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I built up a following over the years, so when I play it’s like a nostalgia. If you
want to hear the kind of stuff I play, you got to hear me because nobody else is playing
it. Whenever I play a ballad I try to get a tone like Johnny Hodges, like he used to
slur notes and sustain certain notes on his saxophone. And I try move through the chords
like Charlie Parker. It’s just a cross between blues and bebop. And most of my stuff is what
we would call the soul side because of all the experience I had with my father and church
music.
First time I heard jazz was on the radio station, WBT from Charlotte, North Carolina, which
was a country and western station. That’s all they played. But they had one disc jockey
there, a guy named Grady Cole and he had one record -Louie Armstrong - and he played that
every day because he loved that. And that’s my first time hearin’ jazz music.
I heard Charlie Parker when I was in the Navy. I liked Charlie Parker’s sound.
Most of the jazz before bebop was dance music, very few bands ever played concerts. Dizzy
and Charlie Parker had a smaller group, and they played a lot of solos. In the dance bands,
you didn’t have many solos. But bebop, everybody could play on every song. Bands kept coming
through, like Dizzy and Lionel Hampton and I’d sit in with the band and they kept tellin’
me to come to New York.
We had about ten clubs right in Harlem where you could go and play.
Minton’s was the best club to play in, it was like a joint. And everybody
came there - Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan. They worked
downtown but their jobs ended at twelve o'clock or one o'clock, so about two o’clock, all
of them were there. People would flock in to see them. Joe Lewis, Malcolm X, Adam Clayton
Powell. So sometimes we’d play til five o’clock. And it was great.
The circuit was the most amazing thing that's ever happened since I’ve been in the jazz
business. We started in Rochester, we hit Buffalo, St. Louis, Kansas City. When we went
to a new place that we never played, we played a cross-section of music. We played fast,
we played slow, we played blues, we played ballads. Whatever the people responded to,
that’s where we laid.
"Because she's mine all mine…"
Then we’d sneak in a couple of bebop tunes and anything that we wanted to play. But once
we got them in our pocket…
It’s still working now.
It’s just a rewarding profession. I don’t know anything else that a person could do
more rewarding than being an artist. I’m still able to play just about as well as I
always did. Sometimes I sit back and think about it and I’d say, "Well, God must have
been on my side." And I’m not a religious man. My wife was. She used to tell me, “Well,
I’m praying for you. That’s why you’re all right. Cause if it were up to you, you’d
be gone.”