This interview took place in April 1994, between sets at the Keystone Corner in Tokyo. He passed away two years later. (All of the other interviews were done in the second half of 2013.) Jordan is one of my favorite saxophonists, and two recordings that he’s on are my all-time favorites. The Pentagon, from 1976, features Cedar Walton, Sam Jones, Billy Higgins, and the percussionist Ray Mantilla. On Dizzy Reece’s Manhattan Project, he teams up with Charles Davis, Al Dailey, [Professor] Art Davis, and Roy Haynes. Sadly – and wouldn’t you know it? – both albums are perennially out of print. PZ: Let me start out by saying I’m a big fan of yours, and have been for awhile, so I’m not going to do an unfavorable review. CJ: Well, usually it’s the unfavorable reviews that always bring the people out. PZ: Is that true? CJ: You know, one time I just had a hip operation, a total hip replacement, and I was walking on crutches. I was playing with Art Farmer out at Catalina’s in Hollywood. And I was kind of standing under a greenish purple light or something like that. So this reviewer came in and said Clifford Jordan looked “wan and debilitated.” So the next night, man, there were so many people in there, and they said, “Man, I believe I saw that review in the paper, I had to come and see you, catch you before you left the planet” [he laughs]. So that’s what happens: “He really sounded bad.” Everybody wants to come in and hear you sounding bad. “Catch that.” PZ: Down and out. CJ: Yeah. PZ: That’s too bad. CJ: Yeah, well, you know, negativity – people are always open to that. Nobody wants to hear any good news much. Bad news is what’s really popular. PZ: I see when you first started out in Chicago, you used to play in these “cutting sessions” with Wardell Gray… CJ: I never thought of it that way. If there was any cutting done, it was me. I was probably bleeding all over the place. But I used to sit in with Sonny Stitt and, you know, he was a very dynamic saxophone player. Yeah, I had kind of bad thoughts about it. I’d play my little solo and he’d come in and just take me out, you know. But after I realized that, you know, playing in this music for some time, that sometimes when a performance goes down, somebody has to come and step in and… lift the airplane up, if the airplane starts descending. PZ: Did he always play alto, though? CJ: He played tenor and alto. He played whatever was available. Yeah, he was an alto player but he would come through Chicago and for some reason, a couple of times, he came without a horn. But he was so good, there would be five or six saxophonists around, they would say, “Hey Sonny, play my horn.” So he started playing tenor that way. But he was originally an alto player. PZ: I’d like to ask you about what it was like playing with Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy. And I’d really like to find out what you’re doing these days. CJ: Well, Charles, he was a very complex, uh, type of person, and his music would change from moment to moment. You talk about…. Hear him cussing… beautiful lady, he’d get happy and be smiling. So he had this way of, you know, having five or six things going on in his mind. But he was very easy for me to work with because mainly I was working on a day-to-day basis, I was a substitute for Booker Ervin and Booker was sick at the time. So whenever he announced the saxophone player, he would say, “Booker Ervin is our saxophonist but Clifford Jordan is taking his place, for the night.” PZ: I thought you were with him for pretty long? CJ: Yeah, but it was still on a day-to-day basis. So we would do a European tour… talked to George Barrow the other day… so it was fun that way because I wasn’t really in the band… just… and I was with him for ten months that way. PZ: Was that all it was? There are a lot of albums [from that time period]. CJ: You see, we did a tour in Europe and they were recording us, radio, TV… public domain. After a while, the record companies started bringing it out. It took me about 14 years… little scale they wanted to pay me. But these are the things you learn playing music… Once you know all the tricks… you’re too old to play. That’s why they want some young guys around…. But you know, Mingus and Dolphy – it was a good band. One thing, he never gave us any music, he sang all the parts… We worked at the Five Spot two or three months, before we went on tour. And he would sing the parts, and we would play them on the sax. Sometimes he’d sing some part one night, then sing something different, so you have two, three ways to go. So it wasn’t really that easy but with his personality, the music had to be played. So if he didn’t like what you were playing, he would tell you right then, “No!” and he would sing it again. There was never a dull moment, I can tell you that. Eric felt that way, too. Most of the guys would be uptight, anticipating what he was gonna do, you know, thinking he might do something really weird but, I guess I was the only one that was kind of beyond that because I was just day-to-day basis, I was ready to go anywhere. Everybody liked the music. Me, I didn’t hear it that way, but what I heard, he wasn’t gonna play anyway. PZ: What about “Meditations on Integration”? Have we progressed from where we were back in the Sixties [in terms of race relations]? CJ: You mean are we still there? Well, I don’t know – maybe one day we might improve, and the next day, maybe backslide a little bit. He called that “Variations on a Theme,” too. So that problem varies from day to day. Black people, Israelis, you know. Everybody’s boxed off in a category. So I think basically the same thing’s going on, it’s just another sophisticated way of doing it. I mean, they’re not quite as brash as they used to be. But you know, at any moment, we’ll go back to medieval days. PZ: Looks like it’s going that way. CJ: Yeah, yeah. PZ: Where do you live now, in New York? CJ: I live in New York City, yes. PZ: Have you lived there for a while? CJ: I’ve lived here for 33 years now. I left Chicago in 1957. I lived one year in California. I moved from New York to California, then back to New York. Then I lived one year in Brussels. And back to New York. PZ: Who did you play with [in Brussels]? CJ: I was just over there by myself. Just solo. Around Europe. I played some gigs with Slide Hampton and an Austrian pop singer. PZ: You used to work with Billy Higgins and Cedar Walton. That was a good band. Is this your band at the moment? Someone told me you have a band with Richard Davis. CJ: Richard Davis and I grew up together. I’ve known him since I was seven years old. We played last year and made a record [Fourplay] But we play occasionally, whenever we get together. I’ve been working with a big band, for the last 30 weeks, I play a regular gig in New York at a place called Condon’s. PZ: Eddie Condon’s? CJ: No, no, it’s called Condon’s Restaurant and it doesn’t have anything to do with Eddie Condon. John Condon. And it’s on Fifteenth Street, 117 East 15th Street. It used to be a Greek restaurant called Z. PZ: Yeah, I remember that place. CJ: It’s right next door to Lee Strasberg’s acting school. And we play every Monday. PZ: Is that your band? CJ: Yeah. I have 15 pieces in it. PZ: I was gonna ask you, when I used to live in New York, there was a big loft scene, and jazz was pretty reasonably priced. And these days it seems like they only have these expensive clubs. CJ: Yeah, well, all the professionals bought up all the lofts, doctors and lawyers and businessmen and people like you [italics mine!] are living in those places. So the art is gone. And the painters and musicians are out of it. What happens is… so we’re back in the clubs. That was like an escape. Because there weren’t enough clubs to take care of the musicians at the time. And consequently, a lot of musicians, Ornette Coleman had a place, and Sam Rivers, and some other guys. So they were using space for performances. PZ: I remember Ali’s Alley. CJ: Yeah, right. I played there, too. PZ: What was that last song you did in the set? CJ: That’s called “Con Man.” It’s a Dizzy Reece composition. PZ: Can you tell me what your inspirations are, either musically or just in general? What you do when you’re not working? CJ: Well, my musical inspiration is to play some music and make people feel well. When they’re feeling ill at ease, I like to make them feel better. And to leave the club kind of charged up with some kind of energy. Or at least get ’em home – and in bed or something, you know [he laughs]. And also to put people together, and I don’t mind people talking when I play, but I do try to play something that’s gonna make them talk about something that’s sincere and truthful. And no BS. The music charges me up also. P.Z. What kinds of music do you listen to? Are you into other kinds of music besides jazz, like classical or blues? Actually I once saw you at a place called, I think it was called Dan Lynch’s, like a blues bar on First Avenue. CJ: Oh yeah. That’s right down the street from where I live. PZ: I went in there to have a drink after work one day, and there’s this rock ‘n’ roll or blues band, and this guy got up to take a solo, and I said, “Wait a minute, that’s Clifford Jordan, what’s he doing there?” CJ: I live two blocks, I live on Seventeenth Street, between Second and Third [Avenues]. So, sometimes I’d rather go into a place like that, to jam, rather than going to some jazz club where everybody’s expecting you to do something special. I just want to play my horn and get in the context of the music that they were playing, rather than superimpose what I play usually, over what they do, because it doesn’t always fit. I just try to stay in that groove. In fact I was in there not long ago. It’s still going. You live in New York? PZ: I used to live there, yeah. CJ: Uh huh. PZ: For a couple years, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. My brother and sister live there and they say it’s pretty bad, a lot of people on the street. CJ: Well, that’s true. The economy is at a point now where they have all these warehoused apartments. If somebody moves out they don’t rent that apartment anymore, they just keep it empty. And it’s always available, they can always sell a building quicker if there are no tenants in it, you know. But there’s a lot of people on the street. And I don’t know what they’re going to do about it. Rent control didn’t help anything. The planet is still filling up. PZ: It’s worse in other countries. CJ: You can see it in New York. When I first came to New York, you went down to the Village, might be ten or twelve people on the corner. Now you look on the corner, it’s thirty, forty people. To find one guy you have to look through all these forty, fifty people, to see this guy you’re waiting for. PZ: Where do you get your inspiration for composing? CJ: Well, I was sort of forced into composition. Horace Silver called me when I was in Chicago to make this record session… PZ: When you first came to New York? CJ: Yeah, that was my first record session. Before I moved to New York, I was living in Chicago. Myself and John Gilmore, another tenor player – he plays with Sun Ra. And so at the end of the conversation [Silver] told me, “Bring two compositions.” I said, “Bring two compositions?” He said, “Yeah.” He said, “Write two tunes.” I said, “I can’t hardly read music, you want me to write something?” “Yeah, bring two tunes.” So I brought a couple of songs, a couple of riffs. And that started it, you know. That was the era when everybody was writing secret music. BMI had just formed as an alternative to ASCAP, who didn’t want to publish or license music that was rock and roll or anything, because they had all the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway shows, and so it was kind of under them to handle this new jazz music and then the rock and roll and blues and all that, so BMI formed to take up that slack. And BMI subsidized a lot of the record companies, and to encourage them to get their own publishing companies, and to encourage the musicians to write so they could build up BMI’s collection of music. So that’s how we all started writing music. So eventually I formed a publishing company. That’s when Horace Silver had a publishing company. So these two tunes he wanted me to put into his publishing company. So after I found out these little things, I said, “Well, I better get my own publishing company and do the same thing.” But the music kind of suffered a bit because, like I said, everybody’s playing mysterious music. You couldn’t just walk in and sit in with a guy, whereas before everybody’s playin’ “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Cherokee,” and some of the standard jazz vehicles. Now they were writing these melodies… start off writing other melodies on the same harmonies. And then when they finished that, then the guys started writing their own harmonies so now you get ready to go and jam and somebody’s playing his tune, it makes you put your horn back in the case, see, right? But anyway, there’s a lot of music. I have about maybe 75 compositions in my publishing company, I just turned New Phase Publishing over to Second Floor Music because they will be able to propagate the music—send scores and songs out to colleges and universities and that kind of thing, you know. PZ: Your double-LP called “Glass Bead Games” [1973] is one of my favorites. Can you tell me more about it? CJ: I produced “Glass Bead Games” myself. I paid all the musicians and paid for the product and the mechanicals and the whole thing. And I do want to release the whole set. It was a series called Dolphy Productions and it was about 7 albums. I named it after Dolphy – I got permission from his parents to use that name. So I produced all that music under Dolphy Productions. And I’m still, you know, a lot of record companies want this particular piece or that one, but nobody wants the whole thing, you know. And they don’t want to pay any money for it either, you know. They want to pay less that what I paid to do it. But I’m working on that, too. PZ: How have you been influenced by other musicians? CJ: See, when John Coltrane started playing with Miles [in the mid-1950s], I had already found my concept of playing and at that time, I wasn’t listening to saxophone players because they can be too influential. If I studied Coltrane, I’d be playing like Coltrane. PZ: What do you make of today’s music? CJ: Songs today are so complex that you have to listen to all these little microscopic bits and pieces to put it together, what they’re saying, when before it was always tiptoeing through the tulips, and perfume and sweet, and shadows on the garden wall, so it left something for the imagination – “Stardust” and things like that. So rap is kind of complex because they’re talking politically. Have you heard these guys 2 Live Crew? The guy said, ‘Baby, lay your black ass on the bed and give me some pussy!’ So they took this stuff and let these judges hear it, and the judges fell out laughing. Because they’re not really saying anything that’s wrong, because all the words they use are double entendre. PZ: What do you do when you’re not working, for relaxation? CJ: Sleep. PZ: Can you tell me a little about your family? CJ: I’m married. I got a couple of kids and they’re grown. My daughter is a psychotherapist, and my son, he’s into cars. He wants to put the pedal to the metal and all that. He’s always having some accidents and losing his license. But he’s a good boy. He just turned it over three times. So his mother said, “He’s slowing down a little bit now,” so I hope so. He’s slowed down and started lifting weights, and dropped a weight on his foot. You know kids are – he’s 22 – you make all these mistakes, and pretty soon, later on, you say OK, well, you know about it. But to know what fire is, you have to get burned one time. PZ: How do you recruit new band members? CJ: We just hook up on the bandstand and say, ‘Hey, man, what’s your name, man, what you doin’ on this particular day?’ and they’re available. It happens that way. Of course, there’s a lot of guys I could have got, some guys I’m playing with all the time, you know, set in their ways, everybody’s set in their ways. But [with young players] you have a chance to hear some new ways. PZ: Have you been involved with Jazzmobile? CJ: I was one of the first people when Jazzmobile started. I was with Jazzmobile before Billy Taylor was [there], from the inception. I haven’t done anything recently because I’ve been doing a lot of performing. They have Saturday classes that are early and I’ve been suffering with gout all my life. PZ: What are you going to play in your next set? CJ: I don’t know what I’m going to play now. Sometimes you have to get up there and see what’s goin’ through the air.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 22:40:06 +0000
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