RADAR 10 - Fashion
Publication Date: April 14, 2004
Whatever Happens... An Interview with Jazz Guitarist Earl Wilson (Maultsby)

Several days after watching a performance of his group Phase Two at Caton Castle, I met jazz guitarist Earl Wilson (real name Earl Maultsby) in his high rise Bolton Hill apartment at 6:00 a.m. (Earl must be short for Early–he is awake every day by 5:00 a.m.) for an interview. As mid-March morning flurries danced around the Baltimore skyline outside his living room window, Earl told me about his street corner doo-wop days, his Pennsylvania Avenue jam session days, his chitlin-circuit touring days, and how a life immersed in jazz and spirituality has enabled him to overcome addiction, incarceration, and an improbable and heartbreaking series of personal tragedies.

You started singing R&B at seventeen on a street corner. What street corner was that?

The corner of Madison and Wilson. We were pretty good. We had a group singing the doo-wop songs, the Swallows, the Drifters, the whole thing, and we were on the corner one day–you know, the Royal still had shows during those days–and we were doing pretty good. We had people looking out the windows and so on. Anyway, this car pulled up with New York tags. It was Clyde McFadda, he sat there for a while, then the window came down and he said, "You guys sound good." He gave us a card, but we never did do it. The whole idea was, "Drink some wine, get on the corner, and have some fun." Though we were pretty good at it. Out of all of that group, two of those members are dead. I think I’m the only one who pursued music seriously.

We had a guitar player, I’ll never forget him. His name was Bunky Rogers. You know, you’re in those groups and…"Wait a minute, man"–they’d take you out–"you supposed to sing this, and you supposed to sing that," and in between those little breaks this guy would be, [scats a guitar line] "buhdoobadoobadoo doowahhhh." Whoa! So he started teaching me a few chords. I already had known a few chords, though. My mother taught me guitar. She was an apostolic faith minister.

Yeah. I could only play in the key of E major, and I had an okay guitar. The strings were so high up from the fingerboard, my fingers would just ache. But I was determined to play. When she was out of sight, I’d do some boogie woogie [laughs]. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had just come out with a tune called "Work With Me, Annie." The guitar intro was like, "Bananana banananana, buhdup buhdup buhdup," and it took me a little while to figure out what he was doing. Then I’d hear my mother come back in, and I’d get right back to, "Jesus is the liiiight…" [laughs]

Piano was my first instrument. But for some reason at an early age I began to develop migraines, and they thought it was the piano. So that’s how I got started. I’m a self taught musician. I spent a little time with Bill Harris in D.C. some years ago. He had the Washington School of Music or something. He was great. A lot of people don’t know that Bill Harris, who I think was rated four or five in the world as a concert guitarist, started out doo-wop, too!

There used to be a show years ago called "Swing Class." It was fifteen minutes, and my brother–who has fifteen years difference on me–my brother would listen to that show. At that age I’m doing homework and listening to it…I was fascinated with all of that. Eventually, I started listening to jazz, started buying jazz albums. A lot of the guys would walk around with the album showing, you know, with the Eddie Jacobs jackets on, like "I’m hip," they’d make sure the cover was showing…it was part of the make up in those days, in the fifties.

I got serious about it because I knew a couple of musicians like Bunty Rogers and Gene Edwards, who used to play guitar with the Lou Bennett trio here. They helped me a lot. There was another guy–he wasn’t a fantastic player, but he knew that guitar. Rob Johnson. I think all his sons started playing, maybe one is in New York now. Somewhere along the line I started picking up more, picking up more, picking up more, and just got it together from there. I’m still learning. I don’t know how you stop learning.

When I started singing again, I was getting such a response that I started mixing that in. We have a vocalist named Ruby Dawson. The songs were getting stale and most of the guys in this group are working and we couldn’t get enough rehearsals in so I just made a change and put another horn player up front. Between Andy Ennis, who spent some eleven years with Ray Charles, and Harold Adams, who worked with a group here called Moon August, and Vance James, who played with Jimmy MacGriff and Hank Crawford, then Bill Bird who played with Sonny Stitt…every time I hear "local musicians" [chuckles]…these guys are really giants.

That’s ‘cause he was drunk! [laughs]

Naw. That’s my buddy, that’s my right arm with that group!

My first influence was Johnny Smith, but I could never figure out what he was doing. It wasn’t till later that I found out that he tuned his guitar different. That’s why I couldn’t figure it out!

No, ‘cause I never figured it out! I had made these inverted chords to try to match what he was doing, but it never worked out. Then along came Kenny Burrell. I love him. I love him. That was when I didn’t know whether to be a musician or a gangster [laughs]. I got technique from Kenny. If you ever listen to him, you can hear every note, everything is clear. He’s a technician. I went on to listen to Barney Kessel, Herb Ellis, Tal Farlow. One of the greatest of those guys, and a guy who teaches everybody and doesn’t get any credit because he’s known for playing country and western, is Chet Atkins. As I have heard the story, Chet Atkins taught Earl Klugh.

I’m at this point where I listen to good music now. I listen to some country and western. I can’t get into the rap, but…the rap really comes out of the…in the seventies we had the poets–Gil Scott Heron…

Yeah, until drugs got in the way. When drugs got in the way, you know, it’s a disruptor. I fought it and fought it and fought it for years. I agree with something, I don’t know if Miles said it, but all the cats were trying to follow Charlie Parker. "Charlie Parker got high–maybe if I get high I can play like that."

Yeah, it did happen. So when drugs got in the way it kind of took me out of the picture for a while.

Oh, ’58, ’59. I had went on the road with a package show: the Blue Bells, Rufus Thomas, Arthur Alexander, Jimmy Soul. They traveled different those days. Artists didn’t make anything off the records, and the more money you made [on tour], the higher your name could go on the marquee. I think the person who turned that around was James Brown when he started suing for residuals, and then Herbie Hancock got involved with it.

It was a time, man. We played what we called the chitlin circuit: Regal in Chicago, Apollo in New York, stop in a town somewhere in between, then play the Royal in Baltimore, then you play Virginia Beach, then you make those circles, went through the South. We couldn’t stay in the hotels back then. Promoters would put us up in private homes, and the homeowner would be charged with feeding us one or two meals a day. But when you doing thirty one-nighters, soon as you fall asleep it’s time to get up. By the time you get to the next gig, you got a chance to set up, get a sound check, get a shower, and get ready for the gig.

In the contracts in those days, they had "grace time." You had 10 or 15 minutes grace time; if you were supposed to start at 9:00 and the first note wasn’t hit between 9:00 and 9:15, you very well could play the whole show and wouldn’t get paid. Guys now take that stuff for granted.

So I came back home…and…tried to fight through the drug thing in ’60, ’61. I think in 1963, I got busted for a bag of dope. It devastated the family, it devastated everybody. It just looked like I didn’t care, you know. I got that together, and what turned me on was–I think in ’69–Gene Ammons was at the Famous Ballroom.

So had I!

I had set up a program in the institution. It was a really funny thing man. When I got there, if you had an instrument you could go down to the auditorium where they showed the movies. You could play for a couple hours. When I got there, there was a rock and roll bass player and a rock and roll drummer. There was another bass player–I can’t think of his name–he was more into jazz. He thumped, he was one of those thumpers.

I said, "Dag, man, I wish we had a drummer," heh heh heh heh! In came Reggie Glasgow. He’s a good, dear friend of mine. It just went on like that. "Man, I wish we had a piano player." Here come Yusef Saleem. [laughs]

Jessup.

I said, "Man, we need a horn player," and this guy–we called him Big John–he had finished up a bit in Lorton, then he came to finish up something else in Baltimore. He could play a little bit. But like all of us, drugs had gotten in the way of development. So the drummer that we had was working in the kitchen, which meant that he had to get up at four in the morning, he couldn’t be down there. So I said, "Man, I wish we had another drummer." And in came a drummer. "And if we had a trumpet to go with that horn player," and so this cat busts in here from Boston! By the time I finished, I had a 22 piece band! [laughs]

We did a big concert for the commissioner of corrections, Joe Canatt, and a lady who is probably responsible for saving my life. She ran the drug program there, Dr. Juliet Simmons. She was a grandma-looking lady. You felt like she could look right through you. You say something stupid, and–you wouldn’t expect this lady with this little gray hair–but she would look at you and she would say right straight to you, "Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?" [laughs] She was rough, so we learned how to deal with her ‘cause at that time you had to go through the drug program to make parole.

I don’t know whether all of this should be in this magazine, but it was a part of my life. Sure, I would like to not have done that. Had I stuck with the music, you know…but that’s life. That’s what comes out of the instrument now, is what you live.

Oh yeah, plenty of it. This town was full of musicians who would–as long as you didn’t get cocky…you didn’t have to go to a music school. You could hook up with this guy Rob Johnson, another guy "Plato" who played piano–I don’t know if I ever knew his real name! But he sounded like Art Tatum. In the old days, it was "each one teach one." I don’t know if there’s anyone left to teach it as an art form. But I am really amazed at the amount of kids who have gotten into jazz. Peabody…I’ve got a young drummer, he’s from Baltimore, Lee Pearson, he was going to the Manhattan School of the Performing Arts, and I think he comes out in May. This kid is fantastic. He’ll be playing with me this coming Saturday.

Lee is 22 years old. He’s played with Kenny Garrett, he’s played with everybody. He’s now the drummer for the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He’ll come down from New York ‘cause both of his parents are ministers. He’s a very spiritual young man.

It’s something it took me a long while to get involved with, a band that had some spiritual connection. Not just to Christ or whoever their God was, but a spiritual connection. You can feel it, you know.

I’ve had this group now for three and a half years, which is amazing here in Baltimore, because groups don’t stay together. We’ve been lucky. And the Caton Castle has been like home for me. Ron Scott who owns and manages it, he loves jazz. The audience kind of slacked off there one time–the health department found a few things. But the people who owned the club, had they known those were problems they would have fixed them up. But it was during this period where the police commissioner was saying, "We need to close down some of these bars, this is where violence is starting." Bars didn’t have anything to do with that. I think the police here have lost control of the situation.

So the crowd is building up again now. I’m thankful to have a place. It’s a beautiful room. He was getting ready to turn it into a hand dance, where they have jitterbugging and line dancing and stuff. When my group is there, I guess I’m like maitre d’. We’ve had Ernie Andrews, the late Nathan Page who passed away last year–hell of a guitarist…we’ve had Cedar Walton, Rene McLean, a young lady from Washington, D.C., Sharon Clark. Whoo! She can sing, man, she’s like Sarah Vaughan and Ella, she’s really good. I don’t know why she hasn’t made it really big.

A story. If it doesn’t have a story, if it’s trite, I won’t deal with it. I won’t deal with any lyrics that’s trite. Tunes like "What’s New," "What are You Doing the Rest of Your Life," "Our Love is Here to Stay," "The Very Thought of You," "You’ve Changed," "Down Here on the Ground." If it’s got a story to it, and a connection…

And I write a bunch of lyrics and poems. I was hoping that I could get a book of poems and prose published, then I get sidetracked with the music. What I really need to do is stop playing. But I just can’t afford it! Just stop playing and concentrate on one project. But once you lead a group, it’s like leading a family. They’re your children, so to speak.

I haven’t done much since October. I got mugged. Almost lost my eye. There’s a plate running from my nose here to the right side of my eye. There’s about four fractures here. I was very lucky. About seven, eight guys…a bunch of punks, I mean, if you’re beating a 65 year old man and you can’t take him to the ground! I didn’t give any resistance cause there’s nothing I could do.

I had stopped to get some Chinese food–

Up on…[pauses] I don’t want to say, I don’t want to give the street a worse name because they’re–it’s in the hood, but they’re doing something to try to revitalize that area, and…I don’t want to give it a bad name, I mean I grew up in that area…[long pause]

Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a time when you couldn’t walk five blocks, you couldn’t take ten steps without hearing a live band. All of those clubs there–

Avenue bar, Casino, Spot Bar, Gamby’s, Bamboo Lounge, Millionaire Club, I can’t think of them all. Live music was going on. Jam sessions was the Department of Education. You could go to Peabody, you could go to New York, you could go anywhere else, but if you couldn’t get in a jam session and hold your own in a blues…basically, you needed to learn how to play the blues because that’s incorporated in everything else. I don’t want to get too far from the major third, I don’t want to get too far from bending that seven. I want to stay to somewhere where it’s simple. The blues is simple. It can get intricate, but it’s simple, it’s a crying out.

It’s got to be in there! Got to come back to that. See, I don’t know if you can differentiate between spirituals, blues and jazz. I think it’s all one music. When you look at how phenomenal music is…I mean everything we listen to come out of these 12 chromatic tones…I don’t care if it’s Bach, Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Earl Scruggs, whoever it is, it’s only 12 tones, basically, you know…I think that makes this music God’s music. That’s the way I feel about it.

Well, let me tell you…

I lost my wife in ’95. It was very devastating, it just took me apart. I had three daughters by my first marriage. I lost two of them almost within two weeks. I wasn’t here, I was living in Dallas. I didn’t come up, I couldn’t handle it. I think it was that I got the first call on a Tuesday and I said I couldn’t come up for a week. Then the next Wednesday my oldest daughter died. So that Friday, I told my wife, come up and go with me. She said, "Well, I’ve got to go to the doctor’s office," and I said, "Okay, we’ll just pack up, and when you leave the doctor’s office we’ll go from there to the airport." When she came out the doctor’s office, they had diagnosed her with ovarian cancer. I just couldn’t take it, that was a little too much trauma for me, I mean the two girls…I mean, it was three daughters, and I just buried the last one here December 17. So it was kind of traumatic for me, it really knocked me over. We had a marriage of 32 years, my wife and I. My daughter by my latest marriage, Tiffany, she’s a great kid. She graduated from college with a math degree, University of Texas at Austin, she works for an insurance company as an underwriter, she sings in the choir down there, she’s great. She’ll be 31 this June.

I came back home in ’98 and lost my mother that year. We were very close. We’d fight like cats and dogs, but we were very close.

…I would go around to the clubs and I’d see these guys up on the bandstand with tennis shoes and jeans, real raggedy…I remember in the old days, we would never think about getting on the bandstand without a shirt and tie and jacket on. In some cases the union would fine you if you didn’t have a shirt and tie on. So my mission was to put class back on the bandstand and do a professional job with it. I think I’ve made a thing about that. We really have a dress code for musicians at Caton Castle. We don’t push it, but… Baltimore’s funny, people get dressed up to go out. People work all week to put on this nice suit and this nice dress to go hear somebody, you know…

I think that’s my biggest vice is clothes. I’ve got an Armani in there that was given to me–I can’t afford it. When I was in Texas, I was doing pretty good down there, I started a bar and had things going. Jazz once a week on Sundays, buy suits as they came to you. I told my wife, "I want to get 28 suits, I want to change suits twice a day." I mean I look at it now, that was kind of vain. [laughs] But I did do it. When I got to 28 she put her foot down; there was nowhere else to put it. I think I got about 12 left now. But I’m fanatical about going on the bandstand and looking good and being professional.

Not really. This was a town that almost lived and died by the Hammond B-3 organ. That put a lot of bass players out of work! [laughs] That was the thing then, everyone was playing Hammond. A couple great organists came out of this town. Cornell Maldrow, Lou Bennett who left here and went to Europe–they called him the Jimmy Smith of Europe–Shirley Scott, Dennis Fisher, Chico Johnson. Most of those guys have gotten to the point where they don’t play as much. Dennis has a nice group. Chico doesn’t play much, he’s kind of sick. Charlie Covington, whoo! He’s something else, but his wife told me he’s got retina problems and he doesn’t play around too much. He was in my group for a while.

I had a group, Charlie Covington and Chester Thompson. Charlie left me and went with George Benson. I was like the granddaddy. We had to get permission for Charles to come in the club to play. Chester left me and went with Genesis, and left Genesis and went with Weather Report. He’s living out in California now. Great kids, man, they used to think the world of me. They didn’t know at two o’clock I’d go home and I’d be trying to figure out, "What the hell did Charlie play?!?" And I’d go back like everything was cool. [laughs]

A few issues back in Radar, Darryl Harper interviewed Baltimore drummer Phil Cunneff. Phil said, "There isn’t a jazz scene in Baltimore–there are several: the Red Room scene, the Caton Castle scene, the Fells Point scene…Creative people make a scene happen." Is there a cohesive jazz community in Baltimore?

Yeah, I think Left Bank [Jazz Society] proved that for years. If you’ve got something to offer them in jazz, they’ll come out. My audience is 80 percent female [laughs] and over forty, but I started pulling out people who used to go when Lenny Moore had the club that was later turned to the Sportsman. We used to have jam sessions up there…well I started seeing some of that old crowd from the 70s showing up now.

I mean the Caton Castle at one time, we had the room so that if the session would start at five o’clock and you weren’t there by quarter to six, you didn’t get a seat. You’re talking 130, 135 people. And it was always packed.

Oh, who was that?!

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I didn’t know what Radar was! I hadn’t heard about it.

What I’m trying to do is…it’s very complicated. In the Afro-American community, where jazz was fluent, it was everywhere, you know–it’s not there anymore, people are not coming out. First of all there’s not the places, but people are not coming out anyway, and that has to do with the crime scene. It’s not safe.

When we started the sessions up at the Caton Castle, the 5 to 9 period on Saturdays was excellent. A lot of people would come in, get home early, and be ready to go to church in the morning…it really has worked out. Now I noticed that during the past few months, we’ve been getting a crowd kind of late, cause it’s really supposed to start at 5 and stop at 9 and I’ve been kind of holding the group back until people show up. My biggest fear is playing to an empty house, and I’ve done that before, you know. Ummm…what was the question again?

Oh, I was there because I wanted to see–that was my first town hall meeting–and I wanted to see who was there. I saw a lot of people who were into promotions…I didn’t see that many musicians that I knew of. We may have had the only jazz table there, which tells you something about what they’re thinking about.

I don’t know what’s going on in Fells Point now, but I haven’t worked down there. The kind of crowd that’s down there seems to be a very young crowd, a rock and roll and blues crowd, I think. I haven’t been down there, ‘cause there’s been nothing down there to offer me to come down there. And that’s been one of the problems, too. There hasn’t really been anything in that area to call for a bunch of Afro-Americans to go down there. It’s not that kind of situation.

You know, I’ve seen this music misused so much. Radio and television stations, they don’t push jazz as an art form. But every time they want to sell something that’s hip, you hear the jazz piano in the background, you know what I mean? [laughs]

Yeah. [laughs]

One of the shows that knocked me out was the Peter Gunn show years ago. ‘Cause that was Henry Mancini, you know. Just knocked me out.

But our youth are now being bombarded with the rap thing. I don’t have any problem with some of it when it has a positive message. But I heard some stuff that you’d get locked up on the corner for saying. I’ve heard guys who can sing a whole album of rap music that can’t count to ten, don’t know their ABCs. You know, it’s like, "We don’t care."

Now, you’ve got to understand that this generation that’s on the street now is a product of the 70s, when everybody was getting high. So if you’re looking for Mom and Dad to correct this kid, Mom and Dad is on the corner, too. Not everybody! The young kids…Charles Funn at Dunbar has a feeling for teaching this music for young kids, and that band is, whoo! I think they’ll be at the Lexington Market noon show this month. He’s got those kids really going on. I’ll tell you another group you need to check out. St. Veronica’s Steel Drum Band. They come out of Dundalk. It’s about 15 kids. They play everything from Bach to Monk. You’d be surprised, 12 year old kids and everybody knows their part.

See, I think that depends on what the city pushes. See, the mayor’s office could take some responsibility and push this thing, you know. And when you consider the diversity here in this town…right now we’re trying to get a Baltimore jazz festival. I mean, this town’s known for jazz. There used to be a saying, "You can’t make it in Baltimore, go to New York," and as hard as it is to make it in New York, a lot of cats who went there and couldn’t make it came back to Baltimore.

There were some great musicians in this town. Some went on to do great things. Eubie Blake, Billie Holiday, Chick Webb, there’s just so many good musicians. Up into the later years, Mickey Fields, Andy [Ennis], a bunch of guys. I think it depends on us becoming a union for advocacy, you know what I mean? It’s got to be some kind of…you’ve got to step on this. It’s a part of the culture that really needs…

That’s really what’s gotten me off track now. I’m not practicing like I’m used to, I’m doing this other community work trying to push jazz, and it’s taking something away from my music. I didn’t intend to be active in this thing. I blame this on Barry Glassman. [laughs] You know, he’s such a nice guy.

I think the future of jazz…there are a lot of people…one of the members on our steering committee doesn’t think too much about the future of jazz, but I think that’s kind of rough.

I don’t think it’s going to die. I don’t think you can kill it. It’s going to be here. But now, if we can get more exposure to it…

Years ago we used to think about Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and along comes this white boy, Dave Brubeck, and everybody who was into the hard swing jazz, we thought, man, he really wasn’t what was happening.

You’ve got to give Dave Brubeck credit for bringing people into jazz who would never have come there if they had to listen to the complexity of Miles and Monk…that may have been a little too hard…

Yeah, he was a bridge, Chet Atkins was a bridge. Now I’m not saying that they were among the greatest players we had. It’s like asking who you like the most: Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald. I don’t think you can make that kind of decision. One belongs here, and one belongs here.

I think jazz is alive and kicking, but we’ve got to push for it.

I’ve got shelves of music over there, original tunes. It’s everywhere over there. Got some in my files on the computer, too. I’ve recorded on two records that never got off the shelf. I have never recorded under my name. I think I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it, first of all. Being self-taught, I don’t have that academic side of being able to write for a band. I can write a sheet, simple stuff, but I don’t have that kind of academic knowledge because I never went to school for it. My project now is to get a CD out. But I don’t want to do it on a home computer, I want to go in the studio and do it right. I’m not going to cut loose anything that doesn’t have any quality to it, that’s not organized.

Miles Davis’s "Blue in Green."

That’s because of the song. I’ve heard other artists do it, but that relationship that Bill and Miles had, WHOOOO!, you would think after that they would go and get married. [laughs] He was a fantastic dude, and Miles was a genius, he broke the barriers. He made a statement–Quincy Jones was interviewing him and he said about the group he had with Tony Williams and John Coltrane, he said–you know how Miles talked [in a gravelly voice]–"I don’t ever have to play that way no more." He got to be crazy!

What he finally said later was, Miles, Diz, and Parker broke the barrier, and these guys should be taking it further. What I don’t understand is we still trying to figure out what Parker was playing, you know what I mean?! [laughs] If we could figure out what they were playing then…they were some intricate tunes, we still trying to figure that out!

Look what Miles did, he went from that to the electronics…Bitches Brew, On the Corner. I love this thing he does, the thing that Cyndi Lauper recorded, um…

Yeah. And his last CD, was it Doo-Wop? It was hip hop! You know, he was a genius. People were saying he was crazy. Most geniuses are crazy, I guess, they got their own plan. I wish I could do that, I wish I could just stay focused with one thing, but life is not like that, there’s a whole lot going on.

And since I just turned 66 on January 28, I’ve got this urgency to get things done. I don’t know whether I think I’m going to die soon, but I need to get it done now. I’m more serious about life now than I was then. Evidently I was trying to kill myself dealing with what I was dealing with.

It’s the other way around. It’s the non-musical parts of your life that you apply to the improvisations. That’s what makes it happen, you know what I’m saying. The way you live, the things you done that’s really coming out in that music. You can’t write about love if you ain’t been in love, or hate neither, if you haven’t been hateful. I can still remember those days when we drank wine on the corner and sang.

I think it’s the other way around. I’m just happy to be alive. I woke up this morning, you know, and I’m thanking God…I’m back into church now.

I don’t know if you heard the sign off tune, "Whatever Happens," we do a thing…[sings]

"Whatever happens, there’ll be some times along the way when it ain’t easy. Find some words of love to say and smile and be happy anyway."

Bill Withers says, "And kiss before you say good night," and I say, "And pray before you say goodnight." And that’s the way we end our evenings.

I think we can take Christ wherever we go. He’s not limited to the church. I think that’s what ministers are finding out now, you gotta get out of the churches, the four walls. As a matter of fact, Christ didn’t have a church did he? He had the side of a mountain. And you hear people building these 8 million dollar churches, well…they should remember the walls of Jericho.

I can’t separate the spiritual from anything else. If I could just have more patience…I’m fighting now to give up the cigarettes, I got a weekend, not quite a week. And I finally went to the doctor and asked for something to help me. You know, I got cocky. I figured, if you can beat a heroin habit, you ought to be able to beat anything. But man, them cigarettes got stuff in it that make heroin look like aspirin!

I have really tried, I have really tried. I’m thankful to God that I’ve made it this far, I’m thankful to God that every time I go get a check up and they tell me, "Nothing’s wrong," I say, "You guys are sure? ‘Cause I know what I’ve done to this body!" [laughs]

I don’t drink anymore. I might take a little wine every now and then, but my purpose now is to keep my head clear. I’m on a mission that I really don’t know what the mission is, but I feel comfortable. One time I thought about going into the ministry, and I was telling some of my homeboys about that, and they said, "Shit, your ministry is on that bandstand!" [laughs]

Matter of fact, I did a thing with PBS…somebody, Wally is his name, that did the filming, said, "What do you think jazz is?" And I think the show ended with, "I think God gave us these music notes and told us to ‘do what you can with it’." That’s how it came out [laughs]. I don’t know if that connection that, uh, historically is being put on the rhythms of Africa, fine, but that doesn’t explain today. You can see the transformation as you go from there to the islands–I call the islands the halfway point before America–and then for America the cotton fields and so on and so on and so on. We went from chain slavery to mental slavery, and music was the only way we could do.

We had to live in codes during those days. We’re still doing it. Somebody comes around that ain’t hip, you know, Caucasian, we start talking the pig Latin! [laughs] In the old days, swing low sweet chariot is about the Underground Railroad. We had to talk around to get comfortable, it was the only way we were going to survive.

And music…music, music, music, music, it kept us going in the cotton fields, and it keeps us going now, in the offices on the 27th floor, you know. Music is the only universal language we have.

Lawrence Lanahan