Welcome to Big Ears Conversations about Music, a
podcast from Big Ears Festival. I'm Sarah Gilletti, We're glad
you're here. Today's episode brings us
another panel discussion from Big Ears 2025, a round table
consisting of three musical thinkers and visionary players
titled 1965 Sound, Fire and Revolution.
This discussion took place on Sunday morning, March 30th, 2025
at the Blue Note Lounge at Jackson Terminal.
We were lucky to convene a dream team, each of whom we knew to be
thoughtful observers of culture, with particular reverence for
jazz's past and present. They are guitars.
Nelson Klein, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Chad Taylor.
1965 was the year that gave us pivotal albums such as John
Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Don Cherry's Complete Communion,
Archie Shep's Fire Music, and Andre Hill's Compulsion.
It was a seismic period for creative music, American
politics, and cultural upheaval. 60 years later, 1965 still
resounds not just as a historical moment, but as an
urgent mirror to the present. In this bracing conversation,
led by critic and author Nate Shannon of WRTI FM and NPR
Music, the panel explores the sounds and messages of that
pivotal year and what they mean in our world now.
Let's listen in. Welcome, welcome.
Welcome to day four. It is Day 4, right?
Day 4 of of Big Years 2025. How is this festival treating
you? Yeah.
Me, too.
Welcome to the Blue Note Pop Up Lounge and to this panel, which
I'm so excited about. I should introduce myself.
My name is Nate Chenin. I'm the author of Playing
Changes, Jazz for the New Century.
I work at WRTIA Jazz and Classical Station in
Philadelphia and contribute to NPR Music.
And we're going to hear a bunch of music today and we're going
to talk about it. But the reason I'm most excited
about this panel is because of these three gentlemen here,
incredible artists, brilliant thinkers, sort of historians and
theorists of this music, whether they choose to identify
themselves as such or not. So I want, I'm going to
introduce everybody, and then I want one huge round of applause.
All right. So starting here on my immediate
right, the amazing bassist, bandleader, composer.
I can call you a critic too, I think.
Oh, definitely a writer. A writer as well, for sure.
When I say critic, that's actually praise, you know, it's
Melvin Gibbs. Yeah.
Hold your applause. Hold your applause.
That. That does feel kind of weird,
though, doesn't it? I'm sorry for doing that.
In the middle here, the maestro Chad Taylor, drummer,
bandleader, composer, professor. Yes, Chad Taylor.
And we move on to the wonderful guitarist and composer and
bandleader and scene maker and catalyst Nels Klein.
Now how about a hand for our panel?
So we are in the Blue Note Lounge, as I mentioned, and it's
pretty obvious. I'm going to begin with a with a
piece of music and then I'm going to set some context that
we can talk about. So I will not identify this.
Let's just settle into it. We'll hear about a minute or
two. The.
All right, who knows the name of
that composition? Distinguished panellists,
anyone? Anyone in the house say that?
Say that a little louder. Lenoir.
Marchand this is an Andrew Hill composition who can translate
from the French. The blacks are marching all
right. So this is an Andrew Hill
composition from the 1965 Bobby Hutcherson album Dialogue.
And so I'll get the, I'll get the, the, the, the product part
of this out of the way first. I, I am holding a tone poet
edition of Bobby Hutcherson's dialogue.
It's the only copy in this store.
And after the panel, if anyone wants to purchase it, I guess
come see me, you know, I'll bring it over, over to the, to
the actual retailers from Blue Note.
But you know, maybe if you're super nice, the, the panel will
even consider signing it. But OK, that, that that ends the
product portion of this. I want to talk a little about
that title and this moment. So please pardon me for talking
a lot at the outset because we're all going to get into it.
But I was thinking about time, right?
This panel is about 1965. Today is March 30th.
On March 30th, 1965, Funeral services were held in Detroit
for a woman named Violet Liuzzo. Violet was a white woman living
in Detroit, but she went down to Selma to be a volunteer driving
marchers between Selma and Montgomery.
And one night, I think on March 27th, her car was forced off the
road by a car full of Ku Klux Klan members.
They shot her, killed her, and one of them was actually an FBI
informant. And so I bring up the story not
to open, not purely to open with heaviness, but just to sort of
ground us in the, the historical moment that has this resonance.
Because in in March of 1965, I mean, Bloody Sunday is March
7th, right? There's another March on, on
March 9th. So it's this incredibly charged
moment in American history, and it's one that has some pretty
uneasy echoes in our own time. So I don't think it's a stretch
to hear all of that in Andrew Hill's music.
And I'm really interested in what you all think about
musicians processing all of this and and translating or investing
it into creative expression. So that's a mouthful and I
apologize, but it it just felt like, OK, we're going to we're
going to start there. Melvin, do you have any, any
response immediately? Well, my kind of immediate
response is contextual. You know, since you started
where you started. My mom and her sister, my aunt,
they actually moved to New York City after witnessing a
lynching. So that was the context of them
going to New York. And I also think about a couple
of years later, as we were talking about 6567, you know, as
you get older, your childhood memories fade away.
And one of the one of the childhood memories that I I
still remember clearly is the riot in Brooklyn in 67.
It stopped two blocks from where we live.
And you can see like buildings burning and shit.
I'm looking out the window like, so I mean, this kind of just
contextualizing what everyone was thinking and how that bled
into the music that that's, that's kind of what it comes to
iron, first of all. Yeah.
That that I didn't know that that was so close to home for
you, you know, in terms of like the bearing witness and moving,
you know, your family relocating because of that.
It's that's that's very heavy. Chad, do you have any response
you know, to the music or the the historical timeline?
Is that Joe Chambers on that record?
This is Joe Chambers, yes. Yeah, so I studied with with Joe
Chambers and he was really one of the reasons why I went to New
York. And an interesting thing that he
told me that that really resonates with me is when he
said that free music, for him, it wasn't a or a free jazz
wasn't about a style of playing, but it was more about musicians
breaking through to playing any style of, of music.
And that's not to take anything away from an Albert Eiler or
that or anything like that. But for him, the real free jazz
were musicians like Bobby Hutch Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, you
know, Henry Grimes, this goes on and on who were able to break
free and and do all these different types of styles within
the jazz contest. And this album is titled
Dialogue, and that is named after a composition by Joe
Chambers. Contributed to the session.
And I love thinking about dialogue in and of itself as
this like, incredibly liberating act.
It's not, you know, like what is possible in that word, in that
idea, you know, it's, it's, it can be a lot more complex than
it seems. Right.
True. All right, Nellis, over to you.
In the 1965 I was like 9 years old and my only awareness of
what was happening in civil rights was what I heard my
parents talk about. They're both school teachers in
the Los Angeles City school system and paying very close
attention to what was happening. But for me, that was a very
abstract thing. I didn't get it.
So I have to, you know, catch up with that as I was getting
older. And then as I started listening
to so-called jazz, that wasn't until I was 16 maybe when I
heard Africa by John Coltrane. So ironically, I made a record a
few years ago of Andrew Hill music and I completely forgot
that that was an Andrew Hill piece.
And, and it's pretty obviously an Andrew Hill piece, you know,
especially all the odd meter stuff going on.
There's something about it that that back then, that mood of
unrest and in the jazz context makes me think also of Charles
Mingus because like, let my children hear music a a, a
record like that, a composition like what we just heard.
It does embrace, like what Chad referring to with Joe Chambers.
It does embrace kind of almost everything all at once, but
maintain this mood of, I guess you'd say unrest and rebellion.
And so it's, it's, it's profound.
It's utterly profound. But I at the time this was
happening, I had no clue like 0. And I was just getting, I was 9,
but I was just getting into my twin brother Alex and I were
just getting into music. But it was the two things, I
guess were rock'n'roll, you know, and this is, you know, I
could say suburban Los Angeles, but almost the entire city is a
suburb. And, and I got really interested
in Ravi Shankar and Indian classical music right around
this time, little after, I guess.
And so I'm just, you know, at this point, always thinking
about the the artist's role in bringing awareness and
consciousness to struggles worldwide or, or domestic local
and how to do that. And this was, I think, a utterly
profound realization of that effort, you know?
I love that track in this conversation because form and
function are really, you know, harmonized the the thing you're
describing and that you describe Chad, where things are kind of
breaking open and there's a new articulated freedom that also
has a sort of social analogy, right.
But a point I want to make about this, especially as we're
talking the beginning of this panel about the civil rights
movement, is that it wasn't only adventurous sounding jazz that
was speaking to that moment, right?
And so I'm going to play another example, Nels, because you're
here, I have to play some guitar.
Now in 1965, Grant Green releases Idle Moments, and I
believe that there are copies of Idle Moments here, but that's
not what I'm going to play. I'm actually going to break
format and play something that's not on Blue, not records.
This is also by Grant Green. It's called the Selma March.
All right. So I mean there is nothing
challenging to the sensibilities about that.
It's just the most, like, beautifully soulful musical
morsel, you know? But the fact that he felt like
this is for the movement, you know, like, I want to dedicate
this grooving composition to the Selma March, you know it.
I think it just speaks volumes about that moment.
Listening to that reminded me of something that I realized has
actually been still influential to me today, which is the fact
that when we were kids, unlike today in New York City anyway,
in the black community, everybody, it was one.
It wasn't like the kids listen to one set of music and older
people listen to a different set of music.
You know, we, you know, you be in the backyard, you might hear
this, you hear Cannon boy Adelie, then you'll hear James
Brown afterwards, then you'll hear Pete Funka.
It would go, then you'll hear B.B.
King. It would all, you know, it was
all part of 1 pot of music back then.
And the other thing is, you know, when you're struggling,
you have you have to have joy. So it's kind of like what I hear
that I'm kind of like, of course, This is why we're
marching because we, we got to, you know, we want to have good
lives. We want to be like everybody
else, you know, in that sense. So that's, that's the kind of
the quality that that I hear in that, you know, the real kind of
like, OK, there there is. I hear community in that and I
hear love in that, and that's part of it as well.
Nate, I'm going to disagree with you a little bit about Grant.
And, and you know, in a different context, you can
really see Grant as a, a avant-garde musician.
And what I what I mean by that is on so many grand green solos,
you know, he'll, he'll play a motif, play a figure and then
you're like, OK, what is he going to do next?
But then he just keeps playing it and you're like, OK, is he
going to switch it up? No, he keeps playing it to the
point where you get uncomfortable and you're like,
no, he's still playing this. And then he finally changes it.
And for me, that's. That's ground breaching.
Yeah. Just just interject.
I was at a manual show. Emmanuel did that a couple of
times and I was like, yeah, you, you know, it's a thing.
You just keep doing the thing to like, OK, I'm just going to keep
doing this. Yeah.
Now, do you have any thoughts about?
About Grant Green, Well, I mean I love Grant Green.
What you're saying about Emmanuel.
I was playing with Jamala Dean the other night.
He was in the band and he did a basically a a low multi phonic
for it was profoundly long drone and I wasn't expecting that at
all. You know, because especially
Alto saxophone for a lot of mellifluous details, you know,
and it for me as a drone freak, it it was really I was
nourishing. Let's say in this piece I hear
hope, you know, I hear it's almost jubilant, but I would
just say it, it sounds profoundly hopeful and which
also kind of makes gives me kind of chills in a in a certain way.
But of course, I think, well, I never really thought about what
Chad said, but it's very true, especially that one.
And and he reminds me musically it I, I know my friend Jeff
Parker has taken a lot of inspiration from Grant.
And so I always have this kind of warm feeling when I listen to
Grant Green because he also makes me think of my friend
Jeff, who I adore, you know, But in terms of this, this piece of
music, it's kind of like, I think what Melvin said, it's
kind of social. You know, and, and that's the
reason that what Melvin's talking about with the big, the
big lump of music, that's why you hear so much, you know, I
hate these terms, you know, the F word, you know, the fusion
word and the, the, the sort of soul jazz term and all that
stuff. But that's why you hear all that
stuff in the sample now, you know, because it was part of
growing up, you know, in people's families, they're
listening to everything like that, you know, Anyway, that's,
I'm not saying much, but that's. Well, and it's important, too,
to think about, you know, to title that piece the Selma
March. You know, I'd have to look up
when in 1965 he recorded that. But he's looking back on that
moment and it's a moment of danger.
But also, especially in the review, it's a moment of joy and
triumph, right? It's like we did this thing,
right? So that that uplifting feeling
and that the social element, that the joyous element that
that all feels just intrinsic to that piece.
I have one more piece of music that I think will be familiar to
everyone in this room. But maybe maybe the the
implications of the title may not be.
And this is a Blue Note record. It's from that album that's on
the wall, right over there, free for all Art Blakey and the Jazz
Messengers. I'm just going to play it.
It's so heartbreaking to cut off right as the solo is beginning.
But why? Why'd you?
Do that. I know.
I'm the critic.
You can throw things at me. It's OK.
Yeah. So.
So you guys know the the name of that tune.
I mean, we know the. Tune you can't remember the
name. So that is a a piece called The
Core. It's by Freddie Hubbard, and it
became a staple in the Jazz Messengers repertoire.
But the Core is named after the Congress of Racial Equality.
And it's one of those jazz titles where it's like, if you
know, you know, right. And so Freddie did that, you
know, with a lot of intention. But yeah, any, any response to
that? I don't have a theory around it.
I'm just like, that's a really, that's a cool thing.
And I love that it's actually on the wall there.
Yeah, well, my first response is to shout out the Muse in
Brooklyn. Y'all don't know, but the muse
was the new, The Children, the new Children's Museum and
Barbara Reggie was the leader, was the head of the music
department there. And all of us, me, Vernon Reed,
who else? A bunch of other people, you
know, there was two, there was Weldon Ernovine in Queens.
But the Brooklyn crew we are, I mean, Reggie is my first base
teacher or actually my, my acoustic base teacher.
I, I played acoustic for a while before I gave it up so I
wouldn't be up here and now without without Reggie and them.
So I got to shout him out first and just amazing piece of music,
you know, thinking about and again, talking about the
intergenerational thing, art the jazz matrices is the one group.
Well, that man son Rah, they could go, you know, they'd be
playing somewhere and you know, all of us like we're already
like in the hip hop era. But when when Blakely and them
start playing everybody like, yo, what's that?
You know what I mean? It it had that level of power
to. So just hearing it is just like
just puts me in a great place. That's all I got to say.
Yeah, this, this record had a, a profound effect on me because I,
I, when I was 14 years old, I started listening to jazz
records and I found this, I think I bought this record for
$0.99, a used version. And I put the thing on and I was
like, wow, jazz can be serious, you know, like this is this is
very serious music. And another profound thing for
me is I was learning how to play the the drum kit and this is a
technical thing. But our Blakey on this on this
track, the core is playing half no triplets on the hi hat
against all this other stuff that he's doing.
And I've, I've never heard anything like that.
And to this day, I'm still trying to learn how to do it.
It's really, really. So it's it's a freedom not just
in, in the in the context, you know, social context, but really
what he's playing is so free and being able to do those half note
triplets. Yeah, Yeah.
It's a different kind of polyrhythm there, right,
Exactly. So 1965 effectively begins with
the release of a Love Supreme. You know that that album was
made in 1964, but and it was sort of conceived, you know,
years and years earlier, but it comes out at the beginning of
1965. And I don't think I have to play
any of a love Supreme. We all I could just say the the
name and it it's playing in your head right now.
So I'm going to play some different Coltrane in a minute,
but let's talk about the the power of that that album coming
out, you know, at the beginning of this year, we're celebrating
the anniversary, one of the most important albums, not on Blue
Note, but I think we can all forgive.
So what does that? What role has that album played
for you all? What's your relationship to it
like? I'm saddled with it.
So for me, I grew up in a pretty religious family and my mom had
a rule in the house. She said, you know, you can play
jazz record to everything, but on Sunday we're only listening
to religious music. So I remember the day I found
that record, Sunday Mortis I would put the divine.
Loophole. I turned the volume all the way
up to 10, just blasted it. And my mom comes running in and
she's like, turn that, turn that music down.
What? You know, we don't listen to to
to jazz. And I said, mom, check this out.
Read this poem. Yeah, read this poem.
And she's like, oh, OK. Nels, what about you?
Is is. Well, well, as I mentioned, I
started sort of on a, some kind of jazz trail from after hearing
Africa, right. And, and my, my brother Alex and
I were, we just couldn't believe what we were hearing.
And, and the context to that is I told this story before, so I'm
sorry if it's if it's boring, but we heard it because a friend
of ours in, you know, junior high school, his dad was a, a
very avant-garde bohemian poet from Brooklyn.
In fact, originally named Jack Hirshman.
He ended up being poet laureate of San Francisco many years
later. But he was my first contact with
like, serious bohemian vibe. And he had been fired and lost
his tenure as a professor at UCLA for two reasons, as far as
I know. One was he was giving all the
male students A's so their grade point averages would be high
enough so they wouldn't go to Vietnam and the other one was
that he at one point rode his motorcycle through the hallways
of the of the. I actually later met a friend
who had him as a English professor and one day went to
class and she was really bummed out because of the mothers of
invention were playing at lunchtime in the student Co-op
and Jack was nowhere to be found and he was found in the front
row of the mothers invention show.
So my, our friend David, his son, told us that his dad wanted
this John Coltrane record for his birthday.
And when he when our friend David heard it, he thought of my
brother. He said, you like all that
instrumental Frank Zappa stuff. I thought you might like this.
See this? It's like, but it's, I mean,
that was a connection he made. So we sat down and listened to
it and, and that was like a complete revelation.
And it was the not just the everything about it.
And I was already, you know, listening to Indian classical
music and rock'n'roll. So there was something about it
that I didn't, I didn't know this was happening, you know,
and I was crushed when I found out that this man wasn't alive
at that point. This was 1971.
The, you know, the, I guess you could say the, the gravitas of
the tenor saxophone entrance was I mean, so, so that I became
obsessed with this man John Coltrane and the so the next
record I got after getting Africa was a Love Supreme 'cause
that's the one everyone talked about when I was, you know,
asking anyone about this man. And this dovetailed perfectly
with my interest in my burgeoning interest in Eastern
mysticism and the idea that I had received from listening to
Indian classical music, about music as an endeavour far beyond
mere entertainment. And so in this man and in this
music, I found not just inspiration, but aspiration, you
know, and this, this informed in my mind at that time.
And it was, you know, 16 and just coming out of Blues rock
and trying to figure out what I was going to do.
I always liked instrumental music the best, you know, So, so
it was the beginning of everything, this recording in a
certain way, but not just musically.
It was, it was about this, this the spiritual component to
artistic endeavour. And with a kind of luster or a
kind of mystery. Mystery that has never lost.
It's never waned in my life. Yeah, I love that story.
I love everything about it. Melbourne Do you have a a Love
Supreme? Connection Kale I got a whole I
mean I can go. I don't know just on this one
second I mean immediately pops into mind.
I have the little, little card that I got at the Coltrane
Church in San Francisco when Harriet Tubman, we were playing
out there and we're like, OK, well, we're here on a Sunday.
What are we doing? I'm like, we're going to the
Coltrane Church. So literally, you know, so your
mom, you know, he, he was straight up Christian.
So yes, he would it's, I mean, he start, he, he literally
started his own cult from this song.
And you think about now that, you know, spiritual jazz is like
a designation of a form of music, you know, you know, and
it's directly, this is the direct inspiration for that.
And I mean, the other thing that comes to mind this, I mean, as I
said, you know, I came up the time I came up with Reggie and
them. I mean, in those days, that was
the aspirational aspect of what train laid down was, you know,
permeated every everybody's playing.
And you know, it's, it's funny. You think about the generational
thing because right now it's about like music's kind of soft,
but there. But that era is really about,
you know, we, we want freedom now.
And so we put that energy out and it's also kind of like,
well, now it's it's it's the energy of now that might not be
a tomorrow. So guys played like, OK, this
might be the last solo I ever take, you know, So it's just a
different, you know, so I mean, it's it's a different vibe that,
you know, as I said, that's not the vibe right now.
But because we're in a place where the political situation is
kind of going back towards that, you know, I kind of feel like
that vibe is going to make a comeback.
And hopefully, you know, I won't seem such like an outlier
anymore anyway. Well, that that seems like a
good segue to the Coltrane piece that I did want to play so a
lot. Supreme was released in 65.
This was recorded in 65. And I'm going to skip ahead at
the beginning. Here we go.
The. You can't stop abruptly on that
one. You got to fade, Chad.
Did you ever play this on a Sunday ascension?
No, I couldn't play this one. So this, this, I think this, you
know, album Ascension is a great illustration of that, you know,
commitment that Melvin, you just are describing that sort of,
this may be my last time, but it also speaks to something that
the three of you I know can can talk about, which is the
elasticization and the explosion of form during this time, right?
It is a it is something that everyone is interested in in
1965. Like even the even the people
who are skeptical of it have to at least be aware of it, you
know, And so, so let's talk about that.
How do you see this year as pivotal?
Do you know? I mean, Ornette had hit the
scene, you know, 5 or 6 years earlier.
So it had been in conversation, but I feel like it's really
coming to a critical mass in 1960. 5 Hey, looking at me
again. Well, first of all, that
listening to that head brought back memories because, you know,
and I'm also in a band called Harriet Tubman with the Brandon
Ross who's going to be playing me and him we're going to play
with without a later and drummer JT Lewis.
And from time to time we do these special projects, the next
one being we have a record coming out with Georgia and
Moldrow next year. But when, whenever somebody
comes up with an idea, they have to go do the homework.
And I had the idea that we should cover Ascension.
So I had to go do the homework and write, write the music down.
And yeah, that was, I guess that was our first record on
Sunnyside where we did, we did our version of Ascension and we
had the three of us +3 DJs. So this idea of elasticity of
form, where you really took advantage of that, you know, and
the idea that you can have multiple dimensions of sound and
multiple ways of looking at time is very important to the music.
And just it's a question of the different ways people think
about, you know, if I'm going to sit here and talking about
Reggie and the guys, you know, they hated the word jazz.
So I don't know if I can use that word if I'm when I'm
talking about them. But the the different ways of
thinking about black creative music where it really you can't
talk about the more stretched versions of the music without
connecting it to the the community situation and the
political situation as opposed to like the European way of
thinking that it where it's about some kind of formal thing
or whatever it is. I mean, yeah, it's about formal
things. I mean, listening to we listen
to Andrew, Andrew Hill, you know, of course it's about form,
but the form is really about what's going on in the world at
that point and just, you know, and really about, OK, this is
what the world looks like, which which is the other thing that,
you know, we take from what Arnett was doing and you know,
Isler and all of that. You know, I mean, just before I
hand it over the again, my other great idea was to cover free
jazz. So again, I had to sit down and
do the transcriptions for that. And in the process of making
those transcriptions, I realized something, you know, about
Arnett, Arnett. Arnett wasn't trying to be
weird. It was literally what he heard
and he was trying to get everybody else to be like, yo,
this is what I'm hearing. How come y'all can't hear it?
You know? So to me, that relates to the
idea of freedom. It's kind of like, yeah, we want
to be free. How come y'all can't just, you
know, why we got to like, why is all that this have to happen for
us to just be who we are, you know?
So I'll just leave it there. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to pick up
on what you were saying, Melvin. I remember when I, when I first
listened to this record, I couldn't stand it.
I didn't understand. I didn't hear it.
I didn't, you know, I didn't know what was going on.
I thought people were, weren't listening to each other.
You know, as I got older, I, I realized listening is a process.
And, you know, I feel like back in 65 was a time when people
were very open for some people were very open to listening to
things in new ways. You know, often Times Now you
listen to something like, oh, I like that, or I don't like that,
or I really don't like that, and then that's it.
But you know, listening is a process.
And with this record in particular, it took me maybe 3
or 4 years of repeatedly listening to the record to
understand that actually, no, everyone isn't displaying
whatever they want. This is just a different way of,
of approaching the music and there are all these motifs and
ideas happening, bouncing off 1 musician to another.
And, you know, it just, it took some time.
And that's, that's one thing great about this festival at Big
Ears is that there's, it's unique in that there's all this
different types of music. And I think we need a lot more
of that, you know? And yeah, I'm going to still
leave it at that. You know, I have so many
directions I could go right now, but I think I'm going because
now, as you are here, as we're talking about form, and I think
this relates to what you said about Ornette too, because
Andrew Hill is another musical thinker who is is so original in
in his concept. And I don't think that he was
thinking, Oh, I'm going to stretch the, you know, like I'm
going to take this and stretch it out.
Like, I don't think that was really the intention.
I think it was really like, this is how I am hearing this.
This is, you know. So without further ado, this is
compulsion. The.
All right, yeah, so I do believe that there is there are copies
of Compulsion 00. Gem is shaking his head.
All right. And I have to say now, one time
I, I reviewed when I was at the New York Times, I reviewed your
Andrew Hill tribute at the Jazz Standard, a day apart from
seeing Andrew Hill and reviewing him playing trio at Trinity
Church. And I ran that as a double
review. And it was a such a heavy,
beautiful thing to think of your tribute and Andrew's music in
dialogue in that way. OK, so I made the Andrew Hill
record 'cause I joined this prominent rock band and
everybody was talking about me and it made me really
uncomfortable. So I thought I'll make a record,
you know, like somebody nobody talks about enough.
I mean, his music, her music, their music, whoever.
So I chose Andrew. We did Compulsion on the record.
We got asked, and this was, you know, Ben Goldberg, Scott
Amendola, Devin Hoff, Andrea Parkins, Bobby Bradford and my
brother's on some stuff. And we got asked to open for
Andrew at SF Jazz playing his music.
And I thought like, that's insane.
Like, I don't even know if we did justice to this music.
And you know, this piece trying to take down, there's this one
part where the horns all go. And I'm thinking like, OK, I
have to transcribe this. It was a challenge.
But this piece is so is so one of my favorite pieces of of
music and not just as an Andrew Hill piece.
It just I always loved this record And and this piece has so
much propulsion with the hand drums.
But I'm now I'm digressing. So we opened for, I mean, opened
for Andrew And, and I had met him only briefly like in
Macedonia at the festival ages before this, and he was just so
lovely. But I was nervous, you know,
really nervous to play our versions of his music.
But he was going to play it from that Timelines record.
It was his new record. He had this beautiful, I mean
this, that that band. And I got to hear Charles
Tolliver play, who I've never heard play live at that point,
you know, And then Andrew dug it.
He liked what we played, and he was really sweet.
And so flash forward to the gig. We were doing like
cryptogramophone records stuff at the Jazz Standard, which I
completely forgot about now until you mentioned this.
And I found out that Andrew was going to play that gig, that
trio gig at Trinity Church. But I was scheduled to be at
Columbia University shilling for my own gig, which I couldn't say
no to. You know, I was helping out my
friends label his, his shows, my friend Jeff Gauthier.
So I missed it. And I knew he wasn't well.
And, you know, he, he passed not long after that.
And his and his wife and his music publisher came to hear us
play that music and said that Andrew wished he could be there.
And I don't know. Yeah.
Yeah, it was. It was just.
I forgot till you mention it. I felt just so much, I felt so
much of his spirit flowing through your ensemble and and it
really felt it truly felt in dialogue, you know, and and to
go from your your performance to his performance, I thought, am
I, is this irresponsible of me as a critic to be combining
these two things really when there's you know, but no, it it
made. He feels good 'cause Andrew dug
it, you know? But also think about I was
trying to do that piano thing that he's doing there.
I was actually being too literal.
Very likely, you know, 'cause I'm kind of get that way and I'm
think I'm doing it 'cause I'm paying homage to somebody and
being respectful. I think that's not what the
music's really about in this case.
It's like, so I just detuned. I used something to detune the
guitar and just play textures. And I'm glad that you heard it
that way, but I was really scared when I did it that it was
really pretentious or something. But I really also wanted all
these rock listener people to to think what, why is he doing
this? And who is this Andrew Hill, you
know? Yeah.
And yeah, Andrew obviously heard stuff his own way because
there's so much odd meter stuff that which which was just
starting to happen I think around that time in the music.
And then there's the freedom we're talking about with
Ascension, the explosion of form.
One thing I want to say about Ascension that's besides having
played it with Orchestrova Rova Saxophone Quartet, Orchestrova
Electric Ascension several times, is that that Coltrane on
this recording also embraced all these young voices, these guys
coming up in what we now look back as a free jazz scene.
I think he was very inspired by Sun Raw.
And it also sounds like a congregation.
It sounds like voices, you know, but there's John Chikai and
Marion Brown and and that's how I found out about those guys is
from this record. And I think it's, it's about the
immediate musical community that was happening at the same time
and, and furthering trying to push everyone, lift everyone and
move them forward, it seems. Yeah.
And, and that idea that what's happening with musical form is
so manifold, right? It's like some people are really
going for absolute freedom of expression and others like
Andrew are doing all these like interesting and really complex
things with elasticity and like metric stuff.
And, and then there's one of the younger musicians who was in
Coltrane Circle. Well, I, I was at one point
going to play Archie Shep's Malcolm, Malcolm Semper Malcolm
on this panel because February of 1965, Malcolm X is
assassinated and Archie Shep includes that poem on his album
Fire Music. It's a little, I think that's a
piece that I don't want to play an excerpt of.
So I'm not going to play it at all.
I think everyone should just seek it out.
Fire Music is a really amazing album.
And that track, I mean, I, what more can you say about that,
right? So instead I'm going to play
something by Albert Eiler. This is spirits.
Spirits rejoice. Music.
Yeah. OK.
I feel like I have to go to Melvin first on this one.
Well, a few memories. I mean, touching on I'm going to
go backwards and football, touching on the circle of young
musicians around Coltrane and Ascension era.
I mentioned, you know, Bob Reggie is one of the big guys in
the neighborhood who was born for us.
The local band in my neighborhood was a band called
BT Express. That was, you know, people know
them now. It's the great funk band, but
their horn arranger was a man named Carlos Ward, and Carlos
was also one of one of our mentors in the neighborhood.
So that's, you know, just thinking about that, would you
know, I mean, you know, and people didn't know that.
I mean, he played with Abdullah Ibrahim from years, but people
didn't know the train side. So the record that came out a
couple of years ago and just, and of course, listening to that
and thinking, hearing Isla reminds me of, you know, the
many years I've played, spent playing with Ronald Shannon
Jackson, who was Isla's drummer for a long time.
And what I remember him telling me that, you know, they were
playing New York and Train would drive up from Philly to come
hear them. And, you know, he was so
avant-garde that, you know, the club wouldn't always be full and
Train would be the one that would pay the band.
That's how much Train love dialer, you know what I mean?
And just thinking, you know, and even listening to this music
now, you know, thinking about all the guys in the Lower East
Side, Will Parker and that whole crew of guys, this music is just
a touch tone for that whole, you know, for a whole section of
what we do, you know, it's just, you know, and.
You know, we began this panel with a March, right?
And we're, we're winding down here with another March, but
with a, you know, when you talk about what Albert Isiler does
with that, that form, it has a completely different
connotation, you know? And you know, that particular
piece, he's sort of borrowing a bit from Lamar Soleil's, you
know, and there's all this, it's an anthem, right?
But it's also a supplication of some kind.
And Nels Chad, you've, you've played music of this quality as
well. Can you talk about that
intention in Albert Eiler's music and, and what it what it
meant when it was? Because 65 is really the year
that that expression from him breaks open, you know?
Yeah, I, I worked a little over 10 years with Henry Grimes, who
played with Albert Eiler, and I really got a little taste of
just the musical integrity and, and spirituality that, that,
that music had working with Henry.
But the point that that I want to make is that, you know, we're
talking about recorded music and we're talking about what's on
record. But there's so much music and so
many musicians that we're playing that we don't, we don't
have a, a record of it. But that doesn't mean that that
music wasn't important or valid. And one person I'm going to just
talk about briefly is, you know, Henry had a a twin brother whose
name was Leon Grimes and Leon, they weren't identical twins,
You know, they look differently. But I talked to Odin Pope and he
told me that he and Leon Grimes and John Coltrane used to
practice together and they used to study together with the the
legendary Hassan and Leon blew all of them out the water, you
know, and this is someone who's never made a record and
unfortunately wounded up in in prison.
And he also had some mental health challenges that, you
know, similar to Henry and, you know, spent his entire life in
prison. So we we don't really know so.
Yeah, no. Well, thank you first of all for
that necessary point about how the albums are really just one,
one lens through which to look at this history.
You know, it's a convenient lens.
You understand why we do, why we use them the way we do.
But that's a really important, as I said, essential point.
Speaking of albums, you mentioned the legendary Hassan.
That's another album that comes out in 1965, Max Roche featuring
the legendary Hassan, You know, and we don't have time to play
music. But at the very end of 1965,
Speaking of Blue Note Records, Don Cherry Records Complete
Communion. The album comes out the
following year, but that's another 1965 album, Nina Simone.
And and this is not Blue Note, but I feel like maybe in the
interest of like sending us out into our big ears experience
today with like just positivity and radiance, maybe we'll hear a
bit of a very famous track by Nina Simone released in 1965.
Birds flying, how you know how I feel.
Sun in the sky. How you know how I feel?
It's drifting on by. You know how I feel.
It's a new dawn. It's a new day.
It's a new life for me. Yeah, it's a new dawn.
It's a new day. It's a new life for me.
And I'm feeling good. Fish in the sea, you know how I
feel. River running free, You know how
I feel. Blossom on the tree, You know
how I feel. It's a new Dome.
It's a new day. It's a new life.
All right, yeah, there's there's blooms on the trees in downtown
Knoxville. We've got a lot of beautiful
music to hear today. If any of you has anything to
say about Nina or that track, please do.
Otherwise, I'm just going to thank y'all.
And I just I have I have restrained myself this whole
time from saying it. But as I look at the three of
you, these brilliant, brilliant artists, when are y'all going to
make a record as a rhythm section 'cause this is going to
be this is some great shit right here.
I'm I'm putting that. You know what?
What is it called when you when you say it and put it out in the
world? Yeah, I'm manifesting this trio
right here. But for the moment, I want you
all to give these gentlemen the hugest round of applause.
Thank you so much. Big Ears Conversations about
Music is a production of Big Ears Festival.
I'm your host Sarah Gilletti. The show was produced by Matt
Marowitz. This episode was edited by
Trevor Smith and Delilah Ryder. Ashley Capps is the executive
and artistic director of Big Ears.
Big Ears 2026 will take place March 26th through 292026 in
Knoxville, TN. For more information and
festival updates, visit bigearsfestival.org.
Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those ears wide
open.