Scott Robinson, fulfilling the promise

Former Kansas City Youth Drum Star Talks to JAM By Roger Atkinson, with Scott Robinson

Jazz at the Bistro, St. Louis, July 16
Pat Martino's music swings, hard. He has been touched by the giants that preceded him; not just the classic guitars of Wes Montgomery and Grant Green, but also the horn players that took the mainstream out to its edges, John Coltrane and Miles Davis being the prime examples. Martino's music is intense, makes the adrenaline flow, quickens the pulse, and won't let your body stay still.

Like he was at Birdland in New York several weeks before, he is being pushed by a drummer who drives a band much like Cobb, Williams, Jones, and Haynes pushed the those giants above. The best jazz has always been about the group and the soloists, how the players push and prod, create and release tension, find intricate melodic and rhythmic patterns, conflict and resolution between the players. The interplay between guitarist and drummer attracts attention. The drummer creates a rhythmic tension within the tunes all by himself, pushing Martino hard. The tension builds and releases. After a Martino solo, after every tune, he looks at his drummer, points and smiles as they know they brought home another outstanding performance in an evening – a career – home.

This is not music for the timid, for the faint of heart.

As Pat has ascended to his lofty perch atop the music world, his drummer for much of the past 10 years should be familiar to Kansas City jazz aficionados from the late 1970's to early 1980's.

The drummer is Scott Allen Robinson, the former boy wonder drummer from Lee's Summit. He is not yet 40 years old.

Birdland, New York City, June 3
“If I was to start my own band, he's who I want as my drummer” —Former JAM contributor Michael Ragan, after Pat Martino's first set.

Jardine's, Kansas City, May 25
“You know, Mike (Metheny), I've been wondering, what's a kid like Eldar to do? From an early age he's known where he's heading. At 17, he records a record for Sony and gains broad critical acclaim. Where does he go from here? How many talented kids in arts and sports have a life that seems predetermined, and what happens to them? How many get there and find it's not what they thought is was going to be?”

“Interesting question, it will be fun to watch Eldar grow though, won't it? And you know, there was a kid around here about 25 years ago, a talented drummer named Scott Robinson, he played with big names when they came to town, similar to Eldar. I wonder where he is now?”

The Scott Robinson Story
“Both of my parents were musicians. They met in the Cincinnati Symphony. My dad was the principal percussionist there, and my mom was a violinist. So, we had a set of drums in the house. My dad played the drums for burlesque in those days. Back then those places were different than they are today. It was almost like vaudeville. He never considered himself to be a great drum set player. Anyway, we had the drums there, and naturally I would go play around on them, like any kid. I don't remember how I got serious about it. I remember my dad showing me things, how to hold the sticks, how to move the wrists and the arms. I was around seven then.

“By the time I was eight I started to get more self motivated. Both of my parents saw that I was naturally drawn towards it. I wanted to play along with records all the time. And so the journey began, and my dad started teaching me, first showing me all the rudiments, all the basic essentials. He actually wrote out a huge amount of material for me over the years. In fact, if at some point it was practical, I'd love to publish it under his name. He was a great drum set teacher, the best I ever could have had.

“I think the first time I played publicly I was nine years old. There were a couple of things, both in Lee's Summit. One was with a great singer from the swing era, Connie Haines, I think she was with Tommy Dorsey. I remember her being a great entertainer. She heard me play, and said ‘we have to get him out on stage!' So I want out and played one of the arrangements I had learned, it might have been ‘Perdido' or ‘Cute'. They were little showcase numbers that my dad wrote out for me. And then on the weekends I had like a regular job at Pappy's Pizza (laughs). It was just me and a gentleman who played guitar and sang. My big feature number was ‘Wipeout.'

The Memorable Gigs
“There were a string of things that were very memorable, because many of the people are no longer around, and I was very fortunate to have the opportunity not just to play with these people, but to just be there. They are a huge part of the history of the music, it was like bumping into Mozart or Beethoven.

“I played with Zoot Sims in Wichita, at the Wichita Jazz Festival. I was about ten. I sat in with the All-Stars, it was Zoot, Clark Terry, Al Cohn, Carl Fontana, Milt Hinton, Hank Jones. I pretty much knew who they were; I have a deeper appreciation now. Make no mistake, I knew who they were. You know when you are around the real thing, people who have been around the music since its infancy. It was an interesting experience. We had this arrangement; we brought charts in. Jazz musicians hate to read charts, at least that generation did. We rehearsed this tune, got it, no problems. So it comes time for the performance, and I come out, the spotlight's on me, I have this introduction at the beginning of the piece, a little four bar tag, then the band comes in. I do my thing, and no band, nobody came in. I'm just in the breeze out there. I actually stopped, after trying to do something to pull it together. Then I did it again, and nothing happened, these guys are just looking at the music. I remember Clark Terry had his glasses on top of his head, looking at the music like he had never seen anything like this before. I don't know what this was all about, because we had rehearsed it and all. Maybe a sabotage kind of thing, we're gonna toughen this kid up, or something. But whatever it was, it worked to my advantage because it taught me at a real early age to keep my cool on stage and taught me how to handle really difficult, awkward moments like that. I mean, what am I going to do, there's this silence in the hall, there's a hush in the audience. Finally the guys came in, but they came in with this ridiculous tempo. It wasn't even close to where it was supposed to be. I remember my dad telling me later, he was thinking what am I going to do now, with them playing the wrong tempo. He said he then realized that I was for real, it was the kind of thing that separates the men from the boys. I forced these guys to a gradual ascent into the right tempo, I pushed the band's tempo up. For a more seasoned player, that's the normal thing to do. But I was ten years old.

“There was a drum battle with Max Roach, at the Charlie Parker Foundation. It was broadcast live on a local radio station. They broadcast it as if it were a fight: ‘in this corner you have Max, in that corner you have little Scotty Robinson. Now Max is coming out,' etc. It was actually pretty effective. Oh, I won that, by the way. I don't think Max was expecting me to be able to pull off as many licks as I could at that time. All credit and respect to Max Roach, but I won (laughs). The head of the Charlie Parker Foundation, Eddie Baker, he was a beautiful, beautiful man. He was scrimping by, trying to make the Foundation work, he was amazing at pulling things together. He gave me opportunities I would have never had anywhere else. I was eleven.

“The next big one with Eddie Baker was the tribute to Count Basie, it was called the Count Basie Bash, I think. It was held in one of the huge theaters downtown. It was amazing, Eddie Baker brought in every living legend of jazz. Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Jo Jones, the Basie Band, Dave Brubeck; I can't remember all the names, but you get the picture. I remember prior to the concert at the Parker Foundation, which was on Troost, there are limos pulling up right and left, and these stars of jazz were getting out and walking into the Foundation. They were holding press conferences, it was a huge event. He got all of these people to come to Kansas City to play for nothing or next to nothing. How did he do that?

“This was the first time I played with my band, we had a funky, rocked-out version of ‘Caravan' that we played. I have a video, looking back, I was just a teeny guy, my suit was too big, my bow tie was as big as my head… I was a little kid. But I didn't feel like it. The Basie band was coming on after us, they were sitting off to the back. And they started to play along with us! In turned into an incredible performance, actually. I had one of the great Kansas City saxophonists with me, Charles Perkins, at that time his name was Bill, he was and is an amazing talent, he was the ‘wonder kid' at the Foundation, they called him ‘little Bird' because he sounded so much like Charlie Parker. I guess he was about 21, he's about 10 years older than me. Either Paul Smith or Mike Ning on piano. The audience really went nuts for us. There was an energy that we had when we played that kind of stuck out because we were so young and so eager to do it. We just played with all the heart and soul that we had. And the people went nuts, it was like the Beatles. And at the end when the Basie band started playing horn riffs, and it turned into this enormous ensemble, the Basie band with us, it was an amazing experience. We brought the house down!

“Eddie Baker and this beautiful man, Carroll Jenkins, he was an angel, he helped me so much. He worked with Eddie Baker at the Parker Foundation, he was behind me all the way, he organized so many things for me. He and Eddie Baker were responsible for many beautiful moments in my life.

“One thing they organized was an opportunity to play with Charlie Mingus, it couldn't have been more than a year before he died. They had to help him on stage, they put the bass in his hands and he played his ass off. He was a real beautiful person, I have heard the opposite, but he was a great guy. I sat in with him and we played a tune, it was great to have a chance to do that. “Our band was the warm-up band for Buddy Rich at the Uptown. It might have been Carmell Jones on trumpet, another beautiful person, I was fortunate to be able to learn from him. Buddy came out and sat behind my dad, right up front, and stayed there for the whole performance, just watching, until we were finished. For Buddy, that was a statement, he would never do that unless he wanted to. Then Buddy came out, played about eight tunes, then grabbed a microphone and came out front, like he always did. He was like a Don Rickles character, a terrific entertainer, he'd live up to his nasty reputation, insulting the audience. And he says, ‘Did you see that kid out here a while ago? Louie and I have this thing we do, you grab one arm, I'll grab the other, we'll take him out back and break his arms.' It was great; he was my living hero. But the biggest compliment to me came during his drum solo. He was watching me, and he pulled off this little trick that I did on my solo. I was like, wow. He was tipping his hat to me. Saying ‘okay, kid, I noticed you.' I'll always remember that.

On to New York
“I had left high school after my sophomore year and went to New York. I got a GED, which means I learned everything in two to three months took the test, and completely forgot it afterwards. I don't recommend it to anybody, no matter what you're pursuing. It simply made my life difficult. If I could do it over, I wouldn't have done it that way again, but at the time it seemed right.

“I was attending Long Island University. I had gotten Lew Tabackin's phone number from an old friend, Arne Lawrence. He told me that Lew and Toshiko (Akiyoshi) were currently looking for a drummer, because their current drummer, Joey Baron, had given notice. I called up Lew, introduced myself, and Lew said sure, come by to rehearsal. I went and played through it. I played reasonably well, Toshiko seemed unaffected by it, as was Lew. I couldn't tell anything from either of them, and didn't hear from them for about a month or two. Then, as these things happen in jazz, they call me up and said they needed a drummer for that night. I hadn't played their music since the rehearsal, had forgotten it, but I showed up, hiked up my pants, and read through her charts, which were quite difficult, very complicated jazz arrangements. I was flying on adrenaline and my natural ability, and everyone in the band loved it. I had played my ass off, and got the approval of the band, the sax section turning around and nodding at me, getting a lot of thumbs up. I remember Toshiko pulling me aside after it was over, and saying ‘Alright, I want you to know that I will need to work with you, this is not Buddy Rich's band, you cannot play like Buddy Rich in my band.' I wasn't aware that I was playing like Buddy Rich, I was playing more like Tony Williams at the time. She was just saying that I was playing too much stuff. She has this thing in her head about the drummer, she wants to hear just this and just that and nothing else. ‘Don't do this, that gets in the way with that. Don't use that cymbal there, use this one.' It was just endless. I can't say it was an enjoyable experience. It was one of my most challenging times. I was with the band about a year. We recorded a Grammy nominated album, Ten Gallon Shuffle.

“It was just after we did that album, on a west coast trip, on the way back to New York we stopped in Kansas City, played a show at Brush Creek. And it was that night that I was going to play like me, I wasn't going to play what she wanted anymore. Being home, it gave me the strength, the backbone, to be me, and not what someone wanted me to be, that never works. I played like me, and she didn't like that. I knew I signed my death warrant. I didn't care, I was tired of it.”

Scott Goes Legit
At this point, Scott came back to Kansas City for awhile, not playing the drums at all. “I was really frustrated with jazz. The world of jazz was not what I thought it would be. Times were changing and still are. Jazz was becoming less and less popular. There's always so much more involved with what you want to be when you are a kid then what you think at the time. There are always obstacles in the path. The world of jazz was quickly turning into something I was getting disillusioned with. For me, being a drummer, I have to play with other people. I'm depending on others to make my life enjoyable, I don't have direction over the sound of the music, and I also, in a way, need their approval, because without them I don't work. I wasn't enjoying that. I might have had the wrong attitude. I didn't want to be a starving frustrated jazz musician living in a dump in New York City, which is what it looked like my options were with jazz. I saw good jazz musicians who were really pretty down and out. They were alone, had no money, often addicted to something or another. This is the life I wanted? So after Toshiko, a cord snapped in me, I decided I didn't want to do it.”

Scott decided to go back to school, and wound up at the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia in 1986. “It was a classic orchestral school. They only take enough students to fill out one orchestra. I spent five years at Curtis. While I was there I started playing extra percussion in the Philadelphia Orchestra. This lasted about 10 years. I went whole heartedly into this world of percussion, packed up my drum set and wanted nothing to do with it.

“What brought me back was the dryness of the orchestral world. The process you had to go through to win an audition, it's more of a competition about who can be the most perfect during the audition. It's about playing the piece over and over until it is perfect. That's not why I got into music.”

So Scott was trapped, caught in a classial world he didn't enjoy, but not wanting to return to the drum set and jazz because it had let him down. “I didn't want to be a part of any of it, but I didn't know what else to do. I was a very angry person for a few years there. It was a low period in my life.”

Enter Pat Martino
“I was trying to come out of the hole I had dug for myself, and Pat was trying to come out of the hole he was in, recovering from a brain aneurysm. The operation had left him in a state of total amnesia. He couldn't remember anyone or what he did. He had to relearn how to play the guitar. We met and he dug the way I played and started our relationship. I've been with Pat since his ascent from his recovery. Pat has been the musical driving force in my life the past ten years. He is certainly the most powerful guitarist on the planet. I've never heard anyone play with such authority and depth. And it goes beyond the guitar, he's more like John Coltrane on the guitar, more like a horn man. It's been a real challenge and joy… every night he gives 120%, he knows no other way to do it. There's never a laid-back set.”

But It Started In Kansas City
“There are so many people in Kansas City who mean so much to me. Carol Comer, Mike Ning, Milt Abel, Paul Smith, Carmell Jones, John Elliott, one of the great teachers. And Roy Searcy, he gave me my first real job at the original Drum Room. They are my unsung heroes. They allowed me to play with them. I was just a green little kid. They gave me so many opportunities to develop and grow. They were my buddies and my mentors, they were everything to me.”

The evening at the Bistro was spent with Scott's parents, Marinka and Glenn, who have just returned to the Kansas City area after spending many years near Scott in Philadelphia. Martino's band is always traveling – the prior week in London, next week in Tokyo – hence they don't hear Scott play as much as they'd like. So the trip to St. Louis is a natural. The closeness of the family was apparent all evening.

Scott has been married for 15 years now to Kim Fisher. Kim is the principal 2nd violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and has developed quite a teaching reputation. “One of the greatest moments of my life was when our son Corey was born. He's eleven. He and my wife Kim… I can't express what they mean to me. Corey is a tennis player, he and Kim are currently in Florida, where Corey is at Chris Evert's tennis school. He's doing very well. I'm very proud of him”

“Drumming is what I do. Kim and Corey, my family, they are a part of who I am.”

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