Meet Mike Longo
Michael Joseph Longo, born 3/19/39 in Cincinnati, Ohio, was the pianist and musical director for Dizzy Gillespie group in the sixties and seventies, upon completing his six-month tutelage under Oscar Peterson. He has also played with Cannonball Adderly, Coleman Hawkins, Red Allen, and Paul Chambers to name just a few. In speaking with Longo one afternoon, one comes to realize he is a natural born storyteller, both in terms of his music and his manner of speaking. There is always a certain intensity in how laid back he can be, and the rhythms inflected in his speech call to mind the heavy groove of a twelve-bar blues. A prolific composer and arranger, LongoÃÂs regularly performing big band, State of the Art Jazz Ensemble, released two records, Explosion (2000) and Aftermath (2001). Still Swingin, his latest, has just been released this month. Here, Longo talks about his mentors, experiences on the bandstand, attitudes towards music, and his own students.
AAJ: You started studying piano at the age of three. Was there anything in particular that attracted you to playing music or specifically to the piano?
ML: Well my mother and father were both musical, and we had a piano in the house. They said I used to go pick out melodies I would hear on the radio. I do remember something when I was 3 years old. we were at our relatives house, and I was sitting at the piano, just looking at the keyboard and something in me saying, man, I can play this thing. I do remember that at 3 years old. The first thing that attracted me was boogie woogie. actually I was born in Cincinnati but I grew up in Florida. My mom and dad had a lot of count Basie Records and Fats Waller records and they were both music fans. my dad was a bass player and my mom played piano and organ in the church. In downtown Cincinnati there were two theaters, the Abli theater and the Schubert. They would have live stage shows every week, and we’d go every week to see a movie and a live show. The live show would be something like Blackstone the musician, the Count Basie band, and at the time there was a little kid named Sugar Chile’ Robinson, he was a boogie woogie piano player. the first time I saw him, man, he knocked me out. I must have been 3 or 4 years old. he played after the Count Basie show, so I went home and started picking out boogie woogie bass lines. That’s the first thing I learned on the piano. I got a teacher to show me some stuff to put with my right hand. Then I was 4 years old, and my parents realized I had some kind of musical talent, and they took me to the Cincinnati conservatory and got me a teacher there.
AAJ: You’ve had the opportunities to play with quite a few jazz legends. Cannonball Adderly himself gave you your first big break when you were 15 right?
ML: Playing with Adderly wasn’t really a big break because he wasn’t famous yet. At that time St. Lauderdale was segregated, so you had the black section of town and the white section of time. The first contact I had with Cannonball was when he was the band director in the black high school. He was in his 30’s, and I was in 9th grade. they had this one old church in town, and the woman who played piano in the church died. They asked Cannoball to get another piano player, because there weren’t any around. So Cannonball called the music director at my high school and I got the gig because I had a feel for that kind of music. They sent me to the church, and I was reading out of the hymn book. The preacher told me not to play it straight like that, and that I should jazz it up for the people to sing along to. But I hadn’t met Cannonball yet.
Ft. Lauderdale started these youth centers to keep kids off the street and to prevent underage drinking. There was a disc jockey in town that had a jazz radio show, and he started organizing jam sessions at the youth center. This was at the time of R & B (rhythm and blues) before rock-and-roll; this was pre-Elvis. So he knew me from playing around town with some other kids, and he called to play at the jam session. On the phone he asked me, “Do you mind playing with a Negro musician?” I said, “Man, I don’t care who I play with, I don”t mind. So when I get to the jam session, the Negro musician was Cannonball Adderly. As soon as we hit the first tune, my jaw hit the ground- I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Apparently he wasn’t making much money at the local high school he was teaching at. I had learned to play from a guy named John Micelli who played like Lester Young. My dad had a club date and occasionally gave me some gigs, so Cannonball gave me his card. My dad played a street dance in the Gateway Theater hopping center, so we hired Cannon. At this time there was never an inter-racial band in ft Lauderdale. this was early 50s. I remember, Cannonball showed up at the gig, and everyone was staring at us. I remember this distinctly- he played “Stars Fell On Alabama,” and it was so gorgeous. Everyone just started dancing on the streets, and my dad was just knocked out.
Around that time, we had just moved into a place called Plantation, Florida, which was mostly farmland, because my dad had a produce business. He would deliver all this food to this country club, so they gave him a membership to the club, and his band played gigs there, too. Naturally, he called Cannonball again. So after the first set, and the matre de comes out and says we have a separate table set up for the band. A few minutes into the meal, he comes back and says, “We’ve had some complaints- the colored guy has to go sit in the kitchen.” So my dad became infuriated, and insisted the whole band eat in the kitchen. The whole band got up and my dad turned to the matre de and said, “You can take my membership and stick it up your ass!” and everybody in there heard him! From that point on Cannonball really digged my father. He would hang out with us at parties and come to play sometime.
At that time, Adderly was a sideman in Harold Fergeson’s R & B band, and Cannonball recommended me to fill in for the pianist. They were going on the chitlin circuit, which is a tour of the black clubs in the south. So he got me on this R & B band. He also started playing on a club called Porky’s. That movie “Porky’s” was based after this club. It was actually Ft. Lauderdale, not Angel Beach like in the movie. In the movie they depicted Porky as some redneck, but he was actually an Italian mobster, and he loved jazz. He had Cannonball’s group play there with Pick Gordon on piano (they called him Pick because he always had a tooth pick in his mouth.) Pick got busted and thrown in jail, so I got the gig, even though I was only in 10th grade. So after that night he said, “You might as well play the rest of the week.” So I played there for a week with the quartet.
The summer of my 10th grade, he came to New York and the rest is history. Before that, Cannonball had a hard time in Ft. Lauderdale. As a high school teacher, he wasn’t supposed to be hanging out in seedy nightclubs, but he needed the money from gigs. There weren”t that many piano players in Ft. Lauderdale, so he was sort of teaching me what music was about. He got himself a piano player, and I got to learn on the bandstand. At 15, I knew what it felt like to play behind Cannonball, to feel his type of swing, to fill his lines with his comping. He was training me on how to think about improvising, so that was a big break in terms of my musical development.
AAJ: That type of mentorship is vital to young musicians and important for the music itself. Is the mentor-student relationship still prevalent today?
ML: The apprenticeship program seems to have pretty much broken down. It has a lot to do about bad karma. I really think jazz has a spiritual basis to it; a big part of that spirituality has been a bridge between cultures. One thing that inspired me about jazz when I was a child was that Benny Goodman had an integrated band with Lionel Hampton. It made me feel good to see them doing this together. Around the 60’s there started a lot of racial discrimination in jazz, which led to this polarization. There were several other things that were problematic. one was greedy promoters. If they were concerned about the future of jazz, they would have had concerts with the younger groups playing after the established musicians, so there would be someone to take their place in the future. For example, suppose Dizzy’s band was playing at a festival, they would have had your group, the Mike Mellia trio, play after them, to give the younger musicians some exposure to Dizzy’s audience. Instead of doing that, greedy promoters kept playing the same acts every year. They were great, Ella (Fitzgerald), Sarah Vaughn, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, but there was never any attempt to bring up new groups. So there was a period where a whole generations of musicians was skipped over. Then you get the young lions, in the 80’s, and that whole generation of guys who should have been the new leaders were skipped over because of these young lions. Consequently there were no new bands for even younger musicians to do apprenticeships on, and that was the beginning of the end, right there. There was also this concept that these young lions didn’t need to pay dues and come up the same way.
When I studied with Oscar Peterson the first thing he asked us is “What kind of environment produces jazz musicians?” and the first the he said, is “I donÃÂt want to hear anything about ethnic backgrounds.” His answer was “the bandstand- who you’ve been with.” The young lions haven’t been on the band stand with anyone, and it’s problematic that they play mostly with musicians their own age. You can practice until you’re blue in the face, but there are some things an older musician has to show you and teach you on the bandstand. It’s like we’re in an age where mediocrity is rewarded with huge amounts of money, and mere competence is being called greatness.
AAJ: You just mentioned Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie, who were two of your most influential teachers. Could you talk about the six months you spent in Oscar Peterson’s Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto?
ML: That was the most intense experience in my life, musically speaking. By that time, I had already earned a bachelor’s degree in music, but there were no jazz programs so it was entirely classical piano. At Peterson’s school I discovered I was playing the instrument all wrong all these years. I had to practice 13 hours a day to turn my whole approach to piano around. In terms of technique, touch, I was playing with locked wrists and too much arm technique. The main thing I got from Peterson was how to play piano and how to be a jazz pianist- textures, voicings, touch, time conception, tone on the instrument. It was an intense creative environment because the school was about 20 people of all ages who were really dedicated to the music. It was 24 hours a day of intense concentrated artistry. I used to have four or five lessons a week with Peterson, and he gave me the key to his studio so I could practice on his piano. My schedule was, I would practice 9:00 to 12:00, take an hour off for lunch, practice 1:00 to 6:00, take an hour off for dinner, practice 7:00 to 11:00. Then I would go to my apartment, where I used an electric piano to transcribe solos. Lots of kids from the school would come over to my apartment to talk about music all night. That was the kind of life, and it was six months of that.
AAJ: How do you maintain your concentration practicing all those hours consecutively?
ML: Oscar Peterson gave me one of the most important lessons in my life. He said, “Never look for results when you practice. When you practice, the only thing you are only trying to accomplish is putting in a certain amount of time on your instrument.” You don’t look for results because what you practice today isn’t going to show up in your playing until six weeks from now or months from now. You might be working on a Czerny exercise, and after three hours of practicing, you didn’t make any progress. The point you need to keep in mind is that you got three hours in. so you just try to put the time in. Maybe a few days from now you go in, and “BANG!” you can play it.
AAJ: That’s kind of like a Zen concept. Don’t try to force anything on the music- let it happen on its own.
ML: Exactly. Eventually I grew to love practicing. It’s an athlete or a boxer. You’re punching the bag, and you’ve got that thing really singing, it’s really coordinated, and you enjoy being coordinated for hours at a time. Three hours would go by like five minutes.
Years later I was studying classical composition with Hal Overton, while I was still with Dizzy [Gillespie]. I was writing an atonal canon, so I had a chart of the tone row, transposed in 12 keys frontwards and backwards. I was just working on it one day after a gig, and to my surprise dizzy shows up with his suit on telling me to get dressed. I asked him “Why are you all dressed up, we just had the gig?” I didn’t realize it was time for the next gig, and I had been writing all night since the day before.
AAJ: Dizzy Gillespie heard you playing a gig with Roy Eldridge in 1966 and hired you to play in his quintet for the next nine years. What was he like as a friend and a musician?
ML: Here’s the first experience I had with Dizzy. When I first got out of college I was poor as a church mouse. A traditional band came through Kentucky named the Salt City Six. The trombone player knew me, so he threw me the gig. The day after I graduated college, I went up to Buffalo to play with this band, and we went on tour with them for two years trying to get to New York. Finally we got a gig a the Metropole, which is now a strip joint. The Metropole had six bands a night playing there.
AAJ: You played there with Red Allen and Coleman Hawkins too right?
ML: Yeah, all those cats. I was playing downstairs with Red Allen, and Dizzy was playing upstairs with his band. So every time he wanted to go outside for a break, he had to come down the stairs and pass us on the way out. There was a joint across the street called the Copper Rail, which was a soul food restaurant and a bar where the musicians from the Metropole would all hang out. Soon I learned Dizzy mentioned me in an interview in International Musician, the musician union’s magazine, when he was asked about any promising young musicians he heard. So then I went up to Toronto to study with Oscar, and when I came back to New York I started a trio, and by the end of the week my manager got us a gig backing up Nancy Wilson. So we went on tour with her for a while. When I came back to New York the trio got a gig for a year at the Playboy Club. After that we played there occasionally and in Atlantic City for a few summers. Around then, my first marriage had broken up, and I was really down on my luck. I had no money, I weighed about 90 pounds, and I was walking around in the rain on a particular day. I was walking past this club called Embers West, and I was soaking wet. So I said to myself, “Man, can you play or what?” So I go in, and the club owner had been a bouncer at the Metropole. “He said, man what happened to you, you look terrible?” So he dried me off with a towel, and I realized Roy Eldridge was playing the gig with Ross Thompkins, one of the other piano players from the Metropole. When he asked me what happened to me I said, “You know, my marriage broke up, and I ain’t been working and all this shit,” so he let me sit in with Roy. I played the weekend with that band too, because Ross had some other gig, which was a lifesaver because I needed the bread at that time. After that weekend, they hired my trio to play there. We got Paul Chambers on that gig and we played for six months. So when I was playing with Roy one night, Dizzy was playing around the corner at the Metropole, and Roy dragged him in to listen. Paul and I used introduce a tune by trading fours on the changes, and then go into the tune. After one set I looked up and saw Dizzy was watching the whole time from the front table. Man, I’m happy I didn’t know he was there. The next day, Dizzy hired me.
AAJ: You eventually became his musical director, right?
ML: Before this one night, everything I had written as a composer was shit. Absolutely terrible. I remember distinctly we were playing at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, after I was with the group for two months. One night, the group was swinging so hard, when I came back to the hotel I couldn’t sleep because I kept hearing the band in my head. Then I realized the stuff I was hearing sounded like Dizzy’s band, but it wasn’t anything we played that night. Then I realized, “That’s were music comes from.” So I wrote it out and made an arrangement, and we started playing lots of my tunes. After that I wrote lots of stuff for the group. A year later I became the musical director, which involved writing and arranging, auditioning new players for the group, and calling rehearsals.
AAJ: You’ve tried to pass on a lot of what you’ve learned with Dizzy Gillespie to your students. You’ve developed a reputation as being a great jazz piano teacher in New York City because you’ve kept his spirit alive musically. Any comments about your students?
ML: Most of what I teach is not common knowledge. That door opening up to students has produced some killing players. Some of the stuff I’m passing on to them seems to open up a whole universe of new thought. Adam Raffredy and John Austria are really doing well. There’s quite a bit of misunderstanding about what it means to say “the be-bop tradition.” Frequently people associate the word be-bop with 1940’s tunes like Anthropology, and that’s not entirely correct. I was playing a funk tune with Dizzy at a college concert one time, and some kids yelled out, “Play some be-bop!” Dizzy got angry, and stopped the band, and said, “Young man, everything we’re playing is be-bop.” You see, be-bop is a concept. Most people associate bebop with playing on changes, but Dizzy was playing on modal tunes and on funk tunes. Be-bop has to do with a concept of melody, and a concept of time, and a certain type of touch and depth of swing. People think when Miles started playing “So What” he wasn’t playing be-bop, which was’t true.
AAJ: He was playing the be-bop concept but not over be-bop tunes.
ML: Right, he was playing be-bop on modal tunes. Later, with Bitches Brew, that was still be-bop with funk beats, and twelve tone- type logic. Same thing [John] Coltrane was doing, the concept remained the same. It has to do with HOW someone plays, rather than WHAT someone plays. That’s what I try to do with students- teach the HOW part. I don’t allow students to play like me or like anyone else.
AAJ: You’ve developed a set of piano and drum exercises to help students understand this concept.
ML: Right, there’s no way in life you can get that knowledge through simply practicing unless someone shows you how the groove feels. The older musicians used to pick that stuff up through osmosis on the bandstand. Like Dizzy would come over and sing something in your ear while you’re playing, and everything would suddenly feel different in the music.
AAJ: Your 18-piece big band “State of the Art Jazz Ensemble” was formed in 1998 and has been getting a lot of great reviews. Any thoughts on your latest two albums “Explosion” and “Aftermath?
ML: The band started by accident. I wrote some big band arrangements for my best friend James Moody, and I had some charts I wrote for Dizzy in the 70s. One day my agent called to ask how much we get for our Dizzy Gillespie all-star alumni band, but $500 a person for 17 pieces was too much for them. I decided to start my own big band just so we can get the gig. I had a few charts, but I was really going crazy trying to finish a bunch of new ones so I would have enough music for the gig. After the concert we decided to go in the studio and make “Explosion” [released in 2000]. It had some of Dizzy’s stuff, like “Fresco,” and some of James Moody’s stuff. “Aftermath” was recorded the next year and was mostly original compositions specifically for the band. It was very important to me to have a large range in age for the guys in the band. The youngest guy is 22, and the oldest is 74, with musicians of all races. The younger players learn a lot from the older musicians, and the older players get kicked by the younger players” fire and enthusiasm.”
AAJ: Your new trio album, “Still Swingin” grooves hard and is really in the pocket. could you talk about the group dynamic of that band with Ray Mosca and Ben Brown?
ML: I knew Ben from Florida in the 1970’s, and he wanted to come up to New York. I played with a trio, while I was still with Dizzy, so he got a guitarist if I had to play somewhere else. I played a lot with the trio with Ben in it right after I recorded with my first trio album with Ron Carter and Mickey Roker. Next, I made a composer album called “900 Shares of the Blues” with Randy Brecker and Joe Farrell on the Groove Merchant label. After that album sold 10,000 copies, the other people on the record label wanted me to write for them. I was writing some stuff for Buddy Rich that was like funk tunes. In fact, I was the first person to teach Buddy Rich how to play a funk beat. He was having some trouble at the rehearsal, so I start singing to him, “uum, uum, bash, ri do oo oo bash.” He got behind the drums and all of a sudden he fell into it. So, point being, I called Ben Brown for the gig, and told Buddy he was going to be the next Ray Brown or Bob Cranshaw. and Buddy fell in love with him. Later I got him a gig with Dizzy, and now he lives in my apartment building here so we play together a lot. Ray Mosca used to be Oscar Peterson’s drummer. I said, “Man these cats can swing,” so I put a trio together.
We always get a good groove playing together, but this new album is really tight-knit. I was watching the Ken Burns jazz special, and they had the Basie band with Prez [Lester Young], Billie Holiday, and Old Joe Jones, who was Ray Mosca’s mentor. That band was swinging so hard, the audience was just having a great time dancing in ecstasy. White, Black, Asian, all kinds of people just grooving and dancing in the isles. That’s what “free jazz” is- jazz that makes people feel free. So on this record, I was trying to find the contemporary equivalent of that; the main motivation was the swing. After six rehearsals, the group was getting tighter and tighter, so we went in the studio and hit most of those tracks on “still swinging” in one take. It was just released to stores.
AAJ: Can you name the five greatest jazz albums of all time?
ML: That’s a hard question. I can tell you a few of my favorites. Dizzy, Stan Getz, and Sonny Stitt made this record in the 1950s called “For Musicians Only.” “Jazz at Massey Hall” with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Oscar Peterson trio “At the Stratford Shakespearean Festival.” Errol Garner “Concert by the Sea.” Miles Davis “Kind of Blue” and “Sketches of Spain.” In college I used to listen incessantly to Count Basie’s band. Bud Powell, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, and finally Quincy Jones, “ÂWalking in Space.” The list just keeps going on.
AAJ: Any last comments or pieces of advice for aspiring musicians?
ML: Swing hard and get to the people.