A NEW WORLD

A NEW WORLD

I felt I entered into a new world, a place I never knew existed. Might as well have took me to Mars or something, you know. But, anyway, I had the orientation. I got through. Spent a few years there.

Music major there was one of the hardest majors. But I loved it. They had stuff there that I would have never imagined existed, just speaking of music. I had about a year of Composition, I can’t even explain to you what they taught me. Now it seems so passe, so routine. I don’t even know how to explain it.

I remember, a few years ago, I was doing a record with Andreas, I call him my protégé, he’s right about 35/36 now. And he just stretches out, stuff that sounds like he’s playin’ out of key, you know 20th century stuff, and he goes back all the way to the blues.

So he wrote this song, “Sinking Above”. In a lot of ways he wrote it for me. He has this beginning horn part and the ending, where I solo, and, I don’t know what it was, but it was a dissonant thing, and I had to play out of some weird scale. And what helped me was what I learned at Berkeley.

What I did was that I created a little motif, I played some little thing, then I played it somewhere else. So I created a story, a kind of arc. It starts more simple with more spacing and it builds at a higher pitch. I didn’t even know that I could do that. But they taught me.

You could give me two notes. maybe a triad. I could probably, if I had the time and energy, create you a thousand themes out of that from the techniques that they taught. They were just amazing.

Dr. Tucker—I just remembered his name! They had a Student Union, some student dues paid for it and they had a large building and two or three jazz bands– not for credit.

Stacey, who I was telling you about,  told Dr. Tucker who was the head of this, that I was so bad. Dr. Tucker had been trying to get me to come to the band for 2 or 3 years, but I told him, I was so busy just trying not to flunk those classes, I was studying all the time.

So after almost 2 years I said OK, so I went in the band. There were 3 bands, the best, the second and third. He put me, of course, in the top band, and I was astounded at how good those white boys could read. Oh, God! Us blacks could never read music like that. I always said some of them could read flyshit backwards. And so I went through that band for about a year.