Sheila Tracy Talks to David Taylor

It's a cast iron certainty that any recital by American bass trombonist David Taylor will be anything but boring and I quote from a recent review of a concert celebrating the work of Luciano Berio.

"After the piano sonata came Sequenza V (1965) for bass trombone, Mr Berio's homage to a great clown, Grock, he remembers from his childhood. The trombonist David Taylor, wearing a tuxedo, but with white socks, black boots, unkempt hair and a harried look, was both a brilliant performer and a one-man circus, producing all manner of rude blasts with a rubber plunger mute as well as an astonishing array of gusty chant, pants and inhalations."

Having seen David Taylor perform on a couple of occasions I fully concur with the description 'one-man circus'. Not content with coaxing beautiful sounds and sometimes downright peculiar sounds from his Edwards trombone, he is first and foremost an entertainer, if a somewhat eccentric one.

"I get very, very nervous but when I walk out on the stage, I just love it. I feel that the bass trombone is a relatively unexplored instrument and when the stock is down you can buy all you want. I tend to shy away from what is considered to be the normal trombone repertoire. I arrange things, I steal things. For instance Schubert, but I really hand pick the Schubert; and Bartok, I really hand pick the Bartok. I think one of the reasons I'm finding a really nice career in the solo, duo and trio world is because I take the time to look for repertoire and try to go for more obscure pieces. I do a lot of research.

I came back recently from the Chicago Institute of Art where I played a concerto written for me by Daniel Schnyder, who besides being a great composer, loves playing the soprano saxophone so he and I with Kenny Drew Jr. on piano, have a trio and we cross over whatever boundaries there seem to be. The pieces are 70% composed, 30% improvised and we even improvise behind a silent movie.. We've also done Bach's Matthew Passion which Daniel arranged for us which we've played for the Bach Archives.

I've been travelling around the world and I'm proud to say I soloed at the Musikverein in Vienna several times last season. It's one of the most famous concert halls in the world and the home of the Vienna Philharmonic. It seats 2,100 and the orchestra I played with sold out the first night and 90% the second night. As an encore I soloed on Schubert Lieder using a plunger mute over a string arrangement I had written and they ate it up. I'm saying this, hopefully not out of ego at this point. Maybe if I were twenty years younger it would be an egotistical thing but I'm 58 now and that I had the will power to see this thing through, knocks me out! I also appeared with my trio earlier in the season at the Konzerthaus, Vienna's other major concert hall. I was talking to Joe Alessi about it and he doesn't think there's ever been a bass trombone soloist who's soloed in both main halls of Vienna in one season. This might have been a first."

The day I met David Taylor he was at Carnegie Hall rehearsing for the Leonard Bernstein Mass but he's equally at home playing with the Mingus Big Band, Bob Mintzer's Big Band, the Dave Matthews Big Band and Michelle Camillo's Big Band from the Dominican Republic. He's also had five concertos written for him with a couple more in the pipeline. So would he describe himself as the total crossover musician?

"I would describe myself as an auto didactic personality and I would describe what I do as genre jumping. I would not describe it as crossover. Crossover describes a specific period, the '70s or '80s when attempts were being made to combine genres. This generation doesn't have to make the attempt anymore as it's already part of them, so crossover is obsolete. When I really want to get dramatic and they ask what are you doing, jazz or classical music, I say those are 20th century terms and this is the 21st century. Man, I'm just playing.

I feel equally at home playing a classical or a jazz concert and I feel that because I'm probably sufficiently idiosyncratic in any genre so the boundaries are opened up. I'm playing Berio's Sequenza in a major venue, that's a major trombone work from the '60s. It's a delineated piece but it's really an areatorically (??) influenced piece and I'm going to stretch it."

And he did! David's latest CD on C.I.M.P Record Doppelganger (David Taylor Trio) consists of bass trombone, bass and drums. Another one will follow on July 24th from Pao Records in Austria. It's unaccompanied and called Hymns, Hums, Hiss and Herz.

"On the new Pao CD I over dub myself once or twice and I combine the music of Charles Mingus and Schubert with some of my own compositions and improvisations, so my records always have an element of improvisation. I don't necessarily feel obligated to delineate swing and other genres. If some people feel that obligation, that's cool, but it's not my inclination.

You know when I feel most confident? When the material doesn't restrict me to the exact notation on every piece I play. I'm most comfortable when the barriers are down. This fellow Schnyder whom I discussed earlier, he knows when I go to play his piece, I'll play what he wrote but if there's a cadenza written, look out. A friend of mine told me, 'Look man, people like the way you improvise because you go from logic to illogic and somehow find the logic', and that's how I feel. I'm a big fan of whimsy, I stress that, accidents and whimsy. One of the lovely things about the British Trombone Society and the ITA is they have elevated people's awareness, student's awareness, musician's awareness, composer's awareness to an amazingly high level.

I think anyone taking up a trombone now is brave. Anyone taking up a brass instrument now is brave. These are not the most sterling times for brass musicians. We don't have the overwhelming audience response the way the bands did in the swing era. We have Wynton Marsalis but I don't hear any Tommy Dorseys on the airwaves. Often the disco relegates us to the back room. If you're going to be an acoustic musician today you're brave. If you're going to be a musician who doesn't wish to be subjected to a steady gig, like an orchestra, you're even braver.

Because I recognise the bravery of trombone students I don't put my agenda on them. I try to elevate what I think are their strengths and their whimsy. If a kid says to me Dave I want to do orchestral stuff, I'll have him come to my gigs, see what I do and if he continues to say he just wants to do orchestral stuff, I help him with what he wants to do because he's being brave. If a guy is a jazz musician I try to steer him to classical music just to broaden him but if he chooses not to, I'll go along with that. In the universities and the conservatories there are enough teachers teaching improvisation, there are enough teachers teaching history, there are enough teachers teaching mechanics so I don't mind being an alternative voice. The trombone has been such a glorious career for me, I want to pass this joy along."

Brought up in a small apartment in Brooklyn, he was lucky enough to attend a school where they encouraged children to play a musical instrument. Given a trumpet he soon became one of the best players in his class but when a tuba player was needed and the teacher held up a silver plated E flat tuba asking 'Who thinks they are big enough to play this instrument?' David didn't hesitate. It turned out to be a lucky break as he was soon in the senior orchestra and catching up fast and when his kid brother borrowed an Olds Opera model trombone, he played that for a year and auditioned for the Julliard School of Music.

"I wanted to study with Davis Shuman. I auditioned on the slow second movement of the Haydn trumpet concerto but I couldn't read very well as I was basically a high school tuba player. I didn't even know how to write the notes but they let me slip through the cracks. They wouldn't let me in on any music theory classes the first year and I had to go to Mrs Bamburger to learn the rudiments.

Davis Shuman invented this angular trombone which had the slide on an angle of about eleven degrees. On an ordinary trombone when you move the slide your arm goes into the centre but when you're playing on this angular trombone, the slide goes out this way but your arm is going straight out. and I played one of those. It meant you could play with shorter arms but the point was it was anatomically correct. It had an 8 inch bell, a small bore and the one I had was a Martin."

David stayed at Julliard for 6 years and in his fourth year someone called him to do a gig on bass trombone and from that moment on it all came together and within a year he was playing in Leopold Stokowski's orchestra, having been invited up to the great man's apartment to audition for him. At 21, being a good tuba player, he was subbing in Broadway shows as there were not that many good tuba doubles around. And when another of his teachers, Allen Ostrander got sick, he subbed for him in the Philharmonic.

"I guess I was earmarked to play in an orchestra but because I was doing so much show stuff I started to get involved in big bands. At 24 I was lucky enough to record with Duke Ellington. He came here to do a record and his bass trombonist wasn't available so I got the call. We were sitting around in a circle and I was so in awe I couldn't even think. He was dancing around us to give us the ¾ feel in some of the stuff and some of it was very demanding. I was watching the interaction of all the guys like Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, all those famous trumpet players. I was totally in awe but he was cool and his sister Ruth, who handled some of his business liked me too.

I played in Gil Evans' band for about 5 years in the '80s and that was fantastic but I always liked playing contemporary music. In 1978 I really started a drive on commissioning pieces and in 5 to 10 years composers began to see how much attention I was giving to playing the new music.

It's very important when you commission a piece of music to play it with total intensity, because composers need us a much as we need them. If a composer sees a musician taking his music seriously, he might even give him the piece. One thing we can't lose sight of is that although we elevate composers to such a high level, much of the great music is written with the concert virtuosi in mind.

Ask yourself questions like 'Who was the trumpet player Bach wrote all that stuff for? Who was the tuba player Prokofiev wrote all that stuff for? Puccini wrote many operas for Caruso and Mozart had his French Horn players, so a lot of composers I find, wrote for specific personalities and we should all know who these guys were. The composers who are writing for me are writing with my style and technique in mind and if you stay up to speed , these composers write for you and don't charge crazy figures.

Then institutions started commissioning for me and the last big work I was involved with, the Schnyder Concerto, was written originally for a Swiss TV show. So the TV programme basically helped finance the record that was nominated for a Grammy Award for Performance. One of the guys up against us, Gidon Kremer, a very famous violinist, won, but it was fun for me that a fiddle player had to be concerned about beating out a bass trombone player!

There are times when I'm a fairly insecure guy but I read a lot of autobiographical material of other artists, painters, writers who write about their craft because often they are more literate than musicians and finding the ways they solve problems is a big influence on me. I think of myself as a problem solver. I'm a bass trombonist not good at steady gigs, I want to be creative, how do I go about this? I'm not good at repeating gigs. It's just too much fun waking up one day having to play a great recital and the next day going to record with the Rolling Stones. It's just too much fun not knowing what you're doing tomorrow.

At this point in my life I enjoy teaching very much because I'm only now becoming confident that I have something to hand down and I want to hand it down. When I was younger I wasn't sure but even if it's just that I help create a repertoire, even if it's just that I've helped keep the bass trombone alive in a big band, even if it's just some kids might see me at a recital, these things give me great pride now."

David has been an Edwards artist since 1990 and plays either 1311 CF or 1215 CF bells on either dependent or independent valve systems. He uses either an Edwards 1 or 2 leadpipe and always plays dual bore slides, either heavyweight or lightweight. John Stork makes many of his mouthpieces and his current one is a variation on a 1.5S.

"I'm such an equipment freak now it's ridiculous but I'm playing so many different things it's good to have different setups.

I still practise the trombone day and night. It has been a part of my life from when I was 24 when I would literally practise major scales from three to six hours a day. Very simple exercises that some of the fellas know about but too lengthy to describe to you here. If I was too tired from playing music I'd play scales. I just love blowing through the trombone. I practise every day, all day and if not all day, a good part of it. I'm a total practice junkie, I love it."

I guess David's wife Ronnie, must love it too, not to mention his children, but how about holidays, does he ever take one and does he ever leave the trombone behind?

"One of the nice things about being in my '50s is that I've developed a style and when you have that, you don't need as much scale work in your routine. You can occasionally take a day off. Up until three years ago, the most I would leave it for was about six days a year. Last week I had a demanding recital with my trio with sax and piano at Lincoln Centre in New York. Prior to that my wife had booked us for a holiday in Costa Rica and I bought a seat on a small plane for my trombone but the day before the trip, I said, why am I doing this, so I left the trombone at home.

After ten days, the first day back was disaster so I didn't play very much. I knew I had to go back slowly but I wasn't panicking because I'm old enough now not to. By the fifth day I could have played that recital with problems, but by the second week when I had to be ready, I was ready and more profoundly ready. I'm going on holiday with my wife over Christmas then I have to play a recital the second week in January but I'll take ten days off or maybe I'll bring the horn!"

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