JazzTimes – October 2019

JAZZTIMES.COM 37

a lot of my favorite jazz artists were

getting hit records: Roy Ayers, Norman

Connors, Joe Beck, Herbie Mann had

“Hijack.” So we thought we would do

the same thing.

We were more studio cats by then. It

was a clique. Everybody worked with

everybody. One day Luther Vandross

was working on David Bowie’s Yo u ng

Americans, then I was Luther’s guitar

player for a while. He was my boss one

week, the next week I had a hit record

and so I was his boss. If you look at

Chic’s first few albums, we had the

greatest musicians in the world and

many of them were jazz cats, from Jon

Faddis to the Brecker Brothers, to clas-

sical players like [harpist] Gloria Agos-

tini to the New York Philharmonic.

Can we go back to your roots?

Growing up in Greenwich Village

and learning jazz guitar...

First it was classical.

You started with classical music?

Absolutely. My classical guitar teacher

was Julio Prol. Julio was fantastic. He

took me to meet Andrés Segovia. I even

played at the Library of Performing Arts!

I really thought I was going to be a con-

cert guitarist at the start. Thank God I

had already been a classical musician pri-

or to meeting Ted Dunbar, because when

he gave me things like Oliver Nelson’s

Patterns [for Improvisation] and [George

Russell’s] Lydian Chromatic Concept [of

Tonal Organization], I could read those

books and play them right there in front

of him, and I could tell he was thinking,

“Wow, this dude is all right.”

Jazz was everywhere when you

were growing up in New York City.

My parents were beatniks. They had

a way of talkin’, they had a way of

walkin’. It was always cool to be a part

of that. Our house was a hotbed of

what we called modern jazz back in the

day, and it was the foundation of what

I was going to become—I just had no

idea at the time. I had to go through a

bunch of things on my own. I ran away

from home when I was around 14, and

by the time I was around 16 I was liv-

ing with my girlfriend at the time, and

I used to be a real hippie. The same way

my parents spoke in a bebop language,

I had this hippie speak. And you know

how nowadays you have sophisticated

ways of coloring hair? In the old days

we would just buy food coloring and

put it in our hair, and if the sun would

hit it right, you’d have a green Afro.

My music ideas were just as mixed

up—I remember wanting to put togeth-

er a band that’s [in hippie lilt] a cross

between Fairport Convention, Jefferson

Airplane, a little bit of Hendrix meets

Mahavishnu Orchestra, maybe Dave

Holland, you know.

Is this when you started going to

Jazzmobile?

I was around 18 by this point and I met

Dr. Billy Taylor and Ted Dunbar and I

got serious. With Ted, everything was

about reading music and playing and

being disciplined. But more than that

was just getting comfortable with mu-

sic, because if you’re going to play live

or on a session you want to be comfort-

able. You want to be able to hear all the

tonal centers no matter where you are

on the neck, which is what’s great about

the George Van Eps technique—you

can start to read music right away.

Ted could see how focused I was. I

don’t say this to compliment myself

because that’s not the kind of guy I am,

but he used to recommend me for a lot

of gigs, and one time I asked him why

he picked me. He said, “Because you’re

my best student.” I kept thinking, “I’m

still here taking lessons, I can’t kill it

yet, and there’s a lot of people that play

At the controls in the

Power Station, 1983

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