Barney Kessel Interview - Jazz Monthly - June 1969

Barney Kessel is too well-known to require a detailed introduction. Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma on October 17, 1924 he has been active in musical circles since nineteen-forty. An extremely melodic and lyrical improviser, his tastes in jazz are catholic. He has, for example, recorded with Kid Ory and Charlie Parker and in recent years has visited Europe with George Wein's touring groups. He has now made his home in London and opened at the Scott Club on May 12 with his trio (completed by Jeff Clyne and Tony Oxley). He is due back at the club on June 30, this time to play opposite the classical guitarist John Williams.

Barney Kessel is, by nature, one of the most likeable and intelligent musicians I have had the pleasure of meeting. I interviewed Barney at Polydor's London headquarters where we were able to play an advance pressing of his latest LP, "Hair Is Beautiful" (Polydor 583 725), recorded here last November.

Morgan: Barney, the reference books all say you were self-taught. Is this so?

Kessel: That's right. I had this news-paper round at home and when I was thirteen I bought a guitar for a dollar. I saw it in a shop window and liked the look of the instrument. I used to sit at home picking out tunes and trying to find the right chords to go with them. My mother told me I'd better make up my mind and decide if I wanted to play seriously. If not, she said, throw the thing away! But I knew even then that I wanted to be a musician and I also knew that I had to leave home and go to Los Angeles or New York to make it.

Morgan: You were, presumably, just too young to have heard Charlie Christian in the flesh.

Kessel: No, that's not so. I not only heard Charlie, I actually played with him, for two days. But he showed me a lot in those two days. I was sixteen at the time and he was a great help. But even then I realised that if I was going to make it, it was no use copying Charlie, much as I admired him. I had to find a way of being myself. This took a few years! Those first records I made under my own name, for the Atomic label with Herbie Steward and Dodo Marmarosa, I still sound like Charlie on Man I Love, Slick Chick and so forth. But that's getting a little ahead of the chronology. I left home for Los Angeles and was lucky enough to get a job with a band fronted by Chico Marx. Actually Ben Pollack was the man who ran the band. It was a good band too. It was made up of experienced guys like George Wettling and Marty Marsala and young fellows just starting out, like Marty Napoleon and me. Mel Torme was the vocalist - he was my room-mate - and the arranger was Paul Villepigue. The arrangements were good too. Paul died, tragically, about twenty years ago incidentally. Chico Marx didn't play much with the band. He just came on to do a few featured spots. After that I was with Charlie Barnet for a while then came Artie Shaw's band.

Morgan: What was it like, working with Shaw?

Kessel: I learned a lot from being with the band. Some of the guys in the band resented Artie's attitude but you've got to have discipline haven't you? He did everything a leader is supposed to do, stayed sober, got plenty of work and fronted a very musicianly band. It wasn't a rough, exciting band like, say Woody's but it played good music. We had some Buster Harding arrangements and some beautiful Eddie Sauter things. I remember that Eddie's Summertime was a gem. But we rehearsed more good arrangements than we ever played on the job, or recorded. Roy Eldridge, Herbie Steward and Dodo Marmarosa were in the band and I was part of the Gramercy Five when we did things like Scuttlebut and the Grabtown grapple. I was under contract with Shaw for a year, which was kind of unusual. I stayed the year then left to free-lance around Los Angeles.

Morgan: When you got to Los Angeles, who were the guitarists around at the time?

Kessel: There weren't too many. There was Allan Reuss, he was with Benny Goodman, AI Hendrickson, he was in the Coast Guard but he was stationed on the coast so he was still able to sit in. Then there was Dave Barbour, Irving Ashby and George Van Epps. But most of the guitarists around then were just making the change from acoustic to amplified guitar. I've always felt that I had an advantage here because I more or less started out on amplified guitar. I never had to undergo the traumatic experience of the change from acoustic It's a big step for a guitarist if he's been playing acoustic for years.

Morgan: You played on at least one date with Irving Ashby.

Kessel: I know what you're going to say! Five guitars in flight with Earl Spencer. Yes, we had a whole section of guitars going there, Irving, Arv Garrison, Tony Rizzi, Gene Sargent and myself. That was in the days before bass guitars, of course. It was difficult to avoid the sameness of sound. One of the guys did tune down, if I remember. But it would have been easier with a bass guitar in the section. That was the Arvin Garrison Quintet tacked onto the Spencer band for that one title. Arvin's dead now. He was married to Vivian Garry, the bass player and vocalist. The Spencer band tried to sound like the Kenton band and played a lot of pretty wild things. The other "progressive" band of the day, Boyd Raeburn, was quite different. Boyd's approach was unique. He played pop music as if it had been scored by, say, Stravinsky. Now that was pretty interesting. In fact it's an approach to pop music which has never been exploited since. And those Raeburn records still sound good today. The only thing that dates the good records of that period are the rhythm sections. When I was starting out a drummer once said to me "we're here to keep the brass and the saxes in line, to stop them racing or dragging. It's not our job to play interesting solos. We're the time-keepers" . That was the attitude of mind in those days. If you were a guitarist in a rhythm section and you tried to take a solo you were told to keep quiet and play the beat.

Morgan: But by 1947 you'd already arrived at a different way of playing rhythm guitar. One of the first occasions I can remember hearing you on record was on Charlie Parker's "Stupendous". You were feeding chords at the most tellingly useful points. Is that the way Bird asked you to play?

Kessel: No, I had been playing like that for some time. It occurred to me one night, at a session, that the pianist's steady four-in-a-bar was crippling my attempts to play in a perfectly natural way, so I broke free from strumming chords in a rigid style. In those days I was still young enough to play all night at jam sessions without feeling the effect the next day! I was playing at a club one night when Bird came by and sat in. After the session he helped me up the stairs with my amplifier and he was saving, "you know, like, man, I mean, you know, like ... " He went on like that for about ten minutes. I though he was putting me on until I realised he was trying to tell me that he'd enjoyed my playing. I was flattered, of course. Then about five days later I got a call to make a recording date with Bird. He'd asked for me to be in the band along with Wardell Gray and Howard McGhee. That was the Relaxin' at Camarillo session.

Morgan: You spent about two years with the Oscar Peterson Trio in the early fifties. How did you enjoy that?

Kessel: Well firstly, let me say that Oscar and Ray Brown are two of the finest human beings that anyone could wish to be associated with. At every level it was a wonderful relationship. They kept me on my toes whenever we played. It was as if I joined the trio at a time when I was just about capable of driving a sports car at sixty miles per hour, but straight away Ray and Oscar kept pushing that pedal down and I found I was trying to control a car at eighty! We got lots of things going with the trio. I learned to recognise Oscar's signals. If he played, say, a little figure in the treble it meant I could go into a chorus of two-part invention! I never had the least trouble over things like passing chords with Oscar, there were no clashes. But nowadays I like to listen to pianists rather than play with them. There are too many problems when you have two instruments capable of playing chords. And the piano can be such a dominant voice too.

Morgan: You've been in Hollywood for a long time. What have you been doing, apart from making those wonderful albums for Lester Koenig?

Kessel: Thanks. You're very kind about my Contemporary LPs. Well, I've been involved with nearly every aspect of the musical business. I've been doing a great deal of writing for films and television. I worked as an A. and R. man for Verve Records for a time. I was even on-camera in an early Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis film in one sequence! You name it, I've probably done it. There's an awful lot of money to be made in Hollywood if you're prepared to work. The work and the money have their effect on some people. They may not want to admit it but I know that a lot of them are not happy at the way they live. I've been through the whole scene. I've done the artist-starving-in-the-garret bit and the "God is Mammon" Act. Now I'm just about back where I was. I've turned full circle and I'm playing the kind of music I want to play. I'm being myself and that's important. I love people and I like to play for them.

Morgan: Have you any thoughts on the younger musicians of today?

Kessel: I think its wonderful that so many young musicians are so well equipped, technically, nowadays. Some of them can fly all over their instruments by the time they are twenty. But I think there's more to it than that. No one can be a good soloist until he's come to terms with himself and with life. You've got to have a philosophy, a balanced outlook based on experience. There are more talented musicians active in our field now than ever before, but I have a theory that the number of really great musicians - and by that I mean guys like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young - remains the same. At any given time there is still only a handful of giants. Not necessarily the same giants, of course, but never more than a handful. I must give credit to the number of really great bass players around today. One I'd like to mention, because he really heralded a new phase and has never received too much credit, is Ralph Pena. I love a bass player who keeps time and retains the essential character of the instrument. I've played with some bass players who spend a great deal of their time down near the bridge, producing upper register lines which conflict with what I'm trying to do on the guitar. When I ask them to stay in the more orthodox register they say ''but if we don't experiment we'll never learn how to do it". I say "go ahead and learn, but not on my date, if you don't mind!" Another thing that baffles me is the way a band can play a two hour concert of originals, sometimes without even announcing the titles of the pieces. The musicians hurl their music at the paying customers in the most unpalatable manner. Then when the public isn't too enthusiastic those same musicians are resentful and talk about "rejection". If they paced the programmes better then the audiences might react more favourably to new works. Anyway, a lot of the so-called "originals" I've heard are not, musically, of much value. Few of them appeal to me as strongly as, say, I concentrate on you and even fewer will last as long.

Morgan: Apart from the works of writers such as Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, etc. what other songs attract you?

Kessel: Well Alun, music is a pretty big world. I try not to close my ears to anything. Recently, I've heard various things by Tom Jones that I've enjoyed, and the other night I came across a nice song and a good interpretation. It was Dusty Springfield singing Windmills of the mind. And some of the Beatles tunes appeal to me. But I want to keep an open mind. I'm not going to play songs by the Beatles just because it's the thing to do. I'll play the Beatles songs I like. The important point is to listen to everything but to remain yourself. You can learn from almost any musical field but don't let it dominate you. I don't want to become, say, "The King Of Bossa Nova" or "The King Of Polka" or whatever. I want to be Barney Kessel, musician. I've heard that it got so bad a few years ago that if Stan Getz was booked for a job and didn't play bossa novas he didn't get paid. The bookers, the club owners, the audiences, they identified Stan with the bossa nova and that's all they'd let him play. It's different now, of course, but I don't want to undergo that kind of treatment.

Morgan: Can we talk about your new Polydor album? How did this come about?

Kessel: I cut it last November, when I was over here with Jazz Expo. I went to see the show and Alan Bates gave me the score. I selected ten of the songs and chose the instrumentation. It's one I like working with. There's a rhythm guitar and organ. The organ plays like a sax section, a solid, full sound beneath and behind the guitar. There's some fine songs from the show.

Morgan: You've altered the treatment in places. This one we're hearing now, "Ain't got no", you've doubled the tempo from the original haven't you?

Kessel: I think it lends itself to jazz more this way. I'm not "selling out" with this album. Listen. When the guitar comes on there, after the theme statement, that's me playing jazz. I'm not diluting the way I usually play. And I think I 'll get through to a lot of people with the tunes from a good show. Let's face it, this is a better commercial proposition than, say, "Barney Kessel Plays Ham Hawes" but my point is that I play the way I always play on this LP. Well, that's not quite true. I think I play better! I'm very pleased with the album

Morgan: How much of it was scored? In the coda of "Frank Mills", for example, the group goes into a beautiful vamp which sounds almost too good to be true.

Kessel: That was spontaneous. It happened quite a bit and I was very pleased at the way we got those ten tunes down before I flew home last year.

Morgan: What are your plans for the future?

Kessel: I'm living here now. London is my base of operations. I like the tempo of life and I'm learning the language fast . I'd like to do more records, play the jazz clubs, possibly do some writing for films and television and appear at the various jazz festivals here and on the Continent. Anyway, I'm booked up until November. After that I shall let things take their course. I'm sure it will work out alright!

Interviewer: Alun Morgan
Publication: Jazz Monthly
Issue: 171
Date: June 1969
Country: UK