This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. The cover of Time magazine in October nine was unusually artistic, a full body portrait of a man alone on a roof at night. His eyes are closed, he's playing the trumpet, and you sense that it's a soft and soulful tune.
The man is went in Marsalis, and the headline, unlike the tune, blares out the new jazz age, the quintessential American genre was back, selling out halls and going platinum for the first time since Bebop, and according to Time, nobody was more responsible for this resurgence than Marsalis. Three years before, he had started the concert series at Lincoln Center that would become Jazz at Lincoln Center, the first addition to Lincoln Center since the Film Society in nineteen
sixty nine. Marsalis is ill It's artistic director. He's also head of the jazz program at Juilliard, his alma mater. For an artist less brilliant than Marsalis, all these achievements might overshadow his genius as a player, but Marsalis's genius could never be overshadowed. He is as the new Yorker
called him the most celebrated trumpeter of his generation. Just as impressive is the fact that perhaps nobody else could have marshaled the donations and the will of the city to build Rose Hall, the permanent one eight billion dollar home for jazz at Lincoln Center in the time Warner Center on Central Park. That's where Marsalis and I sat down to talk in front of a small audience of his students and Jazz at Lincoln Center donors. That silence
was impressive, so we could just jump into it. What do you think is one of the things that you need to have to perform? Jazz? People to play with My shows an hour long, I'm gonna need longer answers to these questions. I'm don't worry. But it is jazz is up. It's communal. So you can look at somebody like Luis Armstrong really really could play. And when he met the penist Earl Hines, man they could play together.
He made some great duets. Because when when Pops heard Earl Hines, he said, Okay, somebody really to play with the real innovation of jazz is grouping provisation and the fact that I can in time we have the pressure of time that in time I can make a decision, and you will make a decision, and we will work out as we go through time how we're gonna negotiate our agendas to some type of meaningful development and conclusion. As I tell my young students, I'm glad they're here.
The main thing of the teaching is how do we play together? Why did you make that decision? How are you playing? Why did you go into two there? Why did you play this cross rhythm? How do you develop the matic material when you're a soloing? So you asked me a question, and the longer I talked, the more difficult it is to stay on the point of that question and make it. I thought I made it clear
when we started that you went too mar salaries. You can say whatever you want to say, no, but but part of part of the problem in jazz improvisation is organization of material. The longer you play and what makes kind of Blew such a great record. Because we're talking about Miles Davison, So what if you take the horn players, Miles cannonball athlete, and John Coltrane. Each of them develops thematic material in a different way. John Coltrane is more
like Faulkner, just comes out in waves. Miles Davis is more like him away, just short phrases that he will develop Boom boom boom boom boom. Cannonball Atlee is just like a valuable, soulful Southern preacher that's just gonna hit you with He beens a gravy and sauce on your plate every time. And when you hear the three of them play, you here distinct personalities on the same form. And that's the allure of jazz. Once a piece and you sit there and say, oh God, this is like
the double black diamond Ski run. You know this is the one man. I gotta be on it. I gotta be on it, and I gotta be so hon it. You're not gonna play pieces perfectly. It's like, can I have a perfect conversation with you? I cannot misspeak a word, but doesn't mean I've had a good conversation. It's the opposite of a few a pianists. You have four hundred and seventy five thousand notes in a concerto. How many
of those notes are you gonna play perfectly? You're gonna miss a good twenty thousand of them and you will play the hell out of it. And when did you first pick up a horn? Al Hurt actually gave me my first trumpet. My father was playing an how Herds band in nineteen sixty six and sixty seven. And in terms of Doc Severance, and just to give you a sense of the history of music, I was supposed to play on the Tonight Show in night two eighty three and they've said, well, let's bump this guy off. He's
nobody knows who he is. Let's because they ran over something that let's bump this guy. From Doc servants and said, oh no, you're not bumping the trumpet. Put this man on, and Doc got me on the show. We have a culture, you know, trumpet players, and we know each other. We talked to each other, we talked about each other across generations, across time. The type of love that we have of our instrument, of our traditions, it's a it's not something
that's known also about jazz musicians. That's another thing that doesn't come come through that eighty year old person would be talking to a twenty year old And the type of love and feeling that we have that goals between us is not like what's common in our culture, you know. So I had a home when I was six, but I couldn't play. But I was always conscious of the music and of the the struggle of social It's the sixties, and my father and the musicians were trying to keep
the music alive. And they were always playing for almost no people, and it was always southern town places. And my father also was involved in education. He was always struggling to get kids to come in and teach the music. And I knew from the musicians, the feeling of them from birth, that it was something they felt was very important in the music and the people in our neighborhood. Even though they didn't like the music my father and
then played like in the barbershop. My Daddy would win the arguments and they said, man, you can't know jazz musician. You know, they've been around the world, they know. So I dealt with the music more from a personal standpoint.
We liked what was on the radio. R and B, James Brown and then Dave Motown and even before Motown kind of like the music my father's sister like was more like you know, Sam and Dave, real deep kind of southern soul Tammy Terrell, Sam Cook, Sam Cook, that was like what we heard it and that and we're from New Orleans, so we have our new a Fats Domino, the music that comes from our culture. But my father and them did not play that type of music. They
played serious jazz. They were improvising, real along and my mother was always funny describing them. She said, I took I took two of my girlfriends to your dad's gig and child they played. The first song was any Minutes, and my my friends are looking at me saying, girl, what in the world are they playing? And then your daddy didn't say a word. And Alvin Battiso was a great clarinet as he's passed away, but he could really
play like a Coltrane. And Alvin Battiss played another long solo and he didn't stop to do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do, And your Daddy didn't say a word. And then he played the third song and they played Old Lord. After the third song, my friends looked at me and say, a girl, you must love him.
And you know, so my daddy and them they were they were they were going uphill with the music, and I like them because they had a kind of feeling like they would hug each other, they knew people, people came from broad I met all the great jazz musicians, you know, Dizzy Gillespie, R. Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Witty Herman. Another thing is I grew up with extreme racism and prejudice and ignorance in Kenna, Louisiana, and New Orleans. But
the jazz musicians were not like that. They had a vibe like we were not like the rest of this. If you grew up in an ignorant environ it was very different. It was stark, you know. So that's kind of what I would attracted me to music. It's jazz an escape from racism. It is a way to address it. Jazz was a way for people, even in the earlier years, to come together and communicate with each other and work
on the healing process that was genuine and honest. Jazz makes it so that you and I can talk and I don't have to I don't have to do all the stuff people have to do in our culture even today, or cheesing and grinning and smiling over nothing, making up stuff, lying and bullshit, and we don't I don't have to do that. You know. My father was like a person that came from out of space or something that was put down in his environment. And I saw a picture of him with a Cliff of Brown album when he
was a teenager, you know, just in his hand. I could just look at the picture. I just saw him, like I said, eating have nothing to do with what was going on. And he loved Charlie Parker and he loved Cliffor Brown. He loved the music. It's kind of intellectuals a person black person, kind of his generation with
an intellectual inclination. They would lean towards jazz, and he liked, uh the style of jazz that was not that popular, but they had all the greatest musicians in the Monk and Duke Ellington and Basie and so he he just was attracted to it. He did not have a large number of people. He started playing saxophone R and B saxophone. He was walking to bar and playing like when people played in the mid fifties. But he loved the music and he changed it to piano. I said, well, what
do you changed the piano? He said, piano players eat when saxophone players starve. So he he he became, you know, and and did he encourage discourage or he just was neutral about your musical education? You know? Did he push? Shoot me? Man? I love my father so much, Like it's it's hard for me to even think about him or talk about him without getting full and crying. And note that my father is is old, he's sick. And I think to myself, even at this age, man, what
am I gonna do when my father dies? Like I'm not gonna have a person to to play for. Like I can't describe y'all of love I had for my father, Like I went with him on gigs. He was always alone. So I want to make it just about my experience. I sat in a car with a man and we would drive forty five minutes to some place. He played like in a in a club would be like three people in it. And he did it for years, and I would be, man, why are you doing this? You
know what? What is the value of this? Nobody cares about this. I joined the funk band when I was thirteen, and me and my brother could make twice the money our father could make, not together, both individually, and he was so much great in us. We couldn't even tease him about that. And he was such a non petty. He is such a non petty not just such an encouraging kind of just so taught. Everybody wasn't just me. I don't care who it was, anybody, Harry Connick, Donald Harrison,
Terrence Blanchett, all the musicians came down. They'd be in my house study with my father. He being a community teaching people. And he was so for real and he has such a deep kind of spirituality and never complained, live hard life, struggle, didn't make money, was not known just but just he was always in there for you. So I just one story I tell about my father. When I came to New York. I was coming to represent my father, not practice, because my father wanted to
come to New York. My father always gave me good advice. My false the least prejudiced person in the seventies and everybody be black power and all of that. My father wasn't a tom He wasn't the type of person was always white folks, all right, now that but he never I saw him sit in rooms full of only black people and defend white people. And I would say, man, why are you always he said, man, you never attacked people who are not there. You know, people don't understand
about humanity. He had always had a larger sense, and I saw him live that. But I came to New York and I got a lot of publicity when I was young. I became really well known. Eighteen nineteen twenty was unheard of for somebody actually trying to play, and I didn't expect that. So I came back to New Orleans and the older musicians were very very hard on me. Well, I growed up in jazz and I talked a lot, so you know, I had opinions and views, and I
expressed them. So it's not like I didn't deserve for them to do how they did be So I wasn't some innocent being treated it alright that I had mused him opinions. I was outspoken. I said what I had
to say. They didn't like it, okay. But I came back home and I played a gig with my father, and my father made me stand like on the bench stand for a long time, and since I was a little boy, he always let me sit in So, man, I sat on the bench and I was kind of started to kind of see you know, man, my daddy gonna even him. He's mad because I got some publicity. They think I'm making more money. And then I got to the last song, my daddy called me up. Man.
I was so mad. I walked up. I played a couple of choruses and I was looking at him like, damn, not you too. And as we walked off the stage, my father put his arm around me and he said, man, I'm sorry, my rhythm section was so sad. I really didn't even want to call you up. And I looked at him and I just had to laugh, and like, this is a man who was never small home. I don't care what the instance was. He was never small. He was uh he he is a man of deep philosophy, curiosity,
and honesty. And when I left home, it was I mean, we were contentious in my home. You know, my mother. I was always fighting with my mama, really a lot over my daddy. And when I was sixteen, me and my men and my mother was fighting so much. My daddy sat me in a car and he said, hey, man, you're gonna have to work this out with your mama. I said, man, mama does this and this and that. Man she's messing with you. Man. Blah blah blah blah blah.
He said, Man, you don't understand what I'm telling you. You need to work this out. Work it out, man, gee bloom. He said, if mama leave, nobody pays these bills. We don't eat, homework don't get done, children don't get raised, and one of your brothers is artistic. If you leave, we have more money. But he was dead serious. He was not playing with me. He was serious, and he said, work this out. I'm gonna be visiting you at your career. Your dad sounds like my dad. When did you know
this is something? This was the path you should run down? You know? I was. I was not even the best musician in my family, and I don't. I'm still not, probably just technically. My brother Branford, I was always unbelievable, learned stuff much quicker than me. And music. My little brother Jason is like a savant with his memory and the stuff that he knows. Um I don't. I was always good at most at things like in school, good playing ball, good hand eye coordination. People didn't mess with me.
Everybody like my went everywhere, and I was always around adults and older people. People struggled. Good talk with my mom about life, you know, because my mother was also very philosophical and always good with dealing with people, like it was a kind of quarterback played, always good dealing with like disputed people want to fight a man, you know,
identifying situations. Um, I think I went into music when I was I was playing on the basketball team actually, and I said, man, I started like Drahn Cold Traine's music, and he's not drumming player. But I put Trains on and I my father was at a picture of him and James Black and New Orleans drumming and Cold Train, and that picture was like a shrine. Man, that's us with Train, you know, Train that's trained. So I know they love Train, and they would always talk about when
Train came to one of their gigs. They were playing at the club called Vernons, and Train came into doing that was the great saxophone player and that stood him up in the door with that was playing it. So I started listening to Train and that then I said, I wonder if I could learn how to play like these people who really can play, because we're playing phone
and playing in pop bands. But I wanted to play like Clifford Brown, or like Train, or like how Miles was playing, or like you know, people who actually could play. So I felt I didn't know whether I could learn how to play the music or not. Music is difficult to learn how to play. It's difficult at that time to figure out what the music was for my generation. I never felt like I'm good, like I really can play, because my brother could play, and the New Orleans a
lot of people could play. With le Roy Jones, a great trumpet player, we call him Jazz. We played in a Febue Baptist church margin band I was eight. We had a lot of trumpet players that could play. A lot of families could play. So you never felt that. And with my father and the musicians, they only dealt with quality. They didn't deal with awards, they didn't deal with none of that. My father really has no value, sister,
mixed up? Is this for real? So when I went to I wanted one of my first Grammy awards when I was twenty two, and my father went to the ceremonies. And he's not a person who's given any kind of you know stuff when you see something's fake, he just he don't care he's not gonna be a crmudge about it, but he just okay, it's not about playing. So he sat through the ceremony a loud, a bunch of nine playing. So we're in the room after I want him talking
to him and he's looking at me. You know, yeah, man, you want? You know I want. I was trying to go out to the party and something. I get ready to go out him and my mama. He said, hey, man, he said, I'm glad you wanted stuff. He said that was the Grammy sign. I said yeah, And he said, you don't think this means you can play, do you? So of course I didn't think it, especially in front of him, because he knew whether you could play or not.
And I was actually in my forties. One time I was playing something and my daddy said, man, I read you on the radio. You ain't learned how to play on changes yet. And he was serious, he was seriously and it was actually a two way. I was kind of shaking on the changes of the song. I said, Man, I didn't even know the song. I just he said, man, you got to you have to work on your years. Man.
Wynton Marsalis, Artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Another greatest of his generation instrumentalist I've spoken to is violinist. It's a Perman. His pleasures these days are, oddly enough, mostly musical. Now that I'm old. There's no food after eight o'clock, you know, if if I pay for it, if you can't eat after, I can't eat it. But then in the middle of the night give vault. So no, no, no,
no food. But you grew up. Food was everything. Food was everything, very very guiding force in your life because you grew up kind of poor, correct, very The rest of my conversation with Itsak Perlman is in our archives at Here's the Thing, Dot org more with Wynton Marsalis in a moment, this is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. When did Marsalis grew up in a household teaming with the greatest jazz musicians of the era thanks to his pianist father. I, on the other hand,
came to appreciate the genre through other means. For me, the portal for jazz was a movie, the movie Lenny with Dustin Hoffman, where Dustin Hoffan played Lenny Bruce and they just had the most beautiful soundtrack, and they remember sitting there watching the movie they play. It never entered my mind. I remember sitting there going, oh my god, this is so beautiful. You know, are there any movies that speak to you in the world you're in? Is a movie you saw you thought was a good movie
about the world that you're in? You know, most of the jazz movies I didn't like. Really you didn't. Why what was missing? Corny? You know what I mean? I knew the jazz musicians, so you know, when you're and it's like I do something about actors, you're gonna be like, that's that's what you think it is, but it's not. But I love when people attempt to do it right, you know. But I think that I like Elia Kazan's movies,
you know, just baby Doll facing the crowd. But Bird and movies like that, No, you know, no, because I just the music didn't have the power, and the musicians were always made to seem less than what they are because they had a bird. Bird got high, okay, but Bird was not. It was not a child, and he wasn't treated like a child by people who are around him. So it failed to convey birds magnetic power and the power of his genius. Every person you ever talked to
who knew birds, did man? Everybody just Jerry Mulligan told me a story about bird. He said, Bird was always late. He was a drug addict. He always had mustard on his tie. He was always he said, So once we were sitting to Jazzy's Philharmonic. All the greatest saxophone players in the world, he says, you got Johnny Hodges. Me. Uh, he just named the greatest saxophe players you ever heard of, He said. Everybody saying wears bird or bird is late? Pird?
Is this the insulting bird talking about bird? He's just so we're all warming up like noways of eight horn players place. All of a sudden, Bird comes in late. Everybody's pretending like they don't see him. He said. Bird took his horn out and put put it together and played a scale. He went, he says, like the most perfect scale you ever heard in your life. He said. Everyone stopped at the same time and looked at Bird.
And that was our critique of ourselves, because there was not another one of us who could have made the rest of us do that. So I think it's hard to convey Black Americans. They convey the actual power and accuracy of jazz musicians, the depth of food they are, and then you manity and what they understand and how deep it it is, and who was the loneout monk
or it's too easy to talk about his hat. It's too easy to talk about When I read the Time magazine article on Monk, it was all about people eccentricities and when Myles left for concert or and the music is extremely difficult to play, and that's why we still keep trying. Over time, we've shifted and taken many of
the fundamentals out to make it easier. But that's why when you listen to the records, as I tell my young students, I'm glad they're here with filling all them because they're the most talented young people in the world. This is hard. When I give Anthony Solos to learn, he could already play when I heard him when he was fourteen. It's hard to play like he plays. He's
a trump player. Unbelievable, he can play. I'm not saying it, and I tell him that if he's just in my house and I'm talking to him, it is difficult to play. You're gonna be fifty. It's hard. So you have to these fundamentals, this stuff, these things. Learn these things thoroughly. No one will know whether you can play these things. No one will care about that. You may be the only person you know who cares about whether you can
play or not, who can evaluate you are playing. Develop an independent sense of integrity, and train yourself to death and and yeah, yeah, you know. I do a play. I do a play one time. And I said, someone said to you, what's the goal? What are you after? What what are you doing, you know, beyond getting a paycheck? And I said, I want the perfect show. They said, what's the perfect show? I say, I say every line as written in order, and I say them the way
that I think they should be said. I mean, I'm really concentrating. And I walk off stage at the end of the show and there's a prop table and I took a cigarette and I lit a cigarette. I looked at the stage manager and I said, well, there you have it, I said, my perfect show. I did it once one show, but you always aim me and I and I said, to what is his naming? That trumpet player Anthony Anthony? I went up to Anthony before and I said, you know, I grew up in an age
of you know, al Her and uh Armstrong. I said, guys who were trying, you look like something that those guys would have had for lunch. You know what I mean? Where where does a person get that training, this little bantam of a man to get that wind? I asked him. But it's the secret. You know when you look at the trumpet players, like ray Nance was small, Miles was little, it's spiritual, like its spiritual weight of your sound. What
you're projecting is a spiritual thing. It's like when you when you see people when they've passed away, you notice how small they are. You always say, damn it really small when they animated and you know you're not holding their breath in the bathtub like a pearl diver. You you got that minute long long tone. I always tell them it's an exercise we have and say, you hold that long tone. To you, it's like life. You hold
that long tone till the end of your breath. So let's say you can hold a long tone for forty five seconds. When you hit forty five seconds the end of your breath, now that's when the long tone starts. So if you get fifteen seconds after that, you did a fifteen second long tone. If you get twenty seconds, you did twenty second long jone. Because the long terone you challenge your breath when you don't have any left.
And that's how you have to approach your integrity. And uh that long done is a microcosm of just life. You become very successful. You become very successful when you're very young. And you've been at the top of this
game for a long long time now. And uh, people talked about you as you know, uh, the new jazz age, and and you were a part of I don't think that you would allow anybody to say, even though it's probably partly true that you were alone in this endeavor, but you were a part of the rebirth of jazz as a very popular music form in this country and around the world. Where would just say we are now
with jazz? What's the state of jazz now? Yeah? I think I was never really part of it being popular or even but I feel like I was a movement towards quality. And I think we still have a long way to go because our nation is going in the opposite direction and we've going in opposite direction with education, opposite direction with our mythology. We're going to opposite direction. So we have to double and triple down. And that's
also why I love to see my younger people. And uh, I feel I feel that part of what we try to do here, Jess Lincolnson and and what you do with the Philharmonica whatever. You know, there's so many people on the country working in the arts and teaching and doing all the things they do. It's true. It's a qualitative thing. You teach a class, you're talking to younger people, you just talk to somebody else, you pass it on and you're you're invariably talking with them about quality. Check
this out, study this, try to be do this. You're gonna find this. And that was always my proposition. Let's start to talk about this, and you obviously become famous and everybody knows you who you are and your brother as well. How this start? A lady from Visitors Services and Lincolnson and named Elena bloom God called me. This is the six She said, can you can you? Can you do some concerts? It it uh at Lincoln Center in August. I said, well, how many concerts? She said, three?
She said, you know, we can't pay. You said, but at that time I was doing two hundred and I don't know, two twenty concerts a year. So I had three concerts, no problem, you know, I just need you to program and book some people and this They had no problem. You know. I booked the people something for jazz and the halls great. I mean I didn't I didn't know what it was. So we booked concert Women in Jazz was one, and then Darth and Kirk was a partner of ours from w B G. Oh. It
was all very local, you know. We just all knew each other. We were talking, can you can we call someone? So musicians we knew. I called different people. We had a bud pole bird. We did different I didn't. We played in the hall in Alice. It was over and Alice Tully Hall and that was seven. It was okay. The next year I said, I wonder if we could do Gellington's music, not like this big band music. We never played it, so I said, let's call this guy. We called them and we said, man, can we uh
could we call Norris Tourney. We just started naming old old Ellingtonians and most of I thought they had passed on, and every time my name, somebody said, well we could, we could call them, we could call them. Then I was twenty six years old, twenty seven, damn, I walking in the room. Next year, Man, there's no there's Norris Turney, britt Woodman Clark, Terry, Jimmy Hamilton's I mean, I was just looking, man, we're gonna play with these people played
on all these unbelievable records from ninety five too. Man, we sat down to play. We didn't want to play their music at all, and they started cussing us out, and you know, the main thing I was saying, y'all play too loud, you know. And then we got questionable reviews about why we were playing Duke Ellington's music. Wasn't the playing Then when I noticed, Okay, these group of people kind of jazz cricks. There are enemies. So if they say you shouldn't play Duke Ellington's music, let's do
two nights next year. Next year, we did two nights to Duke Kellington. Then we started to do Duke Kellington's music. And then a guy named Gordon Davis approached me, said he want to form a committee around jazz and I sat in the first meeting. I didn't know anything about this raising money and talking to people in jazz Lincoln Center, and and I just knew this was gonna be some
free concerts I had to play. So we sat in the meeting and it was interesting, Okay, these are people from the community who are going to help us build a program around jazz. And they said, we need you to come up with the program. Said, okay, I would just take the same thing that I'm doing on the road, because I was then. I had already and I was going to five or six schools a day. Then I would just call schools and say, I'm a musician. Do you need me to come? They be we don't want that.
And I had already had ten years of experience. It was rough. I was just on the road rough, and they calling people going to schools teaching their kids because I saw my father do it. Basically, then we started to put it in place. Man. I looked up Jack
Ruten is a developer. I'm talking to him about like what it was like to fight in World War two, politics in New York City, or what the internal things is and and and we're talking about stuff I didn't talk about what other of your officer and Ed Bradley is on the board. Man, we're talking about this and that it so just said you such. I'm at Ernigan. We're talking and we're arguing about this. And then I started to go through the board members. These people are
gonna give money and time to jazz. Man. People only take stuff from jazz. Beverly Seals goes on a call with me to raise some money and she she says, I brought this guy to talk about Jameson. I don't like jazz, and she asked the man for a million dollars. I thought she was crazy, and he said, I'll give you a million. I was to get out of my office, and I mean, the whole thing was like then, of course I talked to Dinny Gillespie and then we're trying
to build this program. We got a chance to do this because Dizney was always one of the smartest people you ever talked to. If you could get him to actually tell you something and he knew it was serious, you could not have a higher level of understanding than Dizney Gillespie. Okay, so then he wasn't joking enoughing I said uh, you know, big band is not the former music I grew up in us the jazz linca center.
We're trying to do this and that. He said, one should not consider it an achievement to lose one's orchestral music and jazz. We always considered our orchestrame music to be lower. So it's part of the kind of brainwashing it takes place. And I thought, well, you you played in small bands. He said, if I could have kept my big band together, I would have never disbanded. It was a struggle, he said, developed that big band. So on his word, really, I said, okay, I'll give up
what I'm doing and do this. And then we all started to work together. So the kind of defining thing for me in my life was the quality of people I had a chance to work with putting jazz Lyn Consenta together. And then when did this become the vision? This floor of this building and a big nut you gotta raise. I mean, that's facing is not some little clubs somewhere, and it's been attacked for not being that
so many times. We all of us would take the attack of us wanting to keep us in the ghetto and ghetto wise us and make us accept less and be proud to accepted and defined us by the less. So this is the most piece of steel ever designed that leaves this glass wall back to get acoustics. We heard there was a room in the Canary Islands that was made of glass, so we studied that room in the back room rolls based on an Italian opera house. You go to these Italian cities and you play these
opera houses. Local our proms that that oval shape, that shape works, that's perfect. We're gonna have that shape. And our club is just a like like a clubs you have in the Mediterranean. We kind of sound and floor and would So we started to develop our understanding of how these spaces would work. The level of dedication was unbelievable and well even the electricians. We ran out of money and I had to have a meeting with town
a man. We ran out of money, and the guy was was messing what he said, you ran out of money. Well this is New York, buddy. You know we're not gonna be able open. I don't know what to tell you. We need our we need our our damn money man. You know you will be just invent some money. So He looked at me with standing right over here in the building. He said, he said, look, man, I lived down the street from John Cold Drane's house on Long Island. We're gonna finish this. They finished it. So as many
things like that in New York things. And the last thing I want to cover with you is about education and about the future. When you talked about calling up schools and wanted to give it away and so forth. Uh, you went to Julian and have you talked Did you teach jazz at Juilliard? Yeah, I mean I run the jazz program at Juilliard. At Juliard, you know, I went there in seventy nine and eighty. And I also had a rough time there. Why he has a brother and um,
you know it's rough. It's just culturally. I'm from New Orleans. I was always like, oh, I was, you know, like I am right now. I was like that. And I had a running with a conductor the first performance we're playing the writer spring Man. Every time I played the guy stopped orchestras. The first trumpet, first trumpet. First trumpet has a great part to the writers bring. You get
to just bounce high k notes off the wall. So he got to where it was just every time stopped, first trumpet play, I played high pea must play these high parts, and the orchestra shuffles when they like how you play something. So after a while orchestra started to kind of go on my side. They were like shuffling the guy just so, I said. I went to see the assistant uh dean. His name was Brunelli. I said, Brunelli, I wouldn't need you to take me off of this piece. Man.
This guy's like, I can't. I'm I'm my freedom after whippers behind because I can't. I'm not from there. I can't deal with this. Every time he stopped, and he's saying I'm a musical and all this stuff. And if Brunelli looked at me, he's older guy, also a World War Two veterans. He said myself, I hear you from New Orleans. I said yeah. He said, you know, I always wanted to get down there. How's that gumbo? I said, it's good, man, he said, and I got up and
went back to rehearse. Okay, he was telling me something, and what he had to tell me is, man, you here, you know this is what this is like. Play your horn. That's what this is. So okay, I'm not talking to any guy. I'm not doing anything. Where are you from? From New Orleans? You candle a conductor like him? Come on, baby, let's let's get to it. And that's you know, there was there was no jazz there. And then I kind of got into it with my teacher once again about racism.
You know, it's always kind of if I have to be true. But he was Italian. I loved him. Well, your vociano. The deepest lesson I was ever taught in my life was from this this man, and we he was like a guard the trumpet players. He played the New York Philomonic from the thirties to the eighties, and we started to talk about racism. He told me some
kids took his backpack because he was Italian. I said, man, let me start telling your stories about what people will do you, you know, so I told him three ful good choice stories from Kenna Louisiana Circle nineteen sixty nine seventy one. He was like, damn. So every week we would go back to this material and then I, you know, then I kind of dropped off of school. I joined up blaking a jazz mrs. But later, two or threes later,
I called him Vacciano because I still loved him. Your storways telling me I was the best black student he had. That also made me mad. So look, man, don't tell me I'm your best black student. I'm not here to be your black student. And you know, just general reachings clash because I was I called everybody man. Now I understand for him, and that was disrespectful to call him man, But I was. I didn't even know I used the word man all the time. She hates it. She's like,
I'm not a man. You know, you get into that habit. So I went to his househout in Queens and uh, man, this house was dark, you know. And he he invited me in and I sat down and told him I wanted to work on my transposition and stuff. He was like, you don't need to learn anything about transposition, he said, uh. He said, my wife is. My wife is at the end of this room, and she's been an invalid for a long time, he said, and my son died in an accident. We had a contentious kind of thing. He said.
When my wife dies, I'm gonna be all alone. So he's probably in his mid mid eighties at that time. And he said, you're gonna be known. You could play. He said, you're not gonna struggle with that. He said, but your inner life. He said, if your inner life is unhappy, you are unhappy. Take care of your inner life. And that was it. He said, that's your lesson. And you know, offer me a drink. I didn't drink at that time. I was always in bars and stuff. I
didn't and I had alcoholism like in my family. And but you offered me a drink of scotch. I said, okay, man, and I pretended like I was drinking it and then I left. So, but there have been times in my life when I would want to choke or kill maine, one of my kids or something, and uh what his words will come back to me. So that's what I
took away from my Juilliard experience. And uh, with my students, I tried to I don't see them as much as I want to see them, but for me with them as more person like failer, I see them anyway, I don't. I don't just see them in school. Tell me you'll gonna be out of school. I'm gonna see you're gonna be thirty. I'm gonna be people I studied with their dead. I'm still here and I try to teach them away of life, this jazz and when I when I see them, I love them. I hugged them and they know it.
It's no question. I'm not saying it because I'm in front of a bunch of people. Anthony her If it comes to my house to give less and I try to teach him what I love. My daddy talked people with thank you, thank you so much, thank you, thank you. The incomparable went to Marsalis. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing