I made many more trips to Japan, nine in total, and I recorded many more albums for Marshmallow. More than once, Neil Swainson went overseas with me. Toronto boasts a surprising number of world class bass players, and Neil is one of them. He rates with Don Thompson and Dave Young in that category. It's interesting to me that both Don and Neil spent several years working with George Shearing. George was one of those pianists who settled for nothing except the best. He got Neil and Don. And so did I.
On one Marshmallow recording, Neil and I worked with a Japanese drummer named Kazvaki Yakoyama. He turned out to be the finest drummer I encountered in Japan. On another recording, with a quartet, my fellow musicians were all Japanese. The excellent Yakoyama was once again the drummer, the bassist was okay, and the clarinetist owed his style to Buddy DeFranco. It was a mixed bag of musicians that I found myself playing with on all the different recording sessions for my friend Johfu. On a 2009 recording, I had two Toronto guys, Neil on bass and Ernesto Cervini on drums, plus a Japanese alto saxophonist named Hirami Masuda. Masuda was not bad, and she was a she, a young lady alto player. It seemed to me, on my Japanese excursions. I played with everybody except the person I was supposed to have been partners with at the very beginning of my Japanese experience. I never did make the trip with Jim Campbell.
The Japanese connection took on a home component for me back in Toronto when the Japanese Cultural Centre entered my life. The Centre, in North York a couple of miles northeast of my house, was a large sprawling one-story building, which offered plenty of room for art exhibitions, music performances and everything else that touched on the arts. A generous man named Makato Matsumato, who had retired from the upper echelons of a big Canadian company, became a dedicated follower of mine. He collected every record I ever made, and it was Makato who promoted me at the Cultural Centre. The man I actually dealt with in arranging the concerts was the Centre's director, Jim Heron. Jim was probably the most amiable and reasonable concert orgnizer I've ever done business with. As his name indicates, Jim wasn't Japanese, though he spoke the language, and his wife, Masayo, was Japanese. She was as sweet as Jim was amiable, and I wrote a song for one of her birthdays. I didn't mind doing anything for Mr. and Mrs. Heron.
"How is Jim's Japanese?" I once asked Johfu.
"Better than mine," he answered.
I played many concerts at the Cultural Centre, some solo and some with accompaniment. One of them, with Dave Young and the Toronto guitarist Andrew Scott, was released on an album I titled Brand New Morning. No matter who I played with at the Centre, with a trio, duo or solo, I could always count on an attentive and encouraging atmosphere. It felt as if everybody in the audience was a friend. And, in fact, most people who found their way to the Centre became friends sooner or later. It was that kind of venue.
The trio on Brand New Morning made up the group I called Generations. That was because each guy came from a different generation chronologically speaking. I was the senior guy, Dave was the middle-aged representative, and Andy Scott was the guy from the youth movement. Andy was a guitarist I had an interesting relationship with. I first knew him when he was just out of diapers--or maybe still in diapers. His parents were none other than the pianist Marilyn Scott and the financial guy Bill Scott who became friends when I first arrived in Toronto. At one time, they lived on McPherson Avenue in the city's mid-town, on the north side with the busy railroad tracks at the end of the garden. I used to go over to the house, and play piano with Marilyn while baby Andy lay listening in his crib.
Of the three of us in the room way back then, Marilyn, me and Andy, it was Andy who became the most schooled in music. He graduated from the Humber College jazz program. Then he earned a Master's degree in Historical Musicology at the New England Conservatory of Music where he studied with my old friend George Russell, and in 2006, he graduated from York University with a PhD in Musicology and Ethnomusicology. Properly speaking, this young guy I knew as a baby became Dr. Andy Scott. He also became a husband and father, married to Mindy who's a lawyer, and together they're the parents of three young kids. One other thing he became was a wonderful guitarist, and over the years I've worked many gigs with him, usually in the Generations group and often at the Old Mill, a nice jazz room in the city's west end.
Japan wasn't the only foreign country that my second jazz career took me to. England reached out for my music too. First, it was in the English person of Alan Bates. He had a record company named Candid, and he produced and issued two of my 1993 albums, which were cut in Toronto. But in early 1996, at a jazz convention in New York City, I met a Scotsman and great guy named Alastair Robertson who likewise produced records on his own label. Alastair told me he was very enthusiastic to get me on the label, which he called Hep Jazz, and since the people he had already recorded seemed to place him right up my alley-players like the tenor saxophonist in the Four Bothers mode Don Lanphere, the all-round Toronto reedman Jim Galloway, the California alto player Herb Geller-I happily signed with Hep.
In June 1996, I flew to London and cut my first Hep album with a couple of English rhythm guys and a tenor player named Spike Robinson. For most of his life, Spike was neither "Spike" nor English nor a self-supporting jazz musician. He was an American named Henry who had an electronic engineering degree and earned his living in the engineering field. But after thirty years of his first life, he turned entirely to jazz and found an audience in England who loved his playing.
I became a Spike fan in a hurry when we made our record. We played mostly standards, the kind of tunes that jazz musicians like to stretch out on. Spike's stretches were to my taste, since he sounded uncannily like Zoot Sims. When the real Zoot listened to Spike, he thought he was hearing himself. Like Zoot, Spike played with a wonderful tone and he swung like mad. I loved Spike's music, and it was a great sadness to me that he died at seventy-one just five years after we met. He was a guy who made a lot of great music in the short time his career allowed him to play.
The second album I made for Alastair and Hep Jazz turned out to be what I consider my best ever recorded piano playing. I may have played better on different club dates and concert performances over the years, but never on records. Alastair had been keen from the start to record me on a solo album. Finally on June 1, 1999, I soloed on an album of songs by Benny Carter, the musician I revered from the time I was a kid, and it was this album that became the high moment among my recorded performances.
A few years earlier, in late August 1995, I happened to be in Los Angeles visiting Benny at his house when Peggy Lee phoned him. She was set to record Benny's song I See You the next day. Peggy was one of several singers, along with people like Joe Williams, Shirley Horn and Bobby Short, who were recording Benny's songs, one song per singer, as part of a tribute album titled The Benny Carter Songbook. The reason for Peggy's phone call was that she had a few questions for Benny about I See You. But when Benny told her I had dropped by, Peggy immediately asked to speak to me. Once I got on the line, she insisted that I come around to the following day's date and record Benny's song with her.
How could I resist a request like that from a woman like Peggy?
Next day, Peggy arrived in a wheelchair, hooked up to an oxggen tank. I didn't dare ask about her health because, between her and her usual phalanx of doctors, health was a complex subject. Besides, once Peggy began to sing that day, her physical troubles seemed irrelevant. The group in the studio consisted of Benny on alto sax, Peggy, me, John Heard on bass and Sherman Douglas on drums. Peggy sang beautifully, giving I See You a lovely treatment. Everybody, including me, was happy, and when I think back on the date in the studio, I think it may have been Peggy's last recording.
The great Benny Carter.
The recording of my own Benny Carter solo album for Hep Cat took place in a locale called CTS Studios in London. The studios were far to the north of the city by tube, and they were used regularly by the BBC. If they satisfied the BBC, then I figured they'd satisfy me. And, sure enough, on that day in the studio, everything seemed just right. The piano was a very nice Yamaha, and all the people working the job gave me a sense they appreciated the music I was playing. The engineer, the photographer, the tape operator, Alastair himself--all of them were quiet, attentive and completely in sync with the music. Few of Benny's songs would have been well known to these people, maybe only When Lights Are Low, which had the status of a standard, but the listeners that day seemed to understand that Benny's songs offered great and unique beauty.
I played ten Carter songs. Each gave me something a little different, but essentially, I had the feeling throughout the recording that the music in its easily flowing way was playing me. Or, to express my feeling another way, I played so well by virtue of the high quality of the songs. I had to play well in order to rise to the quality of Benny's composing.
Long before I walked into the studio, I put a lot of thought into the songs. I knew that what I was going to present in music was a picture of Benny the man. He was a person of high intelligence and an elevated sense of beauty. I set out to get that into my musical portrait. As an arranger for big bands in the 1930s, Benny had been a step above the regular arrangers like Fletcher Henderson. As a composer and arranger of music for Hollywood movies, he had the courage to break colour barriers. Benny was a man of many parts, and many accomplishments, and I wanted a glimpse of all of them to be reflected in the music I played.
The songs allowed me to do that. Wonderland was a composition that I could work many interesting things with pianistically because the melody invited me to do that. With Souvenir, I had music that operated on three levels: the melody, then a middle line that enhanced the melody, then the bass line. A structure like that begged me to make a fine piano piece rather than to just play a piece. That's Where the Warm Wind Blows offered a melody with a drama distinctly its own, and that was what I took advantage of in a couple of keys. With When Lights Are Low, a few musicians, notably Miles Davis, left out of their recordings of the tune the proper eight bars of the bridge. I felt the omission was definitely to the detriment of the piece. So I put the bridge back in, and I surrounded the song with a modulatory intro that took me through three keys for exploring the whole beautiful conposition.
Things went that way through ten of Benny's songs, then I added a composition of my own. I called it Conversation, and its purpose was to capture the musical shoptalk Benny and I had carried on with one another over the decades of our friendship. Naturally, the piece was heavy on modulations into different keys for the purposes of improvising and generally carrying on some musical explorations.
Benny himself was a modest man about everything he played or wrote or created. I didn't expect him to wax poetic about an album featuring his own songs. He didn't, but he wrote just the right things in a short liner note for the album, taking time to praise my tune, Conversation, in particular and my piano playing in general. It was just enough to let me know that this great man respected my music as I respected his.