Interview with Elvis Costello about jazz
Jazz Times, 2002-05-01
- Christopher Porter
From Elvis in Ireland: Costello's Jazz Jones
By Christopher Porter
Introduction
Elvis Costello grew up in a house filled with jazz. The pop-songwriting
master's father, Ross MacManus, was a professional singer-trumpeter,
usually working with the dance band Joe Loss Orchestra, and Costello's
mum, Lillian, managed the record department of a store and often took
her son to jazz and classical concerts.
Even when Costello was tearing it up like an angry young man in the
late '70s and early '80s, his hard-driving songs featured elements of
sophisticated writing inspired by his love of jazz and its composers.
As early as 1979 he covered the standard "My Funny Valentine"
for the B-side of a single.
Costello brought in Chet Baker to record a trumpet solo on "Shipbuilding"
for the 1983 album Punch the Clock, and he has since collaborated with
many jazz people on his own albums, including the Dirty Dozen Brass
Band on 1989's Spike and Bill Frisell on 1995's live Deep Dead Blue.
He's also been a regular traveler with the Jazz Passengers, whose members
return the favor on Costello's great new CD, When I Was Cruel, which
features vibist Bill Ware and horn arrangements played by trombonists
Frank Lacy (who also plays trumpet) and Curtis Fowlkes and saxophonists
Roy Nathanson and Jay Rodriguez. Despite the presence of all these jazz
guys, When I Was Cruel is a raw, rhythm-heavy record featuring some
of Costello's catchiest rock tunes in years.
Costello has long been fascinated with the music of Charles Mingus.
He participated on Hal Willner's 1992 CD Weird Nightmare: Meditations
on Mingus, and it was during that session that he met Sue Mingus, whose
new book, Tonight at Noon: A Love Story, chronicles her life with the
bassist-composer. Costello has sang with the Mingus Big Band for several
live performances, penning lyrics to Mingus' instrumental compositions,
as he does with "Invisible Lady" on the Mingus Big Band's
marvelous new Tonight at Noon CD.
The following is a transcript of a chat I had with Costello, who was
calling from Dublin, about jazz, Mingus, Baker and his new CD.
Elvis Costello on His New Album
Just seeing the lineup before I had heard When I Was Cruel, and seeing
all the Jazz Passengers guys on there, I was expecting a certain amount
of jazz, or something even like your co-compositions with Burt Bacharach
on Painted From Memory. But the CD turned out to be your most rock record
in years.
I don't know about rock, but it's some sort of music--like a rhythm
record, some kind of rhythm and blues record, though I suppose what
I call rhythm and blues means something else nowadays. You know all
those words they keep changing the meaning of all of the time on me;
it makes it so confusing to talk about music.
Did you go about composing this record sort of in a response to the
more formal or orchestral work you've been doing as of late?
I don't know about in response, because I don't really think in that
way, but I think what you do is you go along in a vein in which leads
one thing into the next. In the last 10 years I've [often] worked in
a collaborative form, whether large-scale, whole album projects like
with Bacharach, or guest appearances with [saxophonist John Harle on
1997's Terror and Magnificence] or other people that I've sung with
[such as pop-classical vocalist Anne Sofie von Otter for 2001's For
the Stars]. I made a couple song-based records of my own in the mid-decade,
but in the last few years it's been really concentrated in ballads you
know culminating in this bizarre pop hit that I had in '99 with "She"
from the Knotting Hill film, which was such a surprise, an anomaly,
really, in all of the records I've recorded.
I mean it's very attractive to take up the opportunity to work with
Bacharach and to work on these highly concentrated, harmonic, highly
developed melodic compositions, and I wrote an orchestral score for
[the T.V. series G.B.H. in 1994 and Jake's Progress in 1996]. All of
these require a tremendous amount of concentration, discipline; to use
the notated, coded form of music there isn't a same degree of scope
for to put that kind of a bass on a record [laughs].
Having a fuzz box and a drum machine at home got me down another road
rhythmically, and suddenly I had a way to play rock 'n' roll that didn't
sound like I'd done it before and that's the most attractive thing.
Once I got working, I found the guys who, I thought, were not really
at all tainted by the past of rock 'n' roll or what part in it that
I played. They kind of had a new idea about the sound that gave us another
way to proceed, and we were able to perform very spontaneously. It has
that feeling. We just traveled to New York for one day to put the horn
section on, which we would have loved to cut live but that was kind
of impractical since we were recording in Dublin.
Do you think that your increased involvement with ballads and orchestrated
music was concurrent with the way you developed your voice? It seems
like in the last 10 years your vibrato is so much more pronounced than
before.
I think my vibrato was always there; it's just a question of tempo.
If I sing slowly the vibrato emerges. I think your vibrato widens as
you get older. There's people that would say, "It's certainly not
a good thing to let that happen, you know?" So I think there's
a point I think the vibrato is very attractive to some people, but as
you've noted and heard this record all the way through, you'll hear
there's hardly one note of vibrato in my record. It wasn't a conscious
decision so much as that is there's hardly any held notes on the record.
There's a lot of sort of short, very short notes, which is why in my
earlier records you could barely detect a vibrato, which was always
in my voice. Certainly I did try to warm up my voice, as the compositions
that I wrote in, say, the early '80s, things like "Almost Blue,"
certainly had more tenderness in them than some of the earlier records.
So I allowed that sound to come through and then it's become a predominant
aspect of my singing when I was working with Burt Bacharach.
Elvis Costello on His Early Jazz Influences
Most of the slower songs that you did earlier were your own but I know
that you did "My Funny Valentine" around the time of Armed
Forces, and jazz has always played a part in your life because of your
parents.
My folks' record collection was pretty rich in great stuff. I can't
pretend that when I was a tiny child I understood it all. I certainly
grew up in music, based around singers who were popular-song singers
who certainly had a jazz foundation: Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé,
Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday. My mother sold records, my mother used
to run jazz clubs that my dad played in, before they were married, even.
My dad was hearing music that was coming out of America like a lot of
English musicians. I mean, he's born in England, but he was from an
Irish background, but there are records of the local music scene in
Birkenhead, which sits across the Mersey from Liverpool. Recently, there
was an article looking back at the late '40s, early '50s jazz scene
on the Mersey side that actually names my father as the first person
to play bebop in Birkenhead. I think you should have it on a T-shirt.
Can you imagine what those early Dizzy [Gillespie] records must have
sounded like, coming from 78s? They must have sounded like music from
outer space.
My grandfather was a military-trained coronet player; played in ships'
orchestras, then he was a pit musician, so he had a very disciplined,
formal way of thinking about music and my father starts playing stuff
that was--his favorite trumpet player was Clifford Brown. So I grew
up with these names buzzing around the house. I can't pretend I sat
down at seven years old and examined all these records, but I was aware
that we had Charlie Parker records in the house, Miles Davis records.
I remember even when I was a teenager I was really absorbed with rock
'n' roll and beat music--what we called beat music--the Beatles, all
the English groups and Motown and Dionne Warwick and all that great
stuff. I remember my dad giving me a big stack of records one day that
he had been listening to and he thought I would be interested in, and
Oh Yeah was one of them--a Mingus record. I think that was the first
Mingus record I had. Certainly we had records that he was on in the
house when I was really a child, not even a teenager. That doesn't necessarily
educate you, but it takes away the mystery and the fear that when you
get out of the end of that teenage stuff, where you only like the thing
right in front of you, when you actually start to want to look beyond,
you're curious and the names you're familiar with are there to be discovered.
I remember going into my school library and there being a biography
of Coleman Hawkins; that's really unusual, I know, but some really hip
teacher put it in there. I just wanted to hear that record; you know,
"Who's this Coleman Hawkins guy?" It's discovery, isn't it?
It's what so much of it is about.
Elvis Costello on His Later Jazz Influences
When did you first start making connections with the Mingus Big Band
and Sue Mingus?
Well the first connection--I think what happened, when I first started
out, I changed my mind about how I was going about making music several
times. I was very pure-minded about music, and didn't even want to try
to make a living out of it. Then I realized I didn't want to work in
an office, and I was going to try to make [music] both my vocation and
my livelihood, and had very little success persuading anybody to let
me do that. And I narrowed my focus to the kind of songs that were on
my first few records, and once I had an audience I started to reveal
the interest I had in other music that--I hadn't to exactly deny it,
but that I just left out of the picture.
And also, simply by benefit of travel, I encountered more [music].
The first time I came to America and discovered all of the great second-hand
record stores that--we're at the late '70s now--I was picking up every
kind of record, from jazz records to country records to gospel records.
I'd just go home with a suitcase full of records every time I came to
the States. There was just so much more available--this was before CDs,
of course--so much more stuff than I could have been exposed to back
[in England].
After that first initial, very disciplined patch of two or three years
at the very beginning of my career, I went on all sorts of adventures
through my listening and among with them were periods when I listened
to, almost exclusively, classical music or to jazz. Early '80s, when
I was making records like Trust and Imperial Bedroom, I might have been
aware of the other pop records that were out at the time, or rock 'n'
roll records, but my chosen listening was Debussy or the 'Round About
Midnight album by Miles was one record I listened to over and over again.
And Chet Baker--I had lots of Chet Baker records. And Mingus. They were
all very different, just depending on your mood. And I found that I
went more and more towards instrumental music, even though I didn't
write it and it really didn't influence the way I wrote; you couldn't
hear the influence on the way I wrote except for maybe some of the placement
of some of the instruments and some of the harmony.
And all of this went on until, I suppose, '89, when I broke with Columbia
and I moved to Warner Bros. and I was given the opportunity to--I went
in with the blueprint of five albums, and they told me to choose one,
to basically do whatever I wanted, so I decided to make all five at
once, which was Spike. I had encountered the Dirty Dozen Brass Band
a couple of years before, and it was the first attempt to use people--to
use horns on a record in other than a quite typical R&B pop way.
They were a jazz ensemble that came out of the marching-band tradition,
and I actually met them when I was in New York with my mother.
I had taken my mother on a trip to New York, and being such a night
owl she wanted to go to the jazz clubs. So I took her into Sweet Basil,
and I couldn't get her out of there; she just wouldn't come out of the
club. She saw the Dirty Dozen, and that was it. She just wanted to stay
to the close. Then the next night we went to the Blue Note and saw Billy
Eckstine. It was just great. We had this great adventure, and a little
while later I got in touch with [Dirty Dozen Brass Band] and asked them
to play on [Spike] and that bleed into the record after that.
Elvis Costello on Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus
I had gotten to know Hal Willner by then and he asked me to play on
the Weird Nightmare record [in 1992], which was interpretations of [the
music of] Charles Mingus, but in all kinds of very extreme ways. We
were in Astoria, in a recording studio housed in the same place as they
made the Marx Brothers movies. And the studio was decorated with the
contraptions and instruments made by Harry Partch. It was the first
time they had been used to play anything other than Partch's compositions.
Cloud Chamber Bowls, the Harmonic Canon and all these imaginary--I don't
know what they were all called; they were incredible. And they were
all set up to play the 42-tone scales that he heard, so whatever you
did with them it was like discovering new colors or something. They
were great for coloring the music, and it was my first time I had met
Bill Frisell. Henry Threadgill was on that session. It was a terrific
lineup. Marc Ribot was on that session. And in the midst of this we're
doing this interpretation of "Weird Nightmare," which is based
on a percussion foundation, using the Partch instruments and totally
confusing tonality--it was in the vague sense of D minor. And Sue [Mingus]
is visiting the studio at this point to hear this, and I'm starting
to think, "Is she going to think this is kind of a travesty of
this composition?" Because you can't hardly hear any of the original
harmony until we hit the kind of B section and then Frisell came and
rescued everybody. It was very free. We did one take, which I thought
was pretty good; despite the strangeness of it all, I really enjoyed
it. And there was a, "Well, maybe we should do another one."
And I just heard this voice say, "Just fucking leave it alone,"
and it was [Sue]. And she just loved it. And I thought, "Well,
if she is the person who is here representing the aesthetic of Charles
Mingus, then I like this woman very much."
We did two more [takes] just to see, and it never was quite as good
again; it started to sound studied, and we started to try and play the
Partch instruments as if they could be played conventionally, which,
of course, they couldn't. The minute you tried to approach them with
any sense of logic, you lost everything that was good about playing
them there. So, it was a very weird introduction; you couldn't be any
further away from the root of the Mingus composition, but I think the
composition was so strong it withstood that [treatment], and in fact
flourished in it.
[Hal Willner and I] had been introduced and we had become friendly
and we talked about music a lot, and he knew that I knew all the music.
Over the years, once I had a little money, I bought all the [Mingus]
records I didn't have. I had all the Mingus records. Particularly I
had been attracted to him. I think I was attracted to the composers
of jazz more than the soloists, truthfully, because I'm not an instrumentalist
myself in the strictest since. I've never played a scale on an instrument
since I was seven years old. I can't improvise in that sense; I can
give you random noise on the guitar. I never learned how to do it, and
I can't site read. So I can't play classical music and I can't improvise
in the way that jazz players do. So, my relationship to jazz is much
more attracted to the compositional element. I was obviously very attracted
to Mingus because of the ambition of the compositions. I was also attracted
to Monk for the same reasons because the themes are so incredibly distinctive
and original.
Elvis Costello on Learning to Read and Notate Music
How do you write then when you are doing the classical pieces or orchestrations?
Just after I did [Weird Nightmare], before I met up with Sue again,
I started working with the Brodsky Quartet and when I realized it was
really self-defeating to maintain this mental block that I had about
musical notation, and I wasn't able to communicate very accurately to
them--and I had done some film music where I had composed the themes,
but they'd always had to be orchestrated for other people. Although
I enjoyed the experience, I was very frustrated that some ideas were
getting bent out of shape, so I enlisted some help with a musician here,
and I got through this mental block [about notation]. I literally had
a mental block about musical notation; it's a very foolish one to describe,
but I got through it and within six months I was writing, you know,
four-part string parts. And now I just wrote the 200-page orchestral
score with a pencil; I don't use computers. So, I learned really fast.
I've always been able to hear harmony really clearly, so it wasn't
a question of I didn't understand the music--I understood very well
what I was doing, I just had no need to write down--I had written 200
songs by that point--I just had no need to write them down because they
were pretty simple; most of the ones I wrote early on in my career were
very simple, and they mostly revolved around, 'Well, we're stealing
this kind of groove from a Supremes record and the chord sequence is
the Beatles and the way I'm singing is something else, it's all sort
of done by example.
Elvis Costello on Writing Lyrics to Mingus' Music
With the Mingus Big Band's new Tonight at Noon album, you only sing
on one song. But last fall you did several songs with them live were
you wrote original lyrics, right?
Yeah, I think we did about six or seven. I wrote some of them very
close to [the show in L.A. on Sept. 27, 2001] and I had written the
words for "This Subdues My Passion" about five years ago--the
Mingus Big Band and I were invited go down to the free jazz festival
in Brazil [Oct. 1997] and that was really strange because I had never
performed in Brazil my own material, and suddenly I turned up as a guest
vocalist with a jazz orchestra. Around the same time [1996] I worked
with the Jazz Passengers for the first time and also with Bill Frisell,
so I was starting to have performing connections with people who are
named as being in the jazz world, although I think of them as just musicians,
composers. I mean, I guess they're jazz musicians, but I don't think
it's the most defining thing about them that the word jazz is attached
to their name, to Mingus anymore than it is to [Jazz Passenger Roy]
Nathanson. They're just American composers of great note and originality
to me. I'm not saying jazz is a bad word, either, it just means that
it sometimes can be confining to people's perception of it, just as
I don't like the word rock.
Do you have plans to record those other Mingus songs?
I'd really love to. The performance of them in Los Angeles, particularly
the second night, had an unbelievable atmosphere. We had come into New
York on the 20th of September [2001], so the atmosphere in New York
to rehearse was extremely odd; among musicians that were just getting
back to work. We rehearsed there and then flew out to Los Angeles, and
although it was very far away, it was still very affected by what had
just happened. And the force of life in the Mingus music was just a
tremendous thing to behold. And you have to understand that my contribution
to this is--as I say, I'm not an improvising soloist, so in the same
way that a tenor player or a trumpet player might be part of Mingus'
theme, with an improvisation of their own devising, I'm only doing the
same thing as a lyricist and a vocalist.
Some of the time I'm singing Mingus' theme with words fitted fairly
accurately to that theme in the case of "Self-Portrait in Three
Colors." In the case of "Don't Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid
Too" I took a melodic line of my own invention that was improvised
at the time of devising it, and then I wrote words to complement that
theme, but it has a relationship to the Mingus composition. It's not
improving it, it's not perfecting it and it's certainly not proposing
that I've defined it, because the original composition still exists
and it still has its integrity, but this is another view.
That's the crucial misunderstanding that the jazz purist has of such
an endeavor--to do this with words is the same spirit as any investigation
of musical material by an improvising soloist, which is the fundamental
aspect of jazz beyond a certain disposition to harmony that isn't strictly
classical or as simple as you find in folk music or modal or any of
the other elements of music. To be suspicious of people from other disciplines
investigating the music using different techniques is a totally self-defeating
position to take in defense of purism, which as you know, any kind of
fundamentalism is deeply dangerous, particularly when it is brought
to bear on music.
What were some of the challenges of fitting words and melodies to some
of the harmonies and intervals that Mingus wrote? Are there any tunes
you attempted to write words to but just couldn't?
No, I discussed which songs with Sue. I was very attracted to "Don't
Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid Too," the most ambitious, I suppose,
of the pieces. I was very attracted to this film noire quality that
was in "This Subdues My Passion." They were written in the
'40s and very much could have drifted in and out of a Dashiell Hammett
story or a Raymond Chandler story. And this is very much true of "Invisible
Lady," the piece on the new record, that it is actually written
as a mystery story; the lyric is written about the elusive person who
comes to bring you beautiful thoughts about words or music but who doesn't
always arrive, but it's written like a murder mystery. I think the music
really suggested that.
"My Jelly Roll Soul," because it's such a classic--I was
reading a biography about Jelly Roll Morton about the time that I was
listening to that piece. I was just really struck by how many times
it referred to [Morton] being demeaned, being reduced to a cartoon by
society at the time. The whole "jungle music" thing, really,
it's very hard to accept that great composers like Ellington were made
to play caricatures some of the time, or be presented as caricatures,
when they were writing music of much greater worth than any serious
composer ever created in that same time period. It's just unacceptable;
we wouldn't tolerate it now because we have very formal, rigid rules
about those things, but then--so I suppose I wrote a more aggressive
text than you might expect for "Jelly Roll," which is a celebratory
piece, but it came out that way and it was an honest thought.
Again, that's the thing that a lyricist can do: You can have a beautiful
theme and blow it into pieces, can't you? That's also been done time
and time again in jazz really, really creatively. And I supposed the
lyrical impulse to do that same thing to that was too much temptation
for me.
Elvis Costello on Jazz Musicians and His New CD
Do you have something in your new contract with Island that allows
you to make something like Spike or like what you did with country music
with Almost Blue?
Well, I don't know how thrilled Def Jam/Island would be to receive
an Almost Blue. My contract is with Universal Classics, which when I
first signed on Polygram Classics did have Verve in that group--it no
longer does under the reorganization under the Universal umbrella. But
having said that, a number of [my] records have appeared on Decca, including
[The Sweetest Punch], the Bill Frisell jazz reorchestrations of the
Burt Bacharach co-compositions. I believe that if I were wanting to
do something with an ensemble that includes jazz players to a greater
degree than they are employed on When I Was Cruel [I could], because
it's not a dominant factor in the record but it's a very vital and beautiful
element of the record.
The timbre of the group--one of the things that influenced that greatly,
apart from the understanding that Jay Rodriguez, Roy Nathanson and those
folks have having played together very much, was the fact that I had
actually asked Kumba Frank Lacy to play solo trombone on "Spooky
Girlfriend," and when I booked the session I spoke to his agent
to make the arrangements and she said, "You know, Frank plays trumpet,"
which I didn't know. And Frank came along with his trumpet; now, a trombone
player playing a trumpet is a very different sound, and it's kind of
a rude sound that I just love. He was just the magic ingredient on top
of those guys that have the almost sireny effect that they create.
Roy understood that the lines I had written, particularly for "15
Petals," had an almost Arabic, or almost a klezmer effect to it
at times, and at the same time Frank brought this kind of rude--I guess
it's just his embouchure. It's just that [the usual] bright, crisp and
sometimes, I have to say, a little slick sound that some trumpet players
bring to those kinds of figures; this thing just sounded like sex. And
Frank just roared through the session, and it was just the greatest
and it was the very thing I wanted. I didn't want the horn section to
sound like a very crisp fusion section; I wanted it to sound like it
had come out of some African country we haven't discovered yet, or some
music from a culture we don't even know about. It was just this great,
unusual combination for sounds.
Elvis Costello on Chet Baker
Speaking of trumpeters, Chet Baker played on "Shipbuilding"
from 1982's Punch the Clock, and I read that he was mad that echo was
put on his horn, and I remember that you wrote once that you were disappointed
that it was on there too.
I think that what it was is that I have this sort of liking that kind
of reverb on a lot of things. If you listen to that record there's quite
a lot of that kind of reverb on all sorts of things. And I guess I heard
somebody do it on a Miles record or something like that, and we did
it once in the mix and it stayed on there because of the atmosphere
of the track. It wasn't a pure jazz [song]. It was a very unusual, very
English chord sequence that Clive Langer had written. Bear in mind I
had nothing to do with the writing of the music at that time, I was
just the lyricist on it; it had been written for Robert Wyatt t sing,
who is simultaneously very grounded in jazz composition but also a totally
English type of singer. And the subject matter was very English. And
Chet, when he first came in--I went to see him in a club; he was playing
in the Canteen in Coven Garden in London. He just arrived, as he always
seemed to do, kind of without any announcement, suddenly turned up in
London. Suddenly, I open the paper one day: Chet Baker's playing tomorrow.
I was in the middle of making the record. Steve Nieve had already played
on the Robert Wyatt recording, which had previously been made.
I had been speaking with the record company about who might play the
solo on this thing. I had got it in my head that we wanted trumpet,
and I didn't know any trumpet player in England that I thought would
necessarily be right to do it--except maybe my father. There was definitely
a sense that the sound I wanted was a particular plaintiveness that--I
was completely obsessed with the 'Round About Midnight record by Miles;
more than Kind of Blue or some more famous record. I actually had a
conversation with Wynton [Marsalis] about doing it--this was kind of
like when he had just made one record. We had one conversation on the
phone, and I think he was totally bewildered some guy from England calls
him to come play on a record, and he couldn't do it. It wasn't until
later that I realized that, "Hey, that's that guy I spoke to on
the phone, that Wynton; that famous Wynton guy's this guy I talked to
about doing the record." So, Wynton's not going to do it; guess
Miles isn't going to do it--who knew how to ask him? And there wasn't
anybody in England I trust, and I open the Melody Maker and Chet Baker
is playing the next day. And he's only my favorite trumpet player--as
far as I can tell, alive--that I can actually get to speak to, or so
I thought. Maybe if I go down there and ask if he'll play, all he can
say is, "No."
I go down to the club; everybody's talking right through everything.
He's playing so beautifully. He isn't playing standards. He actually
has a band that knows his material, which is very rare for him. He was
mostly playing "I'll Remember You" over and over again, but
[that night] he was playing these really beautiful modern compositions.
And at the interval he just walked off the stand, and he went up to
the bar and bought a drink and nobody bothered him--[the audience] just
kept on eating and talking and yakking. I went up to him and introduced
myself--he had no idea; he had never heard of me. I said, "I'm
a musician. Is there any way in the world you would consider coming
and playing on a session." He said, "Well, yeah, I'll do it
for scale." I said, "How about we give you double scale?"
So, he came to the studio the next day and played it. And he played
over the sequence [of chords] and it wasn't like any kind of standard
sequence; it wasn't like anything else that he'd ever heard. The structure
of the song is really unusual; it has things that look like they're
going to repeat, then they don't. So, we went through it a couple of
times, and he did the takes, and like I said, the one thing I regret
is in the mix that we [added echo], and I almost wanted to remix it,
but then we'd have to remix all the other elements, and the record is
very beautiful. And there is much embellished playing on the record
that's glorious.
From then on, [Chet] and I developed this sort of weird relationship
where when he'd come to town--I'd never, ever speak to him when he wasn't
in London--and when he came to London I would just go to Ronnie [Scott's
Jazz Club] or wherever he was playing. And here I was in the club and
he name-checked me, and all these old, very purist jazz fans would hear
my name and say, "Why did Chet say that guy's name?" And he'd
just leave the stand right in the middle of a number and we'd go have
a drink. I was sitting with him in Ronnie's, and some dreadful [vocalist]
in a pink dress was singing "Lullaby in Birdland" and he just
said to me, "She's got a lot to learn." She was just an appalling
cliché of a jazz singer. And he would sing with this incredible
delicacy, even then, even when he was quite sick.
We did one gig at Ronnie's that was taped, which was an amazing thing.
He had that drummerless trio, which was him and a bass player and a
pianist, a French and an Italian guy. I went to rehearsals and they
didn't even know I was coming; Chet wasn't there, I had to teach them
the numbers; we didn't have any language in common. They were very good
musicians. And the weirdest thing happened: as I was walking out of
my flat in London to go to the gig [soundcheck] in the afternoon, Van
Morrison was right outside my front gate. Van lived around the corner
at the time. He said, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm
going to play a television at Ronnie's with Chet Baker, believe it or
not." He said, "Can I come with you?" which was about
the most unlikely thing--Van would never say that normally. So he walked
in with me, and the two young guys that taped this thing had been trying
to contact Van for about six months to do something with him and, I
dunno, Nina Simone or something. So they got Van to sing with the band
[during soundcheck] as well. So Van did, like, "Send in the Clowns,"
which was just the most bizarre thing: Van doing "Send in the Clowns"
without a drummer and Chet playing "Send in the Clowns." They
taped the soundcheck, which is just as well because [Van] never showed
up for the gig. So, I dunno, that's pretty jazz!