When we started the week at The Gate, it felt a bit like a trial by fire. There was no traditional rehearsal; I was just expected to know Freddie’s most current album as well as a good cross-section of songs from his previous albums. It wasn’t until we started that I realized that he was in the habit of calling tunes from a long list of standards that I was expected to know. If I didn’t know them, I had to catch them by ear. We were encouraged to take the tunes to places that were completely different than how he had recorded them, as long as the aesthetic approach was sound. It was an absolutely ecstatic experience for me to play with a musician of Freddie’s stature every night. It was like playing tennis with Rod Laver every day. He had an exquisite sense of how to build a solo, how to interpolate the structure of the melody, use motif development and alternate harmonic elements to build tension. Each song was a masterclass every time we played it. Although I had played with some great musicians on gigs in L.A., this was an entirely different situation because of the stakes at hand in playing behind a musician on Freddie’s level. An ill-considered musical decision would throw off the development of a song, and draw a brief but clear look from Freddie, indicating that one should always be conscious of the implications of every note that they played. The choices that one made as a bass player were crucial in determining the places that the song would go. The right choice would pay off in shifting the landscape that we would explore, and the wrong choice would restrict what Freddie could do melodically; boxing him in and stiffening up the feeling of a section or passage. As Ron Carter has said many times, it is about “finding the right notes”. In the same way that every word that one says when producing a session must be well-considered, every note that one played had to be the right note, played with the right intention.
Lessons From The Street
After the week at The Village Gate we went to Philadelphia for a run at a club called The Bijou. The playing continued to be a continuous masterclass for me; every night playing at the very highest level that I was capable of working at, and learning different ways to support Freddie on each song, without falling into the trap of relying on the tricks of playing something just because it pleased the crowd or even because it pleased Freddie. The prime directive was to find those “right notes” in each moment.
In order to adequately set the stage for a part of the after-show milieu, it’s important that I point out that the crowd that we drew in Philly at this particular club was almost exclusively Black, and during the late seventies, in the jazz world, that meant that the prevalent style was what one might connote with the crime-thriller film “Super-Fly”. The men were dressed in immaculate white suits, with wide-brim hats and shades; a beautiful Harlem fantasy world.
When I entered Freddie’s dressing room after the show, it was a virtual den of iniquity. A variety of drugs was making the rounds, mixed with cigars and cigarettes, and the cognac was flowing abundantly. At this time, though I certainly had experimented with various illicit substances, I was a relative neophyte to parts of the world that I walked into in that dressing room. The practice of free-basing cocaine had become popular, but this particular area was unknown territory for me. The group of “friends” who were in the room, seated in a circle, was composed of musicians, drug dealers, scenesters, and assorted audience members. When the pipe was passed to me, I passed it on. As everyone laughed and joked, at a certain point I had the distinct feeling that in order to be a part of the festivities that I should say something to the group. I sat there in a quandary, and finally, when there was a gap in the boisterous conversation, I said “Wow…..it’s really smokey in here, isn’t it!”
I probably don’t need to tell you that the response was that the entire room went quiet for a beat… then the laughing and conversation continued, thankfully with nobody offering a response to my awkward comment. As I sat there, feeling like the best thing for me to do at that moment would be to disappear, Freddie looked over at me and extended his hand, ostensibly to offer me something. For a moment I felt like my foolish and naive punctuation had passed without disgrace, I put out my hand to receive whatever it was that he was giving to me, only to find that he was giving me an assortment of objects consisting of a bottle top, a cigarette wrapper, and a few other pieces of trash. He looked me in the eye, slightly cocked his head, and let out a huge laugh. I received the message loud and clear… “if you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything” was the bit of social instruction for me. I sat there for a few moments, trying to decipher the completely obvious meaning of Freddie’s zen lesson, then slowly receded towards the door, and exited, feeling young and foolish, but having received an important lesson from my mentor without a word having been exchanged.