The Trombone's Connected To The Lip Bone. - Revision history

Spider of Destiny at 20:24, 20 June 2026

2026-06-20T20:24:58Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 22:52, 31 October 2021

2021-10-31T22:52:43Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 17:09, 4 October 2021

2021-10-04T17:09:57Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 17:04, 14 September 2021

2021-09-14T17:04:46Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 23:32, 19 July 2021

2021-07-19T23:32:11Z

Spider of Destiny at 07:09, 14 November 2020

2020-11-14T07:09:36Z

Spider of Destiny at 00:05, 27 November 2010

2010-11-27T00:05:38Z

Fishbrain: Updated link to London Symphony Orchestra (The Orchestra)

2007-11-27T13:28:17Z

Updated link to London Symphony Orchestra (The Orchestra)

Maroual at 00:41, 24 November 2007

2007-11-24T00:41:34Z

Propellerkuh at 20:11, 11 May 2007

2007-05-11T20:11:20Z

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 JJ Jackson, he's one of the founders of modern jazz trombone. He had probably the best sound, the best tone quality of any of the guys. He also created a standard of cleanliness of playing, accuracy of playing. He stays within himself; he knows what he's going to do. He's kinda careful but at the same time he pushes himself to a great degree in terms of technique. He's not as wild as some trombone players, but he's great. He's a good person too. I know him a little bit. He's a perfectionist, a good writer. He used to live here in Hollywood. He used to write for TV shows and I think he wrote at least one movie. I learnt his solo from 'Yesterday'; I could play that exactly. I also learnt some of his other stuff from records with [[wikipedia:Stan Getz|Stan Getz]]. He's a strong influence.
-There are many others that had an influence: [[wikipedia:Carl Fontana|Carl Fontana]], [[wikipedia:Herbie Green|Herbie Green]]. Carl Fontana is a bit like JJ but he doesn't play as loudly. He's got tremendous technique; he's a traditional jazz be-bop player, not avant garde. Herbie Green from New York is a lead trombonist, a soloist. He influenced Bill [Watrous] a lot. Curtis [Fuller] is a kind of extension of JJ. [[wikipedia:Albert Mangelsdorf|Albert Mangelsdorf]] and other Europeans are strong influences. A guy called Phil Wilson from Boston who used to play with [[wikipedia:Woody Herman|Woody Herman]] ... Dick Nash, a lead trombone player from LA who played with [[wikipedia:Henry Mancini|Henry Mancini]] in the classic ballad style.
+There are many others that had an influence: [[wikipedia:Carl Fontana|Carl Fontana]], [[wikipedia:Herbie Green|Herbie Green]]. Carl Fontana is a bit like JJ but he doesn't play as loudly. He's got tremendous technique; he's a traditional jazz be-bop player, not avant garde. Herbie Green from New York is a lead trombonist, a soloist. He influenced Bill [Watrous] a lot. Curtis [Fuller] is a kind of extension of JJ. [[wikipedia:Albert Mangelsdorf|Albert Mangelsdorf]] and other Europeans are strong influences. A guy called Phil Wilson from Boston who used to play with [[Woody Herman]] ... Dick Nash, a lead trombone player from LA who played with [[wikipedia:Henry Mancini|Henry Mancini]] in the classic ballad style.
 If you go back a little further, there's Jack Teagarden, who was an unbelievable trombone player, one of the all-time classic guys because he played with Louis Armstrong; 'Tricky' Sam [Nanton] and Britt Woodman who were both with Duke Ellington's band; Al Grey who played with Count Basic; Laurence Brown who played lead with the Duke for years and years. Those are some of the highlights.
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 I started on the trombone at about nine or ten, but I was serious by the time I was about twelve. I practised a lot – our parents made us practise an hour a day, but we just started playing together and it was a lot more than that. I studied with some classical trombone teachers and learned how to read. I played in some orchestras, and at high school. I never had any plans, never thought about the future, and then at the end of my teenage days, I just went to college – North Texas State which is a music school. Partly a jazz school. They had some killer jazz bands, big bands. They were ridiculous and there was also a reading band, sight-reading all kinds of music. A lot of the guys in those bands are still making big bucks. At least four of the musicians I played with went on to play with Frank: [[Tom Malone]], [[Sal Marquez]], [[Lou Marini]] and myself. Great band. Plus the school had a lot of serious jazz players and they were older. They'd been in the Army and got out and went to college. They didn't care about school that much; they just wanted to play. We had all kinds of sessions.
-Then I went to the University of Utah which is a math and computer place which was really good. Utah was the cool spot, but I learnt something at North Texas too. This was 1969 and my friends were going to Vietnam and getting themselves killed. I wasn't too happy about that, especially when it all made no sense. But we all got swept up in the culture of the time. My father had battles with the conservative music teachers. That affected my school a lot because I was taking a lot of math classes at the time, so these disputes distracted me from the other stuff. Then Frank called. Before that I went to play with Woody Herman's band. I played some electric trombone. (End of tape)<br>
+Then I went to the University of Utah which is a math and computer place which was really good. Utah was the cool spot, but I learnt something at North Texas too. This was 1969 and my friends were going to Vietnam and getting themselves killed. I wasn't too happy about that, especially when it all made no sense. But we all got swept up in the culture of the time. My father had battles with the conservative music teachers. That affected my school a lot because I was taking a lot of math classes at the time, so these disputes distracted me from the other stuff. Then Frank called. Before that I went to play with [[Woody Herman]]'s band. I played some electric trombone. (End of tape)<br>
 I had to play classical stuff. I think the thing is that you either play the trombone right or you play it wrong. It doesn't matter what kind of music; it's either right or wrong. Within 'right', there's an infinite number of ways of being 'right'. It depends on your own body. The main thing is to be comfortable. I think that's true of any instrument. I think the key thing on improvisation and everything is to listen to the notes coming out the instrument and listen to everyone's notes with your conscious mind. If your mind is on the notes, then that's when you play the best. You have to ignore the mistakes and when you can completely ignore them, then they don't exist any more and it's impossible to even make a mistake because your concentration is just on pure music. That's the ultimate feeling. When you're done, you can't remember anything, but you know it was great. You have an impression of it because it happened in your brain and your body, but your body is part of your brain – it's all the nerves ...

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 '''Did it take long to learn the hand signals?<br>
 Some of them took zero time because it was just intuitive, but others were distinct signals. Most of those were really easy to learn. There were a few that I never learnt (laughs) especially on the 1988 tour. I just couldn't remember them for some reason. We memorised a lot of music, over a hundred tunes. The horns were in rehearsal for two and a half months, eight hours a day, five days a week.
-[[Category:Bandmember Interviews]]
+[[Category:Bandmember Interviews|Trombone's Connected To The Lip Bone.]]
-[[Category:1996]]
+[[Category:1996|Trombone's Connected To The Lip Bone.]]

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 No that was already done by the time I got there. What I would like to do some time is record the original version of '[[The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary|Greggery Peccary]]'. I have the score for that; it got changed a lot for the record. When we played it with the Grand Wazoo, that was a great version. I asked him if he was going to record the instrumental version some time and he said 'I'll tell you what. I'll give you the score and you can do it' (laughs) so one day, maybe ...
-It's one of his greatest pieces. The whole part where Greggery invents the calendar has completely gone; it's not there. And then when it goes into the fast threes, with ''[[The New Brown Clouds]]''; I think it was great as an instrumental piece. It still had a little bit of vocal stuff. I haven't figured out how to do it, but maybe if I heard the old tapes from the concerts, then maybe we could figure out what he did because I can't remember it exactly. 'Greggery Peccary' was one of the first things I ever did with Frank and I thought it was one of the best. We really learned it; it was incredibly hard. (Sings a bit) There's a bar of twenty-three ...
+It's one of his greatest pieces. The whole part where Greggery invents the calendar has completely gone; it's not there. And then when it goes into the fast threes, with ''[[The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary: Movement IV - The New Brown Clouds|The New Brown Clouds]]''; I think it was great as an instrumental piece. It still had a little bit of vocal stuff. I haven't figured out how to do it, but maybe if I heard the old tapes from the concerts, then maybe we could figure out what he did because I can't remember it exactly. 'Greggery Peccary' was one of the first things I ever did with Frank and I thought it was one of the best. We really learned it; it was incredibly hard. (Sings a bit) There's a bar of twenty-three ...
 '''What did you think of Frank's guitar playing?<br>

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-[[Bruce Fowler]] Interview<br>
+[[The Fowler Brothers|Bruce Fowler]] Interview<br>
 By Evil Prince<br>
 [[T'mershi Duween (The Magazine)|T'Mershi Duween]], #55-57, Nov. 1996 – March 1997<br>

← Older revision		Revision as of 23:32, 19 July 2021
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−	The third of our monster interviews with various ex-[[~~Frank Zappa~~\|FZ]] muzos, this time a huge long two hour affair conducted apparently, by the Evil Prince, while Bruce was driving to a gig in LA. No, I didn't believe it either, but that's what it says on the cassette case. Ah well, let's see. If this is any good, then there will be more of it next time and probably even in TD57.	+	The third of our monster interviews with various ex-[[Biography\|FZ]] muzos, this time a huge long two hour affair conducted apparently, by the Evil Prince, while Bruce was driving to a gig in LA. No, I didn't believe it either, but that's what it says on the cassette case. Ah well, let's see. If this is any good, then there will be more of it next time and probably even in TD57.

	'''Let's start by talking about your influences.<br>		'''Let's start by talking about your influences.<br>

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:09, 14 November 2020
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	Some of them took zero time because it was just intuitive, but others were distinct signals. Most of those were really easy to learn. There were a few that I never learnt (laughs) especially on the 1988 tour. I just couldn't remember them for some reason. We memorised a lot of music, over a hundred tunes. The horns were in rehearsal for two and a half months, eight hours a day, five days a week.		Some of them took zero time because it was just intuitive, but others were distinct signals. Most of those were really easy to learn. There were a few that I never learnt (laughs) especially on the 1988 tour. I just couldn't remember them for some reason. We memorised a lot of music, over a hundred tunes. The horns were in rehearsal for two and a half months, eight hours a day, five days a week.
	[[Category:Bandmember Interviews]]		[[Category:Bandmember Interviews]]
		+	[[Category:1996]]

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 We had a small group when I was going to college – alto sax, trombone, bass and drums. No string instruments because we felt that the chord instruments would hold us back from doing the harmonic things we could do without them. If you play with a piano or a guitar, then I think you're stuck within their jail-bars as Beefheart might say. You're kinda put in jail and you have to play somewhere round those notes that they lay down. It's a rare piano player that has enough ears to go with a soloist. Usually the piano player tries to push you in a certain direction. If we're playing music that's really structured harmonically in a certain style, then we obviously can't do that. Then when freeform jazz would come in, it was in the form of that music. In our group, we would play some sort of waltz then go into a rock and roll piece; that still could be free jazz if it's within a certain context of a broad view of music as a whole.
-That's sort of a [[wikipedia:John Zorn|John Zorn]] approach, but maybe not as formalised as him. That's sort of what he does. He goes from one extreme to another. Music as you know needs humour in it, and that's what we try to do, to inject humour into it at least some of the time.
+That's sort of a [[John Zorn]] approach, but maybe not as formalised as him. That's sort of what he does. He goes from one extreme to another. Music as you know needs humour in it, and that's what we try to do, to inject humour into it at least some of the time.
 '''It's nice to know that there is an avant garde in Hollywood and LA. Everyone talks about it being in New York.<br>

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 '''Do you feel comfortable with that situation, because I know you've done TV and film soundtracks?<br>
-I really enjoy that. It's a different thing completely. The great thing about what I do is that I get to write music for a full orchestra, say, or different groups and I get to hear real soon. The kind of buzz is that I'm just finishing up on 'Twister', and that's the kind of money Frank could never spend. He had a chance to play with the [[London Symphony Orchestra|LSO]] but basically it's just too expensive for one person to pay for it, but a movie can. It's a trade-off. You can't write just what you want; it has to fit the picture and the director has to like it. That's something Frank could never have done.
+I really enjoy that. It's a different thing completely. The great thing about what I do is that I get to write music for a full orchestra, say, or different groups and I get to hear real soon. The kind of buzz is that I'm just finishing up on 'Twister', and that's the kind of money Frank could never spend. He had a chance to play with the [[London Symphony Orchestra (The Orchestra)|LSO]] but basically it's just too expensive for one person to pay for it, but a movie can. It's a trade-off. You can't write just what you want; it has to fit the picture and the director has to like it. That's something Frank could never have done.
 But once you get past that, there are a lot of great things you can do, a lot of adventurous things especially now with all the new technology. You've got all these great musicians round here so you can get to hear your music played really well. It's all done very fast. Most movie music isn't too great but there are some exceptions. It's good to be able to do it. The film is the centre of the whole thing, so you have to balance things out with all the technical aspects. This was very interesting too for Frank. He never got to do it, but he would talk about it a lot. He wanted to do it as an improvisation and Vinny's made films that way. But generally nowadays, you really have to have it organised carefully beforehand so the cues fit the timing exactly. There's a lot of care that goes into it before we record and when we record, we have to do it fast. We don't write music that's as difficult as Frank because you don't have time to learn it, but we can do pretty hard music.

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 I'm also interested in geology a lot; that's represented on those records too. I go out and hunt for rocks and fossils. The evolution of life is super-interesting, as well as the evolution of before-life, all the planets that don't even have life on them. Studying all kinds of different things and being interested in other things, and other forms of art as well as just music can certainly help your music as part of the whole experience. I just feel a wide open view of the whole world and all the different kinds of people and music, just let all that coagulate and come out as the events will.
-I made a little plan with myself just the other day to puzzle out, at least a little bit, what Einstein meant by his general theory. I used to read about his Special Theory before, but I could never get anywhere with the General Theory, but now I'm beginning to see a little bit. Learning about that kind of thing and relativity is a great thing for musicians, because isn't that what we do? We put ourselves in the place of someone else and play the feelings of what certain experiences feel like in a musical way, and/or the objective and hyper-rational intellectual side of people's feelings which is almost an emotional thing in some ways.
+I made a little plan with myself just the other day to puzzle out, at least a little bit, what [[Albert Einstein|Einstein]] meant by his general theory. I used to read about his Special Theory before, but I could never get anywhere with the General Theory, but now I'm beginning to see a little bit. Learning about that kind of thing and relativity is a great thing for musicians, because isn't that what we do? We put ourselves in the place of someone else and play the feelings of what certain experiences feel like in a musical way, and/or the objective and hyper-rational intellectual side of people's feelings which is almost an emotional thing in some ways.
 So yeah, I'd like to study science. I think it's really important and it's good for opening your vistas and giving you a bigger view of your own life.