Steve Berman/The New York Times Johnny Griffin at the Blue Note in New York in 1997
All,
Johnny Griffin, who passed away at his home in France on July 25, 2008 at the age of 80, was one of the finest and most original tenor saxophone players to come out of an extraordinary generation of African American Jazz artists all born between 1920-1930 who completely revolutionized the art after 1945 with a highly virtuosic and dynamic musical style popularly known to the general public as 'Bebop' and as simply 'modern music' by the players themselves (e.g. Charlie 'Bird' Parker, Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Fats Navarro, Sonny Stitt, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gene Ammons, Julian 'Cannonball' Adderly, Horace Silver, and Sonny Rollins). At five feet five inches tall the nevertheless powerful and extremely proficient Griffin was a technical marvel on his instrument and a riveting virtuoso player who was highly influenced by Charlie Parker, and was well known for his own unique creative synthesis of the best and most advanced musical aspects of the 'Bebop' and 'Hardbop' harmonic and rhythmic traditions welded to,and immersed in, very rich blues and gospel-based tonalities. It was this disciplined mastery, commanding presence, and consistent artistic depth along with his height that led to him being called 'The Little Giant' by his peers early on in his career. It was a popular designation that not only stuck but was well earned. Coming out of the endlessly rich and fecund black Jazz, blues, Rhythm & blues, and gospel traditions and styles of Chicago, Illinois, Griffin-- like the city of his birth-- put his own distinctive and highly individual stamp on the profound history of the music. He will be sorely missed but his outstanding legacy can be found in hundreds of wonderful recordings that he made for many recording labels in the United States, Europe. and Japan. Long live the Little Giant!
Kofi
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/arts/music/26griffin.html
Johnny Griffin, 80, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies
By Ben Ratliff
New York Times
July 26, 2008
Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived there for 24 years. His death was confirmed by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert on Monday in Hyères, France. Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, embittered by the critical acceptance of free jazz, he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the American marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Europe, where he became a celebrated jazz elder. “It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything anymore,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.” Indeed, Mr. Griffin’s work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days. Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman. Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but mostly on the road. By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the Atlantic label. He entered the United States Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played in an Army band. Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became forces in jazz. He heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945 and, having first internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, became entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality. Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords. In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet. Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint in 1957. The following year he began recording a series of albums as a leader for the Riverside label. On “Way Out!,” “The Little Giant” and other Riverside albums, his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles for testing a musician’s mettle. A few years later he hooked up with Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, with whom he made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to find them either thrilling or filled with too many notes. The Griffin-Davis combination was a popular one, and the two men would sporadically reunite through the ’70s and ’80s. Mr. Griffin left the United States in 1963, settling in Paris and recording mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates, like the drummer Kenny Clarke, and sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, the Netherlands. He moved to the Côte d’Azur with his second wife, Miriam, in 1980, and then in 1984 to Availles-Limouzine, near Poitiers in midwestern France, where he lived thereafter. In addition to his wife, Mr. Griffin’s survivors include four children: his daughters Jo-Onna and Ingrid and a son, John Arnold Griffin, all of the New York City area, and another daughter, Cynthia Griffin of Bordeaux, France. Mr. Griffin stayed true to the small-group bebop ideal with his American quartet, including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington. The record he made with this group for the Antilles label in 1991, “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback. Every April for many years, Mr. Griffin returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase. During those visits he usually also spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York, before returning home to his quiet house in the country.
Johnny Griffin: In Memoriam
By Becca Pulliam
Andrew Kounitskiy
Johnny Griffin performing in Moscow.
WBGO, July 29, 2008 - Jazz musician Johnny Griffin, once billed as "the world's fastest saxophonist," died of undisclosed causes at his home in France on July 25, 2008. He was 80. JazzSet offers this remembrance.
Pianist Michael Weiss remembers the first time he saw Johnny "Griff" Griffin — onstage with Dexter Gordon at the 1978 Ann Arbor Jazz Festival. "The whole audience levitated off their seats," Weiss says. "[Hill Auditorium] was full of people going nuts" to the finger-flying, all-over-their-horns, roof-lifting, two-tenor extravaganza.
Weiss didn't even bother to dream that he would play with Griffin someday, but in 1987, drummer Kenny Washington brought Weiss into the band for an amazing tour. It commenced with 11 nights in a row, hitting cities across the country and, soon thereafter, Japan. The tours continued every year until 2001. Griffin looked forward to them: As he reconnected with his U.S. trio from his home in France, he would say, "I'm going to have to get ready to play with you cats."
As a student at DuSable High School, under the legendary Captain Walter Dyett, Griffin learned the reeds, including oboe and English horn. In the Army, Griffin was sent to Hawaii to play oboe in a military band; most of the soldiers drafted with him were killed in Korea. In New York in the late 1950s, he worked most notably with Thelonious Monk. Griffin's first booking as a leader at the Village Vanguard came in November 1959, but he moved to Paris in 1963. The concerts with Dexter Gordon — one in Ann Arbor, one at Carnegie Hall — marked his homecoming after 15 years in Europe.
Vanguard proprietor Lorraine Gordon cites a big old poster of Gordon and Griffin from 1978 on the wall and says, "He was a great star. Everyone loved him because he was adorable, lots of fun, a true musician in the best sense... He was an original. No matter what he played, it 'swang.'"
Weiss says he agrees. "Griff was fun to be around. He listened closely to what the other musicians played and enjoyed listening to the struggle. His eyes would light up, and he'd smile that big smile when he heard me wrestle with something. He was along for the ride. Although he was deadly serious about making music on the bandstand, playing jazz for him was a positive, joyous experience. That feeling spread to everyone in the audience. He had the people, all the time." Weiss last spoke to Griffin five weeks before the leader's death.
In the words of Dee Dee Bridgewater, who moved to France 25 years after Griffin, "[Johnny's] playing reflected his personality — crisp, soulful, heartfelt, clean, smooth. Johnny always had a glint of playfulness in his eyes. His outlook on life was youthful, and he kept that youthfulness alive throughout his life, even during his suffering.
"I rejoice at having had the opportunity of personally being touched by Johnny, laughing at life with Johnny," Bridgewater adds. Though writers invented the phrase "tough tenor" for Griffin and his few peers, Bridgewater calls him something else: "a true jazz angel."
Additional research provided by Alexander Hotz.
Michael Weiss Remembers Johnny Griffin
Long before he won the Thelonious Monk Institute Composers Competition in 2000, Michael Weiss established himself as a pianist. Fresh out of Dallas in his early twenties, he was soon working with Jon Hendricks, Junior Cook, Charles McPherson and Lou Donaldson, among others. He went on to play with Art Farmer, George Coleman, Frank Wess, Slide Hampton, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Following his Village Vanguard debut as a leader in 2006, The New York Times noted that Weiss was "a confident and sparkling presence on piano," exhibiting "sensitivity and logic, along with crisp control."
In The Chicago Tribune, Howard Reich wrote of Weiss, "Even at full tilt, his sound is sleek, his lines lucid, his textures virtually transparent." The New Yorker reported that his "shrewd writing and arranging skills [are] as clearly in view as his sleek piano work." Weiss's longest association was with Johnny Griffin. He played with the tenor saxophonist from 1987 until Griffin's death last month at the age of eighty. Shortly after Griffin died, Weiss wrote an appreciation and offered it to Rifftides. We are pleased to have it.
Reminiscing About Johnny Griffin
by Michael Weiss
Johnny Griffin was one of the great personalities and individuals of jazz, and if jazz is supposed to embody anything, it is individuality, together with improvisation and collaboration. Griffin was one of the very best soloists who could fully express their personality through their instrument. You hear one note and you know that it's Johnny. Everything that came out of his horn was a magnification of who he is. You don't even notice his influences anymore. He really played like nobody else. His phrases were so unpredictable. He had this way of abruptly lunging at things at any moment, but could also finish the same line with a sweet lyrical melody. Griffin should be remembered not only for his technical virtuosity but for how he used that technique in his overall expression, woven into the fabric of his style.
Long before I played with Johnny I knew all his records with Monk and Jaws very well and had even transcribed a few of his solos. In 1985 I had been working with his drummer Kenny Washington so when Griff's regular pianist was unable to make a gig, Kenny recommended me and I joined the band shortly after that. We toured every year up to 2001.
Working with Griffin was among the most - if not the most - exhilarating and electrifying experiences I've had on the bandstand with any leader. And not just because Johnny liked to play fast tempos. At any tempo there was a level of energy and excitement on the stage that never felt commonplace. Even after I worked hundreds of gigs with Johnny over several years, there was an intensity, focus and energy with each set that was unlike any other group I've played with. It was like mental weightlifting. Griffin, a real extrovert, had a lot to express through his horn and was such a commanding presence that he drew the same thing out of you. Having to solo after him night after night I was compelled to make sure my musical statement was meaningful and worthwhile. Accompanying him was also no easy task, but it didn't take long to realize the best modus operandi was to just stay out of his way. Overall, it was a great training ground to experience that level of seriousness of purpose and integrity on the bandstand.
Griff was fun to be around. He knew how to enjoy life and seemed very comfortable in his own skin. This generally happy demeanor was quite contagious. On the gig, he listened closely to the rhythm section as we worked our stuff out in our solos. He especially delighted in listening to us wrestle through a particular musical idea. During such occasions, I might look up and see Johnny with his eyes aglow and a big smile. He enjoyed the creative struggle and he was along with you for the ride. Playing jazz for him was a positive, joyous experience and he spread that feeling to everyone in the audience. He had the people in the palm of his hand all the time. He was very comfortable on the mic and frequently said some very funny things. But he was deadly serious about musicmaking - on the bandstand there was no nonsense, no messing around.
The Johnny Griffin Quartet was one of the few working bands in jazz that was still touring regularly throughout the 1990s. As performing night after night is the only way a musician can really develop and improve on his craft, I'm grateful to have been able to do exactly that with Johnny Griffin.
To hear Michael Weiss in two of his many collaborations with Griffin,listen to the 1990 CD The Cat and to Griffin's 2000 quintet album with Steve Grossman. Grossman, also an expatriate American tenor player in France, is an improviser whose zeal and vigor nearly match Griffin's.
Long before I played with Johnny I knew all his records with Monk and Jaws very well and had even transcribed a few of his solos. In 1985 I had been working with his drummer Kenny Washington so when Griff's regular pianist was unable to make a gig, Kenny recommended me and I joined the band shortly after that. We toured every year up to 2001.
Working with Griffin was among the most - if not the most - exhilarating and electrifying experiences I've had on the bandstand with any leader. And not just because Johnny liked to play fast tempos. At any tempo there was a level of energy and excitement on the stage that never felt commonplace. Even after I worked hundreds of gigs with Johnny over several years, there was an intensity, focus and energy with each set that was unlike any other group I've played with. It was like mental weightlifting. Griffin, a real extrovert, had a lot to express through his horn and was such a commanding presence that he drew the same thing out of you. Having to solo after him night after night I was compelled to make sure my musical statement was meaningful and worthwhile. Accompanying him was also no easy task, but it didn't take long to realize the best modus operandi was to just stay out of his way. Overall, it was a great training ground to experience that level of seriousness of purpose and integrity on the bandstand.
Griff was fun to be around. He knew how to enjoy life and seemed very comfortable in his own skin. This generally happy demeanor was quite contagious. On the gig, he listened closely to the rhythm section as we worked our stuff out in our solos. He especially delighted in listening to us wrestle through a particular musical idea. During such occasions, I might look up and see Johnny with his eyes aglow and a big smile. He enjoyed the creative struggle and he was along with you for the ride. Playing jazz for him was a positive, joyous experience and he spread that feeling to everyone in the audience. He had the people in the palm of his hand all the time. He was very comfortable on the mic and frequently said some very funny things. But he was deadly serious about musicmaking - on the bandstand there was no nonsense, no messing around.
The Johnny Griffin Quartet was one of the few working bands in jazz that was still touring regularly throughout the 1990s. As performing night after night is the only way a musician can really develop and improve on his craft, I'm grateful to have been able to do exactly that with Johnny Griffin.
To hear Michael Weiss in two of his many collaborations with Griffin,listen to the 1990 CD The Cat and to Griffin's 2000 quintet album with Steve Grossman. Grossman, also an expatriate American tenor player in France, is an improviser whose zeal and vigor nearly match Griffin's.
Johnny Griffin April 24, 1928- July 25, 2008
Interview from 1994
by Bob Bernotas
A few years ago a new recording came out that showcased five young tenor saxophonists. The album's title, inspired, no doubt, by a desire to cash in on the "young lions" craze so much in vogue, anointed its youthful stars as "young tough tenors." Well, there used to be a time when it meant something to be called a "tough tenor." It wasn't just a title your record label bestowed upon you. You had to serve your time on the frontlines of jazz, locking horns nightly with cats called Illinois, Sonny, Jug, Dexter, Wardell, Lockjaw. And when you finally earned the rank, the other tough tenors-not record producers or agents or publicists or critics-let you know. Johnny Griffin won his "tough tenor" stripes in crack regiments like the Lionel Hampton big band, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and the Thelonious Monk quartet. In the early 1960s he co-led a quintet alongside that underrated monster of the tenor saxophone, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. Then, in 1963, he emigrated to Europe and immediately became a fixture on the continent's thriving jazz scene. Griffin did not return to the States until 1978, when he was coaxed back for a guest appearance at fellow emigre Dexter Gordon's Carnegie Hall triumph. Now, every April, the 65-year old Chicago Southsider makes an annual trip to the US, a highlight of which is a week-long birthday gig (April 24) at Chicago's Jazz Showcase, either preceded or followed by a week in New York. When he's not on tour, Griff enjoys his idyllic life in the French countryside, two hundred fifty miles outside of Paris.
"It takes me almost an hour to drive to the nearest train station," he laughs. How did you get started in music? My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records. I began to study piano when I was about six. Then I studied Hawaiian steel guitar for a few years. I started on clarinet in high school when I was 13, all the clarinets, oboe, and English horn, then alto saxophone and then tenor saxophone. That was at DuSable High School in Chicago. Yeah, under bandmaster Walter Dyett. He made me play the clarinets first. I didn't want to play clarinet, but it's a good thing I did. Clarinet, to me, is the papa of the modern reed family. And he made me start playing oboe because the oboist graduated from school and he had this program of some music by Ravel. He needed an oboist in the band, which was good. It gave me another insight. But you really wanted to play the saxophone. My grammar school graduating class in 1941 had a little party for 13 or 14 year-old kids. [Trumpeter] King Kolax's band played for the party and Gene Ammons was playing tenor saxophone with the band. And that's when I said, "That's it!" Just like that, tunnelvision ever since. Ben Webster was my first favorite, then I went to Johnny Hodges, 'cause I tended to play alto like a tenor anyway. Then, of course, Pres, Charlie Parker, and Don Byas, a master. And then I was influenced by Dexter and Wardell Gray and Lucky Thompson. But I was also influenced by trumpet players, pianists, the whole gamut. I mean, Charlie Christian influenced me, Jimmy Blanton. So everything that I heard musically has influenced me one way or the other. I was playing alto before the bandmaster actually let me play alto in the school dance band.
Outside of school, I started playing with T-Bone Walker when I was 15 years old. T-Bone's brother had a big band and T-Bone was the star of the show. We played the off-nights in the large nightclubs on the South Side of Chicagoóthe Rum Boogie, the DeLisa, and the El Dorado. Walter Dyett was a big influence on you, then. He was a big influence on Nat Cole, Gene Ammons, Bennie Green, John Gilmore, Clifford Jordan, Pat Patrick, Charles Davis, everybody who went to that school. He was a real disciplinarian with the band. He could become a father-like figure in a way, too, with his kids. Well, you can see the results. Right. I graduated from high school on a Thursday and I was playing with Lionel Hampton's band on Sunday. Hamp had come by my school for some reason-I think it was a pep assembly for something, I can't remember-in about January or February, 1945. He brought [pianist] Milt Buckner and Herbie Fields with him. Herbie Fields was a clarinetist and alto saxophonist. [Griff likes to accent the second syllable: "sax-AH-phonist."] The bandmaster had me jam with Herbie and Milt Buckner and Hamp at the school. At that time Hamp picked up the late Jay Peters to work with the band, but Jay got drafted into the service a couple of months later. So when Hamp came back to Chicago in June to play the Regal Theater he needed another saxophone player and he looked for me. That's when I transferred from alto to tenor. All along I'd played with the band on alto and when the band left at the end of the week to go to Toledo, Ohio, I took my alto with me. I had always wanted to play tenor, but my bandmaster said, "Oh, the tenor's too large." I was walking on the stage at the theater in Toledo and the late Gladys Hampton stopped me and said, "Junior, where is your tenor saxophone? What are you doing with that alto?" I said, "What do you mean tenor?" She said, "You're playing tenor in the band." So I went back to Chicago and found an old Conn and rejoined the band. You played in the Army band during the early 1950s, didn't you? Saved my life. I had orders to go to Korea. Seven other young men who went in with me, Afro-American kids, all died. I had my orders to go with them, too. What happened was, when the battalion was graduating I already had my orders to go to FECOM, which was Far East Command, to go to Korea. On the bulletin board in the orderly room they asked anyone with any talent to put on a little act or something for a show for the officers. The officers were graduating and having a party. So I knew some soldiers who could play a little bit, and we got together a little group and got on the show. And a colonel there was stoned out of his mind. "Put that boy in the band," he said, the Army band in Hawaii. Other than that, I probably would have been killed, too. How did you join Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers? He sent for me. I met Art Blakey when I was playing with Hamp's band and he was playing with the Billy Eckstine band. I had seen him with the band in 1944 when they came to Chicago, which shook up the world. We were both in LA in 1945, and somehow, somebody asked me to play this jam session at Billy Berg's in Hollywood. Art Blakey was the drummer and we had been tight ever since. When I came out of the service he had gotten Wilbur Ware and Horace Silver to come and play with him, and he tried to get me to come with him. But I had just gotten home and I had just gotten married, so I said no. Then he had me come to do a record date with him at RCA. I think it was the music from My Fair Lady. That would have been back in 1957, and he demanded that I come join the band, which I did. It was fun. Fun, fun, fun, all the time. As it was with Monk, too. It's funny, 'cause Art Blakey always wanted Monk to come and play with him in his band, and Monk wanted Art Blakey to come and play in his band, which was ridiculous. And a year later, you joined Thelonious Monk's quartet. I had known Monk for ten years. I met Monk through Elmo Hope and Bud Powell, who I had known for years. I used to go to Bud's house or Elmo's house and play with Monk. And I used to hang out with Monk. Even when I was with Art Blakey we used to hang out together after he finished down at the Five Spot. Monk was one of the most influential and admired-by me-of all the musicians that I've ever known. He had such a rare sense of humor, not by overly verbalizing. He could say three or four words that could shatter an hour of malicious gabbing. He could shatter the whole conversation with just a thing that he would say, the cutting edge. He'd be walking along with that face, that facade like the Mau Mau, so the idiots wouldn't bother him. But behind that mask was a very warm, humorous person. I'll tell you something he did for me one time. We were someplace and he said, "See, I can play like Art Tatum if I want." And I said, "Get out of here, Thelonious! Stop kidding around!" He said, "Well, check this out." He made a Tatumesque run on the piano and my eyeballs and my ears almost fell off of my head. He said, "But I don't need that." So he played what he had to play, that's all it is. He didn't need to be making flourishes and doing pianistic aerobics. He just played what he wanted to play and he did it perfectly. You never heard him uptight, man."
Many people fondly remember the "tough tenor" combo you and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis had in the early 1960s. For me, the great thing about that group was that each of you had his own identity. There was never any doubt which one of you was playing. Exactly. We really had great contrasts in our styles. I could never understand how Jaws was playing. For years I was around him-he was like my big brother after a while. I could never understand how he'd do things. He put corks under some of the keys! I said, "Jaws, what're you putting corks-?" He said, "I don't need them, I don't need them." He didn't use the keys, didn't need them! I'm always looking for a way to put more keys on it, but he didn't need 'em. He played more for sound than for notes. And strong. And that style he had, why no one could play that style. Sometimes we'd call him "Little Ben," referring to Ben Webster, but he was really his own man. I was amazed at some things he'd do. I thought he was gonna chew up the mouthpiece sometimes. He did some athletic things, whatever, but the sounds coming out of that horn! I don't mean like "free jazz," nothin' like that, but what he could do! That book that Eddie Harris had out, intervallic exercises, why Jaws could do that with ease. And I know he never saw Eddie Harris' book, 'cause he was doing that before Eddie Harris ever put it down. Such strength! Wow! But today, with some of the younger musicians, sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. Yeah, I have trouble with that, too. I think it comes from the way the musicians have to learn their craft these days, being at the universities, the Berklee Schools of Music. The teaching that they give makes very fantastic technicians with fantastic abilities to play and to read. But you know, when I came up, and the other musicians like Jaws, Dexter, Wardell, Jug, jazz was not learned in the classroom. The "classroom" was playing in public, whether on some street corner, in the park, in some smoke-filled clubs or whatever. Or in big bands. I think that you need an audience to bring the personality out of yourself. You need other people for that. That's why I hate to play in the studio, 'cause I don't have anyone to play to. When I play I like the vibrations of people, 'cause it helps me create. I want to see people, not microphones. So I think that's why it's hard for you to tell most of these young cats apart, because they've more or less learned technically the same way. It's almost like having the same teacher. But while I had Dyett as my teacher, I never sounded like Gene Ammons or John Gilmore or Clifford Jordan or whoever. We learned how to play out in the street, I mean, in public. You see, there are no clubs like that anymore. When I went to Europe in '63, there were clubs everywhere, from Harlem to Brooklyn, all over New York. Now you have four or five clubs and that's it. And then all these wonderful musicians, they have no place to play, which is a pity.
Why did you move to Europe? Problems. Plus I had been well-received in Europe in the months before that. Coming back to New York I had family problems, government problems, tax problems. And the way that the supposed jazz critics were promulgating the avant-garde or "free jazz," I thought it was a bad joke. I thought it was a pity. I liked some of the musicians, but the playing was making me sick. I had the chance to go back to Europe and be free without the pressures here, people telling me what I could do and what I couldn't do, the agents in New York. And racism. There was such a big difference. Before I went, the record company, Riverside, said, "Go to Europe. Promote these records." "Go to Europe for what? I mean, New York, this is heaven." But I went to Europe and spent three months there and my eyes were opened. You know, America is very chauvinistic. "This is the world," that's what the soldiers say. "This is the world. The rest of it is nothin'," which is ridiculous. And being from the Middle West, you didn't hear people talking about Europe or Asia or anything. But there's some people over there, too. And musicians-especially now-over there. Then I went back to Europe, 'cause Bud Powell was there and Kenny Drew was there. Kenny Clarke was there. Dexter was there. I had a big family over there. Sahib Shihab, Idrees Sulieman were there. Memphis Slim, the blues singer, was there. Art Taylor came over the same year that I did. He had been over there earlier. And a lot of musicians were coming over at that time. In fact, at any given time I think there are more American musicians living in Europe than there are in America. They're always coming. Young cats that I don't even know, that I haven't met, but I keep meeting when I go to Paris because they're working. Well, the United States, you know what it's like here. Jazz music has a much higher profile in Europe than it does in America. It's really different there. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. I've been coming back for 15 years and I really know it's true.
So in 1963, there was enough work for you in Europe? Well, I worked six months at the Blue Note in Paris at a time. You could go outside of France to Belgium, Holland, Germany-the Germans started waking up to jazz-Italy, Spain, England, Scandinavia. So in that small area, there was a lot of music, a lot of venues to play. When I lived in Paris, it was the golden age of jazz there, at that time. Is it still good today? Yeah, really. I've had my compositions arranged for different bands. I played in Hamburg. I just did 10 titles there five months ago. I'm going to Stuttgart this summer with the band with five or six titles, to Frankfurt, to Cologne, to Munich, to Berlin. And then I'm going to be doing some ballads with a string orchestra in Heidelberg and some things in Holland with the Metropole Orchestra. And I'm doing 10, 11 concerts with the National Jazz Orchestra of France. Then I have my groups that I work with, French and Italian musicians in France. When I go to Copenhagen, I work with Kenny Drew. [Note: Pianist and longtime expatriate Kenny Drew died in Copenhagen in August 1993.] So it's a good way to be bobbin' and weavin' through all this. Sure, it's a good life. You did live in Holland for a while. Seven years-my wife is Dutch. The weather ran me out of Holland, bad weather over there. But there's a lot of music in that little country, 14, 15 million people, because the government subsidizes the small clubs and the musicians straight away. They subsidize classical music, they subsidize jazz-not rock. And in France, you have a Minister of Culture, he sees that jazz gets its share of the money. There's that interest. You see jazz on television. You hear it, of course, on the radio. All the different FM stations have "jazz hour." Unfortunately, that's very rare in the US. This country's changed so much. When I grew up, we had music appreciation class for eight-, nine-year old kids. I mean, we had to listen to an hour of classical music every week. It's no more. I went back to DuSable High School where I learned music. They were honoring my late bandmaster, Dyett, and I had one wish to see the band room where I had studied. There was no band room, there was no music department. They cut it out! And I can't tell you how many kids that program saved, kept off the streets, kept the kids busy doing something worthwhile. Why is that they always cut music out when they have any budgetary problems? They cut music out, like it's not necessary. They don't realize the importance of music for the emotional health of people. They're so busy commercializing everything. I think that every kid should be able to play an instrument, even if it only lasts one or two years. A little piano, a little something. It brings a sensitivity to the soul that will be missing later on if it's not offered. You write most of your compositions on computer now. How did you get started doing that? I was speaking with Dave Holland, the bassist, when he was doing this Philip Morris tour back about five or six years ago. He was talking about how he was using computers as a teaching device, also. And then I went to Chicago and met my daughter's boyfriend. He plays drums now, I think, with some rock band, but he was working for some great securities company or something. They have to watch the markets all over the world and he was working on computers. He had this Mac in his house. This young man couldn't read a note as big as this building. But he was doing music for Porsche automobile commercials with the keyboard he had, 'cause he knew computers. And I got interested in it. So I got me one. I play something on the piano and I write it into the computer. Or I play it in with the synthesizer-but usually I like to write it in-and play it back through the synthesizer and get all these different variations of sound. Synthesizers are OK for what they are. I'm an acoustic person, but this gives me a good idea how acoustic instruments would sound. And of course with the memory of the computer, which is fantastic, man, I can print all the music out and just hand it to the musicians, which is much better than my writing it out by hand. The computer just does it. With the software that they have now for composing, it's fantastic. Then I've been talking to Jimmy Heath out at his house and now I've found some French musicians who are doing it, which really helped me a lot. It just grew. I can't wait to get back to it with the ideas that I have acquired just in these few weeks since I left home. So France really is home to you, now. Do you think you'll ever move back to the US? No. I feel good where I am. That's not to say that I would never come back after all, but the way I feel now, I don't see no reason to go anywhere. I love it where I am. It's heaven. I can't think of any better place to be, really. I eat vegetables from my garden, fruit from my garden, and the people are nice around me. I have my music room with my piano, my computer, my synthesizer to play it back. That's my "rehearsal band." Of course, it's a safari when I have to go to work, but when I get back home, it's lovely.
Johnny Griffin still makes his annual birthday visit to the United States, with his week-long gigs in Chicago and New York. But he always returns to his beloved French countryside. © Bob Bernotas, 1994; revised 1999. Used by permission. All rights reserved. © COPYRIGHT 1996 - 2007 and Beyond - Mel Martin mel melmartin.com
