I’ve told the story many times, but this morning a friend sent me a link to the show. Horace Tapscott, Billy Higgins, Michael Sessions, Juno Lewis, Roberto Miranda, and Kamau Daáood play in the Encino home of Mimi Melnick. Extraordinary! World-class legends playing in a hillside home! At break, Billy Higgins, the legendary drummer on the groundbreaking, late fifties Ornette Coleman records and countless sixties Blue Note recordings pulls out an acoustic guitar and doodle for a bit. He’s the greatest jazz drummer alive; what’s he doing on guitar?? Then during the second set he plays it in a piece with the poet, Kamau Daáood. Amazing. I’d been a part of the poetry community at the World Stage (the place Kamau and Billy founded in 1988) in Leimert Park for a few years at that point, but I didn’t know Billy other than hero worship and a few hellos over the years. But today, I had to share. He was a little in my turf, y’know!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tYrEP9F40E
I’d just recently written a song with another world stage legend, poet Peter J. Harris and the music that came out of me for that song was unlike anything I’d ever done before. I felt Thelonious Monk whispering to me to put the dissonance of snow in Brazil into the chords. Billy had played with Monk (Live at the Blackhawk – the first Monk record I’d owned), so to see him collaborate with a poet…I just had to take the chance to approach him.
I’d always received nothing but love from the musicians in the Los Angeles Jazz community, and they knew I was a musician. But, because I didn’t really play “jazz,” I felt intimidated to share my music. But that day, like I said, he was slightly on my turf, so I figured we’d have a common language, or maybe he’d at least appreciate the C 6/9 b5 that started the song. So I mustered up the courage after the set, and while he was eating chicken, he allowed me to play for him.
His head nodded a little as I played, but his eyes were mostly cast toward the meal in his lap. After I’d finished, he looked up and said, “Those aren’t cowboy chords!” I said I’d been thinking of Monk when I put ‘em together.
Then the next thing he said was, “Have you ever been to Brazil?”
I said, “No, I just kind of like the idea of it.”
“In Brazil, people play like this for each other, just to make each other happy,” he said.
And with that, he took me in the back room of Mimi’s house and began to give me private concert/lesson playing beautiful chords and rhythms, singing to me in Portuguese (or Faux-tuguese Kamau told me later) for about a half hour until the house had cleared out and Roberto had to drag him away. The whole time he played, my jaw was dropped. He’d say, “Then you could do something like this,” and he give a little grunt and go back to that sweet voice, playing and dancing in rhythm like he’d do behind the kit. Ever present, the magic smile I knew from seeing him originally on the screen in “‘Round Midnight,” the 1986 film I watched in Paris knowing I’d return to the US in a couple weeks. It was just too much joy!
I got in my car and soared to the Borders bookstore where my sister worked to share the story. Then straight in the door at home, I called Peter and told him the story. He listened quietly. When I finally paused, he told me – though he’d been a poet for years – when he had decided to write specifically for music, a friend gave him a tape of random things to inspire him. On that tape was Billy Higgins playing acoustic guitar. And “Winter in Brazil” came from that.
In the following years whenever I’d see Billy he’d shout out “Paradise!” part of Peter and my song’s refrain.
It’s amazing to see all these wonderful people in this video: Horace Tapscott and Juno Lewis (check out Coltrane’s Kulu Se Mama featuring Juno’s “Juno Se Mama”), both of these men had the warmest smiles (like Billy) and always greeted me like I was a valued young man in line to carry the tradition forth. I’m still not really a Jazz musician, but I had this amazing conversation once with Kenny Burrell and Louie Bellson about how it was all about the honesty in approaching the music and life. I’d like to think I do carry that tradition forth.
If you’re watching the video, I’m pretty easy to spot standing up in a plaid shirt and t-shirt. (It was the 90s after all.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI5o1B7rDyI
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