Bobby Watson Speaks: Part 3

 In November of 2013 I sat down with one of the greatest living champions of jazz, Bobby Watson, for an interview for JAM Magazine. I've been a huge fan of Bobby's music since my formative early teenage years. I studied saxophone with Bobby at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance for five years, and over the years he has become an important mentor and friend. As a student of Professor Watson, our lessons often consisted of no playing at all--just conversing and philosophizing. Countless times our meetings would start with a simple question or two, and once you got him going, he would end up saying some of the most profound things you'd ever heard. Some of them resonated right then, and others years later. My idea for this interview was, essentially, to re-create the vibe that led to so many heavy discussions when I was his student.
Bobby gave me nearly five hours of dynamite material, but unfortunately I had under 2,000 words to work with in the JAM article and a lot of great pearls of wisdom and insight were left on the cutting room floor. I didn't want any of that to go to waste, so over the next few days and weeks I'll be posting a potpourri of "deleted scenes" from the interview. They'll be mostly unedited and maybe in random order. Parts of these ran in the JAM article, as well. 

If you were moved by any of this in any way, or you found it thought-provoking or interesting, I would encourage you to share this on social media and send to your friends. So many of the things that go viral in jazz these days are transparently and purposely controversial, and sometimes just downright negative. I found this conversation to be uplifting, so how's about we make something uplifting go viral for a change?

 In the third installment, Professor Watson talks about what he misses about New York, his views on education and challenges as a professor at UMKC, and some of the political impetus behind his new CD, "Check Cashing Day."

I’ve sacrificed the opportunity to take any gig that comes my way. I’ve put a strain on my relationships with my agents around the world, because up until the time I came to Kansas City they had free reign to book me any time they wanted. But now they’ll have an opportunity for me and I’ll have to say I can’t do it during that time period. So that’s been a bit of a problem.

I don’t miss being in New York. I miss my New York friends. I miss the kind of conversations that I can have with my New York friends. There are certain kind of conversations I can’t have with cats form Kansas City because it might come across as arrogant. I miss being able to relate to being on the road and fighting the battle for the music. A lot of people don’t understand that and the sacrifices. I miss the food, too…I mean…Korean BBQ...


The hardest thing to do, I’ve found from being at UMKC, is to be an honest and true teacher. I wake up at night thinking about my students and what I’m going to do to help them. Because every year is different. And students are all at different levels. So how am I going to write a syllabus? Because every year’s different. Improv is my favorite class, and my scariest class.

Our education system came out of the assembly line. But we’re talking about human beings, who have different rates of growth, different ways of learning. And you’ve got all these people who come through the assembly line, and get their diploma and go “OK, I’m good.” But then you’ve got others who might be geniuses, but they get put in special education. I believe that education is not a stamp. You’ve got to adjust every year, which puts pressure on the teacher. I might give you an A, but you gotta ask yourself: did you deserve it? I’m not about holding you back. If you got it and didn’t deserve it, you gotta live with it. What’s the value of an A? It’s about the effort that you put in.

Everybody blossoms at their certain time. You have to address the individual and assess the devotion, and the character and the dedication they have. As well as the desire and the ability.

I hear people, and I just want them to hear themselves. Because you can’t escape yourself. We have our own song, but we have to learn to love it. That’s the hardest thing, is to stop looking outward, and look inward.

I’m an expert clinician. I can go to any school and do two or three days and rock their world, man. When I took this job, the hardest thing was to develop students over four years, when they see you every week.

My problem is, I’m still learning. I don’t have it together. I haven’t had time to sit back and codify what I know. But if you ask the right questions of me, I can give you some great answers. But you gotta ask some questions. I’m not a command performance. I’m not gonna spoonfeed you. I don’t have the Bobby Watson method published by Alfred Music or something. Ask me something, and I will show you. I know a lot of stuff, man. I don’t have a life. I didn’t go to the prom. I missed a lot of social events because I was a nerd playing the saxophone, but now I can help with you that.

People develop at different times. It’s not an assembly line. People grow at their own rate and in their own time. And sometimes you might tell somebody something that doesn’t click for another couple of years.

It’s like this. You’re going to have to wash your dishes sooner or later. The dishes can pile up in the sink, but sooner or later you’re going to have to was the dishes. You can do it now, or you can do it later. But sooner or later you’re going to run out of spoons, and you’re going to have to wash the dishes. You don’t want to do your laundry? Cool. But sooner or later you’re going to run out of underwear.

When it comes to the question of race, you ain’t never gonna fix what you cannot face. And none of us have any connection to slavery. None of us are responsible for that. And that’s the tricky part. I wasn’t a slave. I went to an interracial high school, I went to college and got a bachelor’s degree.

It’s tricky. I just want to open up a little window, and then move on. I just want to get back to the bandstand and playing with my boys. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t really want to go there, but at the same time, it was a catharsis for me.

Everybody tries to play it off. Nobody’s getting lynched or anything anymore, but can we just deal with this stuff and get it over with? You gotta respect culture. If you go to Italy, Italians got their culture. There’s an East Indian culture. Everybody’s got their own culture. Respect it, because this is America. We’re the only multi-cultural society on the planet. We’re supposed to be a melting pot.

I grew up, and it was black and white. I got to New York, and I learned the subcultures. I learned what it was like to be Jewish when I was in New York. Polish, Irish, Jewish…all this time I thought all you guys were just white!

We don’t have time to argue, man. You gotta back off, and pick your battles. Sometimes, you gotta go, do I care about this guy? No. Do I love him? No. You gotta go down your checklist, and if he doesn’t make the checklist, am I gonna say something to him? No.

Bobby Watson Speaks: Part 2

In November of 2013 I sat down with one of the greatest living champions of jazz, Bobby Watson, for an interview for JAM Magazine. I've been a huge fan of Bobby's music since my formative early teenage years. I studied saxophone with Bobby at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance for five years, and over the years he has become an important mentor and friend. As a student of Professor Watson, our lessons often consisted of no playing at all--just conversing and philosophizing. Countless times our meetings would start with a simple question or two, and once you got him going, he would end up saying some of the most profound things you'd ever heard. Some of them resonated right then, and others years later. My idea for this interview was, essentially, to re-create the vibe that led to so many heavy discussions when I was his student. 

Bobby gave me nearly five hours of dynamite material, but unfortunately I had under 2,000 words to work with in the JAM article and a lot of great pearls of wisdom and insight were left on the cutting room floor. I didn't want any of that to go to waste, so over the next few days and weeks I'll be posting a potpourri of "deleted scenes" from the interview. They'll be mostly unedited and maybe in random order. Parts of these ran in the JAM article, as well. 

If you were moved by any of this in any way, or you found it thought-provoking or interesting, I would encourage you to share this on social media and send to your friends. So many of the things that go viral in jazz these days are transparently and purposely controversial, and sometimes just downright negative. I found this conversation to be uplifting, so how's about we make something uplifting go viral for a change?

The second installment deals with the influence of youth on the Kansas City jazz scene, and Bobby's experiences with the business side of music.

"I think the Kansas City scene has gotten so much better, and a lot of it is because of the alumni that have come out of UMKC since I’ve been here. They’ve all stepped up and have done their thing and have made a presence on the scene."

"Some of the older guys in town started hiring the students…they ended up embracing the students. They realized our students show up on time, they play their ass off, they read…there’s no prima donna crap or baggage. Here’s this new pool of talent, and they jumped on it. And it changed the whole dynamics of the city. It just sort of changed everything. I think I can take credit for setting a vibe for what it means to be a musician and have certain morals, but I have to give a lot of credit to Dan Thomas. He has this expertise in academia that I don’t have, and he has the right spirit."

"I like the awards, but I like the reward, now, more. I wanna get paid. It’s like that with any profession. Do you work for the job or does the job work for you? I started to see a lot of things pile up…artifacts, posters, trinkets, and then you put them in a box and then you go back out on the road, and all of the sudden you’ve got all of this stuff that you’ve lived for, but do you ever actually look at it? I’m at the point now where I’d like to unpack and look at my life and see where it is. I’m trying to get to the point where I can go fishing and have a little boat out back and have time to use it. Anything that you do with work should support your down time. You know? Time with your family, maybe a season ticket to the Royals or whatever, because I’ve been working on the road and now I’ve got time to go to the games. Because I’m a musician I've got time to do other things. That’s been my whole philosophy my whole life: Your music should bring you that enjoyment in your life to stop and smell the roses.  Artistry should bring you some quality down time. There’s a balance I think that’s been missing in some of the cats that I’ve seen. Some of these cats are on the treadmill, and they’re working and working, and they’re so career-driven, but it’s like 'What about your life?' "

"And that’s one of the things that was so beautiful about getting back to Kansas City. I have a house. I have a front porch, and a backyard. If you’re going to do all this work and toil, shouldn’t you be able to come back to that? That’s the balance of artistry, ultimately. But you have to go through a certain stage of toil. I would be in certain countries and I would get invited to musicians’ houses. And I’d go over to their house after the gig or on a day off and they had these beautiful little houses and they were living nice lives, and they were still artists. And that’s what I want. I still want to be respected and get gigs and be creative, but I want to have a place to live. A place where I can burn some meat, you know?"

"I had done three records for Columbia, three records for Blue Note, and I figured where are you going to go from there? And as my grandmother said, 'all that glitters isn’t gold.' I’ve been to those places, and in certain ways it was a disappointment. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. They didn’t support me in the way that I thought that Columbia should."

 

"The whole thing about being an artist is about publicity. You get a PR person and then you make the rounds. When I was on those labels, I went through that cycle. That’s part of being an artist, you’re doing all these promos and interviews. I told them what I wanted. I wanted to be on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, I had been telling people that for years. Nobody ever made it happen, and now she’s dead. I always wanted to have a Jamey Aebersold play-a-long. That was on my bucket list, man. Everybody has a bucket list. I thought when I got with those record labels, I thought I would be able to clear out my bucket list, and some of them didn’t happen."

"The whole thing about the business is, can you sign your own check? Elvis couldn't sign his own check. He was a superstar but he didn’t own himself. Our whole thing when we were coming up was, we want to own ourselves. And we did stuff for certain labels, but if you look at all my records, the one thing I always insisted on was, I was producer. I didn’t get any extra money for it, but it says in print 'produced by Bobby Watson.' And that established me as a producer."

"I was going into semantics. Post MoTown Bop. What do you play? PMB. I got that from Steve Coleman, with M-Base. He said you gotta name your own music, or else they’ll name it for you. We branded it. I learned years ago that branding is the way of the future. You put a brand out there and live by it."


"What about George Coleman? George Coleman was probably the only guy that didn’t benefit from recording with Miles Davis. My Funny Valentine, Four and More…I mean, what happened to George Coleman, you know? I’m just saying, I’ve been there, I saw what these guys did and did not get from a publicity standpoint."

"I was with Art Blakey, and it helped get me where I am. But I’ve met so many individuals in many different cities who you’ve never heard of, who are great musicians. And when you hear them, they give you goosebumps, and they make you cry, and they make you fill up with emotion. And you’re going, ‘I’ve never heard of this guy. He’s so powerful, oh my God.' You know? And he’s not on any records that I own. This guy is the real deal."

"This music is so deep, man. It’s not about the Downbeat covers. It’s not about the jazz poll. I’m lucky I got a little taste of it, but everything that glitters ain’t gold. I was there, I saw it, I was on the mountaintop, but it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re going to go that way, you’re going to give up part of your soul, and part of your independence."

"Being on a major label was an advantage because I learned about the mechanism. I go in the studio, I record the album, then you get somebody to do the artwork, then somebody to do the mastering, and then somebody to do the PR. Then you have a radio guy. So I saw the mechanism. If I put a record out, I make sure I’ve got enough money to pay the cats, do the record, and have a PR guy and a radio guy. A lot of radio guys are the guys I met when I was with Blue Note and Columbia. But now they’re independent too, because the whole brick and mortar structure of records is falling apart."

"I learned what it takes to promote. A lot of people put out records but they don’t do the other two steps. You need radio and PR, and it’s hard if you don’t have a name. The whole thing about this business, is there’s a lot of people that do it one time.  But you gotta do it more than once. You gotta do it again and again and again, and then they go ‘Oh, this guy is serious, I think we need to listen to him.’ It may take three or four times. If you’re going to do this, you gotta be committed, you gotta do it more than once."

"Kickstarter is BS, man. Everybody’s doing that. Save your money, and put it out on your own, on your own dime. Even if it’s $2 a day. Put it in a drawer. You’ll be happier."  

Part 1: Deleted Scenes from A Candid Conversation with Bobby Watson

In November of 2013 I sat down with one of the greatest living champions of jazz, Bobby Watson, for an interview for JAM Magazine. I've been a huge fan of Bobby's music since my formative early teenage years. I studied saxophone with Bobby at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance for five years, and over the years he has become an important mentor and friend. As a student of Professor Watson, our lessons often consisted of no playing at all--just conversing and philosophizing. Countless times our meetings would start with a simple question or two, and once you got him going, he would end up saying some of the most profound things you'd ever heard. Some of them resonated right then, and others years later. My idea for this interview was, essentially, to re-create the vibe that led to so many heavy discussions when I was his student. 

Bobby gave me nearly five hours of dynamite material, but unfortunately I had under 2,000 words to work with in the JAM article and a lot of great pearls of wisdom and insight were left on the cutting room floor. I didn't want any of that to go to waste, so over the next few days and weeks I'll be posting a potpourri of "deleted scenes" from the interview. They'll be mostly unedited and maybe in random order. Parts of these ran in the JAM article, as well. 

If you were moved by any of this in any way, or you found it thought-provoking or interesting, I would encourage you to share this on social media and send to your friends. So many of the things that go viral in jazz these days are transparently and purposely controversial, and sometimes just downright negative. I found this conversation to be uplifting, so how's about we make something uplifting go viral for a change?

The first installment deals mostly with Bobby's relocation from New York to Kansas City in 2000 to take over the Jazz Studies department at the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance:

"Maybe 3 years or so before I formally applied for the (UMKC) job, I got a letter from Mike Parkinson saying that they were looking for a new director of jazz studies because he was going to be leaving. And I looked at it but I wasn’t really ready for it. In 1999 they unveiled the Bird bust on 18th and Vine and there was a big ceremony there. Max Roach and Milt Jackson and Roy Haynes were there. I had flown back for that and I saw Kerry Strayer. Me and Kerry had known each other for awhile and were really tight. Kerry told me 'You know, they got the search going, and you should try for it.' And I thought that was very big of him because he’s someone, with his expertise, he could have went for it himself. But he realized they were looking for someone with a national or international presence. And as my friend he said 'Man, you should really go for that.' I asked all my friends in New York, 'What do you think?' Being in New York for 25 years at the time, you’re on the front lines of the music and you’re in the trenches…but man, I had a chance to go home. It was almost too good to be true. I always felt that at some point I wanted to come back home, and all of the sudden this opportunity opened up. I went through the process, they invited me out for the interview, and it worked. At the same time, I was tired of the hustle. Of working. I could work every day of the week, but it was just wearing me out. I reached a critical mass in terms of being in New York and being available. I was working with the Mingus Big Band, doing all kinds of stuff that was really high quality. I was working at the Vanguard, the Blue Note, Birdland…but I was kind of in a vice and I couldn’t break out of it. Those gigs helped sustain me, but I couldn’t elevate my profile. I was going to Europe a lot. I was in a holding pattern. I felt like Birdland had a stranglehold on me. They said if I worked there I couldn’t work at the Vanguard for 6th months…if I worked at the Vanguard I couldn’t work at Bradley’s afterwards. As a horn player, at the time I had been with Blue Note and Columbia and I had a name. And when my name went out there they wanted to capitalize on that, so I didn’t have the freedom to freelance in New York like the rhythm section players and other sidemen. That’s how it goes as you put yourself out front as a leader. This thing came up and I was able to get away, and it gave me freedom. It kind of freed me up from that NY vice. Gave me some stability and a steady paycheck and health care. I had no choice at the time man, I had to keep working. Top stuff, man. But you reach this critical mass where you could do this the rest of your life, but…"

"When I taught at Manhattan School of Music, my combo was Stefon Harris, Eric Harland, Jason Moran. I used to play duets in the practice room with Bill Stewart when he was in school."

"I was home, and I was around my folks. The way of life out here in Kansas City is much less expensive and easier. You have the benefits of a steady paycheck and healthcare. And at my age, I was 46 when I came out here. I ran it by a lot of my friends and they said 'If you don’t take it, I will! You’re crazy if you don’t take it!' I felt like I was a traitor if I left New York and left the battle. I felt like I was deserting ship, you know?"

"I was living the life, you know? I had discipline in my life, I was getting up, I was writing, I was practicing, I was creating. I was living the life, man. I was in the prime of my life, and I wasn’t thinking about teaching. That was the last thing on my mind. Going back home and being a professor, are you mad? But all of the sudden it’s just like, something just clicked in my brain. It was something that just happened at a certain time that led me back here. It was a perfect storm."

"I was able to come to a program that had a history, but didn’t have any teeth in it. The program was a vanity. You come to the Conservatory and play in the wind symphony and the orchestra  and you can take a little jazz on the side. So my charge was to put some teeth into this program and make it a bona fide program." 

"We’re trying to brand the program. It’s not about me. If you go to North Texas or Berklee it’s not about who’s teaching there. It’s North Texas, and it’s Berklee. It should be UMKC. That’s the goal, and we’re getting close."

"It’s been better than I expected. It’s exceeded my expectations. At the same time, it’s taught me patience."

"I think the scene in Kansas City has gotten so much better, and a lot of it is because of the alumni that have come out of UMKC since I’ve been here. They’ve all stepped up and have done their thing and have made a presence on the scene." 

"Some of the older guys in town started hiring the students…they ended up embracing the students. They realized our students show up on time, they play their ass off, they read, there’s no prima donna crap or baggage. Here’s this new pool of talent, and they jumped on it. And it changed the whole dynamics of the city. It just sort of changed everything. I think I can take credit for setting a vibe for what it means to be a musician and have certain morals, but I have to give a lot of credit to Dan Thomas. He has this expertise in academia that I don’t have, and he has the right spirit."  

"I’m not going to apologize for who I am, and the dues I’ve paid, and what I’ve done. I’ve owned it, I’ve paid my dues, I’ve sacrificed. My family, my kids growing up…not being home every night to see my kids take their first steps or hear certain words come out of their mouth, man. I missed all that." 

"I was ready to be called 'local'. It doesn’t bother me. The ego part is out of the picture." 

"When I was doing my interview, they asked me, 'What’s your vision?' And I said, 'I just want our students to go out and kick ass.' That’s how I think. And that’s what our guys have done. Our guys are kicking ass, man."

"There are certain relationships I’ve been built in my 13 years here…I can’t even call them students anymore. They’re my friends. They’re my family. The relationships I’ve built with people, it’s beyond words."