Jeff "Tain Watts," Part 2
Traps, Summer 2007
Need an intro to this transcript? Just check Part 1. And now, let’s get right to where Tain and I left off.
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So, “Tain,” how did you get that nickname?
It’s a pretty bland story. I was on tour with Wynton Marsalis in 1983 or ’84. We were in Florida, driving from West Palm Beach to Miami. We had three rental cars with a van and a tour manager, so Kenny Kirkland and I shared a car. We drove and drove. We actually drove through one of those outdoor safari places, with the animals and stuff. Anyway, we passed a gas station that had a profile of an Indian in a headdress; it was called Chieftain Gas. And Kenny decided that would be my name. He said, “Chief Tain? You’re going to be Jeff Tain.” I was like, “I don’t think so,” but I couldn’t stop it.
And thus a dozen song titles were born.
I’m telling you [laughs]!
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Meeting Branford Marsalis at Berklee seems to have been the key event in launching your career.
Branford was like everybody’s friend – the fun guy. He was good at parties. At night I would listen to him practice at the end of the hall, in the practice room. He was working on some Cannonball or whatever. He was playing alto exclusively. Even then he was trying to find ways to play a melodic way over the chord changes without going through them. He was definitely working on that. He’d talk a lot about New Orleans and the musicians there. I remember him coming to my room and playing me a tape of this high school small band. They’d play a little jazz and then they’d play some Brecker Brothers stuff and maybe some skunk funk – and Wynton was in there, maybe at sixteen. I was like, “Man, the trumpet player is pretty amazing.” One thing about Duquesne University was that they had a really strong brass program. A lot of trumpet players were addressing the instrument technically, so I had some awareness of what it took to pull that off.
Did you and he play together back then?
We didn’t play that much the whole time we were in Boston. We’d play a couple of gigs, but mostly we’d hang out at parties and talk. We jammed a little bit but we didn’t play a lot. He always had this attitude – not in a bad way, but I’ll tell you a story that says who Branford is. I brought this cassette deck from Pittsburgh. I had it in my room. Branford would come by my room to listen to music and talk. One day he said, “Man, that cassette deck is nice. I need to borrow it from you sometime.” I said, “That’s cool.” And then maybe a month and a half went by when I came to my room and my cassette deck was gone! Later on I heard about this party. Branford used to like to put music together and deejay for parties. So I went to the party and I was like, “Man, what’s wrong with this dude? He’s crazy!” Later on that night, maybe I had a gig or something, and I came back and he had brought my cassette deck back to my room. I was standing in the hallway, chastising him. I was like, “Man, don’t you ever do no shit like that again!” And he was like, “Well, I asked you if I could borrow it.” I was like, “That shit was a long time ago, man! Don’t do that stuff with me, man!” And in the midst of it, he took my Pirates hat off my head and threw it on the floor! It was like, “Are we really going to fight about this?” And I just had to laugh. That’s the essence of Branford. He’s a bottom-line kind of guy: “What are we really talking about here?”
He recommended you to Wynton. Did he just tell you that his brother had a band and they needed a drummer?
It happened like that. I guess Branford started doing a little stuff with Art Blakey, and Clark Terry had one of his young all-star big bands, and Branford was associated with that. Also, he started doing work with Lionel Hampton. So he starts putting more time in New York. I was walking through the dorm one day. Very few people had phones in their room; there were pay phones in the hall. This guy was on the phone, and he was like, “Yeah, man, Jeff just walked by.” He was talking to Branford. And Branford was like, “Get Jeff. Put him on the phone.” So I got on the phone and he said, “Yeah, man, my brother’s starting a band, and we were going to call you to do some gigs.” I said, “All right, well, just let me know when this happens,” because Branford would talk a lot of shit. Sometimes you could believe it and sometimes he would just be talking, so I invested no energy at all in that and just went about my business. It got close to the end of that semester when I spoke with him, and I spoke also with Wynton, and they were very serious. Then there was this interim period where I was still in school but I started to do a certain amount of stuff with Wynton. I think that Wynton was probably touring in the Herbie Hancock Quartet.
Was Tony Williams the drummer in that group?
Tony Williams was completely the drummer in Herbie’s quartet. Anyway, Branford was putting the band together when Lew Soloff called Branford to do a gig. He said, “I’ll do the gig, but let me pick the group.” So Branford used Lew Soloff’s gigs to prepare Wynton’s band. He called me, and we’d go to Kenny Kirkland’s house and rehearse.
Was that first rehearsal the first time you’d ever seen Wynton?
I’d seen him with Art Blakey. There was a seminar [seminal?] practice where we implemented some conceptual stuff while Wynton was gone. Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel [1976] had started to circulate; Japanese pressings were leaking into the States. So we got into this thing where we were superimposing triplet time over the primary time on standard tunes, like “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” or blues and “rhythm” changes. When I’m going through it, I’m feeling completely foreign and unworthy and unjazzy. A lot of the key to their success is that they just really believed that they belonged in the music. When I listen back now, the guys have some chutzpah. They’re in their roles. They’re being jazzy, but they’d both agree that they didn’t truly know that much. But my perception of them was like, “Man, how did they get all this stuff together? I’ve got to listen! I don’t want to lose this gig!”
“Everybody is trying to be a ‘cat,’ and I always wanted to strive to be worthy of playing this music.”
Even if there is something a little naïve in this music, there’s still something exciting here. These are young kids who are enjoying what they’re doing as they get into this world.
That makes it valid. I’ve come to a conclusion that everybody is trying to be a “cat,” and I always wanted to strive to be worthy of playing this music. Everybody works on their craft. They think that some magic door opens and all of a sudden you’re like a “cat.” But anybody who is sincerely trying to address the music, and they’re considerate of the other musicians they’re playing with, so that they prepare for it, then just when you’re really trying, you’re a part of it. It’s not like one day you become part of it. You are part of it, whenever you’re really trying.
What was the next step with Wynton?
I came home from Berklee for the winter semester in 1982. Wynton told me not to go back to school, so I went home. They said, “Don’t worry, the gigs are going to start coming.” So I left home in January of ’82. I told my family, and they were like, “Who are you going to play with?” I said, “It’s this guy with this funny name.” And they were like, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I said, “Yeah, it’s fine.” It was fine for about three weeks, with my parents seeing me sit around the house. Then they were saying, “Are you really sure? You don’t want get a job or something?” And I was like, “No, it’s totally cool.” Finally they called in March and said, “You’ve got to move to New York next week.” So I came to New York and stayed at Wynton’s house in the Village, and we started working. We did gigs on the East Coast: Philly, and Washington at Blues Alley. The first gig in New York was at Seventh Avenue South, the old Brecker Brothers club. It was pretty typical stuff: clubs, an occasional concert … In summertime we started doing major festivals in the States and Europe. It was pretty typical jazz touring, which was all new to me. I’m like, “This is great. This is what it is.”
By this time your parents must have come around.
Well, something that’s kind of funny is that my father was from Montgomery, Alabama, and he had not idea about any of this. One day he asked me, “What’s up with this band you’re in? There are five of you, right?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Are there any white people in the band?” And I said, “Uh, no.” And he said, “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to be with these guys. You need at least one white person in the band. White people will come and see you for a little while, but if you get just that one white person they’ll come to see him [laughs].” He was dead serious. But that’s his Deep South thing. Anyway, they were kind of skeptical for a long time. And then finally we did our first appearance on The Tonight Show. Bill Cosby was the host, and after that I didn’t have to hear about, “What are you doing?”
Your ambition at one point was to do studio work, but here you were, out on the road with the band. How did live gigs affect your playing?
I didn’t have a lot of experience at doing the jazz thing, so I was just trying to develop some kind of vocabulary. The gigs were becoming a blur: I’d have music to play. We’d play, and then I would go home and try to backtrack and get a little more vocabulary and learn more stuff. I’d make cassettes of people’s albums: “Okay, Billy Higgins sounds like this. [Ed] Blackwell is important; I should learn something about him because we were playing some of Ornette’s music.” But I was never nervous performing; that helped me out.
But did audience energy have an impact on you?
Well, one thing I still do now, and I have to kind of fight to resist it, is that when I’m playing at a club, usually I’m playing acoustically, so I’m able to play the room. I had a tendency then, and I kind of do now, to go “big room.” The sonically sane thing is to play the stage and let the sound reinforcement take over, but I try to play the whole room. We’ll be at the Hollywood Bowl and I’ll just beat the drums to death [laughs].
The Masters
In those early days, which other artists did you consciously study and learn from, whose influence we can still hear in your playing?
I tried to look at things logically. I looked at who Wynton had been playing with, so there was definitely Tony Williams, which meant I had to get better pretty quickly, just as far as playing the drums. And then there was Art Blakey, so I was trying to swing really hard. I liked his control. He had a little band, and he was really good at manipulating sound and putting his personal touch on arrangements. That’s what I got from him.
What about Elvin Jones and Max Roach?
There was a period where I tried to transcribe Max. I think I got only twelve bars of one solo together, which I will still play to this day. I don’t even know where it was from, but it was easily from one of those EmArcy box sets with Clifford Brown. I never transcribed Elvin, but I always gravitated to his time feel. Those triplet things that he would play with the time, those types of figures just naturally fell into my hands. But it didn’t come into my professional playing until later, because so much of the influence for the music we were playing was out of Tony Williams and I was just trying to get some of his devices and phrasing together. Later on, I stopped resisting my Inner Elvin and let it come out [laughs].
Did you go back in your listening to before swing, to guys like Baby Dodds?
I made some tapes of New Orleans drumming. I tried to get with that, listening to some Louis Armstrong stuff with Paul Barbarin, and Chick Webb, who was pretty ingenious. I was into Kenny Clarke, even though that was the beginning of bebop. Kenny Clarke stayed at my house one time. In 1983 I was living with a friend of mine, and her mom was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Kenny Clarke was doing a year-long residency in Pittsburgh, so he just happened to be there. I’m staying in Brooklyn with this lady, and Kenny Clarke came to New York to make one of those last recordings, like that drum thing where Andrew Cyrille and these drummers from different vibes got together. He flew into Newark Airport to do this date. Milt Jackson was supposed to pick him up, but he didn’t show up. So Kenny Clarke calls the girl’s mom, and she’s like, “You should call my daughter when you’re in New York.” So he called her, and she’s like, “What’s going on?” He said, “I need to come to your house.” She handed the phone to me and said, “Jeffrey, some man, a drummer, Kenny Clarke or something, he’s coming over. He needs to spend the night.” I was like, “Really?” I had a cassette, and I invited a bunch of drummers over to my place, and I had him play for ninety minutes and talk. We had some dinner and talked about Fats Navarro and Billie Holiday. Later that night I took him to the Village Gate to see Art. I wish I had a picture of that. So we went back to my place, and I went to spend the night at a friend’s house, and I gave him my bed.
How long did you know Elvin Jones?
The way my personality is, I don’t go out of my way to push myself on these guys to get to know me or like me: “Come to my gig! You’ve got to hear me play!” I’m the last one to do that. But mostly we’d go and get a drink or have some food and talk about things that have nothing to do with music. He gets into that space where he just looks at you for a long time, trying to gauge your character. I remember him always being really kind. I appreciated his being kind to mean, and I’d see how kind he was to other people – not just some guy, but someone of some significance, someone I would know, and someone he probably didn’t remember really well. But he’d look for that love and be really cool.
Did you have much contact with Buddy Rich?
I met Buddy Rich at one of those Kool Jazz Festivals. I guess he had some kind of ritual: He would finish the show, and these guys would come backstage with these pieces of canvas or big towels, and he’d get naked and towel off. They’d hold this thing there to cover him up, and he’d put on some other clothes. I met him; he was really cool. Some people told me he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson – he was pretty funny without the drums too – and they said, “What do you listen to?” And he said, “I’m checking out Weather Report; this Omar Hakim guy is good. And I saw Wynton Marsalis, and this guy Jeff Watts, he can play …” And I was really happy.
Elements of Swing
With a lot of the stuff you play in a meter, if you mute the band and play back only the drum tracks, it can be hard to find the one. But when you add the band, everything falls into place and starts to swing. Do you hear your playing in a similar way? And how did you grow to the point of approaching even 4/4 in a freer way?
There’s a purely musical approach that I got from going to see Al Foster a lot at the Village Vanguard, either in a trio with Joe Henderson and Ron Carter or in the group that I really dug, the Steve Kuhn Trio with Ron Carter. He had this thing that was an extension of Tony Williams, or really an extension of everybody. The techniques that he was using were like Max 2-K, with all these melodies popping out of nowhere and stuff like that. He had this way of playing, especially in a trio setting, where it’s fully orchestrated. The tune will start, and Ron is really holding the time, and Al is just adding things. It might be brushes for a second. Then there’s an entrance and the hi-hat will come in with a motif. The bass drum will come in. All of a sudden, it’s time to swing. The drum part really stands on its own as a musical statement. There’s always a valid reason for everything he’s playing. It’s not just like, “Okay, I’m playing a swing feel. These are the figures I play when I swing.” I tried to incorporate some of that.
And the type of thing you’re talking about, I started thinking about trying to emulate conversation. I started this alternate universe in my head, where if someone plays something my mind would go instantly to the converse. If I hear a rhythm, I hear the converse in that rhythm, or the holes in that rhythm, to formulate a vibe that will answer to what was said. Instead of repeating what was played, I’ll try to play a rhythmic opposite of it.
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How would you define technique?
It’s the means to an end. The goal is expression, so you try and have a direct relationship with that. It’s an extension of the human condition: You can study the language, but then there’s going to be a difference between the very correct language and the knowledge of slang. The ultimate goal is to communicate and to have as high a percentage of what you intend to communicate being received by somebody. It’s a little more esoteric than some paradiddles. It’s whatever it takes for you to get your point across clearly to the other musicians, first of all, so they know where you’re coming from and they can react and give some information back to you, and then as a group you can get a sound and a nice emotional thing and intent and vibe and give that to people. Then they bounce that back to you and you get something back from that; you’ve got that circle going.
Let’s look more at how you added the jazz stuff to your fusion language. That’s a good description of the essential elements in your style. Are they separate parts of what you do, or have they integrated into one thing in your mind as you play?
I definitely have those roots in playing fusion music. That’s some of the first stuff I played on the drum set, in addition to R&B and classic rock. I feel free to dip into various bags of experience, based on what I need at the moment. A lot of times, when I hear drummers now, there’s less dependency on the whole tradition. A lot of times I’ll meet new drummers, or I’ll have students who don’t have a lot of experience in jazz, and they want to be functional. I try to let them know that while it’s completely valuable to have all this information, to transcribe things and to not flee the acquisition of vocabulary about music in general and the history of the drums, the main thing is that they’re in a position to absorb music, as opposed to, “Learn these ten songs and then you’ll play jazz!” What’s the sound? What is the dance? Get the feeling of the music. So I have drummers play a shuffle. I try to let them know that when Ed Blackwell is playing all this complex stuff, or when Elvin Jones is playing all this displaced stuff with triplets, it you take that and look for the overall feel, this is what it is. I try to give people an understanding of Africa, as far as the drums, that feeling of the church and the blues.
How do you do this?
We address the shuffle and play it. And then, no matter what they play, if they’re swinging and playing eighth-note patterns against that, I try and quantize that through the overall feeling. If you can get anything with a really great shuffle, if it’s Art Blakey or ZZ Top or a nice gospel record, so you can sit there and hold the feeling, then they can absorb the music and not get hung up. Bebop is very valuable, but at times it can be kind of codified. The thing that freed me was listening to the stuff before bebop, like Papa Jo, when everybody was really personal and just playing things. It wasn’t so much of a bag. These guys could do any kind of gig. They had some mastery of the swing groove, and then when it was time to solo, they played melodies. With the combination of listening to people like that and also listening to Monk’s music, when you hear Frankie Dunlop, you hear melodies. You don’t hear bop licks; he’s just swinging and making decisions about how to help the music.
On a Mission
That first Wynton band was very influential but also controversial. How did you deal with all the talk that went with being in that band?
I guess everybody concentrated on being some kind of a family. Wynton was called upon to be some kind of spokesman at a young age, and I’m sure he said a lot of things he’d like to take back now, but part of celebrity is to push people out at a young age to speak with authority, like they’re qualified to be doing what they’re doing. At the same time he had this mission in his mind, as far as the music and respectability for the music, regardless of whatever he happened to be playing. He definitely had a deep love for this music, and he felt like he was almost alone in this mission. He would have not the best reaction to negative press: “They’re out to get us! Why don’t they like this music?” We banded together to support him.
You played with Wynton up until around 1988.
The first band lasted until the middle of ’85. That’s when Kenny and Branford started playing with Sting, and the second group, with Marcus Roberts and Robert Hurst, came along. I was with that one too, until early 1988.
You auditioned for Sting but didn’t get the gig. Perhaps, in retrospect, that was good because it opened up a lot of other opportunities.
A lot of people really dig Black Codes from the Underground. We had a nice sound as a group. I guess if I’d played with Sting, that would have been the end of my thing with Wynton. But in the second group I was able to really experiment with the rhythm section and implement all these time things that people play now. All this stuff on Standard Time and Live at Blues Alley, that mindset of playing with rhythm, came about at that time.
You started doing other work too, including some work with McCoy Tyner. How was it different to play with some of these older artists?
I like to play with different people and for them to get to know me for myself and my musicianship – not so much with McCoy, because he’s always been a gentleman. He’s experienced enough to take people at face value. I find myself sometimes dealing with people and, depending on how they feel about the Marsalis brothers, I have to get through a little veneer. I’ve even been around cats, we’ll play and hang out and get a drink, and they’ll find out I had that association, and it’s almost like, “Wow, I thought I liked you for a minute [laughs]! Really, you’re one of them?” I’m like, “Well, yeah!” “I came to see Wynton back in ’84, and you guys had those suits on and you looked so mean, I was afraid to talk to you. But you’re actually a cool guy.” But McCoy used me for the first time around ’86. I was still with Wynton. I was in L.A., and I did a CD with him back then, this thing called Double Trios. I guess Marcus Miller and Steve Thornton were on the date, and he wanted somebody in between to swing and play some other stuff. There’s even some stuff with McCoy on Fender Rhodes on there. But he called me, and I came in and knocked off four tunes. That’s like a blur, like, “I can’t believe I’m playing with McCoy Tyner.” He used to do little gigs around New York once in a while, like at the old club McHale’s [sp?], up on 96th Street, something like that. He’d call me at the last minute, and I’d run and do it. One of the great experiences I had with him, probably in ’88, was when I did a week of quartet gigs with McCoy and Freddie Hubbard. We played at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago, and I learned something about pacing. We had a rehearsal, and I was like, “Wow, I love these tunes. This is going to be really cool.” Then I went up on the bandstand on the first night, and I was really accustomed to playing with younger musicians. We’re playing, we’re swinging, and we’re building. Okay, now I play my bad stuff, and then I’ll move on to the next solo. And Freddie Hubbard whipped my ass like a child. It was pathetic. It was like, I ran out of stuff to play, and he just kept going [laughs]. I was just flailing at the wind. I had nothing left in the tank. It was embarrassing. I finished the night and I said, “Okay, I know how to deal with you guys.” The rest of the gig, I learned how to pace myself, to take some of their information and deal with it. I didn’t have to react to everything. … I get a call from McCoy every eight months or something like that, and I go and get a taste and get reacquainted and do the stuff that I do. It’s a nice balance for me.
What was it like to work with Betty Carter?
It was super-spontaneous. I’d always see her hanging out at Bradley’s, this club that used to exist in New York, a late-night musician watering hole/piano bar. She lived kind of close to me in Brooklyn. Many nights I’d be hanging with some people, and she’d have a car come and pick her up and give me a ride home. We’d talk. She was always really nice to me. But once I was in Bradley’s, and she was like, “Jeff, what are you doing Monday? I need you to do two or three tracks on my record. John Hicks and Walter Booker are going to do it. Will you play with me?” I was like, “Are you crazy?” So I’m glad I had a taste of that. When you’re talking with drummers, and rhythm section players in general, who have toured with Betty, it’s a bittersweet kind of thing. They really learned about playing in a rhythm section, but she works them hard. She has her own barometer for people’s characters. She’ll really tell people about themselves and how they’re living. While I miss some of that discipline, I’m glad I wasn’t around her enough to where she might develop some disrespect for me.
[break in tape]
… of particular importance to you as a drummer?
There was a period of time when I was working with Wynton. Different guys would come and sit in. Dizzy Gillespie was always really kind when he’d come and play with us. It was really cool. There was one tour of Europe where he was popping up all over the place. He used to carry this Chinese cymbal in an African sack all over the place. I guess he had some kind of diplomatic immunity; he could go through customs and not be bothered. When he’d come to sit in, he’d put it on a stand and say, “Do me a favor. When I’m taking my solo, just play this behind me.” I’d be like, “Cool.” The first couple of times I played with him, I just played the way I play, which is kind of random and crazy. He was having some trouble, but he was gracious and self-effacing enough to come to me and say, “You know, man, I’m from this other era. You can play whatever you want, but do me a favor: End it on the and of 4 or on 1. Whatever you do between that, just do that for me.” The music that he played while he was coming up, that’s how it breathed. Rather than be like, “I can’t play with you, you’re terrible,” he’s like, “Help me out.” I got something from that.
I’ll tell another story. I was working with the late Don Grolnick at the Sweet Basil club. I was playing with Ron Carter, who has always been very helpful to me. This is probably right after the Standard Time/Live at Blues Alley stuff, so I was really into trying all these polyrhythms all the time. So we’re playing, I’m feeling pretty good, and he’s taking a bass solo. I’m playing brushes behind him. I can hear everything he’s playing; I know exactly where the hole is going to be and I’ll put something in there. I’ll dice and slice, doing all this stuff. And after the set, he said something really simple: “What you’re doing is really great, but you should think about using what you do to help me do what I’m trying to do.” It was a mindset of helping, as opposed to playing things because you can play them. You get inside the head of the soloist and see where he’s trying to go. To filter all that stuff is just another application of the tools that you have at your disposal: Apply them in that direction.
In a way, that’s an obvious lesson to any accompanist.
Yeah, but it takes the right person to say it the right way. And he did. He was cool like that. Billy Hart told me something that was really cool: He started hearing some records, and he was like, “Yeah, I see you’re really trying to swing hard.” He told me something about dealing with the rhythm through undulating, like it’s okay to grab onto the swing, lock into it, and enforce it. But sometimes you can play with it.
You’re doing a sine-wave gesture to make this point. Yet there are plenty of times on records where you’re laying back and doing a straight beat.
Some music needs a tight groove. Some music needs to breathe. Maybe bebop is tighter and modal stuff is darker and looser. It’s easy to have the illusion of swinging hard at a fast tempo, because it’s more difficult to hear the swing of the individual eighth-notes. I want to have that clarity and play dense and play a lot of stuff, but at the end of the day I want to be able to play almost nothing at a very comfortable tempo and just have the naked groove there so it really swings hard.
Leno & Me
Looking back, what did your run with the Tonight Show band mean to you?
It was definitely a nice gig. They called us, and it was a situation like, “Should be do this?” It’s probably something none of us would have pursued, but it was like, “Okay, well, why not do this? We’re musicians, and musicians should try to do whatever they can do. Who knows where it can lead?” A lot of musicians would really like to have this gig: It’s a stable lifestyle and you’re playing music. The impetus is entertainment as opposed to art. You’re definitely in the entertainment world, but you’re playing your instrument and it’s okay. We all discovered that our lives and our careers were already fine without that, so while it’s a great gig for anyone there was also a certain amount of tension out there, just because they brought a New York band to L.A. There were musicians in L.A. who were saying, “Man, I can’t wait for that trombone player to die so I can get his gig.” Then they brought us out there and it messed everything up. It was like, “We have enough cats out here. Why’d they have to bring them out here?” I guess the main thing I enjoyed, other than the occasional silly sketch I was in, was just getting to play with all these people.
Were there guests you never would have played with in a million years, were it not for The Tonight Show?
Willie Nelson was cool. I played with Vince Gill a few times; he was really musical, because he comes so much from being a player. Al Green was really cool. I tried to tune my rack tom to get that nice doonk that he gets [laughs]. Then there were people I grew up seeing, who my parents really enjoy, like Johnny Mathis. That blew me away. And there was more contemporary stuff: Boyz II Men, Steve Vai, and people like that. Elton John was really cool. Little Richard was really cool. Both of those guys had that old-school thing, where it almost doesn’t matter what the rest of the band is playing because their sounds are so big; they just take over the whole thing and swing the whole band.
Did anyone from the show make any musical suggestions, or was that left entirely up to the band?
Jay never said anything specifically, but when the show started we were doing this mélange of music, classic rock to Weather Report or whatever. As it went on there was this chain of command in entertainment, so when Letterman started kicking The Tonight Show’s ass, then maybe the president of NBC was saying to the producer, “What’s wrong with The Tonight Show?” And then the producer says to the assistant producer, “What’s wrong with the show?” It filters down until it’s like, “It’s got to be that band.” So it went from “play whatever you want” to “play something upbeat and recognizable.” Those are the words they used.
Did anybody ever say, “Sound more like Paul Shaffer”?
No, but I’ll tell you, the band they really liked was Conan’s band. One of the producers was like, “That’s a TV band.” But they came up with the “upbeat and recognizable” thing. We had two different playing situations, where we would back up and musical guest and we’d have people sitting in with the band. It could be almost anybody: Nicholas Payton, Bobby Watson, Bill Frisell, or even some country people. One day Buster Williams sat in with the band, and he brought all that dark music, Jack. We were going into commercial playing “Firewater” or something like that, which is actually not that dark. After that, they said, “You know what? Just don’t play any more jazz [laughs].”
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What an interview! Love all the stuff you post but somehow this really stands out for me.
Fantastic interview. I believe this is the second career-long interview with Tain that I've read. They're so valuable. He doesn't often get asked these questions. Incidentally I'm pretty sure the club that sounds like McHale's was Mikell's.