of her head with pencils in it. She has a vaccination mark on her shoulder that looks like a basketball. So she starts teaching me, but she can't read music! She gives me this book called "Teaching Little Fingers to Play." It's her music school, but she can't teach a thing!
Luckily, the next Saturday, a real teacher comes, a 60 year old guy with a beautiful suit and a white shirt, an Italian guy from Palermo. He's there to teach the advanced students from the music school, one of whom is Mrs. Schindleheimer's daughter who looks exactly like Olive Oyl from the Popeye comics. So, I go up to the Italian guy and I say, "I don't like her! Would you teach me?" I'm a little kid and I have the biggest chutzpah balls in the world! And he starts laughing, and said, "No, I'm sorry." But my father, who is very sensitive to my needs, gets this teacher, whose name was James Palmieri, and says "Listen, my son wants to study with you. Here's twenty bucks," which in 1953 was a lot of cash. So Palmieri takes me upstairs to his private studio that was like a European drawing room with a small Steinway with books and music and a nice rug and a globe of the world.
So I come into the studio, and Palmieri says, "OK. Play something." And I say, "I can't play, please teach me." And he says, "I don't teach beginners." So I begged him and I said, "I will do anything that you say. Please teach me." I don't know how I got this way -I was only five years old. And he said, "OK." And that was the beginning. It changed my life. He started teaching me how to read music, and I'm rabid, listening, memorizing. I run home, I started practicing, learning. To make a long story short, I stayed with him from age five until I was eighteen. He was James Palmieri, a concert pianist who had a terrible tragedy with his wife and son who died in the sinking of the Andrea Doria ocean liner.
Palmieri had a great concert career. He was friends with Rubenstein, Michaelangeli, Horowitz. He lived on 46th Street on Restaurant Row in Manhattan above the Vesuvio Italian Restaurant. Eventually I went on the E Train to his studio in Manhattan. He taught me everything about the piano: reading, interpretation, technique, sound. I have a very good sound, but his sound was ten times as big, and broad, and subtle. And I virtually became his son, who died, and my father was working twelve hours a day, so I needed a father figure. So eventually I had two or three lessons a week with Palmieri. He taught me more than music. He taught me about life, girls. I could tell it was good for him too. He had no friends, no women in his life. After his wife died, he decided that getting close to anybody was too hard -he was in total grief.
AAJ: Did you have any interest in jazz at the time?
RB: When I was twelve, I heard the Milestones record, and specifically the tune "Billy Boy" with
Red Garland
piano1923 - 1984
Philly Joe Jones
drums1923 - 1985
Paul Chambers
bass, acoustic1935 - 1969
I was OK at classical music, but there were kids who could play circles around me, and they loved to play it. But something was missing for me, and then I figured out that the problem is that it's always the same. There's no improvisation. It's all about the composer, which is fantastic if you're the composer. And I suddenly realized that improvisation was the way for me. And I was all ready prepared in an instrument, the piano, and my technique and sight reading were really good. However, my teacher, Palmieri, didn't teach me anything about theory, harmony, and composition. To improvise well, unless you have an unbelievable ear, most of us have to know theory, harmony, and how the music is put together.
Palmieri died when I was 18. I went to Berklee for a year, which in retrospect was a terrible mistake because I didn't get what I needed there, but I did learn some very important things. I learned to survive on my own for the first time. I met
Harvey Mason
drumsb.1947
Miroslav Vitous
bassb.1947
John Abercrombie
guitar1944 - 2017
Keith Jarrett
pianob.1945
Bob Brookmeyer
trombone1929 - 2011
AAJ: You're the first person I've interviewed who didn't praise Berklee as a school. What didn't you like about it?
RB: In 1965-'66, when I was there,
Ray Santisi
piano1933 - 2014
Herb Pomeroy
trumpet1930 - 2007
John LaPorta
clarinet1920 - 2004
On a positive note, I did perform a lot there. I lived on Symphony Road with a bunch of guys. Downstairs was a whore house! I was so na?ve, I didn't know what it was! But the school was not a real school. It was just a collection of people. Later, they became much more successful, they bought a lot of real estate, and it became a factory. It got better in the 1980s when
Branford Marsalis
saxophoneb.1960
Terri Lyne Carrington
drumsb.1965
So I came back to New York, and I got an apartment at Spring and Hudson in Manhattan near the old Half Note, and I auditioned for Manhattan School of Music. That was the smartest decision I ever made. I went there as a theory and composition major, and studied for four years with Ludmila Ulehla, and that's how I learned about harmony, counterpoint, contemporary music, composing, and all the real skills that I teach now, and that Berklee didn't give me.
Manhattan School of Music, Dave Liebman, and the New York Jazz Scene
I started at Manhattan School of Music in 1968. A little before that, in 1967, I met Dave Liebman, who was actually doing substitute teaching in the public schools. We weren't good enough to play jazz gigs then. We played weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and those kind of gigs. But I was learning a lot, and every day we'd get together and hang out. I had an apartment at Spring and Hudson; he had a loft on 19th Street off 7th Avenue near the Con Edison building. I would show him what I was learning at school from an amazing book called Contemporary Harmony by one of my teachers, Ludmila Ulehla. Dave was getting into it too, and took some lessons from Ludmila. He learned how to write music with her. Dave never went to music school formally. He went to NYU and studied American History. But he would help me with melody. He had the greatest sense of lyrical melody, which I'm sure you know. And he could play piano and drums in addition to sax and flute. We used to transcribe solos from Coltrane. We played together a lot in his loft.AAJ: Were you one of the musicians who hung out with Dave in the loft?
RB: Of course!
Randy Brecker
trumpetb.1945
Michael Brecker
saxophone, tenor1949 - 2007
Bob Moses
drumsb.1948
Clint Houston
bassb.1946
Dave Holland
bassb.1946
Chick Corea was a real hero for me then. He was incredible. He was carrying forth the stuff from McCoy. McCoy was awesome, he was pushing forward rhythmically, harmonically, you name it. He was just a great pianist and composer. He was the one. And Chick was carrying that through, personalizing it for himself.
So we come to 1972, I'm studying at Manhattan and Dave is working wedding gigs and some jazz gigs with
Larry Coryell
guitar1943 - 2017
Stan Getz
saxophone, tenor1927 - 1991
Jack DeJohnette
drumsb.1942
Elvin Jones
drums1927 - 2004
Gene Perla
bassb.1940
Steve Grossman
saxophone1951 - 2020
AAJ: Did you play those famous gigs at the Café Au Go Go with Getz?
RB: Sure, of course! We played at Au Go Go, we played at the new Half Note on 52nd Street. We played Rockefeller Center Windows on the World, all over New York. And the old Half Note in the Village as well. Suddenly, we were no longer kids. Dave and I started working with our own bands. And this was the beginning. Dave went to Japan in 1973 with Miles, and I was with Stan in Japan at the same time, and Dave and I made our first record there called First Visit (King Records, 1973). We made it at midnight after a concert. It was an amazing scene. Japan's economy was thriving at the time, and they loved American jazz. So this was a great period, and we then put together our band, Lookout Farm.
AAJ: So you were with Getz, and Dave was with Miles. But then you and Dave started creating your own music together.
RB: For me the driving force all the time was to find my own way. Even while I was studying at Manhattan, I was learning about melody and rhythm, and theory, and harmony, and all the great composers like Scriabin, Khatchaturian, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. I studied everything in that school. We studied all the essential composers. By "essential" I don't mean popular, I mean essential to the continuum of the history of music. If you take one away, you have a hole. For example, Bach and Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Prokofiev, Boulez, Stockhausen, and a few more.
AAJ: You didn't mention Ravel or any of the impressionists who influenced jazz so much.
RB: Of course, they belong on the list. So, over the course of four years at Manhattan, we studied four pieces by each of the composers, with the score and listening to the LPs. We would listen, for example, to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, or a Bach Cantata or the Prelude and Fugue, and so on. And then the teacher, Ludmila Ulehla, picked the essential 20 composers in music history,from Bach Mozart Beethoven, and so on, up throough through Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin, Prokoviev, Shostakovich. Berg, Schoenberg, and Stockhousen. For each of these essential composers, she picked out the most important and iconic pieces for us to analyse. We would listen to the recording and follow the score ,then write a short piece of our own in the style of the great composer. We did this over four years. It was a perfect comprehensive education, and I was lucky to have it.
Eventually, my goal became to put all that I had absorbed from these studies into jazz, into, say, "Stella By Starlight," to integrate the harmony, the melodic ideas, and so on. I continued doing that for about twenty years afterwards. I spent hours and hours at the piano, sleeping as little three hours a night. But I loved it, so it wasn't arduous work.
So then with Dave, him with the melody and me with the chords and the rhythm, we figured out a different way to play! We did all that in Dave's loft. And I wasn't the only one doing this. Bill Evans and Lennie Tristano did something similar before me. McCoy, Bill, and many other jazz pianists like I did, even
Bud Powell
piano1924 - 1966
AAJ: I heard that you studied with Lennie Tristano.
RB: Way before that, Dave told me that he took a lesson with Lennie Tristano. And Lennie lived in Queens on Jamaica Avenue at 179th Street, so I take the train there. I go in. The house is dark, because he's blind, so I hear him say, "Come in. Put twenty bucks on the table!" That was a lot of money in 1966. But I did what he said. And he comes out looking like Frankenstein, but he's very nice, and calls me over to his Steinway. He says, "Play something." So it was awful —I start playing "It Ain't Necessarily So." This was when I was still studying with Palmieri, and I still didn't know shit. After about 30 seconds he shouts "Stop!" He said, "OK. You can't play. You have no time. You have no swing. Your assignment is to listen to
Frank Sinatra
vocals1915 - 1998
Billie Holiday
vocals1915 - 1959
Lester Young
saxophone1909 - 1959
So that whole week, I was depressed. My father asks, "What's the matter?" I say, "Nothing. This guy says I can't play." He says, "Fuck him!" I said, "No, he's right, dad." He says "Really?" And I started listening to Sinatra and Holiday, even though I really wanted Hancock and McCoy, who by the way Lennie didn't like. Lennie stopped at
Bud Powell
piano1924 - 1966
But then I heard the amazing record he did called Lennie Tristano with "Lineup" and "East Thirty-Second Street," where he overdubs the piano part. It really inspired me, and I felt he was ten years ahead of Herbie. But he was a very bitter guy, very nasty. But he really helped me because he gave me the truth, plain and simple. Somebody has to tell you that you can't really play. And of course, he had Olympian standards, and I was not even in the running.
Lookout Farm
AAJ: How did the iconic recording, Lookout Farm, come about.RB: Fast forward to 1972-73. Dave and I are young guys, we're living in New York, we're feeling great. And so we want to do a recording. The record business was thriving then. They paid you good money to make a recording, not like today when you have to produce and pay for your own recordings. And today, anyone can make a record, so there are hundred CDs coming out each month. That's democracy, and it gives anyone a chance to record. But it floods the market with garbage. Back then, you were hired to do a job, and you had to be good.
So we already did the record First Visit in Japan that I referred to earlier, and we were very happy with it. Then Manfred Eicher, the head of then new ECM label in Europe went to hear Miles and met Dave there. ECM was just a local label then. They hardly had any distribution or sales. But we ended up doing a record for Manfred, and it turned out to be Lookout Farm! We recorded it in New York. At that recording date at the Generation Sound studio with Tony May the sound engineer, I play a long solo on a tune we wrote called "M.D." dedicated to Miles. After we record the tune, Manfred, who at the time was recording Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, freaked me out when he said, "That was a great intro. Would you like to make a trio record for ECM?" I of course said "yes," and I did my first record called Eon (ECM, 1975).
AAJ: To me, Lookout Farm is a landmark recording that influenced the jazz to come. What was the magic that created it? And why was it called Lookout Farm?
RB: It was a very special album. What made it happen was that, first of all, it was a working band. And we added John Abercrombie, a great friend. And it was one half acoustic piano and bass, and side B of the LP was electric piano and bass. We had tablas and guitar. And we were a real jazz fusion band. Were playing fusion, and the rock stuff but with advanced harmony. It was really integrated. Also, we were young, we had amazing energy, and the tunes were simple but really well crafted and designed to be a springboard for improvisation. There was not a lot of unison stuff, not a lot of showy bullshit decoration. We just used the heads to get us into the improvisation. 90% of it was improvised. Dave's tune "Pablo's Story" dedicated to Picasso was just four chords, just enough to go. We had this unconscious gestalt that we were going for great improvisations. We tried to build our solos compositionally. This is where all the studies we did to learn how great music is built and constructed were applied.
Of course, Bill Evans, Miles, Herbie Hancock, Chick, Wayne Shorter, and
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
Hank Mobley
saxophone, tenor1930 - 1986
Dexter Gordon
saxophone, tenor1923 - 1990
Jim Hall
guitar1930 - 2013
Lookout Farm itself is an actual place in upstate New York. It's a house and property that still belongs to a great friend of ours, the artist Eugene Gregan. He did the cover paintings for Eon, Drum Ode, and Pendulum. He was our artist and our friend. He was older than us, and we would go up to his place for inspiration. He was living the life of a pure artist. It was the 1970s, and we went up there for inspiration and to smoke some great hash. Eugene was both very supportive and critical. He's still around there at the farm.
So we figured we'd name the band and the record Lookout Farm for Eugene's place. We were sophisticated hippies. We didn't just get high and look at the sky. We wanted to do our creative work. So we had a great time with this album, and then we toured around the world. We won a lot of awards. We won the Downbeat Best New Band award. We went to Japan, and we went to India on a State Department tour. We went to Hong Kong. We went everywhere in Europe. Our promoters would get us a van, and we'd travel 6,000 miles around Europe: Copenhagen, Sweden, Spain, wherever the van would take us. It didn't pay a lot of money, but we were young kids and we were strong, and we would sometimes sleep in the van to save the hotel money. I remember one night we did a gig at the Montmartre in Copenhagen and drove to Rome after that. It was unbelievable.
Then we toured the United States with another van: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Billings, Montana. We played Billings behind chicken wire! The crowd threw beer bottles! And of course, we played New York, Philly, Washington, Florida, every jazz club! We brought our own equipment, we learned, we had to deal with each other, and we became adults. It was great. We'd go on tour for six weeks, come back, chill out, and do it again! And in Europe, we could go back again and again, play gigs, and do a week of teaching. And we'd go to exotic places like Istanbul and Jakarta. We made the most money in Japan—they loved us and they had the money to pay us well.
The 1970s were amazing for us. And ECM became the main record company featuring Keith Jarrett and Chick! Keith's Cologne Concert, a two album set of piano improvisations, sold five million units! So ECM's CEO, Manfred Eicher, put all the money back into more recordings. We got distribution from Polydor and Universal. And I did some records of my own: the solo album Hubris and Elm, with George Mraz and Jack DeJohnette. Then we did Drum Ode. But then we ran into problems with Eicher, because he became very authoritarian. He'd tell us what to play. He liked ballads and bossa nova, not intense jazz like we played. So eventually, we had to leave ECM. Abercrombie and
Ralph Towner
guitarb.1940
Working with Liebman on Chromaticism, Bartok, amd Improvising Approaches
AAJ: Dave told me about how the two of you developed the new music together, and he talked about how you somehow combined the chromatic approach to improvisation which he developed into a teaching platform with your interest in the classical composers like Bartok. Could you say something about that aspect of your collaboration?RB: First of all, I've always been interested in contemporary music. Of course I love Bach and Mozart, Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin, all the guys I mentioned earlier whom I studied with Ludmila. And I don't like that crazy atonal stuff -it doesn't satisfy me. I don't feel anything from it, and I need to feel something. The language can be very dissonant, but for me there has to be some element of emotion in it. Like Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Man is that powerful, and it's really dissonant, and it's really Russian. Do you know that the Russians put Prokofiev in jail! They thought he was mocking the government! How stupid can you be? The government was very oppressive, and unfortunately, oppression is very good for music! You compose to make a statement against it and for freedom and justice! It was the same in the U.S. in the 1960s: the Civil Rights movement and the violence inspired so much great music! But Trane's music and so on from that period is not just protest music, because that becomes pretty thin after a while. But the revolution gets into the music, not just as anger but sheer energy.
AAJ: Do you think that revolutionary fervor affected your own music?
RB: No! We were not about destroying and breaking things down. We loved "the system"—it was working for us. We got our recordings and our gigs. Even though we didn't sell millions of records, we were the "prestige guys" for the recording industry. And, getting back to our collaboration, all of our recordings start with me and Dave working together. Dave writes an amazing melody. He calls me one night from a hotel room in Budapest. And I'm in Leipzig. It's three in the morning. He's freezing in his hotel room. He calls me, and I say "Yeah?" He says, "I got a melody." He plays this incredible melody. I say, "Send it to me." He sends me it in his handwriting by email. His handwriting is terrible! But I can read it, and I sit down at the piano and start harmonizing it. And the melody is so well written. It has within it ten possible implications of which harmony to use. I sat there for six hours working on the harmony. It's called "Kurtland" and dedicated to our great friend and producer, Kurt Reinker. We recorded it on the Jazzline CD, Balladscapes.
Dave and I worked together like Rogers and Hart. We've been doing it now for fifty years! We always surprise each other with our ideas. When our dear friend John Abercrombie passed away, we wanted to write something for him. So Dave said, "Give me a set of changes." So I sent him a really beautiful chord progression, and he comes back in a couple of days with this incredible melody, He plays saxophone, so he's all melody. And he's a total master of it.
Now with the chromatic improvisation idea, I assume you know about Dave's book A Chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody (Alfred Music, 2015). We started working on it together. But he wanted to go in a particular direction, and I realized it was going to be his book, and I pulled out of it. But there's a lot of my stuff in there, a lot of my voicing, and all the examples of contemporary music is mine. I'm perfectly happy that it worked out that way.
The upshot is that we found our own way to play chromatically. It's very simple even if you're not a musician. If you're playing on C minor 7th, it consists of C. Eb. G. Bb. There are playable notes in between like D and F, but then there are notes that would ordinarily be thought of as wrong for improvising, like C# and D# and B natural -you're supposed to avoid them, but they are actually the richest and most interesting to play. All music has been chromatic since Bach. The difference between Dave and I versus Bach is that in Bach, all the chromatic notes resolve up or down into the chord tone. Dave and I are looking for non-resolving chromatic tones that can be held for long duration. Trane did that in 1965. Listen to his amazing solo on "Transition." He plays every note in the chromatic scale when he wants to, and this is a great innovation. It happened in music a hundred years ago with Alban Berg and Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Every note in the chromatic scale became a useable note. And it just became part of the music and created so many more possibilities! And every time you add a chromatic note, you have more possible harmonies for improvisation. The chords changed and expanded. This all developed a hundred years ago. And we studied it.
What Dave and I did was to figure out a way to play standards, like "Softly in a Morning Sunrise," or "Naima," or the blues, and to integrate into the fabric of the conversation all these chromatic notes as long duration notes. And it really became part of our style, our way of handling it. Randy Brecker plays that way too. Wynton and Branford Marsalis both have played that way. There are just a lot of ways you can play chromatically, and it's now the music of the day. And I'm always looking for new possibilities. I'm not just looking for dissonance. I'm looking for lyrical dissonance.
So Dave and I have worked on lots of things together and separately. It takes time. It's been fifty years, and we're still doing it! And we're still developing. The truth is we're playing better now than we ever have, and in the last couple of records that we did, we've reached a real high point. Eternal Voices (Jazzline, 2019) is completely contemporary classical music along with some Bach and Beethoven, and with improvisation. But the Bartok was closest to me because it was the most chromatic and the most organized. In the early days, when I studied Bartok in school, I was in close contact with Dave. And I showed him everything I learned, and Dave went and studied with Ludmila for a while. So this was a natural thing that came around as a big cycle. And eventually, I used the Bartok string quartet themes as a basis for improvisation. What's the difference between "Stella by Starlight" and the rhythm changes of "Oleo" and Bartok? It really is different only in terms of its dimension. So we took the themes from Bartok's string quartet and set them up for improvising. And of course we're a duo, not a string quartet, so it was easier that way. We first thought of doing it with a real string quartet and have the original composition followed by us, but that was not practical.
So we ended up doing one CD of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Scriabin. And we did another CD of the Bartok String Quartets. That was two years ago. And then last year, we went in to make a duo CD with no music, no paper, no talking! Dave and I just improvised for an hour. The album will hopefully be released in 2020, and it will be called Empathy. This is my favorite album of all that we've done together, because it has all of the elements that we love. It has structure, great melodies, energy, interaction, fire, and reflection. And it's all improvisation. And it's really what we were meant to do. But we took a big chance with this. It's still very vital between us. Every time I play with Dave, it keeps growing.
Lieb has been and still is my oldest and best friend and colleague for 50 years. I can't imagine my life musically and otherwise without him. His playing is known everywhere, and the breadth and depth of his personality, and the rare qualities he has acquired during his life have enhanced my entire existence. We came up together, and we learned and helped each other. To this day, I go to him for advice, feedback, and his general view of the world, which is as pragmatic and down to earth as anyone I have ever met. Dave has only gotten better as the years have gone by, musically and as a man. His sound, especially on soprano, carries all the humanity, joy, sadness, and truth of daily life. But being a great artist, it is more. When you hear Dave and of course play with him you are taken away from the everydayness of life. How could such a pragmatic and unaffected cat play with such deep sense of the human part of music? Well, that's the fascinating part of the artist that is Dave. Complex, passionate, empathetic, and honest are some words I would use to describe his music and personality. I still look forward to the times when we get together and do gigs and recording dates and hang out.
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Carnaval - The Songs Were So Beautiful
By Antonio Adolfo buy
