Phil Haynes: a renowned jazz drummer chases the masters

(This transcript has been edited for clarity.)

LP: Thank you so much for making time to do this.

Phil Haynes: Oh, it's my pleasure, and it's so nice to meet someone else who loves this music and the arts.

LP: Yeah, absolutely. I love the book. I should just jump into this.

Phil Haynes: It's like Herb Robertson always says, "Don't worry. We're not like the others." And it could be said for our music, and apparently, it can be said for the book.

LP: I want to approach the book from a few different angles, but one thing I'm really curious about that struck me was how oddly shaped the package was when it arrived at my door. Because I didn't know what was inside, I thought, "Huh, I like getting a big package. That's interesting." What's the significance of the book's form factor? As a recipient, it feels weighty.

Phil Haynes: I went around and around about this with one of my developmental editors, Nicholas Horner, who's actually one of my prized students at Bucknell. He did all the artwork and was the one who said, "Hey, instead of photos, let me do line drawings of these people. We'll get around the Getty image issues." Originally, I formatted the course, and when I wrote the manuscript at 11.5 by 8.5 inches, time started running out. He said, "This book isn't a textbook, but it could be for some eccentric professor's class like yours. I'm not sure it's a bad thing."

I was trying to do a couple of things with the book. One was to make it a nice tabletop item for a coffee table. And then, of course, you could also take it into the bathroom and peruse the quotes, the poetry, or the pictures, or whatever. I really wanted it to serve many purposes. Not very many books come out that are this size.

LP: In this era of digital output, whether it's audio, video, music, eBooks, all the way through, the trend of super deluxe box sets and very elaborate packaging communicates something important. Given the life you discuss—your own, as well as the life of a working artist, and that period—it's really fascinating to me as a student and a listener. It parallels my time in New York, my love of music.

Your career began at such an interesting time for jazz. I've talked to a lot of guests who either emerged in the 80s or were young adults then and have gone on to a creative life. There was this idea in the 80s, at least in the listening community, "Is jazz dead?" That was the question.

There were the traditionalists with Wynton on one end and the avant-garde, exemplified by maybe Zorn or certainly others in Europe, on the other. There wasn't a lot of talk about the people doing the work you were doing, which was maintaining a modern, vibrant form that incorporates tradition and newness to move forward.

I came away with that from the book. There's a figure here, as well as a group of figures, who were doing that work, keeping the form alive and modern. It's not a museum piece, which has enabled, I think, in the last ten years or so, an incredible renaissance of jazz-influenced music, instrumental music.

Could you speak to that arc and tell me about any gratification you get from where the music is in 2023?

Phil Haynes: When we start with the weightiness of the book, it's a weighty topic, and there's a lot of weighty stuff in here. On the other hand, I've always been about making these innovations accessible.

Coltrane, whether he was making albums with Ellington or Johnny Hartman or his ballads record, was always the great ballad player of his era, as well as one of the great avant-gardists who kept moving forward. He was the traditionalist. And those were the kind of masters Paul Smoker, my mentor, used to say, "Don't be afraid of the avant-garde. That's the lifeblood for the rapid development of jazz." On the other hand, you've got to be able to do everything. You pick and choose, but to be terrific, you need to be broad as well as specialized.

There were a bunch of us when I first got to New York in '83, and I started doing sessions and whatever those first seven years in the eighties. There were white jazz musicians who were very accomplished and making money already in jazz, working in the area, who questioned whether Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, and Gary Peacock's standards, the first standards record on ECM, was the right direction. "Is that really jazz?" Myself, and then quickly within a couple of years, Drew Gress, when we met, were looking at this: "Are you kidding? That's the standard. Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, that's the rhythm team. That's the new thing."

Of course, we wanted to be part of that, but we had exactly the problems you talked about. There was a lot of talk about Wynton and his coattails. He had it all, right? Except maybe the originality. Others of us have it all, except maybe the business end and the public ability on stage to electrify audiences, that charisma.

Certain political figures have it, and some don't. And it's the same thing with performance. It's very interesting. I was interested in the important players and the innovative tradition. We all thought of ourselves, whether it was the corner store community, all of us, I think, thought of ourselves as jazz musicians.

And we were a little perplexed. Even someone like Dave Liebman, one of my teachers and collaborators, would say, "Oh yeah, you guys are off on your own thing. The jazz tradition really stopped with Elvin, Weather Report, and Miles." And that was like, "Really?" I can't quote him exactly, but that was the gist.

And I know Ellery and I were like, "You've got to be kidding. This is exactly jazz." We thought he would certainly understand. Lee Konitz understood. We did collaborative festivals at the Knitting Factory, and he would jump right in with trying to break those barriers between all those communities—the young, the old, the known, the unknown.

And not everybody does. And maybe the more successful you are, the more you protect your turf. I don't know. But there was this weird thing in the press that we all saw. If you were pre-that, there was a lot of market available to you, particularly if you were of color.

And if you were very avant-garde, as you say, shock jock, such as the great John Zorn, there was an interesting market, certainly in Europe for that. And we found, we, myself, Paul Smoker, Ellery Eskelin, Herb Robertson, we all found a market in Europe for about 15 years until the industry changed and small labels started disappearing.

But we found an audience there that we did not find. The people in Europe just got it, "Oh, this is the new jazz." And the avant-garde people were like, "Wow, those guys are jazz guys. You can tell they're American. They swing." And the American jazz musicians were like, "Oh no, those guys are avant-garde."

Joint Venture was a great band that did that with Ellery Drew Grass, Paul Smoker, and myself. And when I listen to that music now, 30 years later, it's "Oh gosh, yeah, it's that harmonic content, as well as the quality of the writing and the originality of the players that was pushing things forward."

All you have to do is look at the last twenty years. Oh yeah, the musicians all got it. When I left in the late '90s to come to central Pennsylvania, my corner store community, almost all of them, found at least audiences in Europe. And some people, like Ben Monder, found them everywhere. Everyone has managed to stay with music being their business, their passion, and their art.

And not too many can say that about themselves unless they are teaching. I had been in New York for 20 years. And I had seen a couple of masters who got bitter, and they would vent in the press, and that made me so sad.

Heroes of mine, some of them. And I said to myself long before I left, "I will never let New York or myself get to that point because it'll be my problem, not New York's problem." But I was setting a field. Oh, maybe I should have gotten more than I deserved. Everybody in there, boy—males in their thirties, watch out.

LP: Right, especially us white guys. (laughter)

Phil Haynes: Oh gosh. And so, the nice thing was that I did get out before it got that dark. Then I found that I could teach at a college level, and I wasn't just good at it; I was terrific at it and actually had so much fun. And nobody can take those experiences away from you.

The interesting thing about jumping to COVID is that when I wrote this book, I wasn't interested in writing a book. Then, all of a sudden, you start looking for projects you can do when you're not meeting with people. Studio dates were all canceled or long-distance postponed. I realized that the recordings on my Bandcamp alone spanned three or four decades, and the mastering wasn't consistent.

It drives me crazy when I'm always reaching for the volume. One of Paul Smoker's late students says the same thing about when you're going to get Paul's catalog. I start listening to it. I hadn't listened to some of these sides in 35 years because they came out on LP, and I frankly now realize I didn't have high-quality LP equipment, and neither did Paul.

Those albums didn't sound good to us, even though the music sounded great. I've shown this to a guy in Rochester who does this kind of restoration. He says, "You just get me some vinyl that hasn't been played before." Yeah, I've still got some in plastic.

He says that's what I need. I'll take three of them, put them up, and get rid of the imperfections by comparing the three tracks, and I can make you a new thing. I thought, "Oh, they sound terrific."

LP: So you didn't have production masters, or you didn't have...

Phil Haynes: No, back then, we were selling things to companies that went bankrupt in the nineties when there was this big contraction in the industry, and then streaming services came out, all that stuff. Where a lot of us had been able to eke out something.

Yeah, I started listening, and yes, now we were able to recreate masters, and you realize you're hearing it. This actually sounded just fine. And then the music hits you. Then Paul's playing and the importance that Anthony Braxton always described hit me. Then I started listening to other things, such as Joint Venture, my band, 4 Horns and What?, and the early trio that Ellery had with Drew and me.

Oh my God, we did what we intended to do. And I had always felt, and I know Paul when he passed away a few years ago, he always felt like we gave it a good run, but we came up short. But of course, our goals were as innovators. The best of the best, the top 10 on each of our instruments. Not everybody has that arc, talent, passion, or influences at the right time in their life.

But then I started listening to this music, and it was like, "Oh, we always intended to have music that would age very well. It may have been a music of its time, but it was also timely 20, 30, 40 years hence when people could get a better idea of where it might fit historically." And I'll be darned if all of us, even me, had to listen to myself and say, "You've done alright, man."

As soon as I realized that I wasn't an innovator the way, say, Elvin Jones, Erşahin, or Tony Williams were, but more like Roy Haynes, who was a great sideman, I went on this other arc, and that makes sense. My favorite players are the ones who are not only on the records that made Elvin Jones famous by the John Coltrane Quartet but also on everything that Elvin is on; he makes everybody else play at the top five or ten percent of their playing output.

LP: Yeah, that's how I feel about McCoy. He's on the Freddie Hubbard records or Wayne Shorter records, and those are all my favorite records by those artists.

Phil Haynes: Yep, those people who elevate. When I listened back, I realized, "Oh, the guys that I managed to record with. Yeah, those recordings are close to the top." It was really satisfying, and of course, you don't know until you go back and start listening with different ears. And, of course, I fought depression, so God knows how much of that was there, and you know there's always this crazy imbalance between an artist having enough ego to keep going; they have to believe in themselves, but they also can't think they're the hottest thing since sliced bread or they will fool themselves, right?

And so you have to be both your own greatest critic and your own greatest cheerleader, but from a centered, rooted point of view. We did actually pretty good, more than pretty good. The music does sound good still.

LP: You mentioned Lee Konitz. That's an example of someone who, to your point, integrates multiple strands or multiple worlds and moves between them. Years ago, I had a conversation with Matt Wilson, the drummer, about his ability to move between what I crudely called uptown and downtown at the time.

He acknowledged that metaphor, saying, "First of all, you're a working musician; it's all gigs." I don't know how well, Matt. He's a very jubilant person with infectious energy.

Phil Haynes: Absolutely, personally, professionally, artistically.

LP: Yeah, and he finds excitement and joy in all the different styles and in doing all those different types of work.

I think of another figure like that, Bill Frisell. He can be very far out there. He can also be a bit of a traditionalist, but he moves through these worlds. Something in the book that I'm also grateful for was the several mentions you made of the original Knitting Factory. Just some of the artists who walked through: I saw Sonny Sharrock in there a couple of nights in a row in the early nineties and just...

I can't believe I have any hair that didn't all just fall out from the intensity of it. But those, that room was just shocking in terms of the level of creativity and intensity, and I don't know, capital I importance of that music. God bless them. They went on to have quite an empire as venue owners and as a brand.

But man, that original room was something else.

Phil Haynes: Yeah, Houston Street, mid-'80s, and it was already happening, but I heard about it through watching Tim Berne and John Zorn. They were early people that I admired, even if I wasn't playing with either of them at that point. Then, of course, it's "Oh, maybe we can get gigs there too."

What was interesting was that there were very few venues to play in, and they were pioneers along with Michael Dorf and Partnership. All of a sudden, there was a home for the music that wasn't like the others. It wasn't just the downtown, although a lot of the jazz I was involved with was lumped into the downtown, and I didn't mind. But I always thought it was peculiar because we were the downtown of the downtown; we were Brooklyn.

LP: A recurring theme that you touch on throughout the book is this question of Phil as a sideman, or maybe Phil as not a sideman. I think you were perceived as a leader, and not just a band leader, but because you were hustling to make a community happen.

Is that ultimately what you think happened?

I think it's part of it. One of the reasons I took up organizing the festival and the musicians at the Knitting Factory and so on was because I didn't have enough gigs, and I didn't think this music in that community had enough exposure. And how were we going to get exposure?

Phil Haynes: Except if we banded together to put on a first-class festival. At that point, believe it or not, it was still before the Knitting Factory's "What is Jazz Festival." There wasn't a new Jazz Festival in New York City, of all places, right? And all of a sudden, we banded together, put up an ad, and sure enough, a few people, the New York Times, whoever, we would get some press, some ink that was very hard to get individually.

So yeah, there was that. The other side was I have all these skills, but I'm also a Type A plus personality, whereas some sidemen are just the chillest, most laid-back people, and everybody gets that.

And so that's a different avenue than just shrugging your shoulders. "Sure, whatever you want," or whatever the right answer is. Something that Matt Wilson always did seamlessly, effortlessly. Joey Barron always did effortlessly. Tom Rainey continues to do effortlessly. Each one of those guys also wrestled with it.

When I got to New York, my favorite drummers, Jack, Tony, and Elvin, and really from the '60s and early '70s, those guys were all huge physical presences in the bands they played with. The style I developed with Paul was really like when he introduced me to Bill Evans' music and the great bassist Scott LaFaro with him.

Oh, being able to play counterpoint and a second line just as important and weave it with whatever the primary line was in a way that's not obtrusive but also integral. I wanted to do that as a drummer. "Hey, he could do it in 1961 as a bassist; maybe I can do it as a drummer." Not everybody wants that kind of drummer.

Most people certainly were used to hearing Billy Higgins. Drew and I were always like, "We want to put down the carpet, but of course, we're expected to be able to say more." If you're involved with avant-garde-leaning musicians who are also traditionalists, you're going to combine all of that.

Guess what? That's not always what the people who hire sidemen are looking for. So there were a lot of things. Just because I moved to New York wanting to be a sideman and never once thinking about being a leader, I had good friends who said, "Man, you were a born leader." And I look at it and shake my head, but then I can see why now. It's that A plus personality, that Type A personality.

I work to build collectives, but yeah, I know what I want.

LP: I would imagine there's a little bit of tension there to have your own vision and ideas and will yet be working in a collective context. That's, you don't navigate that well, and there's a lot of room for hurt feelings, at the least.

You mentioned Joey Barron several times in the book. I have vivid memories of seeing him with Masada, tossing the drumsticks aside and playing with his hands and a big smile on that shiny head of his. Some players have a unique physical presence when they're playing. I think of them as radiating joy, and I think of Brian Blade.

He looks like he's moving the music. There's a physicality to the way he plays that is, basically, dancing. It's really incredible. And I wonder, what do you bring physically?

Phil Haynes: Once somebody asked a related question to Jack DeJohnette, and he said he thinks of his playing on the drum set as multidirectional.

He considered the drum set a piano. It was all one instrument. I got that, and I certainly was into that, but I also had come up as a classical musician. With my collegiate experience, I was doing a lot of 20th-century avant-garde music, from Stockhausen or whoever. And so all of a sudden, in that context, the percussionist is setting up individual instruments.

They really are separate instruments. And guess what? That's a very different approach than it's a piano or it's a whole bunch, an array of different instruments. I found that I could flip my switch mentally, and I could play out of a new music way, or I could switch it into a piano way. I heard, felt, and related to the instruments differently.

Like you're saying, some guys, there's a joy that comes out, which I clearly have. There always seems to be this big grin in every photo. Like some other drummers we know. And yes, the dancing thing. Absolutely.

It's more like a Calder hanging, right? A mobile hanging, where you play these separate instruments and choose to have them bring the focus up to them, away from them, or combined. That's one way that I managed to separate my playing sometimes and keep it fresh, as well as do what Jack had done.

I was able to go old school—older than old school—and freshen up some of my playing while embracing the one-instrument idea.

LP: That's really interesting. And even the nomenclature, like the idea of a drum kit. A kit is like an assemblage of individual tools, but it's also one tool. You need the whole kit.

Phil Haynes: Yeah, you're welcome. It is fun. I can say that to my students, and the ones who are hip to contemporary classical music get it like that, and they can immediately do it. The other ones who are used to playing it like a drum set, like a piano, they can get that, but you have to point it out to them.

It's a different approach. It's lots of fun. And that's just what we're all about: having fun and revealing new sides to our own aesthetics and our own ability to communicate.

LP: The book is filled with wonder. I think you're taking the reader on a journey of rediscovering the music you made and realizing that it's now a body of work that's contributed to the form. There's also a fun strand of humor throughout the book.

There are a few pages in particular, about a quarter of the way through, grouped under the theme of the cost of pursuing art or the cost of a life in art. Yeah, that I found so poignant and really impacted the way, or the lens through which I saw the rest of the book.

If you're going to be dedicated, right? If you're not going to be a dilettante. I actually laughed out loud. I have to read the quote to you because it broke up the tension for me. There's a Casey Stengel quote, "The secret of managing a club is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided."

So I was reading in bed next to my significant other, and I laughed out loud. She said, "What? What?" And I read it to her. She just shook her head. That's the biggest life lesson I've gotten in a long time.

Phil Haynes: I came across that quote while writing it just a couple of years ago during COVID-19, and I almost spit up.

When I read it, I got to that punchline. It's poignant, and it's true. This music, obviously, is a combination of European traditions and world traditions, but really African traditions and how they came as slaves.

They were forced. A lot of us, if we had gone through that kind of life, our music probably wouldn't have been all that positive. But somehow, the blues and other forms of this music that came out of the post-slave experience always have this hope, always seeing the joy as well as acknowledging the dark. We sing the blues to make ourselves feel better, as well as to process.

We sing gospel to praise the Lord and acknowledge, "Oh, we got work to do." That is an amazing gift that I suspect is largely African. Man, it is amazing.

Can you give them a cowbell or something and then something integral to do that you're helping them on the path to maybe becoming a master drummer or just rising to their potential, right? And where everybody plays with everybody if you're serious enough, and we recognize that "Oh, you're one of us, you might be one of us," and to include people.

It has great advantages as well as some disadvantages versus the European, "Oh, we're going to group you by age and development and physical height, whatever." We're going to put everybody together because we need the diversity, and we need to continue. The old cats need the young cats for different reasons than the young cats need the old cats.

LP: As an educator, have you ever worked with young children or elementary-grade students? Have you ever done workshops or any kind of educational work with kids?

Phil Haynes: Elementary, yes. You often get beginning drum students in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. Maybe their parents will allow them to take drum lessons as well as piano lessons or whatever.

So yes, some, but most of my students, even the ones that I've taken for five, six years, started around seventh grade or so. So, yes and no, mostly not, except for these noticeable exceptions.

LP: I always think of drummers starting just a shade older than other musicians because they have to wear down their parents to allow them actually to play the drums. Their parents want to see if they can outlast the desire. But more importantly, if you give a child two blocks or two sticks, or a drum or a tambourine, they'll have at it. That was early music education. The idea that you're doing it in a group with other people is fascinating. I was curious about your experience of creating that flow.

Phil Haynes: I might work with more really young students, and maybe that's one of the next things coming into my life now that I am in my 60s.

Maybe when I start volunteering more in the community here in central Pennsylvania, I do need to look at kindergarten and early grade school-aged kids. Not just creating drum circles for them, but building off of that. You can make anything into an instrument and play avant-garde new music. You can teach the same fundamentals. It's okay for imitation, but it's about creating concentric circles that are complementary yet contrasted. You have a chance to build depth and expansion of these ideas. Even though Herb Robertson doesn't talk about it in words, he just does it. There's Phil Haynes before Herb Robertson, and there's Phil Haynes after.

And he was like, "Oh, that's what free playing is." I've been labeled a free player by a lot of people in the press and some musicians in New York. But once I was around Herb, I realized, "Oh, now that's free." And I was able to teach it, as it turns out, to my students in college. I didn't allow very many jazz musicians in the ensemble, preferring classical musicians who needed to learn how to improvise and those who could abstract from all kinds of traditions, whether it was visual artists, dancers, or poets. We could combine all these elements. My wife just did a music program at our local little UU church. It used to be a holiday music program. This year, it not only had music from the oldest to the youngest in it, but it also featured a juggler and a little girl doing early gymnast stuff.

This is how you get a community to grow, right? It's such a simple thing. It's an arts program. We're going to have fun communicating. And this is something that I do know how to do, and I'm pretty good at. Yes, you have to start them young.

I've been reading a few different things that people have been posting about, "Oh, I wish I had been introduced to the instrument this way." And, of course, improvisation is a big part of it. Listen and ask the student, "How do I get it to sound more like your pitch?" All these questions come out naturally instead of, "This is how you get your intonation."

No, it's about having them asking, right? And I always remind my Bucknell students, "I can't teach you anything, but I can help you ask the right questions. Once you ask the right questions that you need to answer, I can help you find the right sources. I can help you find primary sources because you're going to teach yourself. I can't teach you anything. Nobody can teach you anything, but we sure can help you once you're on the right path. This is how you help."

LP: I wanted to circle back to Paul Smoker. There's clearly a lot in the way you depict him that sounds very intimidating. However, one of the things that I took away was his ability to be a very deep listener and then to communicate or comment upon what he was hearing in the music. That's something I admire greatly. It must come with a tremendous volume of listening. It is not just sound volume but a copious amount of music intake, as well as having the sort of academic or intellectual background to synthesize it all. It's just incredibly powerful to be able to hear the thing that needs to be commented on.

Phil Haynes: Paul and I shared a lot. We connected both because we were a lot alike and because we were a lot different. He was absolutely a lead trumpet player, Taurus the Bull, Alpha Male, whereas I'm a Gemini. So, I can go either way, but I'm also a Type A personality. So, I think he always thought he fell a bit short of what he actually achieved, which is what Braxton said, "No, you're a reconstructionist. Paul, you're an innovator. You're helping people jump from Freddie Hubbard to the new music we now all hear around us." He understood clearly back in the '80s that Paul was a missing link.

Paul once said to me, "I probably did okay. What I did okay was every kind of music there is for a trumpet player in America to play. I did it professionally. I did it at a really high level. I played it all." You have to know all that music to be broad enough to have enough scope so that when you start putting things together through yourself, you have something to say that is more likely to have some power and value to people in the future.

And so he had that, and it was interesting because he talks later in the book about playing free and how it's dangerous. That interview struck me because he had never said that to me, but it was so cool that he figured out, "Yeah, there are all these issues with playing free in an ensemble, let alone by yourself."

And it's, "Can you get good at it?" Yes, we would be at the MERS festival with, say, 4 Horns and What?, my quintet, and the band. It doesn't matter who it is, but a very famous black band assumed we were stagehands and asked us for cokes and to get some cognac, and then we walked out on stage and played our set. They were shocked because we opened for them. They could not believe what they saw, and they were embarrassed.

Afterward, Paul finally gets a beer in front of him and says, "Isn't it funny? I know all their music, and they don't know any of mine." He says, "They don't know any of ours, but after today, they do." And that was always the thing. You have to know all that music, and nobody can know everything, but he knew a lot of it. He was able to communicate it deeply.

Ellery Eskelin and I meet, and he comes out of the opposite tradition, growing up on the street with musicians in Baltimore and Philadelphia, where the older generations never talked about the music that just happened on stage. You were supposed to learn by osmosis. Whereas Paul taught, we talked all the time about every performance and listened to it together, picking it apart, not looking for pats on the back but asking, "How do we make this better? How do we communicate better?" And it came down to, "Oh, there aren't three, four, five set gigs anymore for a week at a time, 50 weeks a year. We can't do it by osmosis anymore. If we don't figure out how to talk about it, there's going to be a lot of people left out that otherwise might be able to get this or get a lot farther down the road, closer to their potential." That's all any of us are after, right? On this quest, "What can I find out next? Because the more you know, the more you got to know."

LP: In so much as the book stands as a statement of a case, "This is me. This is my work, my lineage, my group of people, my comrades, my peers, my scene," it's an important document of all the above. Something that really struck me at the end of the book was your struggles during the pandemic and coming out of it, thinking, "Who, what, where am I now?" Now that the book is done and you've been talking about it for a while, how do you feel? Do you feel like you have a direction for what's next for your work?

Phil Haynes: The answer is yes. Reflecting on my career and having a chance to see it from a new perspective has allowed me to feel much better about what I've accomplished. "So, now what?" one of my developmental editors asked. That's a good question. I started with raw, physical, energetic expositions. Then, after meeting Herb Robertson, I realized, "Oh, I need to play all this stuff acoustically." That led to more refinement. But now, "I miss that visceral thing." I'm giving myself permission to play a bit more out of my physical and emotional state, worrying less about development and just seeing if I can get back to that childlike intuition. Certain projects coming up, like recording with Ben Monder, where we used to play one tune, Coltrane's "Transition," for hours, are opportunities to blend that raw energy back in.

LP: As a duo?

Phil Haynes: Yes. Coltrane's "Transition" four different ways. There are places where it's okay, or I'm with certain players who like that kind of physicality. So, I'm giving myself a license. I think that's what I need to do because I've been more refined for the last two-thirds of my career, whereas I started more as a firebrand. Let's see what happens when you try to mix more of that fire back in.

LP: I love the idea of a late-period fired-up Phil! (laughter)

Phil Haynes: It could happen!

LP: Given the era and the scene, I would have expected you to have played with Zorn. You seem like the kind of drummer he would like.

Phil Haynes: I'm not sure why it didn't happen. We met early when I was playing with Paul Smoker's trio. It seemed like there was an obvious connection. Anyway, Zorn has said, "You don't know what intensity is until you've heard Paul Smoker's trio live." Apparently, I'm "too much drummer for almost everybody." But it's direct, so no, it didn't happen. Partly, it is my fault, just like the rest of the scene. It's interesting; it's a community thing, and you have to be seen and be on the scene. Just because it didn't happen then doesn't mean it might not happen in the future.

LP: That's what I was going to say. It's not a missed opportunity if you're both still vibrant and alive.

Phil Haynes: Yeah, no, it's a great idea. Maybe we should think about playing together now. Let's see what happens.

LP: I just saw Ben Monder with Maria Schneider, and he's incredible.

Phil Haynes: Of course. Unbelievable.

LP: Yeah. Thank you so much for a lifetime of music, a terrific book, and, of course, the time you spent with me today. Did we have some fun? Come on, two handsome guys like us. (laughter)

Phil Haynes: Haven't lost all of it yet, baby!

I'm glad you reached out because I feel so good about the book. I feel like I got it about right. This was before people started interviewing me, and I think I got it about even though I never went on to write a book. And now you see the reactions. I wish I had this book when I was a student and when I was reading other jazz biographies. Oh, because a bunch of the stuff in my book wasn't in those and wasn't anywhere else I found. And yet there's a bunch of breadcrumbs that I put together that any creative can use to get a lot closer to their potential and a lot closer to the masters, whoever their masters are.

LP: I appreciate it as a document of a very important time in the music that is still being reckoned with. It has not been incredibly well documented for all the major figures and supporting players. There's a lot of work to be done there. I try to do my part with this podcast to talk to as many people as possible, but I think that the book fits nicely in that part of the scholarship as well.

Phil Haynes: We used to look to the left and the right, whoever was in that community. It's okay. We loved the bit of press we got, but why is it that there's not more? You were competing with people who were hitting Grammys. And their music wasn't as serious or moving the tradition forward, even though it was making money for some people, usually the big labels. And it's like, why isn't there more? Now, as Gebhard Ullmann says, it's several decades later when you find out the difference between a really good record and a great record. It's good at the time, but does it last? And I love that when Miles was poo-pooing Ornette Coleman and Leonard Bernstein said, "Music's more likely in 50 to 100 years to sound like Ornette's descendants than Miles's descendants." It's funny. It sure looks like it's shifting that way, even though Miles is huge. And somehow, Lenny, he always saw big pictures, and by God, I think he's turned out to be right. But it takes time to catch up, all of us, right?