JAM: October/November 2005 Issue: Q&A with Kevin Whitehead

KEVIN WHITEHEAD

Q&A: JAM chats with Kevin Whitehead, jazz author and critic, and jazz contributor to NPR's Fresh Air, who is currently on the faculty at the University of Kansas .

JAM: What brought you to Kansas ?

KEVIN WHITEHEAD: I had been wanting to teach for a while, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. My partner at the time, Deb Unferth, got a job here at the English Department, and as part of her deal she brought me in as an accommodated partner.

JAM: So you hadn't taught before?

KEVIN: I had taught a little bit, a class at Goucher College in Baltimore , I was there in the 80's. I worked at Recordmasters in Baltimore , and actually got a lot of my education there. A couple of people that I worked with there really set me on the path, I started working there right out of college. That's when I first started to get interested in jazz.

JAM: I was in Baltimore at that time, and bought many records from Recordmasters.

KEVIN: Get out of here!

JAM: Where did you go to college?

KEVIN: Oswego State , in New York . I'm originally from the New York City area, but upstate always appealed to me. I also have a Masters from Syracuse .

JAM: What drew you to jazz originally?

KEVIN: I sort of backed into it, like I've come to realize many do. I was a rock and roll fan, like everybody born in the 1950's. And then I discovered Captain Beefheart, and then everything I listened to previously sounded bland, and predictable… boring. I started looking for something that gave me the same kind of jolt. Then I heard the Music Improvisation Company, an ECM thing with Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, like more of a noise esthetic than the later ECM things. Through that I got interested in improvised music. I jumped into jazz this way, then started working backwards. I mentioned Derek Bailey to somebody, and they said “have you heard of Anthony Braxton?” I said “Well, no”, and they said “you are really in for it now.” It was Braxton I think that really drew me into jazz. I started listening to a lot of free stuff, then worked on where that came from, and going back into jazz history. Until I got to the beginning.

JAM: I got my education at the Sunday Left Bank Jazz Society concerts….

KEVIN: … at the Famous Ballroom. I spent many a Sunday there myself.

JAM: Dexter Gordon, Jimmy Heath…

KEVIN: Johnny Griffin. Pat Metheny was in with Gary Burton, in 1976, I think it was. You know, all you need is for someone to open the window for you, and there's this great big beautiful landscape out there, and you just want to know more about that.

JAM: When did you start writing?

KEVIN: 1979, for Cadence. I was in there for quite a while, until the early ‘90's, although it was less and less starting in the late ‘80's, because Bob Rusch and I weren't a good personal combination. I was writing in Coda, and then I was writing in the City Paper in Baltimore for quite a long time. I did a lot of writing about film for them in the ‘80's. I got a lot of my early journalistic grounding there. I moved to New York in 1989, did some stuff for the Voice . I was writing for Downbeat by then, for Musician for a while. Also CD Review for a minute, actually a couple of years. I am writing for Downbeat again, so that's been going on for like 20 years.

JAM: So has writing been a full time gig for you?

KEVIN: Yeah, since like 1980 or so. Until I came here last year I hadn't had like a real job for so long that I couldn't tell you what the previous one was.

JAM: Are you a musician?

KEVIN: I play a bit, but I'm a good enough critic to know my limitations as a musician. I'm a guitarist, play some bass, I hadn't played bass in a long time, so I traded the bass to Art Lange, my co-editor at Downbeat for some of his lovely collages. I've played clarinet and the alto, and drums, and at this point I can do a pretty fair impersonation of someone who knows how to play the piano. I have a good touch, but I don't really know what I'm doing. I like to improvise, I've done it for a long time. I'm a member of an improvising rock band, we've been together since the early ‘70's, called Starship Beer, we have a CD out on Atavistic, in the Unheard Music Series. We just played a few gigs upstate [ New York ], as it turns out, in March, on my Spring break, we played in Rochester and Syracuse . It's an unusual thing because we all have different backgrounds. Our singer is like a poet, we have like a regular rock guitar player who used to be on the Dakota/Wyoming circuit, and my thing was always more of a jazz orientation, as I've been listening to jazz since about when the band was founded. I just like playing improvised music on the bandstand because it gives you an interesting approach to writing about improvised music, more of a process than as a result.

JAM: Did you know Dick Wright?

KEVIN: A saint. No, I never met him, but I have availed myself of his archives a few times. His name turns up with great frequency. He was an opera buff, had a radio show for a long time, apparently had a very sonorous speaking voice. A good thing for the radio, although I can testify that not having one does not preclude one from being on the radio.

JAM: What are you teaching?

KEVIN: I'm doing a two semester jazz history class in American Studies, the first semester we got to 1955, the spring semester we actually got to something close to the present. I promised my students that this would be one survey class that would actually go as far as it was supposed to go. We played something that was recorded in June, 2004, we got that far. In English, I teach a course about writing in the arts, basically try to teach people what I've been doing professionally for 25 years. And then a literature class in jazz autobiographies. We did Satchmo, In My Own Words , and Sidney Bechet, and Morton, Billie Holiday, Mingus, Art Pepper, Anita O'Day. Too many junkies, my students said. There are some things that are out of print that I would like to do, the Hampton Hawes, Willie the Lion Smith, W. C. Handy, they are all out of print.

JAM: Have you taken in any of the Kansas City jazz scene?

KEVIN: Scandalously, no, I've been so busy preparing for classes. I had four new classes to teach, basically. This year I get to teach versions of all four of them again, so that will cut down on the prep a little bit.

JAM: What are your favorite places to listen to music?

KEVIN: The Penthouse in Amsterdam , and the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore . When I was in Holland that was like my second address. I edited a 25 th anniversary book for them, an oral history where we got about 250 people talking, and I sent them emails, and then edited it down. There were lots and lots of musicians and people who were there in the early days. It was a great experience for me. I was in Amsterdam from about 1995 until 1999. I went to write a book on Dutch improvised music. I figured I'd stay for about three months. But once I was there I didn't want to leave. I wound up writing for one of the Dutch dailies. It was a beautiful experience, the best thing I ever did.

JAM: Have you attracted a following yet? Are the students drawn to the material?

KEVIN: I have more students every semester, it seems. My first semester, the guy who teaches a jazz history class in the Music Department had 140 students. I had eleven. But now I'm up to twenty! So that's progress. I think this year people will notice that I'm here more than they did last year. It's like moving to New York , it takes a while for people to realize that you are there.

JAM: Any trends that you see in jazz now? Is the neoclassicism period over?

KEVIN: They have lost the war. In the early 1990's, people made the mistake of assuming that the musicians that came up in Wynton's wake shared his values. And if you look at the kind of records that Christian McBride has made, or the last Terence Blanchard record, or Roy Hargrove, his funk things and all, you see that you can't keep the rhythms of popular music out of jazz., whether you like them or not. I used to go to the Jazz Showcase in Chicago fairly often, I was reviewing for the Sun-Times, and Joe Segal, who has been booking jazz in Chicago since the late 1940's, he feels the necessity to introduce every set with a denunciation of hip-hop. He'd go off on a rant about the nonsense that kids listen to, and why don't they pull up their pants. Then the band would come on, and three songs in you'd hear the drummer play rhythms that were clearly derived from hip-hop. And Joe doesn't even notice because it's been so well integrated into the fabric of the music. It's been digested. That's probably the main trend that I've seen in this country. You can see Jason Moran and others connecting to more popular music. Not that that hasn't happened before. That sort of thing happens fairly frequently and people forget about it. You go back to the late 1950's and early 1960's and you'll find example of jazz-me folk music, Herb Ellis recording “John Brown's Body”. The records Bud Shank made in the 1960's, recording covers of the Mamas and the Papas, a whole album of Lovin' Spoonful tunes. There was a Gene Norman record called Dylan Jazz. Even Ellington recorded “Blowin' In the Wind” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”. Basie has the all-Beatles record, and the all-James Bond album. I think where people over reach the trends is when they talk about the “new” standards. Like if someone records “Last Train to Clarksville ”, and someone says that's the new standard. Well, my understanding of a standard is a tune that enters the shared repertoire. One or two recordings of a rock tune doesn't make it a standard. A dozen, maybe it's becoming a standard.

JAM: Any other trends?

KEVIN: Jazz travel abroad gets more attention than it used to. There are more cities where jazz musicians get to travel and play. Do you know of the ICP Orchestra from Holland ?

JAM: No.

KEVIN: They are the reason I moved to Amsterdam , I just wanted to hear more of their music. It's quite exceptional. And the nice thing about the European stuff, and I talk about this in my book, which is called New Dutch Swing, published in 1998, is that it is much easier for them to play music that transcends genre. When I lived in New York in the 1990's, if someone wanted to combine jazz and classical music they had to have a big discussion about it first about whether it was even allowed. In Holland if they want to do something like that they just do it. Jazz isn't their indigenous culture, so they don't have the same issues with authenticity and preservation and things like that. And maybe it's just from living in Chicago , where a lot of European musicians came through, but there seems to be a lot more interaction between European and American musicians now. It's a predictable globalizing trend.

JAM: A guy like Brookmeyer would be a part of this trend.

KEVIN: Sure, he's done a lot of things with the Metropole Orchestra.

JAM: And his New Art Orchestra recordings are wonderful.

KEVIN: It was through experimentation that jazz got started, doing different things. You can poke a hole through an argument for jazz being pure and free of commercial constraints like it was in the old days. From the time jazz first appeared on record it was commercial as hell. Record companies were just chasing a trend.

JAM: There seems to be a lot more independent recording now, it is relatively inexpensive to record and reproduce a CD.

KEVIN: It's very similar to what happened in the late ‘70's, when the major labels got out of jazz. All of these people started their own labels.

JAM: Seems that there is more variety, even some regionalization that can occur when the majors don't control.

KEVIN: Sure. There are fewer filters. It's a similar situation, back in the ‘70's, for a thousand dollars you could record a record and make 500 copies. I know this from personal experience with Starship Beer. I was talking to Mark Helias, a wise fellow, he said to me many years ago, or maybe I read about him saying this somewhere, although we talked a lot when I was in New York . Anyway, he said that when he was making his first record it was writing his first novel. Now, making a record is like getting a business card made. The fact that it's so easy to make a CD, it has caused a lot of oversaturation. There are a lot of people making records who might be better waiting a couple of years, until they are actually ready to do so. Of course I'm not naming any names here! I can't remember who they are anyway.

JAM: Any recent listens that you've had that are worth noting?

KEVIN: One I just did for Fresh Air, the Pat Metheny / Ornette Coleman recording Song X, was recently reissued with a lot of additional material, it is quite nice. And Nicole Mitchell, from Chicago , more people should know about her. She's a member of the AACM, and records for independent labels. She's a flute player with a really good sound in all registers, and is a really good improviser and a nice composer also. She writes pieces that remind me some of John Carter. A nice sense of woodwind color. She's one to watch.

We haven't even talked about Fresh Air ! That's amazing!

JAM: It sounds like we will now…

KEVIN: They called me out of the blue in 1987. I had heard the show, I was listening to a lot of NPR at the time. When the show went national about six months after in came on Francis Davis did the show. For some reason he decided he didn't want the gig. I auditioned, and except for the fact that I was talking so slowly that it sounded that I was addressing a roomful of drunks, I seemed to know what I was doing. The audition tape was hilarious, I'd be talking and then I'd hold the microphone up to the record player. That kind of thing. But I've been doing it ever since. I've probably filed about 400 reviews for them, well, it is 287 since 1991. It's just the best gig you can have as a jazz critic, because you have an audience that is interested in the arts, and it's fairly intelligent, and you get to talk about the music and play the music. So people can decide if their opinion is the same as yours. I try to do it so that even if you don't care for a particular record you can still pick something up about jazz that may be useful to you. They don't really give me any interference about the things I say or write about. It's a fantastic gig. I'm so grateful. When I got it I told myself that anything over two years is gravy, and it's like 18 years now. And they let me do it after I moved to Europe , which was really fantastic.

JAM: Are the shows archived?

KEVIN: Yes, you can go the NPR website, www.npr.org , and there is an archive link where you can search by name. I'm particularly proud of a series I did about four years ago called “The Avant Garde Made Easy”, I did pieces on Ayler, Braxton, Lester Bowie, Cecil Taylor, Misha Mengelberg and the ICP Orchestra. It's not that difficult, I just try to teach people how to listen to it a little. I really believe that it is possible to describe complicated musical issues so that people understand. That's also something I try to drill into my students.

JAM: I've struggled with Ayler…

KEVIN: I can understand that. I just think the trio stuff with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray is some of the most amazing stuff that's been recorded. Next time you find Spiritual Unity on vinyl for two bucks. If you don't like it, I'll cheerfully refund your money.

JAM: Now we have to do a JAM magazine traditional question.

KEVIN: Oh, the boiler-plate question!

JAM: Yup, the desert island picks.

KEVIN: How many? Five? Okay, Ellington, the Blanton-Webster material, because you can always listen to that stuff. Let's see now. This is going to sound so boring…”Body and Soul”, Herbie Nichols' Blue Note material, Beefheart's Lick My Decals Off Baby, now what's a real off-the-wall one where I can show what a hick erudite listener I am. Maybe something by Sonny Terry. I don't do well with questions like this. I don't plan on going to a desert island, but if I go I hope I have a musical instrument with me. Oh, Ornette's The Shape of Jazz to Come.






	Search our site:		KEVIN WHITEHEAD *Q&A: JAM* chats with Kevin Whitehead, jazz author and critic, and jazz contributor to NPR's Fresh Air, who is currently on the faculty at the University of Kansas . JAM: What brought you to Kansas ? KEVIN WHITEHEAD: I had been wanting to teach for a while, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. My partner at the time, Deb Unferth, got a job here at the English Department, and as part of her deal she brought me in as an accommodated partner. JAM: So you hadn't taught before? KEVIN: I had taught a little bit, a class at Goucher College in Baltimore , I was there in the 80's. I worked at Recordmasters in Baltimore , and actually got a lot of my education there. A couple of people that I worked with there really set me on the path, I started working there right out of college. That's when I first started to get interested in jazz. JAM: I was in Baltimore at that time, and bought many records from Recordmasters. KEVIN: Get out of here! JAM: Where did you go to college? KEVIN: Oswego State , in New York . I'm originally from the New York City area, but upstate always appealed to me. I also have a Masters from Syracuse . JAM: What drew you to jazz originally? KEVIN: I sort of backed into it, like I've come to realize many do. I was a rock and roll fan, like everybody born in the 1950's. And then I discovered Captain Beefheart, and then everything I listened to previously sounded bland, and predictable… boring. I started looking for something that gave me the same kind of jolt. Then I heard the Music Improvisation Company, an ECM thing with Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, like more of a noise esthetic than the later ECM things. Through that I got interested in improvised music. I jumped into jazz this way, then started working backwards. I mentioned Derek Bailey to somebody, and they said “have you heard of Anthony Braxton?” I said “Well, no”, and they said “you are really in for it now.” It was Braxton I think that really drew me into jazz. I started listening to a lot of free stuff, then worked on where that came from, and going back into jazz history. Until I got to the beginning. JAM: I got my education at the Sunday Left Bank Jazz Society concerts…. KEVIN: … at the Famous Ballroom. I spent many a Sunday there myself. JAM: Dexter Gordon, Jimmy Heath… KEVIN: Johnny Griffin. Pat Metheny was in with Gary Burton, in 1976, I think it was. You know, all you need is for someone to open the window for you, and there's this great big beautiful landscape out there, and you just want to know more about that. JAM: When did you start writing? KEVIN:** 1979, for Cadence. I was in there for quite a while, until the early ‘90's, although it was less and less starting in the late ‘80's, because Bob Rusch and I weren't a good personal combination. I was writing in Coda, and then I was writing in the City Paper in Baltimore for quite a long time. I did a lot of writing about film for them in the ‘80's. I got a lot of my early journalistic grounding there. I moved to New York in 1989, did some stuff for the Voice . I was writing for Downbeat by then, for Musician for a while. Also CD Review for a minute, actually a couple of years. I am writing for Downbeat again, so that's been going on for like 20 years. JAM: So has writing been a full time gig for you? KEVIN: Yeah, since like 1980 or so. Until I came here last year I hadn't had like a real job for so long that I couldn't tell you what the previous one was. JAM: Are you a musician? KEVIN: I play a bit, but I'm a good enough critic to know my limitations as a musician. I'm a guitarist, play some bass, I hadn't played bass in a long time, so I traded the bass to Art Lange, my co-editor at Downbeat for some of his lovely collages. I've played clarinet and the alto, and drums, and at this point I can do a pretty fair impersonation of someone who knows how to play the piano. I have a good touch, but I don't really know what I'm doing. I like to improvise, I've done it for a long time. I'm a member of an improvising rock band, we've been together since the early ‘70's, called Starship Beer, we have a CD out on Atavistic, in the Unheard Music Series. We just played a few gigs upstate [ New York ], as it turns out, in March, on my Spring break, we played in Rochester and Syracuse . It's an unusual thing because we all have different backgrounds. Our singer is like a poet, we have like a regular rock guitar player who used to be on the Dakota/Wyoming circuit, and my thing was always more of a jazz orientation, as I've been listening to jazz since about when the band was founded. I just like playing improvised music on the bandstand because it gives you an interesting approach to writing about improvised music, more of a process than as a result. JAM: Did you know Dick Wright? KEVIN: A saint. No, I never met him, but I have availed myself of his archives a few times. His name turns up with great frequency. He was an opera buff, had a radio show for a long time, apparently had a very sonorous speaking voice. A good thing for the radio, although I can testify that not having one does not preclude one from being on the radio. JAM: What are you teaching? KEVIN: I'm doing a two semester jazz history class in American Studies, the first semester we got to 1955, the spring semester we actually got to something close to the present. I promised my students that this would be one survey class that would actually go as far as it was supposed to go. We played something that was recorded in June, 2004, we got that far. In English, I teach a course about writing in the arts, basically try to teach people what I've been doing professionally for 25 years. And then a literature class in jazz autobiographies. We did Satchmo, In My Own Words , and Sidney Bechet, and Morton, Billie Holiday, Mingus, Art Pepper, Anita O'Day. Too many junkies, my students said. There are some things that are out of print that I would like to do, the Hampton Hawes, Willie the Lion Smith, W. C. Handy, they are all out of print. JAM: Have you taken in any of the Kansas City jazz scene? KEVIN: Scandalously, no, I've been so busy preparing for classes. I had four new classes to teach, basically. This year I get to teach versions of all four of them again, so that will cut down on the prep a little bit. JAM: What are your favorite places to listen to music? KEVIN: The Penthouse in Amsterdam , and the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore . When I was in Holland that was like my second address. I edited a 25 th anniversary book for them, an oral history where we got about 250 people talking, and I sent them emails, and then edited it down. There were lots and lots of musicians and people who were there in the early days. It was a great experience for me. I was in Amsterdam from about 1995 until 1999. I went to write a book on Dutch improvised music. I figured I'd stay for about three months. But once I was there I didn't want to leave. I wound up writing for one of the Dutch dailies. It was a beautiful experience, the best thing I ever did. JAM: Have you attracted a following yet? Are the students drawn to the material? KEVIN: I have more students every semester, it seems. My first semester, the guy who teaches a jazz history class in the Music Department had 140 students. I had eleven. But now I'm up to twenty! So that's progress. I think this year people will notice that I'm here more than they did last year. It's like moving to New York , it takes a while for people to realize that you are there. JAM: Any trends that you see in jazz now? Is the neoclassicism period over? KEVIN: They have lost the war. In the early 1990's, people made the mistake of assuming that the musicians that came up in Wynton's wake shared his values. And if you look at the kind of records that Christian McBride has made, or the last Terence Blanchard record, or Roy Hargrove, his funk things and all, you see that you can't keep the rhythms of popular music out of jazz., whether you like them or not. I used to go to the Jazz Showcase in Chicago fairly often, I was reviewing for the Sun-Times, and Joe Segal, who has been booking jazz in Chicago since the late 1940's, he feels the necessity to introduce every set with a denunciation of hip-hop. He'd go off on a rant about the nonsense that kids listen to, and why don't they pull up their pants. Then the band would come on, and three songs in you'd hear the drummer play rhythms that were clearly derived from hip-hop. And Joe doesn't even notice because it's been so well integrated into the fabric of the music. It's been digested. That's probably the main trend that I've seen in this country. You can see Jason Moran and others connecting to more popular music. Not that that hasn't happened before. That sort of thing happens fairly frequently and people forget about it. You go back to the late 1950's and early 1960's and you'll find example of jazz-me folk music, Herb Ellis recording “John Brown's Body”. The records Bud Shank made in the 1960's, recording covers of the Mamas and the Papas, a whole album of Lovin' Spoonful tunes. There was a Gene Norman record called Dylan Jazz. Even Ellington recorded “Blowin' In the Wind” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”. Basie has the all-Beatles record, and the all-James Bond album. I think where people over reach the trends is when they talk about the “new” standards. Like if someone records “Last Train to Clarksville ”, and someone says that's the new standard. Well, my understanding of a standard is a tune that enters the shared repertoire. One or two recordings of a rock tune doesn't make it a standard. A dozen, maybe it's becoming a standard. JAM: Any other trends? KEVIN: Jazz travel abroad gets more attention than it used to. There are more cities where jazz musicians get to travel and play. Do you know of the ICP Orchestra from Holland ? JAM: No. KEVIN: They are the reason I moved to Amsterdam , I just wanted to hear more of their music. It's quite exceptional. And the nice thing about the European stuff, and I talk about this in my book, which is called New Dutch Swing, published in 1998, is that it is much easier for them to play music that transcends genre. When I lived in New York in the 1990's, if someone wanted to combine jazz and classical music they had to have a big discussion about it first about whether it was even allowed. In Holland if they want to do something like that they just do it. Jazz isn't their indigenous culture, so they don't have the same issues with authenticity and preservation and things like that. And maybe it's just from living in Chicago , where a lot of European musicians came through, but there seems to be a lot more interaction between European and American musicians now. It's a predictable globalizing trend. JAM: A guy like Brookmeyer would be a part of this trend. KEVIN: Sure, he's done a lot of things with the Metropole Orchestra. JAM: And his New Art Orchestra recordings are wonderful. KEVIN: It was through experimentation that jazz got started, doing different things. You can poke a hole through an argument for jazz being pure and free of commercial constraints like it was in the old days. From the time jazz first appeared on record it was commercial as hell. Record companies were just chasing a trend. JAM: There seems to be a lot more independent recording now, it is relatively inexpensive to record and reproduce a CD. KEVIN: It's very similar to what happened in the late ‘70's, when the major labels got out of jazz. All of these people started their own labels. JAM: Seems that there is more variety, even some regionalization that can occur when the majors don't control. KEVIN: Sure. There are fewer filters. It's a similar situation, back in the ‘70's, for a thousand dollars you could record a record and make 500 copies. I know this from personal experience with Starship Beer. I was talking to Mark Helias, a wise fellow, he said to me many years ago, or maybe I read about him saying this somewhere, although we talked a lot when I was in New York . Anyway, he said that when he was making his first record it was writing his first novel. Now, making a record is like getting a business card made. The fact that it's so easy to make a CD, it has caused a lot of oversaturation. There are a lot of people making records who might be better waiting a couple of years, until they are actually ready to do so. Of course I'm not naming any names here! I can't remember who they are anyway. JAM: Any recent listens that you've had that are worth noting? KEVIN: One I just did for Fresh Air, the Pat Metheny / Ornette Coleman recording Song X, was recently reissued with a lot of additional material, it is quite nice. And Nicole Mitchell, from Chicago , more people should know about her. She's a member of the AACM, and records for independent labels. She's a flute player with a really good sound in all registers, and is a really good improviser and a nice composer also. She writes pieces that remind me some of John Carter. A nice sense of woodwind color. She's one to watch. We haven't even talked about Fresh Air ! That's amazing! JAM: It sounds like we will now… KEVIN: They called me out of the blue in 1987. I had heard the show, I was listening to a lot of NPR at the time. When the show went national about six months after in came on Francis Davis did the show. For some reason he decided he didn't want the gig. I auditioned, and except for the fact that I was talking so slowly that it sounded that I was addressing a roomful of drunks, I seemed to know what I was doing. The audition tape was hilarious, I'd be talking and then I'd hold the microphone up to the record player. That kind of thing. But I've been doing it ever since. I've probably filed about 400 reviews for them, well, it is 287 since 1991. It's just the best gig you can have as a jazz critic, because you have an audience that is interested in the arts, and it's fairly intelligent, and you get to talk about the music and play the music. So people can decide if their opinion is the same as yours. I try to do it so that even if you don't care for a particular record you can still pick something up about jazz that may be useful to you. They don't really give me any interference about the things I say or write about. It's a fantastic gig. I'm so grateful. When I got it I told myself that anything over two years is gravy, and it's like 18 years now. And they let me do it after I moved to Europe , which was really fantastic. JAM: Are the shows archived? KEVIN: Yes, you can go the NPR website, www.npr.org , and there is an archive link where you can search by name. I'm particularly proud of a series I did about four years ago called “The Avant Garde Made Easy”, I did pieces on Ayler, Braxton, Lester Bowie, Cecil Taylor, Misha Mengelberg and the ICP Orchestra. It's not that difficult, I just try to teach people how to listen to it a little. I really believe that it is possible to describe complicated musical issues so that people understand. That's also something I try to drill into my students. JAM: I've struggled with Ayler… KEVIN: I can understand that. I just think the trio stuff with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray is some of the most amazing stuff that's been recorded. Next time you find Spiritual Unity on vinyl for two bucks. If you don't like it, I'll cheerfully refund your money. JAM: Now we have to do a JAM magazine traditional question. KEVIN: Oh, the boiler-plate question! JAM: Yup, the desert island picks. KEVIN: How many? Five? Okay, Ellington, the Blanton-Webster material, because you can always listen to that stuff. Let's see now. This is going to sound so boring…”Body and Soul”, Herbie Nichols' Blue Note material, Beefheart's Lick My Decals Off Baby, now what's a real off-the-wall one where I can show what a hick erudite listener I am. Maybe something by Sonny Terry. I don't do well with questions like this. I don't plan on going to a desert island, but if I go I hope I have a musical instrument with me. Oh, Ornette's The Shape of Jazz to Come. RETURN TO OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2005 MAIN INDEX © Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors 1996-2005. All rights reserved.